III


The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the
immediate issues of the age. Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at
every point upon the side of the future. Where constitutional reform was
in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy;
though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid
conservatism. In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest
cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too
much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.
Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of
practical sagacity. Had his warning been uttered without the fury of
hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the
Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military
dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw. Had he perceived the real evils
of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed,
forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and
continuous reform. But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had
little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he
was ready to praise. What impressed him was less the evils of the
constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from
its nature but be pruned away. Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper
vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's
conservatism is to be found in his own pages. But he was too much the
apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the
overthrow of privilege. He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence
taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his