Sia,—Agreed : Conservatism today has its most promising opportunity since
1789. Agreed, too, that its prospects are in- adequately reflected in Professor Michael Oakeshott's melancholy anarchist-toryism. But does Mr. Henry Fairlie come any closer to a definition of true conservatism ?
In his article he refuses to define conserva- tive attitudes, contenting himself with a denunciation of conservative betrayals. But the instances he cites are unconvincing. Some conservatives may have declared allegiance to ' equality of opportunity,' but not in the sense Mr. Fairlie uses the phrase. He seems to have confused it with ' all men are born equal,' which is certainly ludicrous if taken literally—but who takes it literally ? Equality of opportunity does not mean that every pri- vate his a field marshal's baton in his kit-bag; it means simply that no private should be excluded from the possibility of ultimate pro- motion by artificial• barriers, social, economic, religious, or political. Presumably Mr. Faulk, would not object ?
His second sort of traitors are conservatives behaving like liberals (who, he asserts, ' frag- mented Europe ')—the conservatives who now preside over the fragmentation of Africa, and who give way timidly to the ugly, illiberal, and unconscrvative force of nationalism.
Nobody would now deny that nationalism can be extremely ugly. ' There is no greater curse to a nation,' Shaw admitted, ' than a nationalist movement.' But he hastened to explain that nationalism was only the agonis- ing symptom of a suppressed natural function; when a child squalls because it is teething there is no need to take a hammer to it. Whether nationalism is a disruptive or a formative force depends mainly on its recep- tion: thwarted it can become vicious; sympathetically received—as it has come to be by British governments recently, in some cases —it can greatly assist a people groping their way to adulthood.
And before Mr. Fairlie again invokes Burke, perhaps he would take time off to re-read what Burke has to say on the subject in his speech on the American colonies, in which conservatism and liberalism fuse into what is very far from an ' unhappy alliance.'— Yours faithfully, Gothic Cottage, Walling/ord BRIAN INGI,IS
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