s acquitted, but Burke's
attacks nevertheless had the effect of uncovering and redressing the
prevailing abuses.

The last period of Burke's life is filled up by his great struggle
against the French revolution. Already in 1769 he had prophetically
asserted that the derangement of French finances must infallibly lead to
a violent convulsion, the influence of which upon France and even Europe
could be scarcely divined; now he directed the attention of the House
(February 4, 1790) to the dangers of the revolution, by which the French
had shown themselves "the ablest architects of ruin," pulling down all
their domestic institutions, making "a digest of anarchy" called "the
rights of men," and establishing a ferocious, tyrannical, and
atheistical democracy. It might be said that they had done service to
England, a rival, by reducing their country to impotence and expunging
it out of the system of Europe; but, by the vicinity of the two
countries, their present distemper might prove more contagious than the
gilded tyranny of Louis XIV. had been, and "much as it would afflict
him, he would abandon his best friends and join with his worst enemies
to oppose all violent exertions of the spirit of innovation, which by
tearing to pieces the contexture of the state prevented all real
reformation;" the last passage alluding to the apology of Fox, hitherto
his closest friend, for French proceedings.

These ideas Burke more fully developed in his famous "Reflections on the
Revolution in France" (1790); liberals maintained that by this work he
had deserted the cause of liberty; conservatives asserted that he had
become the stoutest champion of order combined with rational freedom. It
must be acknowledged that Burke erred by judging the state of France
before the revolution too favorably; if he justly appreciated the
pernicious influence of Rousseau, "that great professor and hero of
vanity," he ought to have discerned that a nation, the higher classes of
which were undermined by materialism and unbelief, while the masses
lived in deep misery, was incapable of a temperate reform; the follies
and terrors of the revolution were the children of the sins of the
"ancien regime." But how amply has history confirmed his judgment on the
revolution itself! While Fox admired the constitution of 1791 as "the
most astonishing and glorious edifice of liberty that ever was erected,"
Burke foresaid that this constitutional king would be torn from his