the last
priest. I would have tried to explain the connection between the
doctrine of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source of all
wealth, and the conclusion that the producers of wealth virtually
compose the nation, by which Sieyes subverted historic France; and to
show that Rousseau's definition of the social compact as a voluntary
association of equal partners conducted Marat, by short and unavoidable
stages, to declare that the poorer classes were absolved, by the law of
self-preservation, from the conditions of a contract which awarded to
them misery and death; that they were at war with society, and had a
right to all they could get by exterminating the rich, and that their
inflexible theory of equality, the chief legacy of the Revolution,
together with the avowed inadequacy of economic science to grapple with
problems of the poor, revived the idea of renovating society on the
principle of self-sacrifice, which had been the generous aspiration of
the Essenes and the early Christians, of Fathers and Canonists and
Friars, of Erasmus, the most celebrated precursor of the Reformation, of
Sir Thomas More, its most illustrious victim, and of Fenelon, the most
popular of bishops, but which, during the forty years of its revival,
has been associated with envy and hatred and bloodshed, and is now the
most dangerous enemy lurking in our path.

Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom of our
ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion that burned
what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic mount up as high as
those of the monarchy, having shown that Legitimacy, which repudiated
the Revolution, and Imperialism, which crowned it, were but disguises of
the same element of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order
that my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral, to
relate by whom, and in what connection, the true law of the formation of
free States was recognised, and how that discovery, closely akin to
those which, under the names of development, evolution, and continuity,
have given a new and deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient
problem between stability and change, and determined the authority of
tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory, which Sir James
Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions are not made, but
grow; the theory that custom and the national qualities of the governed,
and not the will of the governmen