Why Burke, who had championed the Irish Catholics, the American colonists, and the Indians should have championed on this occasion the nobility and the propertied classes of Europe is easy to explain. For him Europe, with all its settlements and usages, was the circumstance; and the Revolution was the challenge to it. From first to last Burke saw the grand upheaval as a contest between inherited condition and speculative insight. The circumstance said that Europe should go on; the Revolution said that it should cease and begin anew.[50] Burke’s position was not selfish; it was prudential within the philosophy we have seen him to hold. Actually his _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ divides itself into two parts. The first is an attempt, made with a zeal which seems almost excessive, to prove that the British government was the product of slow accretion of precedent, that it is for that reason a beneficent and stable government, and that the British have renounced, through their choice of methods in the past, any theoretical right to change their government by revolution. The second part is a miscellany of remarks on the proceedings in France, in which many shrewd observations of human nature are mingled with eloquent appeals on behalf of the _ancien régime_. Burke appears terrified by the thought that the ultimate sources and sanctions of government should be brought out into broad daylight for the inspection of everyone, and the first effort was to clothe the British government with a kind of concealment against this sort of inspection, which could, of course, result in the testing of that government by what might have been or might yet be. The second effort was to show that France, instead of embarking on a career of progress through her daring revolution, “had abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her virtue.” It will be observed that in both of these, a presumed well-being is the source of his argument. Therefore we have the familiar recourse to concrete situation. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen, pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France upon her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiring what the nature of the government was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation on its freedom?[51] In his _Letter to a Member of the National Assembly_ (1791) he said: