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Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to "enjoy the arts" and the right to "the full development of personality." Each specific right, said Burke, had to be won and specifically established as "prescriptive." As for more general rights: "Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to all which society . . . can do in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has but five shillings in the partnership has as good a right to it as he that has 500 pounds . . . but he has not a right to an equal dividend." A century and a half after Burke, his country was handicapped by a national obsession with equal dividends, "fair shares for all," the sterile and envious principle of artificial equality.
Majority rule is no more a natural right than equality, Burke held. Government must take pains to represent all sections or interests of a nation, but "possessing the franchise, holding office and entrusting powers to the people—these are questions to be settled upon practical considerations, varying with time, circumstance and the temper of a nation."
Inevitable Aristocracy. Burke, the great British foe of the French Revolution, had been the great British defender of American independence, which he called "a revolution not made, but prevented." Later thinkers held that the American Revolution and the French were twins, but Burke saw essential differences. He held that the main drive of the colonists was defense of two great conservative principles: local self-government and traditional prescriptive rights, both transgressed by the innovations of George III.
The American Revolution had, indeed, an anti-conservative side which later waxed under the influence of French revolutionary success. The conservative rearguard action, led by John Adams, was vigorous.
Contemporaries and historians denounced Adams as an admirer of aristocracy. He was not. He believed in the inevitability of aristocracy, but not in what he called "aristocracy of stars, garters, ribbons, golden eagles and golden fleeces . . . and hereditary descents." Adams, who had a wry wit and much experience of practical politics, defined an aristocrat as "every man who can and will influence one man to vote besides himself." Since this inequality of influence could never be avoided, it would be better to recognize natural leadership, and to use it for social good. At the same time, through checks and balances, Adams urged vigilant control of the swelling ambitions of the natural leaders.
Almost singlehanded, Adams turned back the sentiment for a one-House Congress and a central government of unchecked powers. "My opinion is, and always has been, that absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats and democrats." Adams led the fight to retain the checks & balances system of the U.S. Constitution, which Kirk calls "the most successful conservative device in the history of the world."