Perhaps more significant for Burke, however, is the manner in which revolution is conducted. He is clear that rebellion should be a last and regretted step in a nation’s pursuit of necessary reform. Revolution is a grave business that calls for sobriety and careful moral attention. 

However, Burke writes of France that “she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the licence, of a ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all the ranks of life…all the unhappy corruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power.” According to Burke, the worst offense of the French revolutionaries was their abandonment of Christianity and the Church. He dwells at length, for example, on the dishonorable nature of the National Assembly’s seizing of Church property to pay national debts. 

Burke suggests that freedom is nothing but licentiousness without a foundation of virtue. Without virtue, individuals have no reason to care for anything beyond themselves. But to love our immediate neighbors, what Burke calls our “little platoon we belong to in society,” is “the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.” What good is a national government if its people have no sense of belonging and obligation to their fellow citizens? 

Upon exiting Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked if the Continental Congress had settled on a republic or a monarch. He famously answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The American Founders were well aware of the challenges involved in maintaining self-government. When a people rule themselves, they alone bear the responsibility for discerning and acting upon what is right, not just for themselves but for the country as a whole. 

Consequently, the demands of self-government make education critical for the preservation of a republic. In the same vein, Burke credits the success of Britain’s constitutional monarchy to their inheritance of a “Gothic and monkish education” that provided them “a share in all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, which have illuminated and adorned the modern world.” He adds, “We think one main cause of this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of the knowledge which was left us by our forefathers.” As wisdom is passed down through the centuries, each generation has the opportunity to extend their well of resources beyond those provided to them by their own place and time.