o it, but by what forfeits our title to
the privileges of our kind. The liberty I mean is _social_ freedom.
It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality
of restraint. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for
justice. _Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice,
neither is in my opinion safe_." The weightiest and most important of
all political truths, and worth half the fine things that poets
have sung about freedom--if it could only have been respected, how
different the course of the Revolution! But the engineer who attempts
to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara, must put aside
the tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the Chelsea
Waterworks. Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France had really
embarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all his
first criticisms, including the _Reflections_, was the proposition
that to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steer
the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom. It is impossible to
deny that this was true. Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild
spirits that were then abroad in the storm made of no avail.

Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound up
in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face to
face with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx. He who could not endure
that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible
instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendom
prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, and
Christianity itself officially superseded. The economical reformer,
who when his zeal was hottest declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a
scullion in the royal kitchen who should have acquired the shadow of a
vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped of
their privileges and deprived of much of their lands, though their
possession had been sanctified by the express voice of the laws and
the prescription of many centuries. He who was full of apprehension
and anger at the proposal to take away a member of Parliament from St.
Michael's or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchy
in Europe was overturned. The man who dreaded fanatics, hated
atheists, despised political theorisers, and was driven wild at the
notion of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines to
public affairs, suddenly beheld a whole kingdom