principal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon the Revolution (Bk.  III. ch. i.), is only a little too cold to be able to pass for Burke’s own.  Quinet’s work on the Revolution is one long sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the incapacity and blindness of the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous crisis upon mere literary methods, without the moral courage to obey the logic of their beliefs, with the student’s ignorance of the eager passion and rapid imagination of multitudes of men, with the pedant’s misappreciation of a people, of whom it has been said by one of themselves, that there never was a nation more led by its sensations and less by its principles.  Comte, again, points impressively to the Revolution as the period which illustrates more decisively than another the peril of confounding the two great functions of speculation and political action:  and he speaks with just reprobation of the preposterous idea in the philosophic politicians of the epoch, that society was at their disposal, independent of its past development, devoid of inherent impulses, and easily capable of being morally regenerated by the mere modification of legislative rules.

What then was it that, in the midst of so much perspicacity as to detail, blinded Burke at the time when he wrote the Reflections to the true nature of the movement?  Is it not this, that he judges the Revolution as the solution of a merely political question?  If the Revolution had been merely political, his judgment would have been adequate.  The question was much deeper.  It was a social question that burned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification of external arrangements.  That Burke was alive to the existence of social problems, and that he was even tormented by them, we know from an incidental passage in the Reflections.  There he tells us how often he had reflected, and never reflected without feeling, upon the innumerable servile and degrading occupations to which by the social economy so many wretches are inevitably doomed.  He had pondered whether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people from their miserable industry without disturbing the natural course of things, and impeding the great wheel of circulation which is turned by their labour.  This is the vein of that striking passage in his first composition which I have already quoted (p. 22).  Burke did not yet see, and probably never saw, that one key to the events which astonished and exasperated him was simply that the persons most urgently concerned had taken the riddle which perplexed him into their own hands, and had in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance.  The pith of the Revolution up to 1790 was less the political constitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, than the social and economic transformation, of which he says so little.  It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measure of an electoral