history. There was another great conservative writer of that age,
whose genius was aroused into a protest against the revolutionary
spirit as vehement as Burke's. This was Joseph de Maistre, one of the
most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers.
De Maistre wrote a book on the Generative Principle of Political
Constitutions. He could only find this principle in the operation of
occult and supernatural forces, producing the half-divine legislators
who figure mysteriously in the early history of nations. Hence he
held, and with astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that
nothing else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of
revolution--he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness--save
the divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope. No natural operations
seemed at all adequate either to produce or to maintain the marvel
of a coherent society. We are reminded of a professor who, in the
fantastic days of geology, explained the Pyramids of Egypt to be the
remains of a volcanic eruption, which had forced its way upwards by a
slow and stately motion; the hieroglyphs were crystalline formations;
and the shaft of the great Pyramid was the air-hole of a volcano. De
Maistre preferred a similar explanation of the monstrous structures
of modern society. The hand of man could never have reared, and could
never uphold them. If we cannot say that Burke laboured in constant
travail with the same perplexity, it is at least true that he was
keenly alive to it, and that one of the reasons why he dreaded to see
a finger laid upon a single stone of a single political edifice, was
his consciousness that he saw no answer to the perpetual enigma how
any of these edifices had ever been built, and how the passion,
violence, and waywardness of the natural man had ever been persuaded
to bow their necks to the strong yoke of a common social discipline.
Never was mysticism more unseasonable; never was an hour when men
needed more carefully to remember Burke's own wise practical precept,
when he was talking about the British rule in India, that we must
throw a sacred veil over the beginnings of government. Many woes might
perhaps have been saved to Europe, if Burke had applied this maxim to
the government of the new France.

Much has always been said about the inconsistency between Burke's
enmity to the Revolution and his enmity to Lord North in one set of
circumstances, and to Warren Hastings in another. The pamp