formulae
without reference to their special application, is pure pedantry.
Burke was the last man to lay down any political proposition not
subject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, and
independently of the particular use which was to be made of it.
Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on
any moral or political subject. The lines of morality, again, are
never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad and deep as well as
long, admitting of exceptions, and demanding modifications. "These
exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic,
but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in rank
of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the
regulator, the standard of them all. As no moral questions are
ever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstract
proposition, must be embodied in circumstances; for, since things
are right and wrong, morally speaking, only by their relation and
connection with other things, this very question of what it is
politically right to grant, depends upon its relation to its effects."
"Circumstances," he says, never weary of laying down his great notion
of political method, "give, in reality, to every political principle
its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or
obnoxious to mankind."

This is at once the weapon with which he would have defended his own
consistency, and attacked the absolute proceedings in France. He
changed his front, but he never changed his ground. He was not more
passionate against the proscription in France, than he had been
against the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war. "I
flatter myself," he said in the _Reflections_, "that I love a manly,
moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he had said, "The liberty,
the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order." The court
tried to regulate liberty too severely. It found in him an inflexible
opponent. Demagogues tried to remove the regulations of liberty.
They encountered in him the bitterest and most unceasing of all
remonstrants. The arbitrary majority in the House of Commons forgot
for whose benefit they held power, from whom they derived their
authority, and in what description of government it was that they had
a place. Burke was the most valiant and strenuous champion in the
ranks of the independent