ABSTRACT
Writing in 1953, Richard Weaver complained that the Republicanism of the 1920s had taken the promotion of prosperity to be the chief end of government and that, as of the 1950s, it still did. Understood and probably sympathized, too, as he sympathized with Burke while himself preferring Abraham Lincoln's unfaltering instinct for the argument "from definition." What Weaver took the West to task for was what, finally, he reproached the Old South with as well: the failure to "define its way of life." The truth is that Weaver appears to have been one of those men for whom that modicum of balance called Happiness is to be found, intellectually speaking, neither in temperament nor in activity, but in the philosophical and moral process of reconciliation.
