ls us how often
he had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon the
innumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the social
economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. He had pondered
whether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people from
their miserable industry without disturbing the natural course of
things, and impeding the great wheel of circulation which is turned by
their labour. This is the vein of that striking passage in his first
composition which I have already quoted (p. 22). Burke did not
yet see, and probably never saw, that one key to the events which
astonished and exasperated him was simply that the persons most
urgently concerned had taken the riddle which perplexed him into their
own hands, and had in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance.
The pith of the Revolution up to 1790 was less the political
constitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true,
than the social and economic transformation, of which he says so
little. It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measure
of an electoral circumscription, that made the Revolution; it was
the iniquitous distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militia
service, the scourge of the road service, the destructive tyranny
exercised in the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and
imposts of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens and
heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industrious
part of the nation. If he had seen ever so clearly that one of the
most important sides of the Revolution in progress was the rescue of
the tiller of the soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed events
with bitter suspicion. For the process could not be executed without
disturbing the natural course of things, and without violating his
principle that all changes should find us with our minds tenacious of
justice and tender of property. A closer examination than he chose to
give of the current administration alike of justice and of property
under the old system, would have explained to him that an hour had
come in which the spirit of property and of justice compelled a
supersession of the letter.

If Burke had insisted on rigidly keeping sensibility to the wrongs of
the French people out of the discussion, on the ground that the whole
subject was one for positive knowledge and logical inference, his
position would have been intelligible and defens