outine 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.

Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He
thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his
time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of
ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has
furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or
education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of
government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that
there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that
is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no
State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without
representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of
the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen
are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life
they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the
dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a
part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember
his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and