58/91 But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends. No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas. Yet even the _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ (1796) have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. |