the king and queen in triumphal procession, Burke felt in his heart that the beginning of the end had come, and that the catastrophe was already at hand.  In October he wrote a long letter to the French gentleman to whom he afterwards addressed the Reflections.  “You hope, sir,” he said, “that I think the French deserving of liberty.  I certainly do.  I certainly think that all men who desire it deserve it.  We cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind.  The liberty I mean is social freedom.  It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality of restraint.  This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice. Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is in my opinion safe.”  The weightiest and most important of all political truths, and worth half the fine things that poets have sung about freedom—­if it could only have been respected, how different the course of the Revolution!  But the engineer who attempts to deal with the abysmal rush of the falls of Niagara, must put aside the tools that constructed the Bridgewater Canal and the Chelsea Waterworks.  Nobody recognised so early as Burke that France had really embarked among cataracts and boiling gulfs, and the pith of all his first criticisms, including the Reflections, was the proposition that to separate freedom from justice was nothing else than to steer the ship of state direct into the Maelstrom.  It is impossible to deny that this was true.  Unfortunately it was a truth which the wild spirits that were then abroad in the storm made of no avail.

Destiny aimed an evil stroke when Burke, whose whole soul was bound up in order, peace, and gently enlarged precedent, found himself face to face with the portentous man-devouring Sphinx.  He who could not endure that a few clergymen should be allowed to subscribe to the Bible instead of to the Articles, saw the ancient Church of Christendom prostrated, its possessions confiscated, its priests proscribed, and Christianity itself officially superseded.  The economical reformer, who when his zeal was hottest declined to discharge a tide-waiter or a scullion in the royal kitchen who should have acquired the shadow of a vested interest in his post, beheld two great orders stripped of their privileges and deprived of much of their lands, though their possession had been sanctified by the express voice of the laws and the prescription of many centuries.  He who was full of apprehension and anger at the proposal to take away a member of Parliament from St. Michael’s or Old Sarum, had to look on while the most august monarchy in Europe was overturned.  The man who dreaded fanatics, hated atheists, despised political theorisers, and was driven wild at the notion of applying metaphysical rights and abstract doctrines to public affairs, suddenly beheld a whole kingdom given finally up to fanatics, atheists, and theorisers, who talked