e fountain of honour? On this halcyon
sea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indies
chooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. No
hurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors to
evade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency in
his pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with its
emoluments his purse will overflow."

A reference to the elegant contingency of Gatton sufficed to deflate a
good deal of eloquence.

Burke, indeed, believed in the pre-ordained order of the world, but he
somehow omitted the rebels. When in his sublimest periods, he appealed
to "the known march of the ordinary providence of God," and saw in
revolution and change an assault on the divine order, one sees, rigid
and forbidding, the limitations of his thinking. The man who sees in
history a divine tactic must salute the regiment in its headlong charge
no less than the regiment which stands with fixed bayonets around the
ark of the covenant. Said the Hindoo saint, who saw all things in God
and God in all things, to the soldier who was slaying him, "And Thou
also art He." The march of providence embraced 1789 as well as 1688.
Paine and Godwin, Danton and Robespierre might have answered Burke with
a reminder that they also were His children.

The key to any understanding of the dialogue between Burke and the
Revolutionists is that each side was moved by a passion which meant
nothing to the other. Burke was hoarse with anger and fear at the
excesses in France. They were afire with an almost religious faith in
human perfectibility. Burke's is a great record of detailed reforms
achieved or advocated, but for organic change there was no place in his
system, and he indulged in no vision of human progress. "The only moral
trust with any certainty in our hands," he wrote, "is the care of our
own time." It was of to-morrow that the Revolution thought, and even of
the day after to-morrow. Nothing could shake its faith. Proscribed amid
the Terror for his moderation and independence, learning daily in the
garret where he hid of the violent deaths of friends and comrades,
witnessing, as it must have seemed to him, the ruin of his work and the
frustration of his brightest hopes, Condorcet, solitary and disguised,
sat down to write that sketch of human destinies which is, perhaps, the
most confident statement of a reasoned optimism in European literature.
He finishe