The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate.... The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.... The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or totally negligent of their duty.... The rights of men in governments are their advantages, and these are often in balances between differences of good, in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.... I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
We are here reminded of the saying of Dumont, the friend of Mirabeau, that the fear of being thought officious and interfering is as universal among the English as is the desire of the French of taking a prominent part and interfering in everything.[901] This home thrust by the able Swiss thinker goes far to explain the difference between the Revolution of 1688 in England and that of a century later in France. Vanity, love of the sensational, and, a mania for wholesale reconstruction on geometrical designs largely account for the failures of the French revolutionists; and Burke’s warnings on these heads were treated with the petulant disdain characteristic of clever children.
Burke also did good service by pointing out the fundamental differences between the general overturn in France and the “glorious Revolution” of 1688 in England. Slipshod comparisons of the two events were then much in vogue, witness the sermon of Dr. Price in the Old Jewry, on which Burke conferred the fame of a never ending pillory. The Whigs, who formed a rapidly thinning tail behind their impetuous leader, were never tired of discovering historical parallels; and it is possible that Pitt’s sympathy with Whiggism, stunted but not wholly blighted by Parliamentary friction, led him to the hopeful prophecy already quoted. Certainly very many Frenchmen saw themselves in fancy entering on peaceful paths of progress under a more genial William III. At the time when Burke was completing his “Reflections,” Wordsworth and his friend during a Long Vacation tour in France were met with warmest cheer by fédérés who had shared in the ecstatic Festival of the Federation (14th July 1790):
And with their swords flourished as if to fight
The saucy air.
At once the Englishmen were greeted as brothers.
We bore a name
Honoured in France, the name of Englishmen,
And hospitably did they give us hail
As their fore-runners in a glorious course.