the innumerable men of whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham will one day emerge.  He justifies the privileges of the English Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion.  The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to examine.

That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke’s philosophy, and it deserves more examination than it has received.  In part it is a rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal.  It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the nature of man is not adapted.  Novelty, which is assumed to be the outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which civilization depends.  Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into the untried places to which thought invites us.  Yet the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved inadequate.  If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men.  But we may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive.  No system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general desire.  It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself.  The uncritical routine of which Burke is the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue.  Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy.  Our real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has social value.  We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance.  Not, of course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part of our nervous endowment in any integral sense.  The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.  Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life.  It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.