Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/104

88 with whom he is united in social compact." Burke asserts that the present rights of man cannot be decided by reason alone, since they are founded on laws and customs long established. But Mary asks, How far back are we to go to discover their first foundation?

Burke's contempt for the poor, which Mary thought the most conspicuous feature of his treatise, was the chief cause of her indignation. She could not endure silently his admonitions to the labouring class to respect the property which they could not possess, and his exhortations to them to find their consolation for ill-rewarded labour in the "final proportions of eternal justice." "It is, Sir, possible," she tells him with some dignity, "to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next." To her mind, the oppression which the lower classes had endured for ages, until they had become in the end beings scarcely above the brutes, made the losses of the French nobility and clergy seem by comparison very insignificant evils. The horrors of the 6th of October, the discomforts and degradation of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and the destitution to which many French refugees had been reduced, blinded Burke to the long suffering of the multitude which now rendered the distress of the few imperative.

The chief fault of her Letter is undue haste in its composition. It was written on the spur of the moment, and is without the method indispensable to such a work. There is no order in the arguments advanced, and too often reasoning gives place to exhortation and meditation. Another serious error is the personal abuse with which her Letter abounds.