Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.

Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature." Is not this to say, in other words, that in every man the substantial foundations of action consist of the accumulated layers which various generations of ancestors have placed for him; that the greater part of our sentiments act most effectively when they act most mechanically, and by the methods of an unquestioned system; that although no rule of conduct or spring of action ought to endure, which does not repose in sound reason, yet this naked reason is in itself a less effective means of influencing action than when it exists as one part of a fabric of ancient and endeared association?
Interpreted by a mobile genius, and expanded by a poetic imagination, all this became the foundation from which the philosophy of Coleridge started, and, as Mill has shown in a famous essay, Coleridge was the great apostle of the conservative spirit in England in its best form.
Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the philosophy of order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have justly asked him whether, when we thus realise the strong and immovable foundations which are laid in our character before we are born, there could be any occasion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which moved Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment decrees, should overthrow the venerated sentiments of Europe about justice and about property?
Should he not have known better than most men the force of the self-protecting elements of society?
This is not a convenient place for discussing the issues between the school of order and the school of progress.

It is enough to have marked Burke's position in one of them.

The _Reflections_ places him among the great Conservatives of history.

Perhaps the only Englishman with whom in this respect he may be compared, is Sir Thomas More,--that virtuous and eloquent reactionist of the sixteenth century.