ABSTRACT
A D E S C R IP T IO N of the reaction in England against the French Revolution begins traditionally with the name of Edmund Burke. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, published in the winter of 1790, stands as the permanent memorial of the Revolution’s effect on English history. The Revolution in France produced a counter-revolution in the mind of Burke, and Burke converted England to his side ; so runs an accepted version. But it is doubtful whether Burke made any vital change in English opinion ; and certainly he changed nothing essential in his own creed. The last stage of his life is a climax, not a paradox. It is true that in the Reflections, the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), he attacks men with whom he had once fought side by side. His front, it has been well said, is different, but his ground is the same as it had been for twenty years. T h e two-fold argument ; that quick and violent changes are neither possible, because the complexity of human affairs is too great for all simplifying systems of philosophers, nor desirable if they were possible ; that society is no ordinary contract and for no ordinary end, but a partnership in all perfection and between all generations, or rather a dispensation by which " the awful Author of our being . . . having disposed and marshalled us by a Divine Tactic . . . has . . . virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned to us ” : all this belongs to the permanent Burke. Even as a reformer he had always been a Conservative. The Revolution did not alter his philosophy but only brought it into high relief.
