This dilemma grows out of Burke’s own reluctance to speculate about the origin and ultimate end of government. “There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all governments,” he declared in his second day’s speech at the trial of Warren Hastings.[59] To the abstract doctrines of the French Revolution, he responded with a “philosophic analogy,” by which governments are made to come into being with something like the indistinct remoteness of the animal organism. This political organism is a “mysterious incorporation,” never wholly young or middle-aged or old, but partly each at every period, and capable, like the animal organism, of regenerating itself through renewal of tissue. It is therefore modified only through the slow forces that produce evolution. But to the question of what brings on the changes in society, Burke was never able to give an answer. He had faced the problem briefly in the _Tract on the Popery Laws_, where he wrote: “Is, then, no improvement to be brought into society? Undoubtedly, but not by compulsion—but by encouragement, but by countenance, favor, privileges, which are powerful and are lawful instruments.”[60] These, however, are the passive forces which admit change, not the active ones which initiate it. The prime mover is still to seek. If such social changes are brought about by immanent evolutionary forces, they are hardly voluntary; if on the other hand they are voluntary, they must be identifiable with some point in time and with some agency of initiation. It quickly becomes obvious that if one is to talk about the beginnings of things, about the nisus of growth or of accumulation of precedents, and about final ends, one must shift from empirical to speculative ground. Burke’s attachment to what was _de facto_ prevented him from doing this in political theory and made him a pleader from circumstance at many crucial points in his speeches. One can scarcely do better than quote the judgment of Sir James Prior in his summation of Burke’s career: “His aim therefore in our domestic policy, was to preserve all our institutions in the main as they stood for the simple reason that under them the nation had become great, and prosperous, and happy.”[61] This is but a generalized translation of the position “If it exists, there is something to be said in its favor,” which we have determined as the aspect of the great orator’s case.