"I do not think," he says at the close of the _Reflections_, to the person to whom they were addressed, "that my sentiments are likely to alter yours.

I do not know that they ought.

You are young; you cannot guide, but must follow, the fortune of your country.

But hereafter they may be of some use to you, in some future form which your commonwealth may take.

In the present it can hardly remain; but before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one of our poets says, 'through great varieties of untried being,' and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood." He felt in the midst of his hate that what he took for seething chaos, might after all be the struggle upwards of the germs of order.