That Burke himself may be said in a sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations of the State.

Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue.

No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.
Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close.

That is the real meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency not less active in England than abroad.

In France, indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere.