THE CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE by J. DONALD ADAMS (Text of an address delivered October 21st, 1954 at Yale Law School, being the second in a series of Lectures on "The Role of the Conservative in Today's World" sponsored by The Conservative Society of Yale Law School, a student organization.) As I understand it, the prime object of this series of lectures is to try to clear the atmosphere. All of us here, I take it, would like to cut through the recurrent mental fogs through which we move, and by which we are increasingly surrounded. We like to think of this time in which we live as one ready to call a spade a spade; we feel that we have gained greatly over the Victorians in frankness of speech, and so, in fact, we have. But what we have gained in frankness we have lost in clarity. Whatever words the Victorians used, they were, I think, surer about their meanings, and much more fully in agreement as to what those meanings were. Of the words with the biggest content, words like democ- racy and God, liberty and honor and faith, they were surest of all. They may have doubted the validity of the content, but they knew what they meant when they used the word, and so did those who heard or read it. This, I need hardly remind you, is not the case with us. Ours is a time of double talk, either conscious or unconscious. Probably never before have so many men been busily engaged in trying to befog the minds of other men-- so much so that the word propaganda has become almost synony- mous with falsehood. Then there are those among us who do not mean to mislead, but who do so because they use words carelessly or loosely or ignorantly, or because there is no certainty in their minds as to the meanings they intend. The preceding speaker in this series, Mr. Russell Kirk, dwelt at some length on the sad fate that has befallen the words "liberal" and "liberalism." No words have been more bandied about in the double-talk of our time. They have in consequence become absolutely valueless, ex- cept to those who use them for the purpose of confusion. The words "conservative" and iconservatism have, I think, fared better. It is true that they have become a little blurred by the proximity of the word "reactionary," and the attempt is sometimes made to imply that there is a direct relationship. Actually there is none, as we shall see if we examine the nature of what I have called the conservative principle. I can think of no better way of defining that term than by telling you a story. It concerns the American Indian, who had a basic understanding of the conservative principle, and from whom, if we had not been so intent upon imposing our own way of life upon him, we could have learned much more than we did. The story is taken from an excellent book called "The Ten Grandmothers, by Alice Marriott, about the Kiowas, a Plains tribe of the Southwest.