over seventeen hours a day, could not earn money enough
to procure the most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may
know with what benignity of brow eternal justice must have presented
herself in the garret of that hapless wretch. It was no idle
abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the Trench cried,
but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to
save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and
cruel death. The _mainmortable_ serfs of ecclesiastics are variously
said to have been a million and a million and a half at the time of
the Revolution. Burke's horror, as he thought of the priests and
prelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a scanty living by the
drudgery of teaching their language in strange lands, should have been
alleviated by the thought that a million or more of men were rescued
from ghastly material misery. Are we to be so overwhelmed with sorrow
over the pitiful destiny of the men of exalted rank and sacred
function, as to have no tears for the forty thousand serfs in the
gorges of the Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop of
Saint-Claude?

The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of the subject
about which he was writing. When he said, for instance, that the
French before 1789 possessed all the elements of a constitution that
might be made nearly as good as could be wished, he said what many of
his contemporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation and
meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered and untrue. As
to the social state of France, his information was still worse. He saw
the dangers and disorders of the new system, but he saw a very little
way indeed into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old.
Mackintosh replied to the _Reflections_ with manliness and temperance
in the _Vindicicae Gallicae_. Thomas Paine replied to them with an
energy, courage, and eloquence worthy of his cause, in the _Rights of
Man_. But the substantial and decisive reply to Burke came from his
former correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield in Suffolk. Arthur Young
published his _Travels in France_ some eighteen months after the
_Reflections_ (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter in
which he closes his performance, as a luminous criticism of the most
important side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than
Burke, Mackintosh, and Paine all put together. Young afterwards became