worth the cost. Nor
is it just to brand an illustrious man with indifference to great moral
and social movements because he would wait, sooner than upturn the very
principles on which society is based. And here is the great difficulty
in estimating the character and labors of Burke. Because he denounced
the French Revolution, some think he was inconsistent with his early
principles. Not at all; it was the crimes and excesses of the Revolution
he denounced, not the impulse of the French people to achieve their
liberties. Those crimes and excesses he believed to be inconsistent with
an enlightened desire for freedom; but freedom itself, to its utmost
limit and application, consistent with law and order, he desired. Is it
necessary for mankind to win its greatest boons by going through a sea
of anarchies, madness, assassinations, and massacres? Those who take
this view of revolution, it seems to me, are neither wise nor learned.
If a king makes war on his subjects, they are warranted in taking up
arms in their defence, even if the civil war is followed by enormities.
Thus the American colonies took up arms against George III.; but they
did not begin with crimes. Louis XVI. did not take up arms against his
subjects, nor league against them, until they had crippled and
imprisoned him. He made even great concessions; he was willing to make
still greater to save his crown. But the leaders of the revolution were
not content with these, not even with the abolition of feudal
privileges; they wanted to subvert the monarchy itself, to abolish the
order of nobility, to sweep away even the Church,--not the Catholic
establishment only, but the Christian religion also, with all the
institutions which time and poetry had consecrated. Their new heaven and
new earth was not the reign of the saints, which the millenarians of
Cromwell's time prayed for devoutly, but a sort of communistic
equality, where every man could do precisely as he liked, take even his
neighbor's property, and annihilate all distinctions of society, all
inequalities of condition,--a miserable, fanatical dream, impossible to
realize under any form of government which can be conceived. It was this
spirit of reckless innovation, promulgated by atheists and drawn
logically from some principles of the "Social Contract" of which
Rousseau was the author, which excited the ire of Burke. It was license,
and not liberty.

And while the bloody and irreligious excesses of the Re