minds, they never inquired.  And Burke never inquired into the enthusiastic acquiescence of the nation, and, what was most remarkable of all, the acquiescence of the army, in the strong measures of the Assembly.  Burke was in truth so appalled by the magnitude of the enterprise on which France had embarked, that he utterly forgot for once the necessity in political affairs of seriously understanding the originating conditions of things.  He was strangely content with the explanations that came from the malignants at Coblenz, and he actually told Francis that he charged the disorders not on the mob, but on the Duke of Orleans and Mirabeau, on Barnave and Bailly, on Lameth and Lafayette, who had spent immense sums of money, and used innumerable arts, to stir up the populace throughout France to the commission of the enormities that were shocking the conscience of Europe.  His imagination broke loose.  His practical reason was mastered by something that was deeper in him than reason.

This brings me to remark a really singular trait.  In spite of the predominance of practical sagacity, of the habits and spirit of public business, of vigorous actuality in Burke’s character, yet at the bottom of all his thoughts about communities and governments there lay a certain mysticism.  It was no irony, no literary trope, when he talked of our having taught the American husbandman “piously to believe in the mysterious virtue of wax and parchment.”  He was using no idle epithet, when he described the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, “moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.”  To him there actually was an element of mystery in the cohesion of men in societies, in political obedience, in the sanctity of contract; in all that fabric of law and charter and obligation, whether written or unwritten, which is the sheltering bulwark between civilisation and barbarism.  When reason and history had contributed all that they could to the explanation, it seemed to him as if the vital force, the secret of organisation, the binding framework, must still come from the impenetrable regions beyond reasoning and beyond history.  There was another great conservative writer of that age, whose genius was aroused into a protest against the revolutionary spirit as vehement as Burke’s.  This was Joseph de Maistre, one of the most learned, witty, and acute of all reactionary philosophers.  De Maistre wrote a book on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.  He could only find this principle in the operation of occult and supernatural forces, producing the half-divine legislators who figure mysteriously in the early history of nations.  Hence he held, and with astonishing ingenuity enforced, the doctrine that nothing else could deliver Europe from the Satanic forces of revolution—­he used the word Satanic in all literal seriousness—­save the divinely inspired supremacy of the Pope.  No natural operations seemed at all adequate either to