This equal surface, he said, facilitates the exercise of power, and many reigns in an absolute government would not have done as much as this single year of revolution, for the royal authority.

Time showed that Burke and Mirabeau were right.
History ratifies nearly all Burke's strictures on the levity and precipitancy of the first set of actors in the revolutionary drama.

No part of the _Reflections_ is more energetic than the denunciation of geometric and literary methods; and these are just what the modern explorer hits upon, as one of the fatal secrets of the catastrophe.
De Tocqueville's chapter on the causes which made literary men the principal persons in France, and the effect which this had upon the Revolution (Bk.III.ch.

i.), is only a little too cold to be able to pass for Burke's own.

Quinet's work on the Revolution is one long sermon, full of eloquence and cogency, upon the incapacity and blindness of the men who undertook the conduct of a tremendous crisis upon mere literary methods, without the moral courage to obey the logic of their beliefs, with the student's ignorance of the eager passion and rapid imagination of multitudes of men, with the pedant's misappreciation of a people, of whom it has been said by one of themselves, that there never was a nation more led by its sensations and less by its principles.