Page:Letters, speeches and tracts on Irish affairs.djvu/16

 that they had ascertained in connexion with their Irish policy "everything everybody else could know!" Burke writes to Mrs. Crewe that a work of his has, he is told, "put people in a mood a little unusual to them—it has set them on thinking.” “One might have imagined,” he adds, "that the train of events, as they passed before their eyes, might have done that!" Nevertheless, it does not; and so, he concludes, "Let them think now who never thought before!" In general, our Governments, however well informed, feel bound, it would seem, to adapt their policy to our normal mental condition, which is, as Burke says, a non-thinking one. Burke's paramount and undying merit as a politician is, that instead of accepting as fatal and necessary this non-thinking condition of ours, he battles with it, mends and changes it;he will not rest until he has "put people in a mood a little unusual with them," until he has "set them on thinking."