ABSTRACT
The mood of England in the Industrial Revolution is a mood of contrasts. Edmund Burke has been called 'the first modern Conservative'; William Cobbett 'the first great tribune of the industrial proletariat'. Burke's attack was upon democracy, as we now commonly understand it. The event which drew his fire was the Revolution in France, but his concern was not only with France; it was, perhaps primarily, with the running of a similar tide in England. Politics is a business of practical expediency, not of theoretical ideas. Burke had no experience of anything that could be called a mass society, but he could not in any case have accepted such an argument. Burke established the idea of the State as the necessary agent of human perfection, and in terms of this idea the aggressive individualism of the nineteenth century was bound to be condemned.
