His eye was on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the sovereign problems of human government.

A book by a member of this circle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the town, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotent measures of repression.

This was the _Treatise on Tactics_, by a certain M.de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion.

The important part of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examined with what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and political causes of the decline of the military art in France.

Burke read it with keen interest and energetic approval.