seventeenth-century Tory
doctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases the
right of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for there
are passages in Godwin against rash rebellion and the anarchy of
revolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke.

Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on his
inspired anticipation of the historical view of politics. Quotation has
made classical those noble passages which glorify the continuous life of
mankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure up
a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our
ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real
opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the
historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary
school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew
nothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with success
and even penned a remarkable essay (_On Sepulchres_) in which he
anticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a
national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory.
Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblest
character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic
evolutionary interpretation of history.

But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above or
from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig
aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw
its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry
indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine
was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting
community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution,
illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was the
sacred constitution in which he saw an "entailed heritage," the social
fabric "well cramped and bolted together in all its parts." For Godwin
it was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, and
social misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capable
of singing the praises of "prejudice," which "renders a man's virtue his
habit." For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderly
procession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-marked
epochs (he en