d. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a
series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a
part of his nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every
man the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated
layers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him;
that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when they
act most mechanically, and by the methods of an unquestioned system;
that although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to endure,
which does not repose in sound reason, yet this naked reason is in
itself a less effective means of influencing action than when it
exists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared association?
Interpreted by a mobile genius, and expanded by a poetic imagination,
all this became the foundation from which the philosophy of Coleridge
started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous essay, Coleridge was the
great apostle of the conservative spirit in England in its best form.

Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the philosophy of
order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have justly asked him
whether, when we thus realise the strong and immovable foundations
which are laid in our character before we are born, there could be any
occasion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which moved
Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment decrees, should
overthrow the venerated sentiments of Europe about justice and about
property? Should he not have known better than most men the force of
the self-protecting elements of society?

This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between the
school of order and the school of progress. It is enough to have
marked Burke's position in one of them. The _Reflections_ places him
among the great Conservatives of history. Perhaps the only Englishman
with whom in this respect he may be compared, is Sir Thomas
More,--that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the sixteenth
century. More abounded in light, in intellectual interests, in
single-minded care for the common weal. He was as anxious as any man
of his time for the improved ordering of the Church, but he could not
endure that reformation should be bought at the price of breaking up
the ancient spiritual unity of Europe. He was willing to slay and be
slain rather than he would tolerate the destruction of the old faith,
or assent to the violence of the new statec