Burke and the Principle of Order

Author(s): Russell Kirk

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1952), pp. 187-201
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27538128 .
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 BURKE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

By RUSSELL KIRK

HAT Matthew Arnold called "an epoch of concen

tration" seems to be over the English
impending
w speaking world. The revolutionary impulses and the
social enthusiasms which have dominated this era since their
great explosion in Russia are now confronted with a countervail

ing physical and intellectual force. Communism, Fascism, and

their kindred expansive all in their fashion were mani
ideologies
festations of a common rebellion the prevalent moral
against
order. To resist them, rather and grumpily, the Eng
gropingly
lish and American traditions of mind and society have been
aroused, quite as they stirred French
against innovating fury
after 1790. We appear to be a time of revaluation and
entering
reconstruction j we begin to discern,
perhaps, the outlines of a
resurrected conservatism in philosophy and politics and letters.
Already many minds have swung right about from the spectacle
of Continental terror to a reaffirmation of ancient as
values,
Coleridge and Southey and Wordsworth and Mackintosh and
their generation abandoned their ideas and be
early levelling
came the most zealous of conservators. in Arnold's
England
"epoch of concentration" became, in spite of its disillusion, a so

ciety of profound intellectual achievement, the revolutionary

energy latent in it diverted to reconstructive ends. That the
epoch of concentration displayed moral qualities so
powerful,
188 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

that it did not sink into a mere leaden reaction, Arnold attri
buted to the influence of Burke. And in our time of revulsion

against the twentieth-century revolutions, we need to recall the

ideas which Burke's genius moulded into a philosophy of social

Lacking these or some other genuine principles,

preservation.
our own age of contraction is likely to slip into sardonic apathy
and fatigued repression.
I have no intention of discussing here the details of Burke's
or of his religion and metaphysics, or even
political philosophy,
of his literary attainments. These things have been done before,
though never quite as they should be: Burke's immensity has

away biographers and editors, so that no proper life

frightened
of Burke exists and no decent edition of his works. I am quite
as much afraid of the ghost of Burke's brilliance. What I am

trying to do in this essay is to capture the bare essence of Burke's

passionate aspiration and exhibit it as the nubbin of any consist

ent conservative growth. What was it that Burke evoked in his
own epoch of concentration? What enduring significance does his

system offer to critics of society and ideas in any time of revul

sion against innovation? Perhaps the soul of Burke's darting
genius is his principle of order.
Some months ago, I heard that eminent American critic Mr.
Kenneth Burke discuss "Rhetoric and Hierarchy." A consider
able part of his small audience composed, was as all such audi
ences must be, of people benevolently determined to be liberal,
but rather hazy about their definition of liberalism, except that
it signifies equality. Now in his essay "The Function of Criti
cism at the Present Time," Arnold has a memorable description
"
of this "liberalism"; and he makes these liberals exclaim, 'Let
us have a social movement, let us organize and combine a party
to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal fartyy
and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up. Let
us have no nonsense about independent criticism, and intellectual
and the few and the many ... we are all in the same
delicacy,
 RUSSELL KIRK 189

movement, we are all liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth.' In

this way the pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical,
affair, almost a chairman, a secretary, and
pleasurable requiring
advertisements ; with the excitement of an occasional scandal
. . .
but, in general, plenty of bustle and very little thought. To
act is so easy, as Goethe says; to think is so hard!" It was mildly
amusing to watch the descendents of Arnold's liberals, in Mr.
Burke's audience, as he spoke of rhetoric and hierarchy.
For Kenneth Burke made it clear
enough, in his Coleridge
like way, that he was as fond of* hierarchy as he was of rhetoric.
He uttered no equalitarian platitudes. He had formerly thought
?said Mr. Kenneth Burke?that "law and order" was a tauto

logical phrase. But he had come to realize that "order" is Aot

simply the same thing as law 3 instead, "order" means class,

rank, gradation, hierarchy. And without order, law cannot sub
sist. Without order, nothing high or enduring in society or
letters can be attained. Perhaps Edmund Burke might have
frowned upon this usage of "hierarchy" 3 but in substance, Mr.
Edmund Burke might have been speaking, rather than Mr.
Kenneth Burke.

Although I cannot say precisely how far Kenneth Burke is

directly influenced by Edmund Burke, it is plain he knows the
works of that great Whig very well?perhaps as well as an
other eminent critic, Mr.
T. S. Eliot, whose recent books The
Idea of a Christian Society and Notes toward the Definition of
Culture contain repeated references to Burke, and whose en
dorsement of Burke's views was the proximate cause of Eliot's
recent lectures at Chicago on "The Aims of Education." But it
is surprising how many writers are unaware of the full extent of
Burke's influence and, perhaps, of just what Burke believed.
Mr. Robert Gorham Davis, for instance, in a recent number
of The American Scholar, observes with alarm a
swelling
conservative movement among literary critics. He is particularly
vexed at the social principles implicit in the "New Criticism"
 190 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

and the "humanist agrarian movement" in the United States,

which he thinks can have no proper in modern democracy.
place
These views, Mr. Davis declares, must be derived from Maistre,
Bonald, Chateaubriand, and other French reactionary thinkers
down to Maurras. With an intolerant which would
complacency
at once have amused and grieved Tocqueville, Davis denounces
these deviationists from democratic orthodoxy; only the demo
cratic creed must be pronounced in America: circum
"Every
stance in this country has tended to the strengthening of this

tradition, and no social basis exists for a rival tradition of serious

cultural significance." The Humanists and Agrarians and New
Critics have been flirting with exotic abstractions:

"Over the last two decades, in thejournals of the New Cri

ticism, authority y hierarchyy Catholicism, aristocracy} tradi
tioriy absol?tes, dogma, truths, became related terms of hon
or, and liheralismy naturalisniy scientismy individualismy
equalitarianismy progressy protestantism} fragmatisniy and
became related terms of and con
personality rejection
. . . the forties, with the intense reaction
tempt. During
against Stalinism, the socio-historical patterns of acceptance
and rejection established by the humanist agrarian move
ment quietly triumphed on the higher literary levels, and
became the required postulates, curiously enough, for the
proper evaluation of literature as literature."1

We will return to these observations presently. But here it is

interesting to interpolate a somewhat similar statement by Mr.

Lionel Trilling, in his preface to The Liberal Imagination:

In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the

dominant but even
the sole intellectual tradition. For it is
the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or
reactionary ideas in general circulation. This does not mean,
of course, that there is no impulse to conservatism or to
liCThe New Citicism and the Democratic Tradition," The American Scholar,
Winter, 1949-50.
 RUSSELL KIRK 191

reaction. . . . But
the conservative and the react
impulse
ionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesi
astical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in
action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resem
ble ideas.

Mr. Trilling is doleful about this; he professes to believe that

an intelligent conservative to exist for the gen
opposition ought
eral well-being of society, quite as J. S. Mill believed Coleridge
ought to be read; but he does not know where to find any
American conservative thinkers. Mr. Davis thinks there are
too many conservatives, Mr. Trilling that there are too few.

They seem to agree, however, that conservatism

philosophical
is a hothouse growth, an orchid
certainly in the United States
and to a lesser degree exotic in Britain. In this respect, they
reveal a kind of provinciality, an infection of the self
perhaps
satisfied "liberalism" Arnold describes. For the profound con
servative influence of Burke has had a continuous existence not

only in England, but in America; and fundamentally it is the

mind of Burke, whether immediately or filtered through the
writings of his Continental admirers, that stimulates the conser
vative critics whom Mr. Davis detests.
Order in society: an arrangement of things not according to
an abstract equality, nor yet to a utilitarian calculus,
according
but founded upon a recognition of Providential design, which
makes differences between man and man (and God and man)
ineradicable and beneficent. This, I think, is the idea funda
mental to Burke's liberal conservatism, and this is the principle
to which all real conservatives after him clung. Burke estab
lished these concepts as a barrier to the corrosive radicalism of
three separate systems of thought: the corrosive rationalism of
the philosophes, the collective sentimentalism of Rousseau's

school, and the arbitrary utilitarianism of Bentham. Of these

three bodies of
ideas, perhaps the last, only beginning to rise in
Burke's last years, has proved to be the most implacable enemy
 192 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDEJR

to old values; and in the shape of its caricature, Marxism, Ben

thanism remains intent upon destroying the principles of order,
prescription, and diversity which Burke and his followers loved.
In Keynes' Two Memoirs is a striking recognition of the des
tructive power of utilitarianism, which is the foundation of the
modern "planners' society," whether nominally "capitalistic" or
"communistic": "I do now regard that as the worm which has
been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is re

sponsible for its present moral decay. We used to regard the

Christians as the enemy, because as the represen
they appeared
tatives oftradition, convention, and hocus-pocus. In truth it
was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the
economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popu
lar Ideal."
This moral enervation which is a consequence of materialistic

humanitarianism, John Maynard Keynes did not perceive until

the anarchy of our era was far advanced. But Burke
already
saw it before 1790, and so, though less distinctly, did John
Adams in America. Ever sincethen, conservatives in the tradi
tion of Burke have been engaged in a dubious its lines
battle,
often ill-defined, against both the totalitarian of
democracy
Rousseau and the planners' utopia of Bentham. The philosophi
cal adherents of Burke have not been confined to the Conserva
tive party in England, nor to any in America.
particular party
The great reformer-conservator was at once the of a
inspiration
resuscitated Toryism, the system of Canning and of Disraeli, and
the model for what was best in Liberalism, the preceptor of

Hazlitt, Macaulay, Gladstone, J. S. Mill, Morley, Birrell, and

a great many others. His and moral influence descends
literary
unbroken through a series of names to conjure
with?Coleridge,
Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Newman, Bagehot, Stephen,
Maine, Lecky, and such diverse thinkers and critics of the pres
ent century as Saintsbury and Squire, Whitehead and Laski. No
 RUSSELL KIRK 193

other modern thinker has exerted so varied and an

pervasive
influence upon serious thought in Britain.
His Continental reputation cannot be properly described here,
but we ought to remember that the Reflections, the Regicide
Peace y the Appeal from the New Whigs, supplied the basis for
European conservatism,
through the medium of Gentz, Maistre,

Guizot, Chateaubriand, and their pupils ; while he was admired

quite as warmly by moderates like Royer-Collard, liberals like

Tocqueville, and critics like Taine. Though the ideas of Burke

were from the beginning a good deal altered in the Continent,
and presently curiously mottled by infusions of Hegel and even

Comte, still when Mr. Davis, and Mr. David Spitz in his re
cent Patterns Anti-Democratic Thought, are zealous to decry
of
imported ideas subversive of "the democratic tradition," often
a French or German re
they are alarmed by nohing more than
flection of Burke.
Burke's American influence, in its full extent, is still less
clearly recognized. But it has been strong, North and South.
The Federalists?not only Hamilton and Ames and Dwight,
but John Adams and his son, these latter somewhat against their
will?learned a great deal from him. The Southern conserva
tism of John Randolph and Calhoun, and thus in some measure
Southern belief to the present day, constantly cited Burke in its
vindication. Tocqueville renewed the social ideas of Burke
among a people who were to forget him. "Criticism
beginning
of literature as criticism of life begins, as a serious matter," re
marks Laski, "with James Russell Lowell;"2 and Lowell, like
Arnold, believed Burke to be the great master of English prose
and the great source of social wisdom. Ever since, social and

literary criticism in the United States has borne the mark (some
times unacknowledged) of Burke. It is plain today upon the
most interesting and vigorous schools of critical thought?upon
the New Criticism, upon the conservative and Thomist circles
2Laski, The American Democracy, 419.
 194 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

best known for their work at the University of Chicago, upon

Catholic thinkers of whom Ross Hoffman is a good instance,
upon the late Ralph Adams Cram and the late Albert Jay Nock,
upon the New Humanists that were led by Paul Elmer More
and Irving Babbitt, upon the Southern "agrarians". It is a pro
found quality in the work of T. S. Eliot. But Mr. Trilling says
that "liberalism is the sole intellectual tradition." Possibly Mr.

Eliot, by virtue of his

churchwardenship, has been translated
into an "ecclesiastical exception"; but I cannot guess how Mr.

manages to dispose of everybody else. There are men

Trilling
beyond college campuses, and ideas beyond the pages of the
Partisan Review.

Nor has Burke ever been wholly neglected by practical states

men in America, even during this century. Woodrow Wilson,
often as a disciple of Jefferson, wrote the best de
represented
fense of Burke on the French
Revolution I know, declaring that
"Burke was Burke, and Burke was right" when he denounced
radicalism.3 And not long ago I heard Senator Wayne Morse

quote Burke, to much before a audience. These in

effect, large
stances could be multiplied.

So much by way of disproportionate preface. The principle

of order, which is the central idea in Burke's system, is not a

concept repugnant to American or English tradition. It has al

ways been the essence of intelligent conservatism. Now we need

to define this principle of order, which is likely to be an idea of
transcendent importance in the approaching epoch of concentra

tion.

Burke having been expounded by eminent critics from Cole

to Quiller-Couch, there ought to be small necessity for re
ridge
stating his central idea. All the same, that necessity exists. Des
the of several books on Burke recently,
pite publication despite
3Wilson, "Burke and the French Revolution", The Century Magazine, Septem
ber, 1901.
 RUSSELL KIRK 195
a considerable number of periodical the interest
articles, despite
aroused in his personality and principles by the Wentworth
Woodhouse Papers being opened to the public at Sheffield,
Burke remains imperfectly understood. Mr. Trilling refers to
him (althought simply in the haste of generalization, I am sure)
as a "Tory", which would Dr. Even some of
surprise Johnson.
the writers who love Burke best do not know enough about him.
In a recent number of Cornhill, Mr. Somerset Maugham pub
lished the best analysis of Burke's
style ever written ; but
Maugham revealed an incidental of Burke's char
misconception
acter which is widespread. Uncritically accepting one
partial
view of Burke's private affairs?that view first given a degree
of probability by Sir Charles Dilke, carried further by Dixon
Wecter, and repeated without proper investigation in Sir Philip
Magnus' biography of a few years goes so far
past?Maugham
as to apply the epithet to the Whig
"corrupt" reformer, though
he substantially retracts that description a little further on.4 Very

likely publication of the Wentworth Woodhouse Papers and

the Milton Papers and other documents and correspondence of
Burke will refute this view, beforemany years elapse; and, in
deed, Augustine Birrell sufficiently refuted it more than sixty
years ago. But I remark this haziness of Burke scholarship only
to suggest that although the rhetoric of Edmund Burke has not
ceased to be appreciated, his principles very are in
commonly
sufficiently apprehended.
Mr. John Chamberlain, in The Freeman, says that a good
many people who formerly drifted leftward now are painfully

making their way back to the ideas of Adam Smith, Jefferson,

and "the earlier John Stuart Mill." If these
people, including
Mr. Chamberlain himself, are to find a of
satisfactory principle
order for society, they will have to search still further. For?
without any intention to depreciate Adam eco
Smith?political
nomy is not the whole of the problem of society; and as for
4"After Reading Burke," The Cornhill Magazine, Winter, 1950-51.
 196 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

picking and choosing from the levelling and conserving sides of

character, or the "earlier" Stuart
Jefferson's preferring John
Mill to the later?why, two sets of ideologues can play at this

game. A consistent and catholic conservatism must be rooted in

Burke. Burke knew that economics and politics do not stand

alone; they are only manifestations of a general order, and that

order is more than human. He applied his great practical in
tellect to a glowing delineation of this principle of order; and,
despite his detestation of abstractions, we find in the Reflections
and its sequels, in the speeches against Hastings, and in certain
other of his productions a social analysis suffused with
general
the imagination of a poet and a critic.

"It was no service to our understanding," writes R. M. Mac

Iver, in the impatient way of "realistic"

political scientists,
"when Burke
enveloped once more in mystic obscurity the office
of government and in the sphere of politics appealed once more

against reason to tradition and religion."6 Perhaps it is unfair

to quote this passage; for Maclver wrote in 1928, and since then
we have beheld some interesting activities by states which have

emancipated themselves from the trammels of "tradition and re

ligion." Basil Willey knows Burke's "mystic obscurity" (which,

however applicable to Coleridge, surely is a phrase grotesquely
inaccurate when Maclver tries to attach it to Burke) to be a be
lief as intelligible as it is influential. Burke, he writes, perceived
that the evil in society "lay in the meddling instinct which pre
sumes to interfere with the mysterious march of God in the
world. Burke was of the company of those who are continually
conscious of the weight of all this unintelligible world; he was
more aware of the complex forces which hem us in and condi
tion all we do, than of any power in us to act back upon and

modify the very environment that limits us."8

Burke's principle of order, therefore, is an anticipatory refu
BMacIver, The Modern State, 148.
Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background, 244-245.
 RUSSELL KIRK 197

tation of utilitarianism, and an affirma

positivism, pragmatism,
tion of that reverential view of society which may be traced

through Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, the Roman jurisconsults, the

Schoolmen, Richard Hooker, and lesser thinkers. It is this; but

it is more. Burke's prophetic gift permitted him to see that the
Revolution in France was no contest, no cul
simple political
mination of enlightenment, but the inception of a tremendous
moral convulsion from which society would not recover until
the disease, the disorder of revolt against Providence, had run its
course. He adapted the reverential view of society to the riddles
of the modern world.

Boldly pious in an age of skepticism, Burke's theology and

morality were those of orthodox "We have not

Christianity.
(as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of
the fourteenth century; as yet have we subtilized
nor ourselves
into savages." The presence of evil among men is an irrefrag
able so that men in society may contend with
fact; evil, God
has ordained the state; and the state, or society, has been "mar
shalled by a divine tactic" which makes order Some
possible.
order always must exist?a
just and natural order, in obedience
to this divine tactic, or an arbitrary and violent when the
order,
world is turned upside down by presumption. There is no pos

sibility of restoring men to an alleged primitive simplicity: man

kind has the choice of obedience, a society guided by the best
men in it, or of presumption and a society bullied by the worst
men in it. "Burke, as he regarded like bees
humanity swarming
into and out of their hives of industry," wrote Augustine Bir

rell, "is ever asking himself, How are these men to be saved
from anarchy?"7
And Burke's answer to himself and to his age is that men are
saved from anarchy by the principle of order. They are saved

by reverence toward God and prescriptive order among men.

They are saved by gradation and prejudice. There is only one

'Birrell, Obiter Dicta, Second Series, "Burke".
 198 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

way really to understand Burke, and that is to read him through.

But, reducing great splendid profundities to meager little para

phrases, we can outline here what Burke means by

perhaps
obedience to a Providential order. To attempt more, when
second-hand sets of Burke can be bought for next to nothing?

why, "the rest is vanity; the rest is crime."

order is only a part of a larger, a super
(1) This temporal
natural order; and the foundation of social tranquility is rever
ence. Veneration lacking, "there is no sanction to any contract,
virtual or even the will of prevalent power . . .
actual, against
we have but this one appeal against irresistible power?

Si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis armay

At sperate D?os memores fandi atque nefandi"

Though Burke does not carry the advocacy of ordination and

subordination so far as Dr. Johnson, he is emphatic that the first
rule of society is obedience?obedience to God and the dispensa
tions of Providence, which work through natural processes.
"Out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable,
arise moral duties, which, as we are able to compre
perfectly
hend, we are bound indispensably to perform." Maugham, in
his admirable essay on Burke cited earlier, observes that we mod
erns are hardly able to understand the spirit of veneration. He
is quite right, of course. But when veneration goes out of so
so much sinks with it that a cyclical process seems to be
ciety,
set in motion, arranging that mankind shall
presently experience
disaster, then fear, then awe, and at last resurrected veneration.
Veneration probably is the product of a patriarchal social out
look. When it is eradicated by sophistication, Providence has a

way of returning us, rather rudely, to patriarchy.

the order of God, Burke comes an order

(2) After implies, of

spiritual and intellectual values. All values are not the same,
nor all nor all men. A natural gradation teaches men
impulses,
 RUSSELL KIRK 199

to hold some sentiments dear and others cheap. Levelling radi

calism endeavors to put all emotions and sensations upon the
same level of mediocrity, and so to erase the moral imagination
which sets men apart from beasts. "On this scheme of things, a
is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an
king
animal, and an animal not of the highest order." When he wrote
of how "learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down
under the hoofs of a swinish multitude," the phrase which ex
cited more ferocious criticism?even from John Adams?than
anything else Burke said, Burke was simply paraphrasing Mat

thew, vii, 6, of course; and he meant what even some eminent

socialist critics like Mr. V. S. Pritchett and Dr. C. E. M. Joad
are coming to dread, that the mass of men, shorn of proper in
tellectual leadership, "all the decent drapery of life torn rudely
off," will be wholly indifferent, or perhaps hostile, to anything
that is not flesh.

(3) Physical and moral anarchy is prevented by general ac

quiescence in social differentiation of duty and privilege. "I am
no friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that word
is usually understood." But a natural cannot be
aristocracy
eradicated from among men unless freedom is to be eliminated
also. The problem of the statesman is to bring to the com
monwealth's service the real aristocracy among a which
people,
is not an If this class is. not recog
simply hereditary aristocracy.
nized and venerated, the brute and the sycophant exercise its
abandoned functions in the name of a faceless "people." Burke's
true natural aristocracy "is not a separate interest in the state."
It includes those who are bred to high ideas and to live in the
consciousness a public
of censorial the leisured, ac
inspection;
customed to reflect and converse; those habituated to command;
the administrators of justice; the professors of sciences and arts;
the manufacturers and merchants who "have cultivated an ha
bitual regard to commutative Anyone who thinks this
justice."
concept of hierarchy illiberal really ought to read what Thomas
200 BURKE AND PRINCIPLE OF ORDER

Jefferson wrote on the same If such classes are trusted

subject.
with the leadership of society, and if property and ancient rights
are venerated, then "as long as these endure, so long the
Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together,?the high
from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity, the
low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of
contempt."
Almost all factions seem
ready to confess, that we need
today,
more virtue and intelligence at the top of society. Planners talk
of an elite to remedy this desperate lack. T. S. Eliot is sus

picious of the idea of an as Burke would have

"elite", been;
since, at best, it is the substitution of arbitrary selection for the

gentler procedures of natural selection. With an elite, all the

elements of subordination may reappear, but none of the conse
cration that accompanies Providential ordination.

Against an "elite" recruited out of to party fa

conformity
naticism and enthusiastic adherence to a shallow and venomous
intellectual credo, Burke wrote in the second letter of the Regi
cide Peace:

To them, the will, the wish, the want, the liberty, the toil,
the blood of individuals is nothing. Individuality is left
out of their
scheme of government. The state is all in all.
Everything is referred to the production of force; after
wards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is military
in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its
movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its
sole objects; dominion over over
minds.by proselytism,
bodies by arms.

These were, of course, the the description

Jacobins; applies as
or even to the Communist and the Nazi rule of
well, better,
an "elite". Here one grasps in a moment all that Burke's
prin
ciple of order was not-, and here one the gulf that
perceives
separates Burke from Hegel. But Burke's constructive imagi
 RUSSELL KIRK 201

nation means more to us than his denunciation of fanatic

"plan
ning", of "plebescitary democracy"; and possibly this generation
will begin to struggle back toward his principle of a true order,
a consecrated society guided by veneration and prescription.

Society is immeasurably more than a political device. Burke,

knowing this, endeavored to convince his generation of the im
mense complexity of existence, "the
great mysterious incorpora
tion of the human race." If society is treated?Bentham and
the several schools of his disciples so regard it?as a simple
contraption to be managed on mathematical lines, then man will
be degraded into something less than a partner in the immortal
contract between the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the
bond between God and man. Paul Elmer More touches upon
this menace, which Burke foresaw with such passionate loathing,
in his essay "Economic Ideals":

As we contemplate the world converted into a huge ma

chine and managed by engineers, we gradually grow aware
of its lack of meaning, of its emptiness of human value; the
soul is stifled in this glorification of mechanical efficiency.
And then we begin to feel the weakness of such a creed
when confronted by the real problems of life; we discover
its inability to impose any restraint on the passions of men,
or to any government which can to the loy
supply appeal
alty of the spirit. And seeing these things we understand
the fear that is gnawing at the vitals of society.8

Critics of
thought and society are going to understand such
fear better and better, as this decade advances; and they will

pay increasing attention to Edmund Burke's ideas on order, I

suspect. The remarks of Mr. Kenneth Burke and the essay by

Mr. Somerset Maugham are some indication of this drift. In
our epoch of concentration that fear will not diminish; critics
will grope for some "loyalty of spirit"; and it will not be found
in Marx, nor in Rousseau, nor even in that arch-modern Ben
tham.
8Shelburne Essays, XI, 249.