He ignored
those catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the
_cahiers_) which the Deputies carried with them to the National
Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive
privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's
helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the
plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that
while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the
hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he
was always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominating
passion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between his
earlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he saw
only cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism,
negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penal
laws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much What
did he believe? as Whom did he pity?

It was the contrast of temperament and attitude which made the cleavage
between Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep and
irreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seems
to agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves.
Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction that
the State is based on some original pact or social contract. That was
Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to
shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been
content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears
to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or
as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for
those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always
brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question,
what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or the
happiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more _a priori_ moods, was
capable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rights
of man; Godwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion.
While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the whole
theoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but he
remained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to "choose our
governors," but he could not relapse into the