was an answer to the Old Jewry sermon, which, eloquent itself, was to beget much eloquence in others. For four years the mighty debate went on, and it became as the disputants conversed across the echoes of the Terror, rather a dialogue between the past and the future, than a discussion between human voices. Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (The Rights of Man) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary Wollstonecraft, and another (Vindiciae Gallicae) from Mackintosh, who afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be known as Sir James.

To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument was reserved for William Godwin, a mind steeped in the French and English speculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of analysis, and inspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logical capacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after him has approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquence which illumines if it does not warm, Godwin's Political Justice was dead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely read than to-day.

The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is passion rather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from the tomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity which appeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. The great store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity of the Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like the luminous phantom which walked in Faust through the witcheries of the Brocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero and prophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen him bequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part of our task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; we are concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by its vehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive the revolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations and opposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation, and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy as he talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in his furious pursuit of the "political aeronauts." His was a volcanic intellect which flung up principles in its moments of eruption, and poured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations.

No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Every statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French Revolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most of his philosophical obiter dicta were uttered. The real nerve of the thinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramatic is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of his syllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. Fanny Burney said of him that when he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately assumed "the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers." That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was to spread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain or excuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price.

If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted the Terror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to the coalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings. But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would be fairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take fire because he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logic which found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil which caused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the French philosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows." He pursued Rousseau and Dr. Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.

To rouse Burke's genius to its noblest utterance, there must needs be a suffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of the dull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution. He ignored those catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the cahiers) which the Deputies carried with them to the National Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he was always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominating passion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between his earlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he saw only cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism, negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penal laws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much What did he believe? as Whom did he pity?

It was the contrast of temperament and attitude which made the cleavage between Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep and irreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seems to agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves. Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction that the State is based on some original pact or social contract. That was Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or the happiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more a priori moods, was capable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rights of man; Godwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion. While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the whole theoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but he remained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to "choose our governors," but he could not relapse into the seventeenth-century Tory doctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases the right of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for there are passages in Godwin