Harold J. Laski

The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril.

Nor does he doubt the chance that what he urges may be wrong.

Rather does he insist that at least it gives us security, for him the highest good.

His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision.

He saw the value of the party-system, and he admitted the necessity of some degree of popular representation.

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.

There was no reason even for agreement, so long as each party was guided by an honorable sense of the public good.

The argument, at bottom, is common to all thinkers over-impressed by the sanctity of past experience.

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…

The experience of the past rather than the desires of the present is thus the true guide to our policy.

The doctrine of progress found an eloquent defender in that last and noblest utterance of Condorcet which is still perhaps its most perfect justification.

Justice was asserted to be the centre of social right; and it was defined as the overthrow of those prescriptive privileges which Burke regarded as the protective armour of the body politic.

In a moment of time, the England which had been the example to Europe of ordered popular liberty became, for these enthusiasts, only less barbaric than the despotic princes of the continent.

If legitimate government is based upon the consent of its subjects, may they withdraw their consent?

The contract of obedience must be free or else, as Hooker had previously insisted, it is not a contract.

Yet Locke urged that the primitive members of a State are bound to its perpetuation simply because unless the majority had power to enforce obedience government, in any satisfactory sense, would be impossible.

They are born subjects of no government or country; and their consent to its laws must either be derived from express acknowledgment, or by the tacit implication of the fact that the protection of the State has been accepted.

But no one is bound until he has shown by the rule of his mature conduct that he considers himself a common subject with his fellows.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.