: "C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans
le monde; la force en attendant le droit."[29] (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,
should 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 naught 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 Renascence, 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[30] 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 observation 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 tha