place.  He must have known that no one in the House of Commons was his equal.  He must have known how few of those he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable of playing the part he pictured for them.  The answer to a morally bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for power.  Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could be maintained.  He said nothing of what education might accomplish for the people.  He did not examine the obvious consequences of their economic status.  Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in their inexperience, might have given him pause.  The “obscure provincial advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation” legislated, out of their inexperience, for the world.  Their resolution, their constancy, their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.

Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry.  Rather may it be urged that what was needed in Burke’s philosophy was the clear avowal of the metaphysic it implied.  Nothing is more greatly wanted in political inquiry than discovery of that “intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise” which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the true foundation of so many of our political judgments.  The theory of natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in its form than in its substance.  It clearly suffered from its mistaken effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a complex experience.  It suffered also from its desire to lay down universal formulae.  It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic they implied.  But the demands which underlay the thought of men like Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke’s own doctrine.  They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly enough, Burke was their master.  But no one can read the answers of Paine and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of metaphysics, to the Reflections, without feeling that Burke failed to move them from their main position.  Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done.  The unconscious deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the motives that are avowed.  Action is less their elimination than their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have the full materials for judgment.