"India, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

"I impeach him in the name of human nature "itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and "oppressed in both sexes. And I impeach him in "the name, and by the virtue of, those eternal laws

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of justice which ought equally to pervade every age, "condition, rank, and situation in the world."

CHAPTER IV.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

edifice was

THE foundation of Burke's political edifice Justice. There were two buttresses to that edifice which supported and gave it strength-Liberty and Order. Indeed, without Liberty and Order there could be no enduring Justice. In his "Reflections "on the Revolution in France" he says: "Men have a right to the fruits of their industry, to the means of making their industry fruitful.......Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing on

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others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has “a right to a fair portion of all that Society, with all "its combinations of skill and force, can do in his

favour. In this partnership all men have equal "rights, but not to equal things. He that has but "five shillings in the partnership has as good a right "to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to his "larger proportion." In saying this he implicitly condemns both autocracy (which places all individual

rights of life, liberty, and property at the mercy of one irresponsible overlord) and democracy (which subjects them to the still greater irresponsibility of the mob). Speaking at Bristol, in 1774, he said: "The liberty-the only liberty I mean-is a liberty "connected with order and virtue, and which cannot "exist at all without them."

In considering, therefore, Burke's attitude on the French Revolution, we must keep in view these three fundamental principles of his life. The year previous to the delivery of the speech we have just referred to he had paid a visit to France, and had come away with gloomy forebodings as to the future of French society. On July 14th, 1789, the Bastille was captured by the Paris mob, and three weeks later, in a letter to Lord Charlemont, he expressed his abhorrence of such disorderly and lawless outbreaks, remarking that, if they were due to character rather than to accident, then the French people "were not fit "for liberty, and must have a strong hand, like that of "their former masters, to coerce them." While Fox, Sheridan, and the other Whig leaders acclaimed the uprising with enthusiasm, Burke proceeded to write that most famous of all his works, "Reflections on

"the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in "Certain Societies in London relative to that Event," which, published in November, 1790, took the world by storm, and sold to the then unprecedented number of 30,000 copies within a few months of its appearance. Its contents threw his former associates into rage and consternation. Taunts of inconsistency and treason to the principles of a lifetime were hurled at him; but the succeeding generations have acquitted Burke of these charges, for they have seen that he was but acting on his three great leading principles of Justice, Liberty, and Order in opposing the violence of the Jacobin mob, as he had been when defending the American Colonists and the Peoples of India. The "Reflections" was followed by was followed by "An Appeal "from the New to the Old Whigs," in which he replied to the attacks of his former political associates, and by many speeches in Parliament on the same subject, during one of which occurred the famous rupture between Burke and Fox, by which their long friendship came to an end. The "Reflections" is couched in the form of "a letter intended to have been sent to

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a gentleman in Paris," and consists of a refutation of three propositions advanced by a dissenting minister

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of the day, the Rev. Dr. Richard Price, in a sermon entitled "Discourse on the Love of our Country," preached in a chapel in the Old Jewry. The preacher's thesis was that by the Revolution of 1688 the people of England acquired three fundamental rights, namely:

1. To choose our own governors.

2. To cashier them for misconduct.

3. To frame a government for ourselves.

This thesis Burke refutes by references to the declarations of the Whigs who made the Revolution of 1688, and to the solicitude with which they preserved, as far as possible, the continuity of the royal succession. The first portion of the treatise is devoted to this subject; the second to the consideration of the Revolution in France, its inception, its progress, and its probable future developments. We give extracts which will, we think, place before the reader a clear conception of Burke's method and argument. It will be seen that his forecast of the course of the Revolution was nothing short of prophetic.

With regard to the first part of his subject, that in which he refutes Dr. Price's three propositions, he deals with it as follows: