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reforms: “There is something else,” he writes, “than the mere alternative of absolute
destruction or unreformed existence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna.” The Latin
phrase means, “Sparta is your lot; adorn it,” that is to say, make the most of the country
in which you have been born; seek to improve it as best you can. Spartam nactus es;
hanc exorna, he says, and continues,
This is, in my opinion, a rule of profound sense and ought never to depart
from the mind of an honest reformer. I cannot conceive how any man can
have brought himself to that pitch of presumption to consider his country
as nothing but carte blanche--upon which he may scribble whatever he
pleases. A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his
society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true
politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing
materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to
improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. (138)
Without some underlying love of country to serve as a moral compass, we are prone to
treat our country as a blank slate upon which we may write the story of our choosing; we
try to imprint our own vision of what would be desirable upon it, without stopping to
remember that the raw material upon which we so readily go to work is in fact composed
of other human beings, our fellow countrymen. Caught up in the excitement of our
favored experiment, we too hastily cut up the infant. And this moral failure on our part,
Burke thinks, arises from our failure to feel a certain kind of prereflective loyalty towards
our own country.
Burke makes the same point in a passage brilliantly describing the corrosive
effects of criticism rooted in hostility rather than loyalty:
[Y]our leaders regard all things only on the side of their vices and faults,
and view those vices and faults under every color of exaggeration. It is
undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical; but in general, those
who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults are
unqualified for the work of reformation, because their minds are not only
unfurnished with patterns of the fair and good, but by habit they come to
Convention