wer, and many reigns in an absolute
government would not have done as much as this single year of
revolution, for the royal authority. Time showed that Burke and
Mirabeau were right.

History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levity and
precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revolutionary drama. No
part of the _Reflections_ is more energetic than the denunciation of
geometric and literary methods; and these are just what the modern
explorer hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe.
De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary men the
principal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon the
Revolution (Bk. III. ch. i.), is only a little too cold to be able
to pass for Burke's own. Quinet's work on the Revolution is one
long sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the incapacity and
blindness of the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous crisis
upon mere literary methods, without the moral courage to obey the
logic of their beliefs, with the student's ignorance of the eager
passion and rapid imagination of multitudes of men, with the pedant's
misappreciation of a people, of whom it has been said by one of
themselves, that there never was a nation more led by its sensations
and less by its principles. Comte, again, points impressively to
the Revolution as the period which illustrates more decisively
than another the peril of confounding the two great functions of
speculation and political action: and he speaks with just reprobation
of the preposterous idea in the philosophic politicians of the
epoch, that society was at their disposal, independent of its past
development, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of being
morally regenerated by the mere modification of legislative rules.

What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as to
detail, blinded Burke at the time when he wrote the _Reflections_ to
the true nature of the movement? Is it not this, that he judges the
Revolution as the solution of a merely political question? If the
Revolution had been merely political, his judgment would have been
adequate. The question was much deeper. It was a social question that
burned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification of
external arrangements. That Burke was alive to the existence of social
problems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from an
incidental passage in the _Reflections_. There he tel