Principles of western civilisation

Iv WESTERN LIBERALISM II7

ing the principles of Locke in the Revolution in America. We are called to witness him later standing, a commanding figure, denouncing with a passionate eloquence, almost beyond the measure of anything else of the kind in literature, what to many minds appeared to be exactly the same principles expressed in the Revolution in France. “A light of great wisdom,” says Sir Frederick Pollock finely, “shines in almost everything of Burke’s making, but it is a diffused light of which the focus is not revealed, but only conjectured.”* We are beginning to understand now something of the profound social instinct from which this illumination proceeds, as well as to perceive the character of the principle Burke had in sight, which reconciles the apparent contradiction here described.

Burke unmistakably gave voice in English thought to a conviction, widespread, deep, and sincere, which has never since ceased to be representative both in England and the United States of the most characteristic of all forces behind the phenomenon of Western Liberalism, namely, the conviction that the principles of Democracy, formulated as they were in the French Revolution (that is to say, as a theory of the interests of the political State, resting logically on the materialistic interpretation of history), are not only different from the principles of Western Liberalism which have come down through Locke and the English and American Revolutions; but that they are not, and never can be, the principles of that Democracy which our civilisation is destined to carry forward to ultimate fruition.

1 History of the Science of Politics, by Sir Frederick Pollock, p. 86.