raft. He viewed Thomas
Cromwell's policy of reformation, just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's
policy of revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would as
willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the block as More
sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to the stake. For neither More
nor Burke was of the gentle contemplative spirit, which the first
disorder of a new society just bursting into life merely overshadows
with saddening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was to them
so bound up with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage active
battle for the gods of their reverence was the irresistible instinct
of self-preservation. More had an excuse which Burke had not, for
the principle of persecution was accepted by the best minds of the
sixteenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it was
emphatically repudiated.

Another illustrious name of Burke's own era rises to our lips, as we
ponder mentally the too scanty list of those who have essayed the
great and hardy task of reconciling order with progress. Turgot is
even a more imposing figure than Burke himself. The impression made
upon us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was austere,
reserved, distant, a man of many silences and much suspense; while
Burke, as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like
some of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he had
associated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and
good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of
the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus.
He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the
Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty
astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men
centuries before. On one side Turgot shared the conservatism of
Burke, though, perhaps, he would hardly have given it that name. He
habitually corrected the headlong insistence of the revolutionary
philosophers, his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor
benevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice; and he could
never endure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost of
this sovereign quality. Like Burke, he held fast to the doctrine that
everything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them. Like
Burke, he realised how close are the links that bind the successive
generations of men, and make up t