  Burke developed his thoughts about civil interests in a work that his executors entitled Tracts on the Popery Laws, which he drafted when he was employed as private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland in the early seventeen-sixties. After this, Burke became involved more immediately in political practice, and, by one means or another, contributed to it until his death and (through the activities of his executors in publishing or reprinting his writings) from beyond the grave. This was one obvious route for practical development, even besides the amenities of status that it brought to Burke. For his view of the compound abstract words involved in civil discussion did not suggest that purely speculative study had unlimited potential either for the mind or for personal satisfaction, because a strictly speculative discussion was likely to be inconclusive at best: such words became more readily intelligible in connexion with the concrete, and therefore the practical. Hence, perhaps, Burke concluded that ‘man is made for Speculation and action; and when he pursues his nature he succeeds best in both.’ (Somerset 1957, 87). There was, on this understanding, intellectual benefit in political participation, and, equally, political practice might benefit from the speculative mind. This is likely to seem an implausible position nowadays, when political activity is frenetic, and learning is a matter of speciality; but in the eighteenth century, when an agile mind could manage at least the basics of several branches of learning, and the British legislature was often in session for less than six months each year, it was more plausible. Political participation, on Burke's understanding, besides its intellectual possibilities, had an ethical potential. To the extent that thinking about politics was necessarily uncertain, the proper conduct of affairs depended upon an honest as well as a capacious mind, and on a well-disposed management of words.