CHAPTER III

6 PRUDENCE

ONE of the most interesting points about a man of affairs is the way in which he approaches and solves his practical problems. Is it by the reasoning that links together means and ends; or is it by the swift intuitive decision that seems to reason not at all; or is it, in whole or in part, by appeal to authority, be it the authority of traditions or persons or institutions; or is it rather by some combination of all three methods?

Now this is a matter on which Burke is explicit. He has left us in no possible uncertainty as to what he deems the paramount virtue of the man of affairs. Prudence,' he declares, 'is not only they first in rank of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.'1 This being so, the question that emerges is obvious: What is this 'prudence' that is thus so unhesitatingly promoted to the primacy?

Clearly, to begin with, it is to be sharply distinguished from the characteristic virtue of the theorist. The theorist thinks first and last of truth and 1 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.

error the man of affairs is concerned with good and evil. The theorist has but one thing before him at a time; his problem is simplified by the familiar, necessary artifice of abstraction, more or less rigorously applied: the statesman is confronted by all the baffling complexity of concrete situations in which considerations of good and evil, advantage and disadvantage, meet and cross and intermingle in ever varying proportions and combinations. Unlike the abstract thinker, he must see, or try to see, everything and neglect nothing. Hence the peculiar, and sometimes crushing, difficulty of the statesman's task. Moving, as he must, in the troubled, perplexing, and shifting medium of concrete circumstances, and thrust on by the imperious urgency of crises that brook no delay, he cannot indulge in that suspense of judgment, which is one of the virtues of the theorist, nor pause to work out his problems theoretically. Time forbids it. Nor can he have recourse to thinkers or theorists who will solve his problems for him. Easy and light would be the burden of the statesman if, in the urgent hour of his perplexity, he could turn to some political adviser, some casuist in politics, to find his problems theoretically anticipated, and their solutions already made. But no such thing is possible. The nature of political fact precludes it. In the complex interaction of human wills and social forces and endlessly varying circumstances, the

problems, if they be serious, are such as no theoretical acuteness can have foreseen, and no theoretical foresight solved by anticipation. And just for that reason there is no course open to the man of affairs but to take upon his own shoulders the burden of facing his problems for himself, and solving them to the best of his ability by his own 'prudence.' For if the tangled knots of politics are to be dealt with, it will not be by the philosopher who unravels them at his leisure sooner or later, and often enough sooner rather than later, they must be cut by the statesman who is fortunate enough to possess the practical wisdom, the 'prudence,' to grasp and weigh the circumstances of the situation, and the nerve to decide what the day or the hour or the moment requires to be done. Small wonder therefore if Burke sets such store on prudence' as to dignify it as the mother of all the virtues. For his glorification of prudence, like Aristotle's laudation of opóvnois,1 is but the inevitable complement of that doctrine of circumstances' which, as we have already seen,2 led him roundly to declare that no lines could be theoretically laid down for civil and political wisdom.3

And yet it must not be supposed that, because 'prudence' does not come to its decisions by theory, 1 Ethics, Bk. VI.

2 P. 7.

3 For Burke's contrast between the theorist and the statesman, see Speech, May 11, 1792, and Speech for Shortening the Duration of Parliaments (date doubtful).

it is therefore purely intuitive. For however sharp the contrast between the statesman and the theorist or 'professor,' as Burke sometimes calls him, it does not imply that 'prudence can dispense with principles and the application of principles to facts. And it is of especial importance to take note of this, not only because the practical man (as he calls himself) is notoriously apt, in contempt for theory, to pin his faith to instinctive common sense, but because Burke himself has, often enough, been taxed with substituting prejudice for judgment and drawing his inferences with his passions rather than his understanding. Nothing could be further from the mark. For the 'prudence' of Burke's panegyric is neither a sense nor an instinct. It is apt to be mistaken for such because its decisions are often so swift as to seem intuitive. But as Burke himself remarks, in speaking of judgments of taste,1 this celerity of its operation is no proof that it needs a distinct faculty to account for it. For whatever intuitive element it may, and indeed must, include, seeing that no man can in matters of detail go on deliberating for ever, and however passions and even prejudices may colour its valuations, it is fundamentally a virtue of the reason. He has himself said so. I have ever abhorred,' so runs a declaration of his later years, since the first

1 Introduction to Inquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

dawn of my understanding to this its obscure twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, inclination, and will in the affairs of government, where only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate.'1

Not that it is difficult to find passages which, on a superficial perusal, might seem to have a very different ring. One occurs in the Speech on American Taxation': 'If you apprehend that on a concession you shall be pushed by metaphysical process to the extreme lines, and argued out of your whole authority, my advice is this: when you have recovered your old, your strong, your tenable position, then face about-stop short-do nothing more-reason not at all-oppose the ancient policy and practice of the empire, as a rampart against the speculations of innovators on both sides of the question; and you will stand on great, manly, and sure ground.' The words are strong, but it would be a serious mistake to take them as if meant to carry a depreciation of the reason declared to be sovereign and paramount. They are levelled only against that bastard reason which all his life he detested-the reason of the oneideaed fanatic of the hocus-pocus of abstraction,' who, having seized an abstract principle, insists upon pushing it to the extreme of logical illation, in all the nakedness of metaphysical abstraction,' and in defiance of the inevitable friction of concrete

1 Letter to a Noble Lord.