AN ENGLISH VIEW OF THE REVOLUTION
With Burke, more than half a century later, we get the strongest possible contrast. He admires nothing; he reprobates everything; he foresees the worst. For one thing, the Revolution had now actually broken out. Already its best aspects were becoming obscured, as disorder fast grew, and as the National Assembly deliberately adopted a policy of destruction to defeat Bourbon apathy and insouciance. France appeared to be threatened with anarchy, and that seemed to Burke more intolerable than the long-continued conditions of tyranny and misgovernment that were responsible for it. He was an old man, and more conservative than in his younger days. To him the glorious revolution of William of Orange and the Whigs seemed the perfect model, and the parliamentary institutions of Britain the ideal form of government. The disorders of Paris and the methods of the National Assembly shocked and wounded him, so he turned on them and rent them. He admitted, indeed, that he was not in a position to pronounce judgment: “I do not pretend to know France as correctly as some others,” and so he confined himself to the rôle of the advocate. His pleading against the Revolution echoed through the Courts of Europe, carried conviction in almost every quarter where doubt existed, and to this day remains the most effective indictment against the men who made modern France. The success of Burke’s book was in part due to the fact that its publication was followed by the Reign of Terror, which seemed to prove the author’s argument, but above all to its brilliant and noble, if somewhat too ample, style. Of this one example only will be given: