Harold J. Laski

He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas.

The rest is vanity; the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.

Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed.

What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote.

No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the…

He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon.

Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate.

Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue.

No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of…

Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close.

The rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries.

Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good.

The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the…

These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.

The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression.

He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.

The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook.

He took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents.

Nor did he admit the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men.

No one will object to privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham will…

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…

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.