reach of most.  “The characteristic essence of property,” he wrote in the Reflections, “... is to be unequal”; and he thought the perpetuation of that inequality by inheritance “that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself.”  The system was difficult to maintain, and it must be put out of the reach of popular temptation.  “Our constitution,” he said in the Present Discontents, “stands on a nice equipoise, with sharp precipices and deep waters on all sides of it.  In removing it from a dangerous leaning towards one side, there may be a danger towards oversething it on the other.”  In straining, that is to say, after too large a purification, we may end with destruction.  And Burke, of course, was emphatic upon the need that property should be undisturbed.  It was always, he thought, at a great disadvantage in any struggle with ability; and there are many passages in which he urges the consequent special representation which the adequate defence of property requires.

The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience.  Hegel and Savigny in Germany, Taine and Renan in France, Sir Henry Maine and Lecky in England, have all urged what is in effect a similar plea.  We must not break what Bagehot called the cake of custom, for men have been trained to its digestion, and new food breeds trouble.  Laws are the offspring of the original genius of a people, and while we may renovate, we must not unduly reform.  The true idea of national development is always latent in the past experience of the race and it is from that perpetual spring alone that wisdom can be drawn.  We render obedience to what is with effortless unconsciousness; and without this loyalty to inherited institutions the fabric of society would be dissolved.  Civilization, in fact, depends upon the performance of actions defined in preconceived channels; and if we obeyed those novel impulses of right which seem, at times, to contradict our inheritance, we should disturb beyond repair the intricate equilibrium of countless ages.  The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy.  “We ought,” he said in a famous sentence, “to venerate where we are unable presently to comprehend.”

It is easy to see why a mind so attuned recoiled from horror at the French Revolution.  There is something almost sinister in the destiny which confronted Burke with the one great spectacle of the eighteenth century which he was certain not merely to misunderstand but also to hate.  He could not endure the most fragmentary change in tests of religious belief; and the Revolution swept overboard the whole religious edifice.  He would not support the abolition even of the most flagrant abuses in the system of representation; and he was to see in France an overthrow of a monarchy even more august in its prescriptive rights than the English Parliament.  Privileges were scattered