were defended.  It is even possible to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in revolt.  For them the fact of discontinuity was vital.  They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the State of which they were part.  They came to see that without self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power, such happiness must go unfulfilled.  The State, in fact, may have the noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also mortal men.  The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic.  The test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the achievement for which they were responsible.  The achievement, as they urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble men.  That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the equation of the real and the ideal.  The first lesson of their own experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free minds.[18]

[Footnote 18:  Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, pp. 65-9.]

VI

No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic movement, to the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Political Justice of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics that Burke’s fundamental influence remains.  His attitude to reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made.  In that sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution of the generation which followed him.  Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in England, are in a true sense his disciples.  That does not mean that any of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals.  The path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time.  Certainly there is no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast they afford.

It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his effort.  Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham.  His very defects are lessons in themselves.  His unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge