Universities were founded to sustain faith by reason—to maintain order in the soul and in the commonwealth. My own university, St. Andrews, was established in the fifteenth-century by the Scottish Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity to resist the errors of the Lollards, the levellers of that age. The early universities’ teaching imparted both order and freedom to [...]
The term “libertarianism” is distasteful to people who think seriously about politics. Both Dr. F.A. Hayek and your servant have gone out of their way, from time to time, to declare that they refuse to be tagged with this label. Anyone much influenced by the thought of Edmund Burke and of Alexis de Tocqueville—as are [...]
Probably at no other time in the history of mankind have cities been destroyed by the deliberate acts of their inhabitants. A mad world, my masters! Yesteryear’s festive bonfire in the village square, with its half jocular, half fearful notions of ghostly presences, has given way to a diabolical destruction in the core of some [...]
“To what truths, then, ought the Academy to be dedicated? To the proposition that the end of education is the elevation of reason of the human person, for the human person’s own sake. To the proposition that the higher imagination is better than the sensate triumph. To the proposition that the fear of God, and [...]
The end of the twentieth century of the Christian era is not far distant, and all about us things fall apart. There comes to my mind the last drawing from the pencil of William Hogarth, who died in 1764: it is a sufficient representation of the state of civilization today. Hogarth’s final drawing is known [...]
"Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?" — The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, v:3 Two hundred and two years after the foundation of this college, Hampden-Sydney is not yet decadent. That is more than we may say of America's higher learning in general. For the most part, American [...]
To speak of American conservative action…may seem a contradiction in terms. The instinct of the conservative, as Lord Hailsham observes, is to enjoy life as he finds it, not to mold society nearer to his heart’s desire; nor does he think of practical politics as the end and aim of being. Family life, church, literature, [...]
Our civilized world is passing out of one age and into another epoch. The age that is passing has been called the Age of Discussion. The age that we are entering I call the Age of Sentiments. Most people are aware of this change only vaguely, if at all. As Disraeli put it, “Prevailing opinions [...]
A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell into a conversation with a neighbor—Mrs. Williams, let us say—who, the day before, had sold a fine old building, long in her family, to be demolished that a lot for used-automobile sales might take its place. Mrs. Williams had certain regrets; but, said she [...]
Avarice, rather, is desiring more wealth than one’s soul can support properly. Avarice sometimes produces present poverty: the miser, proverbially, is ragged and lean. And I am afraid that when our politicians and planners and sociologists talk of output and distribution and real wages, they are not so much intent upon relieving genuine poverty as [...]
Seeking for the roots of order, we are led to four cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. In Washington or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles today, the order which Americans experience is derived from the experience of those four old cities. If our souls are disordered, we fall into abnormality, unable to control [...]
In the twentieth century, no novelist exerted a stronger influence upon political opinion, in Britain and America, than did George Orwell. Also Orwell was the most telling writer about poverty. In a strange and desperate way, Orwell was a lover of the permanent things. Yet because he could discern no source of abiding justice and [...]
It seems to be a tendency of literary critics to attach to the opinions of contemporary writers a significance unjustified with regard to the effect of such opinions upon current social movements. A Voltaire, an Adam Smith, even a Dickens’ Oliver Twist may change the world, but not so the works of the usual writer [...]
James Fenimore Cooper In these days of confident talk of an American reconstruction of Europe upon democratic principles, in these days of fall-of-France and it-can-happen-here novels by the score, it is more than a little interesting to look at, and even to read, certain stories of European life and politics written by a [...]