Explain the following quote from Reflections on the Revolution in France: "On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a...

Burke writes that according to the philosophy
he is describing (as well as critiquing and, indeed, satirizing) everyone is so drastically
equal that we are all reduced to the lowest common denominator. The absurdity of the idea is
shown by the breakdown of logic in the final clause, for the notion Burke is criticizing is
precisely that there is no highest or lowest order of anything. If people are all the same
because we are all animals, then there is no reason to say that animals are not all the same
too. In this case killing one's mother becomes no more terrible than killing an earthworm. Burke
himself makes this point, without extending it to the animal kingdom, when he says that
"this barbarous philosophy" would treat regicide and parricide only as common
homicide.

The dismal egalitarianism of the Revolution which Burke excoriates
is in marked contrast to his own respectful and, indeed, adulatory descriptions of the Queen of
France, whom he recalls seeing when she was still a princess at Versailles sixteen or seventeen
years ago. To view a great queen as no more worthy of regard than anyone else is not, he avers,
a philosophy of light and reason. It is to tear away "the decent drapery of life" and
become an animal oneself.