their
rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people";
and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces
popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic
struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the
pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they
represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too
intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew
little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his
age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the
people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of
right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of
statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained
commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run,
neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.

This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's
aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not
inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors
of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham
was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is
admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect
institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is
morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something
curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which
gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in
the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those
he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable
of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally
bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in
its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact
that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for
power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could
be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for
the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their
economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of
that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in
their inexperience