ws depends upon them. Without them, your Commonwealth
is no better than _a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active,
effective constitution_." Thus early in his public career had Burke
seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured in
the long and ever memorable episode of his war against the French
Revolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements in
politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by what
he calls elsewhere in the present tract the natural strength of the
kingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of the people.
When he spoke of the natural strength of the kingdom, he gave no
narrow or conventional account of it. He included in the elements
of that strength, besides the great peers and the leading landed
gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, and the
substantial yeomanry. Contrasted with the trite versions of Government
as fixed in King, Lords, and Commons, this search for the real organs
of power was going to the root of the matter in a spirit at once
thoroughly scientific and thoroughly practical. Burke had, by the
speculative training to which he had submitted himself in dealing with
Bolingbroke, prepared his mind for a complete grasp of the idea of
the body politic as a complex growth, a manifold whole, with closely
interdependent relations among its several parts and divisions. It
was this conception from which his conservatism sprang. Revolutionary
politics have one of their sources in the idea that societies are
capable of infinite and immediate modifications, without reference to
the deep-rooted conditions that have worked themselves into every part
of the social structure. The same opposition of the positive to the
doctrinaire spirit is to be observed in the remarkable vindication of
Party, which fills the last dozen pages of the pamphlet, and which
is one of the most courageous of all Burke's deliverances. Party
combination is exactly one of those contrivances which, as it might
seem, a wise man would accept for working purposes, but about which
he would take care to say as little as possible. There appears to be
something revolting to the intellectual integrity and self-respect of
the individual in the systematic surrender of his personal action,
interest, and power, to a political connection in which his own
judgment may never once be allowed to count for anything. It is like
the surrender of the right of private judgment to th