nation the wrongs inflicted on the Irish, and the
impossibility of ruling a people who had such just grounds for
discontent. "His letter upon the propriety of admitting the Catholics to
the elective franchise is one of the wisest of all his productions,--so
enlightened is its idea of toleration, so sagacious is its comprehension
of political exigencies." He did not live to see his ideas carried out,
but he was among the first to prepare the way for Catholic emancipation
in later times.

But a greater subject than colonial rights, or Indian wrongs, or
persecution of the Irish Catholics agitated the mind of Burke, to which
he devoted the energies of his declining years; and this was, the
agitation growing out of the French Revolution. When that "roaring
conflagration of anarchies" broke out, he was in the full maturity of
his power and his fame,--a wise old statesman, versed in the lessons of
human experience, who detested sophistries and abstract theories and
violent reforms; a man who while he loved liberty more than any
political leader of his day, loathed the crimes committed in its name,
and who was sceptical of any reforms which could not be carried on
without a wanton destruction of the foundations of society itself. He
was also a Christian who planted himself on the certitudes of religious
faith, and was shocked by the flippant and shallow infidelity which
passed current for progress and improvement. Next to the infidel spirit
which would make Christianity and a corrupted church identical, as seen
in the mockeries of Voltaire, and would destroy both under the guise of
hatred of superstition, he despised those sentimentalities with which
Rousseau and his admirers would veil their disgusting immoralities. To
him hypocrisy and infidelity, under whatever name they were baptized by
the new apostles of human rights, were mischievous and revolting. And as
an experienced statesman he held in contempt the inexperience of the
Revolutionary leaders, and the unscrupulous means they pursued to
accomplish even desirable ends.

No man more than Burke admitted the necessity of even radical reforms,
but he would have accomplished them without bloodshed and cruelties. He
would not have removed undeniable evils by introducing still greater
ones. He regarded the remedies proposed by the Revolutionary quacks as
worse than the disease which they professed to cure. No man knew better
than he the corruptions of the Catholic church in F