ervation therefore at fault; but on the whole, and for
those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these
writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical truth; they
contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the
heavy atmosphere which its own nature is apt to engender round it, and
make its resistance rational instead of mechanical.

But Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought
to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought; it is his
accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration,
not of an epoch of expansion; it is his characteristic that he so lived by
ideas, and had such a source of them welling up within him, that he could
float even an epoch of concentration and English Tory politics with them.
It does not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were displeased with
him; it does not hurt him, even, that George the Third and the Tories were
enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which
neither English Liberalism nor English Toryism is apt to enter--the world
of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it from
being really true of him that he "to party gave up what was meant for
mankind," that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French
Revolution, after all his invectives against its false pretensions,
hollowness, and madness, with his sincere conviction of its
mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combating
it,--some of the last pages he ever wrote: the _Thoughts on French
Affairs_, in December, 1791,--with these striking words:--

"The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where
power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good
intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I
believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the last two
years. _If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men
will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that
way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in
opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men.
They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate._"

That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the
finest things