Volume 20 — Burke And The Revolution.

Bacon's grand testamentary vindication of his life, “bequeathing his name and memory to foreign nations and his own countrymen after some time be passed over,” might have been written with even greater justice of himself—because free from any imputation of moral weakness—by the master-mind of the XVIIIth century in England in the domain of political philosophy—Edmund Burke, the illustrious orator and statesman, the author of Reflections on the Revolution in France. To-day, when France, “incessantly agitated by a propaganda of the most pernicious doctrines,”201 still vindicates the sagacity which foresaw the disastrous course of the Revolution, while England, which he saved from the same propaganda, uninterruptedly illustrates the “beneficial influence of the regular action of the public powers,” it may not be amiss to recall some of the opinions to which he gave utterance at the beginning of the storm. Burke's genius, like Bacon's, was indeed too refulgent not to be acknowledged even in his own day. But the burning questions upon the discussion of which and their solution, so far as human reason can go, he has built up an enduring fame—monumentum ære perennius—lighted up passions too gigantic and furious in the tremendous conflict then inaugurated to allow of contemporary justice being done to his labors. Nor did their negatory influence upon his fame end with his death; two allied causes have conspired to partially obscure the clear and immortal flame of his genius, even to our time:

First, the jealousy of the political and literary followers of Charles James Fox.

Second, the inimical spirit of the Revolution.

Burke, as it is well known, had to contend, during his parliamentary career, not only against the Tory prejudices of the country party, represented by such men as William Lord Bagot and Col. Onslow, but also against the ill-concealed jealousy and oligarchical exclusiveness of his nominal allies, the Whig aristocracy. But this influence of caste, which in his lifetime placed over his head his political pupil, Charles Fox, as the representative of the Whig family compacts, has [pg 824] been succeeded since his death by a more acrimonious spirit of personal jealousy in defence of the fame of his younger rival. The partisans of Fox have never been able to forgive Burke's renunciation of his alliance with the eloquent Whig leader; and so large a share of literary and political criticism during the last half-century has come from the pens of that small but popular band of writers who took their inspiration from the traditions of Holland House, that the acknowledgment of Burke's profound and prophetic genius has been unduly circumscribed by the desire of elevating the “great man” of the family. Macaulay and Earl Russell have given expression to this feeling; the former by covertly insinuating a doubt of Burke's judgment, while lavishly extolling the splendor of his imagination; the latter by open denunciation of his course at the outbreak of the Revolution; Earl Russell with unconscious self-satire quoting these lines from La Fontaine:

“L'homme est de feu pour le mensonge

Il est de glace pour la vérité.”

The efforts of a powerful literary and family connection to elevate its idol, Charles Fox, at the expense of Burke, have had, however, but small effect in limiting the measure of the latter's fame, compared with the hostile spirit of revolution animating the current periodical literature of England and America. If the apostles of the Revolution, who steal Burke's thunder without acknowledgment, when it suits their purpose, against the despotism of power, could bury out of sight his protests against that worse despotism of unchained human passions, which is their ideal of liberty, they would gladly place him in their Pantheon. But the mind of the great political philosopher was too grandly comprehensive to be narrowed within the grooves of that fashionable “liberalism” which covers even the basest tyranny, if directed against the Catholic Church. His humanity was too broad and true not to be aroused into flaming denunciation of the abuse of power, whether it assumed the shape of “opulent oppression” in India or democratic priest-slaughter in France. Hence it is that Burke holds but a half-allegiance of the Liberal party; that his fame has been, as it were, truncated, so far as they have been able to effect it; and that his magnificent vindications of the cause of liberty, bounded by no limitations of race, government, or creed, are circumscribed in their minds by his ante-revolutionary labors.

But it is not in the power of any class of critics, least of all of the light artillery of “liberalism,” to narrow or permanently diminish Burke's kingdom over human thought. His fame will not be dependent upon the fashion of this or any single age. The consensus of humanity has crowned him among the Immortals. When Macaulay and Russell shall have become obscure names, the works of Burke will endure as monuments of our civilization. His place will be with Demosthenes and Cicero, and in the estimation of a more remote posterity he will probably overtop them both.

The long, lean figure, with spectacles on nose, once familiar to the caricaturists of the third George's reign, has faded a good deal from the eyes of the present generation. We now turn over with a smile the prints of the “concealed Jesuit” from S. Omer's, barrette on head, and long soutane clinging to his heels; or the more portly figure of [pg 825] the highwayman, blunderbuss in hand, waylaying, in company with North and Fox, the “savior of India” (Warren Hastings); or the “Watchman” of the constitution, in heavy cloak, lantern in hand, and spectacles on the formidable nose, ferreting out the revolutionary preacher, Dr. Price, in his midnight study. The gravers of Gilray and Sayer have yielded to those of the caricaturists for Punch. The figures of Gladstone, Disraeli, and Bright have supplanted those of Pitt, Fox, and Burke. The great orator and statesman has taken his place as a classic on the shelves of all libraries, but is popularly known only by a few rounded extracts from his speeches, or by Macaulay's description of the entrance on the parliamentary stage of Lord Rockingham's young Irish secretary, “who to an eloquence surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, and an industry that shamed the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which neither Pitt nor Grenville could lay claim.” But if Burke has shared the fate of all great writers not strictly popular in being conventionally admired but practically neglected by the general reader, no political author is more diligently studied by the “middlemen” of thought, the makers and leaders of public opinion. He is the private tutor of public teachers; the vade mecum of the orator and politician. Most of the questions of political ethics which have been the subjects of discussion during the present century have been profoundly treated of by him. Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the freedom of the press, ministerial responsibility, the relations of church and state, the abolition of the slave trade, the amelioration of the criminal law—all have received from him their most ample and brilliant illustration.

Of all the events of his time, however, the Revolution of 1789 gave the chief exercise to his powers. Born in 1730, he was then at the zenith of his fame, in the full maturity of his massive yet acute intellect. Earl Russell's senile complaint in his life of Fox of “the wreck of his (Burke's) judgment” betrays only the dotage of his own. Advancing age had better fitted him for the contest. His mind had, as Macaulay truly says, bloomed late into flower, although the rhetoric of the essayist has caricatured the sterility of his youth. The giant trunk was now crowned with a luxuriant and graceful foliage, which added to its beauty, while it detracted nothing from its strength. The experience of “his long and laborious life,” the accumulated stores of his prodigious industry, furnished him with weapons of finest temper and irresistible force. Thus armed, stepping to the front as the champion of civilization and religion against the Giant Despair which had broken its bonds in Europe, it was with striking appropriateness that his friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, applied to him, at the moment of his rupture with Fox and the opposition, the lines written under the engraving of 1790 from the portrait of 1775—lines in which Milton describes the faithful Abdiel striding forth, solitary, from amid the rebel host:

“So spake the fervent angel, but his zeal

None seconded: .....

...... Unmoved,

Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,

His loyalty he kept, his love, his zeal;

Nor number nor example with him wrought

To move from truth, or change his constant mind,

Though single. From amidst forth he passed

Long way through hostile scorn, nor of violence feared aught;

And with retorting scorn, his back he turned

On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed.”

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The efforts of Burke's single mind at this critical moment decided the course of events in England. His speeches in Parliament and the publication of his Reflections on the Revolution in France aroused a national feeling that all the efforts of the revolutionary propagandists were unable to stem; which Pitt followed rather than led; and which enabled England to carry on without flinching, to a triumphant close, the long and bloody war in national self-defence into which she was driven by the aggressive spirit of the Revolution. Pitt only gave utterance to the national feeling when he declared at the close of Burke's speech on the Army Estimates, in which he flung down the gauntlet to the Revolution, “that not only the present generation but the latest posterity would revere his name for the decided part he had that day taken.”

It was Burke's fortune to witness the temporary triumph, but not the succeeding repulse, of the first outbreak of the Revolution. He died at the full tide of its fury. Yet the tremendous blows he dealt its principles, single-handed, before all that was mortal of him was laid at rest at Beaconsfield, undoubtedly saved England from succumbing to its influence in his own day, and their conservative force is still felt in the government of that country. “This man,” said Schlegel, “has been to his own country and to all Europe—and, in a particular manner, to all Germany—a new light of political wisdom and moral experience. He corrected his age when it was at the height of its revolutionary fury; and without maintaining any system of philosophy, he seems to have seen further into the true nature of society, and to have more clearly comprehended the effect of religion in connecting individual security with national welfare, than any philosopher or any system of philosophy of any preceding age.” True words, and worthy of attention at this moment, when Germany has entered on a new and dangerous course of political action.

From the first mutterings of the revolutionary storm Burke had distrusted its character and future violence. Alarmed by what he had seen of the undisguised levity and scepticism of Parisian society during his visit to France in 1772, he had taken occasion in one of his speeches, as early as 1773, to point out “this conspiracy of atheism to the watchful eyes of European governments.” The outrages in the name of liberty which were simultaneous with its outburst determined his course, although his keen political vision had long before penetrated the hollowness of its professions. The old political gladiator, “in whose breast,” as he proudly and truly said of himself, “no anger, durable or vehement, had ever been kindled but by what he considered as tyranny”; whose potent voice had re-echoed across the Western ocean in support of the American colonist, had pleaded for the African slave and Hindoo laborer, and had instilled fresh hope, in the broken heart of the Irish “Papist,” roused himself now to his last and most powerful effort in defence of the fugitive French “aristocrat” and hunted priest.

“I have struggled,” he said, “to the best of my power against two great evils, growing out of the most sacred of all things—liberty and authority. I have struggled against the licentiousness of freedom, I have contended against the tyranny [pg 827] of power.” Nearly ten years before, in his speech on the Marriage Act, defending himself against the charges of “aristocrat” and “radical” which had been alternately levelled against him, he had predicted his course in these noble words:

“When indeed the smallest rights of the poorest people in the kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of pride countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should come to the last extremity, and a contest of blood, my course is taken. I would take my fate with the poor, and low, and feeble. But if these people come to turn their liberty into a cloak for mischievousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, I would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and ferocious.”

Burke's theory of true reform, illustrated by the honorable labors of his whole public career, was in fact so radically opposed to that of the French constitution makers that no standing-ground common to both could be found. He foresaw plainly enough what were the secret aims and aspirations of the revolutionary leaders from the first, whatever might be their humanitarian professions; that whatever their changes of leaders or watchwords, their goal would always be the same—the destruction of existing society; not reparation, but ruin. He would have seen in M. Gambetta's programme of a nouvelle couche sociale, enunciated at Grenoble in 1872, only a new reading of M. Marat's schemes of universal confiscation in 1792. Neither would have found more favor in his eyes than in those of any English reformer from S. Thomas à Becket to Hampden. He believed with Bacon that there could be no wise design of reform which did not set out with the determination “to weed, to prune, and to graft, rather than to plough up and plant all afresh.” Sixty years afterwards another writer, after an elaborate and prolonged study of the ancien régime, and a lifetime's experience of the results of the Revolution, arrived at the point from which Burke started. The writer was Alexis de Tocqueville. Those who are familiar only with the Democracy in America, the work of his inexperienced youth, would do well to read his Memoir and Letters by De Beaumont. Writing to M. Freslon in 1853, after the events of 1848-51 had pretty well cured him of liberalism, he said:

“When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for hating the ancien régime, but few for loving the Revolution; for one sees that the ancien régime was rapidly sinking under the weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and manners, so that, with a little patience and good conduct, it might have been reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was the government of 1780 from that of 1750. One does not recognize the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Halfway down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order to get sooner to the bottom” (Memoir and Remains, vol. ii. pp. 242, 243, Eng. ed.)

Burke had an invincible distrust of the crude theories and rash speculations of the doctrinaires of the Revolution. “Follow experience and common sense,” he says in a hundred different ways; “these are the arguments of statesmen! Leave the rest to the schools, where only they may be debated with—safety.” [pg 828] “In politics,” he says, “the most fallacious of all things is geometrical demonstration.” Again: “The majors make a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory of truth depends upon the little minors of circumstances.” He compares the socialist theorist ready to plunge into the volcano of revolutionary experiment to the Sicilian sophist—ardentem frigidus Ætnam insiluit. The atrocious principles of the literary and philosophical guides of the Revolution seemed to him almost more portentous than the brutalities of the mob. “Never before this time,” he says, “was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.”

Remarkable sayings then, and true of experience anterior to his time. But had Burke lived in our day, he would have witnessed with astonishment the full development of the spirit he denounced, in the terrible spectacle of an aggressive infidel philosophy, and an almost universal infidel press, sometimes truculent, sometimes frivolous, but always shamelessly boastful of its pagan principles. He would have seen a school of pseudo-philosophy professing its open design to destroy the foundations of revealed religion; filled with the spirit of the apostate Julian; as audacious and boastful as he, but destined to meet as shameful an end.

Let us compare, then, Burke's theory of true liberty, and his opinion of what France might have gained by a large and loyal measure of reform, with the desperate counsels and futile outrages which followed the surrender of the movement by the French conservatives into the hands of the Jacobins. “You would,” he says, had such a course as he recommended been pursued, “have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and recognize that happiness is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walks of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.”

Burke's frequent definitions of true liberty are as beautiful as they are true. “You hope, sir,” he says, writing to De Menonville, “that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think all men who desire it deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse or oblivion of our natural faculties, and a ferocious indocility which is prompt to wrong or violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something a little better than a description of wild beast. To men so degraded a state of strong restraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom, since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery, that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal [pg 829] passions. You have kindly said that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me, then, to continue our conversation, and to tell you what that freedom is that I love. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. It is social freedom. It is that state of things in which the liberty of no man and no body of men is in a condition to trespass on the liberty of any person or any description of persons in society. The liberty, the only liberty, I mean, is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with virtue and order, but which cannot exist without them.”

“Am I,” he asks, in answer to the shibboleth of the “rights of man,”—“am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again the case of the criminals condemned to the galleys and their heroic deliverer, the knight of the 'sorrowful countenance.'”

If we turn from Burke's satire upon the revolutionary actors to his opinions on its probable onward course and changing fortunes, we shall find a series of the most remarkable political prophecies on record. At a time when Fox and the opposition hailed the Revolution as already accomplished, with nothing before it but a future of ideal progress and happiness; when Pitt and the government seemed lulled into a still more fatal inaction, Burke proclaimed in decisive tones that the contest between socialism and all constituted governments had only begun. We group together a few of these remarkable predictions, which time has so amply verified: “He proposed to prove,” he said in his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, “that the present state of things in France is not a transient evil, productive, as some have too favorably supposed, of a lasting good; but that the present evil is only the means of producing future and, if that were possible, worse evils. That this is not an undigested, imperfect, and crude scheme of liberty, which may be gradually mellowed and ripened into an orderly and social freedom; but that it is so fundamentally wrong as to be incapable of correcting itself by any length of time.” Again: “We are not at the end of our struggle or near it. Let us not deceive ourselves; we are at the beginning of great troubles.” Predicting the changing features of the Revolution, he said: “In its present form it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement it may have to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and sword.” The very spirit of the Commune is thus foreshadowed in a letter to M. de Menonville, 1790: “But if the same ends should hereafter require the same course which had been already pursued, there is no doubt but the same ferocious delight in murder and the same savage cruelty will be again renewed.” Tous les évêques a la lanterne was the watchword of both outbreaks of the Revolution.

Compare with these sayings the remarks, fifty years later, of another observer, of great acuteness, but moulded in less heroic proportions than Burke. “This day fifty-one years,” writes De Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, “the French Revolution commenced, and, after the destruction of so many men and institutions, we may say it is still going on. Is not this reassuring to the nations that [pg 830] are only just beginning theirs?”202 De Tocqueville, it is well known, during the early part of his career, was tainted with the prevalent liberal Catholicism of his day in France. He wished to unite the church with the Revolution—chimerical task, of which advancing years and experience convinced him of the sinful folly! Happily for himself, he died a good Catholic in the bosom of the church.

“I scarcely dare hope,” he says, “to see a regular government, strong and at the same time liberal, established in our country. This ideal was, as you know, the dream of my youth, and likewise of the portion of my mature age that has passed. Is it possible still to believe in its realization? For a long time I thought (but long before February this belief had been much shaken) that we had been making our way over a stormy sea, on which we were still tossing, but that the port was at hand. Was I not wrong? Are we not on a rolling sea that has no shore? Or is not the land so distant, so unknown, that our lives and those of our children may pass away before it is reached, or, at least, before any settlement is made upon it?... I am indeed alarmed at the state of the public mind. It is far from betokening the close of a revolution. At the time it was said, and to this day it is commonly repeated, that the insurgents of June were the dregs of the populace; that they were all outcasts of the basest description, whose only motive was lust for plunder. Such, of course, were many of them. But it is not true that they were all of this kind; would to God that they had been! Such wretches are always a small minority; they never prevail; they are imprisoned or executed, and all is over. In the insurrection of June, besides bad passions, there were, what are far more dangerous, false opinions. Many of the men who attempted to overthrow the most sacred rights were carried away by an erroneous notion of right. They sincerely believed that society was based upon injustice, and they wished to give it another foundation. [Compare Gambetta's nouvelle couche sociale.] Our bayonets and our cannon will never destroy this revolutionary fanaticism. It will create for us dangers and embarrassments without end. Finally, I begin to ask myself whether anything solid or durable can be built on the shifting basis of our society? Whether it will support even a despotism, which many people, tired of storms, would, for want of a better, hail as a haven? We did not see this great revolution in human society begin; we shall not see it end. If I had children, I should always be repeating this to them, and should tell them that in this age and in this country one ought to be fit for everything, and prepared for everything, for no one can count on the future.”203

A conversation apropos of a Benedictine survivor of 1789, given from Mr. Senior's Journal (Memoir, vol. ii. p. 1), illustrates the final opinion of the author of Democracy in America upon the Revolution. It took place only one year before his death:

“And what effect,” I asked, “has the contemplation of seventy years of revolution produced on him (the Benedictine)? Does he look back, like Talleyrand, to the ancien régime as a golden age?” “He admits,” said Tocqueville, “the material superiority of our own age, but he believes that intellectually and morally we are far inferior to our grandfathers. And I agree with him. These seventy years of revolution have destroyed our courage, our hopefulness, our self-reliance, our public spirit, and, as respects by far the majority of our higher classes, our passions, except the vulgarest and most selfish ones, vanity and covetousness. Even ambition seems extinct. The men who seek power seek it not for itself, not as a means of doing good to their country but as a means of getting money and flatterers.”204

What more remarkable testimony to Burke's prophetic vision could be offered?

If any were needed, it would be found in an opposite quarter, in the revelations of Cluseret and his accomplices [pg 831] as to the premeditated burning of Paris and the destruction of the Vendôme Column in 1871, viewed in connection with Burke's positive and reiterated assertions that the worst excesses of 1789 were not the result of sudden passion, nor accidental, “as some believed or pretended to believe, but were systematically designed from the beginning.” It is known that among his correspondents in 1789-90 were the notorious Tom Paine and the eccentric cosmopolite, Anacharsis Baron de Clootz, both of whom strove to enlist Burke in the defence of the revolutionary cause before he had decisively pronounced himself. Paine and Clootz, congenial birds of prey, had both flown to Paris (anticipating the course of their disciples in 1871), smelling the approaching carnage afar off; and from them there is reason to believe Burke gathered ample hints of the full measure of the revolutionary programme. Striking also is Burke's remark that the revolutionary subdivision of France would induce a demand for communal or cantonal independence. “These commonwealths,” he says, “will not long bear a state of subjection to the republic of Paris”—a prediction wonderfully verified by the attitude of Lyons and Marseilles during the late war and the period of the Commune, as well as by the cantonal programme of the Spanish revolutionists.

Burke's theory of the true basis of government was as moderate and well conceived as the revolutionary schemes were destructive and unsound. “We know,” he says, “and, what is better, we feel, that religion is the basis of society and the source of all good and all comfort. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than as he finds it; but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing constitution of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.” His defence of the cause of religion in France, and his glowing tribute to the virtue and learning of the French clergy, then, as now, the mark of the deadliest shafts of the Revolution, are eloquent and inspiring, but too long to quote in this article.

Equally remarkable with Burke's prophetic warnings of the successive crimes and follies of the Revolution and its offspring, the Commune, are his speculations on a supposed restoration of the monarchy. More than a quarter of a century after his death their wisdom was illustrated in the events of the inglorious reign of Charles X. His words are almost startling in their applicability to the present posture of French affairs, the Septennate, and the conflicting aspirations of the Comte de Chambord and the Prince Imperial:

“What difficulties,” he says, referring to a Restoration, in his letter on the policy of the allies, “will be met with in a country, exhausted by the taking of its capital, and among a people in a manner trained and actively disciplined to anarchy, rebellion, disorder, and impiety, may be conceived by those who know what Jacobin France is; who may have occupied themselves in revolving in their minds what they were to do if it fell to their lot to re-establish the affairs of France. What support or what limitations the restored monarchy must have may be a doubt, or how it will settle or pitch at last; but one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt—that the settlement cannot be immediate, but that it [pg 832]must be preceded by some sort of power equal, at least in vigor, vigilance, promptness, and decision, to a military government. For such a preparatory government no slow-paced, methodical, formal, lawyer-like system; still less that of a showy, artificial, trifling, intriguing court, guided by cabals of ladies, or men like ladies; least of all a philosophic, theoretic, disputatious school of sophistry—none of these ever will, or ever can, lay the foundations of an order that will last.”

“A judicious, well-tempered, and manly severity in the support of law and order”—this was Burke's advice to princes. He advocated freedom of the press as understood in England; “but they indeed,” he said, “who seriously write upon a principle of levelling, ought to be answered by the magistrate, and not by the speculatist.” We conclude our quotations by the following portrait of the “Legitimate Prince”:

“Whoever,” says Burke, “claims a right by birth to govern there, must find in his breast, or conjure up in it, an energy not always to be expected, not always to be wished, in well-ordered states. The lawful prince must have in everything but crime the character of an usurper. He is gone if he imagines himself the quiet possessor of a throne. He is to contend for it as much after an apparent conquest as before. His task is to win it. He must leave posterity to adorn and enjoy it. No velvet cushions for him. He is to be always—I speak nearly to the letter—on horseback. This opinion is the result of much patient thinking on the subject, which I conceive no event is likely to alter.”

Burke's tremendous onslaught on the Revolution drew forth swarms of opponents in his own day, most of whom are now forgotten. More than emulating the besotted conceit of those early apologists of anarchy, “liberal” writers are still to be found so infatuated with hostility to the Catholic Church, so purblind to the experience of nearly a hundred years—of the bloody chapters of 1793, of 1830, of 1848, of 1851, of 1871—so unawakened by the ruin the same accursed spirit has wrought in Spain, as to be heard chanting the glories of the Revolution and bewailing the possibility of “a priestly reaction” as the “destruction of all that has been gained by the national agonies of the last century.” What has been gained which would not have been gained in the gradual progress of society? What rather has not been lost in national honor and domestic virtue and happiness which would have been retained “if men had not been quite shrunk,” as Burke said, “from their natural dimensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy”? Let a witness like De Tocqueville answer!

The great political philosopher's warnings against the real spirit of the Revolution are still worthy the attention of all governments. Time has added to their value, not diminished it. “Against these, their ‘rights of men,’ let no government,” he says, “look for security in the length of its continuance or in the justice and lenity of its administration. They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but on a question of competency and a question of title.”

His advice is vigorous and plain. “Never,” he says, “succumb to the enemy. It is a struggle for your national existence. If you must die, die with the sword in your hand! But I have no fear for the result!”

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