social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive
privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body
politic. Above all, the men who seized the reins of power became
convinced that theirs was a specific of universal application. Their
disciples in England seemed in the same diabolic frenzy with themselves.
In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of
ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less
barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent. That Price and
Priestley should suffer the infection was, even for Burke, a not
unnatural thing. But when Charles Fox cast aside the teaching of twenty
years for its antithesis, Burke must have felt that no price was too
great to pay for the overthrow of the Revolution.

Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point
consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the
Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for
in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the
other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal
taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as
something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough
that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we
possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing.
The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as
the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to
the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that
freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of
doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form
which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he
exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom.
"The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the _Reflections_, "the