This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between the school of order and the school of progress.  It is enough to have marked Burke’s position in one of them.  The Reflections places him among the great Conservatives of history.  Perhaps the only Englishman with whom in this respect he may be compared, is Sir Thomas More,—­that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the sixteenth century.  More abounded in light, in intellectual interests, in single-minded care for the common weal.  He was as anxious as any man of his time for the improved ordering of the Church, but he could not endure that reformation should be bought at the price of breaking up the ancient spiritual unity of Europe.  He was willing to slay and be slain rather than he would tolerate the destruction of the old faith, or assent to the violence of the new statecraft.  He viewed Thomas Cromwell’s policy of reformation, just as Burke viewed Mirabeau’s policy of revolution.  Burke too, we may be very sure, would as willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the block as More sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to the stake.  For neither More nor Burke was of the gentle contemplative spirit, which the first disorder of a new society just bursting into life merely overshadows with saddening regrets and poetic gloom.  The old harmony was to them so bound up with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage active battle for the gods of their reverence was the irresistible instinct of self-preservation.  More had an excuse which Burke had not, for the principle of persecution was accepted by the best minds of the sixteenth century, but by the best minds of the eighteenth it was emphatically repudiated.

Another illustrious name of Burke’s own era rises to our lips, as we ponder mentally the too scanty list of those who have essayed the great and hardy task of reconciling order with progress.  Turgot is even a more imposing figure than Burke himself.  The impression made upon us by the pair is indeed very different, for Turgot was austere, reserved, distant, a man of many silences and much suspense; while Burke, as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like some of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he had associated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and good influences.  In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus.  He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men centuries before.  On one side Turgot shared the conservatism of Burke, though, perhaps, he would hardly have given it that name.  He habitually corrected the headlong insistence of the revolutionary philosophers, his friends, by reminding them that neither pity, nor benevolence, nor hope can ever dispense with justice; and he could