evious time; the ultimate outcome
of that ideal state of things in which the church had its own way
during the ages of truth. Must not the system have been wrong, when it
had so lost all moral weight as to be at the mercy of a ruffianly
plunderer? And so, as we all admit now, the strongest condemnation of
the old French _regime_ is the fact that it had not only produced
such a set of miscreants as those who have cast permanent odium even
upon sound principles; but that its king and rulers went down before
them without even an attempt at manly resistance. A revolution does
not, perhaps, justify itself; it does not prove that its leaders judged
rightly and acted virtuously: but, beyond a doubt, it condemns the
previous order which brought it about. What a horrid thing is the
explosion! Why, is the obvious answer, did you allow the explosive
materials to accumulate, till the first match must fire the train? The
greatest blot upon Burke, I need hardly say, is that his passions
blinded him in his age, to this, as we now see, inevitable conclusion.

The old-fashioned view, I fancy, is a relic of that view of history in
which all the great events and changes were personified in some
individual hero. The old "legislators," Lycurgus and Solon and the
like, were supposed to have created the institutions which were really
the products of a slow growth. When a favourable change due to
economical causes took place in the position of the French peasantry,
the peasants, says Michelet somewhere, called it "good king Henry".
Carlyle's theory of hero worship is partly an application of the same
mode of thought. You embody your principle in some concrete person;
canonise him or damn him, as he represents truth or error; and take
credit to yourself for insight and for a lofty morality. It becomes a
kind of blasphemy to suggest that your great man, who thus stands for
an inspired leader dropped straight out of heaven, was probably at best
very imperfect, one-sided, and at least as much of a product as a
producer. The crudity of the method is even regarded as a proof of its
morality. Your common-place moralist likes to call everything black or
white; he despises all qualifications as casuistical refinements, and
plumes himself on the decisive verdict, saint or sinner, with which he
labels the adherents and opponents of his party. And yet we know as a
fact, how absurd are such judgments. We know how men are betrayed into
bad causes from good