d Burke's political philosophy. Here lay his inconsistency, not
in abandoning democratic principles, for he had never held them, but
in forgetting his own rules that nations act from adequate motives
relative to their interests, and not from metaphysical speculation;
that we cannot draw an indictment against a whole people; that there
is a species of hostile justice which no asperity of war wholly
extinguishes in the minds of a civilised people. "Steady independent
minds," he had once said, "when they have an object of so serious a
concern to mankind as _government_ under their contemplation, will
disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers." Show the
thing that you ask for, he cried during the American war, to be
reason, show it to be common sense. We have a measure of the reason
and common sense of Burke's attitude in the _Regicide Peace_, in
the language which it inspired in Windham and others, who denounced
Wilberforce for canting when he spoke of peace; who stigmatised Pitt
as weak and a pander to national avarice for thinking of the cost
of the war; and who actually charged the liverymen of London who
petitioned for peace with open sedition.

It is a striking illustration of the versatility of Burke's moods
that immediately before sitting down to write the _Fourth Letter on a
Regicide Peace_ he had composed one of the most lucid and accurately
meditated of all of his tracts, which, short as it is, contains ideas
on free trade which were only too far in advance of the opinion of his
time. In 1772 a Corn Bill had been introduced--it was passed in the
following year--of which Adam Smith said that it was like the laws of
Solon, not the best in itself, but the best which the situation and
tendency of the times would admit. In speaking upon this measure,
Burke had laid down those sensible principles on the trade in corn,
which he now in 1795 worked out in the _Thoughts and Details on
Scarcity_. Those who do not concern themselves with economics will
perhaps be interested in the singular passage, vigorously objected
to by Dugald Stewart, in which Burke sets up a genial defence of the
consumption of ardent spirits. It is interesting as an argument, and
it is most characteristic of the author.

The curtain was now falling. All who saw him felt that Burke's life
was quickly drawing to a close. His son's death had struck the final
blow. We could only wish that the years had brought to him what it
ought to be the