heir failure.

Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past
which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are
afraid," he wrote in the _Reflections_, "to put men to live and trade
each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this
stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of
ages." Of Sieyes' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair
picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from
Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much
a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought
finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For
Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie
buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like
Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That
which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations
was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to
be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the
English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories
with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical
landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all
human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard.
That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and
the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst
for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human
effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it
exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers
limitation to right ends.

The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to
political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper
which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a
fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted
with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have
flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the
midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is
permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace
which stand as oases of wisdom i