rld of
practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the
other; but neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons
said to me the other day: "That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no
objection to it whatever." I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing
is an anomaly _is_ an objection to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of
ideas; it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at
such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and
practice. Joubert has said beautifully: "C'est la force et le droit qui
reglent toutes choses dans le monde; la force en attendant le droit."
Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is
ready. _Force till right is ready_; and till right is ready, force, the
existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But
right is something moral, and implies inward recognition, free assent of
the will; we are not ready for right,--_right_, so far as we are
concerned, _is not ready_,--until we have attained this sense of seeing it
and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and transform force,
the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate
ruler of the world, will depend on the way in which, when our time comes,
we see it and will it. Therefore, for other people enamored of their own
newly discerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and
violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act of tyranny,
and to be resisted. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim,
_force till right is ready_. This was the grand error of the French
Revolution; and its movement of ideas, by quitting the intellectual sphere
and rushing furiously into the political sphere, ran, indeed, a prodigious
and memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the
movement of ideas of the Renaissance, and created, in opposition to
itself, what I may call an _epoch of concentration_.

The great force of that epoch of concentration was England; and the great
voice of that epoch of concentration was Burke. It is the fashion to treat
Burke's writings on the French Revolution as superannuated and conquered
by the event; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and
prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence
and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was
bounded, and his obs