n the heat and stress of social life, we
cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may
well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later
Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria;
but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a
monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely
occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in
the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the
existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they
rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the
purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading
the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more
vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with
which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible
to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke
had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against
that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in
revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but
ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the
State of which they were part. They came to see that without
self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power,
such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the
noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also
mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The
test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the
achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they
urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble
men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the
equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own
experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed
judgment of free minds.[18]

[Footnote 18: Cf. my _Authority in the Modern State_, pp. 65-9.]

VI

No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic
movement, to the _Contrat Social_ of Rousseau and the _Political
Justice_ of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the
romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to
reason, his exaltatio