Two

not fallen victim to the artificialities, vices, and 'chains of advanced civilisation, had no charms, at all for Burke. One of his earliest literary adventures, The Vindication of Natural Society, was an elaborate satire designed to unmask its hollowness by a reductio ad absurdum. The picture repelled him. He regarded it as a proof that its admirers were lacking in the barest rudiments of political knowledge and wisdom. 'When I hear of simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty.'1 pregnant aphorisms justify this condemnation. The one is that 'art is man's nature,' 2 the other that nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms. The Apollo of Belvedere is as much in nature as any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers.' 3 For it is only necessary to piece these together to develop the conclusion that we shall never understand what the 'discipline of nature can achieve till we turn away from the savage and incoherent' life of primitive man to the complex, richly differentiated, and highly organised structure of a civilised society. To Burke the belauded state of nature of the Rousseauites is little, if at all, better than the 'city of pigs' satirised by 1 Reflections. • Appeal.

3 Regicide Peace, Letter III.

Plato in his Republic, or than the 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' life of pre-social man as delineated in the trenchant pages of Hobbes. His conception of 'nature' and the 'natural' is in its essence Greek to the core. It is the Aristotelian conception of the organised 'natural' municipal State read into the life of the modern nation.

Nor can it be doubted that the truth here rests with Aristotle and Burke. It has become a commonplace of evolution that, the more fully evolved societies become, they are, by the very laws of social growth, immeasurably more richly integrated than the more primitive forms which have sometimes carried captive the imagination of apostles of the simple life. And though there is nothing in this, as many an ugly social fact too clearly shows, to prevent the growth of societies, like other forms of growth, from running to rankness and disease, so that luxurious, corrupt, distempered, ill-conducted States need the remorseless knife of revolutionary surgery; yet the laws of social development are not thereby abrogated. For even when revolution, though it were ten times repeated, has done its drastic work, the result is never a permanently simplified society. On the contrary, the irrepressible vitality of the social system, purified as by fire, reasserts itself, and the State finds itself once more advancing in the path of growth which leads from the simple to the complex, from loose aggregation to

intimate integration of parts and members, and which stretches onwards along that line of advance whereby the unity of a people is intensified by the illimitable triumphs of organised specialisation in its myriad forms. To try to reverse this process, to re-trace this path—what is this but to fly in the face of all that the history of institutions has to tell us of the growth of States? Grant that there is a place for simplification. Grant that there is a time for reform. The man is not to be envied who cannot, with Bentham, execrate the complication, confusion, and unintelligibility of bad laws; or who cannot with Paine anathematise the barriers between man and man and the wilderness of turnpike gates which have been set up between man and his Maker' by bad governments; or who cannot with Wordsworth lament the materialism and artificiality which choke the truer life. Yet neither is it to be supposed that these moods and movements are endings. They are really new beginnings. So far from being the journey's end, they are but places of regeneration where the spirit of man renews its powers for fresh effort in its endless forward march. Never can they bring those who face the facts of history to wish seriously to set themselves to fight against the very laws of life. As well rock the grown man in the cradle of the infant,' as Burke has it. In a word, they cannot justify rebellion against the discipline of nature.'

This leads to a further point. For it must be already evident that Burke's conception of a people as under the discipline of nature' involves a complete divergence from that identification of a people with the aggregate of its units, or a 'greatest number' of them, which, in the generation that followed, was the distinctive mark of Bentham and the Benthamites. In the light of Burke's teaching all such arithmetical categories are seen in a moment to be thin and inadequate to the facts. A mere mass of men, still less a mere majority of a mass of men, is not a people. 'It is said that 24,000,000 ought to prevail over 200,000. True, if the constitution of a kingdom is a problem of arithmetic.' So Burke wrote,1 when denying the claims of a majority by count of heads to work its will in politics; and the words are but one of many illustrations of his decisive rejection of mathematical categories as inadequate to social fact. For on his view, as must now be evident, a people cannot be said to exist at all, save when the mere multitude or mass of men has been organised by the discipline of nature in the long course of actual historical evolution. Apart from this, a people dissolves into an incoherent, disbanded mob which is the sheer negation of a civil society; for, as it seems to be the law of life that the social organism, like other organisms, advances towards organisation; and as it is through organisation that 1 Reflections.

it. gets its work done, it cannot divest itself of this its character as a developed society, without thereby ceasing to be a people in the true sense of the word. The happiness of the whole, in other words, can never be the happiness of a people or nation or civil society or commonwealth (call it by what name we will) unless it be, as it was to Burke, as to Plato, the happiness of an organic whole.

For Burke, as must now be evident, had firmly grasped our latter-day conception of society. The eighteenth century had called society a contract; the nineteenth has rebaptized it as an organism. And there can be no doubt which of these categories Burke prefers. Not that he refuses to call society a contract. He often does. For, as already said, he is far from having divested himself of the terminology of his age. But, even in the passages in which he does this, two points emerge quite clearly. The one is that he is little, if at all, interested in the student's question, whether society had its actual historical origin in a contract. The contractual theory becomes interesting to him, as a practical thinker, only when and because it was made the ground of the claim that the members of an exist ing State, and even a majority of their number, by the exercise of that free individual choice which the notion of a contract suggests, could overturn the existing constitution and set up a new one in its place-a claim which he always withstood to the