uld have had the
good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and
good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs
of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been
convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French
monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion.
But none of these conditions existed.

When he dealt with the affairs of India Burke passed over the circumstances
of our acquisition of power in that continent. "There is a sacred veil to
be drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. "The first step
to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred; the next is good
laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly
on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step
to the assumption by the people of France of their own government. Granted
that the Revolution was inevitable and indispensable, how was the nation to
make the best of it? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of
it? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such
a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France
better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her
condition well enough. "Alas!" he said, "they little know how many a weary
step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a
true political personality."

Burke's view of French affairs, however consistent with all his former
political conceptions, put an end to more than one of his old political
friendships. He had never been popular in the House of Commons, and the
vehemence, sometimes amounting to fury, which he had shown in the debates
on the India Bill, on the regency, on the impeachment of Hastings, had made
him unpopular even among men on his own side. In May 1789--that memorable
month of May in which the states-general marched in impressive array to
hear a sermon at the church of Notre Dame at Versailles--a vote of censure
had actually been passed on him in the House of Commons for a too severe
expression used against Hastings. Fox, who led the party, and Sheridan, who
led Fox, were the intimates of the prince of Wales; and Burke would have
been as much out of place in that circle of gamblers and profligates as
Milton would have been out of place in the court of the Restoration. The
prince, as so