Even in America the excesses of the Revolution excited general abhorrence; much more so in England.  And it was these excesses, this mode of securing reform, not reform itself, which excited Burke’s detestation.  Who can wonder at this?  Those who accept crimes as a necessary outbreak of revolutionary passions adopt a philosophy which would veil the world with a funereal and diabolical gloom.  Reformers must be taught that no reforms achieved by crime are worth the cost.  Nor is it just to brand an illustrious man with indifference to great moral and social movements because he would wait, sooner than upturn the very principles on which society is based.  And here is the great difficulty in estimating the character and labors of Burke.  Because he denounced the French Revolution, some think he was inconsistent with his early principles.  Not at all; it was the crimes and excesses of the Revolution he denounced, not the impulse of the French people to achieve their liberties.  Those crimes and excesses he believed to be inconsistent with an enlightened desire for freedom; but freedom itself, to its utmost limit and application, consistent with law and order, he desired.  Is it necessary for mankind to win its greatest boons by going through a sea of anarchies, madness, assassinations, and massacres?  Those who take this view of revolution, it seems to me, are neither wise nor learned.  If a king makes war on his subjects, they are warranted in taking up arms in their defence, even if the civil war is followed by enormities.  Thus the American colonies took up arms against George III.; but they did not begin with crimes.  Louis XVI. did not take up arms against his subjects, nor league against them, until they had crippled and imprisoned him.  He made even great concessions; he was willing to make still greater to save his crown.  But the leaders of the revolution were not content with these, not even with the abolition of feudal privileges; they wanted to subvert the monarchy itself, to abolish the order of nobility, to sweep away even the Church,—­not the Catholic establishment only, but the Christian religion also, with all the institutions which time and poetry had consecrated.  Their new heaven and new earth was not the reign of the saints, which the millenarians of Cromwell’s time prayed for devoutly, but a sort of communistic equality, where every man could do precisely as he liked, take even his neighbor’s property, and annihilate all distinctions of society, all inequalities of condition,—­a miserable, fanatical dream, impossible to realize under any form of government which can be conceived.  It was this spirit of reckless innovation, promulgated by atheists and drawn logically from some principles of the “Social Contract” of which Rousseau was the author, which excited the ire of Burke.  It was license, and not liberty.