The levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.
Burke uses a structural metaphor to explain how attempts at social leveling disrupt the natural order of society.
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More from Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?
But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution.
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
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