defended the system
that prevailed in Britain sixty years ago."

I am no more assured of the rising of to-morrow's sun than I am that to
the stoutest conservatives of 1950, it will appear "almost inconceivable
that rational beings could ever have defended the system" that prevails
in America to-day. They will, however, resist further progress as
doggedly as do the conservatives of to-day, even while these see plainly
how absurd was the attitude of their predecessors of sixty years ago.
Your genuine conservative ever holds doggedly to things as they are. He
clings tenaciously--and vainly. He belongs to a party whose defeat all
history teaches is foredoomed. Now he stands for the divine right of
kings; and notwithstanding he is a man of irreproachable character and
able, moreover, to show that he is much less autocratic than most of his
predecessors, he loses his crown and his head. Again, he stands for the
parent country's unlimited power of taxation, and he forfeits his most
flourishing colonies. At another period he urges long sufferance as a
justification for continuing--even extending--the crime of slavery, and
he meets defeat amid slaughter and devastation. No repetition of the
lesson will ever teach him to consider what is abstractly right--what
ought to be without reference to what is.

But the conservative has to be, in accordance with the law of nature, so
poetically announced in the song of Willis in Iolanthe:

"That every boy and every gal
That's born into this world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!"

Or, as Emerson's prose expresses it--

"The two parties which divide the state--the party of conservatism and
that of innovation--are very old and have disputed the possession of the
world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil
history. The conservative party established the reverend hierarchies and
monarchies of the most ancient world. The battle of patrician and
plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old usage and accommodation to
new facts, of the rich and the poor, reappears in all countries and
times....

"There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism,
joined with a certain superiority in its fact. It affirms because it
holds. Its fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes to see
a better fact. The castle which conservatism is set to defend is the
actual state of things, good or bad. The proj