intense fires, and constant
drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the products of those
mines. If any man informed us that two hundred thousand innocent
persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery, how should
we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our just
indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious
a punishment!... But this number, considerable as it is, and the
slavery, with all its baseness and horror, which we have at home,
is nothing to what the rest of the world affords of the same
nature. Millions daily bathed in the poisonous damps and
destructive effluvia of lead, silver, copper, and arsenic, to say
nothing of those other employments, those stations of wretchedness
and contempt, in which civil society has placed the numerous
_enfans perdus_ of her army. Would any rational man submit to one
of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the artificial
enjoyments which policy has made to result from them?... Indeed
the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the frenzy
and villainy of the other, has been the real builder of this
respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of
mankind has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery
is made a pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness;
for the politician will tell you gravely that their life of
servitude disqualifies the greater part of the race of man for a
search of truth, and supplies them with no other than mean and
insufficient ideas. This is but too true; and this is one of the
reasons for which I blame such institutions.

From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the deepest of
all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century. Johnson and
Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literature
which had been established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a
whole host of apologists carried on the battle against deism and
infidelity. Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of scepticism with
a new array of deadlier engines and more abundant ammunition, had
betaken himself placidly to the composition of history. What is
remarkable in Burke's first performance is his discernment of the
important fact, that behind the intellectual disturbances in the
sphere of philosophy, and the noisier agitations in the sphere of
theology, there sile