have no right to
their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the
maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove
that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to
depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to
gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking
some of those principles or deriding some of those feelings for
which our ancestors have shed their blood."

The second passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present
civil contest over Englishwomen's enfranchisement:

"The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies
are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot,
I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade
them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins
the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they
would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition.
Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest
person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery."

It may be said that these words, unlike the words with which Rousseau
kindled revolution, failed of their purpose. The Government remained
deaf and blind to the demand of British freedom; a terrible war was not
averted; one of the greatest disasters in our history ensued. None the
less, they glow with the true fire, and the book that contains them
ranks with acts, and, indeed, with battles. That we should thus be
coupling Rousseau and Burke--two men of naturally violent antipathy--is
but one of the common ironies of history, which in the course of years
obliterates differences and soothes so many hatreds. To be accepted and
honoured by the same mind, and even for similar service, the two
apparent opposites must have had something in common. What they had in
common was the great qualities that Maine discovered in Rousseau--the
vivid imagination and the genuine love for their fellow-men; and by
imagination I mean the power of realising the thoughts, feelings, and
sufferings of others. Thus from these two qualities combined in the
presence of oppression, cruelty, or the ordinary stupid and callous
denial of freedom, there sprang that flame of indignation from which
alone the burning book derives its fire. Examine those other books whose
titles I have mentioned, and their origin will in every case be found
the same. They are the flaming children of rage, and rage is begotte