"to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack" the French state, "that aged parent, in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians."

Burke's account of the ordeal of Marie Antoinette, torn from her throne and treated by the revolutionaries as a common citizen, clinched his case for the moral value of prejudice—in this case, the prejudice of "chivalry," which demanded respect both for rank and for women. Richard Price and other admirers of the revolution could take satisfaction in the queen's downfall only by ignoring "natural feelings ... unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity," according to Burke.

In this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we [English] are generally men of untaught feelings: that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

Instead of "exploding general prejudices," philosophers would "better employ their sagacity," Burke thought, "to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them." Prejudices guided conduct more reliably than reason, by making a "man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts." Even superstition had its place in a well-ordered scheme of things. "There is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the courage of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety."

Burke did not question the opposition between reason and tradition. He simply reversed the values usually attached to these concepts, extolling prejudice and superstition against the Enlightenment's preference for "naked reason," as he called it. The case against reason, as he stated it, was not confined to reason's encouragement of rash, ill-considered ac

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