He suspended it in the same light of great social ideas and wide principles, in which its authors and champions professed to represent it.

Unhappily he advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any nation.

But the force of the criticism remains, its foresight remains, its commemoration of valuable elements of life which men were forgetting, its discernment of the limitations of things, its sense of the awful emergencies of the problem.

When our grandchildren have made up their minds, once for all, as to the merits of the social transformation which dawned on Europe in 1789, then Burke's _Reflections_ will become a mere literary antiquity, and not before.
From the very beginning Burke looked upon the proceedings in France with distrust.

He had not a moment of enthusiasm or sympathy of which to repent.