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tions. Manners are necessary for the functioning of civil society. "Manners
are of more importance than laws....The law touches us but here and
there, and now and then." The citizen with manners is like the woman in
Robert Frost's poem "The Silken Tent," who is "loosely bound by count–
less ties of love and thought...." The Revolution caused French citizens
to become unmoored from their traditional civilizing ties.
A society in which people have lost the internal controls that stem
from manners is unlikely to remain free. "I doubt much, very much indeed,
whether France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard," Burke said in
1791. Given the intemperate passions of a people infected by revolution–
ary enthusiasm, only despotism can prevent total lawlessness. "Society
cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed
somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be with–
out. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of
intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
It
deeply disturbed Burke that in the early 1790s many people
in
Britain did not see the dangers of the Revolution. In
Rglections,
he attacks
a pro-Revolution speech that Richard Price-a leading Rational
Dissenter-made on the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution. Price, he
says, was one of several ministers "who under the name of religion teach
little else than wild and dangerous politics." These ministers were against
all forms of established authority. "It is no wonder therefore, that with
these ideas of every thing in their constitution and government at home,
either in church or state, as illegitimate and usurped, or, at best as a vain
mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm."
Burke worried that such pro-French radicals might "draw us into a con–
nexion and concurrence with that nation [France] upon the principles of
its proceedings...."
Perhaps Burke exaggerated the danger the Revolution posed to
Britain-though some historians argue that Burke's fears were legiti–
mate-but was he right to strongly attack the Revolution itself? His friend
Edmund Gibbon agreed with Burke about the Revolution, and there are
passages in the final edition of Adam Smith's
Theory
if
Moral Sentiments
that
suggest he also had strong reservations about the Revolution. In the eyes
of many historians the Revolution was on balance a force for progress, but
in recent years a number of historians-among them Francois Furet,
Simon Schama, and William Doyle-have offered a darker assessment. In
the
Oxford History
if
the French Revolution
(1989), Doyle says the
Revolution "was an economic disaster for France"-especially for the
poor: "Nobody...suffered more than the poor and the sick, over several
generations, from the blind destruction of established institutions before
viable alternatives had been devised and funded." Echoing Burke, Doyle
