hypothesis let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer. We have but this one appeal against irresistible power-si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis arma at sperate deos memores fandi atque nefandi." Human law, then, upon Burke's theory, was but conventional and artificial, if based purely upon the needs of a community irrespective of any wider and more absolute standard. When he says, "What in the result is likely to produce evil is politically false, that which is productive of good politically true," the evil and the good to which he refers must be weighed in balances of more than human stability. We find this principle persistent throughout his whole career. When he had driven home his charges against the East India Company's administration, he sums it all up—“To keep faith with the Company was to break the faith, the solemn original indispensable oath in which I am bound by the eternal frame and constitution of things to the whole human race." By the aid of this master-principle we may unlock all Burke's varieties of attitude upon such questions as popular rights, original compacts, the rule of majorities, the rights of a minority. It was obvious to Burke that if the purview of a statesman is to be limited to the human race and the planet which it inherits, these questions would be settled upon certain clear and narrow lines. The deeper problems involved in such terms as God, Immortality, and the Soul, would not be allowed to have their effect upon those mundane matters which could certainly be decided without their interposition. It was, however, Burke's steadfast opinion that they would be decided in a different way. Respect for authority in matters civil would be an entirely different matter according as a civil state of society was regarded merely as an evolutionary growth destined in time to

decay with the race in which it inheres, or as the partial image of some more complete order in which the individuals composing that society might some day live to participate. The right of a majority would be an unconditioned right in matters civil if we willed to make it so, always assuming that no higher court of appeal exists, and that Shakespeare was romancing when he makes one of his characters say, "Heaven is above all. There sits a Judge whom no king (or majority) can corrupt."

I think it worth noting, as a claim on behalf of Burke to present-day recognition, that in this country the direction of thought in matters political seems rather veering round, if not to his standpoint, at any rate to a more respectful consideration of it. Fifty years ago the tide. was running strongly in that line of thought which viewed government as merely a security for the preservation of law and order. Now-a-days we have rather shifted our ground. Take, for example, Gladstone's essay on Church and State, and Macaulay's famous reply thereto. Neither of these would, I think, command the assent of any considerable majority of present day politicians. On the one hand we have come to recognise among the primary responsibilities of a State something of a moral character, rather different to the mere enforcement of law and order. On the other hand, we have certainly not advanced any nearer to that position which makes the resolute propagation of religion a part of State duty. But we have loaded the State with certain responsibilities unknown to our fathers, and so it is that the ethical basis which underlies them has received additional emphasis. Whatever tends to enforce that ethical basis, and give it power upon the minds of men, has acquired pari passu a more respectful attention. This I take to

be the explanation of a certain reaction from a purely secular method in politics, which is one mark of the age we live in. It indicates a disposition to hold to all approved methods of enforcing ethical considerations so long as upon the State devolves more and more the solution of complex social problems. Burke, then, is not so completely out of touch with our times when he is proved to hold strongly to ethics and religion as the only safe basis of government, and the sole guarantee for the orderly progress of the community. This is his general theory. When, however, he comes to deal with governments and communities as such, his appeal is to another great law which again, in our own day, has earned world-wide dominance-I mean that law of growth, that principle of development, which is generally spoken of as evolution. Throughout life, and to its very close, Burke was sensible of the need of change. "We must," he says, "all obey this great law. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means, perhaps, of its conservation. All that we can do is to provide that the change shall proceed. by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change without the inconveniences of mutation." Again and again he urges the wisdom of timely and temperate reform-timely, because it is an amicable. arrangement with a friend in power-temperate, because a temperate reform is the most permanent, and because it has a principle of growth. Burke's prescience on all points was profound. It is, however, hardly to be expected that he should have anticipated Herbert Spencer. None the less, the principle of evolution in communities was with him second only to that master principle to which I have already alluded. He did not, and could not, foresee that the principle of evolution, carried to its fullest extent in the natural as well as in the social world, might

possibly clash with that traditional form of religion to which he devoutly clung. Be that, however, as it may, it is perfectly obvious that to regard ethics and religion as the essential basis of government, and to reconcile with that principle the theory of evolutionary growth in communities, is not an impossible feat even according to present day lights.

Burke's method of government was best summed up in his own words, "Nations are not primarily ruled by wars, less by violence. Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors; by a knowledge of their temper and a judicious management of it." Let us turn to that great example, America, where a wilful blindness to this principle more than to any other led to the loss of a goodly bough from the stem of British liberty. I do not propose to do more than glance at a few of the leading thoughts contained in Burke's great speeches on the question of conciliation with America. To my mind Mr. Morley is absolutely correct when he says that on these discourses must eventually depend Burke's position in history. Speeches have been delivered on a higher pitched level of sustained rhetoric. Some excel them easily in wit and epigram; many have been far better calculated to stir the immediate passions of mankind. But when all this is allowed, there remains in these famous speeches upon a question long since decided something at once indescribable and imperishable. They constitute a matchless appeal to candour, to common sense, to conscience, which one would have thought must have been irresistible to the generation that heard them. If ever a nation was invited to confess a blunder by all those considerations which can move at once what is magnanimous and what is generous

in the human mind, England was so summoned by Burke. Vehemently does he expose the unwisdom of that haughty pride which, having strutted into an error, has not the grace manfully to own it. The natural reluctance to yield concessions from dread of inducing still further demands is met by the famous reply, "It is impossible to answer for bodies of men, but I am sure the only effect of fidelity, clemency, and kindness in governors is peace, goodwill, order, and esteem on the part of the governed." It was under a system of commercial monopoly, combined with freedom from taxation, that America had flourished. To retain the monopoly while superadding the tax was the attempt of Lord North and his imperious master. The attempt was fatal to peace, as, even without Burke's prevision, any nation in cool blood could easily have foreseen. But Burke opposed it also on the ground of his wellknown objection to abstract disputes as between nation and nation. Just as when, later, the question of Irish trade came on, Burke says, "I am not now impeaching the right of parliament to make laws for Irish trade, I am only considering what laws it is right for parliament to make." So on the American question, he emphasised over and over again the necessity for making this important distinction. "The question with me," he says, "Is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to do. I do not enter into metaphysical details, I hate the very sound of them."

To take a stand like this in the teeth of a nation bent upon asserting what it considered its rights over a young and growing dependency, argues courage of a high order. To remain as Burke remained, entirely unmoved by the