Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that danger.  His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision.  “When the reason of old establishments is gone,” he said in his Speech on Economical Reform, “it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them.”  “A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve,” he wrote in the Reflections on the French Revolution, “taken together would be my standard of a statesman.”  But that “ability to improve” conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold.  “All the reformations we have hitherto made,” he said, “have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity”; and the Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.  Nor is this all.  “If I cannot reform with equity,” said Burke, “I will not reform at all”; and equity seems here to mean a sacrifice of the present and its passionate demands to the selfish errors of past policy.

Burke, indeed, was never a democrat, and that is the real root of his philosophy.  He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation.  But he was entirely satisfied with current Whig principles, could they but be purged of their grosser deformities.  He knew too well how little reason is wont to enter into the formation of political opinion to make the sacrifice of innovation to its power.  He saw so much of virtue in the old order, that he insisted upon the equation of virtue with quintessence.  Men of great property and position using their influence as a public trust, delicate in their sense of honor, and acting only from motives of right—­these seemed to him the men who should with justice exercise political power.  He did not doubt that “there is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom ... wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport to heaven”; but he is careful to dissociate the possibility that they can be found in those who practice the mechanical arts.  He did not mean that his aristocracy should govern without response to popular demand.  He had no objection to criticism, nor to the public exercise of government.  There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good.  This, so he urged, was the system which underlay the temporary evils of the British Constitution.  An aristocracy delegated to do its work by the mass of men was the best form of government his imagination could conceive.  It meant that property must be dominant in the system of government, that, while office should be open to all, it should be out of the