overthrow of the British constitution.  Its implication was that every institution not of immediate popular origin should be destroyed.  To secure their ends, he thought, the radicals were compelled to preach the injustice of those institutions and thus to injure that affection for government upon which peace and security depend.  Here was an effort to bring all institutions to the test of logic which he thought highly dangerous.  “No rational man ever did govern himself,” he said, “by abstractions and universals.”  The question for him was not the abstract rightness of the system upon some set of a priori principles but whether, on the whole, that system worked for the happiness of the community.  He did not doubt that it did; and to overthrow a structure so nobly tested by the pressure of events in favor of some theories outside historic experience seemed to him ruinous to society.  Government, for him, was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the existing system.  Principles were thus unimportant compared to the problem of their application.  “The major,” he said of all political premises, “makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of circumstances.”

To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription.  The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril.  “Prescription,” he said in 1782, “is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to government.”  Because he saw the State organically he was impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual’s thought.  It is built upon the wisdom of the past for “the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.”  And since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things.  They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience.  So the prescriptive title becomes “not the creature, but the master, of positive law ... the soundest, the most general and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or public jurisprudence.”  It is by prescription that he defends the existence of Catholicism in Ireland not less than the supposed deformities of the British Constitution.  So, too, his main attack on atheism is its implication that “everything is to be discussed.”  He does not say that all which is has rightness in it; but at least he urges that to doubt it is to doubt the construction of a past experience which built according to the general need.  Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong.  Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good.  “Truth,” he said, “may be far better ... but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues.”