The answer was obvious.  It was well to pity the unmerited agonies of Marie Antoinette, though as yet, we must remember, she had suffered nothing beyond the indignities of the days of October at Versailles.  But did not the protracted agonies of a nation deserve the tribute of a tear?  As Paine asked, were men to weep over the plumage, and forget the dying bird?  The bulk of the people must labour, Burke told them, “to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice.”  When we learn that a Lyons silk weaver, working as hard as he could for over seventeen hours a day, could not earn money enough to procure the most bare and urgent necessaries of subsistence, we may know with what benignity of brow eternal justice must have presented herself in the garret of that hapless wretch.  It was no idle abstraction, no metaphysical right of man for which the Trench cried, but only the practical right of being permitted, by their own toil, to save themselves and the little ones about their knees from hunger and cruel death.  The mainmortable serfs of ecclesiastics are variously said to have been a million and a million and a half at the time of the Revolution.  Burke’s horror, as he thought of the priests and prelates who left palaces and dignities to earn a scanty living by the drudgery of teaching their language in strange lands, should have been alleviated by the thought that a million or more of men were rescued from ghastly material misery.  Are we to be so overwhelmed with sorrow over the pitiful destiny of the men of exalted rank and sacred function, as to have no tears for the forty thousand serfs in the gorges of the Jura, who were held in dead-hand by the Bishop of Saint-Claude?

The simple truth is that Burke did not know enough of the subject about which he was writing.  When he said, for instance, that the French before 1789 possessed all the elements of a constitution that might be made nearly as good as could be wished, he said what many of his contemporaries knew, and what all subsequent investigation and meditation have proved, to be recklessly ill-considered and untrue.  As to the social state of France, his information was still worse.  He saw the dangers and disorders of the new system, but he saw a very little way indeed into the more cruel dangers and disorders of the old.  Mackintosh replied to the Reflections with manliness and temperance in the Vindicicae Gallicae.  Thomas Paine replied to them with an energy, courage, and eloquence worthy of his cause, in the Rights of Man.  But the substantial and decisive reply to Burke came from his former correspondent, the farmer at Bradfield in Suffolk.  Arthur Young published his Travels in France some eighteen months after the Reflections (1792), and the pages of the twenty-first chapter in which he closes