the sphere of ideas:  it is not necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of politics and practice.  Joubert has said beautifully:  “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 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[31]