n a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War
never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be
entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his
generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler
passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed
but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our
friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity;
the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that
century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of
which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.

V

Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It
is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote
from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was
essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed
none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism
would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the
heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of
his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke
came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we
have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so
clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in
what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes
of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who
burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was
more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries
of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious
inference that once the means of government were made known those who
possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He
did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself
the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which
Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the
adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has
been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to
have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations
of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant
dissatisfaction with those foundations his age e