He had pondered whether there could be any means of rescuing these unhappy people from their miserable industry without disturbing the natural course of things, and impeding the great wheel of circulation which is turned by their labour.

This is the vein of that striking passage in his first composition which I have already quoted (p.

22).

Burke did not yet see, and probably never saw, that one key to the events which astonished and exasperated him was simply that the persons most urgently concerned had taken the riddle which perplexed him into their own hands, and had in fiery earnest set about their own deliverance.
The pith of the Revolution up to 1790 was less the political constitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, than the social and economic transformation, of which he says so little.

It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measure of an electoral circumscription, that made the Revolution; it was the iniquitous distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militia service, the scourge of the road service, the destructive tyranny exercised in the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and imposts of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens and heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industrious part of the nation.