never endure to hear of great changes being wrought at the cost of this sovereign quality.  Like Burke, he held fast to the doctrine that everything must be done for the multitude, but nothing by them.  Like Burke, he realised how close are the links that bind the successive generations of men, and make up the long chain of human history.  Like Burke, he never believed that the human mind has any spontaneous inclination to welcome pure truth.  Here, however, is visible between them a hard line of division.  It is not error, said Turgot, which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, and the spirit of routine.  But then Turgot enjoined upon us to make it the aim of life to do battle in ourselves and others with all this indolence, obstinacy, and spirit of routine in the world; while Burke, on the contrary, gave to these bad things gentler names, he surrounded them with the picturesque associations of the past, and in the great world-crisis of his time he threw all his passion and all his genius on their side.  Will any reader doubt which of these two types of the school of order and justice, both of them noble, is the more valuable for the race, and the worthier and more stimulating ideal for the individual?

It is not certain that Burke was not sometimes for a moment startled by the suspicion that he might unawares be fighting against the truth.  In the midst of flaming and bitter pages, we now and again feel a cool breath from the distant region of a half-pensive tolerance.  “I do not think,” he says at the close of the Reflections, to the person to whom they were addressed, “that my sentiments are likely to alter yours.  I do not know that they ought.  You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country.  But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take.  In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, ‘through great varieties of untried being,’ and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood.”

He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos, might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order.  Among the later words that he wrote on the Revolution were these:—­“If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way.  Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men.”  We can only regret that these rays of the mens divinior did not shine with a more steadfast light; and that a spirit which, amid the sharp press of manifold cares and distractions, had ever vibrated with lofty sympathies, was not now more constant to its faith in the beneficent powers and processes of the Unseen Time.