politicians in obedience to a careful observation of the laws of its healthy development. To them a nation was an aggregate of independent units, to be regulated by a set of absolute a priori maxims. In Burke's own language, the 'people' is an 'artificial idea.'' It is, he means to say, a complex body whose will is to be determined from its recognised organs, and not a mere mass of individuals, whose will is to be discovered by counting heads.

122. To the charge of inconsistency, therefore, Burke had, up to a certain point, a triumphant and conclusive answer, which is given in the Appeal to the Old Whigs.' The revolutionary ideas were radically opposed in every detail to the principles which he had spent a life in proclaiming. His defence of the colonies, even his attacks upon the royal prerogative, were absolutely free from any revolutionary tendency. His efforts had been directed to maintaining the 'equipoise' of the constitution. It is only on the theory that a man who approves of one is bound to approve of all revolts, or that a man who opposes the corrupt influence of any power must be opposed to its existence, that the charge could be made at all plausible. Burke's horror of the revolution indeed gives to his later utterances upon the British Constitution an exaggerated tone. When, in his 'Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs,' he invokes the authority of the managers of the Sacheverel trial, one feels a little scandalised by his excessive reverence for those rather questionable fathers of the true political church. His faith becomes superstitious, and his catchword prescription covers something like a defence of absolute stagnation. His favourite revolution of 1688 is justified as a strictly defensive revolution, in which the people and not the king represented adherence to the established order; and Burke ignores the fact that it really involved a transfer of power. But though, under the stress of terror and the influence of old age, Burke's conservatism became stronger as well as more emphatically expressed, the change did not seriously affect the substance of his creed. His whole conception of political science is radically unaltered, and his method shows the same characteristic peculiarities. His position in the narrow limits of political party may have changed, but

1 Burke, vi. 211, 'Appeal.'

as a thinker he insists upon the same principles, applies the same tests, and holds to the same essential truths.

123. And yet there is a sense in which Burke may fairly be called inconsistent. Popular instinct sometimes outruns philosophical insight. Burke's theory condemned the French, whilst it justiñed the American, movement; but the two movements had really a connection not contemplated in his philosophy. The man who is in intention only setting a precedent for maintaining an ancient right of way may be, in fact, encouraging his followers to break down established fences. Burke helped-much against his will-to stimulate the current of feeling which drew fresh strength from the American war, and brought about the crash of the French system. He was the less conscious of this because he was blind to the positive side of the revolutionary creed. A characteristic indication is his incapacity to answer the obvious question, What is the genealogy of this monstrous spectre ? Repudiating the hypothesis that it was begotten by the spirit of resentment for intolerable grievances, it seemed strange that a false and degrading doctrine should suddenly attract proselytes enough to upset the strongest thrones. Some sort of answer is given in the 'Letters on a Regicide Peace.' so unexampled an event, as he truly answers, the concurrence of a very great number of causes was necessary; '1 and he attributes the chief influence to the philosophical atheists and the politicians. The great object of these last, he thinks, was the external aggrandisement of France. They held that a military republic would answer this purpose better than a monarchy, partly, it seems, because they had quarrelled with the Court, and partly because Montesquieu and Machiavelli had infected them with an admiration for Rome.2 The American alliance, though rather the effect than the cause of their republican principles, helped on the work till the palace of Versailles seemed to be a forum of democracy.3

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124. This, in fact, comes to the theory, popular with minds of inferior calibre to Burke, that any event for which they cannot account is due to a dark conspiracy. The whole movement, design; all has been

he declares, has been the result of

matter of institution.' It has been a diabolical plot of the few and a madness of the many. The good professions are a mere impudent throwing of dust in the eyes of the world; and the commiseration for the lot of the labouring poor which has become popular in England is a 'puling jargon;' 'not so innocent as it is foolish.' To a system which is thus uncaused it is, of course, impossible to assign a limit. What has come into being without reason may flourish beyond any bounds assignable by reason. He repudiates the optimist belief that so monstrous a system must fall to pieces from inherent weakness. He argues elaborately at the end of 1791 in behalf of the propositions, that no counter-revolution can be expected from internal causes; that, the longer the system lasts, the stronger it will be; and that, whilst it lasts, it will be its interest to disturb all other countries.3 It is a kind of dry rot '-a mysterious contagion which propagates itself. Want of money matters nothing; for, as he very forcibly says, material resources have never supplied the want of unity of design and constancy in execution; whilst such qualities have never failed for want of material resources.' The whole strength of the country has been absorbed by the new tyrants who came here to rob at pleasure, and Europe must destroy them or be itself destroyed.

125. One question might have revealed the weakness of a theory which seems to have imposed upon him, as upon his readers, more by the power with which it is stated than by the force of the arguments alleged. Jacobinism, he said, and with perfect truth, was partly the offspring of philosophical atheism; and to what was the atheism owing? That question could hardly be answered by a thinker content to rest the claims of religious, as of political faith, upon prescription. Prescription, once questioned, is but a foundation of sand. Burke could not or would not see that the old ideas were perishing. So long as men could be warned off the sacred ground, an appeal to prescription might be in place. But the attempt had long been hopeless. The creeds were rotten; and therefore the dry rot' could sap the old supports and render the crash inevitable. And, as Burke refused to

face this difficulty in the sphere of religion, he was equally unsound in the sphere of politics. A religious creed resting on prescription is analogous to a political creed which renounces responsibility. The rulers who objected to change could appeal to no satisfactory ground of reverence. The divine right theory was dead; and therefore to claim the reverence due only to divinely appointed rulers was to invite destruction. In the face of this, a power relying upon the mere force of prejudice, the revolutionary doctrines had a tremendous advantage; their dogmas might be erroneous, but they were dogmas. The revolutionists asserted, with the fervour of new converts, that laws ought to be reasonable, that social arrangements should be in conformity with justice, that all power should be administered for the good of the people. True, these doctrines were mixed with an element of utterly delusive metaphysics; and therefore the attempt to carry them into practice led to cruel disappointment. Burke's obstructive creed had not that positive element which was required to meet the destructives effectually. Delivered, indeed, to a people full of stubborn conservatism, comparatively careless of general ideas, and frightened by the catastrophe of France, it served to give courage to the party of resistance. But, as yet, men's minds were left in the hopeless dilemma between doctrines which would destroy all authority and doctrines which would support all authority not flagrantly intolerable. In order to appreciate the full significance of the lesson taught by Burke, it is necessary to examine at some length the doctrine which his last breath was spent in opposing, so far, at least, as that doctrine was embodied in English literature.

126. The shrewd but crotchety Dean Tucker had attacked Price and Priestley as the main advocates of the obnoxious 'Lockian' system in England. In their writings, in fact, we catch for the first time the true revolutionary tone. The liberal dissenters, whom they both represented, were the backbone of the reforming party in England. The theoretical principles of the two men differed widely, but their con

clusions as to political questions of the day were identical. Priestley, the crude materialist, and Price, the cloudy advocate of an a priori philosophy, united in condemning the existing order which would satisfy neither the test of utility nor the test of abstract justice. The relation between the utilitarians and the metaphysicians is, indeed, a characteristic peculiarity of English political theory. The doctrine of the indefeasible rights of man has never been quite at home on English soil; but writers, avowedly starting from the opposite pole of speculation, have accepted the conclusions to which it naturally leads. Bentham's hatred of metaphysical methods was at least as keen as Burke's. He objected to the American movement in its beginning, because he thought that the Declaration of Independence savoured of those hated principles. Priestley, as we shall see directly, was in substantial agreement with Bentham, and it was in reading the Treatise upon Civil Government' that the sacred formula about the greatest happiness of the greatest number first flashed upon Bentham's mind. And yet Priestley's doctrine, if utilitarian in substance, easily took the metaphysical form; and his conclusions might have been avowed by Rousseau as well as by Price or Tom Paine. There is, indeed, an obvious point of contact in all these theories. Priestley and Bentham, not less than Rousseau and his followers, altogether ignore the historical method in politics. They are absolutely indifferent to that conception of the continuity of the social organism which supplies the vital element of Burke's teaching. They reject all 'prescription' as equivalent to blind prejudice. They propose to reform society anew, without reference to the special tradi-tions and beliefs by which it has been hitherto bound together. The doctrine of the natural equality of mankind, which is openly avowed by the metaphysicians, is tacitly assumed by the utilitarians as a necessary base for their speculations; and, therefore, however widely their methods may differ, they agree in condemning the whole body of beliefs by which the complex structure of society was bound together. Priestley's "Treatise on Civil Government' first appeared in 1768; Price's 'Observations on Civil History' in 1775. Priestley's main object of attack was the Established Church, whilst Price as

See note to ch. ix. sec. 62, above.