Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely unanswerable.  The things that men desire correspond, in some rough fashion, to the things they need.  Natural rights are nothing more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests.  Upon the narrow basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them.  History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of its achievement.  But upon the value of certain things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder.  Nor is there any difference between the classes of men in this regard.  Forms, indeed, will vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries of science.  Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a static world.  But that does not mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience.  They come, of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power.  Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength.  Yet it is difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they are the worse from the source whence they derive.  Rather do they point to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience.  The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.

That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its cause seems rooted in Burke’s metaphysic outlook.  He was profoundly religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God.  It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God.  “Having disposed,” he wrote, “and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us.”  The State, in fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must accept as of the will of God.  We are to do our duty in our allotted station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward.  What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent rightness of the existing order.  Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude.  Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his antagonism to the French Revolution.  What there was most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did