and imperialism will employ the means Burke painted in unforgettable terms in his picture of Paul Benfield.  He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.  Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.  He abhorred the politics of prestige.  He knew the difficulties involved in administering distant territories, the ignorance and apathy of the public, the consequent erosion of responsibility, the chance that wrong will fail of discovery.  But he did not shrink from his conclusion.  “Let us do what we please,” he said, “to put India from our thoughts, we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest and our national reputation.”  That is a general truth not less in Africa and China than in India itself.  The main thought in Burke’s mind was the danger lest colonial dominion become the breeding-ground of arbitrary ideas.  That his own safeguards were inadequate is clear enough at the present time.  He knew that the need was good government.  He did not nor could he realize how intimately that ideal was connected with self-government.  Yet the latest lesson is no more than the final outcome of his teaching.

IV

A background so consistent as this in the inflexible determination to moralize political action resulted in a noble edifice.  Yet, through it all, the principles of policy are rather implied than admitted.  It was when he came to deal with domestic problems and the French Revolution that Burke most clearly showed the real trend of his thought.  That trend is unmistakable.  Burke was a utilitarian who was convinced that what was old was valuable by the mere fact of its arrival at maturity.  The State appeared to him an organic compound that came but slowly to its full splendour.  It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible.  Political philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty.  While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy.  He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates.  Nor must we miss the religious aspect of his philosophy.  He never doubted that religion was the foundation of the English State.  “Englishmen,” he said in the Reflections on the French Revolution (1790), “know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort.”  The utterance is characteristic, not merely in its depreciation of reason, but in its ultimate reliance upon a mystic explanation of social facts.  Nothing was more alien from Burke’s temper than deductive thinking in politics.  The only safeguard he could find was in empiricism.