inconsistency, and taunting him with having
forgotten that ever-admirable saying of his own about the insurgent
colonists, that he did not know how to draw an indictment against a whole
nation. Burke replied in tones of firm self-repression; complained of the
attack that had been made upon him; reviewed Fox's charges of
inconsistency; enumerated the points on which they had disagreed, and
remarked that such disagreements had never broken their friendship. But
whatever the risk of enmity, and however bitter the loss of friendship, he
would never cease from the warning to flee from the French constitution.
"But there is no loss of friends," said Fox in an eager undertone. "Yes,"
said Burke, "there _is_ a loss of friends. I know the penalty of toy
conduct. I have done my duty at the price of my friend--our friendship is
at an end." Fox rose, but was so overcome that for some moments he could
not speak. At length, his eyes streaming with tears, and in a broken voice,
he deplored the breach of a twenty years' friendship on a political
question. Burke was inexorable. To him the political question was so vivid,
so real, so intense, as to make all personal sentiment no more than dust in
the balance. Burke confronted Jacobinism with the relentlessness of a
Jacobin. The rupture was never healed, and Fox and he had no relations with
one another henceforth beyond such formal interviews as took place in the
manager's box in Westminster Hall in connexion with the impeachment.

A few months afterwards Burke published the _Appeal from the New to the Old
Whigs_, a grave, calm and most cogent vindication of the perfect
consistency of his criticisms upon the English Revolution of 1688 and upon
the French Revolution of 1789, with the doctrines of the great Whigs who
conducted and afterwards defended in Anne's reign the transfer of the crown
from James to William and Mary. The _Appeal_ was justly accepted as a
satisfactory performance for the purpose with which it was written. Events,
however, were doing more than words could do, to confirm the public opinion
of Burke's sagacity and foresight. He had always divined by the instinct of
hatred that the French moderates must gradually be swept away by the
Jacobins, and now it was all coming true. The humiliation of the king and
queen after their capture at Varennes; the compulsory acceptance of the
constitution; the plain incompetence of the new Legislative Assembly; the
growing violence of the