the foundations of the State.  Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue.  No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.

Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close.  That is the real meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency not less active in England than abroad.  In France, indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere.  The rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries.  A power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay, these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past.  It is not difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned.  Burke’s caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good.  In a less degree, the same is true of England.  The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly.  These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn.  The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression.  Burke refused to see that aspect of the picture.  He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.  The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook.  He took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents.  Nor did he admit the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men.  No one will object to privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different thing, and Burke’s doctrine safeguards