This hatred of abstraction is, of course, the basis of his earliest publication; but it remained with him to the end.  He would not discuss America in terms of right.  “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions,” he said in the Speech on American Taxation, “I hate the very sound of them.”  “One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state,” he wrote in the Reflections, “is the propensity of the people to resort to theories.”  “It is always to be lamented,” he said in a Speech on the Duration of Parliament, “when men are driven to search into the foundations of the commonwealth.”  The theory of a social contract he declared “at best a confusion of judicial with civil principles,” and he found no sense in the doctrine of popular sovereignty.  “The lines of morality,” he said in the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), “are not like ideal lines of mathematics.  They are broad and deep as well as long.  They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications.  These exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic but by the rules of prudence.  Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.”  Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion.  “This,” he said, “is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of men—­does it suit his nature in general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?”

Of the truth of this general attitude it is difficult to make denial.  But when Burke came to apply it to the British Constitution the “rules of prudence” he was willing to admit are narrow enough to cause surprised enquiry.  He did not doubt that the true end of a legislature was “to give a direction, a form, a technical dress ... to the general sense of the community”; he admitted that popular revolt is so much the outcome of suffering that in any dispute between government and people, the presumption is at least equal in the latter’s favor.  He urged the acceptance of Grenville’s bill for improving the method of decision upon disputed elections.  He made a magnificent defence of the popular cause in the Middlesex election.  He was in favor of the publication of parliamentary debates and of the voting lists in divisions.  He supported almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral support.  His Speech on Economical Reform (1780) was the prelude to a nobly-planned and successful attack upon the waste of the Civil list.