We feel, indeed, that partly from want of this knowledge, he has gone too far from some of the wise maxims of an earlier time.
What has become of the doctrine that all great public collections of men--he was then speaking of the House of Commons--"possess a marked love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice."[1] Why was the French Assembly not to have the benefit of this admirable generalisation?
What has become of all those sayings about the presumption, in all disputes between nations and rulers, "being at least upon a par in favour of the people;" and a populace never rebelling from passion for attack, but from impatience of suffering?
And where is now that strong dictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that "general rebellions and revolts of a whole people never were _encouraged_, now or at any time; they are always _provoked_"?
[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_.] When all these things have been noted, to hold a man to his formulae without reference to their special application, is pure pedantry.
Burke was the last man to lay down any political proposition not subject to the ever varying interpretation of circumstances, and independently of the particular use which was to be made of it.
Nothing universal, he had always said, can be rationally affirmed on any moral or political subject.

The lines of morality, again, are never ideal lines of mathematics, but are broad and deep as well as long, admitting of exceptions, and demanding modifications.

"These exceptions and modifications are made, not by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence.

Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.

As no moral questions are ever abstract questions, this, before I judge upon any abstract proposition, must be embodied in circumstances; for, since things are right and wrong, morally speaking, only by their relation and connection with other things, this very question of what it is politically right to grant, depends upon its relation to its effects." "Circumstances," he says, never weary of laying down his great notion of political method, "give, in reality, to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.