Practice was the touchstone; a theory was useless unless you could prove
that it had worked. It followed that he was not a democrat, opposed
parliamentary reform, and held that the true remedy for corruption and
venality was not to increase the size of the electorate, but to reduce
it so as to obtain electors of greater weight and independence. For him
a member of Parliament was a representative and not a delegate, and must
act not on his elector's wishes but on his own judgment. These opinions
are little in fashion in our own day, but it is well to remember that in
Burke's case they were the outcome not of prejudice but of thought, and
that even democracy may admit they present a case that must be met and
answered.
Burke's reputation as a thinker has suffered somewhat unjustly as a
result of his refusal to square his tenets either with democracy or with
its opposite. It has been said that ideas were only of use to him so far
as they were of polemical service, that the amazing fertility and
acuteness of his mind worked only in a not too scrupulous determination
to overwhelm his antagonists in the several arguments--on India, or
America, on Ireland or on France--which made up his political career. He
was, said Carlyle, "vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent
far-sighted rhetorician, rather than a deep and earnest thinker.
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