to write a study on that great and inspiring character.
I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc,
then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good
friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to
the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he
thought grievously misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a very
singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin. So
was Burke,--the author of those wise sentences that still ring in
our ears: "_The question with me is, not whether you have a right to
render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to
make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what
humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall
persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity
are not means of conciliation._" Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot,
Comte--what strange sponsors for the "theories and principles of the
Terror"!

What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this
effect: That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the
course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements
are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount
of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never
absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals
is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience,
utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer,
considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as
Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the
hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power
in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on
institutions than institutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for
an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and
guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of
our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient,
the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the
negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with
the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and
reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite
all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought. It
is plain that th