Mr. Wentworth Dilke and Mr. Buckle[1] have pointed out something more than specks in the character of Burke. Even if much of what they say is true, I should not hesitate to acknowledge him as the first political intellect of his age. Since I first spoke of Sieyes, certain papers have come to light tending to show that he was as wicked as the rest of them. They would not affect my judgment on his merit as a thinker.
In this oracular manner the Constitution of 1799 came into existence, and it was not his fault that it degenerated in the strong hands of Napoleon. He named the three Consuls, refusing to be one himself, and he passed into ceremonious obscurity as president of the Senate.
When the Emperor had quarrelled with his ablest advisers he regretted that he had renounced the aid of such an auxiliary. He thought him unfit to govern, for that requires sword and spurs; but he admitted that Sieyès often had new and luminous ideas, and might have been useful to him beyond all the ministers of the Empire. Talleyrand, who disliked Sieyès, and ungenerously reproached him with cupidity, spoke of him to Lord Brougham as the one statesman of the time. The best of the political legacy of the Revolution has been his work. Others pulled down, but he was a builder, and he closed in 1799 the era which he had opened ten years before. In the history of political doctrine, where almost every chapter has yet to be written, none will be more valuable than the one that will show what is permanent and progressive in the ideas that he originated.
It was the function of the constituent Assembly to recast the laws in conformity with the Rights of Man, to abolish every survival of absolutism, every heirloom of inorganic tradition, that was inconsistent with them. In every department of State they were obliged to make ruins, to remove them, and to raise a new structure from the foundation. The transition from the reign of force to
- ↑ Dilke, Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. pp. 309-384; Buckle, History of Civilisation, ed. J. M. Robertson, pp. 258-269.
