he long chain of human history. Like
Burke, he never believed that the human mind has any spontaneous
inclination to welcome pure truth. Here, however, is visible between
them a hard line of division. It is not error, said Turgot, which
opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, and the
spirit of routine. But then Turgot enjoined upon us to make it the aim
of life to do battle in ourselves and others with all this indolence,
obstinacy, and spirit of routine in the world; while Burke, on the
contrary, gave to these bad things gentler names, he surrounded them
with the picturesque associations of the past, and in the great
world-crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his genius
on their side. Will any reader doubt which of these two types of the
school of order and justice, both of them noble, is the more valuable
for the race, and the worthier and more stimulating ideal for the
individual?

It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a moment startled
by the suspicion that he might unawares be fighting against the truth.
In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool
breath from the distant region of a half-pensive tolerance. "I do not
think," he says at the close of the _Reflections_, to the person to
whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments are likely to alter
yours. I do not know that they ought. You are young; you cannot guide,
but must follow, the fortune of your country. But hereafter they may
be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth
may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final
settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says,
'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its
transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood."

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos,
might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order. Among
the later words that he wrote on the Revolution were these:--"If a
great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be
fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way.
Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in
opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of
men." We can only regret that these rays of the _mens divinior_ did
not shine with a more steadfast light; and tha