In a brilliant passage on the American character, he had observed that the Americans were in the habit of judging the pressure of a grievance by the badness of the principle rather than _vice versa_. Burke’s own habit, we now see, was fairly consistently the reverse: he judged the badness of the principle by the pressure of the grievance; and hence we are compelled to suppose that he believed politics ought to be decided empirically and not dialectically. Yet a consequence of this position is that whoever says he is going to give equal consideration to circumstance and to ideals (or principles) almost inevitably finds himself following circumstances while preserving a mere decorous respect for ideals. Burke’s doctrine of precedent, which constitutes a central part of his political thought, is directly related with the above position. If one is unwilling to define political aims with reference to philosophic absolutes, one tries to find guidance in precedent. We have now seen that a principal topic of the _Reflections_ is a defense of custom against insight. Burke tried with all his eloquence to show that the “manly” freedom of the English was something inherited from ancestors, like a valuable piece of property, increased or otherwise modified slightly to meet the needs of the present generation, and then reverently passed on. He did not want to know the precise origin of the title to it, nor did he want philosophical definition of it. In fact, the statement of Burke which so angered Thomas Paine—that Englishmen were ready to take up arms to prove that they had no right to change their government—however brash or paradoxical seeming, was quite in keeping with such conviction. Since he scorned that freedom which did not have the stamp of generations of approval upon it, he attempted to show that freedom too was a matter of precedent. Yet this is an evasion rather than an answer to the real question which is lying in wait for Burke’s political philosophy. It is essential to see that government either moves with something in view or it does not, and to say that people may be governed merely by following precedent begs the question. What line do the precedents mark out for us? How may we know that this particular act is in conformity with the body of precedents unless we can abstract the essence of the precedents? And if one extracts the essence of a body of precedents, does not one have a “speculative idea”? However one turns, one cannot evade the truth that there is no practice without theory, and no government without some science of government. Burke’s statement that a man’s situation is the preceptor of his duty cannot be taken seriously unless one can isolate the precept.