to the winds in a single night.  Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred.  The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification.  On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past history.  Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty.  The religious spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared incompatible with social order.  Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic.  Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application.  Their disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.  In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent.  That Price and Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not unnatural thing.  But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.

Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point consistent with his earlier doctrine.  The charge that he supported the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the other.  And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough that his criticism, de Maistre’s apart, is by far the soundest we possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.  The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship.  He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room.  That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.  “The nature of man is intricate”; he wrote in the Reflections, “the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs.”  The note recurs in substance throughout his criticism.  Much of its application, indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688.  The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles, but the roots were absent from their national experience.