Yet beyond these measures Burke could never be persuaded to go.  He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible.  He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature.  He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions.  “Government and legislation,” he said, “are matters of reason and of judgment”; and once the private member had honorably arrived at a decision which he thought was for the interest of the whole community, his duty was done.  All this, in itself, is unexceptionable; and it shows Burke’s admirable grasp of the practical application of attractive theories to the event.  But it is to be read in conjunction with a general hostility to basic constitutional change which is more dubious.  He had no sympathy with the Radicals.  “The bane of the Whigs,” he said, “has been the admission among them of the corps of schemers ... who do us infinite mischief by persuading many sober and well-meaning people that we have designs inconsistent with the Constitution left us by our forefathers.”  “If the nation at large,” he wrote in another letter, “has disposition enough to oppose all bad principles and all bad men, its form of government is, in my opinion, fully sufficient for it; but if the general disposition be against a virtuous and manly line of public conduct, there is no form into which it can be thrown that will improve its nature or add to its energy”; and in the same letter he foreshadows a possible retirement from the House of Commons as a protest against the growth of radical opinion in his party.  He resisted every effort to reduce the suffrage qualification.  He had no sympathy with the effort either to add to the county representation or to abolish the rotten boroughs.  The framework of the parliamentary system seemed to him excellent.  He deplored all criticism of Parliament, and even the discussion of its essentials.  “Our representation,” he said, “is as nearly perfect as the necessary imperfections of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer it to be.”  It was in the same temper that he resisted all effort at the political relief of the Protestant dissenters.  “The machine itself,” he had said, “is well enough to answer any good purpose, provided the materials were sound”; and he never moved from that opinion.

Burke’s attitude was obsolete even while he wrote; yet the suggestiveness of his very errors makes examination of their ground important.  Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name of expediency.  His opponents argued that, since men are by nature equal, it must follow that they have an equal right to self-government.  To Burke, the admission of this principle would have meant the