"The major," he said of all political premises, "makes a pompous figure in the battle, but the victory depends upon the little minor of circumstances." To abstract natural right he therefore opposed prescription.

The presumption of wisdom is on the side of the past, and when we change, we act at our peril.

"Prescription," he said in 1782, "is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but to what is to secure that property, to government." Because he saw the State organically he was impressed by the smallness both of the present moment and the individual's thought.

It is built upon the wisdom of the past for "the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right." And since it is the past alone which has had the opportunity to accumulate this rightness our disposition should be to preserve all ancient things.

They could not be without a reason; and that reason is grounded upon ancestral experience.