Note 60 — MR. BURKE. ON MOVING RESOLUTIONS FOR CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA. HOUSE OF COMMONS, MARCH 22, 1775.

Note 60, p. 240.—This passage has been much admired for the skill with which Burke excludes the general question of the right of taxation, and confines himself to the expediency of particular methods. But this was in accordance with all of Burke’s political philosophy. In his “Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs,” he announces the principle which governs him in all such cases: “Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all.”