his performance, as a luminous criticism of the most important side of the Revolution, are worth a hundred times more than Burke, Mackintosh, and Paine all put together.  Young afterwards became panic-stricken, but his book remained.  There the writer plainly enumerates without trope or invective the intolerable burdens under which the great mass of the French people had for long years been groaning.  It was the removal of these burdens that made the very heart’s core of the Revolution, and gave to France that new life which so soon astonished and terrified Europe.  Yet Burke seems profoundly unconscious of the whole of them.  He even boldly asserts that, when the several orders met in their bailliages in 1789, to choose their representatives and draw up their grievances and instructions, in no one of these instructions did they charge, or even hint at, any of those things which had drawn upon the usurping Assembly the detestation of the rational part of mankind.  He could not have made a more enormous blunder.  There was not a single great change made by the Assembly, which had not been demanded in the lists of grievances that had been sent up by the nation to Versailles.  The division of the kingdom into districts, and the proportioning of the representation to taxes and population; the suppression of the intendants; the suppression of all monks and the sale of their goods and estates; the abolition of feudal rights, duties, and services; the alienation of the king’s domains; the demolition of the Bastille; these and all else were in the prayers of half the petitions that the country had laid at the feet of the king.

If this were merely an incidental blunder in a fact, it might be of no importance.  But it was a blunder which went to the very root of the discussion.  The fact that France was now at the back of the Assembly, inspiring its counsels and ratifying its decrees, was the cardinal element, and that is the fact which at this stage Burke systematically ignored.  That he should have so ignored it, left him in a curious position, for it left him without any rational explanation of the sources of the policy which kindled his indignation and contempt.  A publicist can never be sure of his position until he can explain to himself even what he does not wish to justify to others.  Burke thought it enough to dwell upon the immense number of lawyers in the Assembly, and to show that lawyers are naturally bad statesmen.  He did not look the state of things steadily in the face.  It was no easy thing to do, but Burke was a man who ought to have done it.  He set all down to the ignorance, folly, and wickedness of the French leaders.  This was as shallow as the way in which his enemies, the philosophers, used to set down the superstition of eighteen centuries to the craft of priests, and all defects in the government of Europe to the cruelty of tyrants.  How it came about that priests and tyrants acquired their irresistible power over men’s