xpressed is the
expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the
facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained
why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever
to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy
and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized
that Wilkes was but the symptom.

Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of
political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning
of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency
not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines
were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not,
as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the
result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A
power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only
from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation
to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay,
these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation
to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not
difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at
Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's
caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils
rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree,
the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon
men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford
powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old
Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a
penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These,
which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble
ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform
they were willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past
as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the
inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect
of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to
the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in
historic experience refused to admit as history the el