life. Yet nothing less than this was the creed of Burke, to whose profoundly religious spirit the attempted secularisation of history and politics was nothing less than a conspiracy to denationalise the nation and to dehumanise the race.

CHAPTER IX

GOVERNMENT

FIERCE and inveterate as is Burke's hostility to the revolutionists, there is one cardinal point upon which he and they are at one. Both he and they believe that, behind the struggles and the flux of politics, there is an objective order which (to revert once more to Burke's words) holds all things fast in their place, and that to this objective order men and nations are bound to adapt themselves. 'It is made to us, and we are made to it.'

For the radical thinkers of that day were neither unbelievers nor utilitarians, but dogmatists. They dogmatised the natural rights of man, in which they saw an order of things, not made by man and never to be destroyed by man, to which all politics were bound, sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, to conform. Nor was this faith shaken; it was only put to the proof by the fact that, in all existing states-except the new American republic and the still newer French experiment—these eternal rights were ignored and outraged. So much the worse for existing states. It followed from this that, when these radicals came to theorise on government,

they laid its foundations in the rights of man inalienable, imprescriptible, not to be questioned by the sons of men. This was the one way of political salvation. For whatever government could or could not do, it remained its paramount function to enact and uphold natural rights, with as firm a faith as though they were the ordinances of the Most High, which indeed to many, to Price, for example, or Paine, they were.

From this dogmatism, however, Burke (as must be by this time evident) dissented, and his words are direct and explicit : The foundation of government is there '—he is speaking of the Reflections— ‘laid, not in imaginary rights of men (which at best is a confusion of judicial with civil principles), but in political convenience, and in human nature; either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes. The foundation of government (those who have read that book will recollect) is laid in a provision for our wants, and in a conformity to our duties; it is to purvey for the one; it is to enforce the other.' 1

Nor does the interest of this passage lie only in its refusal to build on the 'imaginary' foundation of natural rights. Obviously, in its appeal to 'political convenience' and 'human nature,' it is well fitted to carry the suggestion that the writer of it

1 Appeal.

K

had repudiated the false foundation of rights only to adopt the foundation of utility. And, in a sense, this is true. We have already seen the stress Burke lays upon the happiness of the whole people as the paramount end of all political endeavour. So much so, that it might easily appear as if, here in his handling of government, he had simply, like any Benthamite, taken his stand on expediency, and, equally like any Benthamite, quite lost sight of what the utilitarians would probably have called the 'transcendental' foundations of his political creed as these stand written in his political religion. This, however, is far from the fact. The foundation of government is not laid in utility. And this will quickly become evident, if we revert to his attitude to the dogmatists of natural rights. For in holding to his political theism, with a faith so passionate that it drove him to urge the persecution of atheists and infidels, he never laid claim to any immediate revelation of the eternal laws of justice and reason at all comparable to that which was so confidently written in the cutand-dried codes of the rights of man. He was more modestly content to interpret the will of God as written in the gradual revelation of his country's history. However firmly he believed in a divinely ordained objective order that holds all things fixed in their place, he never dreamed of dogmatising a priori as to what this objective order is or prescribes.

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The very attempt was hateful in his eyes. He preferred to consult experience as unfolded in that long and gradual process of historical evolution in which, as he believed, the dispositions of a stupendous wisdom were to be discerned. This was for him the one way of sober thought and sound statesmanship. To take the other path, to dogmatise abstract codes of rights as if they were a direct revelation from Heaven, and then to proceed to realise them forthwith as if history and experience had nothing to reveal-this was the way of fanatics.

But if this divides Burke from the revolutionists, it also divides him from the utilitarians. For it has always been what some folk think the strength, and others the weakness, of Benthamism that, repudiating the uncongenial alliance of Paley, it stood for a political philosophy that was unmitigatedly secular. It has ever fought shy (to say the least) of metaphysics. And though in J. S. Mill (who was after all a kind of heretic from its faith) it began to do justice to the past, it was never much concerned to interpret either past, present, or future in the light of a larger and more cosmic philosophy. On the contrary, having discovered what it mistook for bed-rock in its ideal of a Greatest Happiness of a Greatest Number, it was well content to build on that and to sink no deeper shaft. It was reserved for the younger Mill to try to prove-and with