years before he had said, “The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order.”  The court tried to regulate liberty too severely.  It found in him an inflexible opponent.  Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty.  They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of all remonstrants.  The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgot for whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived their authority, and in what description of government it was that they had a place.  Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the ranks of the independent minority.  He withstood to the face the king and the king’s friends.  He withstood to the face Charles Fox and the Friends of the People.  He may have been wrong in both, or in either, but it is unreasonable to tell us that he turned back in his course; that he was a revolutionist in 1770, and a reactionist in 1790; that he was in his sane mind when he opposed the supremacy of the Court, but that his reason was tottering when he opposed the supremacy of the Faubourg Saint Antoine.

There is no part of Burke’s career at which we may not find evidence of his instinctive and undying repugnance to the critical or revolutionary spirit and all its works.  From the early days when he had parodied Bolingbroke, down to the later time when he denounced Condorcet as a fanatical atheist, with “every disposition to the lowest as well as the highest and most determined villainies,” he invariably suspected or denounced everybody, virtuous or vicious, high-minded or ignoble, who inquired with too keen a scrutiny into the foundations of morals, of religion, of social order.  To examine with a curious or unfavourable eye the bases of established opinions, was to show a leaning to anarchy, to atheism, or to unbridled libertinism.  Already we have seen how, three years after the publication of his Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and seventeen years before the composition of the Reflections, he denounced the philosophers with a fervour and a vehemence which he never afterwards surpassed.  When a few of the clergy petitioned to be relieved from some of the severities of subscription, he had resisted them on the bold ground that the truth of a proposition deserves less attention than the effect of adherence to it upon the established order of things.  “I will not enter into the question,” he told the House of Commons, “how much truth is preferable to peace.  Perhaps truth may be far better.  But as we have scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace.”  In that intellectual restlessness, to which the world is so deeply indebted, Burke could recognise but scanty merit.  Himself the most industrious and active-minded of men, he was ever sober in cutting the channels of his activity, and he would have had others equally moderate.  Perceiving that plain and righteous conduct is the end of life in this world, he prayed men not to be over-curious in searching for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base on which the prerogatives of virtue repose.  Provided that there was peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and content as is compatible with the conditions of the human lot, Burke felt that a too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle but cruel.