umerated nine) from the pastoral state to the French
Revolution, each epoch marked primarily by the shedding of some moral,
social, or theological "prejudice," which had hampered its advance.

It is easy to criticise the naive intellectualism of such a view as
this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes
of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical
view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's duties
into doubts." The revolutionary school believed that all progress
depended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. History
for them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophers
of innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority.
They hoped everything from the leadership of the illuminated few who
gradually permeate the mass and raise it with them. Burke held that "the
individual is foolish, but the species is wise," and the "natural
aristocracy" in whom he trusted was to keep the inert mass in a
condition of stable equilibrium.

We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, the
epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to
Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing--a defence of the
unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of
providence, the "divine tactic" which had made society what it was,
meant for them in bald prose that Old Sarum should have two members.
Burke had not "a doubt that the House of Commons represents perfectly
the whole commons of Great Britain." They, with no mystical view of
history to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handful
of 12,000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester,
Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burke
perorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneer
who put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Borough
of Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. That
auctioneer is worth quoting: "Need I tell you, gentlemen, that this
elegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, titles,
and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highest
situations in the State? And that, meandering through the tempting
sinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed with
roses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands that
flourish in full vigour round th