VARIETY
THE DEGRADATION OF
-ARISTOCRATIC DOGMA
The historian Denis Brogan re–
cently referred to this interesting
contemporary anachronism:
a
group of careless and emphatic
young men who think that "Burke
neat is a useful beverage for
American daily refreshment." Our
New Conservatives are the healers
who prescribe the potion. But few
people know just what Burke stood
for. Since he hated abstractions,
it may be of some interest to con–
struct a hypothetical party plat–
form for the New Conservatives,
based on the concrete elements of
Edmund Burke's social and poli–
tical program.
Burke's
Reflections on the
French Revolution
became the
Bible of the post-1815 Continental
and clerical reaction. Today his
admirers find it and his other
post-1789 works their main source
of inspiration. Published in 1790,
the
Reflections
were an immediate
success. The author was at once
estranged from his party and from
his old political friends. Tories
who had opposed him all of his
life rallied to him, taking up, it
has been said, "the finest weapon
that had ever been put into the
hands of a party of reaction and
privilege."
Burke reprobated no form of
government "merely on abstract
principles," but believed that cer–
tain conditions were necessary for
any stable system. In 1790 he
wrote that France seemed to have
strayed "from the high road of
nature," because "the property of
France does not govern it." One
might rather have said that the
Revolution took place because
property had not governed France.
The Revolution, as Burke well
knew, saw the overturning of one
kind of property by another.
Landed aristocracy gave way to
industrial feudalism. But when
Burke spoke of property he meant
land. He hated financiers, the ris–
ing capitalist class, the Jews. Land–
ed property, he declared, was the
"firm base of every stable govern–
ment." Posing a practical political
problem, he drew the logical in–
ferences. He concluded that the
very wealthy must be "out of all
proportion, predominate in the
representation."
A man with a thousand acres
should not have ten times the po–
litical voice of a man with a hun–
dred acres, but twenty or thirty
times the authority of his poorer
neighbor. Not because ability and
property went together-the re–
verse was true. Ability, Burke
wrote, "is a vigorous and active
principle, and as property is slug–
gish, inert and timid, it can never
be safe from the invasions of abili–
ty, unless it be, out of all propor–
tion, predominate in the represen-
