In 1796, Edmund Burke was stung into writing to the Duke of Bedford about the recent revolution in France. He made a sharp distinction between Reform, which focuses on some specific grievance and at worst does no harm, and Change, which is a reckless fumbling about in the dark of abstract theory and has far-reaching consequences none can foresee.

Burke said that he hoped it would one day be proverbial, that to innovate is not to reform: the French, he said, he been given the opportunity to reform their State but had chosen innovation instead, pursuing it with a relentless determination which no one young or old, in town or country, at home or abroad, was able to escape.

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