class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 22]"/> against rash rebellion and the anarchy of revolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke.

Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on his inspired anticipation of the historical view of politics. Quotation has made classical those noble passages which glorify the continuous life of mankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure up a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew nothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with success and even penned a remarkable essay (On Sepulchres) in which he anticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory. Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblest character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic evolutionary interpretation of history.

But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above or from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution, illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was the sacred constitution in which he saw an "entailed heritage," the social fabric "well cramped and bolted together in all its parts." For Godwin it was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, and social misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capable of singing the praises of "prejudice," which "renders a man's virtue his habit." For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderly procession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-marked epochs (he enumerated nine) from the pastoral state to the French Revolution, each epoch marked primarily by the shedding of some moral, social, or theological "prejudice," which had hampered its advance.

It is easy to criticise the naïve intellectualism of such a view as this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's duties into doubts." The revolutionary school believed that all progress depended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. History for them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophers of innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority. They hoped everything from the leadership of the illuminated few who gradually permeate the mass and raise it with them. Burke held that "the individual is foolish, but the species is wise," and the "natural aristocracy" in whom he trusted was to keep the inert mass in a condition of stable equilibrium.

We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, the epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing—a defence of the unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of providence, the "divine tactic" which had made society what it was, meant for them in bald prose that Old Sarum should have two members. Burke had not "a doubt that the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole commons of Great Britain." They, with no mystical view of history to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handful of 12,000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burke perorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneer who put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Borough of Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. That auctioneer is worth quoting: "Need I tell you, gentlemen, that this elegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, titles, and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highest situations in the State? And that, meandering through the tempting sinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed with roses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands that flourish in full vigour round the fountain of honour? On this halcyon sea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indies chooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. No hurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors to evade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency in his pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with its emoluments his purse will overflow."

A reference to the elegant contingency of Gatton sufficed to deflate a good deal of eloquence.

Burke, indeed, believed in the pre-ordained order of the world, but he somehow omitted the rebels. When in his sublimest periods, he appealed to "the known march of the ordinary providence of God," and saw in revolution and change an assault on the divine order, one sees, rigid and forbidding, the limitations of his thinking. The man who sees in history a divine tactic must salute the regiment in its headlong charge no less than the regiment which stands with fixed bayonets around the ark of the covenant. Said the Hindoo saint, who saw all things in God and God in all things, to the soldier who was slaying him, "And Thou also art He." The march of providence embraced 1789 as well as 1688. Paine and Godwin, Danton and Robespierre might have answered Burke with a reminder that they also were His children.

The key to any understanding of the dialogue between Burke and the Revolutionists is that each side was moved by a passion which meant nothing to the other. Burke was hoarse with anger and fear at the excesses in France. They were afire with an almost religious faith in human perfectibility. Burke's is a great record of detailed reforms achieved or advocated, but for organic change there was no place in his system, and he indulged in no vision of human progress. "The only moral trust with any certainty in our hands," he wrote, "is the care of our own time." It was of to-morrow that the Revolution thought, and even of the day after to-morrow. Nothing could shake its faith. Proscribed amid the Terror for his moderation and independence, learning daily in the garret where he hid of the violent deaths of friends and comrades, witnessing, as it must have seemed to him, the ruin of his work and the frustration of his brightest hopes, Condorcet, solitary and disguised, sat down to write that sketch of human destinies which is, perhaps, the most confident statement of a reasoned optimism in European literature. He finished his Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, left his garret, and went out to meet his death. A year later, as if to show that the great prodigal hope could survive the brain that conceived it, the representatives of the French people had it circulated as a national document.

Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of human faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the duration of