t
abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of
social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.

Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
The attempt to produce an artificial equ