There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond. Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria; but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading the _Reflections_ of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the State of which they were part. They came to see that without self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power, such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The