Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a little way west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to an old doorway in a blank wall.

What is the essence of British and American conservatism? What system of ideas, common to England and the United States, has sustained men of conservative instincts in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation ever since the beginning of the French Revolution? This study is a prolonged essay in definition. To review conservative ideas, examining their validity for this perplexed age, is the purpose of this book, which does not pretend to be a history of conservative parties. But the conservative principle has been defended, these past hundred and fifty years, by men of learning and genius, as well. ¹ Edmund Burke, the greatest of modern conservative thinkers, was not ashamed to acknowledge the allegiance of humble men whose sureties are prejudice and prescription for, with affection, he likened them to cattle under the English oaks, deaf to the insects of radical innovation.

Certainly many dull and unreflecting people have lent their inertia to the cause of conservatism: It is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit, F. Like certain other summary dicta which nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his judgment needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and radical philosophies. The stupid party: this is John Stuart Mill’s description of conservatives.

Kirk the conservative mind