for, and handling, and again handling, the theoretic base
on which the prerogatives of virtue repose. Provided that there was
peace, that is to say, so much of fair happiness and content as is
compatible with the conditions of the human lot, Burke felt that a
too great inquisitiveness as to its foundations was not only idle but
cruel.

If the world continues to read the _Reflections_, and reads it with a
new admiration that is not diminished by the fact that on the special
issue its tendency is every day more clearly discerned to have been
misleading, we may be sure that it is not for the sake of such things
as the precise character of the Revolution of 1688, where, for that
matter, constitutional writers have shown abundantly that Burke was
nearly as much in the wrong as Dr. Sacheverell. Nor has the book lived
merely by its gorgeous rhetoric and high emotions, though these have
been contributing elements. It lives because it contains a sentiment,
a method, a set of informal principles, which, awakened into new life
after the Revolution, rapidly transformed the current ways of thinking
and feeling about all the most serious objects of our attention,
and have powerfully helped to give a richer substance to all modern
literature. In the _Reflections_ we have the first great sign that
the ideas on government and philosophy which Locke had been the chief
agent in setting into European circulation, and which had carried all
triumphantly before them throughout the century, did not comprehend
the whole truth nor the deepest truth about human character--the
relations of men and the union of men in society. It has often been
said that the armoury from which the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century borrowed their weapons was furnished from England,
and it may be added as truly that the reaction against that whole
scheme of thought came from England. In one sense we may call the
_Reflections_ a political pamphlet, but it is much more than this,
just as the movement against which it was levelled was much more than
a political movement. The Revolution rested on a philosophy, and
Burke confronted it with an antagonistic philosophy. Those are but
superficial readers who fail to see at how many points Burke, while
seeming only to deal with the French monarchy and the British
constitution, with Dr. Price and Marie Antoinette, was in fact, and
exactly because he dealt with them in the comprehensive spirit of true
philosophy, tu