Pitt's appeals to emotion, were exchanged for
the impassioned expression of a distinct philosophy of politics. "I have
learned more from him than from all the books I ever read," Fox cried at
a later time, with a burst of generous admiration. The philosophical
cast of Burke's reasoning was unaccompanied by any philosophical
coldness of tone or phrase. The groundwork indeed of his nature was
poetic. His ideas, if conceived by the reason, took shape and colour
from the splendour and fire of his imagination. A nation was to him a
great living society, so complex in its relations, and whose
institutions were so interwoven with glorious events in the past, that
to touch it rudely was a sacrilege. Its constitution was no artificial
scheme of government, but an exquisite balance of social forces which
was in itself a natural outcome of its history and developement. His
temper was in this way conservative, but his conservatism sprang not
from a love of inaction but from a sense of the value of social order,
and from an imaginative reverence for all that existed. Every
institution was hallowed to him by the clear insight with which he
discerned its relations to the past and its subtle connexion with the
social fabric around it. To touch even an anomaly seemed to Burke to be
risking the ruin of a complex structure of national order which it had
cost centuries to build up. "The equilibrium of the constitution," he
said, "has something so delicate about it, that the least displacement
may destroy it." "It is a difficult and dangerous matter even to touch
so complicated a machine."

[Sidenote: Burke and politics.]

Perhaps the readiest refutation of such a theory was to be found in its
influence on Burke's practical dealing with politics. In the great
question indeed which fronted him as he entered Parliament, it served
him well. No man has ever seen with deeper insight the working of those
natural forces which build up communities, or which group communities
into empires; and in the actual state of the American Colonies, in their
actual relation to the mother country, he saw a result of such forces
which only madmen and pedants would disturb. To enter upon "grounds of
Government," to remodel this great structure of empire on a theoretical
basis, seemed to him a work for "metaphysicians," and not for
statesmen. What statesmen had to do was to take this structure as it
was, and by cautious and delicate adjustment to accommodate from