The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly.

These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.
The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn.

The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression.

Burke refused to see that aspect of the picture.

He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past.