and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society
would be dissolved. Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance
of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel
impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance,
we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless
ages. The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present
is thus the true guide to our policy. "We ought," he said in a famous
sentence, "to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend."

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the
French Revolution. There is something almost sinister in the destiny
which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth
century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to
hate. He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of
religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious
edifice. He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant
abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an
overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than
the English Parliament. Privileges were scattered to the winds in a
single night. Peace was sacrificed to exactly those metaphysical
theories of equality and justice which he most deeply abhorred. The
doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and
noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect
justification. On all hands there was the sense of a new world built by
the immediate thought of man upon the wholehearted rejection of past
history. Politics was emphatically declared to be a system of which the
truths could be stated in terms of mathematical certainty. The religious
spirit which Burke was convinced lay at the root of good gave way before
a general scepticism which, from the outset of his life, he had declared
incompatible with social order. Justice was asserted to be the centre of