Burke: A Centenary Perspective

JUST a hundred years ago there was laid to rest in the quiet country church at Beaconsfield one to whom we Americans owe a debt of gratitude that has never been fully paid. Edmund Burke, whom the world now recognizes as one of the few great men of all time, made his first appearance in public life in connection with American affairs. That early speech which won him instant fame as an orator was made in advocacy of the rights and privileges of Americans. In the course thus entered upon he persisted with untiring interest through long and discouraging years of ministerial wrong-headedness and incapacity. He brought to his service a deep and thorough knowledge of American conditions, a sound political philosophy, and a glowing genius ; and yet Burke was little of a hero in American eyes during the struggle of the Revolution, and little of a guide in the formative period that succeeded .

There are certain outer and obvious reasons for this neglect, perceptible at once as we glance, for instance, from Burke to the one whom Americans did cherish in their hearts as their chief protector and defender on English ground, — Lord Chatham. Burke was a beginner in political life ; Chatham had been for years a dominant figure in European politics. Chatham had rank and high social connection ; Burke was an obscure young Irishman of no connection at all. Chatham was a strong and masterful party leader; Burke stood, as he always deliberately chose to stand when circumstances permitted it, in the subordinate position of party follower.

For the failure of our ancestors to recognize the value of Burke’s services and to adopt his ideas, there were, however, other and deeper reasons, to be found in certain general currents of thought and feeling, opposing, crossing, and intermingling in the political and social life of the time.

The anti-American party in English politics began its work of aggression under the cover of legal right, — a right justifying any procedure that might be warranted by the letter of law or the wording of statute. Grenville, the man who, in concocting the Stamp Act, struck the match that set off the whole magazine of revolution, was the arch-type of the legal mind. The various celebrated pen portraits that we have of him show him to have been upright, painstaking, and honest, but oppressively literal, making no allowance for the disturbing force of human emotion in schemes constructed by the human intellect. Having, as he thought, a legal competency to tax the colonies, he saw no possible reason why he should not exercise his right, and he at once proceeded to do so. In opposition to his policy, the party of Chatham and Camden, following the lines laid down by their teacher, Locke, urged the claims of a natural or moral right, which, they maintained, graven deeply and unmistakably in the individual consciousness, offered to every man an infallible test for determining when the commands of positive law embodied justice, and when they did not.

The doctrine of moral right is to be found in the colonies, also, in a state of vigorous and flourishing growth. Wrought out as it had been through ages of social conflict, by one minority party after another, as a weapon of defense against the established law of a hostile party in power, this doctrine was peculiarly at home in a community which, like colonial America, was largely peopled by such a minority party and their descendants. Nor was a doctrine of legal right unfamiliar there; but while in England law and nature, as political principles, were pitted against one another by party politicians, in the colonies they were used to support one another in a common cause of resistance to English oppression.

Two notable figures appear in colonial history, the minister of religion and the lawyer, — the former the dominant personage in the seventeenth century, the latter in the eighteenth ; and while the former, as a true son of the Reformation, had developed, expounded, and typified the doctrine of moral right, until it had become ingrained in the thought of the people, the latter, when he came into prominence, was eager to show his familiarity with the arts of his particular vocation, — all devices of offense and defense that may claim as their warrant the letter of law. We are not, however, to regard the ministerial class in the concrete, at the Revolutionary period, as engaged in teaching a moral right exclusively, while the lawyers, on the other hand, devoted themselves entirely to legality. It was rather the case that the moral or natural right theory, developed and fostered in the period of theological influence, descended to the legal period to form part of a common stock of doctrine which was drawn upon freely by any one at will, as occasion seemed to require.

Burke, in the meantime, was conducting his American campaign along quite other lines. Obedience makes government, he thought, and obedience can be secured only when the governor knows and will work in harmony with the forces of human motive actually in operation in the people to be governed. If men were beings of a simple nature, moved by reason entirely, or by some one fundamental emotion such as fear, the moral right resting on logic, and the legal right resting on force, might do very well as sole principles of government. But Burke saw not only that men are curiously intricate complexes of feeling, reason, desire, belief, passion, and prejudice, but that they are not even uniform in their complexityThe elements of human nature vary from race to race, from community to community, even from person to person. The first task of the legislator, then, if he wants to form a plan of government that will work successfully in practice, must be to study the peculiar temper and character of the particular people with whom he is to deal.

Such a special study Burke made of the American people, — of its original race traits, of its acquired characters, and of all the influences of climate, soil, geographical position, and social tradition that might be counted oil to modify those traits and to accentuate those characters still further. From this research into local conditions emerged certain psychological principles of general application, prominent among them the law of habit. Habit is the force, Burke thinks, that has consolidated the elements of feeling, instinct, and reason in the human mind into a smoothly working whole. Habit gives to human action a strength, surety, and swiftness that seem unattainable by any other means; and the longer habit is at work, the greater will be the effect produced by it. Escape from the influence of habit is difficult, if not impossible. Even when a person or a community voluntarily determines wholly to ignore it, and to reconstruct in every detail the already established plan of life, the attempt will result either in a stoppage of action, or in a failure to break away from custom after all. Much less can habit be uprooted by external agency. The legislator who tries to run counter to the fixed customs of a people will meet with a strength of resistance that will be found insuperable.

Rejecting, then, a legal right which he thought impracticable, and a moral right which he thought misleading, Burke founded his political philosophy upon that use and wont, that custom from time immemorial, which is the basis of the English common law, and in great part of the English Constitution.

So far, Burke might be merely the skillful politician, the Machiavelli of his time, studying without approval or disapproval the complicated instrument he is trying to know only that he may play a tune of his own upon its stops. But a thorough belief in his chosen principle gives to Burke’s philosophy an accent of greatness. Use and wont are means not only to easier but to better action. It is true that habit must be reckoned with by the legislator; a people cannot be permanently governed contrary to its inclinations, and its inclinations become more firmly fixed and more definitely established by long-continued custom. The path is, however, to be kept not only because walking is difficult outside of it, but because the track thus worn by the converging tread of countless feet, at the call of countless interests, desires, and calculations, leads more directly to the great ends of human society than any new road, laid out arbitrarily by the single speculator. And so innovation was, for Burke, the great political heresy, and his chief article of complaint against the Tory party of his day in England.

Use and wont as a ground of doctrine had their place in colonial thought by right of inheritance from a long line of English ancestry. Custom, as well as moral and legal right, was freely alleged In justification of American claims. In the various addresses, petitions, and declarations issued by the colonists from time to time we may find expression of all these doctrines, either separately or in amicable even if somewhat incongruous combination. But as the contest went on, use and wont seemed to be found less and less available as a basis of argument. Hutchinson writes in 1774: “ The leaders here seem to acknowledge that their cause is not to be defended on constitutional principles, and Adams now gives out that there is no need of it; they are upon better ground ; all men have a natural light to change a bad constitution for a better, whenever they have it in their power.” If the principle adopted by Burke was in reality a sound and fruitful one, why should it have been dropped from favor in this way ?

With the passage of time the substantial correctness of Burke’s analysis of the American situation is seen more and more clearly. The revolt was brought about, as Burke said it was, by British violation of use and wont, by British contempt for American opinion and feeling. The condition of affairs in America was the result of natural growth and prevailing circumstance substantially as he depicted it in his various speeches and letters dealing with the American question. Burke’s doctrine of use and wont, however, is a doctrine of the group ; and the colonists were going all the time further and further along the way of individualism. The moral right so dear to the colonists was based upon individual reason; and the legal right invoked so often both for and against them was based upon individual will, either of the one or of the many arbitrarily united.

The use and wont that Burke appealed to, on the other hand, are the work, not of some chance aggregation of unrelated individuals, but of a social group, united by ties of common descent, common names, and mutual affection, — a group joining present, past, and future generations in intimate and living union. Into this group, which Burke assumes as the fundamental unit of human society, members enter, as a rule, not by deliberate choice, but by the involuntary avenue of birth. It is made up, like the family group, of the weak and the strong, of the ignorant and the experienced; and as in the family group, the strong and the wise are the natural leaders, the weak and the ignorant are the willing and obedient followers, while all members work together, not for individual profit, but for the good of the whole. Their plan of action is to be found in the wisdom of ancestors, — the knowledge gathered through ages of experience, and the principles worked out and tested by the actual operation of events.

It is all very well, however, to have recourse in this way to the wisdom of ancestors and to institutions that have stood the test of time and experience, so long as one is in unbroken connection with ancestors, and the conditions provided for in their institutions remain the same ; but when ancestors cast one off and circumstances change completely, what is to be done ? The habit that connected the colonists with England and English institutions was necessarily somewhat weakened, as Burke himself had shown, by the circumstances of colonization. He had in mind particularly, as causes of disconnection, the wide distances that separated the colonists from their old home, and the necessity for hardihood and individual self-reliance arising in the settlement of a new and difficult country. We may see, in addition, that the social group of early colonial times was not, to begin with, the natural group assumed by Burke as the unit of society and as the author of use and wont, but, consisting as it did mainly of adult men and women who had deliberately broken away from former local and social ties, and had deliberately united in a new association by agreement, it was in great degree a concrete example of the artificial group assumed by Locke in his compact theory, — a group formed by the free volition of independent and equal individuals. The tradition of individual independence thus established was never quite lost sight of, even after long settlement had transformed the originally artificial groups into natural groups, which held largely to old English lines of thought and belief, and arranged themselves in the main under the old English social and governmental framework.

In the struggle with the mother country, the necessity for independence of thought and action became once more pressing. More and more the colonists found themselves cut off from precedent and tradition; more and more they found it necessary to assert the rights of the individual against the power of the group as represented by an oppressive government ; more and more they were forced into the position of revolt against all establishment and control, although, as Burke maintained, the establishment they contended against was itself an innovation, and the control was not the true expression of group opinion, but the violation of it. So, while Burke would undertake the work of politics with a " total renunciation of every speculation of [his] own,” and would put his “ foot in the tracks of our forefathers,” where he could “neither wander nor stumble,” the colonists, with Otis, were beginning to see in the inherited laws of nations nothing more than the history of ancient abuses.” While Burke thought that “ intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government ” by prying too closely into its nature, the colonists were becoming ready (again in Otis’s words) " to examine as freely into the origin, spring, and foundation of every power and measure in the commonwealth as into a piece of curious machinery.” This fundamental difference of attitude regarding government and society was too great to be overlooked, and accounts clearly enough for an absence of strong sympathy on the part of the colonists for Burke’s leading ideas, and indeed of any complete comprehension of them.

It would be natural to suppose that when the war of the Revolution was over, the constructive forces once at work in colonial life would resume their activity. The circumstances of the time seemed to call for principles and methods just the opposite to those found necessary in the struggle for independence. During that struggle, the first necessity was to provide for the individual a way of escape from the group ; now the individual must be brought into group relations again, if the American people were to work together as a political society.

At this time there did indeed arise a party that looked first to social order, opposed to a party that looked first to individual liberty ; and in that party of order — the party of Madison and Hamilton — we might naturally expect to find some reflection caught from the great thinker who had expounded so wisely, and so favorably to the cause of the Americans, the fundamental principles of social order. But during the period of the formation and establishment of the federal Constitution there is little trace of the influence of Burke. Turning to The Federalist, that authoritative textbook of constitutional principle, we do, it is true, find some suggestions of Burke’s thought and method. In it the complexity of social workings is recognized ; it is felt that slender results are to be attained by the efforts of human sagacity ; long adjustment of a system of government to its surroundings is regarded as necessary before it can work properly : function in government is more than form, and parchment barriers cannot prevent the encroachment of power; government rests upon opinion, and requires for real stability that veneration which time bestows on everything.

But whatever its authors may have held as personal opinion, the general direction of argumentation taken in The Federalist had to be along quite other lines than those laid down in Burke’s philosophy. In urging the adoption of the Constitution, its advocates could not expect to reach a people in the full tide of individualism, after a successful revolt from the group, by any appeals to a group theory of use and wont ; and besides, by a curious turn of affairs, so far as a doctrine of use and wont could be applied, it would work directly against their purposes.

Our Constitution has been amply shown by numerous modern commentators tobe, in its substance, as much the embodiment of actual experience as is the English Constitution itself. We suffer, indeed, from an embarrassment of riches in sources of practice, American, English, or Dutch, for its various formal provisions. And yet, while the substance and matter of the federal Constitution may be old, there is enough in it that was new in form at the time of its construction to distract attention from more familiar features. For example, popular thought could not take in without difficulty the idea of a political society made up of States that were independent, and at the same time under central control; nor could it understand a central control except under the old form of king and standing army. Furthermore, the circumstances attending the forming and adoption of the Constitution were such as to make it appear a new construction. The meeting of a body of men representing a nation, with the deliberate intention of framing a fundamental law covering the entire field of government, was a new event in political experience. Although much might be said in the convention about English practice and the English Constitution, the fact of choice, of freedom to adopt or reject, made even the following of custom in some sort an act of voluntary creation. This aspect of the convention’s work, at any rate, was the aspect that impressed the imagination of the time most forcibly, and has continued to impress the imagination of succeeding generations until within very recent years.

To this apparently new device of individual creation were opposed those natural groups which had been slowly forming out of the artificial groups of early colonial society, through a hundred years, more or less, of settlement, — the different States of the new union. They exhibited the true characteristics of natural groups : peculiar local traits, particular local customs, differing local institutions, and a general sympathy for all that was within the group, together with a general indifference or hostility to all that was without it. The framers of the Constitution, in trying to establish a uniform and stable system of government, found themselves obliged to get behind the collective personality of these groups to the group members as separate and independent individuals. " The great and radical vice in the construction of the existing confederation,” says Hamilton in The Federalist, “ is in the principle of legislation for states or governments in their corporate or collective capacities, and as contradistinguished from the individuals of which they consist.” Luther Martin, of the other party, complained bitterly that such disregard was paid in the Constitutional Convention to the claims of state groups : " We had not been sent to form a government over the inhabitants of America considered as individuals, . . . but in our proceedings we adopted principles which would be right and proper only on the supposition that there were no state governments at all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive continent were in their individual capacity, without government, and in a state of nature.” The advocates of the Constitution, then, were obliged to meet the charge of violation of use and wont, — that “ innovation” which Burke saw as the great vice of political action, — and they accepted the issue fairly and squarely on that ground. Madison asks in The Federalist: “ Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience ? . . . Happily for America, happily, we trust, for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolutionwhich has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.”

During all this time Burke himself was becoming more and more openly and definitely a supporter of tradition and the group. While we were making and establishing our Constitution, he was becoming, by preoccupation with questions of English local policy, less conspicuous as a friend of American liberty ; and a few years later he was seen occupying a position that apparently indicated him as the enemy of liberty in general. In the overturning in France Burke thought he saw the same spirit of innovation at work that he had deplored in the conduct of the English government in the American matter, and he urged in resistance to it the same considerations of use and wont, of long - continued custom, that he had urged on the former occasion ; but the application of his doctrine made his course appear diametrically opposite in the two cases. What the unreflective mind saw in both instances was a people trying to win freedom, with Burke as their advocate in the one case, against them in the other. As a political philosopher, above and beyond the party politician and brilliant orator, Burke first came into prominence by means of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was widely and eagerly read from the time of its publication. This work stamped him in popular thought as the stanch upholder of royalty, of aristocracy, and of governmental control, — a position that could hardly commend him in a country that had just shaken off royalty, and that had scarcely founded a government. There was besides, in America, a natural feeling of sympathy for a country trying to work out its destiny on principles ostensibly the same as those adopted in American practice. Jefferson expresses the feeling of the “French party" in his disdainful comment on the picture of royalty “gaudily painted in the rhapsodies of the Rhetor Burke, with some smartness of fancy, but no sound sense.” Even the " English party " could not regard with open approval a defense of institutions that they themselves honestly felt were superseded and antiquated, while at the same time they had to suffer every day the imputation of trying to restore them.

The development of the individual, the trust in his powers, the belief in his capabilities, continued unchecked through the early years of our country’s existence as a separate political society. Just as the last portion of land taken into cultivation fixes the rate of rent for all other land in use, so the ever advancing frontier fixed a general type of temper, character, and manner for the whole people. When the intricate network of social relation and institution that each individual has to fit himself to, in an old and compact society, began to form in the longer - settled communities, the young and enterprising, who felt themselves hampered by these growing restrictions, found an ample outlet for their energies in the boundless opportunities and wide spaces of the West. It is not possible to regard very seriously limitations from which escape is so easy ; and so the freedom of the West was an ever present influence in thought, even where conditions were arising to prevent complete individual liberty in practice. The method of the pioneer—the self-reliant, resourceful man who can at call turn his hand to anything — was the method of the whole country, not only because a constant process of new settlement demanded the continued use of that method somewhere, but because it had been handed down by tradition from the days when the frontier was the Atlantic seaboard, as the way in which we were at one time accustomed to conduct our affairs everywhere. There was little or no respect for the expert in any line ; a certain native shrewdness, unaided by special training, long practice, or social support, was thought to be the entire outfit needed by the free-born American to accomplish anything. To outsiders, too, the typical " American ” was the frontiersman, because he was the superlative degree of American tendencies, and because he afforded the most complete contrast to the European type of character, — and contrast always attracts ; so this figure, reflected back through the opinions of others, was fixed even more firmly in the self-consciousness of the American as his own true image.

This individualism of a society dominated by the frontier ideal flourished, until in the war of secession it attained its culminating moment. The abstract theory avowedly held by a whole people, that all men are equal, and, by virtue of bare humanity, endowed with certain natural rights to certain desirabilities of existence, had not been completely carried out in practice, whatever legal casuists might say to the contrary, while human slavery existed as a social institution. Although it is true that political and economic causes deeper than any abstract doctrine of “rights” had their powerful effect in bringing on the civil war, it is no less true that one of its causes was the constant discussion of rights and the constant appeal to ostensibly accepted principles, and that one of its great results was a more complete realization of those principles in the freeing of the slaves. Another victory, too, for individualism was won by the war. The natural groups represented in the States, each with its own distinct social personality, —the same natural groups that had resisted the adoption of a Constitution which threatened to dissolve them into their individual elements, — were, in the civil war, again arrayed against a power that menaced group customs and habits. The result of that war was still further to reduce the power of those groups, to violate local custom and local feeling, and to establish a more general relation of individuals with individuals, regardless of state lines and of state authority.

At this very moment of individualistic triumph, however, group influence began to assert itself again, and with ever increasing power. In the South, the ruin of the war was aggravated by the presence of a population recently freed from a position of legal dependence, but as yet unfitted for a position of economic and social independence. It had to be admitted by the warmest lovers of liberty that even for the enfranchised class itself freedom from outer control was not the unmixed blessing it had been supposed to be ; and so the abstract theory of moral or natural right got a blow. The beautifully balanced Constitution we took such pride in had been juggled with by advocates and opponents of slavery, by Whigs and Democrats, until we came to think that even the letter of a law might not be a certain safeguard ; and so an abstract theory of legality was weakened. Large numbers of foreigners were already coming among us, and inequalities of intelligence, varieties of social condition and local characteristic, were made so prominent that it was increasingly difficult to think of men as “ man,” but we were obliged to regard them as particular kinds of men living in particular ways. Pressure of a population growing rapidly by immigration and by natural growth brought a greater degree of social control, — men cannot act with perfect freedom when they are closely elbowing one another ; and from this growing social control escape was less and less easy to a frontier that was offering ever narrowing possibilities. Pressure of population brought the large industry, which requires a wide and stable market for its product ; and the large industry brought a still further expansion of social control. The large industry makes men unequal and dependent, by fitting them into a great system of unlike and interlocking parts. They can no longer stand in the individual singleness of the frontiersman, but are united in mutual subordination in a group.

Since the war American society has been arranging itself more and more group-wise ; and, in consequence, American thought is becoming more conscious of an inadequacy in the individualistic theories of society that flourished so naturally and so vigorously in an individualistic stage of social life.

About the time that individualism in this country was at its highest point, there emerged into notice, on the other side of the water, a philosophy of the group which had been long prepared for in various movements of thought, and which was soon to be the dominant intellectual influence of the time. That philosophy, eagerly taken up in this country, was the general doctrine of evolution. According to older theories of the universe, each thing worked out its own unimpeded course as a result of qualities inherent from the beginning, which made up its " nature,” —a nature completely expressible in the logical definition of the thing. The evolution philosophy represents things in systems of interaction, as a result of which characters are developed and qualities acquired; and “nature” is not an abstract conception, but a concrete process. The elements in this process are indefinitely numerous ; their reactions are perplexingly intricate. The result of group action in the process of evolution is unlikeness ; it is not conceivable that all particles in a system can be acted upon in the same way at the same time, and the result of unlike action is unlike quality, which in its turn becomes the ground for a further differentiation of elements. This theory makes the group the controlling force, the individual the result, — and a result varying in character as the conditions of group action vary.

The application of this general idea to political theory is obvious, and has been widely made. We are now beginning to regard human society as the resuit of numberless actions and reactions of elements, not always perceptible in all the detail of their working, but obeying fixed and constant laws. We are beginning to recognize as a normal and necessary process the control exerted by a social group over its parts, its action in assigning each to an appropriate place and function, and its influence in establishing in them appropriately varying characters. We are learning that reason, logic, and abstract truth are not the only elements to be considered in the political process, but that the social emotions, instincts, feelings, and impulses caused by a long course of group actions and reactions, differing in their character with the peculiar circumstances and conditions of each social group, are just as important, if not more so.

With a growing prominence of the group as an actual concrete fact in our country, and with the growing prevalence of the group doctrine of evolution as a theory, it seems as if the time were now ripe for the great political philosopher of the group, so long neglected, to take his rightful place among us as a source of theory and a guide to practice. The doctrine of natural selection, the corner-stone of the evolution philosophy, has two aspects, or two stages of logical development, — the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. For the former partial principle, Darwin himself, the teacher of natural selection to our generation, acknowledges his debt to Malthus. But almost a century before Darwin, and a half-century before Malthus, a distinct exposition of the latter principle was made. Burke’s entire political philosophy, from beginning to end, is a copious, powerful, and infinitely varied treatment of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. This is the fundamental principle of his conservatism, — the conservatism that he taught during the American war as well as at the time of the French Revolution, that he followed in the matter of economical reform as well as in the matter of parliamentary representation. It is hard to catch any set formulation of this principle in Burke’s utterances, by reason of a peculiarity that is itself the best expression of a principle, — a dislike for stating principle except in its concrete application. But we may come pretty near to such a formulation in this description of the British Constitution : “ And this is a choice not of one day or of one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice ; it is a deliberate election of ages and of generations ; it is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice ; it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time. It is a vestment which accommodates itself to the body. Nor is prescription of government formed upon blind, unmeaning prejudices ; for man is a most unwise and a most wise being. The individual is foolish. The multitude for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation ; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.”

On nearly every page of Burke’s work is to be found some touch of detail, some contributory figure to fill up and adorn this outline. His insistence upon the necessity of dealing with men according to their special tempers and characters is an insistence upon the great principle of adaptation, so important in the evolutionary doctrine ; his constant reminder that temper and character differ in different groups of men is a reminder of the varying influences at work in the adaptive process. His appeal to the feelings and even the prejudices of men, as a surer guide and stronger force than reasoned calculation, is an appeal to a wisdom gathered and proved in long experience, until, through habit, the conscious process of thought has been consolidated into the unconscious process of instinct. For Burke, as for the modern evolutionist, “ survival ” is group survival. The end of the process of selection in the physical organism is the preservation or destruction of the whole group of related traits and characters, forces and elements, that we know as the living creature. With Burke, the survival of the social whole, not of any one element in it, nor of all its elements taken out of relation to it, was the great end to be sought in the social process. This was, in practical affairs, the final ground of reform or of conservatism, of action or of refusal to act. The urgent “necessity" that Burke allows as a valid plea for the breaking of all bonds of legal and political institution is the necessity for social continuance ; the menacing danger against which all barriers of law and order, of instinct, reason, and feeling, must be set up, is the danger of social, not individual dissolution. In short, Burke is found possessed in a remarkable degree of the fundamental conceptions of organic life long before any general recognition of them. He approaches his object of study— the social group — in the very spirit of the biological student yet to come, looking at it with a fine instinct for the flowing,merging, and blending of subtle elements that make up the life-process ; feeling in it, as it were with sensitive finger-tips, the warmth and pulsation, the inexpressibly delicate and irregular ramification of fibre and interlacement of tissue, of the living thing.

Steeped as we are to-day in evolutionary conceptions, Burke’s thought speaks to us in the language we understand best; it speaks besides with a power that makes it more than a simple parallel to already existing influences. Modern evolutionary philosophy has produced no master of political science worthy to be compared for a moment to Burke, in depth of thought, wealth of observation, experience, and research ; and above all, in that primal energy of mind which, baffling all explanation or formulation, in its mighty outflow bears along with it the minds and feelings of men in enforced but willing subdual.

Although Burke has much to tell us of bygone political complications that have little or no living interest for us, he has also much to tell us that we may put to immediate practical use. He can help us particularly in our endeavor to deal with the problems presented as a result of the growing power of the social group, by showing us the true nature of social groups and their normal laws of action. We may thank him for offering in these laws and principles a test by which we may see that the socialism we are half tempted into, in our feeling that the individualism of an earlier day is outworn, is in reality no group theory at all, but simply another individualism in disguise. The schemes for group action, laboriously contrived by the social theorist and enforced by the legislator to serve the interests of the social whole, are, Burke shows us, but clumsy hindrances to true group action, to the fine and delicate processes of social adjustment that go on by means of the spontaneous growths and natural intertwinings of all the interests, feelings, sentiments, habits, and necessities of men, — a whole too complex ever to be seen by one man in all its parts, much less to be controlled and adjusted by one man’s calculation and forethought. The same objection applies to that form of socialism known as regulation of trade. Here Burke may give us direct assistance, because he dealt with that special problem in his own practical political work. In the heyday of the mercantile system, before Adam Smith had spoken, Burke was a free-trader, in complete consistency with his own theory of the group. It is just because the group as a whole is so sure to work out its own processes, because the wants and desires of men will arrange themselves so inevitably in an industrial system of mutual demand and supply, that we need not form any artificial plan for their guidance. Indeed, if we do adopt such a plan, we shall lose the very good we are aiming at. Under the influence of Burke’s teaching, we shall not so much fear the natural and unimpeded development of an industrial system, the growing complexity of which has caused a certain alarm, as we shall fear to meddle with it on every occasion by an ignorant tinkering that will invariably do real and serious harm, even when it brings a little apparent good.

Much difficulty is felt, in our political system, because of a lack of organization along the lines of natural groups united by common character, common interests, and common sympathies. Recent political studies have pointed out the opportunities for political corruption, or, to say the least, for political ineffectiveness, offered in the attempt to work as a political whole an artificial group that embraces inharmonious natural groups, or cuts groups away from their natural alliances. One such instance may be a large and compact city group, of distinct type and character, united artificially with a large and scattered country group, of opposed type and character ; another may be an upland, infertile district, with certain needs and supporting certain industries, united with a lowland, alluvial district, of quite other needs and supporting quite other industries. From Burke we may learn the advantages of leaving natural groups as far as possible to work out their own problems within their own limits.

Most healthful for us would be that respect for the expert that Burke teaches not only in his theory, but by his practice. All his attempts to deal with the work of government were preceded by long and careful study of each matter he took up, even to the point of exhaustion. The time-honored American theory that any man can take up any task, with any or no degree of preparation, is showing itself more and more inadequate in a more and more complicated state of society and government. The parliamentary system under which our political affairs are managed was the development, not of democracy, but of that eighteenth-century English oligarchy in which Burke saw — with too glowing idealization, perhaps— the type of a true aristocracy. Is it not possible that the faults and failures we find occasion to deplore every day in the working of that system with us are to be provided for, its dangers and perils met, only by recourse to the principle on which it was originally based, the principle taught by Burke, that leadership by right belongs only to those of sufficient ability and training to deal skillfully with complicated affairs, and with sufficient sense of responsibility to the community to use their skill for the common good ? It is, in fact, one of the most necessary lessons we have to learn, that the welfare of the state and the successful conduct of affairs depend upon personal integrity and ability, under the guidance of which any form of government will work, and without which no form of government can work.

After all, the best good we may get from Burke is contact with his lofty spirit. The bare and naked truths of philosophical doctrine he clothes in the gleaming garments of the imagination, and sets walking before us in all the glow and flush of life,—radiant forms that capture our dearest affections and claim our deepest devotion. The state, for Burke, is not a certain tract of bare ground from which to wrest the material supplies of physical existence ; it is figured under “ the image of a relation in blood,” constraining love, reverence, and duty. It is not for bare life alone, hut for the best life ; it is “a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection : ” it comprehends “ all the charities of all.”

This generous ardor is contagious. Civic enthusiasm, slightly out of fashion with us for some time, is coming in again, though largely under the form of bellicose ebullitions of temper against foreign nations. But the civic enthusiasm that Burke inspires is for right living at home, just dealing in internal as well as external concerns, and regard for social duties as well as for social rights. To his mind, the due and faithful administration of civil office, the honest and economical disbursement of public money, the painstaking adjustment of borough, township, and city affairs, are as vital to the state, as much matters of interest and concern, as brilliant leadership in the daring raids, the spectacular campaigns, and the noisy victories of party politics or foreign war.

From Burke we may catch not only the spirit of duty, but the spirit of courage and hope. Humanity as he sees it, “ with all its imperfections on its head,”has within it certain strong life-forces, that work often through crooked and dubious ways, but that, if we give our disinterested service to their guidance, will finally bring the race to higher levels. With this fundamental conviction implanted in us, we need not despair of the state : when theories break down, we may simply think that growth is taking a new direction ; when conditions become perplexingly involved, we may trust that after we have reached the limit of our powers of reason and calculation to unravel them they will work out their own best answer ; when forms of government and society seem hopelessly rotten and bad, we may feel that there is always a remedy to be found in the “ plain, good intention,” the good faith and honor, which cannot be entirely absent from a people, and which need only encouragement and a showing of the way to enter helpfully into public affairs.

Kate Holladay Claghorn.