ders. This was as
shallow as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used to set
down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the craft of priests,
and all defects in the government of Europe to the cruelty of tyrants.
How it came about that priests and tyrants acquired their irresistible
power over men's minds, they never inquired. And Burke never inquired
into the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, and, what was
most remarkable of all, the acquiescence of the army, in the strong
measures of the Assembly. Burke was in truth so appalled by the
magnitude of the enterprise on which France had embarked, that
he utterly forgot for once the necessity in political affairs of
seriously understanding the originating conditions of things. He was
strangely content with the explanations that came from the malignants
at Coblenz, and he actually told Francis that he charged the disorders
not on the mob, but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave
and Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent immense sums of
money, and used innumerable arts, to stir up the populace throughout
France to the commission of the enormities that were shocking the
conscience of Europe. His imagination broke loose. His practical
reason was mastered by something that was deeper in him than reason.

This brings me to remark a really singular trait. In spite of the
predominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of public
business, of vigorous actuality in Burke's character, yet at the
bottom of all his thoughts about communities and governments there
lay a certain mysticism. It was no irony, no literary trope, when
he talked of our having taught the American husbandman "piously to
believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment." He was using
no idle epithet, when he described the disposition of a stupendous
wisdom, "moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the
human race." To him there actually was an element of mystery in the
cohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity
of contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation,
whether written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark between
civilisation and barbarism. When reason and history had contributed
all that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the
vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, must
still come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond