GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

574
POLITICS
counters of political controversy. Burke was concerned to
lay stress upon the importance in a society of tradition.
The origin of society we do not know, for society goes
back to some dim period of the past unrecorded by history;
but, he insisted, wherever there have been men, there
have been societies of men. The character of a society or,
as Burke called it, a natipn, is the result of a large variety
of impalpable factors. "A nation," Burke wrote, "is . . .
an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in
numbers and in space. And this is a choice not of one day,
or one set of people, not a tumultuary and giddy choice;
it is a deliberate election of ages and generations; it is a
constitution made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions,
tempers, dispositions and moral, civil, and social habitudes
of the people which disclose themselves only in a long
space of time. It is a vestinent which accommodates itself
to the body."
A nation, in other words, like a plant or a tree, is an
organic growth. Let any one of the factors that have gone
to its making have been different, and the growth would
itself have been different. And just as a tree cannot be
suddenly or artificially changed without being damaged,
and possibly irretrievably damaged, in the process, so a
nation cannot be changed by "one set of people" acting
in pursuance of "a tumultuary and giddy choice". (Burke,
it is obvious, has in mind the French revolutionaries.)
As with the nation, so with its rulers. Conscious of their
incapacity to manage their own affairs, the people have
from the earliest beginnings of society felt the need of
rulers, and in accordance with a law both natural and
divine, society has thrown up the rulers that the people
need. Thenceforward the authority of rulers has been
sanctified by time. In other words, the mere lapse of
time affords the best possible bails for the right to exercise
authority by those who hold positions of authority. "Pres-
cription" was to Burke "the most solid of all titles not
only to property, but what is to secure property, to government."
It was because the authority of Parliament was