The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired.
Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life.

It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.
Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat.
He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low.

He thought of the people--it was obviously a generalization from his time--as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of ancient habit.

Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude.
"My observation," he said in his _Speech on the East India Bill_, "has furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of government." We can go further than that sober caution.

We know that there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest in it.