"Truth," he said, "may be far better ...

but as we have scarcely ever that certainty in the one that we have in the other, I would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues." Such a philosophy, indeed, so barely stated, would seem a defence of political immobility; but Burke attempted safeguards against that danger.

His insistence upon the superior value of past experience was balanced by a general admission that particular circumstances must always govern the immediate decision.

"When the reason of old establishments is gone," he said in his _Speech on Economical Reform_, "it is absurd to preserve nothing but the burden of them." "A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve," he wrote in the _Reflections on the French Revolution_, "taken together would be my standard of a statesman." But that "ability to improve" conceals two principles of which Burke never relaxed his hold.

"All the reformations we have hitherto made," he said, "have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity"; and the _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_, which is the most elaborate exposition of his general attitude, proceeds upon the general basis that 1688 is a perpetual model for the future.
Nor is this all.