ull warmth and heat which he, the dreamer, the recluse, the
lover of abstract problems, could bring into such discussions.
Here, at all events, his views were definite enough, and stated
with a bold precision of English plainness that would have pleased
the most pronouncedly Tory or Unionist newspaper editors of that
day.

_XVI. FRANCE PAST AND FRANCE PRESENT._

To speak in the simplicity of truth, caring not for party or partisan,
is not the France of this day, the France which has issued from that
great furnace of the Revolution, a better, happier, more hopeful France
than the France of 1788? Allowing for any evil, present or reversionary,
in the political aspects of France, that may yet give cause for anxiety,
can a wise man deny that from the France of 1840, under Louis Philippe
of Orleans, ascends to heaven a report of far happier days from the sons
and daughters of poverty than from the France of Louis XVI.? Personally
that sixteenth Louis was a good king, sorrowing for the abuses in the
land, and willing (at least, after affliction had sharpened his
reflecting conscience), had that choice been allowed him, to have
redeemed them by any personal sacrifice. But that was not possible.
Centuries of misrule are not ransomed by an individual ruin; and had it
been possible that the dark genius of his family, the same who once
tolled funeral knells in the ears of the first Bourbon, and called him
out as a martyr hurrying to meet his own sacrifice--could we suppose
this gloomy representative of his family destinies to have met him in
some solitary apartment of the Tuileries or Versailles, some twilight
gallery of ancestral portraits, he could have met him with the purpose
of raising the curtain from before the long series of his household
woes--from him the king would have learned that no personal ransom could
be accepted for misgovernment so ancient. Leviathan is not so tamed.
Arrears so vast imply a corresponding accountability, corresponding by
its amount, corresponding by its personal subjects. Crown and
people--all had erred; all must suffer. Blood must flow, tears must be
shed through a generation; rivers of lustration must be thrown through
that Augean accumulation of guilt.

And exactly there, it is supposed, lay the error of Burke; the compass
of the penalty, the arch which it traversed, must bear some proportion
to that of the evil which had produced it.

When I referred to th