evil even of a bad time as great as our imagination paints it. Sanabiles fecit Deus nationes super terras.'* There is a natural sanity, a natural good sense and moderation in men which acts as an antidote to the most pernicious principles. Our practice is better than our theory; a happily defective logic secures us from many a folly and many a crime. Extremists, whether of the Right or the Left, are few in number. The average man is of the Centre; and history in the long run is made by the average man.

The nations that accepted the Reformation had their Revolution, or a measure of it, two centuries and more before the rest. This was not an unmixed advantage. The excrescences of the medieval system indeed were cut away: the absolute monarchies which the removal of the Papal theocracy called into existence were at least national; with all their shortcomings the ThirtyNine Articles and the Westminster Confession were less cramping to the spirit than the decrees of Trent. But the framework of Protestantism remained that of the Middle Ages; the outlook over life of Augsburg and Geneva was, if with a difference full of promise for the future, for the time being and in substance, that of Rome. The full fruit of the Reformation was not gathered till the Reformation had become a thing of the past.

'Der Protestantismus ist zunächst in seinen wesentlichen Grundzügen und Ausprägungen eine Umformung der mittelalterlichen Idee, und das Unmittelalterliche, Moderne, das in ihm unleugbar enthalten ist, kommt als Modernes erst in Betracht, nachdem diese erste und klassische Form des Protestantismus zerbrochen und zerfallen war.' t

The Europe of the sixteenth century was not ripe for either civil or religious freedom; and when the hour of liberation struck the half-emancipated nations, feeling their bondage less galling, were less eager than the others to break their chains. This is why the Revolution, the second act in the great drama of which the Reformation was the first, is seen to greater advantage in Catholic than in Protestant countries, above all in France, which is at once the foremost Catholic nation and of all nations the most open to ideas. Catholic as she remained, by reason at once of the genius of her people and the policy of her rulers, France had been profoundly affected by the Reformation. The idea of authority as such was shaken. The old authorities, indeed, both in Church and State, retained their place; but

*Wisdom i. 14.

+ E. Troeltsch, Die christliche Religion,' p. 257.

the belief in their inevitableness was sapped. Slowly but surely the conviction gained ground that they held their tenure not of inherent and intrinsic right, but in virtue of service rendered; because they worked, on the whole, for the common good. Formulated by the few, but passing subtly, after the manner of ideas, into the atmosphere breathed by the many, this changed conception of authority became the condition on which the Monarchy and the Church existed. When it disappeared, when it became plain that these institutions were obstacles to its welfare and progress, the nation broke away from them, first from the Monarchy, then in our own time from the Church.

It is easy to criticise the Revolution, its men, its methods, its aims. Such criticism is, for the most part, futile. The first rule of criticism is, Put yourself in his place: reproduce in imagination the standpoint, the circumstances, and the limitations of those whose conduct you judge. If this be borne in mind it will be seen, first, that the break up of the existing order was inevitable; secondly, that the worst features by which the catastrophe, when it came, was attended, stood to the old society as effect to cause.

'It is a mistake to suppose that the destructive criticism of the French philosophers a hundred years ago was the great operative cause of the Revolution. If Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau had never lived, or if their works had all been suppressed as soon as they were printed, their absence would have given no new life to agriculture, would not have stimulated trade, nor replenished the bankrupt fisc, nor incorporated the privileged classes with the bulk of the nation, nor done anything else to repair an organisation of which every single part had become incompetent for its proper function. It was the material misery and the political despair engendered by the reigning system which brought willing listeners to the feet of the teachers who framed beneficent governments on the simple principles of reason and the natural law. And these teachers only busied themselves with abstract politics because the real situation was desperate. They had no alternative but to evolve social improvements out of their own consciousness. There was not a single sound organ in the body politic which they could have made the starting point of a reconstitution of society on the base of its actual or historic structure. The mischiefs which resulted from their method are patent and undeniable. But the method was made inevitable by the curse of the old régime.' *

The law of cause and effect is invariable. You cannot at once destroy and create character: were a people after centuries

* Compromise, p. 259.

of misgovernment to retain the virtues of free citizens-their self-restraint, their power of initiative, their political insighthalf the arguments against misgovernment would be gone.

It is difficult for us in these happier days to picture to ourselves the France of Louis XV. Decomposition is the word that best expresses it: the life and meaning of what had once been vigorous and significant was gone. The stupidity of the Government was, if possible, greater than its oppressiveness; had it been designed to depress industry, to waste and exhaust the natural resources of the soil, and to impoverish the population, it could not have attained those ends more effectually. The Court resembled nothing so much as that of the Lower Empire. The nobles had sunk to the level of gentlemen ushers: justice had fled from the tribunals, religion from the Church. The Parliaments, long the refuge of such independence as survived, had fallen into deserved odium; of what they were capable the conduct of that of Toulouse in the cases of the Calas family and of Sirven is evidence. Scarcely less infamous was the condemnation of Lally-Tollendal by the Parliament of Paris, the Parliament which confirmed the sentence passed at Abbeville on D'Etallonde and La Barre. La Bruyère's description of the peasantry is too well known to quote; if, as we are told, things were worse with the masses of the population in other countries, the connexion of cause and effect in the great events which followed is the more palpable; no society can violate the law of its existence and live. When Turgot entered upon his office as intendant in the Limousin this is what he found. The leading industries of the province, stock-breeding and the cattle trade, had been destroyed by overtaxation; the manufacture of paper, which had found a market not only in France but all over Europe, was perishing from the same cause.

'An excise duty at the mill, a duty on exportation at the provincial frontier, a duty on the importation of rags-all these vexations had succeeded in reducing the trade with Holland to onefourth of its previous dimensions. Nor were paper and cattle the only branches of trade that had been blighted by fiscal perversity. The same burden arrested the transport of saffron across the borders of the province: salt, which came up the Charente from the marshes by the coast, was stripped of all its profit, first by the duty paid on crossing from the Limousin to Périgord and Auvergne, and next by the right possessed by certain of the great lords on the banks of the Charente to help themselves at one point or another to portions of the cargo. Iron was subject to a harassing excise in all those parts of the country that were beyond the jurisdiction of the Parliament of Bordeaux.'

*Miscellanies, ii, 115.

The corvée, or system of forced labour, by which the roads were maintained, was at once wasteful and slovenly; the cost of keeping up the execrable tracks which here and there crossed the district was three times as great as that at which excellent means of communication could have been provided under a rational and business-like administration. The taille, or person and property tax, combined the minimum of profit to the Treasury with the maximum of inconvenience to those on whom it was levied; and these were precisely the classes least able to meet the burden, the privileged orders, those, that is to say, composed of the wealthier members of the community, being exempt. The decay of the old feudal society had brought about anarchy, legislative, administrative, and economic. Absolutism itself was a lesser evil. The central Government, remote from local influences, was not unwilling to redress individual grievances when those came under its notice; but it was powerless, in the teeth of the vested interests combined against reform, to attack the root of the mischief; society could endure neither its diseases nor their cure. For extreme evils extreme remedies. Only in the agony of the exile could Israel be reconstructed; only from the fires of the Revolution could the new France rise.

It is strange that the signs of the times should have been misread by a political philosopher, the greatest, perhaps, that the world has seen since Aristotle, who even in the dawn of the Revolution blamed where others applauded, and upon its later stages exhausted the vocabulary of hatred and denunciation. Make what allowance we will for perspective, for temperament, and for that overbalance which is so often the tribute paid by genius to lesser capacity, it cannot but be matter for regret that on the most momentous issue set before his generation Burke should have taken lower ground, we will not say than thinkers like Bentham or James Mill, or than poets like Wordsworth, but than politicians such as Fox, Windham, or Pitt. With all the profundity of his genius and with all the splendour of his declamation he tilted, like the knight of La Mancha, against windmills. His standpoint was beyond question, but it had no relation to the circumstances; his conclusions were exact, but the premisses from which they were drawn were as remote from reality as the visions of Rousseau. The French, he insisted-and it was the foundation of his whole argument-possessed 'the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.' It was an amazing delusion, vitiating his position in limine; the very reverse, as lesser men than he saw plainly enough, was the case. "The French could not

'have done as we did in 1688,' was the rejoinder of Francis. 'They had no constitution, as we had, to recur to. They had 'no foundation to build upon. They had no walls to repair.' With us the change from the old to the new came by degrees, to them in an instant; our eyes, little by little, grew habituated to the day as it advanced; theirs were blinded by the sudden glare of the full light of noon. The political instinct, if in the intellectual sphere it deserves the hard things which Mr. Morley says of it-and even here we should be sorry to endorse them-is in the sphere of action the secret of a people's normal and harmonious growth. 'Suave mari magno.' Elizabeth, Cromwell, the men of 1688, politicians all rather than thinkers-these made English to differ from French history, and forbade 'the red fool fury of 'the Seine' to disturb the placid waters of the Thames and the Forth. It is the fashion-a not very happy fashion-to belittle our stalwarts. A little of Macaulay's robust Whiggery would invigorate an anæmic age. There is a mean between selfcomplacency and self-depreciation. We need not be ashamed if our hearts beat higher at the remembrance of those who made England the England that we know.

The old France, then, perished not so much under external assault as of internal rottenness; the Revolution did but accelerate a catastrophe which in the nature of things could not have been long delayed. It was not the Revolution,' says Hazlitt, 'that produced the change in the face of society, but the change in the texture of society that produced the Revolution, and 'brought its outward appearance into a nearer conformity with 'its inward sentiments." Bankruptcy was imminent. When Louis XV remarked that the corporation of farmers-general was a support of the State a courtier answered, 'Yes, sire; 'they support it as a rope supports a corpse hanging from a gallows. The only modern parallels are to be found in Egypt before the British occupation, or in Turkey, and perhaps in Russia, to-day. The destructive side of the Revolution, then, may be taken for granted; it is the constructive which calls for criticism; the ideas which it embodied, the principles from which it set out. The sovereignty of the people, the rights of man, liberty, equality, fraternity, the progress and perfectibility of the species-these were the main articles of the new creed. Powerful as solvents of the old, they were powerless to bring about the new synthesis. They were not themselves new; they meet us in an undeveloped but perfectly recognisable form in scholastic philosophy and theology; there is not a 'single principle in the social contract which may not be found 'in Hobbes or Locke or Althusen.' What was new was the