These are but few books and few authors.  With Lord Morley’s three thrown in, they still fall far short of a score.  Readers will add other names, other books that ranked as acts and burnt like fire.  To their brief but noble roll, I would also add one name, and one brief set of speeches or essays that hardly made a book, but to which Lord Morley himself, at all events, would not be likely to take exception.  He mentioned Burke’s famous denunciation of Rousseau, and, indeed, the natures and aspects of no two distinguished and finely-tempered men could well be more opposed.  But none the less, I believe that in Burke, before growing age and growing fears and habits chilled his blood, there kindled a fire consuming in its indignation, and driving him to words that, equally with Rousseau’s, may rank among the acts of history.  In support of what may appear so violent a paradox when speaking of one so often claimed as a model of Conservative moderation and constitutional caution, let me recall a few actual sentences from the speech on “Conciliation with America,” published three years before Rousseau’s death.  The grounds of Burke’s imagination were not theoretic.  He says nothing about abstract man born free; but, as though quietly addressing the House of Commons to-day, he remarks: 

  “The Colonies complain that they have not the characteristic
  mark and seal of British freedom.  They complain that they
  are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented.”

That simple complaint had roused in the Colonies, thus deprived of the mark and seal of British freedom, a spirit of turbulence and disorder.  Already, under a policy of negation and suppression, the people were driving towards the most terrible kind of war—­a war between the members of the same community.  Already the cry of “no concession so long as disorders continue” went up from the central Government, and, with passionate wisdom, Burke replied: 

  “The question is not whether their spirit deserves blame or
  praise, but what, in the name of God, shall we do with it?”

Then come two brief passages which ought to be bound as watchwords and phylacteries about the foreheads of every legislator who presumes to direct our country’s destiny, and which stand as a perpetual indictment against all who endeavour to exclude the men or women of this country from constitutional liberties: 

“In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.  To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles or deriding some of those feelings for which our ancestors have shed their blood.”

The second passage is finer still, and particularly apt to the present civil contest over Englishwomen’s enfranchisement: