judge on the basis of experience, new and old, our own and that of others, but that we should abide by the experience of the past, should accept its outcome in opposition to our merely personal notions, and make it our main business to retain unsullied the wisdom it has handed down.

Now whatever advantages may be allowed to attach to a regard for antiquity, it is clear at the start that Burke displays a degree of veneration for the past, and a fear of innovation, which inclines distinctly to the latter emphasis. No one will deny the danger that lies in a spirit of reckless innovation. But also one might suppose that over-timidity fails of being altogether safe. The present world happens to be so constituted that it is important at times that one be willing to take risks. Burke seldom or never has a word to say of this counter danger. On the contrary, he finds it hard to express strongly enough his ideal of prudential timidity in all matters that concern the state. He will change nothing till he can see his way with complete certainty. He will admit a justification to the idea of revolution that sets itself against the time-honored constitutional forms, only under circumstances of such extremity as would justify our dispensing with the whole moral law. He will set his face rigidly against any tendency to question the existing order, to make the benefits of the constitution a matter of discussion, because it is unsettling and of uncertain issue, just as his modern disciples proclaim the sin of muck-raking as a menace to prosperity. Although he grants, with some hesitation, that in theory truth may perhaps be a higher aim than peace, yet in practice, unless the truth is very self-evident indeed, he is for holding fast to peace. It is odd that Burke should be so mightily concerned for the consequences of discussion if he really is assured that no genuine grievances are to be disclosed. But in any case it remains true that the impression his attitude leaves is the not very bracing one of a desire above all else to be safe and sane, to risk nothing, to tolerate what is bad oftentimes for fear of worse-an attitude which is the more disappointing in Burke in its contrast to the fine moral

fervor with which he himself can deal with such reforms as do not stray beyond the limits of constitutionality.

The inadequacy of Burke's philosophy of experience is equally suggested by his exaggerated opinion of the wisdom of the past. It is not easy to acquit him even of the vulgar prejudice which sets our ancestors on a pedestal of wisdom and virtue simply because they are sufficiently removed from us to have taken their place in a glorified mythus. He speaks of our canonized forefathers, our wiser and better ancestors. God forbid, he piously exclaims, that we should pass judgment upon people who framed the laws and institutions prior to our insect origin of yesterday. It very likely is human nature, as he himself remarks, rather to defer to the wisdom of times past than to the present, of whose imbecility we have daily experience. But this suggests rather too forcibly that we fail to be in like manner impressed with the imbecility of our ancestors, only because we are no longer in possession of a sufficiently minute knowledge of their motives and reasonings. What in one place Burke adduces as evidence of this superiority-the great goodness of our forefathers in sending over colonists to America to introduce the Christian religion and Christian manners among the natives-is not a little indicative of such a bias toward historical idealization.

What then does constitute the advantage to which the past has a fair claim? The obvious answer is, that by its being past, it has had a chance to put its experiments to the test of experience, and so has got rid of some rubbish which, were the testing still in the future, there could be no certain grounds for condemning. But this is not enough for Burke. For his thesis is, not merely that experience is the test of political truth, but that we have already reached a point where through the process of experience a final constitution of English society has been sifted out. But evidently this will not follow except on one supposition. The past is justified only because its results justify themselves to us, the inheritors of the past, in terms of our satisfaction with them. If people are discontented, then the sole reason for maintaining the superiority of the past fails.

And accordingly the question presents itself to Burke again: Why are you so passionately setting forth the claims of the past, crying down the new spirit of dissatisfaction and revolt? If your estimate of the past is right, it approves itself by the absence of other than minor danger from a discontent which has no real ground. If your apprehensions are well grounded, antiquity cannot support the claims you make for it.

Burke tries on occasion both the ways in which this difficulty might be met. On the one hand he is continually endeavoring to reassure himself in his confidence that things are quite as they should be, and that abuses are only temporary and venial, to recall the unbroken faith of earlier days that in the British constitution, and the Whig party, the powers of good in the universe have put forth their supreme and final effort. Something remains to be said of this self-persuasion in the sequel. But first it may be well to consider the more reasoned grounds on which he attempts to make good his confidence in the inherent justice of the English social structure.

There are two motives in Burke's theory of the grounds of political belief which are not wholly in accord. Nothing is clearer than that his philosophy does not intend to be in the end merely utilitarian and positive. He is fully convinced that, along with utility, there is a second and more ultimate foundation of society-eternal justice; that there is a law of truth and equity in human history which every human law or institution must reflect if it is to have the slightest claim on allegiance. Now one might perhaps suppose that if this is so, it would be useful to apply these fundamental principles of justice to the criticism of human affairs. And this is what the philosophers were endeavoring actually to do. After all, the real inwardness of their meaning is not to be found in a tinkering with constitutions, as Burke uncharitably assumes, but in this effort to apply a rational standard for judging things as they happen to exist. And however crude its application, the "Rights of Man" furnished, and was intended to furnish, such a moral standard. Taken in the proper way, and not as a rule which tells offhand just what politically to do in each particular case,

this is by no means the impertinence that Burke declares it to be. Properly used, even its abstractness is not altogether a deficiency. If such a principle really represents a genuine insight, that can serve as a compass to guide our general direction, while yet we realize that it has to be interpreted by reference to particular circumstances, it is in a way easier oftentimes to make use of in its more general form. It impresses the logical imagination more, the issue is less apt to be obscured by the irrelevancies of the particular case, it carries a certain weight of moral impulse that may easily be lost the more we attempt to make it comprehensive and concrete. Expediency is a valuable word, but it cannot be claimed that it stirs very wildly the moral pulse; whereas Burke himself would have to admit that the "Rights of Man" is even dangerously exciting. At the very least it furnishes a rallying point, a flag or emblem, in the constant warfare against bureaucracy. What is the use, asks Burke, of discussing the abstract right to food? The real question is as to the ways of procuring it. But what if our rulers are not interested in procuring it, but rather in evading so far as possible any responsibility in the matter? Then surely it may be a very practical and useful thing indeed to talk, and to talk very freely and pointedly, about our rights.

Now to such a plea as this Burke makes, it may be said, no demur. As a matter of fact it is the very thing that he himself is constantly doing. But the point I am trying to make is this, that on this account his opposition of abstract principles to expediency is polemically misleading. For in the end it is not expediency at all which is the real motive of his opposition; it is rather a second principle which he substitutes for the revolutionary principle of the "Rights of Man." Erroneous theories stand opposed in his mind to the principle of mos majorum, the glorification of the constitution as it stands the constitution "whose sole authority is that it has existed time out of mind." And to say that the principle of political action is the paramount authority of the past, is quite different from saying that all changes should keep in view expediency and fact. Accordingly the real thing that Burke has to justify is not expediency

versus theory, but one theory against another. The task laid upon him is to establish the philosophy of the legal type of mind as against that of the moralist and reformer, and to ground the over-ruling claims of precedent.

It is not difficult to understand the state of mind which animates Burke. It is most readily illustrated in a religious attitude which is strictly analogous. The belief in an authoritative Bible is not itself opposed to a confidence in reason. Rather such an authority is conceived to be an embodied standard of reason. But when human thinking has started an attack upon the book, its defender finds himself forced in some measure to make a distinction which he would be better pleased to avoid, and to set himself in opposition to the presumption and inadequacy of the merely human intellect, in order to defend the embodiment of settled and digested truth on which he has been accustomed to rest.

But political conservatism, for a man of Burke's caliber, presented a difficulty which did not meet him in the same acute form in religion. There was a generally accepted basis of authority in religion to be found in the conception of revelation. But something different was needed to establish the divine authority of the present social order. Burke's answer is, in general terms, an appeal to history, backed by an underlying faith in the divine order of the world. Prescription, he says, is the most solid of all titles. "It is the deliberate election of ages and generations, made by circumstances ten thousand times better than choice. The individual is foolish, the multitude for the moment is foolish, the species is wise." The justification of the existing order is this test of a developing race experience, which has actually issued in that most blessed of human products, the British constitution; a faith finally anchored by confidence in an over-ruling Providence, from whose justice and benevolence such an outcome as we actually find might from the start have been expected. "For it is not to be imagined that God would suffer this great gift of government to be the plaything and the sport of the feeble will of man." I do not know of a better parallel than is to be found in Newman's philosophy of the au