STEPHEN MILLER
571
the Revolution was a vast conspiracy of
philosophes,
freemasons, infidels,
and Jews. However, Burke's role in the development of ultraconservative
thought should not be exaggerated, for there are only a handful of nega–
tive references to Jews in his writings.
Despite such lapses into reactionary rhetoric, Burke should mainly be
regarded as a progressive conservative-as someone who thought prescrip–
tion and prejudice were generally positive forces that made for a stable
society in which reform could take place. The road from Burke leads not
to nineteenth-century ultraconservative thought but to the progressive
conservatism of Alexis de Tocqueville. Burke would have agreed with
Tocqueville's remark that "I have never been more convinced than I am
today that only liberty...and religion, through a combined effort, are capa–
ble of raising men out of the mire in which democratic equality naturally
plunges them as soon as one of these two supports is lacking."
Though Burke eloquently defended the English establishment, he
knew he was an outsider who would always be regarded by some members
of the Establishment as an Irish adventurer. In the 1790s, he deeply resent–
ed the members of his party who impugned his motives for attacking the
French Revolution. In 1795, when the Duke of Bedford-a close sup–
porter of Fox-attacked him for accepting a pension from the Pitt
government, Burke exploded in
A Letter to a Noble Lord
(1795), which is a
scathing attack on the Duke and a defense of his own political career.
Burke says that he earned his political success; it was not something he
acquired by virtue of his birth: "I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swad–
dled, and rocked, and dandled into a Legislator. . . .At every step of my
progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every
turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to
prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my Country, by a
proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole sys–
tem of its interests both abroad and at home." Throughout his long career
in English politics, it must have rankled Burke that he often was obliged
to show his passport.
