said Grotius, is a blank book. Look around you, and write what you see. The first thing which a man sees is, that men do not in general reason upon Politics. Their reason seems to exhaust itself upon other subjects. Their best reasoned conclusions are often forced to give way to instincts and sentiments for which they have no rational account to give. Even so it is with reason and instinct in matters of religion. It is a paradox, but when we speak of things above ourselves, what is not paradox?

Resolved into their elements, the mainspring both of rational religion and of rational politics seems to be the sentiment of dependence. The effect traceable to this no other theory of life or of society will account for. The sum-total of rational metaphysics has been held to consist of but two propositions. The first, which is involved in the Cogito, ergo sum, of Descartes, may be expressed as 'Here I am.' The second as 'I did not put myself here.' To cut ourselves off, even in thought, from our dependence on our surroundings, is to commit moral suicide. But our dependence on what is outside us, is not limited to our contemporaries. It passes on from generation to generation: it binds us to the past and to the future. Society, says Burke, in his grand Socratic exposure of the imbecile logic which confounded two meanings of one word1, is a partnership in all science, in all art, in every virtue, and in all perfection: a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. There is, says a poet who had fed upon this sublime thought,

'One great society alone on earth,

The noble living and the noble dead.'

The fair mansion of civilisation which we enjoy was not built with our hands, and our hands must refrain from polluting it. Being mere life-tenants, we have no business to cut off the entail, or to commit waste on the inheritance 2. On both sides of us extends a vast array of obligations. Millions as we may be, we stand as a small and insignificant band between the incalculable mass of those who have gone before us, and the infinite army of those who follow us, and are even now treading on our heels. Our relation to the great structure in which we are privileged to

1 'Société,' meaning both society and partnership (p. 113).

2 Page 112.

occupy a niche for a while, is as that of the worm and the mollusc to the mysterious and infinite totality of universal life. We stand there as the undertakers of an awful trust. Like the torch-players in the stadium, it is our business to transmit the precious fire which we bear, unquenched and undimmed, to those who succeed us. This is what Burke explains as 'one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated.' To deny it is to reduce men to the condition of the 'flies of a summer' (pp. 111, 112).

It is an observation of Hume that one generation does not go off the stage at once, and another succeed, as is the case with silkworms and butterflies. There is a perpetually varying margin, into which the men of one age and those of that which succeed are blended. In this everlasting continuity, which secures that the human race shall never be wholly old or wholly new, lies the guarantee for the existence of civilisation. No break in this continuity is possible without the lapse of mankind into its primitive grossness. Imagine for a moment such an intermission. The shortest blank would be enough to ensure the disappearance of every pillar, buttress, and vault, which helps to sustain the lofty and intricate structure of civilised society. We can hardly figure to ourselves the horrible drama of a new generation of utter savages succeeding to the ruins of all that we enjoy. Yet so soon as the work of moral and political education flags, this result is immediately hazarded. In the imagination of Burke, France was well on the highroad to this awful situation: to a solution of moral continuity as disastrous in its effects as a geological catastrophe. All the facts of history prove that civilisation is destructible. It is an essence that is ever tending to evaporate: and though the appreciation of all that is precious in the world depends on the feeling of its perishability, it is seldom that this fact is realised. We come to regard our social life as a perpetual and indestructible possession, destined, like the earth on which we move, to devolve, without any trouble or care on our part, upon our posterity. But the whole tenour of history is against us. The Greeks little dreamed of the day when their broken relics, once more understood, would repair a decayed world, and to those who come after us, things which to us are almost as valuable, and quite as little valued as the air we breathe, may be the

objects of curious conjecture, or of contemptuous neglect. Regard our inheritance in its true light, as precious thing that

we should fear to lose, and we begin to estimate it at its true value. Regard our own title to it as a solemn trust for the benefit of our descendants, and we shall understand how foolishly and immorally we act in tampering with it. How such anticipations as Burke's wrought on kindred minds, might be aptly illustrated from Wordsworth's well-known Dream of the Arab1, who, forewarned by prophecy, is hastening to bury, for preservation from the approaching deluge, the precious talisman that Had voices more than all the winds, with power

To exhilarate the spirit, and to soothe,

Through every clime, the heart of human kind.'

This conception of great intersecular duties devolving upon humanity, generation after generation, reflects on a large scale an instinct which has undoubtedly been strong in the English people. The disposition rather to recur in thought upon the value of the social life and social character which we inherit, than to strain discontentedly for some imaginary ideal, has largely entered into the temperament of those races which have been chiefly instrumental in superinducing civilised society over the face of the earth. 'Moribus antiquis res stat Romana, virisque,' says Ennius. So says Burke, in effect, of the civilised life which the English race have now spread over the four quarters of the globe. With the English race have universally gone the old English ideas on religion, on politics, and on education; America and the rest of the new world have taken them from us and are giving them a new and fruitful development. After the lapse of nearly a century, America and England still exhibit on the whole the highest political and social ideals. The English type, during the present century, has been more widely imitated than the Greek or the Roman at the height of their fame. Our social ideas, poor as they may be by comparison with the creations of ingenious speculation, clearly have some very remarkable value of their own. One element of this value is that effect upon the individual which is attributed to them by Burke. They tend to, or at any rate favour the development of a certain 'native plainness and directness of character.' They keep a man face to face with life

1 Prelude, Book v.

and reality. They include a moral code which fits all times and seasons, all ranks and conditions of life; which hardens a man where it is good that he should be hardened, and softens him where it is good that he should be softened. The same may perhaps be said, in a less degree, of some moral codes of the ancient world; but it certainly cannot be said of those of modern paganism. The lives of some of the best and most earnest of modern Englishmen may not be fairly comparable with that of Socrates; but we may justly boast of a standard far transcending that of Rousseau and of Goethe. A high standard of character cannot be independent of some corresponding standard of politics; and every name which keeps the name of England respected throughout the world, will be found, in a greater or less degree, to confirm that aspect of English character, private and public, which Burke puts forward.

Burke is at his best when enlarging thus on the general philosophy of society: he breaks down when he proceeds to its application. There are few topics in the present volume of which this is not true: and, as has been already noticed, it is conspicuously true of the opening argument on the British Constitution. Pitiful as it is to see the fine mind of Burke self-devoted to the drudgery of Tory casuistry, it is even more so to find his usually ready and generous sympathies, as the work advances, remorselessly denied to the cause of the French people. It was not for any liberal-minded Englishman, rich in the inheritance of constitutional wisdom and liberty, to greet the dawn of representative institutions in France with nothing but a burst of contempt and sarcasm. Least of all was this attitude towards the National Assembly becoming to Burke. His opening address to the French politicians1 is more than ungenerous: it is unjust. It seems incredible that any one should have been found to declare that the path of reform in France was 'a smooth and easy career of felicity and glory,' which had been recklessly abandoned 2. To

1 Page 41.

2 In the opinion that France possessed all the elements of a good constitution, which only required to be cleared of rust and obstructions and put in working condition, Burke erred with many intelligent and patriotic Frenchmen. We can now see that such was not the case, and further that France was not at that time in a condition to adopt any political system of the kind which was then meant by the term constitutional. The boasted English constitution of Burke's time was a notorious sham. It has

do Burke justice, he quickly saw how falsely he had judged in discerning no effect of the Revolution upon France save mutilation and disaster. Two years more, and we hear nothing about the 'fresh ruins of France,' and the French nation 'not politically existing.' Under that guidance which at first appeared so contemptible, France speedily acquired a power far more formidable than had been known in the most vigorous period of the monarchy. Burke then ceased to call the leaders of the Revolution fools, and declared them to be fiends.

Burke's contemptuous parallel of the representatives of the

now been exploded; England, as every one knows, is a democracy ruled by the delegates of the Commons. But it was that very pasteboard show of interdependent powers which was fast losing its credit in England, which Burke wished to see imitated in France. Montesquieu was more clearsighted. Intensely as he affected to admire the political system of England, his doctrine was that France ought to be left alone. 'Leave us as we are,' is the constant theme of that hypothetical speaker by whom Montesquieu (De l'Esprit des Lois, Liv. xix. ch. 5-8) expresses his own opinions. Nature compensates for everything.' Many smiled contemptuously when they heard people talk of liberty and a constitution. Montesquieu had said that a free nation only could have a liberator, an enslaved nation could only have another oppressor. He little knew the terrible awakening which was reserved for the French nation: but he was probably right in counselling that such an awakening should not be anticipated by a false political reformation. The reform which France wanted was a social one: the need penetrated to the very roots of the nation's life. The selfishness and cruelty of whole classes had to be exorcised: a slumbering nation had to be aroused to a sense of political duty. It is hard in the present day to imagine how completely public spirit had vanished from the mass of the French nation, and how utterly void the French were at that time of political knowledge or experience. Turgot was as solitary a being in France as if his lot had been cast in the Sandwich islands. Except a few men of the type of Sieyes, probably few French politicians cared for politics otherwise than as an amusement, or a path to distinction. The Frenchman was repelled by what Burke calls the 'severe brow of moral freedom.' Voltaire at Ferney looked on the political affairs of Geneva merely as a matter for satire and ridicule. It is impossible,' said a Frenchman to Groenfelt, in 1789, 'for a Frenchman to be serious: we must amuse ourselves, and in pursuit of our amusements we continually change our object, but those very changes prove us always the same. Our nation is naturally gay. Political liberty requires a degree of seriousness, which is not in our character: we shall soon grow sick of politics.' (Letters on the Revolution, p. 4.) This gay incuriosity is still the characteristic of the vast majority; and hence France has ever since been, though in a diminishing degree, the prey of petty and interested factions.