n of passion and imagination over the conscious
logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that
sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution
of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de
Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in
England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any
of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he
directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The
path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible
that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were
the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is
no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast
they afford.

It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his
effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as
the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than
as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications,
is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects
are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how
dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men
are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes.
His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless
lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His
disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we
neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of
political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at
least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly
confounded with erroneous doctrine.

Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater
figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the
relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of
T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to
the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a
lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as
no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things
that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political
complexity. Unquestionably, his specu