The later part of Burke’s attack upon the Revolution does not belong to political philosophy.  No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war.  He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas.  Yet even the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it.  So that it is permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric.  “War never leaves where it found a nation,” he wrote, “it is never to be entered upon without mature deliberation.”  That was a lesson his generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler passage that follows.  “The blood of man,” he said, “should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man.  It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind.  The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.”  It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century’s history that these words were written to justify an effort of which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.

V

Criticism of Burke’s theories can be made from at least two angles.  It is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote.  Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed.  Such criticism would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke’s position.  What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote.  Burke came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly apprehended his own economic principles.  Yet there is no word in what Burke had to say of their significance.  The vast agrarian changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate.  No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application.  He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon.  Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate.  That Burke himself may be said in a sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining