panic-stricken, but his book remained. There the writer plainly
enumerates without trope or invective the intolerable burdens under
which the great mass of the French people had for long years been
groaning. It was the removal of these burdens that made the very
heart's core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life which
so soon astonished and terrified Europe. Yet Burke seems profoundly
unconscious of the whole of them. He even boldly asserts that, when
the several orders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their
representatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, in no
one of these instructions did they charge, or even hint at, any
of those things which had drawn upon the usurping Assembly the
detestation of the rational part of mankind. He could not have made a
more enormous blunder. There was not a single great change made by the
Assembly, which had not been demanded in the lists of grievances that
had been sent up by the nation to Versailles. The division of the
kingdom into districts, and the proportioning of the representation
to taxes and population; the suppression of the intendants; the
suppression of all monks and the sale of their goods and estates; the
abolition of feudal rights, duties, and services; the alienation of
the king's domains; the demolition of the Bastille; these and all else
were in the prayers of half the petitions that the country had laid at
the feet of the king.

If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it might be of no
importance. But it was a blunder which went to the very root of the
discussion. The fact that France was now at the back of the Assembly,
inspiring its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinal
element, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke systematically
ignored. That he should have so ignored it, left him in a curious
position, for it left him without any rational explanation of the
sources of the policy which kindled his indignation and contempt. A
publicist can never be sure of his position until he can explain to
himself even what he does not wish to justify to others. Burke thought
it enough to dwell upon the immense number of lawyers in the Assembly,
and to show that lawyers are naturally bad statesmen. He did not look
the state of things steadily in the face. It was no easy thing to do,
but Burke was a man who ought to have done it. He set all down to the
ignorance, folly, and wickedness of the French lea