ALL POLITICS ALWAYS JUST BOILS DOWN TO FREEDOM VS SECURITY...:

Burke's first constitutional principle is that a good constitution grows out of the common experience of a people over a considerable lapse of time. It is not possible to create an improved constitution out of whole cloth. As he declared in his speech on the reform of representation (1782), "I look with filial reverence on the constitution of my country, and never will cut it in pieces and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor. On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath." An enduring constitution is the product of a nation's struggles. Here, Burke is echoed by one of his more eminent American disciples, John C. Calhoun, in his Disquisition on Government: "A constitution, to succeed, must spring from the bosom of the community, and be adapted to the intelligence and character of the people, and all the multifarious relations, internal and external, which distinguish one people from another. If it does not, it will prove, in practice, to be, not a constitution, but a cumbrous and useless machine, which must be speedily superseded and laid aside, for some other more simple, and better suited to their condition."

A truth that Burke emphasizes almost equally with the preceding "organic" concept of constitutions is the necessity of religious faith to a constitutional order. "We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good, and of all comfort," he writes in Reflections on the Revolution in France. "We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long." An established church is required--parallel with "an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy.... All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society." The fist clause of the First Amendment to the federal Constitution, and the American circumstances which produced that clause--Burke's "dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion"--had forestalled any established national church in the United States, three years before Burke published his Reflections. But the First Amendment and curious interpretations of its first clause by the Supreme Court in this century leave us today in some perplexity.

A third point in Burke's constitutional principles which needs to be noted here is his emphasis upon the function of a natural aristocracy, in which mingle both "men of actual virtue" (the "new" men of enterprising talents) and "men of presumptive virtue" (gentlemen of old families and adequate means). It is this aristocracy, "the cheap defense of nations," that supplies a people's leadership. (In a more grudging fashion, a similar apology for aristocracy is advanced by John Adams.) Burke asserts also the necessity for an "establishment of democracy"; he is the most practical eighteenth-century advocate, indeed, of popular government. Nevertheless, "A true aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it," Burke writes in his Appeal from the New Whigs. "It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted."

Fourth--and here we must confine ourselves to four of Burke's constitutional arguments, although there are several others deserving of discussion--Burke contends that the good constitution maintains a balance or tension between the claims of freedom and the claims of order. Natural law is a reality, and from natural law flow certain natural rights; but government does not exist merely to defend claims of personal liberty. The "Rights of Man" claimed by the French revolutionaries are impossible to realize, unlimited, in any civil social order. "By having a right to everything they want everything," Burke writes in his Reflections:

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, a swell as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.... In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.

On no point of political theory in America does greater confusion exist than upon this question of "human rights" as set against the need for restraints upon will and appetite.

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