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Acton and the History of Liberty
This List Is By:
Liberty Fund Staff
Liberty Fund, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Lord Acton (1834-1902) was one of the great historians of the Victorian period and one of the greatest classical liberal historians of all time. His theme was “the history of liberty” and even though he was never able to complete his magnum opus of that name he did write numerous essays, book reviews, and lectures. He also was the inspiration behind the multi-volume Cambridge Modern History.
This reading list is designed to serve as an introduction to his thought.
See our images of Acton at work and play.
1: Chronology of Acton’s Life
This is a brief chronology showing the main events in Acton’s life.
Source: From Acton’s The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=558&Itemid=260 on 2008/2/2
2: A short Biography
A short biography of Acton by someone who knew him.
Source: INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR to John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, with an Introductory Memoir by Herbert Paul, Second edition with additional letters (London: Macmillan, 1913).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1148&Itemid=260 on 2008/2/2
3: Acton as a Teacher
Acton spent much of his life reading and teaching others. His library was donated to the University of Cambridge and is massive, some 60,000-80,000 volumes. Here is an account of his prowess as a teacher.
Source: Acton’s Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=587&Itemid=283 on 2008/2/2
4: Acton on the Incompetence of Political Leaders
Acton was close to the Gladstone family and even spent time vacationing with them in Europe. In one of his letters to Mary Gladstone (daughter of the British Prime Minister) Acton talks ab out the danger of having smart, educated people as political leaders:
They will admit much of my theory, but then they will say, like practical men, that the ignorant classes cannot understand affairs of state, and are sure to go wrong. But the odd thing is that the most prosperous nations in the world are both governed by the masses —France and America. So there must be a flaw in the argument somewhere. The fact is that education, intelligence, wealth are a security against certain faults of conduct, not against errors of policy. There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopædia of Error. They would assert Slavery, Socialism, Persecution, Divine Right, military despotism, the reign of force, the supremacy of the executive over legislation and justice, purchase in the magistracy, the abolition of credit, the limitation of laws to nineteen years, etc. If you were to read Walter Scott’s pamphlets, Southey’s Colloquies, Ellenborough’s Diary, Wellington’s Despatches—distrust of the select few, of the chosen leaders of the community, would displace the dread of the masses. The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation. However that may be, the transfer of power to the lower class was not the act of Mr. Gladstone, but of the Conservatives in 1867. It still requires to be rectified and regulated; but I am sure that in his hands the change would have been less violent.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W.E. Gladstone, with an Introductory Memoir by Herbert Paul, Second edition with additional letters (London: Macmillan, 1913).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/2064 on 2008-03-18
The text is in the public domain.
INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
Lord Acton was in his lifetime dimly known to the general public as a prodigy of learning. The publication of his lectures at Cambridge was posthumous, and he was often quoted as an example of natural gifts buried under an accumulation of excessive knowledge. The image of a Dryasdust, of a bookworm, of a walking Dictionary, was excited by his name among those to whom he was a name and nothing more. To those who had the privilege of his acquaintance he appeared almost the precise opposite of a picture too unlike the truth to be even a caricature. For Lord Acton was a thorough man of the world. An insatiable, systematic, and effective reader, he was anything but a recluse. No man had a keener zest for the society of his intellectual equals. No one took a stronger interest in the events of the day, and the gossip of the hour. His learning, though vast and genuine, was never obtruded. Always ready to impart information, he shrank from the semblance of volunteering it. Indeed, if no direct appeal were made to him, he would let people without a tithe of his knowledge lay down the law as if they knew everything, and would betray no other sign of amusement than an enigmatical smile. He had something of Addison's tendency, exhibited in a much more remarkable and somewhat less genial form by Mr. Froude, to draw out rather than to repress the sallies of conceited ignorance. But for any one who wished to learn his resources were in their fullest extent available. To be in his company was like being in the best of historical libraries with the best of historical catalogues. A question produced not only a direct and complete answer, but also useful advice about the books which the inquirer ought to consult. On matters of opinion he was much more reticent. Sometimes, without a moment's warning, he would utter a paradox which from any one else might have seemed the mere recklessness of socialism, but which, coming from him, was treasured in the memory. I remember, for instance, his telling me that Rousseau had produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero, or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who ever lived. But such sweeping assertions were few. His general attitude was one of rigid adhesion to certain facts, and careful avoidance of hasty judgments. It was not that Lord Acton had no strong opinions. Few people had stronger opinions than he, and their foundation was so solid that it was almost impossible to displace them. But he liked to hear all sides of every question, and to make allowance for all errors which did not involve a violation of the moral law. Any apology, or even excuse, for departure from the highway of the Decalogue he regarded as in itself a crime.
The force and originality of Lord Acton's conversation are reflected, and may be inferred, from his epistolary style. In absolutely uncongenial company he would maintain the silence of the tomb. But when there was any community of taste or subject, he shone equally as a talker and as a listener. It was not that he tried to shine. He did not aim at epigram, and his humour was as spontaneous as it was delightful. He loved to stimulate conversation in others, and no man had more sympathy with a good thing which he had not said himself. His manner was such that his compliments sometimes suggested a faint suspicion of insincerity. The suspicion, however, was unjust, and was merely the result of a subtle, half ironic manner. He was entirely free from jealousy, vanity, and egoism. A merciless intellectual critic he could hardly help being. He had so trained and furnished his mind that it rejected instinctively a sophism or a false pretence.
- Antonio Stradivari has an eye
- That winces at false work and loves the true.
His intimate friends agreed that he was the raciest and most stimulating of companions, with an instinctive perception for the true significance of a hint, so that they never had to tell him a thing twice, or to explain it once. That letters take their tone from the recipient as well as from the writer is a commonplace, almost a platitude. While therefore only Lord Acton's half of this correspondence is printed, the nature of the other half may be surmised from what he says himself. Such letters as the criticism of John Inglesant, or the view of Mr. Gladstone as he will appear to posterity, or the estimate of Ultramontane ethics, stand out as solid documents with a permanent and independent value of their own. The more numerous specimens of his familiar writing will readily suggest why he found this correspondence so congenial, and what was the reason in each case for his choice of topics. The pliability and adaptability of his mind, his easy transitions from grave to gay, his sympathy with all a friend's interests and feelings, are visible in every page.
Lord Acton's personality was a negative of all shams. His spacious forehead, his deep sonorous voice, his piercing eyes, and his air of vigilant repose, were the outward signs of genuine power, in which the latent force behind is greater than anything the surface displays. He might well have sat to Titian for one of those ecclesiastical statesmen whose mingled strength and subtlety have attracted the admiring gaze of three hundred and fifty years. He was a good talker because he was a good listener, always interested in the subject, not seeking to exhaust it, rather putting in from time to time the exactly appropriate word. To draw Lord Acton out, to make him declare himself upon some doubtful or delicate point, was a hopeless task. His face at once assumed the expression of the Sphinx. To students, on the other hand, his generosity was unbounded, and the accumulations of a lifetime were at the disposal of any one who was willing to profit by them. It will be seen from these letters that Lord Acton was not merely a learned man. His perceptions were quick and shrewd. His judgment was clear and sound. He watched every move in the political game with a vigilant keenness quickened by the depth of his interest in the great leader whom he followed to the end. Circumstances had made him from his boyhood familiar with the best political society not merely of England but of Europe. He was as much at home in Italy and in Germany as in his native land, so that he could compare Mr. Gladstone with foreign statesmen of his own time as well as with British statesmen of the past. Although it has been roughly estimated by his friend Mr. Bryce that Lord Acton read on an average an octavo volume a day, as often as not in German, he was never a bookworm. When he was in London he constantly dined out, and he corresponded freely with continental friends. Few people were more agreeable in a country house. No one assumed more naturally the aspect of disengaged leisure, and it was possible to live in the same house with him for weeks without ever seeing him read. Even the frivolities of the world were not beneath his notice. He liked to know about marriages before they occurred. He was an excellent judge of cookery and of wine. Yet the passion of his life was reading. It was, as has been well said, like a physical appetite, and it seemed, if it changed at all, to grow stronger as he grew older. His reading was chiefly historical. He was no great classical scholar. The voluminous notes to his inaugural lecture at Cambridge do not contain a single quotation from any classical author of Greece or Rome. He cared little for poetry, for art, or for pure literature, the literature of style. Of physical science he knew only what most educated men know. But he was well versed in metaphysics, he was a deep theologian, and his knowledge of modern history was only bounded by the limits of the theme.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton was born at Naples on the 10th of January 1834, the only son of Sir Richard Acton, seventh baronet, and the heiress of the German house whose name, Dalberg, he bore. An Italian birthplace, a German mother, and an English father stamped him from the beginning as a citizen of the world. His grandfather, Sir John Francis Acton, had been Prime Minister of Naples under Ferdinand the Fourth, and had reorganised the Neapolitan navy. His maternal grandfather entered the service of France, and represented Louis the Eighteenth at the Congress of Vienna. No wonder that Lord Acton spoke German and Italian as well as French, or that the chief foreign languages were as familiar to him as his own. In fact, as well as in blood, he was only half an Englishman. His entire freedom from insular prejudice, which was peculiarly noticeable in his opinions on Irish affairs, must be attributed not less to his religion than to his origin. He adhered throughout his life, notwithstanding many difficulties which would have shaken a less profound faith, to the Church of Rome. Nor was he one of those Catholics who remain Catholics because they do not care enough about the matter to change. Liberal as he was, tolerant as he was, broad as he was, the central truths of the Christian religion and of the Catholic Church were not merely articles of his creed, but guiding principles of his conduct. If these letters show anything, they show that in Lord Acton's mind, and in his estimate of human affairs, religion overmastered all mundane considerations. It was with him first, and last, and everywhere. Upon that noble text, “Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty,” his life and writings are a sermon. Hating Ultramontanism and Vaticanism as only a passionate believer in the Church which they disfigured could hate them, cherishing the right of private judgment within the widest limits which Rome had ever allowed, he died, as he was baptized, in the faith of his ancestors. Perhaps his allegiance was none the less staunch because it was ethical and rational; because he clung always and before all things, in the clash of creeds, to “those things which are certain still, the grand, simple landmarks of morality.” “If,” said the greatest preacher in the Church of England sixty years ago, “if there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a coward.” Lord Acton would have been unable to conceive the protasis. The apodosis he would not have denied.
Sir Richard Acton died while his son was a child, and at the age of nine Sir John was sent by his mother to the Roman Catholic College at Oscott, of which Dr. Wiseman was the head. Wiseman, until Mr. Wilfrid Ward published his excellent biography, was chiefly known to English Protestants as the instrument of papal aggression, and the subject of Robert Browning's satirical poem, “Bishop Blougram's Apology.” He was in truth an able and accomplished man, a really great organiser, thoroughly well qualified to preside over an educational establishment like Oscott. He was not in any sense of the word a Liberal, and in later years the pupil did not always agree with the master. But of Oscott Lord Acton always spoke with affection, and the five years which he spent there in the pursuit of knowledge were among the happiest in a happy existence. It was the young man's own desire to enter the University of Cambridge. For he did not, like some Catholics, hold it sinful to receive education from a Protestant source. The law would not even then have prevented him from matriculating at Cambridge, as it would at Oxford, and yet the colleges, more bigoted than the law, refused, on what they doubtless considered religious grounds, to receive a student as hungry for learning as ever sought admission within their venerable precincts. Sir John Acton, so peculiarly fitted by nature and education to adorn and illustrate a University, may well have asked with Macaulay, what was the faith of Edward the Third, and Henry the Sixth, of Margaret of Anjou, and Margaret of Richmond, from whose foundations the head of a Catholic family was turned away. If Acton had gone to Cambridge, he would have known more about Herodotus and Thucydides, Cæsar and Tacitus. Of history in its more modern sense, and its more specially ecclesiastical aspects, he would probably have learnt less. Instead of keeping his terms under the walls of the Fitzwilliam, he went to Munich, and studied with the illustrious Döllinger. Döllinger was distinguished for learning even among German professors, and though, unlike his pupil, eminent in classical scholarship as well as in theology, was before all things an historian. He it was who taught Acton to look at everything from the historical point of view, and to remember that, in the immortal words of Coleridge, “The man who puts even Christianity before truth will go on to put the Church before Christianity, and will end by putting himself before the Church.” The time came both to Döllinger and to Acton, when the voice of the Church said one thing, and the voice of truth another. They did not hesitate. But the results to the priest were different from the results to the layman.
At Munich, meanwhile, Sir John Acton laboured prodigiously. Latin and Greek he never mastered as he would have mastered them under Munro and Kennedy. But he learned them well enough for the purposes of an historian, with more help than Gibbon had, though not with the same innate genius. Of French, German, Italian, and Spanish, he became a master. At any subsequent period he would just as soon have written or spoken in French or German as in English. About this time he began to collect the splendid library which he formed in his country house at Aldenham in Shropshire. It consisted, when complete, of sixty thousand volumes, many of them covered with his marginal notes. Unlike most libraries, this one had a definite object, and reason for existence. Lord Acton was from the schoolroom to the grave an ardent, convinced, and enthusiastic Liberal. It was his aim to write a History of Liberty. The book was never written. Not indolence, but a procrastination which resulted from cherishing an impossibly high ideal, prevented it from coming to the light. One of his reasons for not beginning the History of Liberty was that the whole truth about the French Revolution had not yet been discovered. But the library was collected to illustrate the History, and thus the books, now at Cambridge, have a peculiar interest, or rather a peculiar character, of their own. When they were at Aldenham, Lord Acton knew the precise position which each volume occupied in its case and shelf. It is related that on one of his visits to his beloved room, while the house was let, the servants found him reading when they came in the morning to open the shutters. He had forgotten to go to bed. Mr. Bryce's Studies in Contemporary Biography describe in a peculiarly vivid and impressive manner how Acton was dominated and haunted by the idea that he never fulfilled. Late one night, in his library at Cannes, while Mr. Bryce was staying with him, it found vent in speech. “He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired; seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, yet greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remodelled institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again.”
With Professor Döllinger Sir John Acton visited France, and made many distinguished friends, including the foremost among French Liberal Catholics, Montalembert; Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous author of Democracy in America, whose memoirs record the blunders of the Second Republic in France with a concentrated irony not unworthy of Tacitus; and Fustel de Coulanges, whose Cité Antique was as well known thirty years ago in Oxford as in Paris. His German friends were innumerable. Bluntschli, the great jurist, and von Sybel, the historian of the French Revolution, were among them. Of the illustrious Ranke he proclaimed himself a disciple, and it is intensely characteristic of him that his favourite among the moral philosophers of his own day was a Protestant, Rothe. Rothe's Ethik, he said, was the book which he would give to any one whom he wished to turn out a good Catholic. But as Lord Acton would not have crossed the room to make ten proselytes, the value of this selection may easily be exaggerated. To Protestant theology he paid as much attention as to Catholic. Those who feared God and followed Christ in every nation belonged to his household of faith.
Lord Acton deserved as well as Cobden, though for quite other reasons, to be called an international man. Not a great traveller, as travelling is understood in these days of universal locomotion, he was familiar with the chief capitals of Europe, and, so soon as his formal education was completed, he paid a visit to the United States. He was then, and always remained, an ardent admirer of the American Constitution, and of the illustrious men who made it. Its temporary breakdown in 1861 was scarcely then in sight Slave States and Free States were flourishing side by side, and the vital question whether a State had the right to secede from the Union, which could only be determined by civil war, still slumbered in abeyance. Acton held strongly Calhoun's doctrine of Sovereign States, and that is why he “broke his heart over the surrender of Lee.” If the point had been decided by the letter of the Constitution, so that the Supreme Court could have given an authoritative decision upon it as upon the right of recapturing fugitive slaves, many thousands of lives might have been spared. When Sir John Acton went to Washington, the Abolitionists, though busy, were a small minority; they carried their lives in their hands, and the Republicans were no better prepared than the Democrats to adopt abolition as a principle. The Constitution did not expressly forbid slavery. Neither, as was often urged, did the New Testament. But the one said that all men were born equal, without specifying white men; and St. Paul declared that, within the pale of Christendom, there was neither Jew nor Greek, neither barbarian nor Scythian, neither bond nor free.
At the age of twenty-two Sir John Acton found himself in a country whose institutions differed as widely as possible from those of the United States. His mother had married Lord Granville, and he accompanied his step-father to Moscow when Alexander the Second was crowned there in 1856. Lord Granville's reception was not a pleasant one, and even so accomplished a master of tact was driven to remonstrate against the coldness of his treatment, which was made more remarkable, though not more agreeable, by the flattering attentions paid to the French representative, M. de Morny. The Crimean War was hardly over, the ink on the Treaty of Paris was scarcely dry, and already Russia was on better terms with France than with England, while England was on worse terms with France than with Russia. The Emperor Napoleon had taken no pains to secure the fulfillment of the Treaty, whereas Lord Palmerston could not have displayed more zeal on behalf of Turkey if he had been the Sultan's Minister instead of the Queen's. The singularity of the situation could not fail to strike such a mind as Sir John Acton's. For the result of a war in which England had sacrificed twenty thousand men and seventy-six millions sterling to maintain what were called in a licentious phrase the liberties of Europe was that she had not a friend on the European Continent except Turkey. The distinguished company with whom Sir John Acton associated at Moscow were astonished “by the vastness of his knowledge and his mode of exposition.” Between Sir John and his step-father there could not be much real sympathy of taste or disposition. Lord Granville, as Matthew Arnold says, had studied in the book of the world rather than in the world of books. Nature seemed to have destined him to lead the Liberal party in the House of Lords. A thorough and genuine Liberal he always was. He belonged to the Manchester school, the school of Cobden and Bright. At the same time his finished manners, his imperturbable temper, and his ready wit, were just the right equipment for the chief of an aristocratic minority. He knew little, and cared less, about the serious study of historical ethics, and historical politics, which was the essential business of Acton's life.
When he was twenty-five, Sir John Acton came to live at Aldenham, his country house in Shropshire, where there was ample room for many thousands of books. At the General Election held in the summer of 1859 he was returned to Parliament. Although Catholic Emancipation was thirty years old, its effects were almost exclusively confined to Ireland. It was hardly possible for a Roman Catholic to find a seat in England, and Sir John Acton sat for the small Irish borough of Carlow, disfranchised in 1885. He was counted as a Whig, and a supporter of Lord Palmerston. But there was no sympathy, no point of contact, between the jaunty Premier and the erudite, philosophical, reflective Member for Carlow. “No one agrees with me, and I agree with no one,” said Sir John, with unusual tautology. It was not quite true. During those almost silent years of Parliamentary life he watched with critical and yet admiring interest the career of the illustrious man who was destined to be Palmerston's successor. Although Mr. Gladstone had not time to acquire the learning of his disciple, and upon the negative results of German scholarship was inclined to look askance, he was the best theologian, as well as the best financier, in Parliament, and few men were so well qualified to appreciate the range or the depth of Acton's researches. Acton, on his part, was fascinated by the combination of intellectual subtlety with practical capacity which made the Chancellor of the Exchequer the first man in the House of Commons. It was Palmerston's House, not Gladstone's, and the Derbyites were almost as numerous as the Palmerstonians. There was then no Gladstonian party at all. The Peelites were disbanded. Some had fallen back into the Conservative ranks. Some, like Sidney Herbert, who died in 1861, Cardwell, and Gladstone himself, sat in the Cabinet of Lord Palmerston. Others had fallen out of public life altogether. Mr. Gladstone was still to the general public somewhat of an enigma. So lately as May 1858 he had been earnestly entreated both by Lord Derby and by Mr. Disraeli to accept the Board of Control on the resignation of Lord Ellenborough. He had voted for the Conservative Reform Bill of 1859, and against Lord Hartington's motion which turned Lord Derby out. When he accepted office in a Liberal Administration, his Tory constituents at Oxford were so much surprised and annoyed that they did their best to deprive him of his seat, and almost succeeded. The Whigs regarded him as a Tory and a Puseyite. The Tories bore a grudge against him because he had imposed a succession duty on landed estates. The Radicals considered him a lukewarm reformer, and in short hardly any one except his personal friends knew what to make of him. Then came the opportunity, and with it was displayed the full grandeur of the man. The Parliament of 1859 passed no successful or memorable legislation which was not connected with finance. Mr. Gladstone's Budgets were the great events of the Sessions from 1860 to 1865. Almost every year taxes were repealed, expenditure was diminished, revenue was increased. After an obstinate conflict with the House of Lords the paper duty disappeared, and with it the power of the Lords to interfere, except by rejecting a whole Budget, with the taxation of the people. The duties on tea and sugar were so reduced as to bring those commodities within the reach of the working classes. The income-tax fell from nine pence to four pence. The Commercial Treaty with France preserved the peace of Europe, and by the trade which it created between the two sides of the English Channel more than made up for the losses inflicted upon British commerce by the American War. The speeches in which Mr. Gladstone's Budgets of that period were expounded, especially those of 1860 and 1861, are superb specimens of the eloquence which increases, while it dignifies, the force of reason. His speech on the taxation of charities in 1863, though it failed to convince the House that charitable endowments should be taxed, was pronounced by a French critic to combine the grandeur of Berryer with the subtlety of Theirs. Acton was no financier. Neither his tastes nor his training qualified him to be a critic of Budgets, and when he became, as will presently appear, a political editor, he left that business to Mr. Lowe, claiming, with some apparent justification, that he thus made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. But he loved historical processes quite as much as historical results, and the hours which he spent in the House of Commons while the future leader of the Liberal party proved himself to be the economic successor of Walpole, Pitt, and Peel, fixed his political allegiance for the remainder of his life.
All the time that Mr. Gladstone was dazzling the country by the brilliance of his finance, and convincing practical men by the hard test of figures at the year's end, he had to fight his colleagues in the Cabinet as well as his opponents at St Stephen's. Lord John Russell nearly ruined the Budget of 1860 by the persistency with which he pressed his unlucky Reform Bill. Lord Palmerston was continually demanding money for safeguards against a French invasion in which the Chancellor of the Exchequer would not believe. Cobden, from the outside, was urging the one genuine economist in the Cabinet to promote the cause of economy by resigning. Acton, though dissatisfied with “bald Cobdenites,” as he termed them, was always on Gladstone's, and never on Palmerston's side. On the other hand there was a question of European importance which united Mr. Gladstone hand and glove with the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Italian unity, and Italian independence, were as dear to Palmerston and Russell as to Gladstone. Lord John's famous despatch of October 1861, vindicating the right of the Italians to choose their own rulers, was greeted with enthusiastic delight throughout the Italian peninsula. The cause for which Cavour lived, only to die in the moment of its triumph, was nowhere pleaded with more persuasive power than by Mr. Gladstone in the Parliament of 1859. Although Lord Palmerston's Government could never reckon upon a majority of fifteen, the opposition to their Italian policy came chiefly from a few Irish Catholics. Sir John Acton, though a Roman Catholic, and an Irish Member, took no part in it. He was deeply imbued with the spirit of liberty, and he held with all the strength of his mind that the cause of religion was the cause of freedom. To maintain Austria in Italy, or even the temporal power of the Pope, did not belong to Catholicism as he understood it. To identify soundness of faith with arbitrary rule was, in the eyes of a Liberal Catholic like Acton, one of those blunders which are worse than crimes. He was drawn to Mr. Gladstone both by admiration of his splendid capacity and by agreement with his continental Liberalism. In the House of Commons he hardly ever raised his voice. For six years he only put two questions, and made one speech. The questions were unimportant The speech, delivered on the 4th of May 1860, was characteristic. It was in effect an appeal for information about the government of the Papal States. No Catholic, said Sir John Acton, would defend bad government because it was exercised in the name of the Pope. In this case the evidence was contradictory, and all he wanted was the truth. Lord John Russell was unable to give a satisfactory reply, because the Queen had no accredited representative at Rome. Macaulay's description of the Papal States a few years before this time is well known. If, he said, you met a man who was neither a priest nor a soldier, and who did not beg, you might be pretty sure that he was a foreigner. Sir John Acton, though he deprecated hasty judgments, was incapable of defending oppression or injustice. The fact that it was the work of Catholics, so far from prejudicing him in its favour, would simply have increased the severity of his condemnation. It would, in his eyes, have been falling from a higher standard.
The two political subjects to which Sir John Acton attached most importance were ecclesiastical establishments and agrarian reform. The land laws were safe from disturbance under a Premier who flippantly remarked that tenant right was landlord wrong. The Irish Church, to which, as a Catholic and an Irish Member, Acton could not be indifferent, suddenly flashed into fatal prominence, when, on the 28th of March 1865, Mr. Gladstone declared that it did not fulfill its proper functions, because it ministered only to one-eighth, or one-ninth, of the community. This speech, coupled with his declaration of the previous year that every man not mentally or morally disqualified was on the face of it entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution, gave Mr. Gladstone for the first time the confidence of the working classes and of the Radical party. Sir John Acton went with him, then and afterwards, in all confidence and hope. As a Catholic he would naturally have been opposed to the maintenance of Protestant ascendancy by law. As a Liberal he was in favour of extending the suffrage, and of religious equality. But indeed the foundation of his agreement with Mr. Gladstone lay deeper than any political principle or measure. Belonging to two different branches of the Christian Church, they both desired the reunion of Christendom, and both held that religion was the guiding star in public as in private life. Between a High Churchman like Mr. Gladstone and a Liberal Catholic like Sir John Acton there was plenty of common ground. Both men became, in every sense of the word, more Liberal as they grew older, and Acton's belief in his leader ripened into a reverential devotion which nothing could shake.
At the General Election of 1865, Sir John Acton stood in the Whig or Liberal interest for Bridgnorth, the nearest town to Aldenham, and then a Parliamentary borough. “On that occasion he assured the electors that he represented not the body but the spirit of the Church of Rome.” What the electors made of this assurance we do not know, and it would be vain to conjecture. They placed him, however, at the head of the poll. But his majority was a single vote, which disappeared on a scrutiny, and he never again took his seat on the green benches of the House of Commons. He had none of the gifts required for winning large popular constituencies, even if his creed had not been a fatal objection in the mind of the average British voter five-and-thirty years ago.
While Sir John Acton sat in the House, and silently voted with his party, he had not been inactive. The views of the most cultivated and enlightened among English Catholics were expressed in the fifties by a monthly periodical called the Rambler. The editor of the Rambler was the greatest of converts, John Henry Newman. In 1859 an article of Newman's on consulting the laity in matters of doctrine was condemned by authority at Rome, and Newman withdrew from the editorial chair. He was succeeded by Sir John Acton, and no better choice could have been made. He edited the Rambler till 1862, when it became merged in the Homell and Foreign Review. His first contribution, in November 1859, was a criticism of Mill on Liberty, which he took up again in the following March. The subject was peculiarly his own, though he could not, as a Catholic, approach it from Mil's point of view. He wrote, contrary to his custom, in the first person singular, and signed the article “A”; which, in his own review; amounted to acknowledgment. “By liberty,” wrote this Liberal Catholic, “I mean absence of accountability to any temporal authority,” and he added, “I make no reservations.” He afterwards learned that liberty was positive, and that spiritual as well as temporal authority might be pushed to a point inconsistent with freedom. These youthful contributions to his favourite theme show rather the wonderful knowledge which he had acquired at five-and-twenty than the delicate and subtle discrimination which distinguishes his later work. One exquisite quotation deserves to be quoted again. Cui Christus vim intulit? wrote Count Boniface to St. Augustine. Quem coegit? To whom did Christ apply violence? Whom did he coerce? The final failure of persecution was in Sir John Acton's opinion the act of Louis the Fourteenth when he revoked the Edict of Nantes. “Coercion,” he added, “is an educational instrument which Western Europe has outgrown,” though indeed it had not much success in the age of the Cæsars. On the Inquisition he was discreetly silent. But he concluded with a plea for the sacredness of moral responsibility, which hardly came within the scope of Mil's eloquent and powerful treatise. For a Catholic organ, however, the treatment of Mill is, if not sympathetic, at least appreciative and respectful. Of this article Mr. Gladstone wrote to the author, “I have read your valuable and remarkable paper. Its principles and politics I embrace; its research and wealth of knowledge I admire; and its whole atmosphere, if I may so speak, is that which I desire to breathe. It is a truly English paper.”
Among Sir John Acton's other contributions to the Rambler one of the most interesting is his account of Cavour, which appeared in July 1861, just after the Italian statesman's death. Acton had an abhorrence of Carlylean hero-worship, and he did less than justice to Cavour's regeneration of Italy. His criticism of a man who for many years of his too brief life was engrossed in a desperate struggle for national independence is cold and dry. He cannot conceal either the scanty resources which Cavour had at his disposal, or the magnitude of the results which those resources were made to achieve. But, true to his favourite subject, he analysed the Minister's conception of liberty, and found it wanting. It was liberty for the State, not liberty for the individual, nor for the Church. Yet Cavour's cherished ideal was “a free Church in a free State,” and he would probably have replied that from the purely individual point of view Piedmont might well challenge comparison with the Austrian provinces of Italy or the States of the Church. If Cavour's life had been spared, we may be sure that he would, as his dying words about Naples imply, have governed in accordance with the principles of constitutional freedom. A year later, in July 1862, Acton inaugurated the Home and Foreign Review with a characteristic article on “Nationality.” He traced the rise of national sentiment in Europe to the infamous partition of Poland, of which Burke said that no wise or honest man could approve. It was fostered by the French Revolution, and became afterwards the instrument by which Napoleon fell. The Holy Alliance suppressed it for a time, but it soon revived in Italy. By Nationalism, which most Englishmen forty years ago favoured everywhere except in Ireland, Acton meant, as he explains, “the complete and consistent theory that the State and the nation must be coextensive.” “Exile is the nursery of nationality,” he proceeds, “as oppression is the school of liberalism; and Mazzini conceived the idea of Young Italy when he was a refugee at Marseilles.” To the idea of Nationalism, as he defines it, Acton opposed the principle that “the combination of different nations in one State is as necessary a condition of civilised life as the combination of men in society.” To overcome national differences was the mission of the Church, and patriotism was in political life what faith was in religion. There could be no nationality with any claim upon men's allegiance except what was formed by the State. “The Swiss are ethnologically either French, Italian, or German; but no nationality has the slightest claim upon them, except the purely political nationality of Switzerland.” The instance was well chosen. Unfortunately Acton goes on to say that “the citizens of Florence and of Naples have no political community with each other,” which had ceased to be true before the article appeared. Nor was it altogether a fortunate prediction that no organised State could be formed in Mexico, which after the departure of the French became a stable Republic. Paradoxical as the essay in some respects was, it is valuable as an analysis of political ideas, and its concluding sentence is full of suggestion even to minds which do not accept the opinions implied. “Although,” so it runs, “the theory of nationality is more absurd and more criminal than the theory of Socialism, it has an important mission in the world, and marks the final conflict, and therefore the end, of two forces which are the worst enemies of civil freedom—the absolute monarchy and the revolution.”
There is nothing in Sir John Acton's essay on “Nationality” which would be likely to excite suspicion at the Court of Rome. But the Home and Foreign Review was known to be a Liberal as well as a Catholic organ. It was marked by independence of tone, as well as by originality of thought, and it soon fell under suspicion. Even its motto, Seu vetus est verutn diligo sive novum, “I love the truth, whether it be old or new,” was ambiguous. For how can Catholic truth be new? In the month of August 1862, Cardinal Wiseman, the acknowledged head of the Roman Catholic Church in England, received an address from his clergy. His reply contained a severe censure of the Home and Foreign Review for the “absence of all reserve or reverence in its treatment of persons or of things deemed sacred, its grazing even the very edges of the most perilous abysses of error, and its habitual preference of uncatholic to Catholic instincts, tendencies, and motives.” The particular charge of personal misrepresentation against which the Cardinal protested has long since lost whatever interest it may once have had. The general tone of Acton's remonstrance, made in his editorial character and in the periodical condemned, illustrates his attitude towards the Church to which he belonged. Of Wiseman he writes not merely with the reverence due to his ecclesiastical rank, but with the affection of an old pupil at Oscott. “In the Cardina's support and approbation of our work,” he says, “we should recognise an aid more valuable to the cause we are engaged in than the utmost support which could be afforded to us by any other person.” He then proceeds to describe the foundation of the Review. “That foundation is a humble faith in the infallible teaching of the Catholic Church, a devotion to her cause which controls every other interest, and an attachment to her authority which no other influence can supplant. If in anything published by us a passage can be found which is contrary to that doctrine, incompatible with that devotion, or disrespectful to that authority, we sincerely retract and lament it. No such passage was ever consciously admitted into the pages either of the late Rambler or of the Review.” The aim of literature and the function of the journalist are declared to be on a lower level than the work and duty of the Church, though directed to the same ends as hers. “The political and intellectual orders remain permanently distinct from the spiritual. They follow their own ends, they obey their own laws, and in doing so they support the cause of religion by the discovery of truth and the upholding of right.” These manly and sensible words are followed by a still more eloquent and significant passage, which expresses the deepest convictions of Acton's mind. “A political law or a scientific truth may be perilous to the morals or the faith of individuals; but it cannot on this ground be resisted by the Church. … A discovery may be made in science which will shake the faith of thousands; yet religion cannot regret it or object to it. The difference in this respect between a true and a false religion is, that one judges all things by the standard of their truth, the other by the touchstone of its own interests. A false religion fears the progress of all truth; a true religion seeks and recognises truth wherever it can be found.”
When Acton wrote thus, the Darwinian controversy was at its height, and many Protestants, who thought that they believed in the right of private judgment, showed much less tolerance than he. Against the timid faith which feared the light, against the false morality which would do evil that good might come, Acton waged incessant war. Truth, morality, and justice could not in his eyes be inconsistent with the doctrines of the Church. If they appeared to be so, it must be because the doctrines were erroneously expressed or imperfectly understood. To identify the Church with a cause, with a party, with anything lower than morality and religion, was a betrayal of duty and a surrender of the fortress. The policy of the Home and Foreign Review, as expounded by him, was to leave the domains of faith and ecclesiastical government alone, but on all other matters to seek the highest attainable certainty. The progress of political right and scientific knowledge, the development of freedom in the state and of truth in literature, were its objects. Here for the time the quarrel rested. It is not to be supposed that Pius the Ninth and his advisers were satisfied with this lucid and pungent exposition of Liberal principles. But Wiseman had learned from experience that the interests of Catholicism in England were not promoted by a policy of aggression, and he was aware that Sir John Acton spoke for most of those Catholics who did not belong to the extreme or Ultramontane school. For nearly two years Sir John remained editor of the Home and Foreign Review. Then the final thunderbolt was launched by a higher power than Wiseman. At the Congress of Munich in 1863 Acton's friend and teacher, Professor Döllinger, delivered an eloquent plea for the union of Christendom, lamenting the want of dogmatic standards among Protestants, and at the same time urging Catholics “to replace the mediæval analytical method by the principle of historical development, and to encounter scientific error with scientific weapons.” Sir John Acton attended this congress, and reported its proceedings to his Review. In March 1864 the Pope addressed a brief to the Archbishop of Munich, in which he declared that the opinions of Catholic writers were subject to the authority of the Roman congregations. After this Acton felt that it was useless to continue the struggle, or to carry on the Home and Foreign Review. In a farewell article, entitled “Conflicts with Rome,” he explained that he was equally unable to admit the doctrines of the brief or to dispute the authority which proclaimed them. In these circumstances he had only one course to take. He could not abandon principles he sincerely held. He could not reject the judgment of the Holy See without committing the sin of apostasy. “The principles had not ceased to be true, nor the authority to be legitimate, because the two were in contradiction.” He could only sacrifice the Home and Foreign Review. He regretted its discontinuance, because, while there were plenty of magazines to represent science apart from religion, and religion apart from science, it had been his special object to exhibit the two in union. But he had no alternative, if he were to preserve his intellectual honesty and also his loyalty to the Church.
It would have been difficult to emerge with more credit from a peculiarly painful and delicate position. The article, and with it the last number of the Review, appeared in April 1864, when Sir John Acton was thirty years of age. The surpassing prudence which accompanied him from boyhood through life had no connection with weakness nor timidity. It resulted from a very rare faculty of apprehending all aspects of a question at once, and of keeping them separate in his mind. In this same year 1864 Acton told one of his parliamentary friends, the late Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, that he had never felt the slightest doubt about any dogma of the Catholic, meaning the Roman Catholic, Church. A time was to come when his faith would be more severely tried. But, independent as he had always been, Acton was not formed by nature to be a leader of revolts. Moral or intellectual anarchy was the last thing he desired. If he had been brought up a Protestant, he would probably have remained one. In that case, however, he would have seen the danger of private interpretation even more clearly than the perils of dogmatic despotism. He would have asked, if, as Bishop Butler says, we must judge of revelation itself by reason, whose reason it was to be.
At the close of the year 1864, the tenth anniversary of the date on which he had himself proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin as a dogma, the Pope issued his Encyclical Letter against modern thought. In the Syllabus of Errors which this epistle condemned, Pius the Ninth, who had once been reckoned a Liberal, included the heresy that the Holy See ought to seek reconciliation with progress, with Liberalism, and with modern thought. He further pronounced that the Roman Catholic religion should be the exclusive religion of the State; and that liberty of worship, and freedom of the Press, promoted moral corruption and religious indifference. There was, he added, no hope for the eternal salvation of those who did not belong to the true Church. Although Sir John Acton had had some share in provoking the publication of the Syllabus, he made no reply. He had withdrawn from the controversy without surrendering either his faith as a Catholic or his principles as a man.
In 1865 Acton ceased to be a Member of Parliament, and in the same year he married a Bavarian lady, the eldest daughter of Count Arco-Valley. From this time too he abandoned the practice of regular editing and reviewing, nor did he write again for avowedly Catholic organs, though he was throughout the remainder of his life an occasional contributor to secular periodicals on historical and theological subjects. The popular idea that he wrote little, and passed his whole time in reading or talking, is erroneous. That he did not put out much in his own name is true. But the list of his anonymous articles fills more than twenty pages of an octavo volume, and their variety is quite as remarkable as their number. He read every new book of the smallest importance. In the Home and Foreign Review alone there are more than seventy critical notices from his pen. The pen, however, was not the only instrument by which he imparted to others some fragments from his vast stores of knowledge. To his neighbours, one can hardly call them his constituents, in the little town of Bridgnorth, he delivered several lectures, now out of print and scarce, which for range and quality must have been very different from anything his audience had heard before. The first, delivered on the 18th of January 1866, is now only to be found in the Bridgnorth Journal for the 20th. Its subject is “The Civil War in America: Its Place in History.” Nothing can be more characteristic than the tone and temper of this discourse. Though dated only a few months after the fall of Richmond, when, as Acton says in one of these letters, he “broke his heart over the surrender of Lee,” it is as calm and judicial, not to say as dry, as if he were investigating an antiquarian problem. Its dryness never becomes dulness. Unless, however, the Literary and Scientific Institution of Bridgnorth was far above the ordinary level of such bodies, they must have been puzzled and perplexed by the paradoxical subtlety which traced the causes of the war back to the birth of the American Constitution. “Slavery,” he said, “was not the cause of secession, but the reason of its failure.” Then what was the cause of secession? According to Sir John Acton, it was the failure of Jefferson, Hamilton, and their colleagues to provide against the omnipotence of the majority, which he regarded as inconsistent with true freedom. They might have answered, if they could have been heard, that they had made the method of choosing a President indirect, and had given the Supreme Court control even over Congress itself. The first expedient had, no doubt, entirely failed, and the electoral college was a mere machine for registering the popular vote. But the Supreme Court was a substantial reality, and it had before the war decided that a fugitive slave could be reclaimed by his master even in a free State. Nobody will now dispute Sir John Acton's proposition that by the middle of the nineteenth century slavery was an anachronism. Yet, if the Southern States had been more instead of less numerous than the Northern, they would have probably won, and they would then undoubtedly have set up a great Slave Power in the heart of western civilisation. The immediate, or proximate, cause of hostilities was not slavery, but the claim of South Carolina to secede from the Union. Not till the third year of the war did Lincoln proclaim the abolition of slavery. Yet without slavery there would have been no war. If not the causa causans, it was the causa sine quâ non. The value of Sir John Acton's lecture lies chiefly in the ability with which he dissects the American Constitution, and indicates, sometimes in the words of its authors, its weak points. Whatever may be thought of his constructive faculty, his critical acumen was not surpassed by any of his less learned contemporaries.
In 1867, and the early part of 1868, Sir John Acton wrote regularly for the Chronicle, a weekly paper of high repute during its brief existence, contributing a narrative of current events in Italy during the period of Mentana, and the second French occupation of Rome. On the 10th of March 1868 he lectured again at Bridgnorth on the Rise and Fall of the Mexican Empire. This is in my opinion the best popular lecture that Acton ever gave, and I do not know where I could lay my hands on a better. It is clear, spirited, eloquent, and so perfectly well arranged that the whole story of Louis Napoleon's Mexican Expedition, with its plausible pretext, and its miserable failure, was told, not meagrely but completely, in the compass of an hour. The joint intervention of England, France, and Spain in the affairs of Mexico did not last long. Its object was to obtain redress for injuries to European residents, and payment of debts due to subjects of the three Powers. England and Spain soon discovered that the French Emperor had quite other designs, being intent on substituting a Mexican Empire for the Mexican Republic. Sir John Acton explained why in his opinion, which has not been justified by experience, Mexico was unable to stand alone. “A society so constituted could not make a nation. There was no middle class, no impulse to industry, no common civilisation, no public spirit, no sense of patriotism. The Indians were not suffered to acquire wealth or knowledge, and every class was kept in ignorance and in rigorous exclusion; when therefore the Mexicans made themselves independent, the difficulty was to throw off not the bondage but the nonage in which they had been held, and to overcome the mental incapacity, the want of enterprise, the want of combination among themselves, and of the enlightenment which comes from intercourse with other nations. They formed a Republic after the model of their more fortunate neighbours, and accepted those principles which are so inflexible in their consequences, and so unrelenting in their consistency.” Between the Mexican Republic and the Republic of the United States there is no doubt all the difference between Alexander the Coppersmith and Alexander the Great. But Benito Juarez was both a better and an abler man than Acton gave him credit for being, and his successor, Porfirio Diaz, proved himself to be a most efficient ruler. A Civil War in Mexico, simultaneous with Civil War in the United States, gave Napoleon the opportunity he wanted. The one furnished a pretext, the other removed a barrier, and it was not till long after the Austrian Archduke Maximilian had been put upon his pinchbeck throne that President Johnson was in a position to order the French troops out of the American Continent. The poor Archduke himself, basely deserted by the unscrupulous potentate who had sent him to his doom, showed a chivalrous honour and an unselfish courage that fully justify Acton's description of him as “almost the noblest of his race.” The lecture describes the pathetic isolation of Maximilian in a passage of singular power. “There was nothing for him to look forward to in Europe. No public career was open to the man who had failed so signally in an enterprise of his own seeking. His position in Austria, which had been difficult before, would be intolerable now. He had quarrelled with his family, with his Church, and with the protector to whose temptations he had hearkened. And for him there was to be no more the happiness of the domestic hearth. In Mexico there were no hopes to live for, but there was still a cause in which it would be glorious to die. There were friends whom he could not leave to perish in expiation of measures which had been his work. He knew what the vengeance of the victors would be. He knew that those who had been most faithful to him would be most surely slaughtered; and he deemed that he, who had never been seen on a field of battle, had no right to fly without fighting. Probably he felt that when a monarch cannot preserve his throne, nothing becomes him better than to make his grave beneath its ruins.” Sir John Acton closed his lecture with the expression of a hope that the United States would not undertake the government of Mexico. “A confederacy,” he observed, “loses its true character when it rules over dependencies; and a democracy lives a threatened life that admits millions of a strange and inferior race which it can neither assimilate nor absorb.” The warning was unneeded, for the days of American Imperialism were not yet.
Sir John Acton stood again for Bridgnorth, this time unsuccessfully, at the General Election of November, 1868. His personal friend and political leader, Mr. Gladstone, became Prime Minister in December of the same year, and his first legislative work was the disestablishment of the Irish Church. With this policy Sir John Acton, not as a Catholic, but as a Liberal, was in full and complete sympathy. He regarded it as “no isolated fact, but an indication of a change which is beginning to affect all the nations of Christendom, and bears witness to the consciousness that political obligation is determined, not by arbitrary maxims of expediency, but by definite and consistent principles.” “The political connection,” he added, that is, the Liberal party, “which, in spite of many errors and shortcomings, has been identified with the development of our constitutional liberties, and with the advance of science in our legislation, has entered on a new phase of its existence. And it follows a wise and resolute leader, at whose call the nation has arisen, for the first time in history, to the full height of its imperial vocation.”
Although, as has been said, Acton held that the two great political questions of the time were first the relations of the Church with the State, and secondly, the reform of the Land Laws, events were impending which affected him for a time far more deeply than either. Believing, as he did, that “the full exposition of truth is the great object for which the existence of mankind is prolonged on earth,” he could not allow the Papal Syllabus to deter him from following truth with all the knowledge and ability he could command. The Chronicle, for which he had written so often, came to an end in 1868. But the same editor, Mr. Wetherell, took over next year the North British Review, to which Acton contributed a learned essay on the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, marshalling the facts in favour of the theory that the murder of the Huguenots had been premeditated at Rome. Researches such as these, and the consequences which they involved, were not congenial to the Vatican, nor to the personally amiable, dogmatically unbending Pontiff who was still under the protection of foreign bayonets. But to no one was Acton's freedom of speculation and inquiry more repugnant than to the able and ambitious prelate who had succeeded Wiseman as Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. Dr. Manning was at that time a rigid supporter of extreme Ultramontane doctrine, and of authority as opposed to freedom in opinion. With the ardent zeal of a convert, and a convert, as his recent appointment showed, much in favour at Rome, he strove to suppress the religious independence of the English Catholics. But an historical controversy with Acton was a serious affair. It resembled nothing so much as going in for a public examination with a reasonable certainty of being plucked, and that prospect did not smile upon dignified ecclesiastics impressed with a due sense of their own importance. Moreover, Manning was already absorbed in a policy which would put down moral and intellectual rebellion in the Church of Rome once for all.
So early as the 8th of December 1867 the Pope had signed a Bull, convening the whole episcopate of his Church to an Œcumenical Council at Rome in the same month of 1869. Although it was not officially stated, it was perfectly well known that the object of the Council was to proclaim the infallibility of the still Sovereign Pontiff. A famous book, emanating from Munich, The Pope and the Council, by “Janus,” which from the Catholic point of view combated the doctrine of Infallibility, received appreciative notice from Acton in the North British Review. This magazine, though shortlived, and never very widely circulated, appealed more successfully than any of its contemporaries to the lettered and learned class. Some of its articles, such as the essays of Thomas Hill Green, the Hegelian philosopher of Balliol, occupy a permanent place in the literature of metaphysics. The article on The Pope and the Council was therefore sure to be read by those who, by voice or pen, exercise an influence over the minds of others. The reviewer did not mince his words. He pointed out to the bishops that they had already committed themselves to a very grave extent. In 1854 they had allowed the Pope to proclaim a new dogma, the Immaculate Conception. In 1862 nearly all of them had pronounced in favour of the temporal power. In 1864 they accepted the Syllabus. In 1867 they expressed their willingness to believe whatever the Pope might teach them. “Janus” had passed lightly over the Council of Trent, the subject of a work by Fra Paolo Sarpi which Macaulay considered second only in historical value to the books of Thucydides. Acton, who had much in common with Fra Paolo, expressed his own view with unmistakable energy and force. “The Council of Trent,” he said, “impressed on the Church the stamp of an intolerant age, and perpetuated by its decrees the spirit of an austere immorality.” It should be the object of the forthcoming Council to reform, to remodel, and to adapt the work which had been done at Trent.
What actually happened was very different from that which Acton desired, though not very different from what he expected. He went to Rome some time before the opening of the Council, full of interest in the result, and full of sympathy with the distinguished minority who were prepared to resist the forging of fresh chains upon their freedom. Among this minority the most conspicuous was Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, whose tragic death at the hands of the Commune encircled his name with the halo of a martyr and a saint “The Archbishop of Paris,” wrote Acton, “had taken no hostile step in reference to the Council, but he was feared the most of all the men expected at Rome. The Pope had refused to make him a Cardinal, and had written to him a letter of reproof, such as has seldom been received by a bishop. It was felt that he was hostile, not episodically to a single measure, but to the peculiar spirit of this pontificate. He had none of the conventional prejudices and assumed antipathy which are congenial to the hierarchical mind. He was without pathos or affectation, and he had good sense, a perfect temper, and an intolerable wit.” By the end of December 1869 Darboy had exacted a promise that the dogma of Infallibility would not be proclaimed by acclamation, so as to take the majority by surprise. Acton wrote frequent reports of the Council and its proceedings, chiefly to Mr. Gladstone and Professor Dollinger, some of which were afterwards collected and published as the “Letters of Quirinus” in the Allgemeine Zeitung. He considered that the cause of the minority was lost when, on the 24th of April 1870, the Council adopted the Supplement to the First Decree. This was to the effect that the judgments of the Holy See must be observed, even when they proscribe opinions not actually heretical. Acton's comment upon this vote of the episcopal majority does not lack incisiveness. “They might,” he wrote, “conceivably contrive to bind and limit dogmatic infallibility with conditions so stringent as to evade many of the objections taken from the examples of history; but in requiring submission to Papal decrees on matters not articles of faith, they were approving that of which they knew the character; they were confirming, without let or question, a power they saw in daily exercise; they were investing with new authority the existing bulls, and giving unqualified sanction to the inquisitor and the index, to the murder of heretics and the deposing of kings. They approved what they were called on to reform, and blessed with their lips what their hearts knew to be accursed.”
A private letter to Mr. Gladstone, written a month before the first meeting of the Council, shows how gloomy were Acton's apprehensions. “Everything,” he says, “is prepared here for the production of Papal infallibility, and the plan of operations is already laid down in a way which shows an attentive study of Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent. They are sure of a large majority.” A majority, however, would scarcely do. Œcumenical Councils, if not absolutely unanimous, are supposed to attain that moral unanimity which the insignificance of a minority implies. The attitude of the French, as well as of the German and Austro-Hungarian bishops, inspired the Vatican with some alarm. Darboy and Dupanloup were names known and esteemed throughout the Catholic world. Bishops Strossmayer and Hefele, the latter a man of prodigious learning, were still more strongly opposed to the Papal policy than their French colleagues. Against the expediency of promulgating the doctrine there was a resolute and well organised mass of opinion in the Council. But there were few prepared to call the doctrine itself false, and therefore ready to resist it in the last extremity. To drive a wedge between the majority of the minority and the minority of the minority was the obvious tactics of the Pope and his Ultramontane advisers. “If the Court of Rome is defeated,” Acton wrote, “it can only be by men of principle and of science.” He believed that a letter from Mr. Gladstone, dealing with the secular side of the question, and with the effect which the decree would have upon the future of English and Irish Catholics, might do much to counteract the influence of Manning. It was impossible for the English Premier to interfere directly with the affairs of another Church. But he allowed Acton to state what he thought about the effects of Ultramontanism on the prospects of educational measures in England. Acton estimated that the bishops opposed to the expediency of the dogma were about twp hundred in number, while only as many score would vote against its truth.
No sooner did the Council meet than regulations were issued which gave the Pope the sole right of making decrees and defining dogmas. To this the Council submitted. “The sole legislative authority,” Acton wrote on the 1st of January 1870, “has been abandoned to the Pope. It includes the right of issuing dogmatic decrees, and involves the possession of all the Infallibility which the Church claims.” “We have to meet,” he added, “an organised conspiracy to establish a power which would be the most formidable enemy of liberty as well as science throughout the world. It can only be met and defeated through the Episcopate, and the Episcopate is exceedingly helpless.” So it proved. But Acton, besides aiding the minority with the resources of his knowledge and the power of his logic, endeavoured to invoke the secular arm. He was sanguine enough to hope that, as the Pope had anathematised modern civilisation and progress, the governments of Catholic and even of Protestant countries would take some steps in self-defence. The opposition in the Council, he held, was “almost sure to prevail if it were supported, and almost sure to be crushed if it were not.” The change of Ministry in France at the beginning of 1870, and the substitution of a Liberal Premier, M. Ollivier, for M. Rouher, alarmed the Vatican, although the French ambassador, the Marquis de Banneville, declared that there would be no change of policy. De Banneville was wrong. The new French Government announced that if the dogma were carried the French troops would be recalled, although Cardinal Antonelli assured Count Daru, the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, that the Council was purely theological, and had nothing to do with secular affairs. The threat, however, had no effect. The Pope had gone too far to recede, and the forces of the opposition became daily weaker. There was no hope, and no future, for those bishops who set themselves against the majority of their colleagues and the head of their Church. Except in France, they could not look for the protection of the Government, and the French Emperor was a bruised reed. “Two days ago,” wrote Acton on the 16th of February, “a definite message was sent by the Emperor to Cardinal Antonelli, in which the Emperor declared that he could not afford to have a schism in France, where all the employé class, all the literary class, and even the Faubourg St. Germain, are against the Infallibility of the Pope. He added that it would dissolve all the engagements existing between France and Rome.” But Antonelli, a remarkably shrewd specimen of the Italian diplomatist, calculated that if the bishops yielded, the rest of the practising Catholics would follow them. In another passage of the same most interesting letter Acton says that the Schema de Ecclesiâ, already adopted by the Council, “makes civil legislation on all points of contract, marriage, education, clerical universities, mortmain, even on many questions of taxation and common law, subject to the legislation of the Church, which would simply be the arbitrary will of the Pope. Most assuredly no man accepting such a code could be a loyal subject, or fit for the enjoyment of political privileges. In this sense the French bishops have written to the French Government, and that is what they ask me to write to you.” How deep an impression this letter made upon Mr. Gladstone's mind became apparent when, a few years afterwards, he entered into controversy with the Church of Rome. Strange as it may seem, these Gallican prelates appealed through Acton to the Government of the Queen, seeing “no human remedy for this peril other than the intervention of the Powers.” But the British Government could not have acted, even in concert with France, unless they had been prepared to face a storm of indignation, Protestant as well as Catholic, which no British interest required them to encounter.
After the decree of Infallibility had been produced, the German prelates made an important protest against bishops without sees, chiefly Roman Monsignori, being allowed to vote, and also complained, in words furnished by Acton himself, that the claim to enact dogmas by a majority endangered the freedom, as well as the universality, of the Council. But “the minority were in great confusion and uncertainty, and disposed to rely on external help.” That help they never received. Acton put the danger as strongly as he could. Catholics, he declared, would “at once become irredeemable enemies of civil and religious liberty. They would have to profess a false system of morality, and to repudiate literary and scientific sincerity. They would be as dangerous to civil society in the school as in the State.” But between Catholics who held that with such matters it would be profane for any Protestant to meddle, and Protestants who rejoiced that now at last the Catholics were coming out in their true colours, the Cabinet, if they had taken Acton's advice, would have had an uneasy, and barely defensible, position. So what he calls “this insane enterprise” of conferring upon the Pope an unconditional and unlimited infallibility was suffered to proceed without any political remonstrance from England. Mr. Odo Russell, afterwards Lord Ampthill, Lord John's nephew, was instructed to keep the Foreign Office informed of what happened at the Council, but his information was much less copious than Acton's. He was not instructed to do anything more, and officially he was a member of the Legation at Florence. While other governments did nothing, the Italian Government, in Acton's opinion, made matters worse. Their measures of what he called confiscation against the property of the Church would, he thought, prevent some Italian bishops from voting in the minority who would otherwise have been disposed to do so. Yet, if Acton were right in his description of the Papal policy, he could hardly have been surprised that Liberal governments in Catholic countries should regard the Church as an enemy.
On the 15th of March 1870, a curious protest was presented to the Council by some bishops of the United Kingdom. The substance of it is thus described by Acton: “They state that the English and Irish Catholics obtained their emancipation, and the full privileges of citizenship, by solemn and repeated declarations that their religion did not teach the dogma now proposed; that these declarations made by the bishops, and permitted by Rome, are, in fact, the conditions under which Catholics are allowed to sit in Parliament, and to hold offices of trust and responsibility under the Crown; and that they cannot be forgotten or overlooked by us without dishonour.” Acton complained bitterly of France because she maintained the temporal power of the Pope, and excluded Italians from their national capital, by her troops, while yet she would not attempt to restrain him from abusing the jurisdiction she enabled him to exercise. “The religious houses are suppressed, the schools of divinity reduced, the priesthood almost starved, because France is determined to keep the Pope on his despotic throne. It is a policy which degrades the Italian Government in the eyes of the nation, nurses the revolutionary passion, and hinders the independence of the country, and which can no longer be defended on the score of religious liberty. The French Protectorate has become as odious to Catholicism as to the Italian State, and it is about to prove as pernicious to other countries as it is to Italy.” When a division was taken on the dogma of Infallibility, 451 bishops voted with the Pope, 88 against him, and 62 for further inquiry. Then the minority gave up the struggle, and when, on the 18th of July, three days after the declaration of war between France and Germany, the principle was formally defined, only two bishops resisted the acclamation of 533. A few weeks later the French troops left Rome, and the temporal power was at an end.
Such was the miserably futile result of the opposition led by Darboy, Dupanloup, Rauscher, Schwartzenberg, Kenrick, Conolly, Hefele, and Strossmayer. They were borne down by the dead weight of numbers, and the traditional authority of the Holy See. Catholics were offered the choice of submission or excommunication. The official head of the English Catholics, Manning, was among the most zealous supporters of the Papacy. Newman, not, of course, a member of the Council, deeply deplored, but humbly submitted. So even did Strossmayer, the brave and eloquent Croat, who had been shouted down at the Council in violent and abusive language when he denied that Protestantism was the source of Atheism, and pleaded for the old Catholic rule of unanimity. Dollinger, challenged by the Archbishop of Munich to accept the decree, refused, and was cut off, like Spinoza, to his eternal honour, from the congregation of the faithful. Acton, on the other hand, the stay and support of the minority throughout the Council and before it, was not molested, perhaps because he was a layman, perhaps because he was a peer.
For while he was at Rome, in November 1869, Acton had received from Mr. Gladstone, and accepted, the offer of a barony. Considering that he was only thirty-five, this was a great and most unusual distinction. It was made all the greater by the fact that his name occurred in the first list of such recommendations submitted by the Prime Minister to the Queen. At that time the general public hardly knew Sir John Acton's name. But he had all the usual qualifications for a peerage, except wealth, being connected with the aristocracy by birth and marriage, the head of an old English family, and the inheritor of an old English baronetcy, who had gained six years' political experience in the House of Commons. “His character,” Mr. Gladstone wrote to the Queen, “is of the first order, and he is one of the most learned and accomplished, though one of the most modest and unassuming, men of the day.” No praise could be better deserved, or expressed with more studious moderation. Lord Acton pursued in the House of Lords the same silent course that he had adopted in the House of Commons. He remained, unlike many peers of Mr. Gladstone's creation, faithful to the Liberal party, at that time, and for so many years afterwards, led by his step-father, Lord Granville.
Lord Acton was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Munich in 1872, the last year of the North British Review, after which he ceased to write regularly for the Press. In 1873 a very different honour was in contemplation. He had been consulted by Lord Granville upon the European situation, then regarded as critical, and showed such remarkable knowledge of it that the idea of sending him as Ambassador to Berlin was seriously entertained. The appointment would in many ways have been desirable, and in some unexceptionable. For Lord Acton was a born diplomatist, and, though the German Emperor was a Protestant, half the empire was Catholic. But the prize was apparently thought too high for a man outside the diplomatic service who had filled no other post under the Crown. Lord Acton remained at home, and in 1874 found himself suddenly once again in the thick of a theological battle. The echoes of the Vatican Council, and of Papal pretensions, seemed to have died away, when, in November 1874, Mr. Gladstone, freed from the trammels of office, and regarding his leadership of the Liberal party as near its close, startled the world by a pamphlet on “The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance.” He had previously, in an article on “Ritualism,” contributed to the Contemporary Review, expressed his opinion that Romanising in the Church of England was least to be feared at a moment “when Rome had substituted for the proud boast of semper eadem a policy of violence and change in faith; when she had refurbished and paraded anew every rusty tool she was fondly thought to have disused; when no one could become her convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another; and when she had equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history.” While in this frame of mind, Mr. Gladstone paid a visit to Munich, and had many long talks with the venerable Professor Döllinger. The spectacle of a man so wise, pious, learned, and holy under the ban of the Church seems to have kindled in him a burning indignation against the authors of the Vatican decrees. He wrote a pamphlet, and informed Lord Acton from Hawarden in October that he meant to publish it. Lord Acton deprecated this step. He was far nearer to Mr. Gladstone in opinion than he was to the Vatican. But he had no desire to see the subject reopened, knowing that the withdrawal of the decrees was impossible, and fearing that public opinion might be dangerously excited against his fellow-Catholics by so powerful an onslaught. He did not sufficiently allow for the great progress in the direction of tolerance made since the passing of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act, which Mr. Gladstone himself had repealed three years before. The pamphlet appeared in November 1874, and more than a hundred thousand copies of it were sold. The English Catholics were disturbed. Some were indignant, and some were alarmed. But in the end they were none the worse. On the contrary, Mr. Gladstone did them a service by giving them an opportunity to declare that they were, and always would be, as loyal and patriotic as their Protestant countrymen. It is impossible not to trace in Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet, as in the passage already cited from the Contemporary Review, the effect of Lord Acton's letters from Rome in 1870. The substance of the argument is that the Catholics obtained emancipation by denying that Papal infallibility was a dogma of their Church, and that the Power which had changed their faith might change their allegiance. The Vatican decrees reversed the policy of Clement the Fourteenth, who, by overthrowing the supremacy of the Jesuits, had “levelled in the dust the deadliest foes that mental and moral liberty had ever known.” Equality of civil rights should be maintained without regard for religious differences. But Mr. Gladstone thought himself entitled to ask the Catholics of England and Ireland whether they would assist in the re-erection of the temporal power by force. Many were the answers to this famous pamphlet. The most eloquent was Newman's. The most hostile was Manning's. The most interesting was Acton's. It is characteristic of Lord Acton's courage and candour that he should have answered at all. He was regarded at Rome with something more than suspicion, and nobody quite understood why he had escaped the fate of Döllinger. There was nothing that Mr. Gladstone could say of the decrees too strongly condemnatory to command his assent. But his invincible integrity of mind would not allow him, for the sake of his own peace, to acquiesce in the practical conclusions which Mr. Gladstone drew from irrefragable premises. In several letters written for the Times, one of them addressed personally to Mr. Gladstone, Lord Acton gave the only reply which could in the circumstances be given. Mr. Gladstone's reasoning was unassailable in argument. But man is not a logical animal. People are sometimes better than their principles, sometimes worse, very seldom consistent. As Mr. Gladstone himself had said a few years before, “The limit of possible variation between character and opinion—aye, between character and belief—is widening and will widen.” Lord Acton, with all his subtlety and all his learning, could only take refuge in the old and familiar truth that what a man will do cannot be inferred from what he believes. The Corpus Juris, he said, makes the murder of Protestants lawful. Pius the Fifth justified the intended assassination of Elizabeth. Gregory the Thirteenth condoned, or rather applauded, the massacre of Saint Bartholomew. Was it therefore fair to assume that all Catholics who accepted the Vatican decrees, or even all Ultramontanes, were potential murderers? “Communion with Rome,” he said at the same time, “is dearer to me than life.” He concluded his letters in dignified and moving sentences, which made a deep and just impression upon Catholics and Protestants alike. “It would be well if men had never fallen into the temptation of suppressing truth and encouraging error for the better security of religion. Our Church stands, and our faith should stand, not on the virtues of men, but on the surer ground of an institution and a guidance that are divine. I should dishonour and betray the Church if I entertained a suspicion that the evidence of religion could be weakened or the authority of Councils sapped by a knowledge of the facts with which I have been dealing, or of others which are not less grievous or less certain because they remain untold.” It was not to be supposed that this language would give satisfaction to the dominant party in the Church of Rome, which had already been much tried by Lord Acton's energy behind the scenes during the Vatican Council. An apology which was more injurious than the attack added fuel to the flames. “If I am excommunicated,” he wrote to Mr. Gladstone from Aldenham on the 19th of December 1874, “I should rather say when I am.” Yet he was not. He satisfied his bishop, Browne of Shrewsbury, that he was dogmatically sound, and that it would have been inconsistent with his argument to attack the Vatican decrees. He had indeed accepted them as the foundation of his case. What he wanted to show was that neither the Jesuits nor the Inquisition, neither false doctrines nor bad Popes, had made Catholics indifferent to the moral law. Manning, now a Cardinal, was not so easily contented as Bishop Browne, or as Bishop Clifford, who also absolved Lord Acton. His haughty and commanding temper had been stimulated by promotion, and by the favour of the Pope. It was one of his most cherished aims to humble the pride of the old Catholic families, and make them feel the discipline of the Church. He wrote three letters to Lord Acton, and received, it need scarcely be said, the most courteous replies, which left him as wise as he was before. But he went no further, and the correspondence was never published. Manning was not without prudence, and he shrank from proceeding to extremities with a man whose intellect was as keen as his, and whose knowledge was vastly superior. It would not have cost Lord Acton much research to produce a summary account of the Inquisition, or a biographical sketch of selected Popes, which would have done more to prove the soundness of his position than to edify the Christian world. The new Cardinal, if he had indulged in an historical controversy with “Quirinus,” might have emerged from it with less credit to himself than amusement to the learned society of Europe. For these, or for other reasons, he decided to leave Lord Acton alone.
Henceforth, Lord Acton abandoned theological polemics, and devoted himself to his true life, the life of a student. He loved truth too much to love controversy for its own sake, and he was conscious that, though he had escaped penalties, the general run of Catholics would not receive his arguments without prejudice. Mr. Gladstone published another pamphlet, in which, while maintaining his own position, he accepted the loyal assurances of the Catholics as sincere, and with that the controversy ceased. But in June 1876 Lord Acton wrote him a private letter, which contains the clearest statement of his own opinion upon Ultramontanism and Ultramontanes. “I have tried in vain,” he said, “to reconcile myself to your opinion that Ultramontanism really exists as a definite and genuine system of religious faith, providing its own solutions of ethical and metaphysical problems, and satisfying the conscience and the intellect of conscientious and intelligent men. It has never been my fortune to meet with an esoteric Ultramontane—I mean, putting aside the ignorant mass, and those who are incapable of reasoning, that I do not know of a religious and educated Catholic who really believes that the See of Rome is a safe guide to salvation. … In short, I do not believe there are Catholics who, sincerely and intelligently, believe that Rome is right and that Döllinger is wrong. And therefore I think you are too hard on Ultramontanes, or too gentle with Ultramontanism. You say, for instance, that it promotes untruthfulness. I don't think that is fair. It not only promotes, it inculcates, distinct mendacity and deceitfulness. In certain cases it is made a duty to lie. But those who teach this doctrine do not become habitual liars in other things.”
With this plain and straightforward language we may leave Lord Acton as a theologian, and pass to other aspects of his busy life. His great work should have been, and was intended to be, a History of Liberty. For that purpose his library at Aldenham was collected, and to frame different definitions of liberty was one of his favourite pastimes. He loved liberty with all the ardour of Milton, and investigated it with all the science of Locke. Even Liberalism, which may be thought an inferior thing, was with him “the beginning of real religion, a condition of interior Catholicism.” This History was never written, nor even begun. All that there is of it, all that there ever was of it, except books and notes, materials for others to use, consists of two lectures delivered at Bridgnorth in the year 1877. One was called “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” and the other “The History of Freedom in Christianity.” These lectures are exceedingly rare, and the only copies I have seen are in the British Museum. If the audience listened to them with pleasure, and absorbed them with ease, they had intellects of unusual calibre, and employed them to the best advantage. Read carefully and at leisure, they are full of suggestion and of insight. Their fault is that, in homely phrase, they pour a quart of liquor into a pint pot. They are so much crowded with names and references, that to follow the chief thread of the argument is made needlessly hard. “It would be easy,” the Bridgnorth Institute was told, “to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius, that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments; and our case owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vine and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Liturgies, or the five codes of France.” The sentence and the paragraph should have been pointed out. Something should have been said, if not about Vine and Tocqueville, at least about Cicero and Seneca. A geographer may have too many names in his map, and a learned man may condense his knowledge until it has no meaning for those who know less than himself. But, on the other hand, these lectures contain passages at once lucid and worth their weight in gold, which could only have come from a mind at once acute, meditative, and well stored. Such, for instance, is the declaration, “By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.” “Liberty,” proceeds the lecturer, “is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. … A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the Alps than a subject of the superb autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe.” This will seem a hard saying to many, and it is indeed far removed from the sensual idolatry of mere size that vulgarises so much of modern Imperialism. But it was with Lord Acton a fundamental principle, and it is not the size of Periclean Athens, or of Elizabethan England, which made them imperishably great. “It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.” Worse, because more desperate, with less hope of rebellion, or escape. We must look, Lord Acton warns us, to substance and essence, not to form and outward show. The martyrdom of Socrates was the act of a free Republic, and it was Cæsar who liberated Rome from the tyranny of Republican institutions. The fault of the classical State was that it tried to be Church and State in one, and thus infringed upon individualism by regulating religion. The three things wanting in ancient liberty were representative government, emancipation of slaves, and freedom of conscience. In Christian times Thomas Aquinas anticipated the theory of the Whig Revolution. The worst enemy of freedom in modern history was that mock hero of sham greatness, Louis the Fourteenth. The only known forms of liberty are Republics and Constitutional Monarchies. “It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State, ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers and hidden away in Latin folios, burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform under the title of the Rights of Man.” Ever since his visit to America in the days of President Pierce, if not before, Acton had made a special study of the American Constitution in its strength and its weakness, in the amplitude of its safeguards, and in its fatal want of elasticity. A Monarchy cannot be too constitutional. But a too constitutional Republic is a difficult machine to work. England, said a French critic, is a Republic with an hereditary President: the United States are a Monarchy with an elected King.
From this time forward Lord Acton wrote less, and read, if possible, more. Dr. Shaw's careful Bibliography, my obligations to which I have already acknowledged, contains nothing between 1877 and 1885 except a review of Sir Erskine May's Democracy in Europe for the Quarterly of January 1878. Sir Erskine May, the well known Clerk of the House, was a pleasant and popular writer, who dealt largely in generalisations, and sometimes condescended to platitudes. He was an earnest Liberal, though his office imposed some restraint upon his opinions, and it is creditable to the impartiality of the late Sir William Smith that he should have allowed a Liberal critic to deal with a Liberal author in the traditional organ of Conservatism. He certainly had his reward. For it would be difficult to find in the Quarterly Review from the days of Gifford and Southey to our own an article of more fascinating interest and more solid value than this masterly essay, which its author never took the trouble to republish. Notwithstanding Lord Acton's minute and conscientious accuracy in points of detail, he is always best and most characteristic in broad, luminous inferences from large masses of history and long periods of time. He contented himself on this occasion with a few civil remarks about the public servant who made so industrious a use of his leisure, and devoted the rest of his space, which was far too small, to a comparison or contrast of democracy with freedom. He showed that for eleven hundred years, from the first Constantine to the last, the Christian Empire was as despotic as the pagan; that it was Gregory the Seventh who made the Papacy independent of the empire; that Luther bequeathed as his political testament the doctrines of Divine right and passive obedience; and that Spanish Jesuits, in arguing against the title of Henry the Fourth to the throne of France, had anticipated the doctrines of Milton, Locke, and Rousseau. Passing on, with the ease of a man at home in all periods of history, to the dynastic change of 1688, he described the Whig settlement not as a Venetian oligarchy, but as an aristocracy of freeholders, while from the American rebellion of the following century he drew the moral that a revolution with very little provocation may be just, and a democracy of very large dimensions may be safe. The defect in the principles of 1789 was that they exalted equality at the expense of liberty, and subjected the free will of the individual to the unbridled power of the State.
After 1879 Lord Acton ceased to live at his country house in Shropshire, dividing the months when he was not in London between Germany and the Riviera. Besides his great library at Aldenham, there was a smaller but complete library in each of his three houses. He usually spent the winter at Cannes, and the autumn in Bavaria, at Tegernsee, which belonged to the family of his wife. This cosmopolitan existence was by no means uncongenial to him, and, correspondence apart, he was not cut off from his English friends. Cannes in the season is as much English as French, and when Lord Acton was in London he made the best use of his time. The hours he spent in reading were so disposed that he could enjoy at the close of the day the sort of society he liked best. He was a member of Grillions, and of The Club. He knew almost everybody worth knowing, and no one so fond of study was ever more sociable. But, as these letters show, the man whom above all others he esteemed and revered was Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, with characteristic humility, always deferred to Lord Acton's judgment in matters historical. On the other hand, Lord Acton, the most hypercritical of men, and the precise opposite of a heroworshipper, worshipper, an iconoclast if ever there was one, regarded Mr. Gladstone as the first of English statesmen, living or dead. The reasons for this opinion will be found in the following pages. The opinion itself is not the less important because Lord Acton was in many respects cautious to a fault, and had little of the enthusiasm which sustained his idol. Except Dollinger, “the glory of Catholic learning,” as Mr. Bryce well calls him, there was no other contemporary for whom Lord Acton felt unqualified reverence. Mere oratory had not much effect upon him, even if it were John Bright's or the Duke of Argyl's. Admiring, as he could not but admire, the charm and power of Newman's style, he considered Newman himself to be a “sophist, the manipulator, and not the servant, of truth.” Knowing Mr. Gladstone from the inside, as few beyond his own family knew him, he felt his simplicity as well as his greatness, and realised that he had no object except to learn what was true, and to do what was right. In politics there was no difference between the two men, unless it were that Lord Acton could never quite forgive Mr. Gladstone's eulogistic tribute to the memory of Lord Beaconsfield. Even in religion that which divided them was small indeed when compared with that which united them. Lord Acton was as staunch a believer in religious liberty as any Protestant, and no Catholic could desire more fervently the reunion of Christendom. In politics, as I have said, the sympathy was complete. Unlike most Catholics, Acton had been in favour of Italian independence, so dear to Mr. Gladstone's heart. He had always belonged to the school of Liberals who put the rights of the individual above the claims of the State, and he had as little liking for Socialism as Mr. Gladstone himself. He held in utter detestation the foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield, and that temper of mind which goes by the cant term of “Jingoism.” No one rejoiced more heartily over the Liberal victory of 1880, or attributed it more exclusively to Mr. Gladstone. No one worked harder to keep him at the head of the Liberal party, and no one can have foreseen more clearly the disastrous consequences of his final retirement. Perhaps the nearest approach to a schism between Lord Acton and his political chief was that each had a favourite novelist, and that neither would acknowledge the transcendent merits of the rival. Lord Acton was unjust to Scott. Mr. Gladstone underrated George Eliot. Lord Acton's estimate of George Eliot may be found in some of the ensuing letters, and in the Nineteenth Century for March 1885. This article, one of the most elaborate Lord Acton ever wrote, was translated into German, and, so far as the general public were concerned, might as well have appeared in that language at first. It is an extreme and provoking instance of the writer's passion for condensation, reference, and innuendo. It is well worth the trouble of reading, although fiction is not the province in which Lord Acton's opinion was most valuable. But the trouble is due to congested sentences, and might easily have been spared.
When in 1886 Mr. Gladstone made his great attempt to settle the Irish question by Home Rule, Lord Acton gave him a zealous and cordial support. Although, as we have seen, he was far from holding the doctrine of nationality in an unqualified form, he had grasped for many years with increasing strength the conviction that Ireland could be orderly and peaceably governed by Irishmen alone. So far back as October 1881, when the Liberal Government and the Land League were in open hostility, and Mr. Parnell was arrested under the Coercion Act, he wrote, “The treatment of Home Rule as an idea conceivably reasonable (in the speech at Leeds) which was repeated at the Guildhall, delighted me.” There were not many readers besides Lord Acton who discerned at that time the trend of Mr. Gladstone's ideas. But a very few months later, in February 1882, Mr. Gladstone, speaking on the Address, used language of a much more significant kind, to Lord Acton's great delight. “I have long wished,” he wrote on the 20th of February, “for that declaration about self-government. … The occasion last week gave extraordinary weight to the words. … The risk is that he may seem to underrate the gravity of a great constitutional change in the introduction of a federal element.” Lord Acton, it will be observed, much as he desired the change, did not ignore its risks, or even its perils. When the decisive moment came, Lord Acton sounded a note of warning in the midst of his felicitations. “From the point of view of the ages,” he wrote on the 18th of March 1886, “It is the sublime crown of his work, and there is a moral grandeur about it which will, I hope, strengthen and console him under any amount of difficulty, and even disaster.” It was this faculty of seeing the case against his own most deeply cherished principles and predilections which made Lord Acton so valuable a friend and counsellor to Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone's splendid enthusiasm, and indomitable optimism, sometimes led him to ignore obstacles against which he might have provided. Acton, whose temperament was critical, as his mind was judicial, pointed out, with the sincerity of true friendship, though with unfailing tact, the clouds above, and the rocks ahead. No man admired Mr. Gladstone more. No man flattered him less.
The following letter to Mrs. Drew expresses his opinion at the time, and also the judgment of a distinguished Italian statesman who was always friendly to England:—
“Your letter comes in the midst of the living echoes of the speech, and of the uncertainty that follows, and does not quite relieve my feeling of apprehension. Rome is not a good place for accurate news, and I hope for more letters at Cannes in a couple of days. My old friend, Minghetti, is sinking under an incurable illness. The other night, when several people were attacking me about the Irish Bill, he said, very solemnly and in his best Italian: ‘The one will be happy even if he fails, and the other will repent even of his success.’ The other was Bismarck. Next morning came Herbert's letter saying that he feels that for himself the best thing would be defeat.
“I hope that there is not any real inconsistency in my language or in my thoughts at this crisis. I am more decidedly in favour of the principle of the measure than anybody; and there can hardly be one among your father's friends who urged it more decidedly, though some followed more or less contentedly. The Bill is better than I sometimes expected it to be, on one or two important points. It is not only right in my eyes, but glorious as the summit of his career, and if I was on the spot I should be the warmest and the most convinced of its supporters.
“But what makes it more admirable to me is that the stimulus is not hope but duty; that it is very much more clearly dictated by principle than by expediency, that the supreme motive is not strongly sustained by sordid calculation. I do not see a real likelihood of its succeeding in this Session, and I am not sanguine about success in Ireland.
“Arguments founded on the presumed good qualities of the Irish do not go very far with me, and I am ready to find the vices of the national character incurable. Especially in a country where religion does not work, ultimately, in favour of morality; therefore I am not hopeful, and it is with a mind prepared for failure and even disaster that I persist in urging the measure.”
His adhesion to the cause, though it had no weight with the mass of electors, had a deep meaning of another kind. When many men of the lettered, scientific, and learned classes left the Liberal party rather than vote for Home Rule, one of the few English names that enjoyed a European reputation did something to counterbalance others which were paraded so often that they seemed indefinitely numerous.
Lord Acton, however, did not come forward as a popular champion of Home Rule, for which he could have furnished a host of historic precedents. In the sphere of action he was too apt to distrust himself. The House of Lords was not favourable for the purpose, and he never appeared on political platforms. He was more congenially occupied in founding the English Historical Review, of which the late Bishop Creighton, then Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, was the first editor. In 1887 he criticised, not without severity, the third and fourth volumes of the editor's great work on the Papacy. Some editors might have demurred to the insertion of the article. But Creighton was far above all petty and personal feelings of that or any kind. Among the other books noticed by Acton in the Historical Review were Seeley's Life of Napoleon, Bright's History of England, and Bryce's American Commonwealth. Academic honours were now coming in rapid succession. In 1888 Lord Acton was made an Honorary Doctor of Laws at Cambridge, in 1889 a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and in 1890 an Honorary Fellow of All Souls, thereby becoming Mr. Gladstone's colleague. For a man who had published scarcely anything in his own name these compliments were as rare as they were just.
When Mr. Gladstone formed his final Administration in 1892, Lord Acton was appointed a Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen. This may seem a singular method of rewarding literary merit But the circumstances were peculiar. Lord Acton was desirous of showing his devotion to the Prime Minister, and his belief in the cause of Home Rule. His Parliamentary career had not been distinguished enough for more purely political office, and I am told by those who understand such matters that the lowness of his rank in the Peerage precluded him from a higher place in the Household. The incongruity, however, though Lord Acton felt it himself, was not quite so great as it looked. Besides their month's attendance at the Court, the Lords-in-Waiting are sometimes employed to represent public departments in the House of Peers, and Lord Acton represented the Irish Office. In that character he showed, when occasion came, that his long silence in Parliament had not been due to incapacity for public speaking. At Windsor he was agreeable to the Queen from his German tastes and sympathies, not to mention the fact that he could speak German as fluently as English. Every moment of leisure during his “wait” there was spent in the Castle library. Although he was interested and amused by meeting distinguished guests, the position could not be really congenial to him. At this time a vacancy was expected in the British Legation at Munich, and he was asked whether the position would be agreeable to him. To be so near his beloved Tegernsee would have been a great attraction, and his knowledge of German diplomacy would have made the duties congenial. But the vacancy did not occur, and nothing came of the suggestion, either then or afterwards.
Something infinitely better than any political or diplomatic post remained for this born student and truly learned man. In 1895, just a year after Mr. Gladstone's resignation, Sir John Seeley, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, departed this life. The Chair was in the gift of the Crown, that is, of the Prime Minister, and Lord Rosebery appointed Lord Acton. The appointment was singularly felicitous, and the opportunity came in the nick of time. For the Liberal Government was tottering to its fall, and Lord Salisbury was not wont to overlook the claims of political supporters. Lord Rosebery's choice was bold and unexpected. But it was more than successful; it was triumphant. Lord Acton was of the same age as his predecessor, and it is a dangerous thing for a man to begin the business of teaching at sixty. An academic Board would not have had the courage to appoint Lord Acton. They would have dreaded his want of experience. The advantage of retaining a connection of this kind with the State is that a Minister, rising above the purely academic point of view, will sometimes overlook or ignore technical disqualifications in favour of learning or genius. Even Cambridge herself was at first a little startled by the nomination of this famous, but rather mysterious stranger. Lord Acton had to make his own way, and he was not long in making it. The opening sentences of his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History put him at once on good terms with his audience, and through his audience with the University. “I look back to-day,” he said, “to a time before the middle of the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh, and fervently wishing to come to this University. At three colleges I applied for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all. Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in a happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at last fulfilled.” It is probable that the happiest hours of Lord Acton's life were spent at Cambridge. As a writer in the Edinburgh Review says, “He loved Cambridge from his soul; loved the grounds and the trees, the buildings and the romance of the old colleges, the treasures of the libraries, the intercourse with scholars.” In his first lecture he tried to find some point of agreement with Seeley. But their views of History were fundamentally different. To Seeley History was purely political. In Lord Acton's view it included social and intellectual movements neither propelled nor impeded by the State. Lord Acton reckoned Modern History as beginning with the close of the fifteenth century, “when Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and power; Machiavelli released Government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come.” That “history is the true demonstration of religion ” was one of the maxims which Lord Acton impressed upon his pupils at the first opportunity. But perhaps the most characteristic feature of the discourse is his insistence upon the necessity of keeping up the moral standard. Better, he exclaimed, err, if at all, on the side of rigour. For “if we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church or State.” When this brilliant and fascinating lecture came to be published, it was unfortunately encumbered by more than a hundred notes, all quotations, many of which merely expressed Lord Acton's meaning in language less forcible than his own. “As if,” says Macaulay of some pointless reference to a Greek play by a Shakespearean commentator, “as if only Shakespeare and Euripides knew that mothers loved their children.” Lord Acton was rather too apt to think that an expression of opinion, like a statement of fact, required an authority to support it.
Even under the stimulus of Cambridge Lord Acton did not work quickly. During the five years of his active Professorship he only delivered two courses of lectures. The first was on the French Revolution. The second was on Modern History as a whole. He would naturally and by preference have begun with the more general subject. But the exigencies of the Tripos, or of the Curriculum, prevailed, and the thoroughbred animal was put, not for the first time in this world, into the harness of a hack. Lord Acton's lectures were, as they were bound to be, immensely popular, and their publication since his death has shown the world how rich they were in knowledge, how full they were of thought. But they were only a small part of what he did for Cambridge. An Honorary Fellow of Trinity, he received graduate or undergraduate visitors with equal courtesy and kindness at his rooms in Nevill's Court. To them, and to any one who could appreciate it, he would always readily impart the knowledge he had spent his life in acquiring. He was not merely a willing answerer of questions, and a generous lender of books. He had boxes full of the notes he had made since boyhood, each box appropriated to its peculiar subject, and these notes were at the disposal of all historical students who could make a proper use of them. His pupils were, as Mr. Bryce puts it, “awed by the majesty of his learning.” “When Lord Acton answers a question put to him,” said one of them, “I feel as if I were looking at a pyramid. I see the point of it clear and sharp, but I see also the vast subjacent mass of solid knowledge.”
The following letter from Dr. Henry Jackson, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, for which my warmest thanks are due to the distinguished writer, will be interesting to all who desire to know more of Lord Acton's Cambridge life:—
“You ask me for information about Acton's life and work at Cambridge. I am not competent to write anything systematic about either the one or the other; but it is a pleasure to me to put down some of my recollections and impressions, and I shall be glad if my jottings are of any use to you.
“When Seeley died in 1895, my first thought was— ‘If they are good to us, they will send us Acton;’ but I hardly hoped that he would be thought of, and I did not expect that, if he had the offer, he would accept it. So the news of his appointment was to me a very joyful surprise. When he came, he appeared heartily to like his new surroundings—his rooms at Trinity, the collegiate life, the informal conversation, his lectures, his pupils, and the University library. Quietly but keenly observant of men and things, he was very soon completely at home in the University, with which, as he related in his inaugural lecture, he had wished to connect himself forty years before.
“In hall, in combination-room, and where men smoked and talked, he took an unobtrusive but effective part in conversation. His utterances, always terse and epigrammatic, were sometimes a little oracular: ‘I suppose, Lord Acton,’ said some one interrogatively, ‘that So-and-so's book is a very good one?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply, ‘perhaps five per cent less good than the public thinks it’ But a casual question not seldom drew from him an acute comment, an interesting reminiscence, or a significant fact. ‘When was London in the greatest danger?’ asked some one rather vaguely. ‘In 1803, was the immediate answer,’ when Fulton proposed to put the French army across the Channel in steamboats, and Napoleon rejected the scheme.'
“Others will tell you of his influence upon the historical studies of the University, of his help given freely to teachers and to learners, and of his judgment and skill in planning and distributing the sections and the subsections of the Modern History, which he did not live to edit. He was an active member of the committee which recommends books for purchase by the University Library. But, in general, he shunned the routine of business. Even at the Library Syndicate, though he followed the proceedings attentively, he seldom or never took part in discussion or voted. Indeed, I thought that I noticed in him a paradox which extended beyond the limits of academic affairs. On the one hand, he was observant of everything, and he made up his mind about everything. On the other hand, except where supreme principles—Truth, Right, Toleration, Freedom—were in question, he was cautious and reserved in the expression of opinion, and he always preferred to leave action to others.
“Like other specialists, I found that my own study had not escaped his attention. He had a good general knowledge of the work done by modern students of ancient philosophy, and his criticisms of them showed a sound, clear, and independent judgment. One or two trifling incidents seemed to me significant. The first time that he came to my rooms, looking quickly along a bookshelf, he soliloquised: ‘I never knew that Bonitz had translated the Metaphysics.’ It surprised me, not that Acton did not know of the posthumous publication of this work, but that he expected to remember all that a specialist in Greek philosophy had written. On another occasion he was talking of German professors—first of professors of history, afterwards of others. He could tell us about all: he had heard many. At last it occurred to me to ask him about a forgotten scholar who had written a treatise about Socrates. The book was in no way important, but it had given me a very agreeable impression of the writer's personality. I found that Acton had known the man, had attended his lectures, and could testify to the personal attraction which I had surmised.
“When Acton died, writers of obituary notices appeared to regard him as one who, while he devoured books and accumulated facts, passed no judgments, framed no generalisations, and cherished no enthusiasms; and I fancied that Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, in his very interesting letter to the Spectator, unconsciously encouraged this misapprehension. Nothing could well be further from the truth. To me it seemed that Acton never read of an action without appraising its significance and morality, never learnt a fact without fitting it into its environment, and never studied a life or a period without considering its effect upon the progress of humanity.
“His judgments were severe but just. Neither glamour of reputation nor splendour of achievement blinded him to moral iniquity. He had a wealth of righteous indignation which upon occasion blazed out fiercely. ‘Are you aware,’ he once asked, ‘that Borromeo was a party to a scheme of assassinations?’ ‘But,’ said some one, ‘must we not make allowance for the morality of the time?’ ‘I make no allowance for that sort of thing,’ was the emphatic answer; and the contrast with the measured and sedate tones of Acton's ordinary utterance made the explosion all the more impressive.
“This righteous indignation carried with it a corresponding appreciation of anything good. I remember well how he told me the supplement to the old story of the Copenhagen signal—that Parker made it with the expressed intention of relieving Nelson from responsibility, but in the confident expectation that, if skill and daring could do anything, Nelson would disobey. Acton could admire Parker's magnanimity as well as Nelson's genius.
“It would be presumption in me to say anything about Acton's historical attainments; but I may note one or two peculiarities which I noticed in his attitude to the study. History, as he conceived it, included in its scope all forms of human activity; so that scholars whom others would describe as theologians or jurists were in his eyes great departmental historians. This, I thought, was the explanation of his miscellaneous reading; for he was always methodical, never desultory.
“But despite this width of view, he did not grudge the expenditure of time and trouble upon details. On the contrary, he would not only ransack archives, but also interrogate those who had witnessed, or been concerned in, great events. Of course he minutely scrutinised and scrupulously weighed the testimony thus obtained; but when once he was satisfied of the accuracy of his information, he was prepared to use it for the interpretation and explanation of documentary evidence.
“Acton could never have written anything which was not literature of a high order—dignified, incisive, vigorous; and yet history was to him, not literature, but political philosophy; not an interesting narrative, but a scientific study of cause and effect. He had, however, no faith in political forecasts about anything more than the immediate future.
“It is impossible not to regret that Acton has not made his mark in literature as the writer of a great book, or in politics as a great statesman; but he preferred to know, and the men who know as Acton knew are few. The world is the richer whilst they are with us, and the poorer when they go. Acton will not be forgotten at Cambridge.”
A brilliant and penetrating judgment of Lord Acton's services to Cambridge was paid in the Cambridge Review a few months after his death by the late Professor Maitland, who had been associated with him in preparing the Cambridge History as a Syndic of the Press. Himself one of the most learned men in the University, Mr. Maitland was amazed by the extent of Lord Acton's range. “If,” he writes, with a laudable wish to avoid extravagance, “we recall the giants of a past time, their wondrous memories, their encyclopaedic knowledge, we must remember also how much that Lord Acton knew was for them practically unknowable.” His reading was not for amusement. His daily consumption of a German octavo meant mastery of the book, with copious notes in a neat handwriting on slips of paper, which were always, like his books, at the disposal of his pupils. He “toiled,” as Professor Maitland says, “in the archives, hunting the little fact that makes the difference.” He was “deeply convinced that the history of religion lies near the heart of all history,” while it was his fate to be suspected by Catholics as a Liberal, and by Liberals as a Catholic. “This man,” I again quote the Professor, “who has been called a miser was in truth a very spendthrift of his hard-earned treasure, and ready to give away in half-an-hour the substance of an unwritten book.” Some writers, especially bad writers, do not shine in conversation, because they are keeping their best things for the public. Lord Acton would pour out to a sympathetic listener the most recondite history, or, on a different occasion, the spiciest gossip, if that were the commodity in demand. So far as knowledge and power went, and if time had served, Professor Maitland is convinced that Lord Acton could himself have written all the twelve volumes of the Cambridge History. The History is his best memorial. Another is the famous Aldenham Library, presented to the University of Cambridge.
The article which I have ventured to associate with the name of Professor Maitland is signed “F. W. M.,” a signature which the writer would not have adopted if he had desired to preserve his anonymity. The authorship of a letter signed “H. J.,” and written from Cambridge, which appeared almost simultaneously in the Daily News, is not more difficult to identify. “H. J.'s ” words are a memorable and eloquent protest against the ignorant fancy that Lord Acton spent his life in the mere accumulation of learning. The exact opposite, as he says, was the truth. Lord Acton “was no mere Dryasdust: he was a watchful observer of men and affairs. If he studied the detail of history, it was in order that he might the better elicit its significance and its teaching. He was slow to express an opinion; but in his judgments there was never any indecision. In the advocacy of intellectual freedom he was eager: in the denunciation of tyranny and persecution he was at a white heat. He was a man who loved to prove all things, and to hold fast that which is good.” Every one who knew Lord Acton, or at least every one who could appreciate him, must recognise the justice and fidelity of this eloquent tribute. But it was at Cambridge that he put forth to the utmost the whole power of his mind. It was at Cambridge that he showed most clearly how his whole life had been devoted to the cause of freedom and of truth. It was there that he planned the Cambridge History in twelve volumes. Unhappily they were posthumous. Lord Acton did not live to see any of them, nor even to write the Introduction. At the age of sixty-seven he was suddenly struck down by paralysis, and, after lingering for more than a year, died at Tegernsee on the 19th of June 1902. He was “buried by the side of the daughter whose deathbed he had comforted with the words, ‘Be glad, my child, you will soon be with Jesus Christ.’” Such through life and in death was his profound and simple faith.
The lustre which Lord Acton's name reflected upon Cambridge was not felt more deeply, or more sincerely, than the higher standard of learning which he introduced into a learned professoriate. He was the one man in England, if not in Europe, who could have brought with him from the outside an equal knowledge of books and of the world. Cambridge saw his weak side quickly enough. The keen-witted men who enjoyed and appreciated his talk, or watched him listening with an attention that nothing escaped, could understand why Dollinger predicted that if he did not write a great book before he was forty he would never write one at all. As a matter of fact he did not write a book of any kind, small or great. He did not even, as he once thought of doing, republish his Essays. His contemplated Life of Döllinger dwindled into an article of forty pages on Döllinger's Historical Work for the English Historical Review.
But the article, which appeared in October 1890, shows Lord Acton at his best. His affectionate reverence for his great master gives a colour and animation to his style, which it often lacked. This is by far the most readable of all his essays, and by no means the least instructive. Döllinger was in some respects like himself. “Everybody felt that he knew too much to write,” and the best part of his erudition was given to his pupils at Munich. In tracing the course of Döllinger's studies, and of his mental development, Lord Acton wrote the best, because the most characteristic, biography of the Old Catholic leader. Besides the interest of the subject itself, Lord Acton contrived to bring into this wonderful summary a number of judgments on other things and persons as vivid as they are acute. Freeman rather horrified him by preferring printed books to manuscripts as material for history. But then he “mixed his colours with brains.” Lord Acton was inclined to think Stahl, the philosophical and Conservative statesman of Prussia, “the greatest man born of a Jewish mother since Titus.” Döllinger, however, considered that this was unjust to Disraeli, and most Englishmen will probably agree with him in opinion.
Whether Lord Acton ought to have left the Church of Rome when Döllinger was excommunicated, or when the Vatican decrees were pronounced, is a question which it would not become a Protestant to ask, much less to answer. He did not shrink from the risk of speaking out, and it was not his fault that he escaped. No earthly reward or peril would have induced him to say what he did not think, or to profess what he did not believe. The truths which all Christians hold in common, and the moral principles to which Sophocles ascribes an unknown antiquity, guided him in history as in life. His emphatic statement that he had never felt any doubt about any Roman doctrine was made some years before 1870, and the secession of the Old Catholics, which failed for want of an Episcopate. In 1878 Pio Nono died, and was succeeded by a more liberal Pontiff. Manning lost his influence at Rome, Newman was made a Cardinal, and the Broad Churchmen in the Roman communion were tolerated, if not encouraged. Even Lord Acton's old enemy, Manning, turned from theological controversy to movements of social philanthropy, to Irish politics, in which he agreed with Acton, and to good works among the poor. The strictest of Roman Catholics were not sorry to think that the most learned Prelates of the Anglican Church were less learned than a Catholic layman. The more a man knew, the larger was his idea of Lord Acton's knowledge. But for the years between 1895 and 1900 that knowledge would have been comparatively wasted. It would have profited only a few readers here and there beyond the circle of Lord Acton's friends. At Cambridge, the Professor of History was in perpetual contact with fresh minds eager to know, and to transmit what they acquired. He did not altogether understand the Greek mind, for he told Mr. Gladstone that it was unscientific. But he had this much in common with Socrates, the father of science, that he required the clash of dialectic to bring out his full force. When ignorant people laid down the law, Lord Acton smiled. When scholars and philosophers conversed with him, they found him often indeed more inclined to listen than to talk, but always appreciative, suggestive, and awakening. To genuine students he was a mine of information, and would give what was asked tenfold. Nobody ever entrapped him into a path which for good reasons he was disposed to avoid. Attempt to draw him into controversy, and he became cautious, subtle, enigmatic. But every one who came to him, as his Cambridge pupils came, for assistance and instruction, went away not merely satisfied and enlightened, but moved and touched by the profundity of his knowledge, the generosity of his temper, and the humility of his mind.
LETTERS OF LORD ACTON
Mentone, October 31, 1879.
You were threatened with a long letter from me, about people at Paris, but I could not finish it, … and so I lost the only days on which Paris information could be of any use. After a week of care, varied by pleasant visits from Lacaita, F. Leveson, and H. Cowper, we started, and rested at Milan and Genoa, and yet were nearly the first arrivals here. We expect to have the Granvilles for neighbours at Cannes, as well as Westminsters.
Let me first of all transcribe a passage from my unsent letter: “If you see Madame Waddington you will find her a very pleasant specimen of American womanhood. Her husband wants the qualities that charm and win at first, and I suppose he will not hold his own long. He has no dash, no entrain, no personal ascendency, like the men who succeed in France; but there is not a deeper scholar, or a more sincere and straightforward Christian in the country.” I see from your letter that the unfavourable part of my remarks came true more than the praise. Something may be due to awkwardness connected with the Ferry1 Bill. The interview with Scherer consoles me. He is a man of the first order as far as that can be without showy gifts. But he is guarded, cold, unsympathising, and the intellectual crisis by which he came to repudiate the Christian faith was so conspicuous that he is embarrassed with people who are notable for religious conviction.
I wanted to say so much about Mignet, who was celebrated before your father went up to college; of St. Hilaire, the best Grecian and earliest Republican in France; of Dufaure and Simon, the leaders of the Left Centre, who hold the fate of the Ministry in their hands; of Laboulaye, the political oracle of Waddington, who solves every problem by American principles; of Vielcastel, the most sensible and experienced of Conservatives, and the only surviving Doctrinaire; of Broglie,1 who has all but ruined the Republic, in order to expiate his former ecclesiastical Liberalism; of Pasquier, who possesses the good qualities in which Broglie is deficient; of Taine, who has almost the solidity of Scherer, and more than his brilliancy. But it is all too late now.
You describe the Professor2 most justly. Serenity has grown on him with years, although they were years of conflict and of the great grief that men who do not live for themselves can feel for the cause they have lived for. Strength, too, though in less degree, by reason of a vice which besets another great man. From a sense of dignity and of charity he refuses to see all the evil there is in men; and in order that his judgments may be always charitable, generous, and leaning to the safer side, he is not always exact in definitions or rigorous in applying principles. He looks for the root of differences in speculative systems, in defect of knowledge, in everything but moral causes, and if you had remained with us longer you would have found out that this is a matter on which I am divided from him by a gulf almost too wide for sympathy.
Boutney I never saw. But he is a sound and useful man, who makes it his business to spread political knowledge among those classes that govern France. A cousin of ours lectures, under his auspices, to half-educated Parisians.
Le Gendre de M. Poirier at the Français is one of the greatest treats imaginable. Your stay at Paris must have been full of new impressions and experiences, even in its levity.
And now, after a short interval of Victor Hugo at Keble, I fancy you will start for the Midlothian campaign. You were very wrong to suppress that second sheet of your letter, and I hope you will make up for it by letting me know how things go on, and bearing in mind that one learns nothing at Mentone, except the bare outside of public events.
Mentone, March 15, 1880.
There is so much to ask and say that I have not the courage to begin. I am afraid you will forgive the length neither of my letter nor of my silence, and will be as much bored by the silver of the one as by the golden of the other. But when all the world has its rendezvous in Harley Street, admit me, perdu in the crowd.
In this out-of-the-way region we have been kept up to the mark in home politics by pleasant visits from Freddy Leveson—a robust Gladstonian—Cowper Temple, who told me more than I knew about the world of spirits; Goschen, who spent several days with us, and whose footsteps are very visible on the road that leads away from the Liberal party, through Brookes's, to a moderado coalition; Reay, … fresh from Midlothian; Mallet,1 doctrinaire, disputatious and desponding, but abounding in criticism of the policy which he represents. Lord Blachford passed, but I did not see him. Nothing carried me back to England more than the two Italians2 whom you overheard at Venice, who were here when I was very ill, but who took me over the whole ground traversed since 1842. Bonghi's essays3 are appearing successively, and they are meant as a lesson for Italians, and break up the career in a way which loses the thread of continuity and the law of its progress and the wealth of the unity therein. But he is exceedingly intelligent and sympathetic, and I hope that he will recast his materials when he puts them together in a volume. When he asked me: Why is Mr. Gladstone so much attached to the Church and so much against establishments? Why is he so generous towards R. Catholics and so hard on the Pope? Why is not Ireland reconciled? Why is not England won?—you will believe that I found my voice again. I don't think the book will ever suit our public, but I should like it to appear in French.
Madame de Staël is the author of that saying about liberty, whom I commemorate in terms studiously excluding rivalry with George Eliot.
Do you remember a question as to the number of words in Shakespeare and in Milton? There is all about it in Brother Mark's2Life of Milton, which is in the same series as Morley's Burke.
And another, as to the title of the Imitation? I find that it is not the title given by the author—so that Milman's very plausible remark falls through.
Plenty of muffs have written in the Edinbro', but I am not one of them.
You see so many interesting and eminent men that you can spare a miss sometimes. But I am sorry for that silent evening near Lowell. The easy brightness of his mind surpasses all I remember in America. I sat next to him at a dinner at Boston twenty-seven years ago, and spoke of the burying, by Constantine, of the Palladium in a vault at Constantinople. Longfellow would not believe my story. I quoted a passage. “Yes,” said Lowell, “but the passage we want is the passage into the vault”. Somebody questioned whether the statue of Cromwell would stand among the sovereigns at Westminster.“At least,” said he, “among the half-crowns.”
I have never met him since. But if I had been fortunate enough to drop in that evening at Ripon's, I rather think I should have liked to sit next to him. You would have seen the difference between a live dog and a dead lion.
Scherer ought to be much obliged to me for the conversation and for the readers I procured him. He is, I think, one of the three best living writers in France—deeper and more subtle than Taine, and infinitely better versed in political questions than Renan. If you see that arch person you will find his conversation, easy and tripping as it is, very inferior to his writings. There are volumes of essays which I am sure you would read with pleasure. And he has a special bone to pick with the author of A History of Liberty.1
I sent for Seeley,2 and read him with improvement, with much pleasure, and with more indignation. It is hard in a few crowded lines to explain my meaning on a question so fundamental. The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own, in which men play the part of godfathers and godmothers more than that of legitimate parents. We understand the work and place of Pascal, or Newton, or Montesquieu, or Adam Smith, when we have measured the gap between the state of astronomy, of political economy, etc., before they came and after they were gone. And the progress of the science is of more use to us than the idiosyncrasy of the man. Let me try to explain myself by an example of to-day. Here is Ferry's article 7.1 One way of looking at it is to reckon up the passions, the follies, the vengeance of the republicans, to admire or deplore the victory of the Conservatives, to wonder at the Democrats. But beyond the wishes of the Democrats there are the doctrines of Democracy, doctrines which push things towards certain consequences without help from local or temporary or accidental motives. There is a state built on democratic principles, and a society built, largely, on anti-democratic elements, clergy and aristocracy. Those elements of society must needs react upon the state; that is, try to get political power and use it to qualify the Democracy of the Constitution. And the state power must needs try to react on society, to protect itself against the hostile elements. This is a law of Nature, and the vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things.—This is dreadfully didactic prose. But this is my quarrel with Seeley. He discerns no Whiggism, but only Whigs. And he wonders at the mistakes of the Whigs when he ought to be following up the growth and modifications of their doctrine, and its influence on the Church, on Toleration, on European politics, on the English monarchy, the Colonies, finance, local government, justice, Scotland, and Ireland. So you may read in Alison of the profligacy of Mirabeau, the ferocity of Marat, the weakness of Louis, the sombre fanaticism of Robespierre. But what we want to know is why the old world that had lasted so long went to ruin, how the doctrine of equality sprang into omnipotence, how it changed the principles of administration, justice, international law, taxation, representation, property, and religion. Seeley is as sick as I am of the picturesque scenery of the historians of sense, but he does not like to go straight at the impersonal forces which rule the world, such as predestination, equality, divine right, secularism, Congregationalism, nationality, and whatever other ruling ideas have grouped and propelled associations of men. And my great complaint is that he so much dislikes the intriguers of 1688 that he does not recognise the doctrine of 1688, which is one of the greatest forces, one of the three or four greatest forces, that have contributed to construct our civilisation, and make 1880 so unlike 16S.0. See H. of L.,1 page 50,000. All which things make me more zealous, eager, anxious about the coming election than you who are in the midst of it, mindful of the blessing of repose and credulous of Seeley. Therefore I read with delight the address to Midlothian—more even than the speech in Marylebone—and am daily refreshed by Lowe, John Morley, even Rogers,2 and fancy how happy the inquisitors were, who put a stop to the people they disagreed with! But I can quite feel your sensation in watching all this.
I heartily wish your brothers success—even the riotous one3 —especially the riotous one. I will come and wish him joy. If we are beaten, I shall be ashamed to let you see my grief. And as it is, I am ashamed to tell you how much I should like to hear from you, because you will suspect that I only want a supplement to the Times, or a later edition of the Echo. But the next few weeks are going to be a great turning-point in the history of our lifetime, and I believe you know how to be generous. Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.
There is nothing to regret. Your brother has held a conspicuous place1 in the most wonderful election contest of this century. He has held it in a manner which will never be forgotten in his lifetime, and which will do as much for him as victory; and the picture of the young untried son bursting into sudden popularity and turning men's thoughts from the absorbing exploits of his father adds an affecting domestic feature to that great biography. That meeting at Hawarden, after such a revolution and such a growth, is a thing I cannot think of without emotion.
So I cannot offer you anything sincere, except congratulation. We know now, indeed, that the British Democracy is neither Liberal nor Conservative in its permanent convictions, and therefore the party triumph is not as altogether satisfactory and secure as it should be. But the individual triumph, the homage rendered to a single name, could not be greater; and there could not be a fuller atonement for the desertion of 1874, than a success so personal as to convey dictatorial authority, apart from party merits and combinations.
Your idea has this advantage, that one must strike when the iron is hot, and it is now at white heat, and our legislative measures, even though they involve an early dissolution, ought to be begun soon. What I should fear most would be that, content with the intense reality of power, Mr. Gladstone should repeat the unhappy declarations of five years since in a way that would commit him for all future time; absolute abdication would be a misfortune all round, and the Conservative reaction would soon set in. But if an eventual return to power is not absolutely excluded, if no word is said of what might happen under certain contingencies, then we should still feel that we have an invincible reserve force, that, when our first line is broken, we can proclaim the Jehad and unfurl the green flag of the Prophet. For the patchwork settlement of 1875 depends on the life of a man who is several years older than your father,1 who is a duke, and who has a deplorable habit of falling asleep early in the afternoon. But I only express this premature fear in view of circumstances which I am sure every influence in the country, except, perhaps, the influence of Windsor, will be strained to avert.
Your description of Lowe's generous and feeling sympathy is really touching. How little I thought, fourteen years ago,2 when he was the hardest hitter your father had to meet, and when your father said he might well shrink from crossing swords with such a man, that he would close his active life as your brother's sponsor before vast constituencies, or that we should come to think of him listening with tears in his eyes to your brother's speeches, and muttering the words you tell.
Please tell Herbert that I have followed his proceedings as carefully as one could at a distance, that I don't think much of his defeat, that, in short, I go halves with Lowe.3
I see that your sister made her way into the fray. I trust all the worry and toil was not too much for Mrs. Gladstone.
We are ending the season here, not as far out of the world as you would suppose; for I just saw your neighbour Westminster, and here are Argyll, Cardwell, and Goldsmid.
If Disraeli waits to meet Parliament, and to fall in the daylight, I may hope to have an opportunity of expressing to you myself all my sense of the meaning of the victory, and my want of sympathy for you in your defeat.1
Paris, May 23, 1880.
I have been in Paris only a few hours, and have seen nobody yet but Broglie, Gavard, and Laugel. I must see Scherer and talk to him about your visit here in the autumn. I have not been here for two years, and many of my friends are growing so old that I don't like putting off my visit to them. So I must keep those who have not that defect for a happier time.
To begin at the top. Here is Lowe, positively wounded at the letter offering him a peerage instead of power, and wounded by the very thing which showed Mr. Gladstone's anxiety not to give him pain, by the absence of any reason given for being unable to offer him office. For one so often finds that acts specially showing delicacy and considerateness, little supererogatory works of kindness, are taken unkindly. Now that is just a state of mind you can improve away by an initiative of civility, bearing in mind that what Lowe says to me, his wife delivers from the house-tops.
Bismarck is so angry with Münster, that I hope he will transplant him; meanwhile it ought to be remembered that he, M., not only scouted the idea of Tory defeat, but wrote most disparagingly of Mr. Gladstone's influence and position.
Hayward will tell you what I learn from other sources, that Chenery really wishes to bring the Times round. Mr. Gladstone dislikes thinking of those things, and allowed Delane to slip from him.
I hope, towards the end of the session, you will consult MacColl about the Bavarian mystery.1 It would be nice if Leeds does not require its member just then. Above all things keep a very regular diary. You will be so glad afterwards, unless you have some distant correspondent, and make your letters to him, or her, do for a regular diary, which is also a good plan.
Tegernsee, June 1, 1880.
I received your letter last night on my return from Italy, and read the enclosure with interest. There are two things to be said in its defence. It is true that Hartington has, of late, shown higher qualities than the world attributed to him, and so far his adoring kinsfolk may consider their higher estimate justified. His whole attitude during the election was creditable, and his conduct towards Mr. Gladstone was correct.
Then, there is a grain of truth in the notion that the force that creates, and sustains in a crisis, is not quite the same that is wanted in time of prose to continue and to preserve; or in other words, that creative power makes a great consumption of party resources, and, if Burke gave up to party what was meant for mankind, it is better still to give up to mankind what some people mean to use for party. This is only a half truth, because party is not only, not so much, a group of men as a set of ideas and ideal aims; so that I do not admit Goldsmith's antithesis.2 But taking party in the practical and popular sense, of an instrument for holding office, people are uneasily conscious that Mr. Gladstone will sacrifice it to loftier purpose sooner than they would like. Nothing is more untrue than the famous saying of an ancient historian, that power is retained by the same arts by which it is acquired; untrue at least for men, though truer in the case of nations.
But don't you see, pervading the letter and guiding the pen, the great intellectual and moral defect of the present day? I mean, the habit of dwelling on appearances, not on realities, of preferring the report to the bullet, and the echo to the report. To spend and lose a majority in some great cause, to be abused and ridiculed and calumniated, seems to the writer a misfortune so great that it is worth while to haul down one's flag rather than incur the risk of it. This is the power of journalism, of salons and club life, which teaches people to depend on popularity and success and not on the guide within, to act not from knowledge, but from opinion, and to be led by opinion of others rather than by knowledge which is their own. Not only—,nearly everybody yields up his conscience, his practical judgment, into the keeping of others.
I do not accuse Harrington, but it is clear from the words1 of—and—,that there was a scheme to get Mr. Gladstone out of the way. To expect him to take the first step was to expect him to resign. It is so easy to do a dirty thing with self-satisfaction when it consists in abstaining from action. The one letter is only the plausible, affectionate, amplification of the other's impertinence, with a saving clause, on the first page, inserted from dictation, when the grievous indiscretion had been committed. …
Be sure that I also know what I say when I assure you that the victoria pilgrimage1 will be a help to your father, and that Lady R.'s coachman will grease wheels more important than her own. Do go on, this summer at least, and see whether it is not true. Lady R. is, moreover, a friend of Lady Blennerhassett, and will sympathise with your feelings.
I should not have supported our side in its attack on Sir Bartle Frere. It was not merely a question of empire, but of lives he would be unable to protect, against a savage army1 far stronger than the whole armed population of Natal. I fancy that the analogy, or apparent analogy, with the Cabul policy, which he had so much promoted, turned Liberal opinion against him. But Frere is a strong, an able, and a plausible man. It is true that his strength is akin to obstinacy and self-will, that he is rather too plausible, and that he will gain his ends by crooked paths when he has tried the straight in vain. He is a dangerous agent, but, I should think, a useful adviser. Indians are not generally a healthy element in the body politic, and he has the constant vice of Indians, belief in force. But he has a breadth of mind that is rare among them; and I have known people who hated him, because he is so good. I do not suggest that that is the motive of the three Anabaptists who ply you with advice from which I disagree.
Thanks, a thousand thanks, for all the kindness of your letter. I enjoyed the Sherbrooke-Airlie-Trevelyan dinner very much, and shall envy Lady R. every Monday to come. …
My letter was posted with the one to you, though written, I think, the night before, so that it must have been stopped and opened by some postmaster whom the direction attracted, and who, like yourself, exaggerated its importance. There are truths so prosaic, so dense, so dull, that one can hardly state them without suggesting the idea of something subtler or more interesting beyond-Of course, to one who spends his time in watching and trying to understand the progress of political life and thought, no public event could equal the late progress from Dalmeny to Downing Street, and no prouder thing could happen than to be able to serve Mr. Gladstone's policy. Indeed, if I was not lured by his genius, his persistent friendship, and a curious sympathy in many deep questions, I should be, now, by qualities never so apparent as in the last few days, by the power of grasping principle in one hand and policy in the other, without clashing, which was shown in the opium speech, and just before, in the speech on the liability of employers. I don't know whether I could ever have been of use abroad, in other circumstances, if my nearest relation was not Foreign Secretary,1 for there is only one place for which I could pretend to any special fitness. But as to trying to qualify as a candidate for anything at home, you would soon be satisfied that it is impossible, if I had a good opportunity of talking—if we climb a mountain, a very high mountain, or cross a broad and stormy lake some day.2 But I think I must remind you of the old lady at Carlisle in Forty-Five, who shut herself up in terror of the Highlanders, and, not being pursued, grew impatient, and cried out: “When are they going to begin? ”
I am a little disturbed at the highly ingenious and easy solution of the great party3 question. It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness. Now there is a source of future weakness in the idea of power assumed only for a term limited and defined. A Parliament near its end becomes helpless and unable to act When the period fixed, or supposed to be fixed, is approaching, power will slip away. Disappointed people, men impatient of having to wait, hungry, jealous, reluctant supporters, will gravitate in other directions, will promote rivalry, will speed the parting chief, will magnify the rising sun. By having only Free and Easies, you establish a festive Centre elsewhere, and the world, revolving in an improper orbit, may lose its way. There has been, in this direction, a slight waste of capital. …
Your card came just after my letter was posted. I shall be at Munich on Friday, and have written to Hallam Tennyson, poste restante; but I hope to waylay them at the station. It will be pleasant to pilot the great man through Munich, or on the road to Achenthal, and I will do my best....
I hope you will not quarrel with John Morley, for he seems to be making the Pall Mall the best Liberal paper in England. But he has so many points of antagonism to Mr. Gladstone that I am afraid. He is a sceptic; his studies are all French, eighteenth century; in political economy he is a bald Cobdenite, and will do scant justice to the political aspects of the French treaty; he is a friend of Lytton's, and, I suspect, of the peccant Strachey;1 he has the obstinacy of a very honest mind. But I perceive that I am getting to be a bore. …
Tegernsee, June 21, 1880.
The Tennysons came and went, I am sorry to say, prematurely. They spent two days with us, and would have gone by Achensee to Innsbruck, but the rain sent them back to Munich, where they took the train for Italy. You will be surprised to learn that the Poet made a favourable impression on my ladies and children. He was not only a gracious Poet, but he told us lots of good stories, read aloud without pressure, walked repeatedly with M., and seemed interested in the books he carried to his room. Lady Acton took him to Kreuth and round the lake, and liked him well. Yet our ways were very strange to him, and he must have felt that he stood on the far verge of civilisation, without the enjoyments proper to savage life. Even I was tamed at last. There was a shell to crack, but I got at the kernel, chiefly at night, when everybody was in bed. His want of reality, his habit of walking on the clouds, the airiness of his metaphysics, the indefiniteness of his knowledge, his neglect of transitions, the looseness of his political reasonings—all this made up an alarming cheval de frise.
But then there was a gladness—not quickness—in taking a joke or story, a comic impatience of the external criticism of Taine and others found here, coupled with a simple dignity when reading ill-natured attacks, a grave groping for religious certainty, and a generosity in the treatment of rivals—of Browning and Swinburne, though not of Taylor—that helped me through. He was not quite well, in consequence of the damp and of the mountain fare.
I write for news to your hotel at Venice, the weather having been against the Dolomites.
Hallam is a much better and clearer politician than his father, and the only time we differed he was the truer Blue. If I add that I discovered why he refused a baronetcy, I suspect it is no more than you know very well already.
... Let me suppress truths only when they are pleasant, and confess that I have a doubt about the scene with O'Donnell. Mr. Gladstone brought against him an engine as obsolete as the Veto,1 not for the sake of France, for he could have his say in another way, but for a disorderly act which was not the worst on record. It seemed a stretch of severity when the claim to have been severely treated is the most telling feather in an Irish cap, when the fact of having been silenced in a new way inflates the lungs, if it does not strengthen the hands, of a Home Ruler. But perhaps I am so fresh from the history of the Plebs and their Tribunes that I am not quite sound as to the management of Obstructives.
Challemel Lacour is the scholar, the philosopher, the ascetic of that republican school of which Gambetta is the Tribune and the platform hero. He is their Minister in reserve; and Albert Gate is so manifestly the stepping-stone to power, he is so conspicuous a leader of untried policy, that the civility of his reception will be taken in France as a tribute to his party in a way there has been no example of. He is probably the most interesting specimen in existence of the school from which Robespierre would have chosen his colleagues. I should very, very much like to know how he impresses you; and there is so much more I should very much like to know, that I must learn to be less obtrusive.
I think Reay deserves a seat in the H. of L. (in the vulgar sense of those mystic letters).1 I hardly know a more genuine good fellow. Do you know Morier, who is in town? Another man exceedingly able, resolute, and energetic. …
Tegernsee, July 1, 1880.
... I hope you have not many correspondents as unmerciful as I am, or as much inclined to forget that you are living the most interesting of lives, by the intensest blaze of light in all the world. Only let me just thank you for your letter of yesterday and for your kindness in asking me to future entertainments. My prospects are too uncertain for me to accept I must come only if I am wanted, and we shall hardly have any close divisions of importance until the end of July. Your invitations have doubled in value since Reay, whose particular group of friends is so well known as to betray him to the worst of guessers, has supplied you with a key —a false key—to my Venetian Mystery.
We must wait till Sunday before the result of this evening's debate reaches Tegernsee. There is not any doubt the motion1 is right; but I can imagine a much stronger statement of objections than the righteous indignation of the Tories produced.
Let us hope that John Morley was not discouraged by encountering Sweet Cæsar's ghost on Tuesday. The Pall Mall is getting a little personal, and too highly coloured in reports of fact. Do you know my intimate friend Lathbury, political editor of the Economist? A Weekly is easier to conduct than a Daily; but his articles seem to me excellent in tone, judgment, and impartiality. He wrote much formerly in the Daily News and the Pall Mall, and I was negotiating with Delane to put him on the Times when Bagehot's death gave him the other opening. His wife was Bonamy Price's daughter. You never saw a man more frank, cheery, and well-conditioned.
I suppose Hayward has brought—. Let him bring Chenery, that he may be useful as well as ornamental. It is not a matter of indifference that, when other journalists come, he should be left to stay away. Only don't let his sins be cast in his teeth.
I am afraid you will not take to Morier; but he is the greatest force in our diplomatic service, in spite of his discomfiture at Lisbon. He would be the very man to meet Challemel Lacour, who will be an offence to so many.
Tegernsee, July 10, 1880.
I am heartily glad to hear what you say of Mr. Gladstone's health and strength and spirits, and of the nook behind Hampstead,1 so much better than the dull air of the Thames Valley. There must be so much to harass him besides what appears, and what he can wind up and swamp in dazzling speech. Rosebery's anxiety is shared by many thorough Liberals, and it is not, perhaps, unfortunate that the perils of the position have made themselves felt at once, that the full warning comes in time, and the remedy can be taken early.
I wonder whether, for a reason you know as well as I do, a thing we all perceive remains a mystery to the person most concerned to know it. The Liberal party is held together, not by forces within, but by a force above it. It consists, like the being that declined a chair, of two wings and a head. Without Mr. Gladstone's ascendency and the lustre of his fame, Harcourt, Argyll, and Bright would soon offend every group into insubordination and incohesion. The jealousy between the old Liberals, who are losing ground, and the usurping Radicals, and all other familiar elements of discontent, cannot be restrained by Parliamentary management alone. There remains a great sphere for direct personal influence. The men Mr. Gladstone used to look up to, Peel and Aberdeen, had not much of this, and I fancy he takes from them the belief that it is unnecessary or undignified. He has been so long without holding the threads of party: it is so natural, in one who writes and speaks so much, to suspect those who misunderstand him doing it voluntarily: it is so natural to him to underrate the effect of personal contact, that he may think that the sole legitimate method of mastering men is Parliamentary speaking, or writings addressed to mankind. But it is worth anything that people should know and see more of him, in society if possible. First, because people are flattered. Next, because they are awed. Last, because they are con ciliated, and so disciplined. And this applies to three sorts especially—members, diplomatists, and journalists. I am sure all that public policy can do to strengthen the Government will be done. But I note an unhappy impatience of those inferior arts my earthy spirit relies on.
I see how willing the Times is to be taken in hand, in spite of Walter. Sir Henry Maine, like Stephen, used to write in the Pall Mall. I don't know whether he has joined Morley. Maine's nature is to exercise power, and to find good reasons for adopted policy. Augustus or Napoleon would have made him Prime Minister. He has no strong sympathies, and is not at heart a Liberal, for he believes that Manchesterism will lose India. He considers also that the party, especially Lowe, has treated him less well than Salisbury. He is intensely nervous and sensitive. After that, I may say that I esteem him, with Mr. Gladstone, Newman, and Paget, the finest intellect in England. I wish you would see him. …
It would be very kind of you indeed to ask the Lathburys some Tuesday or Tuesdays. I say that because he is so much my friend, but he is also an eminently useful and trustworthy man. His wife wrote much in the Saturday—I don't remember the article you speak of. When I am a little in doubt about anything I consult Lathbury, who steadies and encourages me. When I feel very sure of some conclusion I go to Maine, who always knocks it to pieces. He is much the more instructive of the two. The other is more pleasant.
With Maine, above him indeed at the India Office, is Sir Louis Mallet, a thoughtful economist, a sincere, almost passionate Liberal, but under Cobden's influence, one of those sincere Liberals least attracted by your father. He is very sound beyond the Indus, and I wish you sometimes saw him; but I ought not, perhaps, to say it, for I half suspect the Prime Minister has some ancient reason for objecting to him.
The breakfast with the archbishop,1 the philosopher,2 the Frenchman,3 and even with G—does not suggest hilarity. What you will do for sketches of character after the Reays leave England, I cannot imagine.
Our defeat in the Lords1 opens a wide vista of difficulty and trouble—partly because it injures the Government, but not much, and will probably increase the ascendency of the P.M.; particularly because of the H. of Lords itself. Nobody will ever believe that such a majority was due to honest and disinterested motives. People will say, and will say truly, that an assembly which is moved by selfish and sordid motives, when there is a question of preventing ruin and Scarvation, is not only an injury to the poor, but a disgrace to the community, and there is no way out of it. Small majorities may give way or abstain; but after so determined a demonstration, repentance will be suicidal. And the one instance in modern times where the Lords have proved stronger than the Commons, because postponement here was prohibition, is a question of helping the poor who suffer, at a slight sacrifice and slighter danger to people immensely rich.
We are only beginning with questions of this kind. Did you hear the speech at the end of May in which Mr. Gladstone spoke of that class which is so numerous that it is virtually the entire nation? Graver words were never spoken in Parliament, for the entire land is virtually in the hands of another class. The considerations which this contrast, this contradiction suggests, have a mighty future before them, a future damaging to my boy's prospect of ever sitting on a red leather bench.
I am sorry we were not 52.2 It would have been impressive, like the Doctrinaires of whom it was said: “Ils sont quatre; mais quand ils veulent imposer par le nombre, ils pretendent Stre cinq.” Indeed, for all the reasons which Argyll repudiates, justifying my prophecy about him in the spirit, if not to the letter, there has been no measure for which I should be so anxious to vote. I wrote to Lord G.1 to send me timely warning, as there was no trouble I would not take.
Having been to a doctor, without any idea that I was seriously out of order, I was sent here suddenly, and am forbidden, for reasons I must acknowledge, to move for some weeks to come. It could not have happened at a worse moment for me.
I was sorry for Frere, and should probably have allowed his daughter to come round me. …
It is too kind of you to remember, after all that has passed over you and the nation, details of former letters. Unless there has been a change lately, there are two editors of the Economist, one for money matters and the other for politics. Maine will be proud and happy, and ought to be much obliged to me for supplying a topic for so pleasant a conversation. I wonder whether he showed you the luminous side of his mind, whether you saw why he always disagrees with me, and why some people are more afraid than fond of him.
Whatever passes at the end of the Session, I do hope that a season of rest is included in our friend Dr. A. Clark's prescriptions. It might give me some remote chance of seeing you again.
That Dutch Interior is charming, and I hope you enjoyed the circle of widowers as much as I did your graphic account of them. It is delightful to think of the repose after the storm has been weathered so well. Argyll practising his next speech in the solitude of night, —'s diplomatic deafness and yet more artful slumber, his brother with a hook placidly fixed in Bright's aggressive nose, the refined American2 offended by the rigidity of the Democrat, the group of listening Senators, the harmless youth, the envious beauty—and then the great historic background and the one overshadowing figure—there is not a page in Mme. de Rémusat approaching it Do you write like this to other people? Do you write at least six pages of diary every night? Please do; and let me read it now and then. And remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin. If you are really going to be left at Hawarden, you ought to shut your door, shut your eyes, recall all that you have seen and heard during the last six months, and write it carefully down. You have such an opportunity and such a power. I am not like the Roman:1 I envy almost as much as I admire.
You make me happy by allowing me to conclude that I gave no offence by what I wrote of our exalted House. I don't mean that your uneasiness was quite unreasonable. When a Bill2 gets knocked about in Committee, even when an artful Minister means it to be knocked about, it can never go up to the Lords harmonious, consistent, and the genuine expression of a policy. There are not two sides to every question, but there is always an opening, in such cases, for sincere criticism. The way out of that is to pass the second reading, and to correct in Committee what was done wrong in Committee. What I mean in this case is that the Bill involved a principle of infinite force and value, which the Ministry probably veiled to their own eyes, and which the Lords were right to resist as a private association, which they are not; wrong to resist as a disinterested national institution, which is their claim to exist.
It is impossible to exaggerate the depth of aversion the Bill has evoked. You must have heard enough of it. One man has spent two days here for the purpose of telling me how wrong it was. Another writes to me that he has paired for the session, feeling that Government will be obliged to those who help them when they are hopelessly wrong, although the help consists in pairing and going to Vichy. These are idle men, representative of thousands.
It reminds me of the great landowner, Bedford, who reminds me of Arthur,1 who reminds me of Maine. I suppose it was a refuge in Piccadilly that revealed the secret to me. Arthur's one fault is a delight in secrets. Although Maine is unfitted to be P.M. (under any but a despotic monarch), nobody has so large a conception of all questions relating to the tenure of land. I dare say he has been asked to say what he knows about Ireland. What pure reason and boundless knowledge can do, without sympathy or throb, Maine can do better than any man in England.
I am sorry to think of Lowell's sun sinking behind your horizon. At first sight one always fancies that those who question the certainty of history sap the certainty of religion, or are the victims of those who do, and I fancy I should have had a word (with corners) to throw at him. The Rémusat volumes are one of my landmarks in judging Napoleon. It is, of all accounts by competent people, the most injurious to his memory, as Segur's are the most favourable. Until I read them, I thought the fixed intention to put Enghien to death, the charge of murder, not proven. If the authority of these recollections breaks down, I must invent for myself a new Napoleon. After allowing for the fact that they were written, or re-written, years later, like the Diary of John Adams, the Memoirs of S. Simon, the History of Burnet, of Clarendon, the Annals of Tacitus, the Nine Muses of Herodotus, the Eight Books of Thucydides, which are the most conspicuous sources of all history, and for the suspicion that there was a great secret she not only could not tell, but wrote in order to obliterate, and after giving whatever weight it deserves to the little joke that calls it: “Souvenir d'une femme de chambre renvoyée,” I am so persuaded that the book is authentic and true, that I should have liked to hear the argument But this is true, history does not stand or fall with historians. From the thirteenth century we rely much more on letters than on histories written for the public. I need not add that the history of our Lord which we find in the Epistles is one most valuable testimony in favour of the Gospels. So that even if Lowell can damage the reports in this book, we can restore the certainty of history by the aid of letters, of documents and of those facts in which independent witnesses agree.
Is it not heroic of your sister renouncing a life like your own for the toil of Newnham? I wish her success and happiness in her pilgrimage most sincerely. By-the-bye your other sister is the real pilgrim, and I wish I had known in time to warn my belongings of her movements.
Tegernsee, Sept. 21, 1880.
My children went to Ammergau and came back not deeply moved, but strongly impressed. I let them go without me from a sort of dread many people must have felt, not because of the chief actor, for a pious, simple-minded peasant's conception of the two natures is probably not more inadequate than my own, but what we do gradually realise in meditating the Passion is the character and experience of the disciples, the effect of that companionship, the utter human weakness that survived in the midst of the intense feelings it must have awakened in them. Those are contrasts that can be expressed, and are apparently too subtle for the performers at Ammergau. I am told that, on the whole, the audience remained cold.
The answer to my telegram was signed in a way that led me to doubt whether it came from you. I trust it was sent by your brother, and that Mr. Gladstone was not molested by my inquiries on the top of so many more. It is beginning at the wrong end to read David Copperfield first, but he is worth anything to busy men, because his fun is so hearty and so easy, and he rouses the emotions by such direct and simple methods. I am ashamed to think how much more often I return to Dickens than to George Eliot.
Do some of the brothers or secretaries make a point of reading the Temps Of all that is written against the Ministry and its general policy, the Temps articles seem to me the most serious and suggestive, and at Marienbad I went through a course of Austrian newspapers, which are very hostile, and better written than our Tory organs, but not near so good as the Temps. I am afraid it is my friend Scherer. Not being a Frenchman, his patriotism is peculiarly lively. Don't call Chenery my friend. I have never seen him, and only know that he is making a mess of the Times. But my reasons were those you know well, and they will hold good next year.
You are quite right in all your corrections.—is a very good fellow. His only artifice is his discretion. His mind is accustomed to travel along roads straight, and wide, and beaten, so that it accumulates conventional truths and borrowed convictions, but he is as well meaning and as sincere as a man can well be who is not on the watch to root up prejudices. His son is threatened with Toryism as with the gout. I don't know which is worse. … I talk nonsense at times, because sense is monotonous. It won't do to shrink from hard speeches and judgments when they are necessary. But it is horrible to make them when one is not compelled. Commynes says: “It is no shame to be suspicious, but only to be deceived.” That is a contemporary of Machia-velli. Two centuries later you will find in Télémaque these words: “Celui qui craint avec excés d'être trompé mérite de 'être, et 'est presque toujours grossiérement.” That is the progress of 200 years. Don't you think you see the distance between Bismarck and your father?
You have had an excellent idea about those letters. If you go on and arrange them, it will be very precious to him some idle day, if that should ever come, and to you all. The inner reality of history is so unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations. I conclude that all political correspondence has been set in order regularly, otherwise that ought to be thought of too.
From something you wrote I gather that Mr. Gladstone did not altogether disagree with Forster's sentiments; I am sure I did not; yet it seemed to me very hazardous to make such a speech in Mr. Gladstone's absence, suggesting wide differences in the Ministry, rousing expectations which will go on growing through the autumn, making the Lords more angry than repentant, using terms so vague that they can be almost honestly misrepresented, and a great deal more. Home Rule will make great capital out of the events that happened after your father fell ill.
J. McCarthy's two last volumes1 are not equal to the first, but you will be interested in reading them. But here is post-time, and I cannot say one-half.
Tegernsee, Sept. 27, 1880.
It is not easy to add to the panegyric pronounced on St. Hilaire by a too zealous friend in Friday's Pall Mall. That gratifying description is not quite satisfactory. The writer affirms that St. Hilaire is an Orientalist of the first rank, and a Greek scholar unsurpassed in France. He knows Greek thoroughly for working purposes, but not exquisitely as a scholar; and he has done little, on the whole, for his idol Aristotle in the way of consulting the manuscripts and improving the unsettled text. And although he has studied Eastern religions deeply, I do not believe that he is a master of Eastern languages. Nor does he live on a third floor in that good street the Rue d'Astorg. He does not live there at all, but three miles away, in a charming little bachelor's house at Passy. His rooms, formerly in the Rue d'Astorg, were “au fond de la cour au premier,” and his maid-servant is not (and was not) elderly, but young, though ill-favoured. And it is not fair to say, with obvious purpose, that he never deserts the Thiers dinner-table except for the Germans. I made his acquaintance at a dinner at Lord Lyons's.
From all which I conclude that the letter is a vehement endeavour to recommend the new Minister abroad. Last summer St. Hilaire gave me the three big volumes of his Aristotelian Metaphysics, and, when I remonstrated, said, “Vous me le rendrez un jour, d'une autre façon.” That is what I am doing at this moment, when I tell you how very highly I rate the man.
St. Hilaire is quite at the top of scholars and philosophers of the second class. Not a discoverer, not an originator, not even clever in the sense common with Frenchmen, not eloquent at all, not vivid or pointed in phrase, sufficient in knowledge, but not abounding, sound, but not supple, accustomed to heavy work in the darkness, unused to effect, to influence, or to applause, unsympathetic and a little isolated, but high-minded, devoted to principle, willing, even enthusiastic, to sacrifice himself, his comfort, his life, his reputation, to public duty or scientific truth. He is not vain, so much as didactic; there is a method about him that is a little severe, a solidity that wants relief. His character has been shaped by long devotion to a cause that was hopeless, by which there was nothing to gain except the joy of being a pioneer of ideas assured of distant triumph. So that he is disinterested, consistent, patient, tolerant, convinced, and brave. Indeed, courage, contempt of death, is the one thing I have heard him speak of with something like display. The Republican party, to which he belonged even under Charles X., and of which he is the patriarch, had a good deal of dirty work to wash off; and I have observed that he was not communicative when, in an interest which it were superfluous to mention, I have tried to learn the secret history of Republicanism under the monarchy. There are few of them who never touched pitch. But he and Littré are distinct from most others by their hard work and their voluntary poverty.
This makes him peculiarly hateful to opponents. A legitimate Marquis said to me: “C'est un honnête homme, qui nous coupera la tête de la maniêre la plus honnête du monde.” People who admit that he is unstained by the gross vices of his party, speak of him as an enthusiast, and a dupe, and no doubt expect him to acquiesce, like Pilate, in all manner of wrong that he will not initiate.
I do not feel that there is no truth at all in these imputations. I have found that he thinks accurately, that he is even penetrating, but not impressive. He told me the speech he had prepared against the Jesuits, which, I believe, he never delivered. The argument was: The conscience of man is his most divine possession. Jesuits give up conscience to authority, therefore they forfeit the rights of men, which are the rights of conscience, and have no claim to toleration. I won't undertake to refute this argument; but it is pre-eminently unparliamentary, and smells of the oil he burns all day. St. Hilaire does not believe in the Christian religion, but he has Descartes's philosophic belief in God, and the elevated morality of the Stoics. Not the least of his merits is that having spent his life on Aristotle, he told me that he thought more highly of Plato; and in his Introduction to the Ethics he shows the weakness of his hero's attack on Platonism. In saying this he overcame a strong temptation. Scientifically his great achievement is the transposition of the several books of the Politics—which were in hopeless confusion before him. All Germany accepts the arrangement he proposed, and as the work is the ablest production of antiquity, this is no small matter. As a moderate, unambitious, totally dispassionate Republican, he belongs to the Thiers Centre. He thinks Jules Simon the most eminent public man in France, so that he is scarcely to the Left of Freycinet He despises and detests Laboulaye, the oracle of the Centre Gauche. I often heard, but am not sure, that St. Hilaire turned the scale, and made Thiers adopt, and enforce, Republicanism.
Forgive me for writing so soon and so confusedly.
Tegernsee, October 3, 1880.
Remembering Macaulay, Circourt, and Rémusat, I do not care to believe that Cousin or Radowitz was far superior to them in talk. But then I, again, look back to the people I knew with regret, and think my contemporaries less amusing.
Cannes, December 14, 1880.
I have been afraid to write. The delicious and most spiritual gift1 was sent to me here, whither we came early, only to find ourselves in- sore trouble, for a child had died of diphtheria in our villa just before we arrived. We had to settle in half-furnished apartments, where Mrs. Flower2 found us, bringing a flavour of Hawarden. What has stood in my way is this: Some time ago, recalling a foolish speech of mine, a year old, and spoken under the spell of a great charm, you asked me to repeat it on paper. I hesitated long, and whilst I hesitated, the little volume came, and made it churlish to decline any wish of yours. I resolved that the best sign of the sincerity of my gratitude would be to do what you had asked, and to be much more foolish than ever by putting on impertinent record the evanescent conversation of Tegernsee. But I have been so fearful of giving you more annoyance than pleasure, whether by the seeming of flattery or of censure, that I have allowed myself to slip into a much more grievous fault. Will you understand me and try to forgive me? I can never thank you enough for all the friendship of which that beautiful volume is the treasured symbol. There is so much of your thought in the beauty of it, and so much in the choice of it—more than you could guess. A dear friend of mine, now dead,1 devoted himself to the study of the Sonnets, as the real key to Shakespeare, being the form of his own ideas, not what he gave to his characters. We discussed them much together in long evenings at Alden-ham, and he wrote a book about them, which he followed up with a volume called The School of Shakespeare; and the two together are the best introduction to him that I know. … Swinburne himself has recognised their merit; so that a lost part of my life came back to me with your gift. All which is to say that, whereas all that comes from you is very precious to me, if anything could add to its price it was the happy chance that guided your hand.
Beyond that I must thank you very heartily for the confidence you showed me in sending me that early letter.2 It fills a large blank in my conception and understanding of his life, for it shows—for the first time to me—how large a part of what we know and contemplate with wonder is an original gift, and was born with him, and how little, on the other hand, has been added by the training of life. There are things which experience has restrained, and checked in their exuberance; but there are almost all the germs of the power that rules the movements of half a world. When I read that skit of the revered philosopher,3 it almost seemed to me as if I had sometimes doubted his greatness, and I think you were very good-natured. He is one of the few Englishmen of genius; one of the most perfect masters of our language that ever wrote; and when one has said that, and said it as forcibly as can be, one comes to a deplorable catalogue of evil qualities with which I shall not darken my pages. It was very good of you to send me that introduction.
I went to the Ghetto, and was amazed at the knowledge and conversation of a lady who turned out to be Mrs. Mark Pattison. … She seemed to be much in the secrets of the Chamberlain-Morley-Dilke faction, and despondent about the Pall Mall. But I like Mrs. Flower exceedingly, though I had only a glimpse of her. I thought her intelligent, sensible, and good—things not to be lightly spoken of anybody—and especially not to you. As to Lady Blennerhassett, she is kind-hearted, knows how to think straight, and is the cleverest woman I ever met out of St. John's Wood.1 If I ever said less than this in her favour, it would be injustice to do so now. Sir Rowland Blennerhassett fell at one time into bad hands—hands of Midhat and of Newman. … I fancied he was half a jingo, half an Ultramontane; and his wife seemed to back him, and held much aloof from us. They have richly made up for it since, and there is no Irishman whom I should more wish to see in conference with your father just now. He told me so much that was curious and important and concrete, that I begged him to put our conversation on paper, that I might use it in the proper quarter. He has not chosen to do it, I fear from a motive of delicacy. For we suppose that a set is being made against Forster; and he would not like, by private letters, to contribute to it, as his statements certainly would have done. But all these are words of wisdom: it is time for foolishness. I remember the occasion. You wished that you could disengage your mind from its surroundings, and learn the judgment of posterity; and I said that, if you chose, you might hear it at once. How I retrieved my audacity I cannot tell; and it is an awkward matter to recall, unless, like the ghosts that looked so foolish in the vestibule of the Inferno, I avoid both good and evil.
The generation you consult will be more democratic and better instructed than our own; for the progress of democracy, though not constant, is certain, and the progress of knowledge is both constant and certain. It will be more severe in literary judgments, and more generous in political. With this prospect before me I ought to have answered that hereafter, when our descendants shall stand before the slab that is not yet laid among the monuments of famous Englishmen, they will say that Chatham knew how to inspire a nation with his energy, but was poorly furnished with knowledge and ideas; that the capacity of Fox was never proved in office, though he was the first of debaters; that Pitt, the strongest of ministers, was among the weakest of legislators; that no Foreign Secretary has equalled Canning, but that he showed no other administrative ability; that Peel, who excelled as an administrator, a debater, and a tactician, fell everywhere short of genius; and that the highest merits of the five without their drawbacks were united in Mr. Gladstone. Possibly they may remember that his only rival in depth, and wealth, and force of mind was neither admitted to the Cabinet nor buried in the Abbey. They will not say of him, as of Burke, that his writing equalled his speaking, or surpassed it like Macaulay's. For though his books manifest the range of his powers, if they do not establish a distinct and substantive reputation, they will breed regret that he suffered anything to divert him from that career in which his supremacy was undisputed among the men of his time. People who suspect that he sometimes disparaged himself by not recognising the secret of his own superiority will incline to believe that he fell into another error of wise and good men, who are not ashamed to fail in the rigid estimate of characters and talents. This will serve them to explain his lofty unfitness to deal with sordid motives, and to control that undignified but necessary work, his inability to sway certain kinds of men, and that strange property of his influence, which is greatest with multitudes, less in society—and least at home. And it will help them to understand a mystery that is becoming very prominent, that he formed no school, and left no disciples who were to him what Windham, Grenville, Wellesley, Canning, Castlereagh were to Pitt; that his colleagues followed him because he had the nation at his back, by force more than by persuasion, and chafed as he did by the side of Palmerston.
Some keys, I imagine, will be lost, and some finer lines will yield to the effacing fingers: the impress left by early friendship with men who died young, like Hallam, or from whom he was parted, like Hope Scott; the ceremonious deference to authorities that reigned in college days under a system heavily weighted with tradition; the microscopic subtlety and care in the choice of words, in guarding against misinterpretation and in correcting it, which belonged to the Oxford training, which is a growth of no other school, which even in such eminent men as Newman and Liddon is nearly a vice, and is a perpetual stumbling-block and a snare for lesser men—these are points appreciable by those who know him that must be obscure to those who come after us. They will wonder how it was that an intellect remarkable for originality and independence, matchless in vigour, fertility, and clearness, continued so long shrouded in convictions imbibed so early as to be akin to prejudices, and was outstripped in the process of emancipation by inferior minds. The pride of democratic consistency will aim its shafts at those lingering footsteps, as a scientific age will resent the familiarity and sympathy with Italian thought to the detriment of more perfect instruments of knowledge and of power, and that inadequate estimate of the French and German genius which has been unfortunately reciprocal.
But all the things about which no New Zealander will feel as we do, do not disturb your appeal to the serene and impartial judgment of history. When our problems are solved and our struggles ended, when distance has restored the proportions of things, and the sun has set for all but the highest summits, his fame will increase even in things where it seems impossible to add to it. Ask all the clever men you know, who were the greatest British orators, and there are ten or twelve names that will appear on every list. There is no such acknowledged primacy among them as Mirabeau enjoys in France or Webster in America. Macaulay told me that Brougham was the best speaker he had heard; Lord Russell preferred Plunket; and Gaskell, Canning. I have heard people who judged by efficacy assign the first place to Peel, O'Connell, Palmerston, and to an evangelical lecturer, whom I dare say nobody but Lord Harrowby remembers, of the name of Burnett. But that illustrious chain of English eloquence that begins in the Walpolean battles, ends with Mr. Gladstone. His rivals divide his gifts like the generals of Alexander. One may equal him in beauty of composition, another in the art of statement, and a third, perhaps, comes near him in fluency and fire. But he alone possesses all the qualities of an orator; and when men come to remember what his speeches accomplished, how it was the same whether he prepared an oration or hurled a reply, whether he addressed a British mob or the cream of Italian politicians, and would still be the same if he spoke in Latin to Convocation, they will admit no rival. “C'est la grandeur de Berryer avec la souplesse de Thiers,” was the judgment of the ablest of the Ultramontanes on his speech on Charities.
There are especially two qualities that will not be found in other men. First, the vigorous and perpetual progress of his mind. Later ages will know what in this critical autumn of a famous year is only guessed, that even now, at 70, in his second ministry, after half a century of public life, his thoughts are clearing, moving, changing, on the two highest of all political questions.1
His other pre-eminent characteristic is the union of theory and policy. Bonaparte must have possessed the same mastery of infinite detail; and the best democrats, Jefferson, Sieyès, and Mill, were firm and faithful in their grasp of speculative principle. But in democracy that doctrinal fidelity is neither difficult nor very desirable of attainment. Its disciples embrace a ready-made system that has been thought out like the higher mathematics, beyond the need or the chance of application. The sums have been worked, the answers are known. There is no secret about their art Their prescriptions are in the books, tabulated and ready for use. We always know what is coming. We know that the doctrine of equality leads by steps not only logical, but almost mechanical, to sacrifice the principle of liberty to the principle of quantity; that, being unable to abdicate responsibility and power, it attacks genuine representation, and, as there is no limit where there is no control, invades, sooner or later, both property and religion. In a doctrine so simple, consistency is no merit. But in Mr. Gladstone there is all the resource and policy of the heroes of Carlyle's -worship, and yet he moves scrupulously along the lines of the science of statesmanship. Those who deem that Burke was the first political genius until now, must at this point admit his inferiority. He loved to evade the arbitration of principle. He was prolific of arguments that were admirable but not decisive. He dreaded two-edged weapons and maxims that faced both ways. Through his inconsistencies we can perceive that his mind stood in a brighter light than his language; but he refused to employ in America reasons which might be fitted to Ireland, lest he should become odious to the great families and impossible with the King.1 Half of his genius was spent in masking the secret that hampered it. Goldsmith's cruel line is literally true.2
Looking abroad, beyond the walls of Westminster, for objects worthy of comparison, they will say that other men, such as Hamilton and Cavour, accomplished work as great; that Turgot and Roon were unsurpassed in administrative craft; that Clay and Thiers were as dexterous in parliamentary management; that Berryer and Webster resembled him in gifts of speech, Guizot and Radowitz in fulness of thought; but that in the three elements of greatness combined, the man, the power, and the result—character, genius, and success— none reached his level.
The decisive test of his greatness will be the gap he will leave. Among those who come after him there will be none who understand that the men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them (because laws should be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls), and who yet can understand and feel sympathy for institutions that incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead. Fill the blanks, deepen the contrasts, shut your eyes to my handwriting, and, if you make believe very much, you shall hear the roll of the ages.
Dec. 14, 1880.
Don't let me be unjust to Lecky. Dr. Smith asked me to review his Eighteenth Century, but added that if I found myself inclining to severity he would wish to recall the proposal, inasmuch as the Quarterly had just attacked Tyndall. For it happens that Smith1 and I sometimes dine at a self-satisfied place that calls itself The Club. Good men belong to it, but stay away: Lowe, that he may not meet —, whom he dislikes sober, and detests drunk; the P.M., because he too much appreciates the sweetness of home; others, for other futile reasons. The group that continues faithful and carries on the tradition of Johnson and Garrick is consequently small, and it is a delicate matter to meet in such close lists men one is editorially holding up to ridicule and obloquy. Indeed, the presence of both Edinburgh and Quarterly on that narrow stage imparts a taste of muttered thunder to most of our meetings. Tyndall and Lecky are members, and Smith did not like to be on with a new quarrel before he was off with the old. He had spoken unfavourably of an early and unripe book of Lecky's, who was gratified when he heard of the message I had received, and still more when Hayward reviewed him instead of me. I declined, because I was already in the clutches of a longer task, and because I find that people quarrel with me for reviewing them—not from dislike of the book. Hayward could find nothing in it he did not know before. But I was more fortunate; I learned a great deal, and should have said that it was solid, original, and just. Perhaps not deep or strong or lively, or even suggestive, for that is a refined quality, inconsistent with the habit of telling all one knows and thinks, and dotting all the i's. The book is lop-sided, having grown out of a desire to demolish Froude's Irish volumes. And it was a mistake to treat the central, political history as a thing generally known, that could be taken for granted. No part of modern history has been so searched and sifted as to be without urgent need of new and deeper inquiry, and the touch of a fresh mind. Here is a new volume of 600 pages on Mary Stuart, by a man I never heard of, in which every other page tells us something unknown before, and the times of Walpole, Pelham, Pitt, being stirred by no surviving strife, have been much less studied than the great dispute whether Protestant or Catholic should reign in England. Neglecting the inexhaustible discoveries before him in the Archives, Lecky has to give sentence when he gives too little evidence, to describe characters more fully than careers, and to obtrude his own very good sense where a true scholar and artist would take care not to be seen.
There is another defect, due to the secular tone of Lecky's mind, but common to most historians. The age he writes of was the last in which permanent political doctrines were formed by ecclesiastical principles. Men very easily shape their notions of what government ought to be by their conception of divine right, of that domain in which the actual legislator is God. As to one class of minds Church interests are the supreme law in politics, to others, Church forms are the supreme example. Nobody is so fanatical as Nigel Penruddocke; but through subtle channels the influence works, and it was not merely a propelling, but a constructive force in politics from the end of the Middle Ages until the middle of the eighteenth century, when it became fixed in the theories of men like Atterbury, Toland, Hoadley, Wilson, Warburton—whose innermost instincts might be better exposed.
As to the novel of the season,1 it is so dull and so absurd that I cannot get beyond the first volume. Except querulousness, it has nearly all the bad qualities of old age; and if St. Barbe is meant for Thackeray, it is contemptible even in caricature. My neighbour Salisbury must feel that his time is soon coming.
There is a little disappointment for Hayward even in the Life of Fox. There is less pioneer's work in it than in Fitzmaurice. But the fulness of knowledge, the force and finish of the style (you see by my three F's that I have been studying the Irish question) have revealed a new man. I see him compared to his uncle,2 and I think it is not an exaggeration, though Taine says there have been only two men in the world who had Macaulay's perspicuity. G. O.3 is as transparent as graceful, and more easy. The only thing that has shocked me yet is his presumptuous assurance about the authorship of Junius. It is a Whig dogma that Francis was Junius; but that is mere Macaulayolatry. I have seen half the arguments that convinced me thirty years ago fall to pieces; and I am provoked that Trevelyan gives me old conclusions instead of new proofs. If his speaking has made as much progress as his writing, the Government has acquired a future Secretary of State. But I am still unhappy at their meeting Parliament with Courtney out in the cold.
As I quote Taine, I ought to say that I do not agree with him. The problems Macaulay made so clear were not the most difficult. Fenwick's attainder, and the theory of standing armies—purple patches in the way of exposition—are trifles compared with questions which jurists, divines, economists have to discuss. The phases of the Pelagian controversy, or the principles of government about which the Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, and Anglican Churches contended, would better have tested his power of making darkness clear.
I am glad that I wrote to Fagan before reading his book.1 For I wrote about the Italian correspondence, which is curious. But the biography does not deserve the praise it gets from partial people in Downing Street. Houghton, I hear, has written ill - naturedly about Panizzi; but the book is as full as an egg of mistakes, and of things worse than mistakes, so that even remonstrance would be thrown away. You will read with interest two volumes of Mdrimee's letters to Panizzi, just coming out. He was a bad man, and generally wrong; but few men ever wrote so well.
Here is Parker,3 fresh from Hawarden; the Card wells are our nearest neighbours. He is much better than half a year ago, but very weak. For three weeks the sun has shone all day. Greatcoats and umbrellas are obsolete; and we have the most beautiful walks.
T. B. Potter, also at Montfleury, and a great favourite with my children, keeps me supplied with Cobdenian literature, and I have read Brodrick4 with much pleasure.
Of course we are always thinking of Ireland, wishing for heroic treatment, such as would have saved Louis XVI. and the old French Monarchy, despairing of the needful overwhelming majority in the Commons, of any majority in the Lords, of union and strength in the Ministry; cheered by several intelligent letters and articles in the newspapers, sure only of the chief, and more sure of his strong mind than of his strong hand. If he has time for anything else, I hope he has read La Belgique et le Vatican, the volume published by Frère-Orban, the Belgian Minister, a weighty study of Vaticanism.
I am under the shock of the sudden Cabinet and of the Standard article, and am waiting for an answer to a telegram to know whether I must come at once. If not now, then on Monday or Tuesday before the opening, for I want to get the cue of the situation from the P.M. (an affair of five minutes), to see you, not quite so rapid a proceeding, and to hear the first debates.
It is so like you to take my nonsense kindly and only to dispute the praise. But I am not quite so far off as you imagine. In speaking of home I must have indicated by a—break, that there was a change of key; that I could not stay among the lofty entities that surround Tennyson even when he butters toast, that I was coming down from the silver side of the clouds and groping for things of earth. So that my climax is not quite literally meant. Having thus paved the way to retreat from an exposed position, let me take my stand for a moment, and say that I think it not quite untenable. … You yourself, who have shared so much of your father's thoughts and confidence, have hardly adapted yourself to his chosen tastes and special pursuits? In more than one of the later phases of his life, I fancy you hardly recognised the secret laws of the growth of his mind, and join him sometimes by an effort, over a gap. There is an ancient scholar at Cannes, who told me that he has such confidence in the P.M. that he feels sure he will succeed in defending his policy. I partly said and partly thought that anybody can be on Mr. Gladstone's side who waits to be under the thrall of his speech. The difficulty is to hear the grass growing, to know the road by which he travels, the description of engine, the quality of the stuff he treats with, the stars he steers by.
Really it is time for me to adopt the — tactics and run away from my post of defiance.
You know one of the two subjects. You will know the other on the last night of the debate on the address. I am only listening to the grass.
You will not resist what I said of our five Ministers if you will consider one word. I think I spoke of their best qualities, not of all their qualities. Pitt's art of making himself necessary to the King and the constituencies is unapproached. But then it is a vice, not a merit, to live for expedients, and not for ideas. Chatham was very successful as a War Minister. Mr. Gladstone has not rivalled him in that capacity. I fancy that both Pitt and Peel had a stronger hold than he has on the City. Please remember that I am possessed of a Whig devil, and neither Peel nor Pitt lives in my Walhalla. The great name of Mr. Canning and the greater name of Mr. Burke1 are the only names that I hold in highest honour since party government was invented.
You can hardly imagine what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau. Systems of scientific thought have been built up by famous scholars on the fragments that fell from his table. Great literary fortunes have been made by men who traded on the hundredth part of him. Brougham and Lowe lived by the vitality of his ideas. Mackintosh and Macaulay are only Burke trimmed and stripped of all that touched the skies. Montalembert, borrowing a hint from Dollinger, says that Burke and Shakespeare were the two greatest Englishmen.
But when I speak of Shakespeare the news of last Wednesday2 comes back to me, and it seems as if the sun had gone out. You cannot think how much I owed her. Of eighteen or twenty writers by whom I am conscious that my mind has been formed, she was one. Of course I mean ways, not conclusions. In problems of life and thought, which baffled Shakespeare disgracefully, her touch was unfailing. No writer ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold, but disinterested and impartially observant sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.
Forgive me if there is one point, if only one, on which I do not agree with Ruskin, who never writes to any one what might not be written to the world, on the fly-leaves of books.
Your mother must think me an ill-mannered wretch, even if she did not discover it before—for going away without thanking her for that beautiful photograph. I did not feel sure, at first, how much she was weighted with trouble, for I had never witnessed her serene courage. I will leave it to you, if you please, mindful of an exquisite proverb quoted this evening in the House as follows: Speech is silence, but silver is golden.
La Madeleine, Jan. 20, 1881.
You evidently think that George Eliot is not the only novelist at whose feet I have sat, and that I have learned from Endymion the delicate art of flattery. So that the seed of suspicion has taken root after all, and I hang by my own rope.
We might perhaps agree about Trevelyan better than you suppose. I probably started from a lower estimate of the man, and was astonished at his fulness of knowledge and the vigour of his pen. The oblique style of narrative is said to be an invention of Gibbon, and Trevelyan is of course full of Gibbon's times and writings. And I quite agree with you that the business of historians is to get out of the way, and, like the man who plays Punch, to concentrate attention on their personages. Nobody, however, did this less than his illustrious uncle.
I shall look out with extreme interest for your kinsman's1 review of George Eliot. I heard so many hard things said of her by Arnold and Palgrave, but Wolseley is one of her admirers.
La Madeleine, Jan. 21, 1881.
It is hard to say why I rate Middlemarch so high. There was a touch of failure in the two preceding books, in Felix Holt, and even in Romola. And it was Middle-march that revealed to me not only her grand serenity, but her superiority to some of the greatest writers. My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of view, the raison d'être, the secret of fascination for powerful minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and antipathies. Poets are no better. Hugo, who tries so hard to do justice to the Bishop and the Conventionnel, to the nuns and the Jacobinical priest, fails from want of contact with the royalist nobleman and the revolutionary triumvirate, as Shakespeare fails ignobly with the Roman Plebs. George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference, or caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly analysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never realised.
I heard the close of Friday's debate, and was much distressed at the hopeless badness of C—'s speech. But the situation gained by the result, and still more by what passed on Monday.
The topic of the reason for delay is, as I hinted at my last moment, a very delicate one, and not to be discussed lightly. Suppose there is bloodshed in Ireland before the Protection Bill passes; then a reproach would lie at their door for thinking more of eventualities that regard themselves than of the immediate danger to life, and the heavy strain on families of small means dependent on their own or other people's rents. And there will be this argument to meet, that less severity in October or November would go farther than greater severity in March.
My whole social philosophy consists in the desire not merely to gratify by civilities, but to bring men into contact with Mr. Gladstone—be it by breakfast, dinner, or small and early, or even by a formal talking to like —'s—and your best art, together with the due discharge of pasteboard, will be to bring him to bear, directly, on the seventy or eighty men who want it, and are fit for it, and don't neglect Lady Spencer's parties, or Lady Granville's less multifarious evenings. It is the confrontation, not the ceremony, that matters. False believer,1 because impostor, not to say hypocrite. I mean that, beyond his charitableness and a written eloquence that always fills me with an unspeakable admiration and delight, I do not believe in your artful philosopher; that the differences revealed to us by his writings, his conversation at Hawarden, the letter you treated so generously, cut down to the bone, and leave me no space or patience for anything better than a gracious courtesy. Therefore, in abetting your studies in Ruskinese, I am no better than a humbug, which is not a word to be written in books that will live and will irritate as long as the language.
La Madeleine, Jan. 28, 1881.
Those are not truisms about George Eliot. The reality of her characters is generally perfect. They are not always quite vivid, or consistent. They degenerate sometimes into reminiscences. But they live a life apart from hers, and do not serve her purposes. I wonder whether Arthur Lyttelton knows any good German criticism of her; I don't think I have seen any.
He makes out an irresistible case against those who think all is right in Ireland, so far at least as to need nothing exceptional from Parliament. He thinks little of the man—the imaginary hearer—who thinks that the Irish peasants have a case; that the suffering and the wrong are real, and are partly the work of the law; that the horrors which fill us with impatience are the direct —though not the unmixed—consequence thereof; that the first way to remove effects is to remove the cause; that, whereas all this is certain, it remains to be proved that the evil is beyond that treatment; and that the movement which has its root in the soil, cannot be so dissociated from the movement that has its root in America, that the one may heal and the other may starve. Probably he does not wish to speak of remedial measures beforehand, and in the same comminatory breath, or to dwell too much on the purely revolutionary peril, which is a delicate topic, about which people are not agreed, and which it is awkward to prove. But he is so little occupied with the one real objection, in this speech charged with the wisdom of many Cabinet discussions, that one wonders whether that other line of thought, so repugnant to the Castle,1 was ever forcibly put forward in the Cabinet.
What you say of great men manifesting only themselves in their works—the predominance, one should say, of the lyrical mood—is profoundly true. Milton and Byron are supreme examples. It is the reason why there are so few great epics, and so few great—there are many good—histories. It is, in higher literary work, the same solicitude that makes it almost impossible for men to think of the right instead of the expedient. You can hardly imagine how people wondered what Mr. Gladstone's motives were in the Bulgarian affair. Most politicians would be ashamed of having done any considerable thing because it was right, from no motive more clever than duty.
Fancy the Encyclopœdia Britannica asking me to do their article on Jesuits! I answered that I hoped they would have one on Mrs. Lewes. I have written my testimony to Mr. Cross,2 encouraging him about the intended life. …
La Madeleine, Feb. 2, 1881.
I was hoping that you had heard the glorious speech.3 It must have been a treat for you; and we saw at once, from our Pall Mall itself, how profound the impression had been. My imaginary listener, if he had listened, might not have remained unconverted. Certainly, as you say, the strongest confirmation of both speech and policy is the attitude of these ill-conditioned Irishmen. As I have paired with Lord Limerick (who has married a Miss Colquhoun of Cannes, and prefers bondage at his father-in-law's villa to the protection of the land-league in his ancestral domain, and who would support the Bill), I have virtually paired against it, and am, I dare say, the only peer on that side, unless Henry Stanley1 escapes from Clare, where he is detained, under pretence of Boycotting, by the transparent artifices of friends. …
I was prepared to believe the Standard account by a visit from Wolverton, who offered to show me his last letter from Downing Street, and I told him I thought he could do it. He was delighted to find the Hawarden photograph at Cannes. You will not see him for a fortnight, unless he lost all his money to-day at Monte Carlo. He deserves to lose it. He wants a strong Coercion Bill and an illusory Land Bill; but his party and personal loyalty make up for much obdurate deafness to the Morley predications.
I am very much obliged indeed for your message about Trevelyan. I talked about bringing in outsiders, and men not of one's own politics; and I spoke of Trollope and Morley in the former capacity, and of Goschen in the latter. Trollope is condemned as noisy. There are obvious objections to a newspaper editor, and the particular Lyttelton objection was urged, in a letter to me, by Reeve.2 Derby and Arthur Russell put forward G. O.,3 and I leave Goschen in the lurch until he answers my letter from Paris pointing out the error of his ways; but I hope you will be gracious to him before he goes. Goschen is above sordid motives. He dreads the Radicals, detests —, despises —, and, if left to himself and the nearest influences, he will drift away. His lips have never been touched with the sacred fire of Liberty. His international soul has never glowed with the zeal of the good old cause. He is moved by the fears to which City men are prone, and there are people more calculating than he is, who work those fears, partly to check the Government, partly to provide a new chief for the Opposition. Nobody can keep him straight but Mr. Gladstone. There is nothing present to offer him, as I take it for granted that one Budget will not satisfy his—the P.M.'s —vast financial designs. But he can employ the plan of Napoleon, who said to reluctant tribunes: “Que ne venezvous discuter avec moi, dans mon Cabinet? Nous aurions des conversations de famille.” It is not a profound constitutional view of the uses of an opposition; but there is a hint in it for Mr. Gladstone, who underrates his own power over men in private. The bill as sketched by the Standard will strengthen his hold on Goschen.
Chamberlain has been often as indiscreet as the theory he expounded to F. Cavendish implies, but he can hardly have prompted the Standard.
Your choice of topics shows how you were on your guard with Sir Bartle. The true thing about him is the strength, not the softness. I know that many have been taken in by that assumed quality, and much resented it. The right place for him would be in Asia Minor.
If you were to see those letters you would say that Burne-Jones is not the only hand at missing a likeness; but in politics you would recognise exactly what must have been your impression, that I had strung my expectations a little above practicable height, and came down with anguish to the baseness of prose.
I fear there is a perceptible change for the worse in Cardwell.
La Madeleine, Feb. 10, 1881.
You have gone through an anxious time, and I need not say where my thoughts were fixed during the week of Revolution.1 I trust you are well out of it, and found relief at Lubbock's. Wolverton is growing excited and goes back. I shall miss his good spirits, his keen pugnacity, his singularly practical and unphilosophical view of politics, and Godley's2 letters. And I don't know whether the Government will gain an adviser prompt, if they make a mistake, to help them to find it out.
I have suggested to May1 a precedent for the action of the Speaker in stopping the discussion. It was three days before the Little Gentleman in Black Velvet2 at Hampton Court changed the dynasty. The House was in Committee; the Tories were getting the worst of it and wished to prevent a division. The Whigs would not hear of an adjournment, and were jubilant, when one of their number had a stroke of apoplexy. Harley, the Speaker, in concert with the Chairman, seized the opportunity, took the chair, and closed the debate. Although the majority was floored, nobody seems to have remonstrated. I presume it is not on the Journals, and does not count.
In the hundreds of reflections suggested by the day of the scene, and of the superb speech, there is one slightly laced with regret (laced is a metaphor taken from toddy and negus). Once in 1816, the extreme Royalists, taking offence, walked out of the Chamber of Deputies. The majority were about to vote when De Serre3 said: “Personne ne croira que j'approuve, même indirectement, l'espèce de scission dont nos yeux sont frappés en ce moment. Mais je demande s'il ne serait pas de la sagesse, je dirai mêime de la générosité de la majorité ici constatée et qui pourrait délibéer très légalement, de remettre la séance a demain. II importe qu'on ne puisse pas dire que vous avez refusé d'entendre ceux de vos membres qui pourraient avoir des observations à faire.” And the debate was adjourned.
I like to quote De Serre, for though a Tory in those days, he would have developed if he had lived; and there is no statesman in French parliamentary history who has so much analogy with Mr. Gladstone.
Arrival of your letter from High Elms,1 with enclosure—I was surprised at those Irishmen going astray so hopelessly, when they had a man amongst them who knows so much about parliamentary tactics as Justin McCarthy. Their anger at the arrest of Davitt shows that it was not properly deliberate. One argument with which you must have grown familiar in the autumn comes to one's mind again since the Resolution. Free government is government by consent; and consent is conveyed by the choice constituencies make of their representatives. In a local and circumscribed, not imperial question, legislation must, as a rule, depend on the consent of those concerned, as represented in Parliament This argument is not conclusive against Coercion, because the Land League has not even an Irish majority on its side. But it might apply to the three quarter vote.2 In a purely Irish question the whole Irish representation might be swamped and silenced by half the House. I think the Irish might make some play here by insisting on the distinction between wanton obstruction—stoppage of imperial measures and paralysis of the House—and obstruction on their own exclusive ground. Wanton obstruction cannot be tolerated in a Parliament that legislates for one-fifth of mankind, although it was the method by which Rome acquired liberty. But the Resolution makes even local obstruction impossible to the unanimous people of Ireland. It establishes a degree of subjection that did not exist before. As the test of liberty is the position and security of minorities, it has to encounter a very grave objection which is not felt in Mr. Gladstone's time, but might be, under men like Harcourt, or the late Lord Derby, or George Grenville.
As the police3 are responsible, I hope Mr. Gladstone will always be ready to listen to their advice. But he knows very well that it is the function of the police to take fright, and to wish to be very much indeed on the safe side.
I am glad you saw more of Lubbock, and liked him better. He has astonishing attainments, and a power of various work that I always envy. And he is gentle to the verge of weakness. He has something to learn on the gravest side of human knowledge; apart from that he would execute his own scheme1 better than almost anybody. How I should like to see my own List of Authorities drawn up by you! There was a Pope who said that fifty books would include every good idea in the world. Literature has doubled since then, and one would have to take a hundred. How interesting it would be to get that question answered by one's most intelligent acquaintances: Winton,2 Dunelm,3 Church, Stanley, Liddon, Max Miiller, Jowett, Lowell, Freeman, Lecky, Morley, Maine, Argyll, Tennyson, Newman, W. E. G., Paget,4 Sherbrooke, Arnold, Stephen, Goldwin Smith, Hutton, Pattison, Jebb, Symonds, and very few others. There would be a surprising agreement. One is generally tempted to give a preference to writers whose influence one has felt. But that is often accidental. It is by accident, by the accident that I read Coleridge first, that Carlyle never did me any good. If I had spoken of him it would not have been from the fulness of the heart. Excepting Froude, I think him the most detestable of historians. The doctrine of heroes, the doctrine that will is above law, comes next in atrocity to the doctrine that the flag covers the goods, that the cause justifies its agents, which is what Froude lives for. Carlyle's robust mental independence is not the same thing as originality. The Germans love him because he is an echo of the voices of their own classic age. He lived on the thought of Germany when it was not at its best, between Herder and Richter, before the age of discipline and science. Germany since 1840 is very different from that which inspired him; and his conception of its teaching was a grotesque anachronism. It gave him his tnost valuable faculty, that of standing aside from the current of contemporary English ideas, and looking at it from an Archimedean point, but it gave him no rule for judging, no test of truth, no definite conviction, no certain method, and no sure conclusion. But he had historic grasp—which is a rare quality—some sympathy with things that are not evident, and a vague, fluctuating notion of the work of impersonal forces. There is a flash of genius in Past and Present, and in the French Revolution, though it is a wretched history. And he invented Oliver Cromwell. That is the positive result of him, that, and his personal influence over many considerable minds—a stimulating, not a guiding influence; as when Stanley asked what he ought to do, and Carlyle answered: “Do your best!” You see that I agree with the judgment of the Times (outer sheet) j and the Daily News, preferring him to Macaulay and G. Eliot, and constructively to Mill or Newman or Morley, seems to me ridiculous. I should speak differently if, reading him earlier, I had learned from him instead of Coleridge the lesson of intellectual detachment.
The royal dinner-party was evidently a high success, and, apart from royalty, I was glad to think of Derby frequenting Downing Street. I hope his time will come soon, although when he and Goschen are in the Cabinet I am afraid I shall lose my tenant at Prince's Gate. …
Cannes, Feb. 16, 1881.
Your kindness to B—is like nothing but yourself —not only for procuring him his innings so opportunely, but for interpreting so generously his perplexity and irresolution. I dare say you are right to lay the blame on me. It will be very amusing to get remonstrances from bewildered friends, and I think I shall have to write to Arthur Russell, as the most inquisitive and idle of them all, and therefore the best to trust with a secret that is to be told. For pray believe that there is no real truth in the report.
I paired for the Government with Lord Limerick against,1 No doubt, if he was present and voted, he would support the bill. Therefore, in balancing or neutralising his vote, I am virtually pairing with a supporter, not an opponent, and am myself practically opposing. But that is only my metaphysical commentary, founded on the fact that an Irish Conservative is sure to like the bill much better than I do. There is no understanding of the kind between us, and neither of us mentioned this particular measure to the other. I am simply in Cork's list, paired with a good Tory. And it all comes to nothing, for none of us expect a division on the second reading.
The only people with whom I need disclaim the impeachment would be Morley & Co., as I should only be making Radical capital out of a little joke. The joke consisting in your representing me as a worse enemy to Ministers than all the Tories and half the Irish.
I made out in the autumn that Blennerhassett laid a good deal of blame on Forster's want of flexibility of mind and of coup d'œil. I dare say he is quite right. There is evident truth in one remark you quote. The excuse for agitation is by no means always its cause; and I would not be too hopeful of the effects even of the most perfect or most popular Land Bill. Ultramontane priests will never, permanently, be on the side of the State. To nurse their own influence and the religious faith of the people, they always magnify antagonism and persecution, which implies denunciation of antagonists and persecutors. And there are deeper reasons still, why it is useless to apply to Irish measures the usual test of success. However, I am more often angry with our clergy for absolutism than for revolution, so that I will say no more. …
I never knew Amalie v. Lasaulx; but her brother was one of the best friends I ever had. For two years I followed his lectures on ancient literature, philosophy, etc., and he left his library to me when he died. His whole mind was occupied with religious ideas and studies; but it was an intellectual religiousness, without a notion of a church or any fervour of prayer. His sister had his independence of mind and the same generous idealism, and a humble piety which he had not, and which is remarkably rare among intellectual Germans.
... The Speaker1 seems to be a physician as well as a statesman. The victory over the disturbing Irish must bring your father immense relief. It is twenty-one years since I met him at Brighton, horribly jaded, and getting rapid baths of sea-air. I hope he will benefit this time.
You will have seen Scherer on Carlyle. The passage in Monday's Pall Mall, exalting Arnold at his expense, only shows that his2 burlesque language provoked the rigid and highly white-chokered critic. Froude will be a worthy biographer for so unscrupulous a hero.
Cannes, Feb. 19, 1881.
What I said of St, Hilaire has become a little obsolete since his resolute denial that the Greeks have a European decision—or award, as it stood in the English draft—in their favour. I cannot remember whether I indicated the mental peculiarity which has developed into such impolicy; but whatever I did say is for you to apply and employ entirely as you please. The Arthur Russells, moreover, know him enough to introduce the necessary vinegar.
The little joke about Forster is no deeper than Æsop. One said: “He has a woman's heart with a lion's spirit” Somebody answered: “Rather, a lion's skin.”
It was reported that Ecuador was preparing a Bark in defence of the Pope. Your father suggested that it must be a vocal bark. Others said it was probably Jesuit's bark (they prevail in Ecuador). And so it went on— that it was worse than their bite, etc., etc., etc.
I thought the World's apology to the Irish utterly impudent, but one of the best strokes of wit I can remember in my time.
I meant it as you say; only the slightest tinge. One need only look at them to see that generosity would be as completely wasted on them as on Salisbury, though there are three or four very much better than others. De Serre was, except Chateaubriand, the only man with a streak of genius among the politicians of Louis XVIII.'s reign; and he had virtue and governing power, which that brilliant impostor had not. It seldom happens that parliamentary debates cut down to the bone, or tap the bed of principle. There are about half-a-dozen series of debates that do, because they constructed a system of government from the foundations—the French National Assembly, in 1789--1791 and 1848; Frankfort, in 1848; Belgium, in 1831; the French Parliament, after 1815, are among the rare instances. And in that latter instance the most eminent orator, the finest character, was De Serre. He stood nearly where Canning stood at that time—between the parties, disliked by both, persuaded, without the least prejudice or passion, that a strong monarchy was necessary in the levelled society of France, willing to make some sacrifice of strict principle in that cause, yet looking forward to better times, which he did not live to see, for his health broke down in 1822, and he died in 1824. One story will explain the man to you. In one of his speeches he laid down that the bulk of a representative assembly is almost always well meaning (an axiom of constitutional philosophy). Furious outcries from all the royalist benches interrupted him; shouts of: “Vous oubliez la Convention!” He answered: “Yes, even the Convention! (order! order!) … and if the Convention had not voted under the terror of assassins, France would have been spared the most terrible of crimes!”
Laveleye has great knowledge of Political Economy and of politics, and his peculiarity is that he does not think of party, or power, or wealth, but is thoroughly anxious about the condition of society. That separates him from orthodox Economists (Lowe, Mallet, Newmarch), who do not attend to the problem of Distribution, and are not made sleepless by the suffering and sorrow of the poor. He is slightly heterodox; what Germans call Kathedersozialist, and what even Maine would call downright Socialist. His chief work is an account of early forms of property, an indirect and rather confused plea for common property in land. Ingram,1 Cliffe Leslie nearly represent him in England. He is a special enemy of the Catholic priesthood, like M. Frère-Orban, the Belgian minister, and Laurent of Ghent; but differs from them in the wish to give the people something better than negations. He has married a Protestant lady, and attends Protestant service; but whether from any dogmatic conviction, or as a bulwark against Ultramontanes, I am not sure. He is a very estimable man, well informed, earnest, slightly tiresome, and not at all original.
Don't mind coming to grief over parallels. A disposition to detect resemblances is one of the greatest sources of error. To me parallels afford a blaze of light, but they are rare, and hard to find.
... What you tell me of Mr. Gladstone's health is good news indeed; and I hope you will not listen to his regrets about a measure contrary to the law of freedom. As much authority as is wanted to protect the few against the many, or the weak against the strong, is not contrary to freedom, but the condition of freedom. The disease lies in society, not in the state. The other view, that the only dangerous enemy a nation has is its government, is pure revolution, and was invented by St. Just.
Cannes, March 7, 1881.
When the accident1 happened, the Cardwells had a favourable telegram from a friend of yours, and we learned the news and Paget's verdict together. You must have passed through terrible moments at first. But the best thing about it was your setting off to amuse yourself at Oxford. All England has been made to feel the truth of what you say, and Mr. Gladstone is almost the only man who does not ask the question: What is to be done if he is disabled?
I must give up my friend Sir Bartle at last. I thought he had courage and self-command; but he has been showing the mean spirit of recent Toryism in a way I did not suspect.
Your father's resolute adherence to principle, and his ascendency over weaker colleagues will be put to a grievous trial by the folly of the hapless Jingo2 Wolseley bequeathed to the new government.
I had a cousin who travelled beyond the Vaal, and at last died there. He taught me to believe that the Boers were excellent fighting materials. But Sir Garnet pretends that they are liars and cowards, the only white race retrograding. So that Sir Bartle is not the only South African authority I must relinquish.
I hope you really like Sir James Paget. You know that he is one of my Blue Roses, and makes up for my manifold disbeliefs in great contemporaries. The author1 of the novel just mentioned is here, and is our amiable and hospitable neighbour. There has been such a Whip for Candahar that five people asked to pair with me. They are not, on the whole, interesting travellers, except one, with a handsome and over-married wife. And we have had Sir Louis Mallet, very interesting and very sound about Afghanistan.
I am just off to Rome, to bring my mother-in-law away, who has spent the winter there, and to see what ten years and a new pope and new king have made of it. I am only allowed a week's holiday, and must crowd a good deal into it. The Sermons2 will be my first resource when I come back next week. Thank you, beforehand, so very much for them. I did not guess the secret history, and, after your letter, the Arms Bill was a disappointment. When in England I convinced myself that there was, at that time, no threat of invasion or insurrection; but when I saw the Bill going on, I fancied Endymion might be right about that hidden danger.
The conversation of those three great men1 is very curious—I should have liked to see and hear them. … If, by chance, there was a message or a commission for Rome, I shall be at the H. d'Angleterre until next Monday.
Cannes, March 25, 1881.
Rome is the cause of all my delinquency. I remained a week, very ill with sunshine and south wind, but very happy, and supremely grateful for your letters and Illing-worth's Sermons. Travellers' Rome is what it was; but in the real city the change is like the work of centuries. The religious activity and appearance that were of old are gone, and their place is usurped by things profane. The State has so thrown the Church into the background, that the Leonine city sleeps like a faded and deserted suburb, and one must look behind the scenes for what used to be the glory and the pride of Rome. The bewildered Girondin2 at the Vatican, who stands so well with the Castle,3 I did not see, but heard much of his moderation, patience, and despair. I think he is the first Pope who has been wise enough to despair, and has felt that he must begin a new part, and steer by strange stars over an unknown sea.
Layard, after serving the Court as a stick to beat Paget with, had left before I came. Almost all my time was spent with the two friends4 whom you remember at a memorable examination at Venice, and seven days passed like hours.
Lecky seems to me to have composed unconscious of another tune running in his head. The likeness1 is greater in the description than in the reality. Chatham had public virtue, genius, energy, coupled with the magic power of transmitting it, the strength that comes with unselfish passion, and a grand way of spending popularity that others meanly hoard. He had few ideas, less instruction than Fox or Shelburne, too little political knowledge for a clear notion of his own place, of the stair he stood upon in history, or for any definite view of the English or European future. I admit no comparison,2 except with the Burke of 1770--80. That early Burke would have made the peace with the Africanders, which is the noblest work of the Ministry.
When you seem to doubt what I think of it, you mean that Coercion has robbed me of my footing in your confidence. Four weeks ago a very eminent foreigner wrote to me that the discovery of the Afghan papers would chill your father's Russian sympathies. After explaining that the discovery was not new for Ministers, I begged my friend to dismiss sympathies for principles, and to understand that there are in the world men who treat politics as the art of doing, on the largest scale, what is right; and I informed him that he would presently see peace made with the Boers on terms of great moderation, after disasters unavenged, in defiance of military indignation, in spite of lost prestige. You see that I knew what I was saying. Bearing in mind how strong a weapon of offence is thus given to enemies at home, considering the strength the offended feelings lately showed, and the weakness that lies in the attitude of the Government down to the time of our defeats, I declare that I rejoice in this inward victory with heartier joy and a purer pride than I have been able to feel at any public event since I broke my heart over the surrender of Lee.3
Carlyle's two volumes are crowded with grotesque eloquence, but they make him smaller in my eyes (nothing could make him worse). The account of Southey seems to me to do him less harm than the rest. Common Sense I read and recognised as Hayward. It seemed to me nearly true; but I thought the Times and Temps near the truth.
Your question about my injustice to Germany before 1840 touches a vital point, and you narrowly escape a very long answer. Scientific Germany was hardly born in all those years when Goethe, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, Richter reigned. The real, permanent, commanding work of the nation has been done by a generation of men very many of whom I have known. To me it seemed that Carlyle spoke of great men before Agamemnon, and the bonfires that were good in the dark obscure the daylight.
And there would be much to say about the appreciation of the French and German genius, and the unpleasant reciprocity of chilled sympathy. But even if I could convince you of the fact, I do not know the reason. Let me only say, to prove that I am not fearful of giving you pain, that I think there is some want of method in his1 pursuit of foreign literature. Things come to him by a sort of accident, are pressed on him by some occasion, and are taken up with absorbing vigour, not always with a distinct recognition of the book's place in its series, of the writer's place among other writers. That sort of knowledge can only be obtained by close and constant study of Reviews, by men having more patience than urgent steam pressure, by much indistinct groping and long suspense. This seems unreasonably confused; yet I think you will see what I mean by the time we have taken a walk over the hill of Californie,2 from which you gaze on fifty miles of the Riviera.
To-morrow I must be away from home; so I write in ignorance of your brother's speech on Candahar. I am sure, if he spoke on so good a subject, he justified Challemel. It will be a real privilege to hear Lowell discourse on Dante. I am sorry the Paradiso,1 which is in the press, has not appeared. It is a good thing for all parties that Lowell should be linked by more than political chains.
The Sermons2 have been unjustly taken by Wickham before I could read them; but I shall have them soon. I saw enough to justify all you said, in former letters. There is an originality about them which obliges one to think again before acquiescing in everything. The next number of the Church Quarterly will be very interesting to me. But there will be a dreadful cold shower-bath when the Life3 appears.
Consuelo is a very great novel. Afterwards she4 threw herself away on Monographs. I know that I don't like her; but I don't think I could ever have compared Miss Brontë or Miss Austen to her.
Cannes, April 2, 1881.
Herbert's speech seems to me to deserve all the praise it brought him. That evening I met Henriquez, who spoke at Harrow during his canvass, and who says that as a speaker, apart from political experience and knowledge, he has nothing to learn. At the beginning the Skobeleff argument struck me as wanting a more elaborate introduction, but my doubt was soon dispelled. Please tell him, with my hearty congratulations, that the Roman empire perished for want of a good Land Bill. That criticism1 which Palgrave has disinterred makes me think of the judge who was not tied to a stake, and of Roger Collard's answer when asked whether he had called Guizot an austere intriguer: “I never said austere.” It is rather a gift of inventing picturesque, and often grotesque epithets and nicknames, than general power of expression. The sentences are seldom good, and not comparable to those of the faithful Ruskin. But the man who called Stanley a body-snatcher deserves a monument in Westminster Abbey.
You must have snubbed — at Lady Reay's. Or did he think you laughed at him? That, you know, is a possible error. There is no doubt that the opinion others have of us is one of the very many sources of subtle error in our judgments which have grown into such a prodigious catalogue since Bacon feebly began to enumerate them. People who study them, and stand on their guard against this particular temptation, fall easily by identifying themselves with their principles. It is almost an axiom in controversy that to attack one's adversary personally is to confess disbelief in one's cause, where doctrine and not conduct is in question. And I do see men who are personally attacked, conclude that their adversary is dishonest and knows that he is in the wrong. On the other hand, there is an institution in London founded on the belief that private acquaintance and good-fellowship softens the asperity of public conflicts. You know about Grillion's, where men dine without quarrelling, and where, by a pleasant fiction, no bore is supposed to live. There the effect is what your father says. People make opponents like them, and soften to their opponents, in consequence.
I write under the shadow of Disraeli's illness. Our last accounts are very threatening; and I, who think that the worst part of the man was his cause, and who liked him better than the mass of his party, look with dismay on the narrowness and the passion of those who will succeed him. He, at least, if he had no principles or scruples, had no prejudices or superstitions or fanaticism. You have heard it said of — that he would have been a good fellow, if he had not been a drunkard, a liar, and a thief. With a few allowances … a good deal may be said for the Tory leader who made England a Democracy. One must make so much allowance for so many public men besides Midhat.1
The Pope2 probably had no clear view about policy. If he had, he would hardly be Pope. But he sees that the old spells have lost their power over men, and so he gives them up. It does not yet appear whether he knows that the power is gone for ever; but visibly, for the time, he is trying new arts, and endeavours to restore, by conciliation and management, what Pius ruined by authority. The attempt to disengage himself from the crash of the Legitimists is the most remarkable instance of the change. He explains that the Church must not be so committed to any political party as to stand or fall with it. But that has been, since 1849, the entirely unvarying policy of Rome, and has forced all the enemies of absolute power to turn their forces against Catholicism. If once the two things are separated, there will be a great change in the position of things in Europe. If the Pope does not maintain Legitimacy he gives up the temporal power. He has no legal or political claim to Rome that Chambord has not to France, for arguments derived from Canon Law are without validity in politics. By weakening his one resource, he shows that he thinks the game is up. And then there is no insuperable obstacle to reconciliation with the Powers. Solicitude for temporal sovereignty has been the cause of all the faults and disasters of our Church since the murder of Rossi.1 To surrender it implies such a conversion that I shall not believe in it till I see clearer signs; for his chief confidant is the Archbishop of Capua, an old friend of mine, who is what Newman would be without his genius, his eloquence, and his instruction.
I don't know where to stop. Capua is a bad stopping place.
Cannes, Palm Sunday, April 10, 1881.
Don't mind my weak handwriting and brief letter, but I have spent most of this great parliamentary week in bed, and this is my first attempt to write.
I so much want to hear from you that your father is well and happy. The achievement seems incomparable, and the policy wonderful.2 But I am too confused in mind yet to understand the whole thing and the flight of the Thane.3 Probably it has been long foreseen, and is taken almost as a victory from coming alone. It portends tremendous opposition in the Lords, unless Derby has succeeded him,4 and even then. I have seen nothing but the Times—stormy weather delaying all English papers; and I read the peroration to my family as explaining why the speaker is in my eyes so much the best of statesmen. I wonder what an intelligent Socialist would make of the sentence which says that the Irish landlords would have been guilty of injustice by appropriating the results of tenant labour in improvement of the soil. In a rough and ready way they might apply the maxim to manufactories too. Then comes an extract from the ninth paragraph of the Bessbro' Report to the effect that Irish rents are lower than English, which might, I fancy, serve when they try to stop the way by getting up an agrarian movement in this country. I should add, having been so recalcitrant, that the Court ought to be able to effect what is substantially just in the Irish claims. I don't much believe in peasant proprietorship; but I should like much done for emigration, and have not been converted from what he said about that in 1845. The threatening close of the eleventh1 Budget speech must not, I hope, be taken literally—not only because the Budget, laid down on partly Tory lines, is not a very great one; partly because the speech is full of promise and suggestion, and even menace; also because the only successor whose succession would not seriously weaken the Ministry, Goschen, declared his resolution not to join it when he returns. …
You will not have had time to read French newspapers and academic speeches. They elected Rousse,2 a lawyer, not famous, but much trusted by the expelled monks. Falloux was not ashamed to say to me: “au moins, c'est un honn?te homme—chose précieuse aujourd'hui.” His speech was an exquisite composition. But d'Aumale, in his reply, said that Cicero was a much better man than Demosthenes—in politics. I hope that sentiment would vex your father, the one man who has the right to pronounce between them. A good historian says of Demosthenes: “Er war Idealist und überschätzte in gefahrvollen Zeiten die Wirkung sittlicher Kräfte.”
I am anxiously watching the change of Ministry in Italy, where I saw this mischief brewing so lately. A worse administration than the present seemed to me almost inconceivable. They avowed the doctrine that there is no resisting the priesthood except by definite Spencerianism; and that whatever is given to God goes to the Pope. …
La Madeleine, April 14, 1881.
... Your welcome and consoling handwriting quickly followed by the appearance of Wolverton fresh from home, brought me all I was wishing for almost as soon as my letter was gone. Thank you so much for knowing so well what one is thinking of.
We rather expect Argyll to take refuge here too during these holidays.
The Pall Mall is worth anything for its concentrated essence of opinion. Much of this is stupid. But the accusation begun by Argyll—that the measure abandons the old lines on which the Liberal party won its battles, introduces new principles not tested yet by the experience of nations, and begins, in short, a new departure—is one that will be urged with great force and some truth, and it will not do to disguise the magnitude of the change. The suspicion that the P.M. was changing on. the two1 greatest of all political questions comes true after all; and I wonder which of the twenty-two texts was in the ascendant when I thought myself convicted of false prophecy!
I don't feel to know how much German Herbert reads, for I don't rely on what he picked up at Tegernsee. But I want to draw his attention, if it avails, to one literary matter.
Within the last ten or twelve years there has been a wonderful change in political economy in the direction of which Laveleye, Ingram, Cliffe Leslie are popular exponents, and which Sherbrooke and Bonamy Price anathematise. The essential point is the history and analysis of property in land. It is important that our people should be exactly acquainted with these views and results before the debate comes on. Two volumes contain all that it is necessary to read:—Roscher, National Oekonomik des Ackerbaus, and Wagner's Grundlegung der Volkswirthschaft.
He that has read these two books knows a good deal about the lines on which Society is moving that he cannot well discover elsewhere.
Punch's Irish landlord spoils a very old Italian story. The poet Mortola, out of envy, shot at another poet and missed him. He had to get relieved of his excommunication by the Pope, and his confession was: “È vero, Santo Padre, ho fallito.”2 …
Cannes, April 24, 1881.
I am not sure that there is any quite available and compendious answer to the two reproaches of setting the poor against the rich, and of giving power to those least fit for it. There lurks in each an atom of inevitable truth; and the sententious arguments which serve to dazzle people at elections may generally be met by epigrams just as sparkling and as sound on the other side. Politics are so complex that almost every act may be honestly seen in very different lights; and I can imagine so strong a case against our African policy as to drive from his moorings any man not well anchored in justice.
Assuming that the first objection culminates in Midlothian: it was necessary to bring home to the constituencies, to needy and ignorant men, the fact that Society, the wealthy ruling class, that supported our late Mazarin3 in clubs and drawing-rooms, was ready to spend the treasure and the blood of the people in defence of an infamous tyranny,4 to gratify pride, the love of authority, and the lust of power. Nearly the same situation arose in Ireland, and in other questions not so urgent. Secondly, as to Democracy, it is true that masses of new electors are utterly ignorant, that they are easily deceived by appeals to prejudice and passion, and are consequently unstable, and that the difficulty of explaining economic questions to them, and of linking their interests with those of the State, may become a danger to the public credit, if not to the security of private property. A true Liberal, as distinguished from a Democrat, keeps this peril always before him.
The answer is, that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs—that politics are not made up of artifices only, but of truths, and that truths have to be told.
We are forced, in equity, to share the government with the working class by considerations which were made supreme by the awakening of political economy. Adam Smith set up two propositions—that contracts ought to be free between capital and labour, and that labour is the source, he sometimes says the only source, of wealth. If the last sentence, in its exclusive form, was true, it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the class on which national prosperity depends ought to control the wealth it supplies, that is, ought to govern instead of the useless unproductive class, and that the class which earns the increment ought to enjoy it. That is the foreign effect of Adam Smith—French Revolution and Socialism. We, who reject that extreme proposition, cannot resist the logical pressure of the other. If there is a free contract, in open market, between capital and labour, it cannot be right that one of the two contracting parties should have the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these securities, all these advantages, should be on the same side. It is monstrous that they should be all on the side that has least urgent need of them, that has least to lose. Before this argument, the ancient dogma, that power attends on property, broke down. Justice required that property should—not abdicate, but—share its political supremacy. Without this partition, free contract was as illusory as a fair duel in which one man supplies seconds, arms, and ammunition.
That is the flesh and blood argument. That is why Reform, full of questions of expediency and policy in detail, is, in the gross, not a question of expediency or of policy at all; and why some of us regard our opponents as men who should imagine sophisms to avoid keeping promises, paying debts, or speaking truths.
They will admit much of my theory, but then they will say, like practical men, that the ignorant classes cannot understand affairs of state, and are sure to go wrong. But the odd thing is that the most prosperous nations in the world are both governed by the masses —France and America. So there must be a flaw in the argument somewhere. The fact is that education, intelligence, wealth are a security against certain faults of conduct, not against errors of policy. There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopædia of Error. They would assert Slavery, Socialism, Persecution, Divine Right, military despotism, the reign of force, the supremacy of the executive over legislation and justice, purchase in the magistracy, the abolition of credit, the limitation of laws to nineteen years, etc. If you were to read Walter Scott's pamphlets, Southey's Colloquies, Ellenborough's Diary, Wellington's Despatches—distrust of the select few, of the chosen leaders of the community, would displace the dread of the masses. The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation. However that may be, the transfer of power to the lower class was not the act of Mr. Gladstone, but of the Conservatives in 1867. It still requires to be rectified and regulated; but I am sure that in his hands the change would have been less violent.
Nor do I admit the other accusation, of rousing class animosities. The upper class used to enjoy undivided sway, and used it for their own advantage, protecting their interests against those below them, by laws which were selfish and often inhuman. Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the rich lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were discovered to be not quite unlimited. Think not only of the Corn Laws, but of the fact that the State did nothing for primary education fifty years ago. The beneficent legislation of the last half century has been due to the infusion of new elements in the electoral body. Success depended on preventing the upper class from recovering their lost ground, by keeping alive in the masses the sense of their responsibility, of their danger, of the condition from which they had been rescued, of the objects still before them, and the ancient enemy behind. Liberal policy has largely consisted in so promoting this feeling of self-reliance and self-help, that political antagonism should not degenerate into social envy, that the forces which rule society should be separate from the forces which rule the state. No doubt the line has not always been broadly marked between Liberalism where it borders on Radicalism, and Radicalism where it borders on the Charter. Some reproach may visit Bright and Mill, but not Mr. Gladstone. If there were no Tories, I am afraid he would invent them. He has professed himself a decided Inequalitarian.1 I cannot discover that he has ever caressed the notion of progressive taxation. Until last year I don't think he ever admitted that we have to legislate not quite impartially for the whole nation, but for a class so numerous as to be virtually equal to the whole. He dispels the conflict of classes by cherishing the landed aristocracy, and making the most of it in office. He has granted the Irish landlords an absolution ampler than they deserve. Therefore, though I admit that the condition of English society tends in some measure to make the poor regard the rich as their enemies, and that the one inveterate obstacle to the welfare of the masses is the House of Lords, yet I must add that he whose mission it is to overcome that interested resistance has been scrupulous not to excite passionate resentment, and to preserve what he cannot correct. And I do not say it altogether in his praise.
It is the law of party government that we contend on equal terms, and claim no privilege. We assume the honesty of our opponents, whatever we think or know. Kenealy and Bradlaugh must be treated with consideration, like Wilberforce or Macaulay. We do not use private letters, reported conversations, newspaper gossip, or scandals revealed in trials to damage troublesome politicians. We deal only with responsibility for public acts. But with these we must deal freely. We have to keep the national conscience straight and true, and if we shrink from doing this because we dare not cast obloquy on class or party or institution, then we become accomplices in wrong-doing, and very possibly in crime.
We ought not to employ vulgar imputations, that men cling to office, that they vote against their convictions, that they are not always consistent, etc. All that is unworthy of imperial debate. But where there is a question of unjust war, or annexation, of intrigue, of suppressed information, of mismanagement in matters of life and death, of disregard for suffering, we are bound to gibbet the offender before the people of England, and to make the rude workman understand and share our indignation against the grandee. Whether he ought, after that, to be left to Dean Stanley1 is another question.
But I am not surprised at the complaint you heard. To many people the idea is repugnant that there is a moral question at the bottom of politics. They think that it is only by great effort and the employment of every resource that property and religion can be maintained. If you embarrass their defence with unnecessary rules and scruples, you risk defeat, and set up a rather arbitrary and unsanctioned standard above the interest of their class or of their church. Such men are not at their ease with the Prime Minister, especially if he is against them, and even when they are on his side. I am thinking of Argyll in Lytton's first debate; of Kimberley always; of soldiers and diplomatists generally.
Whilst you find Conservatives surprised at the moderation of the Bill, I have had the pleasure of meeting two members of the Government who think it goes much too far. And now the papers announce two more impending secessions.1 I really don't know what is to become of us in the Lords.
The Pall Mall résumés of Lord Beaconsfield have been intensely interesting. None seemed to me too severe, but some were shocking at the moment He was quite remarkable enough to fill a column of Éloge, Some one wrote to me yesterday that no Jew for 1800 years has played so great a part in the world. That would be no Jew since St. Paul; and it is very startling. But, putting aside literature, and therefore Spinoza and Heine, almost simultaneously with Disraeli, a converted Jew, Stahl, a man without birth or fortune, became the leader of the Prussian Conservative and aristocratic party. He led them from about 1850 to 1860, when he died; and he was intellectually far superior to Disraeli—I should say, the greatest reasoner that has ever served the Conservative cause. But he never obtained power, or determined any important event Lassalle died after two years of agitation. Benjamin,2 the soul of the Confederate ministry, now rising to the first rank of English lawyers, had too short and too disastrous a public career. In short, I have not yet found an answer.
I think, failing sons and secretaries, it is really important that the P.M. should set somebody in Downing Street to read Wagner's Grundlegung. It would be a great advantage to an outsider if he were to get it up, and to know exactly where the agrarian question now stands in Europe, both as to theory and practice. It is an exceedingly able, bold, and original book, and the author occupies, at Berlin, the first chair of Pol. Economy in Germany. I would even venture to ask you to mention it to him, as flotsam from the Riviera.
La Madeleine, April 30, 1881.
Like you I am sorry for the omission1 on Monday, and for the sequel to it next week. The homage of the House in which he was so long distinguished was due to Disraeli, and it would have been a fit occasion for a panegyric which might have appeared natural and informal. The Monument is a homage paid by the nation, demanding more than parliamentary or other intellectual distinction, and implying public service of some exceptional merit and amount. This is wanting in Disraeli. And we deem not only that the good was absent, but that the bad, the injurious, the immoral, the disgraceful was present on a large scale. Let us praise his genius, his wit, his courage, his patience and constancy in adversity, his strength of will, his originality and independence of mind, the art with which he learned to be eloquent, his occasional largeness of conception, his frequent good nature and fidelity to friends, his readiness of resource, his considerable literary culture, his skill in the management of a divided and reluctant party, even his superiority to the greed of office; let us even call him the greatest Jewish minister since Joseph—but if we say that he deserved the gratitude of the nation, and might claim his reward from every part of it, I am afraid we condemn ourselves. This feeling will certainly be expressed out of doors, if not in the House, and will not only mar the general effect, but will almost seem to have been provoked, by the formality and the postponement. Its existence in any considerable measure is a reason against doing what offends many consciences, and is gracious only when all but unanimous. Personally it will be a great opportunity for your father. I am afraid I deplore it from every other point of view.
La Madeleine, May 7, 1881.
The defect of the argument is that it will neither wear nor wash. It cannot be employed in public. Nobody can say:—“I who overthrew Lord Beaconsfield's ministry, reversed his policy, persuaded the nation to distrust him, and brought his career to a dishonoured end—I who, altogether disagreeing with a certain friend of mine, thought his doctrines false, but the man more false than his doctrine; who believe that he demoralised public opinion, bargained with diseased appetites, stimulated passions, prejudices, and selfish desires, that they might maintain his influence; that he weakened the Crown by approving its unconstitutional leanings, and the Constitution by offering any price for democratic popularity,—who, privately, deem him the worst and most immoral minister since Castlereagh, and have branded him with a stigma such as no other public man has deserved in my time,—nevertheless proceed, in my public capacity, to lock my true sentiments in my breast, and declare him worthy of a reward that was not paid to Fox or to Canning; worthy not only of the tribute due to talents, efficiency, and courage, but of enduring gratitude and honour; and I do it because I am not the leader of the nation, but the appointed minister of its will; because it is my office to be the mouthpiece of opinions I disapprove, to obey an impulse I condemn, to execute the popular wishes when they contradict my own.”
That is a position which cannot be held, a motive impossible to avow. But then there is no answer to Labouchere when he recalls the scathing denunciations of last year and asks “whether they were seriously meant, or whether, having served their purpose, they have been abandoned and committed to oblivion; whether the Prime Minister declares their injustice and invites the country to join him in making reparation, whether the responsibilities of power have effected the usual transformation from the exigencies of electioneering agitation, and whether we are to understand that the career of Lord Beaconsfield appears in a different light to those who have inherited his difficulties and have learned to appreciate his aims, from that which blazed on so many platforms. If the Rt. Honble. gentleman maintains his maledictions, if his soul is still vexed by the memory of disgraceful peace and disgraceful war, of tyranny protected, of bloodshed unavenged, then let him not forget the picture which he drew, which still dwells in the hearts of millions; the praise that comes from the lips that uttered those burning words must be hollow, for the soul cannot be there; it would be better that he left the task to more congenial hands, to some who could speak from the fulness of the heart, to some less prominent critic of Tory policy, to some less austere apostle of national duty.”
The nation, it is true, supported Lord Beaconsfield, but the same nation also very decidedly condemned and rejected him. The author of the rejection is the worst possible mouthpiece of the former approval. And in a question which is really one of morals everybody must judge and act for himself. If the degradation of public principle spread from Lord Beaconsfield to his party, and from them to the Liberals, to whom are we to look for a stricter spirit and a loftier standard? Is it for him who, as a volunteer, stemmed the tide of corruption, to ride on it now that all authority, moral, political, personal, is concentrated in him? No doubt, the opposition will be overdone; but there are materials which a light and skilful hand, P. J. Smyth, for instance, might use with telling force.
I will propose a double Cartoon: The P.M. proposing the monument, correct, slightly white-chokered, wearing what Whiteside called his oratorical face, making the splendour of words do duty for realities—and the Philippic Demosthenes of Midlothian rousing the sleepy Lion with tumultuous argument and all the unceremonious energy of a deep conviction.
To “sweep away” the House of Lords would be a terrible revolution. The more truly the House of Commons comes to represent the real nation the more it must fall under the influence of opinion out of doors. It has less and less a substantive and independent will of its own, and serves as a barometer to register the movement going on outside. Now the opinion of a whole nation differs from that of any limited or united or homogeneous class by its inconstancy. It is not pervaded by one common interest, trained to the same level, or inspired by one set of ideas. It is rent by contending motives, and its ideas cannot get a firm grip because there is nothing solid to lay hold of. The whole is not more sure to go wrong than a part, but it is sure not to go long the same way. This sort of fluctuation which is unavoidable in the nation has to be kept out of the state, for it would destroy its credit, its influence abroad, and its authority at home. Therefore, the more perfect the representative system, the more necessary is some other aid to stability. Six or seven such aids have been devised, and we unite three of them in our House of Lords — Primogeniture, Established Church, and an independent judiciary. Its note is Constancy — the wish to carry into the future the things of the past, the capacity to keep aloof from the strife and aims of the passing hour. As we have none of the other resources proper to unmixed governments, a real veto, a federation of states, or a constitution above the legislature, we must treasure the one security we possess. A single assembly has an immense preponderance of authority and experience against it. Chamberlain would soon bring it under the control of instructions, that is, would convert it into a democratic engine, and the empire, I apprehend, would go to pieces.
The worst anybody can imagine is a modification of the House of Lords, such as would make it less independent, less affected by tradition, less united in one interest, but more intelligent and, probably, more powerful. That seems to me possible, though difficult, and uncertain and hazardous in an infinite degree. I do not plead for this, but I cannot set myself absolutely and irrevocably against it. The House of Lords represents one great interest— land. A body that is held together by a common character and has common interests is necessarily disposed to defend them. Individuals are accessible to motives that do not reach multitudes, and may be on their guard against themselves. But a corporation, according to a profound saying, has neither body to kick nor soul to save. The principle of self-interest is sure to tell upon it. The House of Lords feels a stronger duty towards its eldest sons than towards the masses of ignorant, vulgar, and greedy people. Therefore, except under very perceptible pressure, it always resists measures aimed at doing good to the poor. It has been almost always in the wrong—sometimes from prejudice and fear and miscalculation, still oftener from instinct and self-preservation. Generally it does only a temporary injury, and that is its plea for existence. But the injury may be irreparable. And if we have manifest suffering, degradation, and death on one side, and the risk of a remodelled senate on the other, the certain evil outweighs the contingent danger. For the evil that we apprehend cannot be greater than the evil we know.
Tegernsee, June 3, 1881.
... I thought his1 speech on the 2nd Reading2 admirable, but for the allusion3 to the larger measure the Tories would have to bring in, which might put Shaw & Co. into some difficulty.
They say that Lenbach has gone on painting him, and has succeeded admirably, but that the likeness is severe and depressing.
Lord Granville told me of his Roman troubles, and I had to give an opinion, which was not that of the importunate widow. But a representative so foolish and so hostile would have been more dangerous at St. Petersburg than at Rome, where he is only throwing away the mighty influence of your father's name, but where there is not critical interest at stake. Lord G. seems to me to have done well about Tunis; but I am sorry I wasted my eulogy on B. St. Hilaire.
The Contemporary was very interesting. There was a saying of Carlyle that Germany had produced nothing since Goethe, which confirmed what I said to you about the limit of his information. I don't know who Shirley4 is; but the small divine5 amused me very much, and his article would have been just and good if it had not ended by implying that the judgment of the late elections settles the question of right—a sentiment fit for Gambetta and the punch-drinking politicians of Cahors.
You asked me the other day a perplexing question, suggested, less by the loss in the house of your friend, than by the observation that men are passionately fond of talking about themselves, and practising autobiographical arts. My answer must be what you anticipated. Being refused at Cambridge, and driven to foreign universities, I never had any contemporaries, but spent years in looking for men wise enough to solve the problems that puzzled me, not in religion or politics so much as along the wavy line between the two. So I was always associated with men a generation older than myself, most of whom died early—for me—and all of whom impressed me with the same moral, that one must do one's learning and thinking for oneself, without expecting short cuts or relying on other men. And that led to the elaborate detachment, the unamiable isolation, the dread of personal influences, which you justly censure.
Please write that censure is not anger, and tell me what you are all doing, what the prospects are, how much social trouble you take, and whether you liked Matthew Arnold and his airs. …
She1 has taken with her one of the strongest links that attached me to this world, but I do not follow less keenly the movements of the man who, of all now living, has the greatest power of doing good. The Irish speech on Friday, and the economic speech on Saturday, made the strongest impression on me.
I fancy the man who attacked the calculation of national profit in the latter, misunderstood his own case, and might have made something of it if he had spoken of the distribution, not of the increase of wealth. The treatment of Home Rule as an idea conceivably reasonable, which was repeated at Guildhall, delighted me. I felt less sure of the distinction between that as a colourable scheme, and the Land League, as now working, as one altogether revolutionary and evil. At least, the censure and arrest of Parnell made me regret more than ever the monument and the eulogy of Disraeli. But then, you know that that is my favourite heresy.
What has most struck me in these speeches of the Recess is that they do almost more than the parliamentary oratory to make the whole country familiar with Mr. Gladstone's ways of thought, and to stamp his mind on the nation. I fear they must be fatiguing to him, because I have always thought that he found an intellectual audience most easy to deal with. In the Palmerstonian days I remember your brother1 asking me at Twickenham what I thought of our prospects; and I answered that the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not water his wine enough. And I believe he thought me a fool. But it was quite true: he tried to make us understand his figures, in the House; but he did not much unfold his thoughts for the public; and I used to be surprised to find that men who knew him well, Lord Granville, Argyll,2 S. Wilberforce, saw neither the connection nor the consequence of his ideas. This is so much altered now, that he does not dislike to sit for his mental portrait, and his philosophy of government is the study of thousands. So he is moulding the mind of the nation as no man ever did.
I wonder whether you will have patience to talk to me about him at Cannes? We are just starting for the Madeleine, through Switzerland. …
What might, possibly, be done in a moment of triumph,3 would be desertion and disaster to the party at any other moment. Nobody can hope that next Easter, or for a couple of years, we can be altogether crowned with laurel. In the presence of Mr. Gladstone himself the Tories are recovering spirits. They would take a leap forward if Achilles was safe in his tent.
That is so clear to any one looking below the surface that it suggests another objection—there might be an appearance of retreat at the first turning of the tide, of an inclination to escape, individually, from a prospect of losing battles and declining prosperity, and to leave others to face the renewal of disintegration and reaction, such as we saw in 1873. I know that this is not a consideration where duty is visibly concerned; but it is a valid consideration where policy is concerned. And it must be remembered that he may resign office but cannot abandon power.
Herbert's constituents1 were probably more deeply impressed than I was by the repeated, but too suggestive, eulogy on Hartington and Lord Granville. Has Mr. Gladstone fairly faced the question, What will the party do without him? I may quote my own sentiment, because I grew up among Russells, Ellices, Byngs; and though I am very suspicious of early impressions and of doctrines unaccounted for, I know I am much more favourable to the great Whig connection, to the tradition of Locke and Somers, Adam Smith and Burke and Macaulay, than Mr. Gladstone would like. Yet it would seem dust and ashes, but for him. … The idea that politics is an affair of principle, that it is an affair of morality, that it touches eternal interests as much as vices and virtues do in private life, that idea will not live in the party. Indeed it is already overshadowed by the Beaconsfield monument, described by that prophet, Pope.2
Besides, the party would become unable, from internal divisions, to govern the country. I take the letter to be a recognition of the fact that the P.M. ought to be in the House of Commons. In that case it is on the cards that Lord Granville would retire at the same time. Where should we be in the Lords, if neither Argyll, nor Derby, nor Lord G. sat on the Treasury Bench; if Northbrook, Carlingford, and Kimberley were left to face Salisbury and Cairns? And then, if Selborne resigns the woolsack, and it becomes necessary to choose a Chancellor for his debating power? The future is as gloomy in the Commons with Bright and your father away, Goschen out of office, Hartington liable, any day, to leave it. In both cases we come to the level of mediocrity; we depend on the second rank. …
The new constituency gives increased weight to the Democratic leaders, and it will be impossible for the Whigs to control them or to do without them. They will force their programme on the party by keeping it out of office until they prevail. This must come sooner or later. But Mr. Gladstone ought not to retire until he has provided for the future of the party he has remodelled. With respect to persons, if he does not bring Derby and Goschen in, nobody else can. As to Goschen —whose position will be a considerable one, as the best financier of the party, afterwards—it has been unfortunate that the overtures were not made by the P.M. himself. They would have been far more flattering; probably also more clear and definite. The measure1 he objects to is considerably postponed. The way is crowded with bills on which he agrees with ministers.
There is something graver than the question of persons. There is his own Church policy, the Eastern—especially Egyptian and Armenian—question, the decentralisation of H. of Commons business, redistribution of seats, and ever so much more. I should like him to see more of the Prince of Wales,2 that something of his influence should survive in the Royal Family. And his present power is such that there will be a real failure in his career if he retires without employing it to secure the future of the party. It would be wasting or burying the fortune of Rothschild, the most enormous capital ever collected in one hand.
The resistance to G. Eliot, the preference for Scott, the desire to confide in —, are all one and the same thing: idealism. When Disraeli sat down exclaiming, “The time will come when you will hear me,” his neighbour slapped him on the back and said, “So they will.” That encouraging neighbour was —. He can never take to a man of strong principle and purpose. He is little better than a vague Jingo: and he is the most indiscreet, and not the most accurate of men. To trust him with such a secret is like rejecting G. Eliot as cynical, gloomy, and uncharitable in her views of life. A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark. There is just one thing on which the P.M. is wilfully a little superficial!
Private Secretaries have no time for letters of their own; otherwise I think with pleasure of your new occupation. Don't let it tire you. In many ways it will interest you; and J. S. Mill would highly have approved of it, as portending an end to the subjection of women.
La Madeleine, Nov. 9, 1881.
I am sorry to have lost the Knowsley letters, as I know something of your accounts of country houses. The envelope raised expectations which added to my disappointment; for there was no danger that the dulness of the company would affect the record. The newspaper list of visitors surprised me. …
The point, however, is the good impression which Derby made during their walk, as there was no previous liking.
Your suggestion of a visit to Hawarden is as tempting as it is kind. I should like nothing so much if I thought it suited Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone; but at this moment I am wanted, sadly wanted, here; and the ingenious indiscretion of somebody has provoked a demonstration more impressive than any arguments of mine. It has shown what the triumph of the Tories, what the helplessness of the Liberals would be. Mr. Gladstone must see now that his resolution must depend on facts, and not on wishes. What he is to the cause and the party I fear he will never understand.
Touching the future, I can abate nothing of what I said. It is odd, especially for me to say, who often disagree with him in maxims if not in aims, but you undervalue him in comparison with other men. Is it the strife in the Cabinet, the defection of friends, the zeal of opponents, the slow growth of results, the versatility of popular feeling, the coldness of Continental opinion, that depresses you? or is it Morley's book?1 T. B. Potter has just arrived, I hope with a copy for me. I see from the extracts that it is a piece of very superior work. At first I expected an oblique attack on your father, as a dilatory and inconsistent convert, prompted by Cobden's long distrust, by Bright's early denunciations, by the aversion of literal economists, of Equalitarian Democrats, of stubborn unbelievers in those qualities which raise him above the highest level of Liberalism. But I can fancy that you might be impressed by so vigorous, sincere, and complete a system of politics very distinct from his own. The lieutenants of Alexander, Napoleon and his Marshals, are the only fit comparisons to describe the interval between the P.M. and the best of those who come next to him.
We lose a weak, an ornamental, an unstable, but patriotic man in —. As he has been the guiltiest misleader in ecclesiastical questions, his retirement is appropriate at the moment when we are trying to get the ear of the Pope. There are, of course, better reasons for that just now than the state of Ireland, and I think he (the Pope) deserves the kind of help it must give him. His impulses seem almost always right, whilst his execution, depending on others, and requiring force of character as well as good intentions, is generally poor and shabby. If the Powers had been quicker to understand how strongly he contrasts with his predecessor they might have enabled him to prevail against his court.
John O'Hagan, the chief of the new Land Court, is a man whom I tried to bring forward, and made much of in the beginning of his career. He has the stamp of 1848 upon him as deep as Duffy,2 and I found him rather literary than politic, more full of good and gracious aspiration than practical and solid. The Court has done two things which must, I imagine, raise doubts at Hawarden. They undertake to fix a rent such as will fairly enable a man to live—that is a rule which would reduce rent per acre in proportion to the smallness of the holding, and would extinguish it altogether in the smallest. And they judge not by the land and buildings, but by the capacity of the tenant—that will lead them to do more for the worse farmer and less for the better. On the other hand, it is terrible to read that farmers cultivating 20 or 30 acres never eat butcher's meat. In France I find that the families of day labourers have meat for dinner every day. I am told that there is scarcely an exception.
Hawarden after Knowsley must have been a relief, especially with Lightfoot, Goldwin Smith, and may I say Harcourt? There is no room—there never is—for what I have to say.
Cannes, Nov. 25, 1881.
I have been away from Cannes for a few days, and am ashamed to be again behindhand.
If I had not known it before, I should discover now what a good fellow Alfred Lyttelton is. F. C.'s view does not convince me. The impeding facts will be there, but the strong will1 and the untimely gift of self-disparagement may be too much for the facts.
I am struck by what you say of the omission in Morley's book, which I am to receive in a few days. A person who has had a large and legitimate share in its preparation spoke to me some time ago in a manner which led me to expect that the Treaty narrative would be hostile to Mr. Gladstone, and would reveal soreness against him on the part of Cobden. I discussed the thing with him a good deal, but without materials which would justify me in hoping that I had made an impression. Since then, Mr. Gladstone has become P.M. and Morley is editor of one of the principal organs of a part of the ministry. That explains some degree of reticence, if my former impression was correct. I do not think such reticence quite worthy of the occasion and the men; and it would be well that the true story should be told, unless it should be likely in any way to embarrass the new negotiation. That is a question that can only be settled at Hawarden.
Knowles proposed that I should review the book, having a Tory review already undertaken. He offered to bring the volumes to Cannes before the end of this month. That would not give me the needful time. It would be necessary, in the dearth of books here, and of all sources of information besides T. B. Potter, to have some things looked up in England, by slow process of post. And it would be quite essential to ascertain how much of what is omitted may be supplied. Not feeling sure of that, and of the time, I was obliged to decline. If Knowles comes here, as he portended, I shall have an opportunity of talking it over with him.
Many, many thanks for the glimpse into that precious Diary.1 You will have observed how he demolishes his own argument. He compares what I say now with what people said of Palmerston. Those people were wrong because Palmerston left a better man than himself behind him. But Mr. Gladstone goes on to say that there is nobody behind him fit to lead, except —. Just work out the sum in Proportion: as G. to P., so is X. to G.
And it is not only a question of men, but of elements. There are many things in the glimpse that are very notable. I fancy that Goschen's late speech has done him good; but it still seems clear that he wiII not shut the door on the Tories. I am in communication with them1 again, and should perhaps see them on my way back, if I could come to Hawarden.
I write this off in haste, before I have an opportunity of showing Mrs. Gladstone's most kind letter to Lady Acton. I don't like to answer her until I have done so.
Of course I should like to come beyond anything. If Parliament does not meet before the proper time, it might be possible to come early in January. The middle of December would not be quite so easy, for reasons here. But please tell me if it would be very much better for reasons paramount. Two thousand miles would be nothing for a good hour's talk with him, and several hours with his Secretary. I hope the Temple of Peace would not lose that character by my invasion of its pacific precincts.
Seeley would be hard on Lecky if he applied those words to his Eighteenth Century, which is a weighty, thoughtful book. But the two former works, by which he became famous, do not really rise much above the vulgar level. There is nothing in his writings nearly equal to the new Bampton Lectures.2
Cannes, Nov. 29, 1881.
Hartington's speech has not arrived yet; but the French papers describe him as differing about Ireland from the P.M. and not repelling the idea of Compensation. As this was not urged at the time, it would now be a reproach to the Act, which might never have passed with such conditions. And one neither sees how compensation is to be regulated, nor by whom; whether by a commission stultifying the present one, or by the same contradicting itself. And it is very unlike the economic policy of the P.M. But I can conceive a very powerful argument on the other side, which the Tories are not likely to use.
I have not fired all my shot, and I don't rely on Hartington's translation. His last speech does not strike me favourably.
He puts away the compensation argument in a fashion more parliamentary than statesmanlike. In debate, where effects are immediate and momentary, one is glad of anything that tells against opponents, and gets used to phrases instead of reasons.
Macaulay was indiscreet enough to write to his constituents on Windsor Castle paper. It was good material for a laugh, and no more; but Peel and Graham never let him hear the end of it. “From the proud Keep of Windsor you bade the lieges have no fear,” and such like seemed equivalent to argument. When one addresses the Nation, with a sort of Manifesto on a difficult, new, and dangerous question, one must go straight to the point. We expect of a real statesman that he wiII take the case of his adversary not by its weak end, but at its strongest; that he will see whether he cannot even strengthen it before he replies. If he deals with the weak points, like a lawyer, somebody will follow, and will beat him. That is part of the integrity of public men. And I must say that H.'s idea that he meets the case for compensation by asking whether rack-renting landlords are to be paid for their iniquity, exposes him to a rejoinder so crushing as to damage his position and to strengthen my plea.
There is no constructive power among the Whigs. There is some among the Democrats, because their principles have been thought out, and provide legislation for generations. But the two men capable of working out thoughts into system on other than purely democratic lines are Derby and Goschen. And they are outside, and do not really contribute to the force of the party.
Cannes, Dec. 14, 1881.
To-morrow I am off to Nice with M., after the Blue Rose, and Christmas presents for the others. They tell me that Mr. Cross1 is here. If so, I hope to have a talk with him about the difficult life he is writing.
I have been looking forward to the books of the Year, which I have not had courage to send for, especially the life of the most fascinating writer2 of the day, and the letters of Bishop Thirlwall, I am glad to think that I need not stop in London to read them, and am extremely interested by what you say of Thirlwall, I never found him very attractive or accessible, personally.
The success of Newnham is a thing to congratulate your sister on. As to Herbert, the papers enable me to follow his wanderings and conversations with old Irishwomen. He must be making himself very useful to Mr. Gladstone; and I rejoice at symptoms in this day's papers which tend to weaken my inclination to compensation.
Athenæum, Jan. 7, 1882.
... I met three Ministers last night at dinner, and the impression is that Mr. Gladstone is remarkably well. But the Conservatism of London is something too excessive.
I met at the Russells', Maine, Monck, F. Leveson, and Reay. At the Athenaeum, Hayward, H. Spencer, May; and there are much worse croakers than these.
It will be quite refreshing to spend Monday at Seacox, with a man1 who is understood to be travelling towards the Ministry, and no longer away from them. It has been impossible to call in Downing Street; and I dare say your mother was rushing about. But I am to meet them, thanks to you as usual, at Lansdowne House this evening.
At the Museum, Poole gave me the papers to read that Mr. Gladstone spoke of.
I was much struck by this answer—much struck to find a philosopher, entirely outside party politics, who does not think Toryism a reproach, and still more, to find a friend of mine ignorant of my sentiments about it. And I am much tempted to have it out with him, and discover what he really means. Besides which, I spent some hours in Mark Pattison's company; found Reay desponding, but eager to speak; May,1 very much depressed; H—,pottering feebly, as I thought, over Montlosier,2 whom he does not understand, in the Quarterly, and Junius, whom he does not discover, in the Encyclopcedia; Moncks3 remarkable as the one happy Irishman.
By-the-bye, you condemn me for my indefinite answers to some very searching questions; and I find you are right. At least I have read a paper on the Revised Version' which satisfies me that I ought to have joined more heartily in Mr. Gladstone's censure of it. But I have been reading it to my children, and it had got associated with very sweet moments. Once more, I perceive that my letter is full of everything except yourself. …
Cannes, Jan. 25, 1882.
I return the letter of my heroine4 with many thanks. It reminds me of what she wrote to me. If I could find it I would send it to you. … I think there is a piece of truth in Mr. Ottley's remark. Her strongest conviction, the keystone of her philosophy, was the idea that all our actions breed their due reward in this world, and that life is no reign of reason if we put off the compensation to another world. That is a moral far more easily worked in cases of outward, transitive sin than in those which disturb only the direct relations of man with God. These indeed are cases which may partly depend on our belief in God, not only in humanity and human character. Deny God, and whole branches of deeper morality lose their sanction. Here I am preaching against Bradlaugh, after all!
Her genius would no doubt reveal to her consequences which others cannot imagine. But still the inclination of a godless philosophy will be towards palpable effects and those about which there is no mistake. Especially in a doctrine with so little room for grace and forgiveness, where no God ever speaks except by the voice of other men. Defined and brought to book, that is a detestable system. But it is not on the surface—and many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.
Still there is a piece of truth in this paganism. Looking at history, not at biography, taking societies, and not individuals, we cannot deal with things seen by God alone; things take other proportions; the scale of vice and virtue is not that of private life; we judge of it by its outward action, and hesitate to penetrate the secrets of conscience. The law of visible retribution is false even there. But it is true that the test and measure of good and evil is not that of the spiritual biographer.
Cannes, Feb.20, 1882.
I spent at Rome a most interesting fortnight, explaining the history of the Church and of the world to M., listening to a great debate on the representation of minorities, and hearing a good deal of the M.P.1 who neither has nor has not a mission. We wound up with two days at Florence, and I accompanied M. to Genoa, along the finest part of the Riviera, and then went to Bologna, to a dying relation. All which has stood in the way of coming home, of writing, and of knowing what is going on. I am reading up the debates, and your letters light up the task.
I was not happy about Errington. Everybody spoke well of him. But there was too manifest a desire to amplify the significance of his position, and to entangle him in Roman schemes and views.
Schlözer's first visit was to me, as we lived in the same house, and are old friends. They, at least, have something to offer; but the mission seems to me very ambiguous.
I have long wished for that declaration about self-government j but I am persuaded that there has been as much statesmanship in the choice of the time as of the terms. There is so much danger of being deserted on that line, and of one's friends combining to effect a reaction. It will not do to make too much of the speech of 187I. The occasion, last week, gave extraordinary weight to Mr. Gladstone's words; and he would not now say that the movement is superfluous, or that Ireland always got what she wanted. The risk is that he may seem to underrate the gravity of a great constitutional change, in the introduction of a federal element.
Liberty depends on the division of power. Democracy tends to unity of power. To keep asunder the agents, one must divide the sources; that is, one must maintain, or create, separate administrative bodies. In the view of increasing democracy, a restricted federalism is the one possible check upon concentration and centralism.
But I am very anxious about one thing. If Mr. Gladstone thinks that he cannot carry his colleagues, his party, Parliament, or the nation with him, and declines to take the lead in this movement, the throwing out of the idea may become a source of weakness. They will say that he waits for the initiative of others, that he is expecting a wind, that he is ready to be squeezed, if others will do it for him, that he looks on opinion as a thing to be obeyed, not to be guided—and so will proceed to put pressure on him and to make demonstrations not at all in conformity with his spirit and purpose.
Goschen agreed to go with me to Paris, and changed his mind at the last moment. The consequence was that I did not stop at Paris, and some letters which were sent there from Seacox have only just reached me. And so I have left unanswered your birthday letter, and seemed to disregard the reproach as well as the kindness it expresses.
I will not say that, in the former, there is not much that I have had to consider. Still, in giving up one's home, and country, and friends and occupations, there is at least a mixture of good motives with selfish ones, and something sacrificed, if there is also a good deal of calculated pleasure-seeking and ease. If I held an appointment abroad, keeping me permanently away from my— very modest—estate, you would say that the Government was insane to offer it, but you would hardly think it wrong of me to accept it. And the duty I have allowed to precede all other duties is one that possesses a strong, and unmistakable, claim on me.
Between my children and my Shropshire neighbours my choice is indeed decided.
I am seeing a good deal of the Mallets. He is getting over a very bad illness, and seems to like Cannes, in spite of Sir E. Colebrooke and the Pall Mall. I have succeeded in making Sir Louis shake his head over the secret Jacobinism of his friend Morley. Yesterday I had the pleasure of dining with your favourite correspondent.
Your view of the speech introducing the new Procedure is far more just than R.'s. It displayed that serene mastery and lightness of touch which are the latest growth or ripest form of his talent, rather than the controlling and compelling power which we know so well. As to the censure,1 I hold the necessity of keeping the working of the Act from interference; but I cannot admit that the case of the Commissioners is good, at the weakest point. The defence of their general action seems to me triumphant; but I don't think the attack has been met in the particulars; and the common maxim of all constitutional governments, to stand by one's subordinates in their need, is, I think, a very dangerous one.
John Inglesant has been begun but not finished, for want of time in London. Here is a letter which it can be no indiscretion to show you, on that interesting subject. I did not, in reply, quite confirm the critic's doubts, though I probably could not remove them. I would rather regard it as a philosophical than as a historical work.
And I missed the AtheæumSummary. When one comes to classify all that appears, the gaps strike one as much as the bulk. Still, in the narrow domain of my own book—“The Madonna of the Future”1 —every week brings several new publications that are sure to contribute some light or some difficulty.
Cannes, March 4, 1882.
We have no particulars yet, and I still hope it was not an Irishman2 . The villa at Mentone stands in the midst of dark olive woods, scarcely a mile from the frontier. and less than a furlong from the sea. It will require to be well guarded.
I have followed the conflict with the keen attention you may imagine, and rejoice quite as much as anybody in Downing Street at the personal triumph, and at the accession of strength which is due so entirely to his own efforts and belongs exclusively to himself. It is a gain for a better cause than the Ministry. We are just in that intermediate state in which the issue at Northampton3 is unknown, but seems certain, which will be a relief.
The correspondence with Gardiner has gone on at some length, and the problem is very interesting. He persists in rejecting the story. I now understand that John Inglesant is willing to be received, but is told by the Jesuit that he is safe if, with that belief and disposition, he remains an Anglican.
I imagine that he might have argued in this way: Roman Catholic divines hold that the 39 Articles may be understood in a favourable sense. Anglicans hold that they are not literally binding on the clergy. Still less on the laity. Therefore his position in the English Church does not involve this layman in any error. It may involve him in certain dangers and difficulties. But these are not greater than the dangers and difficulties which would follow his conversion. For there are many opinions, not only sanctioned but enforced by the authorities of the Church of Rome, which none can adhere to without peril to the soul. The moral risk on one side is greater than the dogmatic risk on the other. He can escape heresy in Anglicanism more easily than he can escape the ungodly ethics of the papacy, the Inquisition, the Casuists, in the Roman Communion. The solicitation, the compulsion, will be more irresistible in the latter. A man who thought it wrong to murder a Protestant King would be left for hell by half the Confessors on the Continent. Montagu, Bramhall will not sap this man's Catholic faith so surely as the Spanish and Italian moralists will corrupt his soul.
There were men, in the XVIIth century, who would have argued in this way. I can even conceive a Jesuit doing it, for they were much divided, and there were men amongst them far more deeply and broadly divided from the prevailing teaching of their own Church, than from the Catholic party in Anglicanism. But I cannot name any Jesuit living in Charles I.'s time of whom it could be said with any probability. So that I am sure not to shake Gardiner's conviction. He is not well informed in religious history; but as a friend of Brewer he must have read the Life of Goodman, which, I think, Brewer edited.
Gardiner is Irving's son-in-law. His position in that Church inclines him to Conservative views, and it would be hard for him to admit that illustrious Catholic divines who did so much for Christian revelation and for spiritual doctrine were in reality so infamous in their moral teaching as my hypothesis implies. But I am letting the cat of the Piazzetta1 out of the bag.
I do hope that the social duties are not too irksome.
Cannes, March 9, 1882.
I was at Mentone yesterday, and as I do not much like the place where the Queen is to live, I took pains to ascertain what is doing for her safety. The Vice-Consul is a singularly intelligent and practical man, and I saw with satisfaction that the peculiar drawbacks are fully understood. Every precaution will be taken, without attracting attention, or being perceived by the Queen herself.
I shall not get credit for my loyalty, for it caused me to miss a meeting which was held here, during my absence, to vote an address. But I was rewarded by finding Green, the historian, at Mentone, in good spirits —but in bad health—and I spent an interesting hour with him.
Gardiner tells me that I understand nothing about the question, that the Jesuit was only a conspirator and intriguer, and that John Inglesant is abominably overrated. So let us wait for Fraser, with open and unsettled minds. Brewer published in 1839 The Court of James I., being the Memoirs of Goodman, Bp. of Gloucester, possibly not the book in question, but one that would make the situation clear to the intelligent reader. Green, who does not agree, much, with Gardiner, tells me that he has made great sacrifices by adhering to Irvingism, and that he has still to struggle with extreme poverty. Being one of the two or three most solid historians in England, he has to teach at an inferior girls' school. He has had the misfortune to lose several children, as well as his first wife. Do you know his Outline of English History?I make my children read it, to keep out—. I wonderwhat the numerous Wickhams will learn history in. I am so glad that I have a new friend of the same kind as those I like so much.
As Mr. Gladstone has had various correspondence with Mivart, it may interest him to know that that very distinguished philosopher, the most eminent man of science our Church has had in England, was constrained to decline election at the Athenæum, being certain of blackballs, by reason of his quarrel with the Darwinians. In the hope that the Committee may elect him, he wishes to be put down in the books againj and he asks me to propose him. As I have never spoken to him in my life, it is against the rule j but I have agreed to do it, in acknowledgment of his unquestioned eminence and because of Mr. Gladstone's weakness for him, which I, otherwise, do not share. The wicked Sclater, vendor of Jumbo, is the Seconder.
Even without knowing the conversation with Gibson, who seems to me a most able specimen of his kind, the attitude taken up towards the Lords seems to me in all ways excellent. As to Bradlaugh, as he is there, I wish the amendment1 had succeeded—for I have not read the Nineteenth Century.2 But have you seen in the Century— once Scribner—Bryce on Disraeli? It is a good paper.
In the middle of John Inglesant came the enclosed3 which I return, with dismay. The impression given seems to be that by speaking of dogmatic danger in England, and of moral danger in Rome, I ingeniously laid a silent imputation of heterodoxy on Anglicans, whilst implying that we are free at least from that suspicion j so that I thought of 1882 whilst I spoke of 1640, and meant controversy, though pretending to write history.
The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife. My only endeavour was to recall what might have occurred two centuries and a half ago, to a sincere and upright priest, that is, to one who studied to detach his mind from its habitual surroundings, to look behind his own scenes, to stand apart with Archimedes, to practise the doute mèthodIque of Descartes, to discern prejudice from faith and sympathy from truth. There was no such problem, and I know now that my zeal was wasted on a personage whose notion of religion was not worth inquiry. But I was not pleading a cause. I scarcely venture to make points against the religion of other people, from a curious experience that they have more to say than I know, and from a sense that it is safer to reserve censure for one's own, which one understands more intimately, having a share of responsibility and action.
It would have been more accurate to sacrifice my antithesis by referring to doctrinal trouble as well as moral risk on our side. If I did not do so—I have no recollection of my words—the reason may be that I am too deeply impressed with the moral risk to have the other very present to my mind. Encountering an associate of Guy Fawkes and RavaiIlac, I do not stop to ask what he makes of the Apocrypha, or how far he goes with the Athanasian Creed. I believe that our internal conflicts spring from indifference to sin, and not from a religious idea A speculative Ultramontanism separate from theories of tyranny, mendacity, and murder, keeping honestly clear of the Jesuit with his lies, of the Dominican with his fagots, of the Popes with their massacres, has not yet been brought to light. Dollinger, who thinks of nothing else, has never been able to define it, and I do not know how to distinguish a Vaticanist of that sort. a Vatican ist in a state of grace, from a Catholic.
Let me supply my omission by declaring that my hypothetical divine would not have found all the moral evil in one quarter, and ambiguous doctrine only in the other. I dare say he would think that in England too little was done for the spiritual life, and, unless he had a taste for Donne, that devotional literature was backward; and he might even agree with Thorndike that the neglect of the discipline of penance threatened the Church with ruin. In like manner, he would not view with favour some of the dogmatic theology that flourished amongst his friends. He might, for instance, deem that Molinism or Jansenism, neither of them yet approved or rejected, but severally dominant in many lands, were false systems, and that, between the two, a Catholic doctrine of grace was hard to find. He would be aware that Rome still cherished the idea that roused Luther, that, by committing a sin one may save a soul; and he would perhaps conclude, with a famous Jesuit of his day, that Luther did well to attack it.
Of the instances suggested, one, the CuItus of the Blessed Virgin, was partly of later growth and would not seriously disturb a contemporary of Charles' the First. It does not offend in the older, classical literature of the Church, in the Imitation, the Exposition, the Pensèes, or the Petit Carème. Sixty years ago, a priest who is still living was sent as Chaplain to Alton Towers. At Evening Prayers, when he began the Litany of Loretto, Lord Shrewsbury rose from his knees and told him that they never recited it. He was a man, as the Life of Panizzi shows, without an idea of his own.
Images would probably impress him as a danger to be warded, rather, I think, than Transubstantiation. Here the difficulty that strikes a dialectician hardly reaches the people. Many Catholics are practically conscious of no difference from the higher Anglican or Lutheran view of the Real Presence. Hegel's argument, that a mouse which had nibbled a Host would become an object of adoration, would strike nine laymen out of ten as a poor joke. I know not whether the confusion of thought was greater then or less; but he would remember so many cases of Protestants ready to conform on no harder condition than the concession of the Cup that his scruples would be likely to melt. Montagu saying that he knew no Roman tenet he would not subscribe, unless it were Transubstantiation, would have made him wonder why a Catholic-minded prelate should be more stiff-necked than the unbending Lutherans or fiercer Bohemians.
But whatever the dogmatic perils he might apprehend, he would meet them in the same spirit of charitable construction he had employed on the other side. I will presume that he took the oath of allegiance, for, in 1635, the Jesuits allowed their penitents to take it. He would even admit the Royal Supremacy, like Father Caron, as not exceeding the prerogative of Kings in France and Spain. He would drop the imputation of schism, seeing that Bramhall wrote that there was no formed difference with the Church of Rome about any point of faith. Finding that an Archbishop denied any necessary articles of faith beyond the Apostles' Creed, he would regard the 39 Articles as Hall, Chillingworth, Bramhall, Stillingfleet, and, according to Bull, all that are well advised, considered them—pious opinions which no man was obliged to believe. With Bossuet, he would acknowledge the force of the case in favour of Anglican orders, and with Richard Simon he would admit that the Caroline divines had not their equals in his own Church, and would revere them as the strongest enemies of the specific heresies of Luther and Calvin, as the force that would sap the fabric against which Rome still contended in vain. If he heard that there was a bishop who begged prayers for his soul, another who tolerated the Invocation of Saints, a third who allowed Seven Sacraments, and so on, he might be willing to believe, with Davenport, that the chasm was filled that had separated England from Trent.
To reach that point of conciliation it would be necessary to make the best of everything, so far as could be without sophistry, violence, or concealment. And the same rule of favourable interpretation would be applied by the same man to his own Theology. He would be bound by the limits of Richelieu's proposals, and would keep within the lines of Bossuet, and those which Spinola afterwards drew, with the assent of Pope and General.
He would have been confirmed in this method by the response it drew from such eminent Protestants as Grotius, Bramhall, La Bastide, Prsetorius, Fabricius, and Leibniz. Their judgment would have encouraged him to abide in his own communion, and would have taught him that he was as safe as his friend on the other side. The same impartiality would have led to the same result. There were even Protestant divines who sanctioned conversions to Rome.
The last time I saw Count Arnim he asked about Newman's Vatican defence. I said that he had explained the decrees away by declaring that he meant no defence of persecution and tyrannicide. That was a canon of interpretation strong enough to blow any other ingredient into gas. Arnim objected that Newman's manipulations were not accepted at Rome. Just then he became a Cardinal, and so they were indirectly sanctioned.
I endow my seventeenth - century divine with the ingenuity and the integrity of Newman. Having given England the benefit of No. Xc., he would gild Rome with the answer to the Expostulation. Shutting one eye to the Articles, like Chillingworth, he would, like Spinola, shut the other to the Council of Trent. Having expounded Anglo-Catholicism by the light of Bramhall, he would, in the same spirit, choose Cassander, Bossuet, Corker as genuine exponents of Roman Catholicism, and he could do both without insincerity or surrender.
Don't let me make too much of that passage in Newman. He defended the Syllabus, and the Syllabus justified all those atrocities. Pius the Fifth held that it was sound Catholic doctrine that any man may stab a heretic condemned by Rome, and that every man is a heretic who attacks the papal prerogatives. Borromeo wrote a letter for the purpose of causing a few Protestants to be murdered. Newman is an avowed admirer of Saint Pius and Saint Charles, and of the pontiffs who canonised them. This, and the like of this, is the reason of my deep aversion for him.
There is not time for Shorthouse to-day. I will tell you about him as soon as I can.
Cannes, March 20--22, 1882.
Wickham lent me John Inglesant yesterday, and I finished it before bedtime. I have read nothing more thoughtful and suggestive since Middlemarch,and I could fill with honest praise the pages I am going to blacken with complaint But if I had access to the author, with privilege of free and indiscreet speech, it would seem a worthier tribute to his temper and ability to lay my litany of doubts before him. Not having it, I submit my questionings to yourself, as the warmest admirer of his work. Probably the difficulties which occur to me have been raised already in reviews which you have read. For instance: —
I. 29. Inglesant's name does not appear in the trials of the Protestants. Did the Marian persecution rage in Wilts?
73, 74. Here is a Puritan party in Parliament and a scheme to pervert its leaders, in August 1637. No Parliament had sat for eight years.
83 Juan Valdes was not a papist but a Protestant.
90. Would Foxe be the favourite and characteristic author of such Arminians as the Ferrars?
101. The Mass is the strongest of all the motives that lead men to Rome.—I really doubt it, for I remember more instances of men attracted by our orders, by authority, unity, confession.
107. Hobbes thinks it is the consecrating power by which a priest, in the hour of death, can save a soul.— He should have said, the power of absolution.
207. Something similar to the feeling in England during the Sepoy rebellion. Read: Mutiny. This is an understatement. The Irish massacre was more appalling to the imagination because it was nearer and of vaster reported proportions. A respectable writer who lived in Ireland believes that there were 300,000 victims.
272. Charles contrasted most favourably with his judges, whose sole motive was self. Ludlow's Memoirs, and other sources, show that something was at work besides selfish fears. The men perhaps were no better for that. They may even have been worse, inasmuch as the higher and better part of them served as the motive of crime. Carnot may have been as infamous as Barerej but it is unjust to tar them with the same brush.
277. Eustace loses his suppers with the French King —Louis was eleven years old.
279, 312. I don't remember the term Quakers in current use as early as January 1650, but very soon after.
327. In opposition to this, the Jesuits about the time of the Reformation came forward with what was called a new doctrine.—The book in question came out in 1588.
Vol. I. 339. II. 12. Legate and nuncio are treated as the same thing. They are as different as Prætor and Dictator.
II. 3. The learning of the Fathers was not what it had been a century ago.—These Fathers must be Italian monks generally, or else the Jesuits. It is not true of either. The Jesuits had no very eminent scholars in the first generation. Salmeron, the most noted, lived to be told by Bellarmin that his books would take a good deal of retouching before going to press. The middle of the seventeenth century, especially the second quarter, was the golden age of Jesuit learning, when their supremacy was uncontested. The Benedictines did not begin to rival them quite so early as Cressy says, I. 334.
4. Chigi is never di Chigi, and the pope's sister-in-law was called Olimpia Maidalchini.
106. An age or two ago the priestly government was better. Yet Machiavelli brings much the same accusation against it in his time.
138. Some confusion as to the name of the English College.
272. The steps of the Trinità were hardly built then. There might be more of these little scruples, and, by themselves, they do not build up a strong misgiving. The picture may be true in spite of slips in accessary detail. But is the picture true, I will not say controversially, but historically? There are glaring faults in it, not open to dispute or controversy, and I will begin with these.
Inglesant comes to Rome about 1654, where Molinos has already resided some years; and he then attends to the business of the Duke of Umbria. Umbria is Urbino. The last Duke of Urbino died nearly forty years before Molinos settled in Rome. Inglesant is present at the condemnation of Molinos, and afterwards visits Worcester, in Charles the Second's reign—II. 369. Charles the Second had been dead two years when Molinos was condemned.
In the pontificate of Alexander the Seventh, we hear all at once that Molinos is arrested, and are told of a meeting, at the Chigi palace, of persons belonging to the time of Innocent the Eleventh. II. 333. Without a single word, we are carried over three pontificates and an interval of thirty years.
The Jesuit who is so hopeful of Anglican reunion that he will not allow his favourite pupil to join the Church of Rome is called Sancta Clara. There was a Father Sancta Clara in those days, who is peculiarly well remembered among English Catholics as the greatest writer we had between Stapleton and Newman, less acute than the one, less eloquent than the other, more learned than either; remarkable for opinions so conciliatory as to resemble those of his imaginary namesake, and to make him the originator and suggester of No. Xc.; remarkable also for the extreme difficulty of getting his books. But he was a Franciscan, not a Jesuit, a scholar, not an intriguer; and his name was not Hall, but Davenport.
This is surely a wilful and wanton confusion of persons, times, and things. It destroys confidence in the writer's carefulness or knowledge, gives a tone of unreality, and makes one feel that the whole is out of keeping.
The book depicts the religious strivings of the age so far as the hero would come in contact with them, keeping a sort of syncretism1 in view. Some of the most remarkable currents of thought are left out of sight, and others, which were not within reach, are introduced by a tyrannical use of time and space. The Rosicrucians can hardly have been talked about in England within twenty years after the Fama appeared. The Quietists had not appeared in Rome under Innocent the Tenth. The wonderful teaching of Bohme, which did reach us under Charles the First, is not alluded to; and Inglesant lives in the same house with Van Helmont, and never discovers that he is more than a physician. The most intense religious force of all that which prevailed during Inglesant's English career, Independency, is nowhere named, as well as I remember. The writer does not differentiate Puritans. He lumps Arminian with Predestinarian, the man who looks on Schism with the horror felt by Baxter and the man who made Schism a principle of organisation. Monarchy, he tells us, was restored because the Puritans hated the tyranny of Cromwell. It was restored, because Presbyterians would not stand being oppressed by Con-gregationalists; and for another reason which was discovered by Harrington,2 and may still be discovered in his Works. We are introduced to Hobbes and to More —Hobbes much better drawn than More—but we never meet Chillingworth, and though at one time very near to Hammond we do not hear him. Ussher offering terms to Presbyterians, Baxter seeking for peace with Prelacy, Bramhall holding out a hand to GaIlicans, Leighton consorting with Jansenists—all this good and apt material is disdained. Instead of the original thinkers among the English Catholics—Barnes, Holden, Davenport, White, Caron, Serjeant, Walshe—we have only Cressy, by way of a foil to the Jesuits, and with a vague reminiscence of a page in the writings of an Edgbaston neighbour. Of the efforts making in France and Holland to mitigate Calvinism, and in Germany to tone down the dogma of Augsburg, not a word. Lutherans only appear in order to be saddled with a doctrine by which they would be sorry to stand or fall. Jansenism, odious, probably, to the author, is not displayed; and the definition of the Oratorian spirit as contrasted with Benedictine and Jesuit, is quite inadequate.
Mysticism and High Church Anglicanism are so highly favoured that the hero, when the Jesuit relaxes his grasp, acquiesces in both. At Rome he is a hearty Molinosist. Driven from Rome he is a hearty Anglican. Perhaps Malebranche or Fenelon might have facilitated the transition from Petrucci to Norris and Nelson and Ken. But there is no transition. The passage is made by the help of no subtler agency than a Newhaven smack. The thing is unexplained, inartistic, inorganic, but quite consistent with the drifting nature of Inglesant. Coming to more debatable ground I proceed with greater diffidence: Who sat for the profane and sceptical Cardinal? There is some likeness to Retz, without his genius or any premonition of the change which, in Inglesant's time, came over him. But it would be an unpardonable error to paint an Italian prelate with colours owned by a Frenchman. I suspect the author of having no authority for this description, both because his account of the Conclave is so superficial, and for the following reason. Rinuccini, alluding to persecution, goes back a century for an example, to a foreign country and a hostile church. One later instance occurs to his company, but he rejects it. Evidently, he thinks that there is nothing of the sort nearer at hand. If, he says, they once commenced to burn at Rome, they would not know where to stop.
An account of Catholicism which assumes that, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Rome had not commenced to bum, is an account which studiously avoids the real and tragic issues of the time. The part of Hamlet is omitted, by desire. For when Rinuccini spoke, the fires of the Roman Inquisition were, indeed, extinct, but had been extinguished in his lifetime, under the preceding pontificate, having burnt for nearly a century. Familiar instances must have been remembered by his hearers; and they had read in the most famous theological treatise of the last generation, by what gradation of torments a Protestant ought to die. They knew that whoever obstructed the execution of that law forfeited his life, that the murder of a heretic was not only permitted but rewarded, that it was a virtuous deed to slaughter Protestant men and women, until they were all exterminated.
To keep these abominations out of sight is the same offence as to describe the Revolution without the guillotine. The reader knows no more than old Caspar what it was all about
There was no mystery about these practices, no scruple, and no concealment. Although never repudiated, and although retrospectively sanctioned by the Syllabus, they fell into desuetude, under pressure from France, and from Protestant Europe. But they were defended, more or less boldly, down to the peace of Westphalia.1 The most famous Jesuits countenanced them, and were bound to countenance them, for the papacy had, by a series of books approved and of acts done, identified itself with the system, and the Jesuits were identified with the cause of the papacy. A Gallican was not quite so deeply compromised. He might say that these are the crimes and teaching of the Court, not of the Church, of Rome; and he was on his guard to restrict the influence and to disparage the example of the Popes. Nevertheless, to say: If you believe the books which Rome commends; if you accept the doctrines which Rome imposes under pain of death and damnation; if you do the deeds she requires, and imitate the lives she proposes as your patterns, you will be probably hanged in this world, and assuredly damned in the next—this would have sounded like derision even in the mouth of Pascal or Bossuet. To a Jesuit it was impossible. He existed in order to sustain the credit of the Popes. He wished the world to think well of them. They were a tower of strength, an object of pride. to every member of the Society. He was obliged to swallow them whole. Therefore, though he might wear the mask of Lancelot Andrewes or William Wilberforce, within it was a lining of Saint Just. It is this combination of an eager sense of duty, zeal for sacrifice, and love of virtue, with the deadly taint of a conscience perverted by authority, that makes them so odious to touch and so curious to study.
You will be prepared to hear that I no more recognise the Jesuit than the Cardinal. Something indeed may be urged in behalf of the sonorous wickedness of those instructions in which he betrays his spirit, in the strongest passage of the book. It matters not what cause we take up, provided we defend it well—that is Probabilism. It matters not what wrong we do in a good cause—that again is the maxim that the end justifies the means, which, like Probabilism, was just then in the ascendant. It matters not whether the cause for which we sin is religion or policy--even that is paralleled by the way in which the French Jesuits, all but one, supported Richelieu in his alliance with the Protestants, in the Thirty Years' War. But it is the character of an exceptional Jesuit, not a type. It is not indicated that he goes wrong from the worthiest motive; that the disinterested spirit of religion, which to other men is a safeguard, is as fatal to him as vulgar passions to other men. The true Jesuit falls better than that. His decay begins at the top. He does not find his way to Malebolge1 until a guide misleads him whom he takes for an angel of light. The sordid, lying, selfish, ambitious specimen does not appear unless grafted on a fanatical stock. The essence that vitiates so much discipline and virtue is so subtle that we seldom feel the resemblance when Jesuits are portrayed from outside.
The author seems hardly to detect his own rogue, When Hall coolly announces that a lie must be told which will cause a man's death, and is therefore equivalent to murder, it is not clear whether this is infamous or not. For Charles betrays GJamorgan as his son afterwards betrayed Montrose, and we are still expected to revere him as something better than the enemies who, to save their necks, resorted to Pride and Bradshaw. So again, speaking of Laud and Strafford, he implies that if they were unsuccessful tyrants, they were no tyrants at all. That is, to be a tyrant, you must succeed, just as, to be a rebel, you must fail. The model of tyrants is Caæsar Borgia. When he was down, Machiavelli, who had thought him worth attentive study, said to him that he wondered so good a player should have lost the game. He answered that he had foreseen every combination except that of himself being prostrate with illness when the crash came. That miscalculation would become his excuse.
If this propensity to absolve royal and loyal culprits comes from sympathy with them, it seems to me no better than the crooked canon of Macaulay, Carlyle, and Froude. The standard, in another place, is a low one: The priest who invites Inglesant not to die with a lie in his mouth reminds him that they subordinated their religion to their political intrigues. But what if they subordinated politics to their religious interest? To waver about ship money until one knows whether Charles or Hampden is on the side of one's Church is dishonesty. To have no moral test of duty apart from religion is to be a fanatic. What Inglesant imputes to the Catholics is very near the definition of an honest man. For reasons less obvious I am not satisfied with the character of Inglesant. We learn in the first volume, p. 34, that he never formally joined the Church of Rome j and in the second, p. 318, that he must have been formally received into it. There is a more serious contradiction still. His life is singularly blameless and heroic, but one does not perceive the safeguard. Three channels by which God speaks to the soul are excluded. Inglesant will do anything but read the Bible. He has never studied to distinguish the voice of the Church, the constancy of her teaching, the line of least resistance, the law that regulates her movements. Conscience is a word that does not occur during the first 200 pages of religious training. Then she asks him, what if they ask him to do something that his conscience cannot approve? He very truly answers that it is too late to think of that. Then the word returns two or three times, but the idea is gone. We repeatedly find that he knows not right from wrong, and is not scared by sin. When reminded of the horrors of the Inquisition he calmly observes: Not one of these practices but has some shadow of truth in it. A priest, defending imaginary relics, says: These things are true to each of us according as we see them. Inglesant is content, and does not ask who invents or promotes the fable. Having, with some pains, forced his master to confess the iniquity of his scheme, he adopts it with alacrity. There is not a momentary struggle between self-devotion and the shock of indignation. The spring is broken. The sense is dulled. The voice within is hushed. What then kept this man's life so pure in court and camp? The book is not written to suggest that honour and chivalry are a genuine form or a substitute for grace.
One might suspect that it is the idea which Plato transmitted from Socrates, which Cameron, in 1624, had revived—that the knowledge of good and evil is virtue. But Inglesant possesses the virtue without the knowledge. He is as destitute of conviction as he is free from vice. His one security is Direction. He passes from hand to hand, and successive teachers impress him for a time, but impart no principle. When they fail him, he stands where they found him, a safe and contented Churchman, not because he has examined all things and chosen the best, but because the master he preferred happened to be in prison.
A fine opportunity had peen wasted. A clever, refined, high-spirited youth, who has won, in a religious philosophy, a standing ground apart from Churches, who yet learns to sympathise with them, and who sheds his prejudices and illusions as he grows in spiritual experi- ence; that would be a noble study in the days of Grotius, Descartes, Lord Herbert, Hammond, Baxter, Roger Williams, Blondel, Raynaud, and Pascal. None of these appear on the platform with Hobbes and Cressy and Molinos—s though, two centuries later, a man should seek rest for conscience without going near Channing, Arnold, Newman, Vinet, Neander, Rothe, Schelling, or Grundtvig. Last, the terms Romish, papist, popery, in so good an artist, make me ask myself whether a papist who respects himself would talk of heretics, schismatics, apostates, and infidels? But I have become confused from my prolixity.
I shall be very glad if there is anything in what I said that Arthur Lyttelton can turn to account, after careful verification. If he will take the trouble to examine for himself, there can be no reason to allude to anybody else.
He will abstain, I know, from raising those points respecting persecution which would give just offence, appearing in this indirect way. To mark the enormity of supposing that the Cardinal did not know that people used to be burned in Rome; it would be enough to say that he cannot have forgotten the reign of Paul V. Down to that reign, from 1542 to 1608, the thing was common and notorious. After Paul V. there is little that anybody would remember who has not made a study of such things. This also must be borne in mind, that in Rome, unlike Spain, the victims were usually strangled, and were not committed to the flames until they were dead.
The book alluded to, I. 327, is Molina, on grace. The defence about the appearance of the name of Quakers would be that it appeared in that very year 165o. But they are here talked about as early as January, as if quite well known. The answer to my objection about Sancta Clara would be that the similarity of opinions suggested the use of the name. But the man is too well known to be treated in that unceremonious way.
To say, I. 137, that among Puritans self-restraint and concealment were sins, is so serious an imputation, especially the first word, that it should be defined which sect was meant. Nobody says that Baxter was rude, not even Howe, in private life. There is a slovenliness in this use of a big brush. Cardinal Howard does not deserve the praise he gets, II. 333. He was a very pale figure.
Observe II. 273. There are no spires in Rome. I hear that the author has never been in Italy. That accounts for many topographical mistakes, and leaves a margin to his credit.
The date of the steps of the Trinita might perhaps be discovered in the life of. Cardinal Polignac, or in the article on him in Michaud or Didot. It matters not; but the correctness of local and chronological colour turns on such points as these. I think Cressy could hardly have justified what he says of the Fathers.
On looking over my lengthy prose I find something that I must add: Valdes never renounced Catholicism, but his writings, only lately made accessible, are the writings of a Protestant. The numbers mentioned in the Irish massacre are, of course, monstrously exaggerated, as were the numbers given by Clarendon, Milton, and Baxter. I quote them to show the greatness of the alarm. The French Jesuits stood by Richelieu and allowed one of their number to be exiled for his opposition to the German war when, after the peace of Prague, it had ceased to be a war in defence of the Protestants, and was purely aggressive. This was because, in 1627. he had made them understand that they must leave France if they resisted his will. It was easier to associate resistance to Puritanism with the Catholic cause than aggression on the Catholic Powers in Germany. I do not say that the care taken to prevent conversion is absolutely impossible. Some Franciscans at that time might have done it; and something like it is told of a Jesuit a few years later.
There is a very curious passage, II. 385. on persecution: It was these selfsame ideas of the future and its relation to this life that actuated their tormentors. This is an attempt to look beneath the surface, and a soothing tribute to the feelings of those who admire Galerius and Calvin and Gregory the Thirteenth. The Natural History of Intolerance has not yet been written; but the analysis is not so simple as these words imply. Half of the persecution in the Roman Empire, all the persecution of Huguenots by the Valois, and of Roman Catholics under Elizabeth, was due to other ideas than those of the future. And where religious ideas induced men to side with the tormentors against Toleration, there is much that is not more sincere or more excusable than the ideas that have led to political massacres. The opinion expressed covers some of the ground, but only a very small part of it.
But I must stop somewhere.
Cannes, March 29, 1882.
That is a very kind question about Gardiner; and as I have at hand, here, the means of learning more without risk of indiscretion, I had better postpone my answer. If, as a rule, those pensions are granted to people almost destitute of means, the case could not well be admitted. He ought to be at the Record Office instead of the present Hardy. It is in Jessel's gift, and he asked my advice, specially excluding clergymen, and thereby losing the two best men, Brewer and Stubbs. I suggested Freeman, Gardiner, and Bond. Freeman sent me word that he would not take it. Jessel told me he would appoint Bond—who is now the very good and estimable, but gloomy successor of Panizzi—but that he had been told that Bond was a Catholic. He said that a Jew was not strong enough to appoint a Catholic Keeper of the Archives. Bond is a Broad Churchman, and the report arose only from my recommendation. Gardiner therefore remained; but it was resolved, under I know not what pressure, to keep the thing in the Hardy family. Meantime, I think Gardiner succeeded Brewer in his professorship at King's College—not, I imagine, remunerative, but still an obstacle.
Yes, I agree about Forbes, and rather think he is one of the men Simon speaks of, and defies the Sorbonne to meet—unless I am mixing up the two divines of that name.
Spinola wrote no book. He was a Franciscan bishop, Imperial Confessor at Vienna, and produced several schemes of union, on the part of Rome, which differ from other such by being definite and sincere. Leibniz, and the Calixtine school of Lutherans, were very near adopting his plan; but as he was an agent of pope and emperor when Louis XIV. was the enemy of both, Bossuet contrived to baffle him. What was known of these transactions down to our day is in Pichler's work on Leibniz. Much more has since come out in the Correspondence of the Electress Sophia, and there is more to come, whenever “The Madonna of the Future”1 is unveiled.
Of John Inglesant, let me say that it would be a very fair text to work on—how far the pagan, human virtues, coupled with qualities which are not, in a spiritual sense, virtues, such as courage, delicacy, good nature, veracity, pride, can accomplish the outward, visible work of grace. But that is clearly not the author's design.
If Gardiner's paper is very hostile, and you then think it worth while to send my remarks to Mr. Shorthouse,2 through his publisher or otherwise, that is a case governed by the saying of the younger Pompey,3
I liked what I saw of the Fox Memorials during a very short inspection; and yesterday, lunching at the parsonage at Mentone, I found the Life of Lowder. Fancy my finding myself with two excellent clergymen, both ardent Gladstonians, and both wishing for the admission of Bradlaugh. Otherwise my journey was not altogether successful, as I got half a sunstroke, which you have already seen traces of in my letter.
Cannes, April27, 1882.
Lecky only arrived two days ago, and is scarcely begun. But the beginning, and the account of Junius struck me as very far indeed ahead of all his former writings. There is a good deal of slovenly writing, and it is puerile to write modern history from printed books; but this is a wonderfully solid performance. You will not think it as amusing as Fronde's Carlyle, when you come to it, but much more nutritious.
You depressed my spirits the other day by showing that the majority of 39 did not amount to quite so much as I, from a distance, had imagined. And the Budget, though open to very little remark, does not do much to raise them. If I was not conscious of being the worst accountant yet discovered, I should say that there is a slip in one of the calculations of Savings Bank deposits.
Gardiner for some reason did not publish his article. … If Arthur Lyttelton, out of pure cussedness, wishes to put in the note you speak of, I would like to see what it is he says, starting from the materials buried in my letter.
I wonder whether you have the Temps or Dèbats in Downing Street, and have read the speeches of Pasteur and Renan. I do not remember so interesting a reception, and what is serious is that the most powerful intellectual force in France has declared, virtually, for materialism.
Cannes, May 5, 1882.
We have nothing later than Tuesday's speech, so that the lines are not traceable into the future, and I am still in a very anxious and doubting stage.
It is not apparent why Spencer occupies a position between earth and heaven. He looks like a warming-pan. Not for a prince, for that is out of the question. For Dufferin2 But Dufferin, who is easy, dexterous, and popular, has not the sterling and transparent quality of Spencer himself. It may well be the basis of a vast change in the machinery for the government of Ireland; but that would require legislation for which there is no time. Perplexity No. I.
Then one must conclude that the change comes from assurances given by the moderate Irish members, that it would enable them to moderate the raging ones. But to ensure that, they must have a finger in the pie, and Russell or Shaw would have to have the offer of the Irish Office. It seems clear, from the delay, that that is not to be; and one hears of Lefevre and Chamberlain. … Perplexity NO. 2.
There is a look of uncertainty and want of clearness about the whole thing. Cowper resigns; after an interval, half a successor is appointed; then the suspects are released; then Forster resigns; and then, after another interval showing want of preparation, there is a new Secretary. This way of doing whatever is to be done suggests that the Ministry had not the foresight to anticipate opinion, or strength to lead it. Dropping one colleague after another in their Irish course makes that course appear wanting in deliberation and design, and strengthens the notion that, under heavy pressure, they may be driven nobody knows where, like men who yield, not like men who lead. I presume that there is some evidence of ensured improvement, consequent upon concession. But one doubts that again, when Forster resigns; and it seems that the change is in the ideas more than in the facts. As to any gain on Irish opinion from the grace of concession, I should not expect it, as so many suspects remain in custody. If so, then the advantage would be derived from the new position of the Irish leaders—a very doubtful policy. Then again, I don't like the moment; immediately after Cairns's stroke, and the untimely publication of his draft report.1 I don't like anything which looks like overtrumping, because it is not fit for such a Prime Minister to follow initiative, whether that of opponents, or of English or Irish opinion.
These misgivings occur to me although you know, if nobody else does, that I was not convinced by the argument in favour of coercion, and saw no evidence of greater demoralisation than was the direct effect of actual suffering. Since then there has been so much atrocity in Ireland, so much foreign influence, and so manifest a change for the worse in the conduct of the clergy, that I have grown reconciled to the strong hand. Even if full of sympathy with the spirit of the present policy, I cannot satisfy myself with the mode of its inception, and I shall not feel comfortable for some days, until the design grows clear. To you, they will be intensely interesting, and I shall be very glad indeed to hear that confidence reigns in Downing Street.
Post OfficeandSubmarine Telegraphs.
Cannes, 5.14, 8/5, 11.54, on the 8/5, 1882.
Do not let him lose confidence in himself.1
Acton.
Cannes, May 9, 1882.
We have only vague reports in French newspapers, but I cannot wait for full accounts of the tragedy that touches us all so nearly, to give you my warm tribute of sympathy and sorrow. It is shocking to think of her, so worthy of happiness and so afflicted. You, I know, have, of all people, the most soothing hand for the most cruel wounds.
It must have been a dreadful blow in your own home, and at a distance one grows anxious about many things. I apprehend a violent burst of passion in the country, with despair of healing such disease with lenient arts; and, if the tide turns, the change will be felt in Parliament, and will be used by men quite capable of seeing that Mr. Gladstone's statesmanship is confirmed by the very crime which will condemn it in common minds. Assuming that some of the Cabinet assent reluctantly to the heroic policy, and that the last few weeks have not added to his personal ascendency, I fear that they will either forsake him or urge him to forsake his own ideal lines. Thinking of this, of his strong affections, of the shadow on the hearth, I could not restrain my wish to send you my small vote of confidence.
For we heard at first that Spencer had instantly resigned.2 I was ashamed to show myself, and whispered to my family how Nicholas, the bad emperor, faced a rebellious army. There is very different news to-day. I gather that Spencer remains, that Forster redeems many faults by offering to go back, that Parnell has made his choice between murder and conciliation, that the Opposition holds its hand, expecting Mr. Gladstone to turn against himself.
It seems to me that much ground must inevitably be lost, and that the true moral of this catastrophe can never be made visible to the average Englishman. Still I see great opportunities of recovery, and I know in what spirit I hope that he has had the strength to receive the blow aimed through Freddy Cavendish at himself.
St. Martin, Ried, Haute Autriche, July 20, 1882.
I very much wish for a completer defence than I have seen yet; and at the same time I think that a good defence, with some measure of political success in Egypt, will be a source of new strength, and if there is some blame, I anxiously ask myself whether it lies at the Foreign Office, at the War Office, or at the Admiralty.
It is provoking not to know most of the names of the people going out on this difficult errand. That is one side of the question. The other, nearer home, for me, is That you are still going through terrible worry, and that the wear and tear must be telling on Mr. Gladstone. I ask myself one question, which most people would think an unlikely one, whether he thoroughly controls his colleagues, and whether the work of the House absorbs him too much. … I hope you sat next to Bright. …
St. Martin, July29, 1882.
It is impossible not to feel that the Ministry grows weaker by the associates it has lost as well as by the associates that decline to join. There are now the ingredients of an alternative Liberal Cabinet, consisting of men fairly equal to those now in office—with the necessary exception—and hostile to them. The ground is getting narrow under our feet, and the full force of the party does not support Ministers. The want of a successor to Bright indicates too clearly that Mr. Gladstone, though still master of his majority, is not what he has been, master of his party. I hope for new arrangements at the end of the session, and for a real gain of strength from ultimate success in Egypt. But, like Ireland, it is a harvest that will ripen slowly. I wonder whether things have seemed to you as gloomy as this, or whether the light before you dispels the darkness.
Mozley's book, and all others published in England since January, I have not seen. He interests me more than almost any other of our divines, and I look forward to a good time with his reminiscences, if, as I understand, it is the divine, and not the manifold writer.1
Tegernsee, August 4, 1882.
Paris, August 12, 1882.
Salisbury's collapse1 is less decisive than mine, and although there is a pleasant corner in the House of Lords, my journey ends in nothing better than disappointment and in having set you to write notes all day. My accounts show that they are not comfortable at home, so that I have no right to be basking in the ethereal sunshine of Downing Street.
It is remarkable how little he chooses to realise the tremendous loss of authority and power which the party will incur by his retirement, and he has no idea how little he would soon be in harmony with them. However, Ireland is not all right yet; and there are obvious complications impending in Egypt which he cannot leave unsolved. With that, there will still be time for the Reform Bill.
This letter is written by scraps, in various places and countries. I crossed with Forster, on his way to Russia, and got him to tell me his inner history. I shall be at St. Martin the day after to-morrow. …
Shorthouse's5 letter could not go with Dante, and I will enclose it in my next. I have got Democracy. The Mays, considered an authority on the subject, do not think much of it. Forster does, and says it is not by Mrs. Adams. He says that Bright has no idea that he left either too early or too late. Will you—very earnestly —put my excuses before Mrs. Gladstone for my way of dealing with her boundless hospitality?
La Madeleine, Cannes, Feb. 13, 1883.
... These books are enclosed to show Mr. Gladstone what good German prose is, in expounding difficult, very difficult, questions. Also, a little book, by a very famous Dane who has grown more and more to be a power since his death. …
La Madeleine, Cannes, March 3, 1883.
After seeking a moment's distraction at a château near Marseilles I came home to find your letter, so kindly written in the intervals of Parisian dissipations.
The failure of Challemel was truly sad, but I hope that Fedora,1 following the little dinner on the Boulevard, made up for it. The tranquillity and sameness of Cannes will soon be thrust far out of sight by the centre of European life. We do our best, in your absence, to be a little worldly. Bright, Houghton, and the Mallets lunch to-day. I am to meet Colonel Hay at tea, and the little bishop2 at dinner this evening.
... It is pleasant to think that Lyons made you enjoy Paris, and divined the one thing you all have a passion for, and he seems to have done the political part of his work very well by bringing you into contact both with the ruling men and with the Left Centre. That was just what was wanting to redress the Wolvertonian balance.
I am a little sorry that the visit at the Elysèe was not more interesting. Grèvy's speeches in 1848 were very sensible indeed, but he seems to be pushing the theory of the roi fainèant much beyond the American, or even the Merovingian, limit, if he avoids politics with such a visitor. Then I rejoice much at the visit to Jules Simon, though you don't say whether it was spontaneous or a return, and a curious question is, where was the limit drawn? Did he and Broglie, Decazes, Harcourt, avoid each other? If these former ambassadors did not call, it is matter for speculation. At Marseilles, I found myself in a nest of Legitimists, and learnt that the chief of them, Coriolis, lately asked the Count of Chambord for leave to raise the white flag. If there was more of this kind, it is odd that the advocates of expulsion made so little of it. If it had been possible to stay longer at Paris, it would have been a very desirable thing, for they do not really know or understand him,1 and the conflict of forces there would be worth observing otherwise than in Blowitz' or Lyons's despatches.
It is a pity to have missed Mrs. Craven— a woman of great talent and elevation of mind, but who has just written on the Salvation Army a paper that seems to portend the approach of mental decay. Lady Blenner-hassett is very far her superior. Tell her all about Cannes if you see her. … Mrs. Green writes me a touching letter to say that she has no hope left. …
La Madeleine, March 7, 1883.
This is only a hasty line of thanks and congratulation on your prosperous journey. I have not yet seen either the Wolvertons or the Anson family, and to-day there are a couple of inches of snow over Cannes. Incorrigible Potter circulates the Financial Reform Almanack in the name of the Cobden Club, for which Reay, A. Russell, and others have denounced him. He asked me to read it through, which has been the melancholy occupation of a whole day, ending in agreement with the critics.
I am losing Mallet, who is less well and goes to Mentone. Also, Colonel Hay,1 Lincoln's secretary and biographer, who proved a most agreeable acquaintance. Yesterday, there was an expedition to Pègomas (Houghton, Dempsters, etc.) and I find that the old lady2 is the original of St. Monica in Ary Scheffer's picture. Myers, translator of Homer, is here, with a nice, newly-married wife, and Cross is in great force, writing the biography3 and wanting me to read the papers.
Thanks for the MS., with the answer for which pray express my acknowledgments.
I say nothing about the purchase, and have only insisted that we must, as we did before, make terms with Paris. But I want you to know that Lèopold Delisle is one of the most eminent scholars in France, that he is a most estimable and high-minded man, thó' not a conspicuous bookmaker or litterateur, that he stands as high in Germany as any Frenchman living, and that I have long enjoyed the privilege of his friendly acquaintance. So that, if it should be otherwise feasible, any civility shown him by the P.M.4 on this his very peculiar international mission, would be taken in France as a marked sign of courtesy and goodwill, just after the visit to France.
This is quite independent of the decision the Treasury may come to about the grant. I may add that Delisle is perfectly trustworthy, and that we are safe in the hands of the Museum people, to come to right judgments as to the MSS. …
Cross has shown me, with some secrecy, a very curious letter of Dickens, declaring that only a woman could have written the Scenes from Clerical Life. But he gives no good reason, and I am persuaded that he had heard the secret from Herbert Spencer, who at once detected it. I dare not express my doubt. John Morley writes pleasantly, but says he still feels like a fish out of water on the benches.
La Madeleine, March 21, 1883.
I hope to see them1 at the station, and then we can make plans for next week. The hotel is very full, but Cross tells me that there is just room for them. Ill-timed is really all I say against that passage of the lecture;2 and, if other people had gone straight, it would not even have been ill-timed. My censure has never gone farther than that.
Nobody can well be more strongly persuaded than I am of the necessity, the practical and moral necessity, of governing nations by consent, national consent being proved both by the vapour of opinion, and by the definite mechanism of representation. I am not even surprised that many Irishmen should be suspicious of the goodwill of a country which turns as readily to a Tory government as to a Liberal, which is seldom awake to its sins and the consequences of its sins, unless roused by terror, and which has made amends only under compulsion, or under the intense, but not permanent, influence of one resolute mind. Even that is not all that I concede to them. Therefore, in substance, Herbert has all my sympathy; only, if anything awkward arises, it is his father who has to find the remedy or bear the burden. The danger now is that the great wave, of his own raising, that has sustained his policy of generosity, and even of eventual confidence, will fall. People will lose, not only sympathy, which is not to the point, but hopefulness. I cannot even say that they will be wrong to lose hope. But if men cease to look forward to success, they cannot be made to go straight by looking back to their own evil deeds. Nobody, then, would stand by the P.M. except pure Democrats, like Chamberlain and Morley. If I was a Minister, I would say, not that we shall devise new schemes to disarm this new evidence, not that we shall relax our efforts in just indignation and despair, but that we shall go on with our appeal from the ill-disposed to the well-disposed, pursuing a policy which is not dictated by momentary hope or momentary fear, but proceeds from the heart and spirit of the principles which are our raison d'itre as a party and as a government. But I don't say that I should succeed.
If flurry and apprehension penetrate Downing Street, nothing can sustain Mr. Gladstone better than your own serenity. Be true to him and to his cause even if these odious crimes continue, even when you feel that the harvest will not be reaped in his time. The mills of God grind slowly.
It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men's minds. What is glorious is the way in which Mr. Gladstone rides on the whirlwind. You need not wonder much what I am thinking of it all.
As long ago as 1870 I ceased to be sanguine that we could govern Ireland successfully. The best influence over the Irish people is the influence of the clergy, and an ultramontane clergy is not proof against the sophistry by which men justify murder or excuse murderers.
I hope you will read and like Montègut's articles on George Eliot, especially the second, in the Revue of March IS. See pp. 307 and 329 for some very excellent criticism.
Miss B. met Cross here at lunch, was intensely excited, and explained it by saying that he is Ladislaw. But I cannot believe it. They say that Dorothea is here too. H—has been in great force. He is unwell now, but looks forward to M—'s arrival to-day, declaring, with accurate self-knowledge, that he likes nothing so much as an impostor.
He has given me Bradley's Recollections to read, from which I learned very little, and Stephen's very curious history of our criminal law.
Oscar Browning is here, divided between the French Revolution and the Gracchi—the most interesting of all purely secular topics.
La Madeleine, March 31, 1883.
The Wickhams are most inaccessible people, only to be seen on the road to Gourdon or St. Cèzaire. I have had only a glimpse of them; but we hope to overtake them between Chóteau Scott and S. Paul's on Sunday. They have some wild scheme of visiting Languedoc.
Cross told me that he had asked for some criticisms of mine which you told him of I answered that I did not believe you would send them, and he said that if you did, he would forward them unread. But I am sure there is nothing of any possible use to him. He is very communicative, and I am to see her letters and to advise as to publication. What I have seen is of such a kind that merely strung together with a few short notes, it would make a very interesting book: Memorials of George Eliot.
The real answer to your remark1 about that list2 is that which Johnson gave about fetlock,3 I have nothing to say about physical science that is not a reminiscence of conversations with Owen or Hooker, Paget or Tyndall; and it would be important to put down all the decisive works in those branches. I have tried to know the books on the history and method of discovery, the laws of scientific progress, and the tests of truth and error; and I find that this is a matter which very few scientific men take any interest in.
If I must defend my list, this is the sort of sophism I would employ:—
We all know some twenty or thirty predominant currents of thought or attitudes of mind, or system-bearing principles, which jointly or severally weave the web of human history and constitute the civilised opinion of the age. All these, I imagine, a serious man ought to understand, in whatever strength or weakness they possess, in their causes and effects, and in their relations to each other. The majority of them are either religious or substitutes for religion. For instance, Lutheran, Puritan, Anglican, Ultramontane, Socinian, Congregational, Mystic, Rationalist, Utilitarian, Pantheist, Positivist, Pessimist, Materialist, and so on. All understanding of history depends on one's understanding the forces that make it, of which religious forces are the most active, and the most definite. We cannot follow all the variations of a human mind, but when we know the religious motive, that the man was an Anabaptist, an Arminian, a Deist or a Jansenist, we have the master key, we stand on known ground, we are working a sum that has been, at least partially, worked out for us, we follow a computed course, and get rid of guesses and accidents. Thirdly (I am thinking, let us say, of my own son), we are not considering what will suit an untutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman who would never come to an end of the Imitation or the Serious Call. Her religion may be enough for heaven, without other study. Not so with a man living in the world, in constant friction with adversaries, in constant contemplation of religious changes, sensible of the power which is exerted by strange doctrines over minds more perfect, characters that are stronger, lives that are purer than his own. He is bound to know the reason why. First, because, if he does not, his faith runs a risk of sudden ruin. Secondly, for a reason which I cannot explain without saying what you may think bad psychology or bad dogma— I think that faith implies sincerity, that it is a gift that does not dwell in dishonest minds. To be sincere a man must battle with the causes of error that beset every mind. He must pour constant streams of electric light into the deep recesses where prejudice dwells, and passion, hasty judgments and wilful blindness deem themselves unseen. He must continually grub up the stumps planted by all manner of unrevised influence. The subtlest of all such influences is not family, or college, or country, or class, or party, but religious antagonism. There is much more danger for a high-principled man of doing injustice to the adherent of false doctrine, of judging with undeserved sympathy the conspicuous adherent of true doctrine, than of hating a Frenchman or loving a member of Brooks's. Many a man who thinks the one disgraceful is ready to think the other more than blameless. To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history, the chief business of every life, and the first agent therein is religion or what resembles religion. That is my sophism, beyond Dr. Johnson. But I think I represent Anglicanism by only one book, or two at most. Others, such as books on Church and State, cover much secular ground. Luckily, the paper limit stops me in the middle of a long prose.
Hotel Klinger, MarienbadSept. 1, 1883.
... Here, at last, I am resting from hard times at Marienbad, where the waters get into one's head, as my letter will probably show. You insist on my recording everything on which you will disagree, so I must say that I should have voted more in royal than episcopal company.1 In our Church and in the countries I have lived in much, one is so accustomed to those marriages that one does not think of a law to prevent them. Then as to Egypt, I was not orthodox as to the policy of the argument in favour of Lesseps, but vehemently comforted by the line taken, to make no sordid profit out of our military position, and to resist every entanglement that would indefinitely prolong the occupation. When I consider that our presence there should be the pivot for the settlement of the Eastern question, and the means of civilising Africa, I can see so much to dazzle ambitious politicians that I fear no Minister but one will ever be strong enough—in ascendency as well as in moral power—to evacuate, and I complacently take note of that additional steam to my propeller, whenever the question of retirement stirs again; and my third heresy is about the Pope. His declaration was concerted, I suppose, to hit some of the clergy between wind and water, and so had a political, not a moral aim. We may get embarrassed if we prompt and promote the political influence of the Pope, whose principles are necessarily, whose interests are generally, opposed to our own. It is as dangerous for us that his political authority should be obeyed in Irish confessionals as that, in this instance, it should be defied. Having morally supported the movement which upset his sovereignty, being prepared to oppose any movement to restore it, we come with a bad grace to ask him to prop and protect our authority in our dominions. Long ago I remember writing to headquarters that it would become impossible—impossible for Liberals—to govern Ireland after the Council; and although I am avowedly the worst of prophets, this prophecy has had a good deal of confirmation. It was an interesting question whether the Pope would definitely and unconditionally condemn murder, whether from religious or political motives. It would have borne untold consequences, as a direct revocation of the Vatican system, which stands or falls with the doctrine that one may murder a Protestant. But I don't believe that so audacious a change of front would have moved a single priest in Ireland.
Of George,1 in the sixpenny edition, I had a glimpse at Cannes. The better part of him, with more moderation and philosophy, and a wider induction, may be found in the writings of the academic Socialists, who, in the last ten years, have occupied almost all the Chairs of Germany, and who have been the warmest admirers of the Irish policy.
One can hardly congratulate you … about St. Peter's. At Montreux I met a newly-married young clergyman whose ugliness almost made me take him for —, and who assured me that it was offered to Holland. The dean of St. Paul's1 was at Munich the other day, and delighted Dollinger, who believes, in consequence, that a more mischievous fellow than Chamberlain does not eat bread. He also sent him, and enabled me to read, Mozley's washy Recollections. Liddon, I see, is busy with Rosmini, in the intervals of Pusey.2 Rosmini will interest you if the book ripens. He had much of Newman, and nearly reformed the papacy. But I am troubled with a doubt. His book was answered, by Passaglia, Thenier, Curci, and others, and it was condemned by the Index. Rosmini wrote a long and curious defence of it, which he printed, but did not publish, so as not to defy his censors. Liddon ought to have this defence before him, to strengthen his text withal. Perhaps Lockhart, and the other English Rosminians, may scruple to give it to him, lest they break the measured silence of their chief. It may be worth while to ask the eloquent and impulsive Canon, whenever you see him, whether he knows of it. Do let me thank you warmly for speaking of me to Mrs. Craven. She was almost my earliest friend, and I am shocked to think that I seemed unfaithful to memories forty years old. She was intimate with my mother before I was born. What does it matter that she also bores me a good deal by her restlessness, her curiosity and indiscretion, her want of serenity, etc.? I always liked her in spite of it, and she was always a great, but uncomfortable, admirer of Mr. Gladstone. Not so Waddington. You must have seen at once that he is a very estimable, solid, deeply religious man. There is hardly so great a scholar in France, and I think he is the only Frenchman before whom Mommsen has retracted a statement. That indeed is his proper line. Like George Lewis, he is really happiest among his coins and inscriptions, and was never made for the active life in which his high character, his knowledge, and now his willingness to serve a party not his own, have carried him so far. He has more caution than go, and has neither eloquence, nor influence over men. Above all things, he is cautious to do nothing that would enable adversaries to accuse his patriotism. His language about Egypt, and the future of France in the East, would seem exaggerated, but I dare say you have read Memories of Old Friends, a book meant for invalids at Bohemian wells, and curiously displaying English minds as they were about 1840. In the second edition Mill's letters are appended, in one of which he describes Tocqueville's opinion that one must not lower national pride, “almost the only elevated sentiment that remains in considerable strength.” Waddington might adopt those words with even greater justice now. He once befriended me, so that I am bound to speak up for him. We had met but once, at the Embassy, when he asked me to dinner, and arranged that I should meet, besides Lyons, Wimpfen and Hohen-lohe, whom he knew to be old friends of mine, Louis Arco, and the three most learned men in Paris, and then he gave me his box at the Francais, But whilst I testify what a good fellow he is, it is necessary, highly necessary, to add that he is not a friend of Mr. Gladstone. That class of scholars to which he belongs, men busy with inscriptions, ruins, medals, vases, contriving thereby to amend a text or fix a date, inevitably resent the spirit in which Mr. Gladstone studies antiquity, carrying with him emotions and ideals derived from elsewhere, and considerably disturbing accepted habits and conclusions. Then it to see with patience a powerful government that does not always use its strength, that accepts rebuke and repulse, and is ready to draw in the outposts of the empire. Whatever the true cause, I am pretty sure of the fact that he will come to Hawarden, like Ruskin, curious to probe the great Gladstonian mystery, not favourably prepossessed. I hope you will have him soon, and deal justly with him.
When you sit down to Macaulay, remember that the Essays are really flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism; his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous reviews, on Bacon and Ranke, show his incompetence. The essays are only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It is the History (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of diplomatic affairs, by Klopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely unfair. Read him therefore to find out how it comes that the most unsympathetic of critics can think him very nearly the greatest of English writers.
My good friend Bright1 got me into controversy by sending me Beard's Hibbert Lectures, on the Reformation. There was a great deal to say, with the usual result; but you would think them interesting as a stimulant. Have I ever told you that I have read the Diaries, letters, etc., of G. Eliot? Cross wants me to review them in the Nineteenth Century, or at least wanted; but I know not where he is, or whether he still wishes it.
I always see Miss Helen Gladstone in the papers, and suppose she is with you. I don't know whether Miss Renouf is in her house.2 She is a sort of godchild of mine, and her father is, without exception, the most learned Englishman I know. The daughter of such a man should be something unusual; the mother, too, is of a clever family, a Brentano.
Lady Blennerhassett gave me some accounts of you at Holmbury. Minghetti, whom I saw lately, tells me that our friend Bonghi has a Roman History in the press, which the Italians hope to set up against Mommsen. I forgot, to complete my confession, that I have never been happy about our policy with Cetewayo. But the general result of the session cannot be lamented, only it is not heroic success, such as Mr. Gladstone's supremacy and the flatness of the Opposition would demand. The great thing is his health. I did not come over, not being once summoned, so that we shall only meet at Cannes.
LA MADELEINE Feb. 9, 1884.
Do not think ill of the people they call academic Socialists. It is only a nickname for the school that is prevailing now in the German universities, with a branch in France and another in Italy, a school whose most illustrious representative in England, whose most eminent practical teacher in the world, is Mr. Gladstone. In their writings, inspired by the disinterested study of all classic economists, one finds most of the ideas and illustrations of Mr. George, though not, indeed, his argument against Malthus. This makes him less new to one; but nobody writes with that plain, vigorous directness, and I do believe that he has, in a large measure, the ideas of the age that is to come.
I am glad, too, that you like Seeley's book. It is excellent food for thought. But so is the first article in the January Quarterly.1 I wrote eight pages of criticism and should have liked to send them to you instead of Maine, but perhaps you have not read him.
Liddon's objection to saying what may damage a very meritorious body of surviving friends of Rosmini is practically reasonable; but it is rather a reason for not writing at all on the subject. Rosmini made a vigorous attempt to reform the Church of Rome. He was vehemently attacked, repelled, censured; and he defended himself in a work more important, argumentatively, than the first. If this dramatic incident is left untold, if his stronger statements are omitted from his case, we shall get an imperfect notion of a memorable transaction, and of an interesting, if not a great, divine.
I am so very glad that Mr. Gladstone is in his best health, and that the troubled times have put out of sight the notion of retirement. For that reason I could almost console myself in looking at the Soudan. That affair has been in the hands of a colleague without much original resource, attentive to the wind, and glad to follow the advice of local agents. It chances that I have been reading—'s confidential letters written to a friend sure not to show them to Ministers j and I have thought him deficient in imagination—in the discovering facuIty—and also in independence. There is no denying that there has been a lack of initiative genius in the last few weeks, and that Mr. Gladstone would have done more if Bonaparte had been his departmental colleague.
Of all critics of my Iist,1 Lubbock is best informed in a vast region where I am a stranger. I by no means disregard his criticisms.
18 Carlton House TerraceFeb. 13, 1884.
I gather, from something I have just heard, that Froude wiII not wish for the Professorship. As to Freeman, I am not quite sure. There can be no real competitor but Gardiner.
Dinner without any prospect beyond will be mere dust and ashes; but what awful fun Oxford2 would be!
Feb. 15.
... It was such a delight to meet the greatest of all our historians3 at this particular moment. There never was so much kindness in this world. I can think of nothing but our journey, and the wretchedness of having only one day there. Of course I am going to live at the Clarendon. If any doubt arises, do not let it exist for a moment. Then I must visit the Bodley for an hour, and Stubbs, Liddon, M. Muller, Jowett, Brodrick, Bright of University.
But these are my private wanderings. Do remember that, and let them not spoil the cachet of their own grouping. As all passes through you, do take an opportunity to say how thankfully and joyously I accept his invitation.
March 17.
... Meanwhile the troublesome question of retirement is in a new phase. The half Reform bill is floated by a half pledge as to redistribution which is personal to himself. He cannot leave it to be redeemed by others, who, he expressly stated, are not parties to it. He is virtually pledged to complete the work himself; that is, to meet the next Parliament. For they will inevitably force him to dissolve in the autumn, if they do not succeed in crowding out the Reform question. If not carried by an immense majority, it will be carried by Irish votes. The Lords will be able to say that England ought to be consulted definitely, that it ought not to be overruled by Ireland, in an old Parliament, and that such a change in the Constitution is not to be carried by enemies of the Constitution until the country has pronounced.
I don't imagine that it is a bad point to dissolve upon —at any rate, there is no swopping in such a crossing.
But I suppose he has abandoned the hope of himself retiring from Egypt, and if he does not, nobody else will; and so one must begin to face what is inevitable, and to acknowledge that the Soudan has altered our position in Egypt. A further complication cannot be far off. The best time to re-open the Turkish question will be whilst we are a little damaged as to disinterestedness by Cyprus and Egypt, whilst our increased security makes us less anxious and less nervous about Constantinople, and whilst the censor of the Turk resides at No. 10. The position in the East is so much altered since Berlin1 that Russia will not long be bound by that Treaty, having a price by which Austria can be won. Every step of that sort will help to fix us in Egypt.
And as long as we are at Alexandria or even at Souakim, the future of Central Africa will depend on us, or at least on our people. I do not believe that Mr. Gladstone would revive John Company and send him to the Equatorial lakes; and yet I fancy there is an opening there for inventive statesmanship.
My eagerness about Liddon's elevation does not mean that my head was turned by the ambush of that deferential Sacristan at Oxford Station,1 or that the Warden2 talked me over—though he talked wisely. For I am not in harmony with Liddon, and scarcely in sympathy. He has weak places that nobody sees and resents so sharply as I do; and he has got over, or swallowed, such obstacles on the road to Rome that none remain which, as it seems to me, he ought logically or legitimately to strain at. I will even confess to you alone—that that affair of Rosmini leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. But one might pick holes in any man, even in the new Bishop of Chester,3 Nothing steadies a ship like a mitre—and as to his soundness, his determination to work in and through the Church, and not on eccentric courses, I satisfied myself with the supreme authority of Dean Church, on my last night in town. One cannot help seeing that Liddon is a mighty force, not yet on its level. He knows how to kindle and how to propel. Newman and Wilberforce may have had the same power, but one was almost illiterate; the other knows what he might have learnt in the time of Water—land or Butler; whereas Liddon is in contact with all that is doing in the world of thought. …
......La Madeleine, March 30, 1884.
At the same time, I think it an evil in many ways. Girls and widows are Tories, and channels of clerical influence, and it is not for them so much as for married women that your argument tells. If we ever have manhood suffrage—dissociating power from property altogether, it will be difficult to keep out wives. The objections to voting wives are overwhelming.
La Madeleine, June 19, 1884.
You will be careful, another time, I hope, as to the enclosures you forward, seeing how long a reply they involve, and how great a delay. The difficulty which prolongs and has delayed my letter will be very apparent to you before you reach the end.
First, as to the personal question:—
It was not my purpose to depreciate Canon Liddon. I came over with the highest opinion of him—an opinion higher perhaps than Dr. Dollinger's, or even than Mr. Gladstone's, whose ostensible preference for divines of less mark has sometimes set me thinking. Impressed by his greatness, not as a scholar to be pitted against Germans, but as a spiritual force, and also by a certain gracious nobleness of tone which ought to be congenial, I tried, at Oxford and in London, to ascertain whether there is some element of weakness that had escaped me.
Evidently, Liddon is in no peril from the movement of modern Science. He has faced those problems and accounted for them. If he is out of the perpendicular, it is because he leans the other way.
The question would rather be whether a man of his sentiments, rather inclined to rely on others, would be proof against the influence of Newman, or of foreign theologians like Newman.
On the road Bishops and Parliament were taking a few years since, there would be rocks ahead, and one might imagine a crisis in which it would be doubtful who would be for maintaining the National Church and who would not. I have chanced to be familiar with converts and with the raw material of which they are made, and cannot help knowing the distinct and dissimilar paths followed by men like Newman himself, Hope, Palmer, R. 1. Wilberforce, Ward, Renouf, many of whom resembled Liddon in talent and fervour, and occupied a position outwardly not far from his own.
He once called the late Bishop of Brechin1 the first divine in the Church. I knew the Bishop well, and am persuaded that the bond that held him in the Anglican Communion might easily have snapped, under contingencies to which he was not exposed.
Putting these questions not quite so crudely as they are stated here, I thought that I obtained an answer. At any rate, I was assured that Liddon is made of sterner stuff than I fancied, that he knows exactly where he stands, where others have stood before him, and where and why he parts with them; that the course of Newman and the rest has no secrets and no surprises for him; that he looks a long way before him, and has no disposition to cling to the authority of others. In short, it appeared very decidedly that he is—what Bishop Forbes was not— fixed in his Anglican position.
Under this impression, I could not help wondering why Wilkinson, Stubbs, and Ridding are judged superior to Liddon. I could have felt and have expressed no such wonder if I had not taken pains to discover that he has tried and has rejected the cause of Rome, and that neither home difficulties nor external influence are at all likely to shake him.
Far, therefore, from meaning disparagement, I rate him higher than any member of the English clergy I know; and touching the question of stability, I have the sufficient testimony of his friends, of men naturally vigilant on that point, of which I am not competent to judge or to speak.
So little competent, indeed, that I should be at a loss to define his system, or to corroborate, of my own knowledge, the confidence which others have expressed. It seemed to me necessary to indicate that, for myself, I could not speak without some qualification or reserve, such as perhaps would only occur to a close student of Roman pathology. To do more, will be giving undue and unfair prominence to a parenthesis. It lays stress where there ought to be none, makes the deduction, the exception, greater than the positive statement, and gives me the air of a man whose praise is designed to convey a slur of suspicion.
That is why your letter with its formidable enclosure has afflicted me with dumbness. The doubt which I indicated in writing to you has been suggested chiefly by what passed in reference to Rosmini.
You will remember that you sent Liddon word that Rosmini wrote a very long defence of the little book which he was translating. He preferred not to make use of the information and not to see the book; and he avoided the subject when we met at Oxford. The reason is, that the Rosminians wish the Defence to be ignored, as it qualifies the submission of the author when the book defended was condemned.
The suppression injures nobody; it only puts the readers of the translation slightly off the scent, and gives an imperfect article instead of none. There is some trace of complicity with those who are interested in a suppressio veri. But it may have been due, as he was under obligations to them, and this is only preliminary matter.
-My real difficulty is, that he speaks of his author with great respect, and evidently thinks his doctrine sound and profitable.
Now Rosmini, allowing for some superficial proposals of reform, was a thorough believer in the Holy See. His book itself, by the nature of the reforms proposed, implies that no other defects of equal magnitude remain to be remedied. Apart from the Five points he accepts the papacy as it stands; and he has no great objection to it, Five points included.
He was what we vulgarly call an ultramontane—a reluctant ultramontane, like Lacordaire. An Anglican who views with satisfaction, with admiration, the moral character and spiritual condition of an Ultramontane priest, appears to me to have got over the principal obstacle on the way to Rome—the moral obstacle. The moral obstacle, to put it compendiously, is the Inquisition.
The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed, or assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. It was set up, renewed, and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the supreme authority in the Church. No other institution, no doctrine, no ceremony is so distinctly the individual creation of the papacy, except the Dispensing power. It is the principal thing with which the papacy,is identified, and by which it must be judged.
The principle of the Inquisition is the Pope's sovereign power over life and death. Whosoever disobeys him should be tried and tortured and burnt. If that cannot be done, formalities may be dispensed with, and the culprit may be killed like an outlaw.
That is to say, the principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man's opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination.
If he honestly looks on it as an abomination, he can only accept the Primacy with a drawback, with precaution, suspicion, and aversion for its acts.
If he accepts the Primacy with confidence, admiration, unconditional obedience, he must have made terms with murder.
Therefore, the most awful imputation in the catalogue of crimes rests, according to the measure of their knowledge and their zeal, upon those whom we call Ultramon-tanes. The controversy, primarily, is not about problems of theology: it is about the spiritual state of a man's soul, who is the defender, the promoter, the accomplice of murder. Every limitation of papal credit and authority which effectually dissociates it from that reproach, which breaks off its solidarity with assassins and washes away the guilt of blood, will solve most other problems. At least, it is enough for my present purpose to say, that blot is so large and foul that it precedes and eclipses the rest. and claims the first attention.
I will show you what Ultramontanism makes of good men by an example very near home. Saint Charles Borromeo, when he was the Pope's nephew and minister. wrote a letter requiring Protestants to be murdered, and complaining that no heretical heads were forwarded to Rome, in spite of the reward that was offered for them. His editor, with perfect consistency, publishes the letter with a note of approval. Cardinal Manning not only holds up to the general veneration of mankind the authority that canonised this murderer, but makes him in a special manner his own patron, joins the Congregation of Oblates of St. Charles, and devotes himself to the study of his acts and the propagation of his renown.
Yet I dare say I could find Anglican divines who would speak of the Cardinal as a good man, unhappily divided from the Church of which he was an ornament, and living in error, but yet not leading a life of sin—I should gather from such language that the speaker was not altogether averse from the distinctive characteristic of Ultramontanism, and had swallowed far the largest obstacle on the road to Rome.
The case of Rosmini is not so glaring, but it is substantially the same. Language implying that an able and initiated Italian priest accepting the papacy, with its inventory of systematic crime, incurs no guilt, that he is an innocent, virtuous, edifying Christian, seems to me open to grave suspicion. If it was used by one of whom I knew nothing else, I should think ill of him. If I knew him to be an able and in many ways an admirable man, I should feel much perplexity, and if I heard on the best authority that he deserved entire confidence, I should persuade myself that it is true, and should try to quiet my uneasiness.
That is what I have done in the case of Liddon. When he speaks of an eminent and conspicuous Ultramontane divine with the respect he might show to Andrewes or Leighton, or to Grotius or Baxter, he ignores or is ignorant of the moral objection, and he surrenders so much that he has hardly a citadel to shelter him. I dare say he would give me a very good answer, and I do not hesitate to utter his praises. But I have no idea what the answer would be, and so must leave room for a doubt
I should hardly have resolved to say all this to anybody but yourself, relying on you not to misunderstand the exact and restricted meaning of my letter. I should like my reason for misgiving to be understood. But I care much more to be understood as an admirer, not an accuser of Canon Liddon. My explanation is worthless if it fails to justify me there
St. Martin Haute Autriche, June 20, 1884
The idleness of Coombe Warren1 has much to answer for. I was taken by surprise when you sent me that letter,2 and would have given a great deal to escape the necessity of answering it. Ever since, it has stood grievously in the way of writing to you; and I have conquered my difficulty with extreme reluctance
I still think that we ought to evacuate;4 but I thought there would be no time for Mr. Gladstone to do it, and no obligation on others. The convention is a very dexterous way of laying compulsion on the Ministers, whoever they may be, several years hence. It meets what I thought an insurmountable difficulty, if it succeeds, as I hope it will. But I cannot look with satisfaction on the principle as compensation for the risk of failure. The cause does not seem to me so sacred or so pure as to offer consolation for the fall of the Ministry.
It is an indefinite principle, depending for its application on variable circumstances. It is not clean cut. We retain certain ill-gotten possessions, obtained by treaty or by necessity. It is not evident that we should surrender a possession which is not ill-gotten.
Our motives for surrender are mixed. It is to relieve us from a very troublesome and very dangerous engagement, to avoid a formidable expenditure, to disarm the menacing jealousy of other Powers. The mixture of motives is obvious, and we are not in a position to claim the merit which belongs to the purest among them
The Ministry would not be united for common action on this question, if the motives of expediency did not corne to aid the motive of principle. The bit of gold has to be beaten very thin to gild the whole of them. One sees and recognises the surface gilding, but one knows that there is inferior metal beneath
The position would be loftier and more correct if we retired from an enterprise crowned with success, in the fulness of conscious superiority as well as of conscious rectitude. But we have not accomplished triumphantly the work from which we withdraw. We are not incurring the sacrifice of stopping short in a career of victory and of political triumphs, so that the world wonders at our moderation and self-control. We are giving up an undertaking in which we have disappointed the expectation of the world, in which we have shown infirmity of purpose, want of forethought, a rather spasmodic and inconclusive energy, occasional weakness and poverty of resource; and our presence and promise have been mixed blessings for the Egyptian people. So that the principle is not large enough as a basis for such a structure, nor clear enough to yield me comfort for the enforced close of such a career.
Do not be angry with me for saying all this—you have heard it before.
St. Martin, Aug. 15, 1884.
You never told me what plans there are for the short recess. I am glad the Scottish campaign is to be soon, so as to give guidance to the popular movement. There is a good deal of nonsense in the air; but I hope there will be strength.
Salisbury's avowal of numerical principles set me thinking. I cannot make out whether it is a surrender or a snare. It confirms the expectation that they will put the minority theory forward, which is, I think, their best card. Not so much because I agree with them, as because it divides the Liberal party, and rescues them from the position of mere resistance.
The objections to Northbrook's mission1 are obvious; and yet I should have liked to go out with him, and try to understand the problem as it now stands; for it is taking a new shape, unwelcome, I fear, to Mr. Gladstone, and yet not unforeseen, at least since the appearance of Blignieres, It does not seem impossible to combine rigid principle with practical necessities.
There is not a brighter spot in my retrospect than our visit to Cambridge, the execution of it, as well as the delight of it, due to you. Looking back I fancy that I can never have said to you nearly how much I was impressed by Sidgwick's conversation—to say nothing of their hospitality. But the fact is we never talked over anything, and it is all to come.
Alfred's2 triumphant bowling makes me hold his coat and umbrella comparatively cheap, yet I suppose we got beaten after all,3 …
I have been staying at Tegernsee with Dollinger. The impending vacancy at Lincoln was announced while I was there, and I am sorry to say that we did not quite agree in the speculations which it suggested. I hope you will see my dear friend at Chester.4 There is not a greater Tory in England, or a greater ornament to that perverse party.
St. Martin, Aug. 29, 1884.
There was nothing definite to quote in my conversation with the Professor5 about Liddon. He hardly knows the better side of Liddon, as a preacher, and as a religious force. He sees that he is not a very deep scholar, and thinks his admiration for Pusey a sign of weakness, I think he once used the term fanatical—meaning a large allowance of one-sidedness in his way of looking at things. Indeed, Dollinger is influenced by nearly the same misgivings that I felt some months ago; and he has not had the same opportunities for getting rid of them. For instance, the Dean of St. Paul's6 assured me that Liddon, far from reclining on others, is masterful and fond of his own opinion. Moreover, Liddon's attitude in the question of Church and State is a matter which the Professor and I judge very differently, and it is a difference which it is useless to discuss any more.
I am waiting very eagerly for the speeches in Midlothian. They will be almost the most important of his whole career.
Forwood's proposal of equal electoral districts is another sign of dissolution in Toryism. The principle of setting a limit to inequality might be defended much more plausibly. I am glad to figure in your company in Northumberland as well as at Cambridge. Your experiment1 is perhaps worth trying, and Stuart knows his people too well to promote it if it is likely to fail. An outsider has not any secure means of forecasting; but I shall retain some hesitation.
Your letter was waiting here when I came from Tegernsee, where I have spent another few days with my Professor.2 Knesebeck, the Empress' secretary, was there; and I was dismayed to learn that Morier has spoken to him in the most hostile terms of our foreign policy. I was sorry, in London, that you did not see more of that strong diplomatist in Downing Street.
In the doubt as to your movements I direct to Hawarden, where I hope you will see the excellent, learned, homely, humble Bishop of Chester, whose virtues ought to disarm even the recalcitrant Dean.3
St. Martin, Sept. 10, 1884.
I was able to realise your late experience,4 even to the tones of voice in certain passages, and I envied you. It must make one change. He5 cannot any longer elaborately and perversely ignore the fact that he himself is the life and the force of the Liberal party. His reception by Midlothian in 1880, when he did not appear as a candidate for office, constrained him to become Prime Minister; and the more definite issue laid before Midlothian in 1884, still more emphatically answered, determines that he must remain P.M. Just as he accepted the consequences then, when they involved withdrawal of public declarations, he must accept them now, when they compel, and are very definitely designed to compel, the surrender of private aspirations.
The public voice has spoken this time more loudly and more consciously. It would not be right towards the country, but especially towards his colleagues, to obey it then and to resist it now. It would be not only a breach of the contract now made by something more than implication, but a yielding up of the party to its enemies in an inextricable crisis. I have not the least doubt that the position will be so understood.
I think less of the gain which the Ministry derives from the policy, the limitation and the enormous effect of the speeches. It is possible, I think, to detect a weak place in them. When one speaks in answer to opponents who are present, and who state their own case, the thing to do is to demolish it. But when one addresses the public, in the absence of debate, it is often good policy to state the opposite case in one's own way, prior to demolition; one's own way is the way one would state it if it was one's own: and everybody knows that he would make the Tory position more logical, more plausible, and stronger than they make it themselves, if he was on their side. It is a process one has to go through for oneself, to see what the adversary's case looks like, stripped of all the passion, ignorance, and fallacy with which he presents it. We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong; and we are strictly bound not to transform the sophisms of the advocate into flaws in his case.
An intelligent Tory might say that this figure or precept of rhetoric was not followed, and that their argument was presented, not unfairly, but not at its best.
Of course he would see the point of the speeches in the restraint of agitation, and the offer to make terms. I hope—against hope—that this moderation is founded on knowledge of what is going on among the Tories. One sees signs of collapse in their policy of reform, but not in their determination to resist, and my own impression is that even Wemyss meant to fight it out, only in another way. But if there is no collapse, I see no resource except the agitation which Mr. Gladstone still deprecates.
To my mind the most significant passage was that in which he spoke of the probable fall of several Ministries. That means that the Home Rulers are going to be the arbiters of party government. That means ruin to the Liberal party. Many Liberals see the moment looming when they will have more sympathy with a party led by moderate Conservatives than with a party inspired by Radical Democrats. The looming will be quickened by the necessity of presenting a front to the Irish. But that is only a small part of the argument accumulating against retirement before the next Parliament, when the new constituencies will be fixed for generations.
Odo Russell1 is difficult to replace at a moment of peculiar soreness and strain. In the service, I should prefer Dufferin; out of it—Bedford! I understand that he would not accept. I find Lord Granville quite feels that our strongest diplomatist, Morier, is out of the question at Berlin, but it will be ten times worse to send Carlingford, and an indication of weakness.
Many, very many, thanks for your letter, which did not seem to me to suffer from the distractions and dissipations of Dalmeny. The best part of it is the good report of your father's health and spirits.
Cannes, Nov. 12, 1884.
It is a very important crisis, as there is a possibility of such complete and perfect success for Mr. Gladstone's Policy of Reform; and I do so hope he may have it in all fulness. There never was such personal ascendency; and I trust nothing will happen in Africa to disturb it
Yes, I would give a trifle to have heard the discussion of our Revolution by our greatest statesman1 and our greatest historian.2 The latter betrayed his uncompromising Conservatism by half a parenthesis at Keble. It is very superficially disguised in his book, and he ought to have been more grateful to me than he was for abusing Macaulay. Brewer was just like him in judging those events, and Gardiner contrives only by an effort not to revile the good old Cause. We are well out of the monotonous old cry about Hampden and Russell.
La Madeleine, Dec. 9, 1884.
... M— received an account which pleased her, of my bath of goodness and spirituality at Oxford; and the writing to her about scenes and people she knows, and trying to explain thoughts and facts, has been half the pleasure of my solitary journey.
The meeting at your door3 of the professors of heterodoxy4 and chatterboxy5 in political economy is delightful, and I hope it will fructify. But my friend the “nice little old gentleman”6 will always be too strenuous and urgent for the Fra Angelico of Economists; and besides, we live in the Gladstonian era—and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. That, however, might be a bond of union between those Sophisters.
In London I could not escape a luncheon with——, who threatens me with a friendly visit next month at Cannes. Next week I expect Bryce with Robertson Smith. Did I tell you of my pleasant dinner with them on Wednesday, and meeting Creighton?7 He is an agreeable and superior man, whom you would like; and he is full of general knowledge. But I am afraid you will find his book1 a severe study.
Thursday—Rather an uninteresting dinner at——; but one goes there to eat. Lord G. not in very good spirits. I conciliated Enfield, who … was a little shocked to find that I agree with Courtney.
There was not a gap of time for a farewell in Downing Street, and I had to decline dinners with the Granvilles, Mays, and Pagets, and a visit to Seacox—Hamlet left out.
The journey succeeded beautifully, for it was the roughest passage I remember, and I was none the worse for it. At Calais one gets into a sleeping-car and gets out of it at Cannes, after dining and sleeping comfortably. A young Englishman described the Grasse Hotel to me, where he had lived with Cross, who was writing a book. He did not discover that it2 was the book in my hand. I have sent it back with some considerable suggestions.
Mrs. Green writes an amusing account of Dr. Stubbs's violent language in politics when she approaches him with her history. I have advised her to sacrifice everything and everybody to the object of securing his help. Leviathan3 wiII not aid her.
I have strongly urged May to write a new chapter of Constitutional History, coming down to this our era of Good Feeling, as Americans call the last administration of Monroe.4 It is the greatest landmark in English Politics; and it has the merit of all well-defined epochs, that it is not going to last.
At the British Museum, Gardiner was working, and I wished him joy on the endowment of Research.
......Cannes, Dec. 18, 1884.
If sleeplessness comes on again do represent the merits of Cannes in their proper light. January is often the finest month, and this is the finest season ever known. Also it is the emptiest. I hear that Thorenc is not to let, in the hope that the Wolvertons may take it. Such rest and change as he would get here, after so much hard work, might be quite invaluable, especially if it is in his thoughts that the Session of 1885 is to be his last in office. That would be worth refreshing for; and we shall do our best to occupy and distract him, and all of you, during your stay.
Croker1 was so large and promising a morsel that I postponed temptation and read no part of him carefully; besides it is a question hot with hidden fire. Have you not discovered, have I never betrayed, what a narrow doctrinaire I am, under a thin disguise of levity? The Duke of Orleans nearly described my feelings when he spoke, testamentarily, of his religious flag and his political faith. Politics come nearer religion with me, a party is more like a church, error more like heresy, prejudice more like sin, than I find it to be with better men. And by these canons I am forced to think ill of Peel, to think, if you won't misunderstand me, that he was not a man of principle. The nature of Toryism is to be entangled in interests, traditions, necessities, difficulties, expedients, to manage as best one may, without creating artificial obstacles in the shape of dogma, or superfluous barriers of general principle. “Perissent les colonies plutot que les rincipes” (which is a made - up sentence, no more authentic than “Roma locuta est”), expresses the sort of thing Liberalism means and Toryism rejects. Government must be carried on, even if we must tolerate some measure of wrong, use some bad reasons, trample on some unlucky men. Other people could recognise the face and the sanctity of morality where it penetrated politics, taking the shape of sweeping principle, as in Emancipation, Free Trade, and so many other doctrinaire questions. Peel could not until he was compelled by facts. Because he was reluctant to admit the sovereignty of considerations which were not maxims of state policy, which condemned his own past and the party to which he belonged.
But if party is sacred to me as a body of doctrine, it is not, as an association of men bound together, not by common convictions but by mutual obligations and engagements. In the life of every great man there is a point where fidelity to ideas, which are the justifying cause of party, diverges from fidelity to arrangements and understandings, which are its machinery. And one expects a great man to sacrifice his friends—at least his friendship—to the higher cause.
Progress depends not only on the victory, the uncertain and intermittent victory, of Liberals over Conservatives, but on the permeation of Conservatism with Liberal ideas, the successive conversion of Tory leaders, the gradual desertion of the Conservative masses by their chiefs— Fox, Grenville, Wellesley, Canning, Huskisson, Peel— Tory ministers passing Emancipation, Free Trade, Reform —are in the order of historic developments. Still the complaints of Croker are natural. He had been urged along a certain line, and being a coarse, blatant fellow, he overdid it, and wrote things from which there was no release. It was not in his brutal nature to appreciate the other side of questions. He did not begin by seeing the strong points of his enemy's case, and so far he was dishonest.
My impression is that Peel was justified towards his party in 1846 by what occurred in 1845. He explained his views; some of his friends declared against them; and he resigned. After the exchange of Stanley for Mr. Gladstone, it was a new Ministry, a new departure on distinct lines. Nobody was betrayed. Peel did not carry his friends with him because he had not the ascendency which his great lieutenant possesses. The Radicals have been made to look as foolish as Croker. The bread has been taken out of their mouths, as they are not to devour the Lords. They have consolations in the future which the Protectionists have not; but they are in as false a position as the Protectionists were; and yet they stand fire on the whole well, and without secession.—But I am conscious of more nearly hating Croker than anybody, except Lord Clare, in English history. It was my one link with a late, highly-lamented statesman and novelist.1
La Madeleine, Jan. 14, 1885.
I have bored the P.M. to extinction with praise of Liddon, and as all I could say is obvious to others, I am not tempted to repeat the offence. But the death of that uninteresting, good Bishop Jackson2 disturbs my rest. It is clear, very clear to me, that it would not be right to pass Liddon over now that there are two important vacancies to fill; and one asks oneself why he should not be chosen for the more important of the two, and who is manifestly worthier to occupy the greatest see in Christendom? The real answer, I suppose, is that his appointment will give great offence, and that he is a decided partisan, and a partisan of nearly the same opinions as the P.M. himself.
No doubt there would be much irritation on the thorough Protestant side, and in quarters very near Downing Street, and I feel, myself, more strongly than many people, that partisanship in Liddon runs to partiality, to one-sidedness, to something very like prejudice. And with all that strong feeling, I cannot help being agitated with the hope that the great and providential opportunity will not be lost.
Assuredly Liddon is the greatest power in the conflict with sin, and in turning the souls of men to God, that the nation now possesses. He is also, among all the clergy, the man best known to numbers of Londoners. There must be a very strong reason to justify a Minister in refusing such a bishop to such a diocese.
The argument of continuity does not convince me, because it was disregarded when Phillpotts died. Still more, because so eminent a representative of Church principles had not occupied the see of London within living memory, and there is a balance to redress. When I think of his lofty and gracious spirit, his eloquence, his radiant spirituality, all the objections which I might feel, vanish entirely.
The time has really come when the P.M. has authority to do what he likes, and to disregard cavil. He is lifted above all considerations which might weaken action at other times and in other men. No iII consequences of his use of patronage can reach him. He can be guided by the supreme motive, and by the supreme motive only. It may be well that these are the last conspicuous ecclesiastical appointments that will be his to make. He is able now to bequeath an illustrious legacy to the people of London.
And, speaking on a lower level, the shock of Liddon's elevation might be blunted by the contemporaneous choice for Lincoln.
One qualification ought to be remembered. He is more in contact than other churchmen with questions of the day. Not only politics and criticism, but science. Paget delights to relate how Owen was discoursing on the brevity of life in the days of the patriarchs, and how beautifully Liddon baffled him by asking whether there is any structural reason for a cockatoo to live ten times as long as a pigeon. If it was my duty, which it is not, or my habit—which it is still less—to speak all my mind, I would say that there is, within my range of observation, some inclination to make too much of distinguished men in the Church. I name no names, but if I did, I might name Pusey, Wilberforce, Mozley, Church, Westcott, as men whom there has been some tendency to overestimate, at least in comparison with Liddon. Not that he is their superior, but that he seems to me to have fallen short of his due as much as they, in various ways, have been overpaid, in praise, confidence, and fame. If there have been reasons explaining this, I think they ought not to operate now.
Who are conceivable candidates? Temple, Westcott, Wilkinson, Butler, Lightfoot? Two of these are more learned and more indefinite theologians; but I can see no other point of rivalry. And I do not learn that Dunelm possesses unusual light in dealing with men. Fraser? Who can say that he has the highest qualities in Liddon's measure? Temple is vigorous and open; but he is not highly spiritual, or attractive, or impressive as a speaker; he has an arid mind, and a provincial note in speech and manner. But he also understands science. The Dean assures me that, Pusey being gone, Liddon will be under no personal influence, that he has more confidence in himself and more backbone than I was able to discover for myself.
La Madeleine, Jan. 22, 1885.
Although Chamberlain is not the only source of weakness in the Government, he will be the cause of dissolution if your threat is executed at Easter! I really must come over and make myself very disagreeable if that goes on. It is time to play the last card in one's hand, for one year more of office and power, for the sake of the indefinite future. But perhaps the Vyner Cottage1 may give me the desired opportunity
For this is a very central part of Europe. I have had Dilke and Ripon; I saw Salisbury yesterday; and Scherer dines here on Saturday.
Cross is coming with his book2 next week.
Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, Feb. 26, 1885.
I shall be delighted to dine in bad company on Thursday. Goschen will speak against the Government to-morrow, but will vote for them. I dined there yesterday with Morier, Milner,3 and Albert Grey;4 and the same party dines with Morier this evening as soon as the P.M. sits down, Several Ministers (Harrington, Spencer, and others) have said too much that they wish to be beaten.
A very strong speech to-night would retrieve the position. If the enemy came in now, England would soon become no better than the Continental powers, and our true greatness and prosperity would depart from us.
Athenæum, March 3, 1885.
I am so glad to know that he is getting better.
If you will burn my letters there will be less difficulty in voting for Government. Certainly a peer cannot vote absolutely only as he approves or disapproves—or I must have voted on the other side.
La Madeleine, April 9, 1885.
Pattison himself suffers from the extreme narrowness of the Oxford horizon in his time. He knows nothing about the other side of the hill; and when he came to know, in later years, his religious spirit was extinct Newman had unfitted him for Rothe. A strong mind cannot rest without thinking out its thoughts. But Pattison rests without caring to explain which of the several systems which exist outside of the churches satisfied his conscience. He grew impatient of theology. He does not recognise the great importance of Casaubon in religious history, or of Milton's theological treatise on the progress of his mind. Once, having reviewed Pascal, he said to me that he thought, after all, the Jesuits were in the right. I disagreed, but I remember that I was delighted at the openness of his mind. But now I again find him hooded with prejudice. He rightly discerned that the French Protestants created independent scientific learning, and glorifies Scaliger as the type of them: and then he treats Petavius as an impostor, got up by the Jesuits in defiance of Scaliger. Whereas the Jesuit was one of the most deeply learned men that ever lived, by no means inferior to Grotius or Ussher or Selden.
Every year some zealous Frenchman exposes the iniquities of the Tudors, hoping to discredit the Church of England; and Taine fancies that to show the horrors of the Revolution is a good argument against democracy. Pattison must have stood, as to his inner man, nearly on the same level of logic.
......Cannes, April 22, 1885.
He is also the great patron of Amiel, whom I read with delight as having a savour of Vinet—with more serious culture and curiosity, and inferior understanding for religion. There is a plot in Arnold's circle to make him known and popular in England. Nobody thought anything of him in his lifetime, at Geneva.
A careful study of my Pall Mall has left me quite in the dark as to Zulfikar, etc.1 I thought there was a deliberate intention to force us into war, and I did not imagine that there was any way out of it. To my cheap and pacific mind it seemed a disaster not only without remedy, but without even a remote compensation or consolation, in which victory could do us no good, and in which the mere conflict would degrade us to the brutal level of Continental powers.
Nothing has so completely puzzled me for the last two years as the hesitation of Russia to re-open the San Stefano question, while we are not only at Cyprus, but in Egypt, and without any moral vantage ground from which we can resist the overthrow of the European Turk. I would willingly give up the whole country from Bulgaria to the Ægean for a few miles of Afghan desert.
But it would be bad policy to give up both and have to fight for existence in India whenever a capricious bell rings at Petersburgh.
......Cannes, April 27, 1885.
— is very intelligent, agreeable, amiable, a little complex in design; accurate calculation sometimes resides in the corner of her eye, and she knows how to regulate to a hair's breadth, when she smiles, the thin red line of her lips.
Princes' Gate, June 20, 1885.
No one ever saw Mr. Gladstone in better spirits than he was at dinner yesterday. I hope it was the hitch.1 It is a bore to be away when the thing is to be decided. May agrees with me, and with that other Radical2 from Cambridge, that even the ingeniously remodelled assurances ought not to be given; when we have preserved peace with so much difficulty, no concession not absolutely required should be made to these dangerous successors.3 But it will need great fortitude, and I do not seriously hope for success against the strong wish of so many colleagues.
......April 1885.
Cannes, Nov. 11, 1885.
I wish I had been with you in Norway or could have seen Hawarden during this most interesting time. Other trouble and travel have made havoc of my correspondence, and when you receive these superfluous lines, the die will have been cast in Midlothian. For I fancy that the enemy's only hope now is that Mr. Gladstone will not be able to address his audience.
Lord Granville has kept me up to the mark as to important matters, and announced the manifesto1 in very warm terms; but his abrupt style of composition is not favourable to the more delicate shades of party division. One makes out, from afar, that Chamberlain is going off from the X. P.M.2 while Goschen is elaborately advancing towards him; also that he, in fact, agrees better with Chamberlain, whilst the policy of the moment draws him to Goschen.
Our Joe ought to know how to bide his time. I suppose he thinks that something must be offered to the new voters that they care for. I imagine that the Church question forms a very real cause of division. Mr. Gladstone's authority will be able to keep it down for the time, and no more.
Let us hope for an utterly overwhelming victory, in spite of some perceptible progress on the part of the Tories. Through a friend I have explained to Bismarck that he must be prepared for this, if only the voice holds. Tories here tell me that they have no real hope. Selborne's name being on the Grey manifesto, I conclude that he will not be Chancellor. It will be possible to strengthen the new Government immensely with new men, but I am afraid a certain friend of ours will claim the Woolsack. The Eastern question makes me very impatient to see Mr. Gladstone in Downing Street again.
If Morier only came to luncheon, you hardly can have seen the change in him. He is a strong man, resolute, ready, well-informed and with some amount of real resource. But a dexterous Muscovite will always be able to provide an opportunity of putting him in the wrong and getting up an ugly fracas. Arnold Morley is new to me; I gather from what you say that Russell1 is sure of his seat I was disturbed to find the Duke so hard on him, and so little support on the more amiable side of the family.
I quite agree with Chamberlain, that there is latent Socialism in the Gladstonian philosophy. What makes me uncomfortable is his inattention to the change which is going on in those things. I do not mean in European opinion, but in the strict domain of science. A certain conversation that you remember, when Stuart, fresh from the horny hands of Democracy2 produced his heresies, was very memorable to me. But it is not the popular movement, but the travelling of the minds of men who sit in the seat of Adam Smith that is really serious and worthy of all attention. Maine tells me that his book, a Manual of unacknowledged Conservatism, is selling well. It is no doubt meant to help the enemy's cause, and more hostile to us than the author cares to appear. For he requested me not to review it. You know that the new Hatzfeldt is the son of the lady who protected Lassalle, and that it is desirable to speak of his wife as little as of his mother. He is a Berlin bureaucrat, pur sang. I have something to write against time, which keeps me at work during the night until the end of November.
Fancy my disappointment: Paget1 passed under our windows, and Liddon—as he told the World—was at Tegernsee, and I missed them both. The Pagets have set up a delightful daughter-in-law, and a near relation of hers, a Balliol man, son, I believe, of the chief Tory wire-puller in Shropshire, has just come out here. …
La Madeleine, November 28, 1885.
It was a serious blow to find in your letter that you had no confidence in the election,2 but I am glad now to think that you were so much better prepared to lose than I was, in spite of what I had also heard about Bright's despondency. I only hope that it has not been a bad time, otherwise, at Dalmeny, and that Mr. Gladstone has not suffered from so much effort.
At this moment I know only the result of the first three days, and have no Scottish news since Goschen got in. I conclude that we are beaten past recovery, and wonder whether the Dark Horse3 will make the Government independent of their Irish supporters. If not, the rift in the lute will betray itself any time after the first Session.
As I am the only Englishman still so besotted as to feel Salisbury's presence in Downing Street exactly as I should feel Bradlaugh's at Lambeth, I will say nothing about my own sensations to a correspondent necessarily unsympathetic. What strikes me most strongly is the probability of Mr. Gladstone thinking that his release has come, and that he is not bound to embark on a voyage which is very unlikely to lead back to power until he is in his seventy-eighth year. For I suppose that the secret of the situation is that Chamberlain has so far played false, played, I mean, a private game, that he looked far ahead, and did not care to come back to office in the old combination, especially with the prospect of losing Dilke at first So that, in fact, the Gladstonian influence, which would be unshaken in the country at large, was unable to control his own colleagues, and the old inferiority in the management of men, compared with the management of masses, which Goschen exemplified before, has appeared in the direction of the Radical wing.
As I know his characteristic of caring for measures much more than for the organisation which is to carry them, I conjecture he will say that he is not harnessed for ever to the coach, that he will be grievously tempted to give up leading an active opposition. Of course I should deeply deplore such a decision, but my old arguments, which circumstances did so much to impress, will be weaker now.
Three legitimate causes have told in favour of the Tories. They have not done much to make them odious, and the position abroad is easier, very decidedly, though not very considerably, easier. Then, the case against us in the Soudan is a very strong one. I may say so now that Mr. Gladstone does not really resist it; and you, at any rate, know how strongly I thought so before. That is not a positive recommendation of the Tories, but it does weaken us, and the reproach is not met, in the judgment of impartial men, by saying that the Tories did nothing to restrain or to correct us. Thirdly, the Church argument is logically against us. Mr. Gladstone's attitude gave no security that the Liberals, if they returned strengthened from the poll, would not eventually employ their increased strength to pave the way for disestablishment.
What you say of a flaw in his reckoning is very true indeed. In his literary occupations it appears still more strongly. The grasp is often more remarkable than the horizon. I do not think that it has been much of a drawback in politics, and the minds it would estrange are very few.
You would have written a capital review of Greville.1 It is very odd that a man should be so shrewd, and so full of experience, and yet so destitute of positive ideas. I see that I thought too much of him, having known him before I knew the difference between common sense and capacity. My friend Maine certainly did not fear that I should spoil his effects, for I should never have found a point of contact with the views of the general reader. I don't think he likes to admit that one can have gone over the same ground, and have come impartially to opposite conclusions. His book is a symptom of the change which is so remarkable in the Times.
Cannes, January 1, 1886.
It would have been a very great pleasure to be at Hawarden during these festive days; and only very strong local ties oblige me to say that it is impossible. There has never been a time when I was more anxious to learn what is really going on, and to see things from the centre, and it is therefore a disappointment to be away. But there is nothing that I could say or do that would contribute an element to the momentous decisions to be formed. That Mr. Gladstone will, in this great and perhaps final crisis, put himself into the position of Irishmen and view things not only from the point of their present wishes, but with their historic eyes, and that he will hold that the ends of liberty are the true ends of politics, that is the one thing certain and known to all men, and it is the whole of the political baggage with which I set out on the Irish expedition.
I know neither how to resist the claim of the Irish nation to govern themselves nor even their claim to possess the land, and nobody really familiar with the events of this century can say that the one is beyond the resources of political, or the other, of economic science. They are problems which have been solved repeatedly within the experience of two generations. Many experiments have been made, and it is not difficult to determine which solutions have failed, which have succeeded, and to tell the reason why.
I have thought so for twenty years, and now that the question has become perforce a practical one, nobody can be more heartily than I am on the side which I understand to be Mr. Gladstone's, or, to speak definitely, on the Irish side. The claim of duty exactly coincides with the claim of necessity, and that is all about it that one can say from a distance, without having seen what is on paper, or felt pulses all round.
Duty and necessity settle the question, but not as to policy in detail, which I have no right to talk about without hearing more what is said by people on the spot. Only let me say that I would not be influenced by hope of a very brilliant success, even if it is possible to do what would satisfy the better part of the Irish party. The people are so demoralised, both laity and clergy, that we must be prepared to see the best scheme fail. No Irish failure is so bad as the breakdown of parliamentary government, so that even from a sordid point of view that is not insuperable. But I would arm myself against disappointment. There is another point of view from which I see much to apprehend and prepare for. The elections send back Mr. Gladstone to Westminster, and even to Downing Street, with some loss of influence. I see it not only in the reduced majority, but still more in the increase of Conservative minorities at the poll, the infidelity of most important colleagues, and the reluctance with which he will be followed by members under pressure from their constituencies.
We saw the centrifugal forces at work last Session in the Ministry itself. Mr. Gladstone only retained office after the Egyptian vote by the neutrality of Rosebery, and in the question of concession to Parnell he had to yield to the Lords in the Cabinet.
How can they stand by him now, to support measures much more formidable, probably, than that which they rejected last spring? And could not Salisbury dexterously put the question in such a way that their vote then given should disable them altogether?
One sees the danger that Mr. Gladstone would be almost isolated among his friends, even if there is a majority in the House, and I can imagine no way of getting any considerable scheme through the Lords. I wish you would tell me that all this has been provided for, and that very careful negotiations have been carried on. Taking the question grossly, in outline, I can only say that I hope fervently that he will have strength to accomplish the only scheme of policy I can think worthy of his fame.
It seems obvious that, in the mass of letters that afflict your postman, there have been plenty of communications from good men of all sorts in Ireland. I speak of that from a slight, a remote, fear that the study of details, of conflicting and undigested suggestions, may have become distasteful to him. Writing to Lord Granville the other day in answer to a question, I proposed that his former private secretary, Wetherell, should make a tour in Ireland, as he has a very large acquaintance among people who do not clamour in the street. He would bring valuable information to bear. But I hope that there is no lack of information or of advisers.
One has to think of people in the background just because they are the minority. That may justify me in sending you the enclosed letter from a man who had, I think, a good deal of Spencer's confidence and good-will. I would not send it if I thought it could discourage, but Mr. Gladstone has faced heavier artillery every day since Christmas. Happy New Year never meant so much as to-day! …
P.S.—A frightened and discontented voice says, by this day's post, “If there is a vote of censure we must join in it and take the consequences of a majority, for we have no other mandate from our constituents but to bring back Gladstone, and if we abstained from voting we should lose our seats.”
Cannes, March 31, 1886.
If a Paris friend of mine forwarded anonymously a poor and hasty copy1 of one of the best Hundred Books in the World, please set it down to me and to my recollection of many conversations on that sore subject. Sore, because of the irrepressible Pall Mall Bore, whom I wish back in his dungeon. His present offence, against which no legislation provides, is that he pursues me with letters and telegrams for permission to publish what he must have obtained from you, which, to say the truth, has no more to do with Lubbock than a red herring with a hare.
Herbert sent me such a good and hopeful letter that I felt almost ready to hope. But the real fact has never been so apparent that all our hopes centre in the resource and influence of the Prime Minister.
Many things make me ready to give credit to what is reported about Chamberlain, announcing new difficulties to come.
Herbert is so good-natured and longanimous that he keeps me up in the proceedings, so that I have understood pretty well. I am not yet sanguine. The defection of friends strengthens the enemy's argument, and that is already strong for any one who is not sound in the Liberal doctrine, a thing beyond the Liberal policy. The concentration of everything in your father's hands is appalling, because one cannot see what the future is to be like. His old weakness—the want of an heir—is very serious now.
In answer to your question, I did not think very well of the new Government, and I like it less now. Trevelyan's position seemed conceivable, from the elasticity of Home Rule, and the existence of alternative plans. I very seriously regret his resignation. I fancied he possessed the general, outside, knowledge of politics needful at this moment, apart from the local expedients. Few have that sort of information to which no problem appears new. Lefevre, who makes up for the want of it by much recent study, is a loss. So, I think, is Courtney. And Bryce is not enough to the front in this matter. So that John Morley's importance is excessive.
Rome, April 14, 1886.
But I should not know how to prophesy any very smooth things in private, I don't mean about endurance in Downing Street, but about final pacification. Let me only add that the Purchase plan and the exclusion of the Irish from Westminster, which Chamberlain rejects, seem to me excellent parts of the scheme.
What afflicts us now is a thing I have long preached about, the want of real cohesion and understanding with his colleagues. One always saw the time coming when each of them would fall away, being attached to the surface, not to the core of his policy. So that if I go on croaking, it is to an old tune.
We are off to-night, after ten profitable days at Rome, during which my son has begun to see the world. I think the only man who has any appreciation of Mr. Gladstone's policy is Minghetti. There is an interesting crisis here, and the process of reconciliation with Germany makes the moment doubly and trebly important. I look forward to three or four weeks at Cannes, and expect to find the conflict still raging when I come home.
June 18, 1886.
I have just returned from Holmbury. Your father was well, and enjoyed the repose and the company; and his spirits were only too good. I do not mean that it is a mistake or a weakness to be sanguine; but I must tell you that he is too willing to take facts in a favourable light, and a little slow to accept what is adverse to the cause. I had several opportunities of observing this during our walks and drives.
The fact is, we are not very hopeful. But the others are just as uncertain. Last night I had a long and confidential conversation with Goschen, and he declares that they have no idea how things will go. Maine, fresh from Hatfield, said the same thing.
I was a little apprehensive about his voice that morning; but he nursed it on the way, reading the letters of Disraeli, and he seems to be quite himself on the Great North Road.
I rushed off to Cambridge, in time to be your sister's neighbour at a dinner party in honour of my old friend Sir William White. I was a little disturbed at the decisive rapidity with which she refused the Hollo way College, as she might have had a grand opportunity as the real foundress, the Romulus and Alfred of the institution. But she had no doubts.
I have seen a little of Herbert, who is visibly ripening, and a very little of Stephen and his wife, before they started for foreign travel. One is a little afraid that the isolation from old friends, which only adds vigour to your father's intrepid spirit, is telling on your mother. I hope Scotland will set this right. Maine, who is really an avowed Tory, was immensely gratified at being asked to succeed May,1 just after writing a stout volume against the Gladstonian policy.
Here and at King's I have been seeing Holmes, who is reaping a harvest he never sowed, and was very well received by the insolent youths in the Senate House yesterday.
72 Princes' Gate, August 6, 1887.
I hope I did not say too much against your friend and possible comforter, Carlyle. Lamartine is certainly much more inaccurate; yet Pontécoulant, who died under the Second Empire, and whom Charlotte Corday chose as her defender, said that the Girondins were substantially a true picture, and made his nerves tingle much as they did in 1792.
There is a good deal of that general reality which comes from vigour of thought and vivid expression in Carlyle, and he is good for reading aloud and discussing loudly. But he wrote before the materials existed. The first serious history was written by Droz, a year or two later, who had the then unpublished memoirs of Malouet, and so made a good book, obsolete since the printing of Malouet Probably Carlyle, in later editions, took hints from him. But it is surprising how few of the books we now rely on existed in 1838.
Michelet in 1847 first examined the papers of the Commune; Sybel, in 1853, first saw those of the Foreign Office; Mortimer Ternaux, those of the Home Office.
Only after all that, things began to be seen in their concatenation, we still are ignorant of the most essential things.
Therefore, I beseech you, read Carlyle without too much reliance. He is suggestive, and even impressive; but it is only en grand, telescopically, that he is true: after Sybel, Tocqueville, Taine, and Quinet there is little that will stand scrutiny in his pages. One goes to him for literature, not for history. Nevertheless, I have given him to my children because he sets the brain on fire and is open to discussion.
Bournemouth, October 8, 1887.
A mild attempt to attract your father to Cannes for the early winter failed conspicuously. I had dreamt of raising all the problems of his career and getting him to pass everything in vivid review.
Perhaps the Granvilles would have come too. I see that, in pursuing the topic of Mrs. Craven's publication, the scheme of setting his papers in order has been divulged.
We had rather a good time at the Wolvertons'. As you will hear all about it from two witnesses on Monday, let me prepare you with impartial observation. Foreseeing that Wolverton would try to burn other ships besides his own, I could not help advising Lord Granville not to attend the meeting at Templecombe; but as that reason could not be stated I suppose it remained unguessed, and left room for conjecture. Wolverton was a good deal wilder than anybody could have foreseen, and enjoyed himself thoroughly. I had a most welcome opportunity of getting the measure of John Morley. He did not speak in a way to carry away his audience. P. Mahony said that it is nonsense to apprehend anything for the Irish Protestants. His wife and little children were in Kerry, alone among Irish Catholics, miles from any Protestant neighbour; yet he was in Dorset, not at all uneasy, etc. John Morley thought this rather a fine stroke, as if the conduct of the majority on the morrow was prefigured by their conduct on the eve.
I found a wider rift He sees nothing in politics but higher expediency and no large principles. As there are, for him, no rights of God, there are no rights of man—the consequence, on earth, of obligation in Heaven. Therefore he never tries to adjust his view to many conditions and times and circumstances, but approaches each with a mind uncommitted to doctrines and untrammelled by analogies. It is useless to speak to him of the application of democracy to land in Ireland as part of a process going through many countries, or of Home Rule as a question tried in a long series of instances (seven or eight at least), under the pressure of one far-reaching force.
The consequence of this propensity of mind is that he draws his conclusions from much too narrow an induction; and that his very wide culture—wide at least for a man to whom all the problems, the ideas, the literature of religion are indifferent and unknown—does not go to the making of his policy.
These are large drawbacks, leaving, nevertheless, a mind of singular elasticity, veracity, and power, capable of all but the highest things. He seems to me to judge men dispassionately. He has by no means lost his old admiration for Chamberlain, but it is balanced by a rising reliance on Harcourt's ability and resource. He cleaves to Spencer, and is but little drawn towards Trevelyan or Bryce or Rosebery. He has strong underground links with Courtney. I very much hope you will make much of him at Hawarden.
October 16, 1887.
I received your letter during a visit with Mamy at Holmbury, where I had the room in which you heard Argyll discoursing to himself. They were expecting S. Rendel to bring Morley to dinner.
The great bulk of cultured men in our day do not believe that politics are a branch of Moral Science. They think that politics teach what is likely to do good or harm, not what is right and wrong, innocent or sinful. If I say: “I owe this man half-a-crown. He is sure to get drunk on it; shall I pay him?” They will answer—Certainly; you must do your duty, in private life, and wherever the plain rules of morality or the applicable laws extend, regardless of consequences. But they would not admit a like obligation in politics. America cannot be taxed because it is not represented. Civil disabilities for religion must be abolished. Slavery must be put down. The tyranny of Indian princes must be repressed, etc., etc., etc. Such propositions they would deny absolutely. They would say: “It is highly desirable—not obligatory. We must consider consequences, balance probabilities, estimate forces, choose the lesser evil. Until it can be shown that oppression, repression, suppression, damage the interests of the State, there is no good reason to interfere with them. If the State would be greater, stronger, richer, by keeping down part of its subjects, by denying education, by restraining labour, by working children to death in factories, by wars for prestige, etc., etc., etc., then those things are lawful by the only test known to politics. You must keep your promises and pay the public debt, because the law of common morality goes as far as that. But the law of common morality is silent as to questions that exist only in a political shape. Those can only be treated experimentally, by the Baconian methods. There is no code of political morality distinct from or beyond the limits of private. There is no such thing as political science; men do not lose their souls by political, as they do by domestic, error. Whoever does not see this is a doctrinaire, a fanatic, an unfit survival from the dogmatising and abstract epoch, before the reign of Induction.”
Thus Maine, Stephen, Dilke, all men who live in diplomacy, all men concerned with India, all men belonging to the Services. Above all, this is part of the teaching of Burke, and from him Morley has adopted it.
Newman and Keble are the two types. When Newman moaned and murmured at the Disestablishment1 policy, Keble said, “But isn't it just?” Newman must have thought that the good man was getting a little weak. At Christmas 1885, when Bryce came to Cannes and talked about Home Rule, I said, “Remember, it will break up the Liberal Party.” I could not have said such a thing to Morley, or Newman, or Maine. They would have replied, “You cannot be sure that this policy will succeed in Ireland; you are persuaded that it will grievously injure political life in England. What else have you to go upon?” Bosworth Smith spoke to me in almost these very terms, and evidently felt that he had said what could not be answered.
But this negation of a science of political ethics, this repudiation of political principle, does not depend on men's attitude to religion. Political Economy and Criminal Law were the first branches of practical politics that assumed a scientific form. The founders of the former, Hume, Quesnay, Smith, Turgot, were all unbelievers. So were the reformers of Criminal Law, Beccaria, Morellet, Bentham. Jefferson, who wrote the American Rights of Man, Lafayette and Sieyes, who composed the French, were all alike unbelievers.
There is a very strong tendency to substitute for a religious system another system of obligations, equally determined and absolute, but not at all religious. Especially nowadays when unbelief in the shape of doubt is yielding to unbelief in the shape of certain conviction.
And in these things the influence of religion is by no means certain. It has often been opposed to the theory of the divine right of man. As the history of persecution, of slavery, shows, quite naturally. The New Testament, which deals so largely with private morality, deals very little with public, and introduced only one political idea beyond the Hellenic horizon. If, therefore, we admit the authority of a binding system, independent of religion, we raise up a rival power, in morals as in science. Our conduct becomes subject to a law which is not that of the Church, which may deviate from it, and which, at certain points, inevitably collides with it. We live under a divided reign. Christianity becomes an influence instead of an authority, a prop, but not a sufficient guide. The surrender of one bit of its domain to the mathematicians, of another to the economists, of a third to the politicians, may be followed by further encroachment from biologists, evolutionists, and Monistic philosophers.
That is the line of reasoning which makes religious belief a weak security for political principle, unless the faith of men is thoroughly sincere, and even men thoroughly sincere may object that they know not which political theory or which system of the Rights of Man is so surely the right one that, where it commands, they must prefer it to their religion. No consensus, no Vincentian Rule, exists that can decide this question.
Therefore, although I fully admit that political Rights proceed directly from religious duties, and hold this to be the true basis of Liberalism, I do not mean to say that there is no other foundation for a system of right for men who know of no relations between man and God. Indeed I gathered that Burke and Austin had deleteriously influenced Morley in this respect, and that he easily submitted to their influence, having no conception of certain rights that are divine.
Let me add, as I am disparaging Burke, that he is not consistent, and there is another strain in his web. But if he had not taken the lower level in the American question, he would have been forced into an attitude on Irish questions, and perhaps on parliamentary reform, which would have isolated him and alienated his friends, who were also his patrons, in the British aristocracy.
This is why I thought Mahony wrong. No doubt, some people would say, there is no security for Protestants among Catholics. These are essentially fanatical, etc. To such people the answer is sufficient But then such people are not serious, and the argument was open to a decisive reply.
One must never suppose one's adversary foolish, but must meet his argument in its strongest form. The strongest form in this case, the real objection, is this. The Irish detest the Protestants, as represented by people like Cairns. They will be under the influence of priests who think that every Protestant deserves the death of a dog, and are restrained from inflicting it by a wide consideration of consequences, not by conscience. It is not safe to commit a Protestant minority to such keeping. They will try to boycott them in detail, to take away their institutions, to injure them in education, in appointments, socially, etc., etc. This peril ought to be provided against. No such provision is made by the Liberals, because they deny the danger. Therefore it is wiser not to expose the minority to it. What we apprehend is not an explosion of violence, but a subtle, crafty, gradual, slowly working sap. Nothing of the sort is to be feared at a moment when Scotch and English opinion has to be won over, while they depend on the support of British Protestants. Least of all is it to be feared by a Protestant who is one of their champions. For that would deprive them of all Protestant support, and drive them from operation by craft to operation by violence. It would be an act of madness. Now nothing is more sure than that the Irish cause is managed with the greatest art and calculation.
Cannes, Nov. 2, 1887.
One's memory is both a fragile and a treacherous thing, and if the guardians of Keble's reputation doubt, I am sure I cannot substantiate my story. But my impression is that I read it in Sir J. Coleridge's Life of K. There Newman relates how he went to see his old friend, and found Pusey there; and either then, or at another interview, if there was another in the last year or two of Keble's life, the conversation must have taken place which, in my recollection, has probably taken a wrong shape.
Coleridge's book must be in the Chapel of Ease. When you have verified, please put me out of my pain. I hope it was clear that I spoke of Irish Disestablishment. The case in England might be or become a strong one; but that plain elementary quality of Justice it can never have in our time. The Northern Miner's speech is as fine as Keble's supposed one. But that is not one of those matters to which Justice applies entirely, excluding Policy. France was built up by the agency which we absurdly call the Salic Law.
There is a reason why you should not be surprised or disappointed at the touch of failure in men like the Dean of St. Paul's; but it is hard to expound without offence to the sister, wife, and cousin of so many Anglican divines.
It was very interesting to arrive at Sudbury just when the echoes of Nottingham and Derby were still sounding. The effect had been quite satisfactory, and was even more than Midland residents expected. There was a slight trace or flavour of a policy accepted by the speaker, rather than proceeding from him. I mean that sort of conference with wirepullers and understanding with local managers which does not always leave him quite at his ease. It belongs to the new system of limited leadership and partnership tenure of authority, of divided and intermittent action, which is having the effect of giving so much prominence to Harcourt, at a time when there is no peer who could possibly lead. And so it brings the thought of coming danger to my mind.
The attack of hoarseness was remarkable, because it was so rapidly overcome.
There was a curious incongruity in our group at Sudbury. The master of the house, bewildered at his prominence, but true to the accepted position, and otherwise free from the gnawing cares of thought. … A Bessarabian taking the opportunity to do a little Staffordshire politics. A sadly failing and discontented old Hellenist, in whom the world has lost, or overlooked, the raw material of a skilled intriguer. A high priest of Positivism, in go-to-meeting garb, very attentive to the local sermon, and only regretting that he was out of reach of the Oratory. Lastly, the second in command, hitting rather wide at the good name of Burke, and occasionally giving a good “contrapelo rub.” For myself, I was as happy as could be when your father was about, and vainly forbidden to speak; and at other times I was immersed in rare treatises on Dante, which I never saw elsewhere.
Cannes, Feb. 18, 1888.
Otherwise I was not going to festive scenes while Maine lay unburied. He had not been living at the Madeleine, but at the Hotel Montfleury close by, with Dick's tutor. There he was struck down, and after two days died without coming to himself. Next morning Lady Maine arrived, unprepared, and had to learn at the station that she came too late. She has borne it well. We have all combined to conceal from her that Maine's splendid mind was beginning to decay. There were moments when he terribly reminded me of Cardwell at the same place, eight years ago. At times he was nearly as good as ever, and quite happy about himself; only disinclined to study, and a Tory of the most ordinary and uninteresting type.
Fustel de Coulanges, who is to pronounce his éloge at the Institute, and who is here, very ill, tells me that he considers him the first historian of our epoch. I saw that most of the English here called him Sir Richard, and thought he was the retired chief of the police. When he did not come to us, Dick used to go and dine with him, and I think it was useful to him to hear so able a man even at second-best.
An early telegram of mine to Humphry Ward getting the benefit of Sunday, produced that remarkable notice in the Times by its least Tory contributor. I have advised that Maine's recent Lectures on International Law be carefully revised before publication. Even in the summer, when he was preparing them, I could not induce him to read books he was not familiar with.
July 2, 1888.
We had an extremely jolly time at Cambridge, and Rosebery stood very generously and manfully the touch of ridicule which attaches to guests of Oscar Browning. One observed your mother on the best of terms with triumphant Lady Salisbury. Once I had to take in Lady Sophia Palmer, with whom it turned out that I had a good deal in common. And at one of the dinners I had good entertainment between her father and Balfour, who poked up the astronomers near us, and compelled them to be interesting.
For myself, there was a touch of sadness, as Cambridge only knew me through Maine, and I missed him sadly. His son, too, died just then. I was a good deal struck with the want of softness and sympathy in the way men remember him.
At Oxford I spent some days in still more Tory company, living with Dicey, and fed at All Souls. I arranged with Warren for Dick to go to Magdalen, and everybody I consulted—Talbot, Liddon, Paget—decidedly approved my choice. I thought Jowett weaker than last year and more vague. Bright is such a good fellow and good Liberal, for the head of the Cecilian College;1 and you must read his new volume on England from 1735 to 1880. John Morley, after trying to get Mr. Gladstone to write the life of his cherished Elizabeth, in the “Statesmen” series, asked me to dinner, and I made acquaintance with his gracious wife. I tell him that his lecture on aphorisms is not worth much; and he says it is my fault for giving him bad suggestions. There is a Conservative inside him. We held discourse about Mr. Pitt, distressing to ears as sensitive as mine. I ended by telling him that I would have hanged Mr. Burke on the same gallows as Robespierre. Tableau.
Under the influence of the funeral minute-guns I put on paper what seemed good to say about the Emperor; but your father declined with thanks, and then advised the Contemporary to get me to write an article on him—declined ditto. His speech was extremely solemn and impressive.
St. Martin, August 15, 1888.
I am to review Bright's new History. He is such a good fellow—all round—and the only Liberal Head of a House, and likely to be Dick's only protection against the prevalent Conservatism of Oxford, that I want to do him honour. So much so, that another man having undertaken to do it, I have suffered Creighton to put him off for my sake.
Here is my difficulty:—
Bright says, page 444: “A letter1 in which four years previously he had declared the question of disestablishment in Ireland to lie beyond the field of practical politics was alleged in proof of his rapid change of front.”
I ought to know all about this letter, but I have forgotten it. And this is my fix.
When I first met you at Cliveden, he and I had a very memorable talk on this question. The result was, that I not only understood that he was going to disestablish, but that he was going along the path leading to where he stands now.
I have always kept that day, March 31, 1864, as the date of getting the future policy of Liberalism quite clear before me. Something of this I intended to testify in reviewing Bright.
But here is his description of that letter. I cannot make out its date, and I do not know its terms, and how far they were guarded.
No doubt all this came out later, in 1868, when he gave a sort of autobiography. But I am out of the way of all books. And so my question is: May I say that the change of front in 1867, 1868, was at least as old as March 1864—as a thing inevitable and foreseen, if not as a thing actually done?
And secondly: Is the refusal to form a ministry with Lord Lansdowne, after the Crimean War, still a secret?1
I remember a letter of Roundell Palmer's going back even farther than our meeting at the Duchess of Sutherland's, which Ronald Gower has commemorated, much to my honour and diversion.
Cannes, March 30, 1889.
From our conversations, too short and much interrupted, I was not quite prepared for the immediate attack on the government. But I suppose the Irish following grows impatient. We discussed two other matters of importance. He wrote a letter to the Prefect on leaving Naples, a very handsome letter, containing some words of warning, as became the author of the letter to Lord Aberdeen. And the Prefect asked his leave to publish it. I don't know whether it has appeared; but it would probably have led to larger things, and would have been followed up by a public disclosure of what appeared to him good and especially wise in the condition of Italy. I was rather anxious that nothing should be written, unless under valid compulsion. The Italian danger is financial, and that comes from political causes—the Roman question which is an element—I don't mean actually a producing cause—of enmity with France, and the German alliance, which induces excessive armaments. I thought it useless to discuss the surface effect without touching the deeper causes. And I thought it untimely to discuss the Roman question, and perilous to go into the European system of alliances, while we have our Egyptian log, threatening us with a French quarrel at any time; but especially at the general election next autumn. For a spirited policy in Egypt is the first card of any Pretender who may come to the front.
Indirectly I am afraid I appeared rather an obstacle to another plan of writing on biblical criticism; for I not only urged that there is a good deal to read up, but obtrusively furnished the necessary books. This is how I have come to shine in the light of an obstructive, of a too perpetual note of interrogation and a bore. I mention the humiliating particular, because it is a reason for not annoying him on another point of which I think very much, namely, the business of getting copies of his correspondence during so many years with so many people. It will not do to say that that can be done years hence, by those who will be his heirs and the guardians of his fame. As I have said this to somebody else, altho' a friend of yours, I think I ought to say it to you:—His life has been the fullest in the world, and it will take long, hereafter, to master all the materials in detail. Neither the party, nor the country, nor the world, will be willing to wait, years, for his Theodore Martin. If he never puts together his reminiscences, which he will not do, now, unless disabled by illness for other work, the right way of reproducing his mind and career would be a very carefully selected volume of Letters. That would be the best and immediate form of Testament And for its effect, it should be prepared and laid down in his time.
Mallock has been here, and visited me. Also the H. Wards, separately; she, eager to talk about the Times; he, scrupulously silent. She began a new novel while she was here.
Villa St. Patrick, Cannes, Dec. 7, 1890.
One's impression at a distance, trying to collect all information, is that there is a tendency at home to make too much of the catastrophe.1 But then I never believed in Parnell, until, as you most truly say, he stood in the last ditch and showed the strong man he is. At this moment, I don't know the result of the Conference, which seemed at first a mistake. But whatever it is, I take the collapse of Parnell for certain. The question is whether, after losing his present position, he will not be able to use his influence and talents in a dangerous way, at least playing into the hands of the Tories.
Of course I expect a dissolution. I cannot even say that it would be very wrong, in the present position of Liberalism. That will be an occasion for all the Statesmanship and all the eloquence of a Statesman and orator who has always risen with the difficulty of the occasion. I cannot quite agree in your praise of the Irish members. They must have known that the chance with English constituencies was gone, if Parnell remained. M'Carthy's action seems to incapacitate him for the leadership. And I am afraid that my candidate, Dillon, is too young and innocent.
I did not telegraph this time, not to let him lose confidence in himself,1 because I not only don't see that he has made a miscalculation; but Parnell's assault upon him has brought out his transparent integrity and sincerity as nothing else in the world could have done. I am so glad of all you tell me about him.
Could you tell me what you remember about this? In 1883 I begged him to see Scherer when he came to Paris. My recollection is that I since asked if there was anybody he cared to see, that he mentioned Scherer, saw him, and thought that he had not met a more intelligent man in France. Is my memory correct?
Villa St. Patrick, Jan. 7, 1891.
All things increase in gravity, in intensity, after eighty; and I see that the late events, with the momentary eclipse of the party for purposes of action, have made a profound impression.
It is just possible that we, out here, seeing things and hearing them from a distance, at intervals, and not in the constant dust and din, incline slightly to underrate the catastrophe. But at any rate, we are not despondent and not taken by surprise, and we see the back of the cloud.
I have remarked that Hampden is as hopeful as myself, and as fully satisfied that the right thing has been done. For myself, I am as hopeful as ever; and I never was more mathematically convinced that the line taken by your father was the best and highest If we are, for the moment, baffled and weakened, we should have been, just as much, if he had not done what he did; and the loss would have been permanent, without promise of recovery and without the redeeming dignity, the moral superiority, the splendid art with which he put in the front considerations not personal to himself.
Once or twice I have certainly thought, and to you perhaps have said, that he seemed to fail where Chatham or Bismarck would have imposed his will, by extreme deference, delicacy, consideration, and reliance upon others. What I love to observe at last is that there are no others, and that his resolutions are as much his own as his reasoning.
Indeed I don't authentically know what our friends have thought. Except Bryce, who, I fear, did not agree with me.
32 MAXIMILIAN STRASSE, MUNICH, Dec. 24, 1891.
As it was I who asked Mr. Hutton for his articles,1 which he politely sent me, being a stranger, I scarcely had a right to mix my thanks with censure. I said what there was to say in acknowledgment, I think with the necessary limitation if not with sufficient drawback. Something that was meant as a sort of warning may have been in a second letter which you did not see. Dick, who started your belongings from Charing Cross, told me that Hutton had shown your father what I wrote him; but I know not whether it all went by the underground communication between N.L.C. and Hawarden. He mentioned your disapproval without explanatory detail.
Did he tell you that Manning is so well pleased that he has invited him to write his Life too? I read enough of Rosebery to write about him to Morley. It is very well done indeed, for the general reader, and assuming the reader to be a Tory, ought to satisfy him. In London I found people open-mouthed against it, and I hope I induced one angry and aggressive critic to hold his avenging hand.
There is little fault for enemies to find in the way of fact. I think it was at Fontainebleau, not at Versailles, that Pitt was refused by Mdme. de Staël; Napoleon decided on the Austrian campaign before he knew that his fleet had retired to Cadiz; and it is wrong, in a political book, to call Luther an apostle of freedom, as he was an apostle of authority and divine right, and promoted freedom in the other, the spiritual sense.
As England was saved from invasion, not by the superiority of our admirals, but by treaties with Russia and Austria, which were the triumphs of the subsidising policy, it should have been pointed out in a life of Pitt.
There is a graver objection, not so easy to define. The book is, from end to end, a panegyric. Pitt appears to have been right all along his main lines of thought, if not of action. To admit this is to admit the essentials of the Conservative case, to yield almost all that we live and fight for, all that for the sake of which your father gave up power, and spent the six most precious years of his life in opposition, after breaking up his party. When this is written by Rosebery, and edited by Morley, one asks oneself for what sufficient reason, then, they are not Secretaries of State.
Whilst there is little criticism of Pitt's views of State policy, there is constant and repeated answer of his opponents, there is a caricature of the Whig creed, and a definite attack on the notion of political principle (by which I don't mean principle in politics). There is hardly a good word for Burke; Windham, figuring as a Whig, is a mediocrity; Grenville, after his conversion, is deliberately depreciated; and Fox is treated with injustice for the greater glory of Pitt His opposition to the War is treated as if it was worthless and factious, as he went on with it just the same, when in office. And yet Fox immediately opened negotiations, and underwent not a little humiliation in his quest of peace.
As I have not read all, I don't know what there is to counterbalance these things, and to correct the impression they naturally make.
My own quarrel with Rosebery is for spoiling my favourite story. I very well remember Macaulay telling me Pitt's last speech. He had it from Sturges Bourne, and was so much struck that he made him repeat the words. They were these: “England has saved herself by her own energy, and I hope that after having saved herself by her own energy, she will save Europe by her example.” Rosebery misses the resounding repetition which caught the ear of Macaulay. I suppose he takes it from his uncle,1 who also had it from Macaulay, but without the point. At the Congress of Vienna, when Pitt's proud hope had been fulfilled, the Regent struck a medal with this inscription: Seipsam virtute Europeam exemplo. It is the whole speech, in sublime concentration. The word virtute corresponds with energy better than with exertions.
Athenæum, June 22-23, 1892.
I write a line which, in the circumstances in which I find the country, can be only congratulation.
First, because your father's health and force are admirable. Argyll said to me just now that he is as formidable as ever; and Stead tells me that he was carried off his Nonconformist feet by the Clapham speech. How much I hope that he will not overwork himself at Edinburgh, and will escape the cold blast and sudden shower of the ancestral climate.
Every day since I arrived, last Friday, my impression as to immediate prospects has grown more favourable and sure; and I observe that calculations made by different and unconnected men, like Cook and Giffen, nearly agree, and lie between Schnadhorst's limits. The most modest estimate is the one which Herbert and Trevelyan allow to circulate. As even Balfour says that our defeat would be a misfortune for the country, it is clear what they are expecting.
I called just now in Berkeley Square, but Rosebery had not returned. One of my alarms—I have several—comes from his want of touch with the left wing, and their wish to have Kimberley in his place (at the F.O.). Here is Egypt coming on again, and Ribot not at all pleased at our accession. He told me, with evident satisfaction, that Waddington prophesied against us, and I find that that is his tone here, and that in spite of your father's attack on the Triple Alliance. It forebodes mischief, and mischief founded on ill-will and a wish to be arrogant and aggressive; for I find that the numerous small holders of Egyptians in France dread the consequences of evacuation.
My comfort is that Morley stands much nearer the chief than before Armitstead—to whom I vote a statue.
I find my friend Lefevre eager to discredit Rosebery as an authority on diplomatic history; and I must admit that his book seemed to me suspicious and unsound. The Irish Bar, rather uneasy lest, after they have been six years out in the cold, Russell should be made their Chancellor. But I learn on the best authority that Coleridge is ready to make way, at your father's wish. I was glad to find Justice Mathew content with the Belfast language and with the results of a recent visit to Ireland, and he says that whereas he was the only Home Ruler on the Bench, there are now 2 1/2, if not 3.
It is provoking to find that a great friend of yours, and of mine, who is exceedingly intelligent in politics, and not unfaithful to the cause, has so little hold on the party. But one detects envy a little way below the surface of most people if one scratches long enough.
July 31, 1892.
It was immensely kind to let me see the graphic record of those grim days at Dalmeny. I did not see everything so clearly, and they certainly knew how to disguise what they went through even from the familiar eye of friendship.
Athenæum, Wednesday, March 29, 1893.
You do not overestimate our present prosperity; opposition makes no way with its attacks, and the party is admirably consolidated. The Conference on Monday showed it. Mr. G. imposed the supremacy of the Home Rule Bill upon them all, and there was no note of discord, although so many of them dislike the policy, and regret their own measures, offered in sacrifice.
The strangest note was the Repentance of Labouchere, who was made to speak as one of the ministerial group, and went beyond them all in submission and eager loyalty. Next to that, the hearty and universal acceptance of Harcourt, who has made progress, as occasional leader, and stands better than in any former Parliament.
Mr. Gladstone's final declaration, of devotion to the cause and to his friends, puts all notion of anything like an early retirement out of sight.
There is a want of vigour in the management of his colleagues, and a tendency to postpone things. But he never showed such mastery in public, such authority, such severity and ease, and he is best in moments of trouble.
The last two days have been an extraordinary triumph. The Secretaries were much impressed at his dealing with the Deputations. It was, perhaps, a drawn battle. I am to dine there this evening, and take leave before they start for the maritime realm of Armitstead.
Morley has stood fire well, but scarcely makes way. Accounts from Ireland depress him, and he is prepared for broken heads. And then a disturbing question arises: If we see no prospect of the Bill becoming law, and are only striving to redeem our pledges, it is hard to let men risk their lives for what, in the opinion of many, is only a phantom. In a couple of months I am afraid that this dim feeling will begin to tell, and will relax our efforts, and repress our spirit.
Your argument is perfectly just. The imprudence of this Ulster policy is great. But it may serve a purpose, and help the Lords to reject the Bill.
I dined on Monday next to Chamberlain, at Grillion's; and Welby was surprised how long I took to warm him up; but I succeeded at last.
We had an apparent loss of ground this evening, as the Evicted Tenants Bill did not pass the Second Reading. But the Government only accepted it with such reservations that it is no defeat for us.
The Athenæum, Pall Mall, S.W., Monday, Sept. 4, 1893.
Stress of politics keeps me in town this week; and on Saturday I go with Asquith to the Humphry Wards, on my way north.
The Life of Burton is dreadfully ill-constructed, and I believe the hero to have been a great rogue, so that I am a little impatient of so much admiration and so much exclamation. I knew her a little, during the visit to Cannes which she commemorates.
Feb. 3, 1894.
Knowing how easily he is bored, I don't suppose you will have read my long letter to him. These things are certain: that a mistake would be irreparable; that the consequences of his intended action1 would fall heavily on colleagues who have been faithful to him; that it will ruin permanently, as far as we can see, the cause to which he has devoted his later years in parliament, and for which he has extended them; and that every one of his best friends is against him—reasons for a Christian to distrust himself.
The Athenæum, March 12, 1894.
I am anxious to report what will be a satisfaction to your father, that, cold, perfunctory, artificial as the tone of proceedings was at the F.O., in the evening Rosebery made a speech in reply to Salisbury, so serious, so strong, so convinced, and so victorious and confident as to alter his position and raise him to a higher level in the country and in Ireland. Everybody I saw was deeply impressed.
It was a come down afterwards to hear Harcourt, although he spoke well too. Salisbury spoke of your father, as it seemed to me, with exact and perfect justice. In the Commons I found them all émus at Balfour's tribute, which I failed to hear.
8 Briennerstrasse, Munich, December 23, 1896.
The Speaker was very good-natured and friendly, even thinking too well of modern English writers. He missed the point, that my notion of history is as of a thing the same for all men, not open to treatment from special and exclusive standpoints.
I am sorry that Morley will not write either of the Gladstonian chapters.1 Luckily his book on Home Rule is coming out, and will tell (most of) what he knows, and we shall go on painting on his canvas with such material as we possess.
Bryce, I think, would be my next choice, Trevelyan being out of it. Sixty historians have already promised assistance, and I have not got through half my list, or received answers from America.
This is to be a whole choir of Madonnas.2
Briennerstrasse, Munich, April 7, 1897.
When you are settled, and at leisure, if at all, I shall be anxious to obtain your advice, on a subject which does not interest you, but which I cannot suppress as perfectly as I should wish. For the next few years I have to lecture on all Modern History, and I presume a rather big book will be the result, besides the other, bigger, book that I am expected to inspire and direct. Both of them raise the question of the Gladstonian era.
I have asked John Morley to write Home Rule, which will be the last chapter of English History, from 1880 to the end. He declines, for the sufficient reason that he is bringing out a book of his own on the subject. For other, less convincing, reasons, Rosebery and Trevelyan are not to be obtained.
As I am trying, as far as possible, to obtain new matter, and highest authority, I do not wish to leave this department to be filled up by the aid of Morley's book, of the new MacCarthy, and the like.
But I cannot undertake it myself, without your father's sanction, or without the assistance of such papers as he might care to let me see, for the years 1880 to 1894.
And I do not think it would be right for me to ask for his sanction, or for permission to consult any portion of the Hawarden archives. It would be asking for too much, and taking an unfair advantage of his overwhelming kindness.
Therefore I want you to advise, and tell me what he would like best to be done, if you know. I should not be afraid to ask Lady Granville for your father's letters in her possession, but I can only do that if he authorises me. She would be quite right to refuse.
The Prince promises that I shall see the Windsor papers, but I know not when. As the offer comes from him, I can take no active step in the matter.
The volume of the Cambridge History will not be out for a number of years, but I intend that my lectures shall be published when I have delivered them two or three times.
Munich, April 14, 1897.
I am infinitely grateful to you. And please thank your father for me.
For I take this to be contained or implied in your letter.
First, that he does not disapprove of this eventful history being in my hands, as Morley, Trevelyan, and Rosebery are barred; and does not propose any other alternative.
Next, that he considers the daily letters to the Queen which the Prince has offered me as the central authority on the subject.
And lastly, that he will allow me to consult him about it, and will consider what further material he will let me use.
With the corollary, that I may come to Hawarden and discuss the matter at headquarters.
Of course, the essential thing for me now is to be sure that I shall write with your father's assent, and upon consultation with him.
If what I said just now about Morley and the two others suggests to you that I offered Home Rule to all three, I must correct the looseness of my language. Morley declined it because of his forthcoming book. I did not propose it to the others, who refused to write for me at all.
Athenæum, May 19, 1897.
If you can help me, and if you do rather care that that final chapter should be written by a devoted and grateful friend, I shall' succeed in doing it. But if he has a misgiving, I can find some fit man, who will be fitter than I, to write without confidential matter—beyond what, of course, I possess already. Morley's narrative, I think, is to appear soon.
I am sorry to say that Lord Peel will not do his father's last Ministry, and I hesitate to ask his son George, whose article in the National Biography is good, but not founded on esoteric information.
Morley gives the Romanes, this day fortnight, on Machiavelli; and if my colleagues will let me off a day's examinations, I hope to get across. On Friday next I hasten back, to get a beating on the Rights of Women.
I saw Margot at dinner yesterday, much to her advantage. But can you imagine a party made up of Asquiths, Bryces, Reays, Peel, Lyall, and Kimberley not being very pleasant?
Tegernsee, August 13, 1898.
The veiled passage was the answer to a definite question, so that Herbert is responsible for what seems an allusion. His letter did not authorise me to raise the question of the biographer, and I did not specially mean Morley, though he was obvious in the line of vision.
As your letter does authorise the discussion it cannot now be presumptuous to say exactly what occurs to me, and to many of your friends.
Several very capable men are, I think, excluded by the conditions of the contract—the important contract—to be made, with English and American houses.
Its success will depend largely on three things: the completeness with which the family undertakes to supply the materials; the date when the book is to appear; and the name of the writer.
More will be offered if he is well known, especially in the United States. Godley, George Russell, MacColl, would do very well, but for this; and for the further reason, that Godley is a permanent official, and that MacColl, surely, is predestined for another function1 than the one I am speaking of.
Two other names suggest themselves legitimately, that must, for valid reasons, be put aside. Courtney is unfitted for work, besides being an adversary, though the least adverse of adversaries, in the one thing that gives unity to your father's career. Walpole, sound and thorough as he is, has neither enough power nor enough depth, and is probably disqualified by his office.
Three men remain, any one of whom would, in my opinion, do the work admirably, and against whom I see no preliminary objection.
Morley is the one who knew him best, and had most of his confidence, both as to men and things. He would set up many obstacles, including that of revealing Cabinet secrets. The answer to that is that he has already written, has already printed, a book on the history of Home Rule, in which he has got over that difficulty. It is true, he is keeping it back. But, for that, there may be motives which would not prevent his undertaking the much more splendid and historic work.
Trevelyan knew him much less intimately; but he lives for Parliamentary history, and has shown himself capable of writing a biography which is one of the best in the language—better than the Life of Cobden. Unlike Morley, he is out of public life, and has not got to weigh every word he says about Harcourt or Devonshire.
Bryce has, I think, greater knowledge of politics than anybody, and proved his power of appreciating your father by what he said at the time. He thinks that there ought to be no life since 1865. If it is settled against him, he would probably give way.
I am assuming that the documentary matter would be known to the writer, not displayed in the book; that the bulk of ecclesiastical things would be reserved; that the family would give not only the archives, but all the oral information in their power, including extracts from your own diaries; that all friends would help — Godley, Hamilton, Gurdon, West, Welby, Rendel, Talbot, etc. If the thing is put before him in this way it would be difficult for any one of the three to decline.
Birnam, Feb. 25, 1901.
In the long main gallery of the Museum [Madrid] you will see two striking pictures: Charles V., by Titian, on a horse, whose feet are too near the ground, and the surrender of Breda. The former has been reproduced, I think in Stirling's “Don Juan.” The other is wonderful. The very grumpy defender, angry at having to give up the keys of the fortress, and the charming figure of the victorious Spinola politely assuring him that he has done well—and then the contrast between the draggled Dutchmen and the serene and easy Spaniards, and in the distance the captured town. I forget who lately selected it as his favourite among all pictures. Perhaps the guide will point out Velasquez himself in the group. Then, in the room containing the treasures, a Cardinal of Raphael. In all, eight paintings by him, including one very fine Madonna. All the Raphaels have been terribly retouched.
Take note of the almost perfect, and most unattractive, portrait of Mary Tudor.
I did not see the Goyas upstairs. They are the summit of Spanish art towards 1800, and, I believe, horribly powerful.
With a little more time than I had you will see much more. There is not much in the way of fine churches. But there is the Palace, and an important collection of historic armour.
I hope the fair grandchild1 will enjoy it.
After S. Sebastian you pass near Loyola; and at the nek between Pyrenees and Cantabrigian mountains, you come down on Vittoria, and understand the battle, north of the town. You cross the Ebro at Miranda; and see at some distance from the line the grand Cathedral of Burgos. At Valladolid you turn to the south, and, after Avila, enter the dreary Guadarrama. One of the most striking scenes in Europe is the point where, still pretty high up, you emerge from the mountains, and see the plain of Castile before you, the Escurial to your left, Madrid forty miles away to your right, and, far beyond, the hazy mountains of Toledo. If you do not pass that spot by day, going, try to do it returning.
It is all rather bare; and in the Guadarrama below you to the right, it is pleasant to see a forest belonging to the Medinas.
We are expecting bad news of the Empress.1 When Seckendorff was here for the funeral at Frogmore, he told me that the end must be very near. You know how her attitude touched your father at the moment when he parted from the Queen.
The Government did what they could to turn the ceremonial to their advantage and the promotion of Imperialism. I fancy the King agrees, and it is one bond with his nephew.2 He takes his work seriously, and gives himself pains.
The country is going to pieces, as the old country gentlemen used to say; but it is what doctors call a beautiful case, coming out normally and regularly.
From time to time Morley makes an appointment to lunch or dine, and we go into points. He grows more and more eager and is working rapidly. His health seems to me better.
Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
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[1]Jules Ferry, see p. 6.
[1]Due de Broglie, statesman and historian (1821--1901).
[2]Dr. Dollinger,
[1]Sir Louis.
[2]Minghetti and Bonghi.
[3]On Mr. Gladstone.
[1]Mr. Gladstone was an unsuccessful candidate for South-West Lancashire in 1868. He was at the same time elected for Greenwich.
[2]The Reverend Mark Pattison, then Rector of Lincoln.
[1]The book on which Lord Acton was then at work, and for which he amassed vast hoards of material.
[2]The Expansion of England.
[1]For the expulsion of the Jesuits and other unauthorised congregations from French schools.
[1]History of Liberty.
[2]Thorold Rogers, sometime M.P. for Southwark, and Professor of Political Economy at Oxford.
[3]Herbert Gladstone.
[1]He stood for Middlesex.
[1]The late Duke of Devonshire, who lived till 1891.
[2]In 1866, Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe took opposite sides on the question of Parliamentary Reform.
[3]Mr. Lowe, on hearing one of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's speeches during the Middlesex election, declared that in the pure gift of eloquence, there was nothing to choose between him and his father.
[1]In Middlesex.
[1]The Passion Play at Ammergau.
[2]See p. 37, note 2.
[1]Referring to two letters sent him by his correspondent.
[1]Leaving cards.
[1]The Zulu.
[1]Lord Granville.
[2]An allusion to expeditions at Tegernsee.
[3]Small weekly evening parties in Downing Street.
[1]Sir John Strachey had seriously under-estimated the cost of the Afghan War.
[1]Mr. O'Donnell, an Irish member, moved the adjournment of the House for the purpose of attacking the new French Ambassador, M. Challemel Lacour Mr. Gladstone moved that he be not heard, and the debate on this motion occupied the whole sitting.
[1]House of Lords, not History of Liberty.
[1]That any member claiming the right to affirm instead of taking an oath should be allowed to do so, subject to any liability imposed on him by statute. Under this motion Mr. Bradlaugh took his seat provisionally for Northampton.
[1]Littleberries, rented by Lord Aberdeen.
[1]Trench.
[2]Herbert Spencer.
[3]M. Tachard.
[1]On the Compensation for Disturbance Bill, intended to protect the Irish tenants from eviction during the winter.
[2]The majority against the Bill was 230, of whom 51 were Liberals.
[1]Granville.
[2]Lowell.
[1]Non equidera invideo; miror magis.
[2]See p. 22, note 1.
[1]Lord Arthur Russell.
[1]History of Our Own Times.
[1]Shakespeare's Sonnets, pocket edition.
[2]Now Lady Battersea.
[1]Richard Simpson (1820--1876), author of an Introduction to the Philosophy of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1868), and The School of Shakespeare (1872).
[2]A letter from Mr. Gladstone on the choice of a profession.
[3]Mr. Ruskm.
[1]George Eliot lived in St. John's Wood.
[1]Agrarian Laws and Ecclesiastical Establishments.
[1]He stood by Ireland to the end, and his last letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe reaffirms the principles of his youth.
[2]“And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.”
[1]The editor of the Quarterly Review.
[1]Lord Beaconsfield's Endymion, in which Nigel Penruddocke is one of the characters.
[2]Lord Macaulay.
[3]George Otto Trevelyan.
[1]Life of Panizzi.
[2]“Julian the Apostate” By the Rev. the Hon. Arthur Lyttelton, afterwards Bishop of Southampton.
[3]Charles Stewart Parker, then M. P. for Perth.
[4]English Land and English Landlords. By the Honble. George Brodrick, late Warden of Merton.
[1]An allusion to Mr. Gladstone's speech on the Reform Bill of 1866.
[2]George Eliot's death.
[1]Arthur Lyttelton's. See his Modern Poets of Faith, Doubt and Paganism, and other Essays (Murray).
[1]This refers to the inscription Lord Acton inserted in Ruskin's Arrows of the Chace— “From a False Believer.”
[1]Speech on introducing the Peace Preservation Bill.
[1]Dublin Castle.
[2]George Eliot's husband.
[3]On the introduction of the new rules of Procedure after the expulsion of the Irish Members.
[1]The late Lord Stanley of Alderley.
[2]The Editor of the Edinburgh Review.
[3]Trevelyan
[1]The obstruction of the Peace Preservation Bill, which ended in the autocratic intervention of the Speaker, and the removal of the Irish Members from the House.
[2]Sir Arthur Godley, at that time private secretary to Mr. Gladstone.
[1]Sir Erskine May.
[2]The Jacobite description of the mole whose burrowings caused the death of William the Third by making his horse stumble.
[3]The Comte de Serre was a Minister under Louis XVIII., and a leader of the Moderate Royalists after the Restoration.
[1]Sir John Lubbock's.
[2]For closing debate
[3]At this period shadowing Mr. Gladstone's movements.
[1]Sir John Lubbock, in conversation with Miss Gladstone, complained of the lack of a guide or supreme authority in the choice of books. She suggested Lord Acton, and mentioned this talk in writing to him.
[2]Harold Browne
[3]Lightfoot.
[4]Sir James Paget, the great surgeon
[1]By Robert Wallace, afterwards M.P. for East Edinburgh. The definition, “trust in the people, tempered by prudence,” was laid down by Mr. Gladstone himself in a speech at Oxford in 1877.
[2]Of Liberty.
[1]On the Peace Preservation Bill.
[1]Mr. Brand, afterwards Lord Hampden.
[2]Carlyle's.
[1]John K. Ingram, Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and author of the article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[1]Mr. Gladstone fell on the ice as he entered the gardens of Downing Street, and cut open the back of his head.
[2]Sir Bartle Frere, then Governor of Cape Colony.
[1]Miss Dempster.
[2]Sermons in a College Chapel, by J. R. Illingworth.
[3]George Sand.
[1]Gladstone, Tennyson, and Paget.
[2]Leo XIII.
[3]Dublin Castle.
[4]Minghetti and Bonghi.
[1]To Mr. Gladstone.
[2]i.e. of Mr. Gladstone.
[3]Lord Acton said elsewhere of Lee “The greatest general the world has ever seen, with the possible exception of Napoleon.”
[1]Mr. Gladstone's.
[2]At Cannes.
[1]Scartazzini's.
[2]Illingworth's In a College Chapel.
[3]Of George Eliot.
[4]George Sand.
[5]Meaning the Irish Land Bill. The reference is to the agrarian laws of Tib, and C. Sempromus Gracchus.
[1]On Carlyle.
[1]Midhat Pacha was the head of the reforming party in Turkey at that time.
[2]Leo XIII.
[1]November 15, 1848. After the murder of Count Rossi, his Liberal Minister of the Interior, Plus IX. left Rome, and fled to Gaeta, from which he only returned under the protection of French bayonets.
[2]The introduction of the Irish Land Bill.
[3]The late Duke of Argyll's resignation.
[4]Lord Carlingford succeeded him.
[1]Mr. Gladstone's eleventh.
[2]To the Academy.
[1]See p. 36.
[1]The first Lord Cairns.
[2]“It is true, Holy Father, I have failed.”
[3]Lord Beaconsfield.
[4]The Sultan's.
[1]See Diary in Ruskin's Letters to M. and H. G. (privately printed).
[1]For burial in the Abbey.
[1]Lord Lansdowne's and Lord Listowel's.
[2]Judah Philip Benjarmn, Q.c., author of Benjamin on Sales. He left America after the defeat of the South, and attained great distinction at the English Bar.
[1]Mr. Gladstone did not arrive in time after the Easter recess to give notice of his own motion for a public memorial to Lord Beaconsfield, who died on the 19th of April 1881. The notice was given on Mr. Gladstone's behalf by Lord Richard Grosvenor, now Lord Stalbridge.
[1]Convicted at the Old Bailey for incitement to the murder of the German Emperor.
[1]Mr. Gladstone's.
[2]Of the Irish Land Bill.
[3]Mr. Gladstone predicted that, if the Conservatives defeated the Bill and came into office, they would themselves introduce not a smaller, but a larger measure.
[4]Sir John Skelton, K. C. B., author of Thalassa, Scottish disciple of Disraeli, a brilliant and scholarly writer.
[5]Canon Maccoll.
[1]His little daughter.
[1]W. H. Gladstone, M P.
[2]The late Duke of Argyll.
[3]Mr. Gladstone's retirement
[1]At Leeds.
[2]“Like some tall bully, lifts its head and lies.”
[1]The County Franchise Bill.
[2]King Edward VII.
[1]The Life of Cobden.
[2]The late Sir Charles Gavan Duffy.
[1]Mr. Gladstone's.
[1](Hawarden, 15th Nov. 1881.)—“Têete-à-tête breakfast. A long most interesting talk on the great vexed question of his retirement, started by his saying that he and Lord Granville had discussed it, Lord G. good-humouredly declaring it out of the question. I quoted to him Lord Acton's words, how it would be a serious flaw in his political career to damage and perhaps run the Liberal party, by retiring from the leadership while in full possession of health and strength. He said the same arguments had been used in Lord Palmerston's case—that it was said the power and cohesion of the party depended on one man's life; that history had proved in that case that this was not so; that in his own case he had retired in '74 for good, that his reassumption of office was accidental, conditional, and temporary; that it was undertaken for certain purposes foreshadowed in his Midlothian Speeches, that these purposes were all or nearly all accomplished; that if he did not retire after Ireland was settled, and House of Commons procedure readjusted, there was no moment in the future when it would be possible—that Lord Hartington1 was a man of unusual strength and ability, but that before becoming Prime Minister he required more training as House of Commons leader. (I objected that he might at any moment go to the House of Lords, which would immensely weaken his influence; and besides, who could then lead the House of Commons?) The future leader of H. of C. was a great puzzle and difficulty Sir Charles Dilke would probably be the man best fitted for it, he had shown much capacity for learning and unlearning, but he would require Cabinet training first, that as time brings nearer Lord Hartington's move into House of Lords, force was added to the argument in favour of his own retirement. That he did not foresee great difficulties ahead for the Liberal party; that the Conservative ditto had thrown away what should have been their strength —the return to the principles and policy of Sir R. Peel; that they were demoralised and degraded; that they had inherited the vices of Lord Beaconsfield without his tact and judgment (Lord B.'s climax was reached in his attack on Sir Robert Peel. What a magnificent virulence he had shown; what a power of cutting and piercing the man through a searching knowledge of his character); that this jingoism was perpetuated in them, and must eventually be their ruin. That of Forster, Harcourt, and Childers it was hard indeed to say which was best qualified for leading; that Forster would probably be the best, but that he had shown occasional incapacity; that Goschen had sadly injured himself by following up his errors as to franchise with an elaborate eulogium of weak-kneed Liberalism—(I quoted Lord A. again ‘that he might resign place, but could not resign power’). He demurred to this: for two years—1874 to 1876—he insisted he had had no influence on the Lib. party, that he should attend the H of C very rarely, and possibly begin by going abroad before the Session”
[1]The Goschens.
[2]The late Dr. Hatch's Lectures on the “Organisation of the Early Christian Churches.”
[1]The husband of George Eliot.
[2]A short Life of Newman, by Mr. Jennings.
[1]Mr. Goschen.
[1]Sir Erskine May.
[2]The Comte de Montlosier, a French emigrant, Royalist, historian, antiquary, feudalist, and Liberal Cathohc.
[3]Lord Monck, first Governor-General of Federated Canada.
[4]George Eliot.
[1]Sir George Errington.
[1]The vote of censure on the Lords for appointing a Committee to inquire into the operation of the Irish Land Act.
[1]His correspondent's name for his History of Liberty. It was of course taken from the title of Mr. Henry James's delightful novel.
[2]On the 2nd of March a lunatic named Martin fired at the Queen and Princess. Beatrice at Windsor Station.
[3]Bradlaugh's re-election.
[1]This refers to a conversation at Venice in October 1879.
[1]That Mr. Bradlaugh, having been re-elected for Northampton. should be allowed to take the oath and his seat.
[2]A protest by Cardinal Manning against the admission of Mr. Bradlaugh.
[3]A letter from Mr. Gladstone to his daughter.
[1]Union, fusion.
[2]James Harrington, 1611--1677. Toland edited his work on the Theory of the State, which was seized by Cromwell.
[1]1648.
[1]Situated in the depth of the Inferno.—Canto XVIII. hne I,
[1]The History of Liberty.
[2]The letter in question was sent to Mr. Shorthouse, and was answered in detail by him.
[3]“Ah, this thou should'st have done and not have spoken on't.
In me 'tis villainy. in thee it had been good service.”[1]Mr. S. R. Gardiner's review of John Inglesant.
[2]The late Marqri of Dufferin,
[1]On the working of the Irish Land Act, 1881.
[1]Sent immediately after the murders in the Phœnix Park.
[2]It need hardly be said that for this rumour there was no sort of foundation.
[1]It was the “manifold writer.”
[2]Home Rule.
[1]Lord Salisbury was unsuccessful in persuading his party to throw out the Irish Arrears Bill in the House of Lords.
[2]Mr Gladstone's.
[3]Downing Street.
[4]Paradiso.
[5]Letter written by Mr. Shorthouse in answer to Lord Acton's criticism of John Inglesant.
[1]Sara Bernhardt.
[2]Of Gibraltar. The late Dr. Sandford.
[1]Mr. Gladstone.
[1]Mr. Secretary Hay.
[2]Mrs. Hollond.
[3]Of George Eliot.
[4]Prime Minister.
[1]Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone.
[2]Mr. Herbert Gladstone's Lecture on Ireland, in which he used the words “Irish Parliament.”
[1]The predominance of books on religion and the few on science.
[2]The list of the hundred books given by Lord Acton to his correspondent.
[3]“Ignorance, madam, sheer ignorance.”
[1]On the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill.
[1]Henry George, author of Progress and Poverty.
[1]R. W. Church.
[2]Liddon translated Rosmini's Five Wounds of the Church
[1]The Master of University.
[2]At Cambridge.
[1]“The American Constitution.”
[1]The hundred books.
[2]Lord Acton's first visits to Oxford and Cambridge (to Dr. Talbot's, Warden of Keble College, and to Professor Sidgwick's) were arranged by his correspondent.
[3]Stubbs.
[1]Treaty of Berlin, 1878.
[1]Dr. Liddon met Lord A. and Miss G. at the station.
[2]Dr. Talbot.
[3]Dr. Stubbs.
[4]Woman's Suffrage.
[1]Duchess of Sutherland, Countess of Sutherland in her own right, died 1839.
[1]Forbes.
[1]Lord Wolverton's residence near London.
[2]A letter from Mr. Gladstone to his daughter.
[3]Contemporary Review.
[4]Egypt.
[1]To Egypt. Its object was financial.
[2]Lyttelton.
[3]England v. Australia, Kennington Oval.
[4]Bishop Stubbs.
[5]Dollinger.
[6]Church.
[1]Scholarship (£10) for Northumberland miners, comprising a month's residence at Cambridge.
[2]Dollinger.
[3]Dr. Howson.
[4]The third MIdlothian campaign.
[5]Mr. Gladstone.
[1]The first Lord Ampthill.
[1]Mr. Gladstone.
[2]Bishop Stubbs.
[3]At Oxford.
[4]Ruskin.
[5]Bonamy Price.
[6]Mr. Ruskin's playfully affectionate description of Mr. Benamy Price, Professor of the science which he most abhorred.
[7]Afterwards Bishop of London.
[1]Tke History of the Papacy durig the Reformation.
[2]Life of George Eliot.
[3]Freeman.
[4]President Monroe formulated, at the suggestion of Mr. Canning, the doctrine that the American continents were not to be colonised in the future by foreign Powers.
[1]The Croker Papers.
[1]Disraeli.
[2]Bishop of London.
[1]Walsham How, then Suffragan Bishop of Bedford.
[1]At Cannes.
[2]The Life of George Eliot.
[3]Now Viscount Milner.
[4]The present Earl Grey.
[1]Mark Pattison's Memoirs.
[1]The Afghan frontier. See Mr. Morley's account of the Penjdeh incident in his Life of Gladstone, vol. iii. pp. 183-5.
[1]The reference is to Tennyson's lines on the Franchise Bill:
“Steersman, be not precipitate,” etc.[1]Disagreements in the Cabinet on Ireland had been cut short on June 8 by the defeat of the Government, through a combination of Tories and Irish, on the Budget.
[2]Mr. James Stuart.
[3]When Lord Salisbury came into office in June 1885, he required assurances of support from the Leader of the Opposition, which Mr. Gladstone refused to give.
[1]Mr. Gladstone's Election Address, partly written in Norway, containing the Authorised Programme of the Liberal party.
[2]i.e., ex-Prime Minister.
[1]Mr George Russell. He stood for Fulham, but was not elected.
[2]At his election for Hoxton.
[1]Now Bishop of Oxford.
[2]The General Election of November 1885, consequent on the County Franchise and Redistribution Acts.
[3]The county voters.
[1]The Greville Memoirs, Part III.
[1]A wedding present.
[1]As Clerk to the House of Commons.
[1]In Ireland.
[1]University.
[1]Written to Dr. Hanna of Glenalmond in 1865.
[1]This must mean during the Crimean War. There was no change of Government between 1855 and 1858.
[1]The Parnell Divorce Case.
[1]As he did after the murders in the Phoenix Park.
[1]On Cardinal Newman. Mr. Arthur Hutton, the author, was at that time Librarian of the National Liberal Club.
[1]Lord Stanhope, the historian.
[1]Resignation of Premiership.
[1]Cambridge Modern History, started and planned by Lord Acton.
[2]“Madonna of the Future”; see letter Feb. 25, 1882.
[1]History of the Church.
[1]Dorothy Drew.
[1]The Dowager Empress of Germany, Princess Royal of England.
[2]The Emperor William.
[1](Hawarden, 15th Nov. 1881.)—“Têete-à-tête breakfast. A long most interesting talk on the great vexed question of his retirement, started by his saying that he and Lord Granville had discussed it, Lord G. good-humouredly declaring it out of the question. I quoted to him Lord Acton's words, how it would be a serious flaw in his political career to damage and perhaps run the Liberal party, by retiring from the leadership while in full possession of health and strength. He said the same arguments had been used in Lord Palmerston's case—that it was said the power and cohesion of the party depended on one man's life; that history had proved in that case that this was not so; that in his own case he had retired in '74 for good, that his reassumption of office was accidental, conditional, and temporary; that it was undertaken for certain purposes foreshadowed in his Midlothian Speeches, that these purposes were all or nearly all accomplished; that if he did not retire after Ireland was settled, and House of Commons procedure readjusted, there was no moment in the future when it would be possible—that Lord Hartington1 was a man of unusual strength and ability, but that before becoming Prime Minister he required more training as House of Commons leader. (I objected that he might at any moment go to the House of Lords, which would immensely weaken his influence; and besides, who could then lead the House of Commons?) The future leader of H. of C. was a great puzzle and difficulty Sir Charles Dilke would probably be the man best fitted for it, he had shown much capacity for learning and unlearning, but he would require Cabinet training first, that as time brings nearer Lord Hartington's move into House of Lords, force was added to the argument in favour of his own retirement. That he did not foresee great difficulties ahead for the Liberal party; that the Conservative ditto had thrown away what should have been their strength —the return to the principles and policy of Sir R. Peel; that they were demoralised and degraded; that they had inherited the vices of Lord Beaconsfield without his tact and judgment (Lord B.'s climax was reached in his attack on Sir Robert Peel. What a magnificent virulence he had shown; what a power of cutting and piercing the man through a searching knowledge of his character); that this jingoism was perpetuated in them, and must eventually be their ruin. That of Forster, Harcourt, and Childers it was hard indeed to say which was best qualified for leading; that Forster would probably be the best, but that he had shown occasional incapacity; that Goschen had sadly injured himself by following up his errors as to franchise with an elaborate eulogium of weak-kneed Liberalism—(I quoted Lord A. again ‘that he might resign place, but could not resign power’). He demurred to this: for two years—1874 to 1876—he insisted he had had no influence on the Lib. party, that he should attend the H of C very rarely, and possibly begin by going abroad before the Session”
[1]Afterwards Duke of Devonshire
5: Acton as the Historian of Liberty
Acton hoped to write a lengthy history of liberty which unfortunately he was never able to complete. We have a few pieces which show us what it might have looked like, such as the essay on liberty in the ancient world and another on liberty in the early Christian world which are included below.
Source: From Acton’s The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=559&Itemid=283 on 2008/2/2
6: Acton on the Corrupting Infuence of Power
In the first letter to Creighton written in 1887 Acton makes his famous statement that kings must be judged according to the same rules as ordinary men and hanged if necessary for the crimes they commit. He also states the famous dictum that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.
Source: Add. Mss. 6871.
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1354&Itemid=262 on 2008/11/3
7: Acton’s Inaugural Lecture on History at Cambridge University
In this inaugural lecture Acton lays out his ideas on the nature of history as an academic profession. He planned the original edition of the Cambridge Modern History but did not live long enough to see it published.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906). Chapter: INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY*
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/209/41611 on 2008-03-18
The text is in the public domain.
INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY*
Fellow Students—I look back to–day to a time before the middle of the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh and fervently wishing to come to this University. At three colleges I applied for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all. Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in a happier hour, after five–and–forty years, they are at last fulfilled.
I desire, first, to speak to you of that which I may reasonably call the Unity of Modern History, as an easy approach to questions necessary to be met on the threshold by any one occupying this place, which my predecessor has made so formidable to me by the reflected lustre of his name.
You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning, because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately unmeaning.
“Politics,” said Sir John Seeley, “are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.” Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For the science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to the making of the future.1 In France, such is the weight attached to the study of our own time, that there is an appointed course of contemporary history, with appropriate text–books.2 That is a chair which, in the progressive division of labour by which both science and government prosper,3 may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well to acknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For the contemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of its facts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is always excepted, and a generation passes before we can ensure accuracy. Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality, as the initiated know it. Even of a thing so memorable as the war of 1870, the true cause is still obscure; much that we believed has been scattered to the winds in the last six months, and further revelations by important witnesses are about to appear. The use of history turns far more on certainty than on abundance of acquired information.
Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment. The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active life.4 For a man is justly despised who has one opinion in history and another in politics, one for abroad and another at home, one for opposition and another for office. History compels us to fasten on abiding issues, and rescues us from the temporary and transient. Politics and history are interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is a domain that reaches farther than affairs of state, and is not subject to the jurisdiction of governments. It is our function to keep in view and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the effect but the cause of public events;5 and even to allow some priority to ecclesiastical history over civil, since, by reason of the graver issues concerned, and the vital consequences of error, it opened the way in research, and was the first to be treated by close reasoners and scholars of the higher rank.6
In the same manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as one consistent epic.7 Yet every student ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which we are sprung.8 If we are to account mind not matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity and grace and intellectual value to history, and its action on the ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the universal by the national, and civilisation by custom.9 A speech of Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates, a few lines that were inscribed on an Indian rock before the Second Punic War, the footsteps of a silent yet prophetic people who dwelt by the Dead Sea, and perished in the fall of Jerusalem, come nearer to our lives than the ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian acorns.
For our present purpose, then, I describe as Modern History that which begins four hundred years ago, which is marked off by an evident and intelligible line from the time immediately preceding, and displays in its course specific and distinctive characteristics of its own.10 The modern age did not proceed from the medieval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and power; in those days Machiavelli released government from the restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come. There is the same unbound originality and disregard for inherited sanctions in the rare philosophers as in the discovery of Divine Right, and the intruding Imperialism of Rome. The like effects are visible everywhere, and one generation beheld them all. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of society,11 and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalculable change.
That forward movement divides it broadly from the older world; and the unity of the new is manifest in the universal spirit of investigation and discovery which did not cease to operate, and withstood the recurring efforts of reaction, until, by the advent of the reign of general ideas which we call the Revolution, it at length prevailed.12 This successive deliverance and gradual passage, for good and evil, from subordination to independence is a phenomenon of primary import to us, because historical science has been one of its instruments.13 If the Past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the Past is the safest and the surest emancipation. And the earnest search for it is one of the signs that distinguish the four centuries of which I speak from those that went before. The Middle Ages, which possessed good writers of contemporary narrative, were careless and impatient of older fact. They became content to be deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false witness, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the forger and the cheat.14 As time went on, the atmosphere of accredited mendacity thickened, until, in the Renaissance, the art of exposing falsehood dawned upon keen Italian minds. It was then that History as we understand it began to be understood, and the illustrious dynasty of scholars arose to whom we still look both for method and material. Unlike the dreaming prehistoric world, ours knows the need and the duty to make itself master of the earlier times, and to forfeit nothing of their wisdom or their warnings,15 and has devoted its best energy and treasure to the sovereign purpose of detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth.16
In this epoch of full–grown history men have not acquiesced in the given conditions of their lives. Taking little for granted they have sought to know the ground they stand on, and the road they travel, and the reason why. Over them, therefore, the historian has obtained an increasing ascendency.17 The law of stability was overcome by the power of ideas, constantly varied and rapidly renewed;18 ideas that give life and motion, that take wing and traverse seas and frontiers, making it futile to pursue the consecutive order of events in the seclusion of a separate nationality.19 They compel us to share the existence of societies wider than our own, to be familiar with distant and exotic types, to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along the central range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and men of genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are bound to store up objects for admiration as far as may be;20 for the effect of implacable research is constantly to reduce their number. No intellectual exercise, for instance, can be more invigorating than to watch the working of the mind of Napoleon, the most entirely known as well as the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fénelon, the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and another, that genius poured in torrents from his eyes. For the minds that are greatest and best alone furnish the instructive examples. A man of ordinary proportion or inferior metal knows not how to think out the rounded circle of his thought, how to divest his will of its surroundings and to rise above the pressure of time and race and circumstance,21 to choose the star that guides his course, to correct, and test, and assay his convictions by the light within,22 and, with a resolute conscience and ideal courage, to remodel and reconstitute the character which birth and education gave him.23
For ourselves, if it were not the quest of the higher level and the extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him the foundations have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon paper, but claiming to develop by a law of organic growth; with our disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles and our reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other communities have displayed the inmost secrets of political science to every man who can read. And the discussions of constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened States in the American Union, when they have recast their institutions, are paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which at home we have never enjoyed.
To historians the later part of their enormous subject is precious because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know because it is the best known and the most explicit. Earlier scenes stand out from a background of obscurity. We soon reach the sphere of hopeless ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But hundreds and even thousands of the moderns have borne testimony against themselves, and may be studied in their private correspondence and sentenced on their own confession. Their deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens its archives and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When Hallam wrote his chapter on James II., France was the only Power whose reports were available. Rome followed, and the Hague; and then came the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian and the Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam and Lingard were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult the diplomacy of ten governments. The topics indeed are few on which the resources have been so employed that we can be content with the work done for us and never wish it to be done over again. Part of the lives of Luther and Frederic, a little of the Thirty Years’ War, much of the American Revolution and the French Restoration, the early years of Richelieu and Mazarin, and a few volumes of Mr. Gardiner, show here and there like Pacific islands in the ocean. I should not even venture to claim for Ranke, the real originator of the heroic study of records, and the most prompt and fortunate of European pathfinders, that there is one of his seventy volumes that has not been overtaken and in part surpassed. It is through his accelerating influence mainly that our branch of study has become progressive, so that the best master is quickly distanced by the better pupil.24 The Vatican archives alone, now made accessible to the world, filled 3239 cases when they were sent to France; and they are not the richest. We are still at the beginning of the documentary age, which will tend to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing, and to accomplish a revolution in other sciences as well.25
To men in general I would justify the stress I am laying on Modern History, neither by urging its varied wealth, nor the rupture with precedent, nor the perpetuity of change and increase of pace, nor the growing predominance of opinion over belief, and of knowledge over opinion, but by the argument that it is a narrative told of ourselves, the record of a life which is our own, of efforts not yet abandoned to repose, of problems that still entangle the feet and vex the hearts of men. Every part of it is weighty with inestimable lessons that we must learn by experience and at a great price, if we know not how to profit by the example and teaching of those who have gone before us, in a society largely resembling the one we live in.26 Its study fulfils its purpose even if it only makes us wiser, without producing books, and gives us the gift of historical thinking, which is better than historical learning.27 It is a most powerful ingredient in the formation of character and the training of talent, and our historical judgments have as much to do with hopes of heaven as public or private conduct. Convictions that have been strained through the instances and the comparisons of modern times differ immeasurably in solidity and force from those which every new fact perturbs, and which are often little better than illusions or unsifted prejudice.28
The first of human concerns is religion, and it is the salient feature of the modern centuries. They are signalised as the scene of Protestant developments. Starting from a time of extreme indifference, ignorance, and decline, they were at once occupied with that conflict which was to rage so long, and of which no man could imagine the infinite consequences. Dogmatic conviction—for I shun to speak of faith in connection with many characters of those days—dogmatic conviction rose to be the centre of universal interest, and remained down to Cromwell the supreme influence and motive of public policy. A time came when the intensity of prolonged conflict, when even the energy of antagonistic assurance abated somewhat, and the controversial spirit began to make room for the scientific; and as the storm subsided, and the area of settled questions emerged, much of the dispute was abandoned to the serene and soothing touch of historians, invested as they are with the prerogative of redeeming the cause of religion from many unjust reproaches, and from the graver evil of reproaches that are just. Ranke used to say that Church interests prevailed in politics until the Seven Years’ War, and marked a phase of society that ended when the hosts of Brandenburg went into action at Leuthen, chaunting their Lutheran hymns.29 That bold proposition would be disputed even if applied to the present age. After Sir Robert Peel had broken up his party, the leaders who followed him declared that no popery was the only basis on which it could be reconstructed.30 On the other side may be urged that, in July 1870, at the outbreak of the French war, the only government that insisted on the abolition of the temporal power was Austria; and since then we have witnessed the fall of Castelar, because he attempted to reconcile Spain with Rome.
Soon after 1850 several of the most intelligent men in France, struck by the arrested increase of their own population and by the telling statistics from Further Britain, foretold the coming preponderance of the English race. They did not foretell, what none could then foresee, the still more sudden growth of Prussia, or that the three most important countries of the globe would, by the end of the century, be those that chiefly belonged to the conquests of the Reformation. So that in Religion, as in so many things, the product of these centuries has favoured the new elements; and the centre of gravity, moving from the Mediterranean nations to the Oceanic, from the Latin to the Teuton, has also passed from the Catholic to the Protestant.31
Out of these controversies proceeded political as well as historical science. It was in the Puritan phase, before the restoration of the Stuarts, that theology, blending with politics, effected a fundamental change. The essentially English reformation of the seventeenth century was less a struggle between churches than between sects, often subdivided by questions of discipline and self–regulation rather than by dogma. The sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing over the nations; and they were concerned with the individual more than with the congregation, with conventicles, not with State churches. Their view was narrowed, but their sight was sharpened. It appeared to them that governments and institutions are made to pass away, like things of earth, whilst souls are immortal; that there is no more proportion between liberty and power than between eternity and time; that, therefore, the sphere of enforced command ought to be restricted within fixed limits, and that which had been done by authority, and outward discipline, and organised violence, should be attempted by division of power, and committed to the intellect and the conscience of free men.32 Thus was exchanged the dominion of will over will for the dominion of reason over reason. The true apostles of toleration are not those who sought protection for their own beliefs, or who had none to protect; but men to whom, irrespective of their cause, it was a political, a moral, and a theological dogma, a question of conscience involving both religion and policy.33 Such a man was Socinus; and others arose in the smaller sects, — the Independent founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and the Quaker patriarch of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy and zeal which had laboured for authority of doctrine was employed for liberty of prophesying. The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new cry; but the cause was still the same. It became a boast that religion was the mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful offspring of religion; and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms of political life by the development of religious thought, brings us to the heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of the historic cycles before us. Beginning with the strongest religious movement and the most refined despotism ever known, it has led to the superiority of politics over divinity in the life of nations, and terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfilment of duty to God34 —a doctrine laden with storm and havoc, which is the secret essence of the Rights of Man, and the indestructible soul of Revolution.
When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world towards self–government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded by the religious motive in the seventeenth century. And this constancy of progress, of progress in the direction of organised and assured freedom, is the characteristic fact of Modern History, and its tribute to the theory of Providence.35 Many persons, I am well assured, would detect that this is a very old story, and a trivial commonplace, and would challenge proof that the world is making progress in aught but intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or that increase in freedom is either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who was my own master, rejected the view that I have stated;36 Comte, the master of better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain under the gathered weight of the dead hand;37 and many of our recent classics—Carlyle, Newman, Froude—were persuaded that there is no progress justifying the ways of God to man, and that the mere consolidation of liberty is like the motion of creatures whose advance is in the direction of their tails. They deem that anxious precaution against bad government is an obstruction to good, and degrades morality and mind by placing the capable at the mercy of the incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for the benefit of the average man. They hold that great and salutary things are done for mankind by power concentrated, not by power balanced and cancelled and dispersed, and that the whig theory, sprung from decomposing sects, the theory that authority is legitimate only by virtue of its checks, and that the sovereign is dependent on the subject, is rebellion against the divine will manifested all down the stream of time.
I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial controversy of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order to make my drift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction. No political dogma is as serviceable to my purpose here as the historian’s maxim to do the best he can for the other side, and to avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own. Like the economic precept laissez faire,38 which the eighteenth century derived from Colbert, it has been an important, if not a final step in the making of method. The strongest and most impressive personalities, it is true, like Macaulay, Thiers, and the two greatest of living writers, Mommsen and Treitschke, project their own broad shadow upon their pages. This is a practice proper to great men, and a great man may be worth several immaculate historians. Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a historian is seen at his best when he does not appear.39 Better for us is the example of the Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of his illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulanges, who said to an excited audience: “Do not imagine you are listening to me; it is history itself that speaks.”40 We can found no philosophy on the observation of four hundred years, excluding three thousand. It would be an imperfect and a fallacious induction. But I hope that even this narrow and disedifying section of history will aid you to see that the action of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he redeemed fails not, but increases;41 that the wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world;42 and that achieved liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the converging and combined conditions of advancing civilisation.43 Then you will understand what a famous philosopher said, that History is the true demonstration of Religion.44
But what do people mean who proclaim that liberty is the palm, and the prize, and the crown, seeing that it is an idea of which there are two hundred definitions, and that this wealth of interpretation has caused more bloodshed than anything, except theology? Is it Democracy as in France, or Federalism as in America, or the national independence which bounds the Italian view, or the reign of the fittest, which is the ideal of Germans?45 I know not whether it will ever fall within my sphere of duty to trace the slow progress of that idea through the chequered scenes of our history, and to describe how subtle speculations touching the nature of conscience promoted a nobler and more spiritual conception of the liberty that protects it,46 until the guardian of rights developed into the guardian of duties which are the cause of rights,47 and that which had been prized as the material safeguard for treasures of earth became sacred as security for things that are divine. All that we require is a workday key to history, and our present need can be supplied without pausing to satisfy philosophers. Without inquiring how far Sarasa or Butler, Kant or Vinet, is right as to the infallible voice of God in man, we may easily agree in this, that where absolutism reigned, by irresistible arms, concentrated possessions, auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more; that commerce having risen against land, labour against wealth, the State against the forces dominant in society,48 the division of power against the State, the thought of individuals against the practice of ages, neither authorities, nor minorities, nor majorities can command implicit obedience; and, where there has been long and arduous experience, a rampart of tried conviction and accumulated knowledge,49 where there is a fair level of general morality, education, courage, and self–restraint, there, if there only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition of life towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been moving through the allotted space.50 You will know it by outward signs: Representation, the extinction of slavery, the reign of opinion, and the like; better still by less apparent evidences: the security of the weaker groups51 and the liberty of conscience, which, effectually secured, secures the rest.
Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on a contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more often by violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is towards convulsions and catastrophes,52 if the world owes religious liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to the French and its successors,53 what is to become of us, docile and attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian.54 By its authentic exponents, Jefferson and Sieyès, the Revolution of the last century repudiates history. Their followers renounced acquaintance with it, and were ready to destroy its records and to abolish its inoffensive professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor of civilisation than ever before, and a movement began in the world of minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancient learning.55 The dispensation under which we live and labour consists first in the recoil from the negative spirit that rejected the law of growth, and partly in the endeavour to classify and adjust the Revolution, and to account for it by the natural working of historic causes. The Conservative line of writers, under the name of the Romantic or Historical School, had its seat in Germany, looked upon the Revolution as an alien episode, the error of an age, a disease to be treated by the investigation of its origin, and strove to unite the broken threads and to restore the normal conditions of organic evolution. The Liberal School, whose home was France, explained and justified the Revolution as a true development, and the ripened fruit of all history.56 These are the two main arguments of the generation to which we owe the notion and the scientific methods that make history so unlike what it was to the survivors of the last century. Severally, the innovators were not superior to the men of old. Muratori was as widely read, Tillemont as accurate, Leibniz as able, Fréret as acute, Gibbon as masterly in the craft of composite construction. Nevertheless, in the second quarter of this century, a new era began for historians.
I would point to three things in particular, out of many, which constitute the amended order. Of the incessant deluge of new and unsuspected matter I need say little. For some years, the secret archives of the papacy were accessible at Paris; but the time was not ripe, and almost the only man whom they availed was the archivist himself.57 Towards 1830 the documentary studies began on a large scale, Austria leading the way. Michelet, who claims, towards 1836, to have been the pioneer,58 was preceded by such rivals as Mackintosh, Bucholtz, and Mignet. A new and more productive period began thirty years later, when the war of 1859 laid open the spoils of Italy. Every country in succession has now allowed the exploration of its records, and there is more fear of drowning than of drought. The result has been that a lifetime spent in the largest collection of printed books would not suffice to train a real master of modern history. After he had turned from literature to sources, from Burnet to Pocock, from Macaulay to Madame Campana, from Thiers to the interminable correspondence of the Bonapartes, he would still feel instant need of inquiry at Venice or Naples, in the Ossuna library or at the Hermitage.59
These matters do not now concern us. For our purpose, the main thing to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens, and extends the mind.60 And the accession of the critic in the place of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative, the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of dynasty, in the historic realm. For the critic is one who, when he lights on an interesting statement, begins by suspecting it. He remains in suspense until he has subjected his authority to three operations. First, he asks whether he has read the passage as the author wrote it. For the transcriber, and the editor, and the official or officious censor on the top of the editor, have played strange tricks, and have much to answer for. And if they are not to blame, it may turn out that the author wrote his book twice over, that you can discover the first jet, the progressive variations, things added, and things struck out. Next is the question where the writer got his information. If from a previous writer, it can be ascertained, and the inquiry has to be repeated. If from unpublished papers, they must be traced, and when the fountain–head is reached, or the track disappears, the question of veracity arises. The responsible writer’s character, his position, antecedents, and probable motives have to be examined into; and this is what, in a different and adapted sense of the word, may be called the higher criticism, in comparison with the servile and often mechanical work of pursuing statements to their root. For a historian has to be treated as a witness, and not believed unless his sincerity is established.61 The maxim that a man must be presumed to be innocent until his guilt is proved, was not made for him.
For us, then, the estimate of authorities, the weighing of testimony, is more meritorious than the potential discovery of new matter.62 And modern history, which is the widest field of application, is not the best to learn our business in; for it is too wide, and the harvest has not been winnowed as in antiquity, and further on to the Crusades. It is better to examine what has been done for questions that are compact and circumscribed, such as the sources of Plutarch’s Pericles, the two tracts on Athenian government, the origin of the epistle to Diognetus, the date of the life of St. Antony; and to learn from Schwegler how this analytical work began. More satisfying because more decisive has been the critical treatment of the medieval writers, parallel with the new editions, on which incredible labour has been lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the prefaces of Bishop Stubbs. An important event in this series was the attack on Dino Compagni, which, for the sake of Dante, roused the best Italian scholars to a not unequal contest. When we are told that England is behind the Continent in critical faculty, we must admit that this is true as to quantity, not as to quality of work. As they are no longer living, I will say of two Cambridge professors, Lightfoot and Hort, that they were critical scholars whom neither Frenchman nor German has surpassed.
The third distinctive note of the generation of writers who dug so deep a trench between history as known to our grandfathers and as it appears to us, is their dogma of impartiality. To an ordinary man the word means no more than justice. He considers that he may proclaim the merits of his own religion, of his prosperous and enlightened country, of his political persuasion, whether democracy, or liberal monarchy, or historic conservatism, without transgression or offence, so long as he is fair to the relative, though inferior, merits of others, and never treats men as saints or as rogues for the side they take. There is no impartiality, he would say, like that of a hanging judge. The men who, with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed the uncharted sea of original research proposed a different view. History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions. They had their own notion of truthfulness, based on the exceeding difficulty of finding truth, and the still greater difficulty of impressing it when found. They thought it possible to write, with so much scruple, and simplicity, and insight, as to carry along with them every man of good will, and, whatever his feelings, to compel his assent. Ideas which, in religion and in politics, are truths, in history are forces. They must be respected; they must not be affirmed. By dint of a supreme reserve, by much self–control, by a timely and discreet indifference, by secrecy in the matter of the black cap, history might be lifted above contention, and made an accepted tribunal, and the same for all.63 If men were truly sincere, and delivered judgment by no canons but those of evident morality, then Julian would be described in the same terms by Christian and pagan, Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by Whig and Tory, Napoleon by patriotic Frenchman and patriotic German.64
I speak of this school with reverence, for the good it has done, by the assertion of historic truth and of its legitimate authority over the minds of men. It provides a discipline which every one of us does well to undergo, and perhaps also well to relinquish. For it is not the whole truth. Lanfrey’s essay on Carnot, Chuquet’s wars of the Revolution, Ropes’s military histories, Roget’s Geneva in the time of Calvin, will supply you with examples of a more robust impartiality than I have described. Renan calls it the luxury of an opulent and aristocratic society, doomed to vanish in an age of fierce and sordid striving. In our universities it has a magnificent and appointed refuge; and to serve its cause, which is sacred, because it is the cause of truth and honour, we may import a profitable lesson from the highly unscientific region of public life. There a man does not take long to find out that he is opposed by some who are abler and better than himself. And, in order to understand the cosmic force and the true connection of ideas, it is a source of power, and an excellent school of principle, not to rest until, by excluding the fallacies, the prejudices, the exaggerations which perpetual contention and the consequent precautions breed, we have made out for our opponents a stronger and more impressive case than they present themselves.65 Excepting one to which we are coming before I release you, there is no precept less faithfully observed by historians.
Ranke is the representative of the age which instituted the modern study of History. He taught it to be critical, to be colourless, and to be new. We meet him at every step, and he has done more for us than any other man. There are stronger books than any one of his, and some may have surpassed him in political, religious, philosophic insight, in vividness of the creative imagination, in originality, elevation, and depth of thought; but by the extent of important work well executed, by his influence on able men, and by the amount of knowledge which mankind receives and employs with the stamp of his mind upon it, he stands without a rival. I saw him last in 1877, when he was feeble, sunken, and almost blind, and scarcely able to read or write. He uttered his farewell with kindly emotion, and I feared that the next I should hear of him would be the news of his death. Two years later he began a Universal History, which is not without traces of weakness, but which, composed after the age of eighty–three, and carried, in seventeen volumes, far into the Middle Ages, brings to a close the most astonishing career in literature.
His course had been determined, in early life, by Quentin Durward. The shock of the discovery that Scott’s Lewis the Eleventh was inconsistent with the original in Commynes made him resolve that his object thenceforth should be above all things to follow, without swerving, and in stern subordination and surrender, the lead of his authorities. He decided effectually to repress the poet, the patriot, the religious or political partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books, and to write nothing that would gratify his own feelings or disclose his private convictions.66 When a strenuous divine, who, like him, had written on the Reformation, hailed him as a comrade, Ranke repelled his advances. “You,” he said, “are in the first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian. There is a gulf between us.”67 He was the first eminent writer who exhibited what Michelet calls le désintéressement des morts. It was a moral triumph for him when he could refrain from judging, show that much might be said on both sides, and leave the rest to Providence.68 He would have felt sympathy with the two famous London physicians of our day, of whom it is told that they could not make up their minds on a case and reported dubiously. The head of the family insisted on a positive opinion. They answered that they were unable to give one, but he might easily find fifty doctors who could.
Niebuhr had pointed out that chroniclers who wrote before the invention of printing generally copied one predecessor at a time, and knew little about sifting or combining authorities. The suggestion became luminous in Ranke’s hands, and with his light and dexterous touch he scrutinised and dissected the principal historians, from Machiavelli to the Mémoires d’un Homme d’État, with a rigour never before applied to moderns. But whilst Niebuhr dismissed the traditional story, replacing it with a construction of his own, it was Ranke’s mission to preserve, not to undermine, and to set up masters whom, in their proper sphere, he could obey. The many excellent dissertations in which he displayed this art, though his successors in the next generation matched his skill and did still more thorough work, are the best introduction from which we can learn the technical process by which within living memory the study of modern history has been renewed. Ranke’s contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and suspense, and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by beginners who borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made of these obscure preliminaries which a man may accomplish for himself, in the silence of his chamber, with less demand on the attention of the public.69 That may be reasonable in men who are practised in these fundamental technicalities. We who have to learn them, must immerse ourselves in the study of the great examples.
Apart from what is technical, method is only the reduplication of common sense, and is best acquired by observing its use by the ablest men in every variety of intellectual employment.70 Bentham acknowledged that he learned less from his own profession than from writers like Linnæus and Cullen; and Brougham advised the student of Law to begin with Dante. Liebig described his Organic Chemistry as an application of ideas found in Mill’s Logic, and a distinguished physician, not to be named lest he should overhear me, read three books to enlarge his medical mind; and they were Gibbon, Grote, and Mill. He goes on to say, “An educated man cannot become so on one study alone, but must be brought under the influence of natural, civil, and moral modes of thought.”71 I quote my colleague’s golden words in order to reciprocate them. If men of science owe anything to us, we may learn much from them that is essential.72 For they can show how to test proof, how to secure fulness and soundness in induction, how to restrain and to employ with safety hypothesis and analogy. It is they who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails.73 Theirs is the logic of discovery,74 the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress and the vital spark in history. And they often give us invaluable counsel when they attend to their own subjects and address their own people. Remember Darwin taking note only of those passages that raised difficulties in his way; the French philosopher complaining that his work stood still, because he found no more contradicting facts; Baer, who thinks error treated thoroughly nearly as remunerative as truth, by the discovery of new objections; for, as Sir Robert Ball warns us, it is by considering objections that we often learn.75 Faraday declares that “in knowledge, that man only is to be condemned and despised who is not in a state of transition.” And John Hunter spoke for all of us when he said: “Never ask me what I have said or what I have written; but if you will ask me what my present opinions are, I will tell you.”
From the first years of the century we have been quickened and enriched by contributors from every quarter. The jurists brought us that law of continuous growth which has transformed history from a chronicle of casual occurrences into the likeness of something organic.76 Towards 1820 divines began to recast their doctrines on the lines of development, of which Newman said, long after, that evolution had come to confirm it.77 Even the Economists, who were practical men, dissolved their science into liquid history, affirming that it is not an auxiliary, but the actual subject–matter of their inquiry.78 Philosophers claim that, as early as 1804, they began to bow the metaphysical neck beneath the historical yoke. They taught that philosophy is only the amended sum of all philosophies, that systems pass with the age whose impress they bear,79 that the problem is to focus the rays of wandering but extant truth, and that history is the source of philosophy, if not quite a substitute for it.80 Comte begins a volume with the words that the preponderance of history over philosophy was the characteristic of the time he lived in.81 Since Cuvier first recognised the conjunction between the course of inductive discovery and the course of civilisation,82 science had its share in saturating the age with historic ways of thought, and subjecting all things to that influence for which the depressing names historicism and historical–mindedness have been devised.
There are certain faults which are corrigible mental defects on which I ought to say a few denouncing words, because they are common to us all. First: the want of an energetic understanding of the sequence and real significance of events, which would be fatal to a practical politician, is ruin to a student of history, who is the politician with his face turned backwards.83 It is playing at study, to see nothing but the unmeaning and unsuggestive surface, as we generally do. Then we have a curious proclivity to neglect, and by degrees to forget, what has been certainly known. An instance or two will explain my idea. The most popular English writer relates how it happened in his presence that the title of Tory was conferred upon the Conservative party. For it was an opprobrious name at the time, applied to men for whom the Irish Government offered head–money; so that if I have made too sure of progress, I may at least complacently point to this instance of our mended manners. One day, Titus Oates lost his temper with the men who refused to believe him, and, after looking about for a scorching imprecation, he began to call them Tories.84 The name remained; but its origin, attested by Defoe, dropped out of common memory, as if one party were ashamed of their godfather, and the other did not care to be identified with his cause and character. You all know, I am sure, the story of the news of Trafalgar, and how, two days after it had arrived, Mr. Pitt, drawn by an enthusiastic crowd, went to dine in the city. When they drank the health of the minister who had saved his country, he declined the praise. “England,” he said, “has saved herself by her own energy; and I hope that after having saved herself by her energy, she will save Europe by her example.” In 1814, when this hope had been realised, the last speech of the great orator was remembered, and a medal was struck upon which the whole sentence was engraved, in four words of compressed Latin: Seipsam virtute, Europam exemplo. Now it was just at the time of his last appearance in public that Mr. Pitt heard of the overwhelming success of the French in Germany, and of the Austrian surrender at Ulm. His friends concluded that the contest on land was hopeless, and that it was time to abandon the Continent to the conqueror, and to fall back upon our new empire of the sea. Pitt did not agree with them. He said that Napoleon would meet with a check whenever he encountered a national resistance; and he declared that Spain was the place for it, and that then England would intervene.85 General Wellesley, fresh from India, was present. Ten years later, when he had accomplished that which Pitt had seen in the lucid prescience of his last days, he related at Paris what I scarcely hesitate to call the most astounding and profound prediction in all political history, where such things have not been rare.
I shall never again enjoy the opportunity of speaking my thoughts to such an audience as this, and on so privileged an occasion a lecturer may well be tempted to bethink himself whether he knows of any neglected truth, any cardinal proposition, that might serve as his selected epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as a target. I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say — Learn as much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names;86 see that your judgments are your own, and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions;87 do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good;88 never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice,89 and study problems in preference to periods; for instance: the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of Bacon, the predecessors of Adam Smith, the medieval masters of Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig. Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.90 The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present.91
The mission of that school was to make distant times, and especially the Middle Ages, then most distant of all, intelligible and acceptable to a society issuing from the eighteenth century. There were difficulties in the way; and among others this, that, in the first fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross, after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of Jews. To judge them by a fixed standard, to call them sacrilegious fanatics or furious hypocrites, was to yield a gratuitous victory to Voltaire. It became a rule of policy to praise the spirit when you could not defend the deed. So that we have no common code; our moral notions are always fluid; and you must consider the times, the class from which men sprang, the surrounding influences, the masters in their schools, the preachers in their pulpits, the movement they obscurely obeyed, and so on, until responsibility is merged in numbers, and not a culprit is left for execution.92 A murderer was no criminal if he followed local custom, if neighbours approved, if he was encouraged by official advisers or prompted by just authority, if he acted for the reason of state or the pure love of religion, or if he sheltered himself behind the complicity of the Law. The depression of morality was flagrant; but the motives were those which have enabled us to contemplate with distressing complacency the secret of unhallowed lives. The code that is greatly modified by time and place, will vary according to the cause. The amnesty is an artifice that enables us to make exceptions, to tamper with weights and measures, to deal unequal justice to friends and enemies.
It is associated with that philosophy which Cato attributes to the gods. For we have a theory which justifies Providence by the event, and holds nothing so deserving as success, to which there can be no victory in a bad cause; prescription and duration legitimate;93 and whatever exists is right and reasonable; and as God manifests His will by that which He tolerates, we must conform to the divine decree by living to shape the future after the ratified image of the past.94 Another theory, less confidently urged, regards History as our guide, as much by showing errors to evade as examples to pursue. It is suspicious of illusions in success, and, though there may be hope of ultimate triumph for what is true, if not by its own attraction, by the gradual exhaustion of error, it admits no corresponding promise for what is ethically right. It deems the canonisation of the historic past more perilous than ignorance or denial, because it would perpetuate the reign of sin and acknowledge the sovereignty of wrong, and conceives it the part of real greatness to know how to stand and fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary flood.95
Ranke relates, without adornment, that William III. ordered the extirpation of a Catholic clan, and scouts the faltering excuse of his defenders. But when he comes to the death and character of the international deliverer, Glencoe is forgotten, the imputation of murder drops, like a thing unworthy of notice.96 Johannes Mueller, a great Swiss celebrity, writes that the British Constitution occurred to somebody, perhaps to Halifax. This artless statement might not be approved by rigid lawyers as a faithful and felicitous indication of the manner of that mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings, that was never profaned by the invading wit of man;97 but it is less grotesque than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original writer of political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between Harrington and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced a scheme of limitations which, in substance, if not in form, foreshadowed the position of the monarchy in the later Hanoverian reigns. Although Halifax did not believe in the plot,98 he insisted that innocent victims should be sacrificed to content the multitude. Sir William Temple writes: “We only disagreed in one point, which was the leaving some priests to the law upon the accusation of being priests only, as the House of Commons had desired; which I thought wholly unjust. Upon this point Lord Halifax and I had so sharp a debate at Lord Sunderland’s lodgings, that he told me, if I would not concur in points which were so necessary for the people’s satisfaction, he would tell everybody I was a Papist. And upon his affirming that the plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no, in those points that were so generally believed.” In spite of this accusing passage, Macaulay, who prefers Halifax to all the statesmen of his age, praises him for his mercy: “His dislike of extremes, and a forgiving and compassionate temper which seems to have been natural to him, preserved him from all participation in the worst crimes of his time.”
If, in our uncertainty, we must often err, it may be sometimes better to risk excess in rigour than in indulgence, for then at least we do no injury by loss of principle. As Bayle has said, it is more probable that the secret motives of an indifferent action are bad than good;99 and this discouraging conclusion does not depend upon theology, for James Mozley supports the sceptic from the other flank, with all the artillery of Tractarian Oxford. “A Christian,” he says, “is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself. . . . He sees it where others do not; his instinct is divinely strengthened; his eye is supernaturally keen; he has a spiritual insight, and senses exercised to discern. . . . He owns the doctrine of original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognising anywhere what he knows to be everywhere.”100 There is a popular saying of Madame de Staël, that we forgive whatever we really understand. The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her descendant, the Duke de Broglie, in the words: “Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much excusing.”101 History, says Froude, does teach that right and wrong are real distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.102 And if there are moments when we may resist the teaching of Froude, we have seldom the chance of resisting when he is supported by Mr. Goldwin Smith: “A sound historical morality will sanction strong measures in evil times; selfish ambition, treachery, murder, perjury, it will never sanction in the worst of times, for these are the things that make times evil.—Justice has been justice, mercy has been mercy, honour has been honour, good faith has been good faith, truthfulness has been truthfulness from the beginning.” The doctrine that, as Sir Thomas Browne says, morality is not ambulatory,103 is expressed as follows by Burke, who, when true to himself, is the most intelligent of our instructors: “My principles enable me to form my judgment upon men and actions in history, just as they do in common life; and are not formed out of events and characters, either present or past. History is a preceptor of prudence, not of principles. The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will admit of any other.”104
Whatever a man’s notions of these later centuries are, such, in the main, the man himself will be. Under the name of History, they cover the articles of his philosophic, his religious, and his political creed.105 They give his measure; they denote his character: and, as praise is the shipwreck of historians, his preferences betray him more than his aversions. Modern History touches us so nearly, it is so deep a question of life and death, that we are bound to find our own way through it, and to owe our insight to ourselves. The historians of former ages, unapproachable for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot be our limit. We have the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just than they; and to learn from undisguised and genuine records to look with remorse upon the past, and to the future with assured hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that if we lower our standard in History, we cannot uphold it in Church or State.
[* ]Delivered at Cambridge, June 1895.
[1 ]No political conclusions of any value for practice can be arrived at by direct experience. All true political science is, in one sense of the phrase, a priori, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our general experience of human nature, or as the result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.—Mill,Inaugural Address, 51.
[2 ]Contemporary history is, in Dr. Arnold’s opinion, more important than either ancient or modern; and in fact superior to it by all the superiority of the end to the means.—Seeley,Lectures and Essays, 306.
[3 ]The law of all progress is one and the same, the evolution of the simple into the complex by successive differentiations.—Edinburgh Review, clvii. 428. Die Entwickelung der Völker vollzieht sich nach zwei Gesetzen. Das erste Gesetz ist das der Differenzierung. Die primitiven Einrichtungen sind einfach und einheitlich, die der Civilisation zusammengesetzt und geteilt, und die Arbeitsteilung nimmt beständig zu.—Sickel,Goettingen Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1890, 563.
[4 ]Nous risquons toujours d’être influencés par les préjugés de notre époque; mais nous sommes libres des préjugés particuliers aux époques antérieures.—E. Naville,Christianisme de Fénelon, 9.
[5 ]La nature n’est qu’un écho de l’esprit. L’idée est la mère du fait, elle façonne graduellement le monde à son image.—Feuchtersleben, in Caro,Nouvelles Études Morales, 132. Il n’est pas d’étude morale qui vaille l’histoire d’une idée.—Laboulaye,Liberté Religieuse, 25.
[6 ]Il y a des savants qui raillent le sentiment religieux. Ils ne savent pas que c’est à ce sentiment, et par son moyen, que la science historique doit d’avoir pu sortir de l’enfance. . . . Depuis des siècles les âmes indépendantes discutaient les textes et les traditions de l’église, quand les lettrés n’avaient pas encore eu l’idée de porter un regard critique sur les textes de l’antiquité mondaine.—La France Protesiante, ii. 17.
[7 ]In our own history, above all, every step in advance has been at the same time a step backwards. It has often been shown how our latest constitution is, amidst all external differences, essentially the same as our earliest, how every struggle for right and freedom, from the thirteenth century onwards, has simply been a struggle for recovering something old.—Freeman,Historical Essays, iv. 253. Nothing but a thorough knowledge of the social system, based upon a regular study of its growth, can give us the power we require to affect it.—Harrison,Meaning of History, 19. Eine Sache wird nur völlig auf dem Wege verstanden, wie sie selbst entsteht.—In dem genetischen Verfahren sind die Gründe der Sache, auch die Gründe des Erkennens.—Trendelenburg,Logische Untersuchungen, ii. 395, 388.
[8 ]Une telle liberté . . . n’a rien de commun avec le savant système de garanties qui fait libres les peuples modernes.—Boutmy,Annales des Sciences Politiques, i. 157. Les trois grandes réformes qui ont renouvelé l’Angleterre, la liberté religieuse, la réforme parlementaire, et la liberté économique, ont été obtenues sous la pression des organisations extra–constitutionnelles.—Ostrogorski,Revue Historique, lii. 272.
[9 ]The question which is at the bottom of all constitutional struggles, the question between the national will and the national law.—Gardiner,Documents, xviii. Religion, considered simply as the principle which balances the power of human opinion, which takes man out of the grasp of custom and fashion, and teaches him to refer himself to a higher tribunal, is an infinite aid to moral strength and elevation.—Channing,Works, iv. 83. Je tiens que le passé ne suffit jamais au présent. Personne n’est plus disposé que moi à profiter de ses leçons; mais en même temps, je le demande, le présent ne fournit–il pas toujours les indications qui lui sont propres?—Molé, in Falloux,Études et Souvenirs, 130. Admirons la sagesse de nos pères, et tachons de l’imiter, en faisant ce qui convient à notre siècle.—Galiani,Dialogues, 40.
[10 ]Ceterum in legendis Historiis malim te ductum animi, quam anxias leges sequi. Nullae sunt, quae non magnas habeant utilitates; et melius haerent, quae libenter legimus. In universum tamen, non incipere ab antiquissimis, sed ab his, quae nostris temporibus nostraeque notitiae propius cohaerent, ac paulatim deinde in remotiora eniti, magis è re arbitror.—Grotius,Epistolae, 18.
[11 ]The older idea of a law of degeneracy, of a “fatal drift towards the worse,” is as obsolete as astrology or the belief in witchcraft. The human race has become hopeful, sanguine.—Seeley,Rede Lecture, 1887. Fortnightly Review, July 1887, 124.
[12 ]Formuler des idées générales, c’est changer le salpêtre en poudre.—A. de Musset,Confessions d’un Enfant du Siècle, 15. Les révolutions c’est l’avènement des idées libérales. C’est presque toujours par les révolutions qu’elles prévalent et se fondent, et quand les idées libérales en sont véritablement le principe et le but, quand elles leur ont donné naissance, et quand elles les couronnent à leur dernier jour, alors ces révolutions sont légitimes—Rémusat, 1839, in Revue des Deux Mondes, 1875, vi. 335. Il y a même des personnes de piété qui prouvent par raison qu’il faut renoncer à la raison; que ce n’est point la lumière, mais la foi seule qui doit nous conduire, et que l’obéissance aveugle est la principale vertu des chrétiens. La paresse des inférieurs et leur esprit flatteur s’accommode souvent de cette vertu prétendue, et l’orgueil de ceux qui commandent en est toujours très content. De sorte qu’il se trouvera peut–être des gens qui seront scandalisés que je fasse cet honneur à la raison, de l’élever au–dessus de toutes les puissances, et qui s’imagineront que je me révolte contre les autorités légitimes à cause que je prends son parti et que je soutiens que c’est à elle à décider et à regner.—Malebranche,Morale, i. 2, 13. That great statesman (Mr. Pitt) distinctly avowed that the application of philosophy to politics was at that time an innovation, and that it was an innovation worthy to be adopted. He was ready to make the same avowal in the present day which Mr. Pitt had made in 1792.—Canning, 1st June 1827. Parliamentary Review, 1828, 71. American history knows but one avenue of success in American legislation, freedom from ancient prejudice. The best lawgivers in our colonies first became as little children.—Bancroft,History of the United States, i. 494. Every American, from Jefferson and Gallatin down to the poorest squatter, seemed to nourish an idea that he was doing what he could to overthrow the tyranny which the past had fastened on the human mind.—Adams,History of the United States, i. 175.
[13 ]The greatest changes of which we have had experience as yet are due to our increasing knowledge of history and nature. They have been produced by a few minds appearing in three or four favoured nations, in comparatively a short period of time. May we be allowed to imagine the minds of men everywhere working together during many ages for the completion of our knowledge? May not the increase of knowledge transfigure the world?—Jowett,Plato, i. 414. Nothing, I believe, is so likely to beget in us a spirit of enlightened liberality, of Christian forbearance, of large–hearted moderation, as the careful study of the history of doctrine and the history of interpretation.—Perowne,Psalms, i. p. xxxi.
[14 ]Ce n’est guère avant la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle qu’il devint impossible de soutenir l’authenticité des fausses décrétales, des Constitutions apostoliques, des Récognitions Clémentines, du faux Ignace, du pseudo–Dionys, et de l’immense fatras d’œuvres anonymes ou pseudonymes qui grossissait souvent du tiers ou de la moitié l’héritage littéraire des auteurs les plus considérables.—Duchesne,Témoins anténicéens de la Trinité, 1883, 36.
[15 ]A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas.—M. Pattison,Memoirs, 78.
[16 ]Travailler à discerner, dans cette discipline, le solide d’avec le frivole, le vrai d’avec le vraisemblable, la science d’avec l’opinion, ce qui forme le jugement d’avec ce qui ne fait que charger la mémoire.—Lamy,Connoissance de soi–même, v. 459.
[17 ]All our hopes of the future depend on a sound understanding of the past.—Harrison,The Meaning of History, 6.
[18 ]The real history of mankind is that of the slow advance of resolved deed following laboriously just thought; and all the greatest men live in their purpose and effort more than it is possible for them to live in reality.—The things that actually happened were of small consequence—the thoughts that were developed are of infinite consequence.—Ruskin. Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its value.—Macaulay,Works, v. 131.
[19 ]Die Gesetze der Geschichte sind eben die Gesetze der ganzen Menschheit, gehen nicht in die Geschicke eines Volkes, einer Generation oder gar eines Einzelnen auf. Individuen und Geschlechter, Staaten und Nationen, können zerstäuben, die Menschheit bleibt.—A. Schmidt,Züricher Monatsschrift, i. 45.
[20 ]Le grand péril des âges démocratiques, soyez–en sûr, c’est la destruction ou l’affaiblissement excessif des parties du corps social en présence du tout. Tout ce qui relève de nos jours l’idée de l’individu est sain.—Tocqueville, 3rd January 1840, Œuvres, vii. 97. En France, il n’y a plus d’hommes. On a systématiquement tué l’homme au profit du peuple, des masses, comme disent nos législateurs écervelés. Puis un beau jour, on s’est aperçu que ce peuple n’avait jamais existé qu’en projet, que ces masses étaient un troupeau mi–partie de moutons et de tigres. C’est une triste histoire. Nous avons à relever l’âme humaine contre l’aveugle et brutale tyrannie des multitudes. — Lanfrey, 23rd March 1855. M. du Camp,Souvenirs Littéraires, ii. 273. C’est le propre de la vertu d’être invisible, même dans l’histoire, à tout autre œil que celui de la conscience.—Vacherot,Comptes Rendus de l’Institut, lxix. 319. Dans l’histoire où la bonté est la perle rare, qui a été bon passe presque avant qui a été grand.—V. Hugo,Les Misérables, vii. 46. Grosser Maenner Leben und Tod der Wahrheit gemaess mit Liebe zu schildern, ist zu allen Zeiten herzerhebend; am meisten aber dann, wenn im Kreislauf der irdischen Dinge die Sterne wieder aehnlich stehen wie damals als sie unter uns lebten.—Lasaulx,Sokrates, 3. Instead of saying that the history of mankind is the history of the masses, it would be much more true to say that the history of mankind is the history of its great men.—Kingsley,Lectures, 329.
[21 ]Le génie n’est que la plus complète émancipation de toutes les influences de temps, de mœurs et de pays.—Nisard,Souvenirs, ii. 43.
[22 ]Meine kritische Richtung zieht mich in der Wissenschaft durchaus zur Kritik meiner eigenen Gedanken hin, nicht zu der der Gedanken Anderer.—Rothe,Ethik, i. p. xi.
[23 ]When you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form itself into.—Carlyle,On the Choice of Books, 131. Nach allem erscheint es somit unzweifelhaft als eine der psychologischen Voraussetzungen des Strafrechts, ohne welche der Zurechnungsbegriff nicht haltbar wäre, dass der Mensch für seinen Charakter verantwortlich ist und ihn muss abändern können.—Rümelin,Reden und Aufsätze, ii. 60. An der tiefen und verborgenen Quelle, woraus der Wille entspringt, an diesem Punkt, nur hier steht die Freiheit, und führt das Steuer und lenkt den Willen. Wer nicht bis zu dieser Tiefe in sich einkehren und seinen natürlichen Charakter von hier aus bemeistern kann, der hat nicht den Gebrauch seiner Freiheit, der ist nicht frei, sondern unterworfen dem Triebwerk seiner Interessen, und dadurch in der Gewalt des Weltlaufs, worin jede Begebenheit und jede Handlung eine nothwendige Folge ist aller vorhergehenden.—Fischer,Problem der Freiheit, 27.
[24 ]I must regard the main duty of a Professor to consist, not simply in communicating information, but in doing this in such a manner, and with such an accompaniment of subsidiary means, that the information he conveys may be the occasion of awakening his pupils to a vigorous and varied exertion of their faculties.—Sir W. Hamilton,Lectures, i. 14. No great man really does his work by imposing his maxims on his disciples, he evokes their life. The pupil may become much wiser than his instructor, he may not accept his conclusions, but he will own, “You awakened me to be myself; for that I thank you.”—Maurice,The Conscience, 7, 8.
[25 ]Ich sehe die Zeit kommen, wo wir die neuere Geschichte nicht mehr auf die Berichte selbst nicht der gleichzeitigen Historiker, ausser in so weit ihnen neue originale Kenntniss beiwohnte, geschweige denn auf die weiter abgeleiteten Bearbeitungen zu gründen haben, sondern aus den Relationen der Augenzeugen und der ächten und unmittelbarsten Urkunden aufbauen werden.—Ranke,Reformation, Preface, 1838. Ce qu’on a trouvé et mis en œuvre est considérable en soi: c’est peu de chose au prix de ce qui reste à trouver et à mettre en œuvre.—Aulard,Études sur la Révolution, 21.
[26 ]N’attendez donc pas les leçons de l’expérience; elles coûtent trop cher aux nations.—O. Barrot,Mémoires, ii. 435. Il y a des leçons dans tous les temps, pour tous les temps; et celles qu’on emprunte à des ennemis ne sont pas les moins précieuses.—Lanfrey,Napoléon, v. p. ii. Old facts may always be fresh, and may give out a fresh meaning for each generation.—Maurice,Lectures, 62. The object is to lead the student to attend to them; to make him take interest in history not as a mere narrative, but as a chain of causes and effects still unwinding itself before our eyes, and full of momentous consequences to himself and his descendants—an unremitting conflict between good and evil powers, of which every act done by any one of us, insignificant as we are, forms one of the incidents; a conflict in which even the smallest of us cannot escape from taking part, in which whoever does not help the right side is helping the wrong.—Mill,Inaugural Address, 59.
[27 ]I hold that the degree in which Poets dwell in sympathy with the Past, marks exactly the degree of their poetical faculty.—Wordsworth, in C. Fox,Memoirs, June 1842. In all political, all social, all human questions whatever, history is the main resource of the inquirer.—Harrison,Meaning of History, 15. There are no truths which more readily gain the assent of mankind, or are more firmly retained by them, than those of an historical nature, depending upon the testimony of others.—Priestley,Letters to French Philosophers, 9. Improvement consists in bringing our opinions into nearer agreement with facts; and we shall not be likely to do this while we look at facts only through glasses coloured by those very opinions.—Mill,Inaugural Address, 25.
[28 ]He who has learnt to understand the true character and tendency of many succeeding ages is not likely to go very far wrong in estimating his own.—Lecky,Value of History, 21. C’est à l’histoire qu’il faut se prendre, c’est le fait que nous devons interroger, quand l’idée vacille et fuit à nos yeux.—Michelet,Disc. d’Ouverture, 263. C’est la loi des faits telle qu’elle se manifeste dans leur succession. C’est la règle de conduite donnée par la nature humaine et indiquée par l’histoire. C’est la logique, mais cette logique qui ne fait qu’un avec l’enchaînement des choses. C’est l’enseignement de l’expérience.—Scherer,Mélanges, 558. Wer seine Vergangenheit nicht als seine Geschichte hat und weiss wird und ist characterlos Wem ein Ereigniss sein Sonst plötzlich abreisst von seinem Jetzt wird leicht wurzellos.—Kliefoth,Rheinwalds Repertorium, xliv. 20. La politique est une des meilleures écoles pour l’esprit. Elle force à chercher la raison de toutes choses, et ne permet pas cependant de la chercher hors des faits.—Rémusat,Le Temps Passé, i. 31. It is an unsafe partition that divides opinions without principle from unprincipled opinions.—Coleridge,Lay Sermons, 373
- Wer nicht von drei tausend Jahren sich weiss Rechenschaft zu geben,
- Bleib’ im Dunkeln unerfahren, mag von Tag zu Tage leben!
- Goethe.
What can be rationally required of the student of philosophy is not a preliminary and absolute, but a gradual and progressive, abrogation of prejudices.—Sir W. Hamilton,Lectures, iv. 92.
[29 ]Die Schlacht bei Leuthen ist wohl die letzte, in welcher diese religiösen Gegensätze entscheidend eingewirkt haben. — Ranke,Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vii. 70.
[30 ]The only real cry in the country is the proper and just old No Popery cry.—Major Beresford, July 1847. Unfortunately the strongest bond of union amongst them is an apprehension of Popery.—Stanley, 12th September 1847. The great Protectionist party having degenerated into a No Popery, No Jew Party, I am still more unfit now than I was in 1846 to lead it.—G. Bentinck, 26th December 1847; Croker’s Memoirs, iii. 116, 132, 157.
[31 ]In the case of Protestantism, this constitutional instability is now a simple matter of fact, which has become too plain to be denied. The system is not fixed, but in motion; and the motion is for the time in the direction of complete self–dissolution.—We take it for a transitory scheme, whose breaking up is to make room in due time for another and far more perfect state of the Church.—The new order in which Protestantism is to become thus complete cannot be reached without the co–operation and help of Romanism.—Nevin,Mercersburg Review, iv. 48.
[32 ]Diese Heiligen waren es, die aus dem unmittelbaren Glaubensleben und den Grundgedanken der christlichen Freiheit zuerst die Idee allgemeiner Menschenrechte abgeleitet und rein von Selbstsucht vertheidigt haben.—Weingarten,Revolutionskirchen, 447. Wie selbst die Idee allgemeiner Menschenrechte, die in dem gemeinsamen Character der Ebenbildlichkeit Gottes gegründet sind, erst durch das Christenthum zum Bewusstsein gebracht werden, während jeder andere Eifer für politische Freiheit als ein mehr oder weniger selbstsüchtiger und beschränkter sich erwiesen hat.—Neander,Pref. to Uhden’s Wilberforce, p. v. The rights of individuals and the justice due to them are as dear and precious as those of states; indeed the latter are founded on the former, and the great end and object of them must be to secure and support the rights of individuals, or else vain is government.—Cushing, in Conway,Life of Paine, i. 217. As it is owned the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood; so, if it ever comes to be understood, before the restitution of all things, and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the same way as natural knowledge is come at—by the continuance and progress of learning and liberty.—Butler,Analogy, ii. 3.
[33 ]Comme les lois elles–mêmes sont faillibles, et qu’il peut y avoir une autre justice que la justice écrite, les sociétés modernes ont voulu garantir les droits de la conscience à la poursuite d’une justice meilleure que celle qui existe; et là est le fondement de ce qu’on appelle liberté de conscience, liberté d’écrire, liberté de pensée.—Janet,Philosophie Contemporaine, 308. Si la force matérielle a toujours fini par céder à l’opinion, combien plus ne sera–t–elle pas contrainte de céder à la conscience? Car la conscience, c’est l’opinion renforcée par le sentiment de l’obligation.—Vinet,Liberté Religieuse, 3.
[34 ]Après la volonté d’un homme, la raison d’état; après la raison d’état, la religion; après la religion, la liberté. Voilà toute la philosophie de l’histoire.—Flottes,La Souveraineté du Peuple, 1851, 192. La répartition plus égale des biens et des droits dans ce monde est le plus grand objet que doivent se proposer ceux qui mènent les affaires humaines. Je veux seulement que l’égalité en politique consiste à être également libre.—Tocqueville, 10th September 1856. Mme. Swetchine, i. 455. On peut concevoir une législation très simple, lorsqu’on voudra en écarter tout ce qui est arbitraire, ne consulter que les deux premières lois de la liberté et de la propriété, et ne point admettre de lois positives qui ne tirent leur raison de ces deux lois souveraines de la justice essentielle et absolue.—Letrosne,Vues sur la Justice Criminelle, 16. Summa enim libertas est, ad optimum recta ratione cogi.—Nemo optat sibi hanc libertatem, volendi quae velit, sed potius volendi optima.—Leibniz,De Fato.Trendelenburg,Beiträge zur Philosophie, ii. 190.
[35 ]All the world is, by the very law of its creation, in eternal progress; and the cause of all the evils of the world may be traced to that natural, but most deadly error of human indolence and corruption, that our business is to preserve and not to improve.—Arnold,Life, i. 259. In whatever state of knowledge we may conceive man to be placed, his progress towards a yet higher state need never fear a check, but must continue till the last existence of society.—Herschel,Prel. Dis. 360. It is in the development of thought as in every other development; the present suffers from the past, and the future struggles hard in escaping from the present.—Max Müller,Science of Thought, 617. Most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty in any sense implying suffering may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society combined with the good sense and providence of individuals.—All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.—J. S. Mill,Utilitarianism, 21, 22. The ultimate standard of worth is personal worth, and the only progress that is worth striving after, the only acquisition that is truly good and enduring, is the growth of the soul.—Bixby,Crisis of Morals, 210. La science, et l’industrie qu’elle produit, ont, parmi tous les autres enfants du génie de l’homme, ce privilège particulier, que leur vol non–seulement ne peut pas s’interrompre, mais qu’il s’accélère sans cesse.—Cuvier,Discours sur la Marche des Sciences, 24 Avril 1816. Aucune idée parmi celles qui se réfèrent à l’ordre des faits naturels, ne tient de plus près à la famille des idées religieuses que l’idée du progrès, et n’est plus propre à devenir le principe d’une sorte de foi religieuse pour ceux qui n’en ont pas d’autres. Elle a, comme la foi religieuse, la vertu de relever les âmes et les caractères.—Cournot,Marche des Idées, ii. 425. Dans le spectacle de l’humanité errante, souffrante et travaillant toujours à mieux voir, à mieux penser, à mieux agir, à diminuer l’infirmité de l’être humain, à apaiser l’inquiétude de son cœur, la science découvre une direction et un progrès.—A Sorel,Discours de Réception, 14. Le jeune homme qui commence son éducation quinze ans après son père, à une époque où celui–ci, engagé dans une profession spéciale et active, ne peut que suivre les anciens principes, acquiert une supériorité théorique dont on doit tenir compte dans la hiérarchie sociale. Le plus souvent le père n’est–il pas pénétré de l’esprit de routine, tandis que le fils représente et défend la science progressive? En diminuant l’écart qui existait entre l’influence des jeunes générations et celle de la vieillesse ou de l’âge mûr, les peuples modernes n’auraient donc fait que reproduire dans leur ordre social un changement de rapports qui s’était déjà accompli dans la nature intime des choses.—Boutmy,Revue Nationale, xxi. 393. Il y a dans l’homme individuel des principes de progrès viager; il y a, en toute société, des causes constantes qui transforment ce progrès viager en progrès héréditaire. Une société quelconque tend à progresser tant que les circonstances ne touchent pas aux causes de progrès que nous avons reconnues, l’imitation des dévanciers par les successeurs, des étrangers par les indigènes.—Lacombe,L’Histoire comme Science, 292. Veram creatae mentis beatitudinem consistere in non impedito progressu ad bona majora.—Leibniz to Wolf, 21st February 1705. In cumulum etiam pulchritudinis perfectionisque universalis operum divinorum progressus quidam perpetuus liberrimusque totius universi est agnoscendus, ita ut ad majorem semper cultum procedat.—Leibniz ed. Erdmann, 150a. Der Creaturen und also auch unsere Vollkommenheit bestehen in einem ungehinderten starken Forttrieb zu neuen und neuen Vollkommenheiten.—Leibniz,Deutsche Schriften, ii. 36. Hegel, welcher annahm, der Fortschritt der Neuzeit gegen das Mittelalter sei dieser, dass die Principien der Tugend und des Christenthums, welche im Mittelalter sich allein im Privatleben und der Kirche zur Geltung gebracht hätten, nun auch anfingen, das politische Leben zu durchdringen.—Fortlage,Allg. Monatsschrift, 1853, 777. Wir Slawen wissen, dass die Geister einzelner Menschen und ganzer Völker sich nur durch die Stufe ihrer Entwicklung unterscheiden.—Mickiewicz,Slawische Literatur, ii. 436. Le progrès ne disparait jamais, mais il se déplace souvent. Il va des gouvernants aux gouvernés. La tendance des révolutions est de le ramener toujours parmi les gouvernants. Lorsqu’il est à la tête des sociétés, il marche hardiment, car il conduit. Lorsqu’il est dans la masse, il marche à pas lents, car il lutte.—Napoleon III., Des Idées Napoléoniennes. La loi du progrès avait jadis l’inexorable rigueur du destin; elle prend maintenant de jour en jour la douce puissance de la Providence. C’est l’erreur, c’est l’iniquité, c’est le vice, que la civilisation tend à emporter dans sa marche irrésistible; mais la vie des individus et des peuples est devenue pour elle une chose sacrée. Elle transforme plutôt qu’elle ne détruit les choses qui s’opposent à son développement; elle procède par absorption graduelle plutôt que par brusque exécution; elle aime à conquérir par l’influence des idées plutôt que par la force des armes, un peuple, une classe, une institution qui résiste au progrès. — Vacherot,Essais de Philosophie Critique, 443. Peu à peu l’homme intellectuel finit par effacer l’homme physique.—Quetelet,De l’Homme, ii. 285, In dem Fortschritt der ethischen Anschauungen liegt daher der Kern des geschichtlichen Fortschritts überhaupt.—Schäfer,Arbeitsgebiet der Geschichte, 24. Si l’homme a plus de devoirs à mesure qu’il avance en âge, ce qui est mélancolique, mais ce qui est vrai, de même aussi l’humanité est tenue d’avoir une morale plus sévère à mesure qu’elle prend plus de siècles.—Faguet,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1894, iii. 871. Si donc il y a une loi de progrès, elle se confond avec la loi morale, et la condition fondamentale du progrès, c’est la pratique de cette loi.—Carrau,Ib. 1875, v. 585. L’idée du progrès, du développement, me paraît être l’idée fondamentale contenue sous le mot de civilisation.—Guizot,Cours d’Histoire, 1828, 15. Le progrès n’est sous un autre nom, que la liberté en action.—Broglie,Journal des Débats, 28th January 1869. Le progrès social est continu. Il a ses périodes de fièvre ou d’atonie, de surexcitation ou de léthargie; il a ses soubresauts et ses haltes, mais il avance toujours.—De Decker,La Providence, 174. Ce n’est pas au bonheur seul, c’est au perfectionnement que notre destin nous appelle; et la liberté politique est le plus puissant, le plus énergique moyen de perfectionnement que le ciel nous ait donné.—B. Constant,Cours de Politique, il. 559. To explode error, on whichever side it lies, is certainly to secure progress.—Martineau,Essays, i. 114. Die sämmtlichen Freiheitsrechte, welche der heutigen Menschheit so theuer sind, sind im Grunde nur Anwendungen des Rechts der Entwickelung. — Bluntschli,Kleine Schriften, i. 51. Geistiges Leben ist auf Freiheit beruhende Entwicklung, mit Freiheit vollzogene That und geschichtlicher Fortschritt.—Münchner Gel. Anzeigen, 1849, ii. 83. Wie das Denken erst nach und nach reift, so wird auch der freie Wille nicht fertig geboren, sondern in der Entwickelung erworben. — Trendelenburg,Logische Untersuchungen, ii. 94. Das Liberum Arbitrium im vollen Sinne (die vollständig aktuelle Macht der Selbstbestimmung) lässt sich seinem Begriff zufolge schlechterdings nicht unmittelbar geben; es kann nur erworben werden durch das Subjekt selbst, in sich moralisch hervorgebracht werden kraft seiner eigenen Entwickelung. — Rothe,Ethik, 1. 360. So gewaltig sei der Andrang der Erfindungen und Entdeckungen, dass “Entwicklungsperioden, die in früheren Zeiten erst in Jahrhunderten durchlaufen wurden, die im Beginn unserer Zeitperiode noch der Jahrzehnte bedurften, sich heute in Jahren vollenden, häufig schon in voller Ausbildung ins Dasein treten.”—Philippovich,Fortschritt und Kulturentwicklung, 1892, i., quoting Siemens, 1886. Wir erkennen dass dem Menschen die schwere körperliche Arbeit, von der er in seinem Kampfe um’s Dasein stets schwer niedergedrückt war und grossenteils noch ist, mehr und mehr durch die wachsende Benutzung der Naturkräfte zur mechanischen Arbeitsleistung abgenommen wird, dass die ihm zufallende Arbeit immer mehr eine intellektuelle wird.—Siemens, 1886, Ib. 6.
[36 ]Once, however, he wrote:—Darin könnte man den idealen Kern der Geschichte des menschlichen Geschlechtes überhaupt sehen, dass in den Kämpfen, die sich in den gegenseitigen Interessen der Staaten und Völker vollziehen, doch immer höhere Potenzen emporkommen, die das Allgemeine demgemäss umgestalten und ihm wieder einen anderen Charakter verleihen.—Ranke,Weltgeschichte, iii. 1, 6.
[37 ]Toujours et partout, les hommes furent de plus en plus dominés par l’ensemble de leurs prédécesseurs, dont ils purent seulement modifier l’empire nécessaire.—Comte,Politique Positive, iii. 621.
[38 ]La liberté est l’âme du commerce.—Il faut laisser faire les hommes qui s’appliquent sans peine à ce qui convient le mieux; c’est ce qui apporte le plus d’avantage.—Colbert, in Comptes Rendus de l’Institut, xxxix. 93.
[39 ]Il n’y a que les choses humaines exposées dans leur vérité, c’est–à–dire avec leur grandeur, leur variété, leur inépuisable fécondité, qui aient le droit de retenir le lecteur et qui le retiennent en effet. Si l’écrivain parait une fois, il ennuie ou fait sourire de pitié les lecteurs sérieux.—Thiers to Ste. Beuve,Lundis, iii. 195. Comme l’a dit Taine, la disparition du style, c’est la perfection du style.—Faguet,Revue Politique, lii. 67.
[40 ]Ne m’applaudissez pas; ce n’est pas moi qui vous parle; c’est l’histoire qui parle par ma bouche.—Revue Historique, xli. 278.
[41 ]Das Evangelium trat als Geschichte in die Welt, nicht als Dogma—wurde als Geschichte in der christlichen Kirche deponirt.—Rothe,Kirchengeschichte, ii. p. x. Das Christenthum ist nicht der Herr Christus, sondern dieser macht es. Es ist sein Werk, und zwar ein Werk, das er stets unter der Arbeit hat.—Er selbst, Christus der Herr, bleibt, der er ist in alle Zukunft, dagegen liegt es ausdrücklich im Begriffe seines Werks, des Christenthums, dass es nicht so bleibt, wie es anhebt.—Rothe,Allgemeine kirchliche Zeitschrift, 1864, 299. Diess Werk, weil es dem Wesen der Geschichte zufolge eine Entwickelung ist, muss über Stufen hinweggehen, die einander ablösen, und von denen jede folgende neue immer nur unter der Zertrümmerung der ihr vorangehenden Platz greifen kann.—Rothe,Ib. 19th April 1865. Je grösser ein geschichtliches Princip ist, desto langsamer und über mehr Stufen hinweg entfaltet es seinen Gehalt; desto langlebiger ist es aber ebendeshalb auch in diesen seinen unaufhörlichen Abwandelungen.—Rothe,Stille Stunden, 301. Der christliche Glaube geht nicht von der Anerkennung abstracter Lehrwahrheiten aus, sondern von der Anerkennung einer Reihe von Thatsachen, die in der Erscheinung Jesu ihren Mittelpunkt haben.—Nitzsch,Dogmengeschichte, i. 17. Der Gedankengang der evangelischen Erzählung gibt darum auch eine vollständige Darstellung der christlichen Lehre in ihren wesentlichen Grundzügen; aber er gibt sie im allseitigen lebendigen Zusammenhange mit der Geschichte der christlichen Offenbarung, und nicht in einer theoretisch zusammenhängenden Folgenreihe von ethischen und dogmatischen Lehrsätzen.—Deutinger,Reich Gottes, i. p. v.
[42 ]L’Univers ne doit pas estre considéré seulement dans ce qu’il est; pour le bien connoître, il faut le voir aussi dans ce qu’il doit estre. C’est cet avenir surtout qui a été le grand objet de Dieu dans la création, et c’est pour cet avenir seul que le présent existe.—D’Houteville,Essai sur la Providence, 273. La Providence emploie les siècles à élever toujours un plus grand nombre de familles et d’individus à ces biens de la liberté et de l’égalité légitimes que, dans l’enfance des sociétés, la force avait rendus le privilège de quelques–uns.—Guizot,Gouvernement de la France, 1820, 9. La marche de la Providence n’est pas assujettie à d’étroites limites; elle ne s’inquiète pas de tirer aujourd’hui la conséquence du principe qu’elle a posé hier; elle la tirera dans des siècles, quand l’heure sera venue; et pour raisonner lentement selon nous, sa logique n’est pas moins sûre.—Guizot,Histoire de la Civilisation, 20. Der Keim fortschreitender Entwicklung ist, auch auf göttlichem Geheisse, der Menschheit eingepflanzt. Die Weltgeschichte ist der blosse Ausdruck einer vorbestimmten Entwicklung.—A. Humboldt, 2nd January 1842, Im Neuen Reich, 1872, i. 197. Das historisch grosse ist religiös gross; es ist die Gottheit selbst, die sich offenbart.—Raumer, April 1807, Erinnerungen, i. 85.
[43 ]Je suis arrivé à l’âge où je suis, à travers bien des évènements différents, mais avec une seule cause, celle de la liberté régulière.—Tocqueville, 1st May 1852, Œuvres Inédites, ii. 185. Me trouvant dans un pays où la religion et le libéralisme sont d’accord, j’avais respiré.—J’exprimais ce sentiment, il y a plus de vingt ans, dans l’avant–propos de la Démocratie. Je l’éprouve aujourd’hui aussi vivement que si j’étais encore jeune, et je ne sais s’il y a une seule pensée qui ait été plus constamment présente à mon esprit.—5th August 1857, Œuvres, vi. 395. Il n’y a que la liberté (j’entends la modérée et la régulière) et la religion, qui, par un effort combiné, puissent soulever les hommes au–dessus du bourbier où l’égalité démocratique les plonge naturellement.—1st December 1852, Œuvres, vii. 295. L un de mes rêves, le principal en entrant dans la vie politique, était de travailler à concilier l’esprit libéral et l’esprit de religion, la société nouvelle et l’église.—15th November 1843, Œuvres Inédites, ii. 121. La véritable grandeur de l’homme n’est que dans l’accord du sentiment libéral et du sentiment religieux.—17th September 1853, Œuvres Inédites, ii. 228. Qui cherche dans la liberté autre chose qu’elle–même est fait pour servir.—Ancien Régime, 248. Je regarde, ainsi que je l’ai toujours fait, la liberté comme le premier des biens; je vois toujours en elle l’une des sources les plus fécondes des vertus mâles et des actions grandes. Il n’y a pas de tranquillité ni de bien–être qui puisse me tenir lieu d’elle.—7th January 1856, Mme. Swetchine, i. 452. La liberté a un faux air d’aristocratie; en donnant pleine carrière aux facultés humaines, en encourageant le travail et l’économie, elle fait ressortir les supériorités naturelles ou acquises.—Laboulaye,L’État et ses Limites, 154. Dire que la liberté n’est point par elle–même, qu’elle dépend d’une situation, d’une opportunité, c’est lui assigner une valeur négative. La liberté n’est pas dès qu’on la subordonne. Elle n’est pas un principe purement négatif, un simple élément de contrôle et de critique. Elle est le principe actif, créateur organisateur par excellence. Elle est le moteur et la règle, la source de toute vie, et le principe de l’ordre. Elle est, en un mot, le nom que prend la conscience souveraine, lorsque, se posant en face du monde social et politique, elle émerge du moi pour modeler les sociétés sur les données de la raison.—Brisson,Revue Nationale, xxiii. 214. Le droit, dans l’histoire, est le développement progressif de la liberté, sous la loi de la raison.—Lerminier,Philosophie du Droit, i. 211. En prouvant par les leçons de l’histoire que la liberté fait vivre les peuples et que le despotisme les tue, en montrant que l’expiation suit la faute et que la fortune finit d’ordinaire par se ranger du côté de la vertu, Montesquieu n’est ni moins moral ni moins religieux que Bossuet.—Laboulaye,Œuvres de Montesquieu, ii. 109. Je ne comprendrais pas qu’une nation ne plaçât pas les libertés politiques au premier rang, parce que c’est des libertés politiques que doivent découler toutes les autres.—Thiers,Discours, x. 8, 28th March 1865. Nous sommes arrivés à une époque où la liberté est le but sérieux de tous, où le reste n’est plus qu’une question de moyens.—J. Lebeau,Observations sur le Pouvoir Royal: Liège, 1830, p. 10. Le libéralisme, ayant la prétention de se fonder uniquement sur les principes de la raison, croit d’ordinaire n’avoir pas besoin de tradition. Là est son erreur. L’erreur de l’école libérale est d’avoir trop cru qu’il est facile de créer la liberté par la réflexion, et de n’avoir pas vu qu’un établissement n’est solide que quand il a des racines historiques.—Renan, 1858, Nouvelle Revue, lxxix. 596. Le respect des individus et des droits existants est autant au–dessus du bonheur de tous, qu’un intérêt moral surpasse un intérêt purement temporel.—Renan, 1858, Ib. lxxix. 597. Die Rechte gelten nichts, wo es sich handelt um das Recht, und das Recht der Freiheit kann nie verjähren, weil es die Quelle alles Rechtes selbst ist.—C. Frantz,Ueber die Freiheit, 110. Wir erfahren hienieden nie die ganze Wahrheit: wir geniessen nie die ganze Freiheit.—Reuss,Reden, 56. Le gouvernement constitutionnel, comme tout gouvernement libre, présente et doit présenter un état de lutte permanent. La liberté est la perpétuité de la lutte.—De Serre. Broglie,Nouvelles Études, 243. The experiment of free government is not one which can be tried once for all. Every generation must try it for itself. As each new generation starts up to the responsibilities of manhood, there is, as it were, a new launch of Liberty, and its voyage of experiment begins afresh.—Winthrop,Addresses, 163. L’histoire perd son véritable caractère du moment que la liberté en a disparu; elle devient une sorte de physique sociale. C’est l’élément personnel de l’histoire qui en fait la réalité.—Vacherot,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1869, iv. 215. Demander la liberté pour soi et la refuser aux autres, c’est la définition du despotisme.—Laboulaye, 4th December 1874. Les causes justes profitent de tout, des bonnes intentions comme des mauvaises, des calculs personnels comme des dévouemens courageux, de la démence, enfin, comme de la raison.—B. Constant,Les Cent Jours, ii. 29. Sie ist die Kunst, das Gute der schon weit gediehenen Civilisation zu sichern.—Baltisch,Politische Freiheit, 9. In einem Volke, welches sich zur bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, überhaupt zum Bewusstseyn der Unendlichkeit des Freien—entwickelt hat, ist nur die constitutionelle Monarchie möglich.—Hegel’sPhilosophie des Rechts, § 137, Hegel und Preussen, 1841, 31. Freiheit ist das höchste Gut. Alles andere ist nur das Mittel dazu: gut falls es ein Mittel dazu ist, übel falls es dieselbe hemmt.—Fichte,Werke, iv. 403. You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured. For liberty ought to be the direct end of your government.—Patrick Henry, 1788; Wirt,Life of Henry, 272.
[44 ]Historiae ipsius praeter delectationem utilitas nulla est, quam ut religionis Christianae veritas demonstretur, quod aliter quam per historiam fieri non potest.—Leibniz,Opera, ed. Dutens, vi. 297. The study of Modern History is, next to Theology itself, and only next in so far as Theology rests on a divine revelation, the most thoroughly religious training that the mind can receive. It is no paradox to say that Modern History, including Medieval History in the term, is co–extensive in its field of view, in its habits of criticism, in the persons of its most famous students, with Ecclesiastical History.—Stubbs,Lectures, 9. Je regarde donc l’étude de l’histoire comme l’étude de la providence.—L’histoire est vraiment une seconde philosophie.—Si Dieu ne parle pas toujours, il agit toujours en Dieu.—D’Aguesseau,Œuvres, xv. 34, 31, 35. Für diejenigen, welche das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit erkannt haben, bildet die denkende Betrachtung der Weltgeschichte, besonders des christlichen Weltalters, die höchste, und umfassendste Theodicee.—Vatke,Die Menschliche Freiheit, 1841, 516. La théologie, que l’on regarde volontiers comme la plus étroite et la plus stérile des sciences, en est, au contraire, la plus étendue et la plus féconde. Elle confine à toutes les études et touche à toutes les questions. Elle renferme tous les éléments d’une instruction libérale.—Scherer,Mélanges, 522. The belief that the course of events and the agency of man are subject to the laws of a divine order, which it is alike impossible for any one either fully to comprehend or effectually to resist—this belief is the ground of all our hope for the future destinies of mankind.—Thirlwall,Remains, iii. 282. A true religion must consist of ideas and facts both; not of ideas alone without facts, for then it would be mere philosophy; nor of facts alone without ideas, of which those facts are the symbols, or out of which they are grounded; for then it would be mere history.—Coleridge,Table Talk, 144. It certainly appears strange that the men most conversant with the order of the visible universe should soonest suspect it empty of directing mind; and, on the other hand, that humanistic, moral and historical studies—which first open the terrible problems of suffering and grief, and contain all the reputed provocatives of denial and despair—should confirm, and enlarge rather than disturb, the prepossessions of natural piety.—Martineau,Essays, i. 122. Die Religion hat nur dann eine Bedeutung für den Menschen, wenn er in der Geschichte einen Punkt findet, dem er sich völlig unbedingt hingeben kann.—Steffens,Christliche Religionsphilosophie, 440, 1839. Wir erkennen darin nur eine Thätigkeit des zu seinem ächten und wahren Leben, zu seinem verlornen, objectiven Selbstverständnisse sich zurücksehnenden christlichen Geistes unserer Zeit, einen Ausdruck für das Bedürfniss desselben, sich aus den unwahren und unächten Verkleidungen, womit ihn der moderne, subjective Geschmack der letzten Entwicklungsphase des theologischen Bewusstseyns umhüllt hat, zu seiner historischen allein wahren und ursprünglichen Gestalt wiederzugebären, zu derjenigen Bedeutung zurückzukehren, die ihm in dem Bewusstseyn der Geschichte allein zukommt und deren Verständniss in dem wogenden luxuriösen Leben der modernen Theologie längst untergegangen ist.—Georgii,Zeitschrift für Hist. Theologie, ix. 5, 1839.
[45 ]Liberty, in fact, means just so far as it is realised, the right man in the right place.—Seeley,Lectures and Essays, 109.
[46 ]In diesem Sinne ist Freiheit und sich entwickelnde moralische Vernunft und Gewissen gleichbedeutend. In diesen Sinne ist der Mensch frei, sobald sich das Gewissen in ihm entwickelt.—Scheidler,Ersch und Gruber, xlix. 20. Aus der unendlichen und ewigen Geltung der menschlichen Persönlichkeit vor Gott, aus der Vorstellung von der in Gott freien Persönlichkeit, folgt auch der Anspruch auf das Recht derselben in der weltlichen Sphäre, auf bürgerliche und politische Freiheit, auf Gewissen und Religionsfreiheit, auf freie wissenschaftliche Forschung u.s.w., und namentlich die Forderung, dass niemand lediglich zum Mittel für andere diene.—Martensen,Christliche Ethik, i. 50.
[47 ]Es giebt angeborne Menschenrechte, weil es angeborne Menschenpflichten giebt.—Wolff,Naturrecht;Loeper,Einleitung zu Faust, lvii.
[48 ]La constitution de l’état reste jusqu’à un certain point à notre discrétion. La constitution de la société ne dépend pas de nous; elle est donnée par la force des choses, et si l’on veut élever le langage, elle est l’œuvre de la Providence.—Rémusat,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1861, v. 795.
[49 ]Die Freiheit ist bekanntlich kein Geschenk der Götter, sondern ein, Gut das jedes Volk sich selbst verdankt und das nur bei dem erforderlichen Mass moralischer Kraft und Würdigkeit gedeiht.—Ihering,Geist des Römischen Rechts, ii. 290. Liberty, in the very nature of it, absolutely requires, and even supposes, that people be able to govern themselves in those respects in which they are free; otherwise their wickedness will be in proportion to their liberty, and this greatest of blessings will become a curse.—Butler,Sermons, 331. In each degree and each variety of public development there are corresponding institutions, best answering the public needs; and what is meat to one is poison to another. Freedom is for those who are fit for it.—Parkman,Canada, 396. Die Freiheit ist die Wurzel einer neuen Schöpfung in der Schöpfung.—Sederholm,Die ewigen Thatsachen, 86.
[50 ]La liberté politique, qui n’est qu’une complexité plus grande, de plus en plus grande, dans le gouvernement d’un peuple, à mesure que le peuple lui–même contient un plus grand nombre de forces diverses ayant droit et de vivre et de participer à la chose publique, est un fait de civilisation qui s’impose lentement à une société organisée, mais qui n’apparait point comme un principe à une société qui s’organise.—Faguet,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1889, ii. 942.
[51 ]Il y a bien un droit du plus sage, mais non pas un droit du plus fort.—La justice est le droit du plus faible.—Joubert,Pensées, i. 355, 358.
[52 ]Nicht durch ein pflanzenähnliches Wachsthum, nicht aus den dunklen Gründen der Volksempfindung, sondern durch den männlichen Willen, durch die Ueberzeugung, durch die That, durch den Kampf entsteht, behauptet, entwickelt sich das Recht. Sein historisches Werden ist ein bewusstes, im hellen Mittagslicht der Erkenntniss und der Gesetzgebung.—Rundschau, November 1893, 13. Nicht das Normale, Zahme, sondern das Abnorme, Wilde, bildet überall die Grundlage und den Anfang einer neuen Ordnung.—Lasaulx,Philosophie der Geschichte, 143.
[53 ]Um den Sieg zu vervollständigen, erübrigte das zweite Stadium oder die Aufgabe: die Berechtigung der Mehrheit nach allen Seiten hin zur gleichen Berechtigung aller zu erweitern, d.h. bis zur Gleichstellung aller Bekenntnisse im Kirchenrecht, aller Völker im Völkerrecht, aller Staatsbürger im Staatsrecht und aller socialen Interessen im Gesellschaftsrecht fortzuführen.—A. Schmidt,Züricher Monatschrift, i. 68.
[54 ]Notre histoire ne nous enseignait nullement la liberté. Le jour où la France voulut être libre, elle eut tout à créer, tout à inventer dans cet ordre de faits.—Cependant il faut marcher, l’avenir appelle les peuples. Quand on n’a point pour cela l’impulsion du passé, il faut bien se confier à la raison.—Dupont White,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1861, vi. 191. Le peuple français a peu de goût pour le développement graduel des institutions. Il ignore son histoire, il ne s’y reconnaît pas, elle n’a pas laissé de trace dans sa conscience.—Scherer,Études Critiques, i. 100. Durch die Revolution befreiten sich die Franzosen von ihrer Geschichte.—Rosenkranz,Aus einem Tagebuch, 199.
[55 ]The discovery of the comparative method in philology, in mythology—let me add in politics and history and the whole range of human thought—marks a stage in the progress of the human mind at least as great and memorable as the revival of Greek and Latin learning.—Freeman,Historical Essays, iv. 301. The diffusion of a critical spirit in history and literature is affecting the criticism of the Bible in our own day in a manner not unlike the burst of intellectual life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.—Jowett,Essays and Reviews, 346. As the revival of literature in the sixteenth century produced the Reformation, so the growth of the critical spirit, and the change that has come over mental science, and the mere increase of knowledge of all kinds, threaten now a revolution less external but not less profound.—Haddan,Replies, 348.
[56 ]In his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence, and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of His goodness.—Coleridge,Biographia Literaria, ii. 240. In other parts of the world, the idea of revolutions in government is, by a mournful and indissoluble association, connected with the idea of wars, and all the calamities attendant on wars. But happy experience teaches us to view such revolutions in a very different light—to consider them only as progressive steps in improving the knowledge of government, and increasing the happiness of society and mankind.—J. Wilson, 26th November 1787, Works, iii. 293. La Révolution, c’est–à–dire l’œuvre des siècles, ou, si vous voulez, le renouvellement progressif de la société, ou encore, sa nouvelle constitution.—Rémusat,Correspondance, 11th October 1818. A ses yeux loin d’avoir rompu le cours naturel des évènements, ni la Révolution d’Angleterre, ni la nôtre, n’ont rien dit, rien fait, qui n’eût été dit, souhaité, fait, ou tenté cent fois avant leur explosion. “Il faut en ceci,” dit–il, “tout accorder à leurs adversaires, les surpasser même en sévérité, ne regarder à leurs accusations que pour y ajouter, s’ils en oublient; et puis les sommer de dresser, à leur tour, le compte des erreurs, des crimes, et des maux de ces temps et de ces pouvoirs qu’ils ont pris sous leur garde.”—Revue de Paris, xvi. 303, on Guizot. Quant aux nouveautés mises en œuvre par la Révolution Française on les retrouve une à une, en remontant d’âge en âge, chez les philosophes du XVIIIe siècle, chez les grands penseurs du XVIe, chez certains Pères d’Église et jusque dans la République de Platon.—En présence de cette belle continuité de l’histoire, qui ne fait pas plus de sauts que la nature, devant cette solidarité nécessaire des révolutions avec le passé qu’elles brisent.—Krantz,Revue Politique, xxxiii. 264. L’esprit du XIXe siècle est de comprendre et de juger les choses du passé. Notre œuvre est d’expliquer ce que le XVIIIe siècle avait mission de nier.—Vacherot,De la Démocratie, pref., 28.
[57 ]La commission recherchera, dans toutes les parties des archives pontificales, les pièces relatives à l’abus que les papes ont fait de leur ministère spirituel contre l’autorité des souveraines et la tranquillité des peuples.—Daunou,Instructions, 3rd January 1811. Laborde,Inventaires, p. cxii.
[58 ]Aucun des historiens remarquables de cette époque n’avait senti encore le besoin de chercher les faits hors des livres imprimés, aux sources primitives, la plupart inédites alors, aux manuscrits de nos bibliothèques, aux documents de nos archives.—Michelet,Histoire de France, 1869, i. 2.
[59 ]Doch besteht eine Grenze, wo die Geschichte aufhört und das Archiv anfängt, und die von der Geschichtschreibung nicht überschritten werden sollte. Unsere Zeit, 1866, ii. 635. Il faut avertir nos jeunes historiens à la fois de la nécessité inéluctable du document et, d’autre part, du danger qu’il présente.—M. Hanotaux.
[60 ]This process consists in determining with documentary proofs, and by minute investigations duly set forth, the literal, precise, and positive inferences to be drawn at the present day from every authentic statement, without regard to commonly received notions, to sweeping generalities, or to possible consequences.—Harrisse,Discovery of America, 1892, p. vi. Perhaps the time has not yet come for synthetic labours in the sphere of History. It may be that the student of the Past must still content himself with critical inquiries.—Ib. p. v. Few scholars are critics, few critics are philosophers, and few philosophers look with equal care on both sides of a question.—W. S. Landor in Holyoake’sAgitator’s Life, ii. 15. Introduire dans l’histoire, et sans tenir compte des passions politiques et religieuses, le doute méthodique que Descartes, le premier, appliqua à l’étude de la philosophie, n’est–ce pas là une excellente méthode? n’est–ce pas même la meilleure?—Chantelauze,Correspondant, 1883, i. 129. La critique historique ne sera jamais populaire. Comme elle est de toutes les sciences la plus délicate, la plus déliée, elle n’a de crédit qu’auprès des esprits cultivés.—Cherbuliez,Revue des Deux Mondes, xcvii. 517. Nun liefert aber die Kritik, wenn sie rechter Art ist, immer nur einzelne Data, gleichsam die Atome des Thatbestandes, und jede Kombination, jede Zusammenfassung und Schlussfolgerung, ohne die es doch einmal nicht abgeht, ist ein subjektiver Akt des Forschers. Demnach blieb Waitz, bei des eigenen Arbeit wie bei jener des anderen, immer höchst mistrauisch gegen jedes Résumé, jede Definition, jedes abschliessende Wort. —Sybel,Historische Zeitschrift, lvi. 484. Mit blosser Kritik wird darin nichts ausgerichtet, denn die ist nur eine Vorarbeit, welche da aufhört, wo die echte historische Kunst anfängt.—Lasaulx,Philosophie der Künste, 212.
[61 ]The only case in which such extraneous matters can be fairly called in is when facts are stated resting on testimony; then it is not only just, but it is necessary for the sake of truth, to inquire into the habits of mind of him by whom they are adduced.—Babbage,Bridgewater Treatise, p. xiv.
[62 ]There is no part of our knowledge which it is more useful to obtain at first hand—to go to the fountain–head for—than our knowledge of History.—J. S. Mill,Inaugural Address, 34. The only sound intellects are those which, in the first instance, set their standard of proof high.—J. S. Mill,Examination of Hamilton’s Philosophy, 525.
[63 ]There are so few men mentally capable of seeing both sides of a question; so few with consciences sensitively alive to the obligation of seeing both sides; so few placed under conditions either of circumstance or temper, which admit of their seeing both sides.—Greg,Political Problems, 1870, 173. Il n’y a que les Allemands qui sachent être aussi complètement objectifs. Ils se dédoublent, pour ainsi dire, en deux hommes, l’un qui a des principles très arrêtés et des passions très vives, l’autre qui sait voir et observer comme s’il n’en avait point.—Laveleye,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868, i. 431. L’écrivain qui penche trop dans le sens où il incline, et qui ne se défie pas de ses qualités presque autant que ses défauts, cet écrivain tourne à la manière.—Scherer,Mélanges, 484. Il faut faire volteface, et vivement, franchement, tourner le dos au moyen âge, à ce passé morbide, qui, même quand il n’agit pas, influe terriblement par la contagion de la mort. Il ne faut ni combattre, ni critiquer, mais oublier. Oublions et marchons!—Michelet,La Bible de l’Humanité, 483. It has excited surprise that Thucydides should speak of Antiphon, the traitor to the democracy, and the employer of assassins, as “a man inferior in virtue to none of his contemporaries.” But neither here nor elsewhere does Thucydides pass moral judgments.—Jowett,Thucydides, ii. 501.
[64 ]Non theologi provinciam suscepimus; scimus enim quantum hoc ingenii nostri tenuitatem superet: ideo sufficit nobis τὸ ὅτι fideliter ex antiquis auctoribus retulisse.—Morinus,De Poenitentia, ix. 10.—Il faut avouer que la religion chrétienne a quelque chose d’étonnant! C’est parce que vous y êtes né, dira–t–on. Tant s’en faut, je me roidis contre par cette raison–là même, de peur que cette prévention ne me suborne.—Pascal,Pensées, xvi. 7.—I was fond of Fleury for a reason which I express in the advertisement; because it presented a sort of photograph of ecclesiastical history without any comment upon it. In the event, that simple representation of the early centuries had a good deal to do with unsettling me.—Newman,Apologia, 152.—Nur was sich vor dem Richterstuhl einer ächten, unbefangenen, nicht durch die Brille einer philosophischen oder dogmatischen Schule stehenden Wissenschaft als wahr bewährt, kann zur Erbauung, Belehrung und Warnung tüchtig seyn.—Neander,Kirchengeschichte, i. p. vii. Wie weit bei katholischen Publicisten bei der Annahme der Ansicht von der Staatsanstalt apologetische Gesichtspunkte massgebend gewesen sind, mag dahingestellt bleiben. Der Historiker darf sich jedoch nie durch apologetische Zwecke leiten lassen; sein einziges Ziel soll die Ergründung der Wahrheit sein.—Pastor,Geschichte der Päbste, ii. 545. Church history falsely written is a school of vainglory, hatred, and uncharitableness; truly written, it is a discipline of humility, of charity, of mutual love.—Sir W. Hamilton,Discussions, 506. The more trophies and crowns of honour the Church of former ages can be shown to have won in the service of her adorable head, the more tokens her history can be brought to furnish of his powerful presence in her midst, the more will we be pleased and rejoice, Protestant though we be.—Nevin,Mercersburg Review, 1851, 168. S’il est une chose à laquelle j’ai donné tous mes soins, c’est à ne pas laisser influencer mes jugements par les opinions politiques ou religieuses; que si j’ai quelquefois péché par quelque excès, c’est par la bienveillance pour les œuvres de ceux qui pensent autrement que moi.—Monod,R. Hist. xvi. 184. Nous n’avons nul intérêt à faire parler l’histoire en faveur de nos propres opinions. C’est son droit imprescriptible que le narrateur reproduise tous les faits sans aucune réticence et range toutes les évolutions dans leur ordre naturel. Notre récit restera complètement en dehors des préoccupations de la dogmatique et des déclamations de la polémique. Plus les questions auxquelles nous aurons à toucher agitent et passionnent de nos jours les esprits, plus il est du devoir de l’historien de s’effacer devant les faits qu’il veut faire connaître.—Reuss,Nouvelle Revue de Théologie, vi. 193, 1860. To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed–plot of all other virtues.—Locke,Letter to Collins. Il n’est plus possible aujourd’hui à l’historien d’être national dans le sens étroit du mot. Son patriotisme à lui c’est l’amour de la vérité. Il n’est pas l’homme d’une race ou d’un pays, il est l’homme de tous les pays, il parle au nom de la civilisation générale.—Lanfrey,Hist. de Nap. iii. 2, 1870. Juger avec les parties de soi–même qui sont le moins des formes du tempérament, et le plus des facultés pénétrées et modelées par l’expérience, par l’étude, par l’investigation, par le non–moi.—Faguet,R. de Paris, i. 151. Aucun critique n’est aussi impersonnel que lui, aussi libre de partis pris et d’opinions préconçues, aussi objectif.—Il ne mêle ou parait mêler à ses appréciations ni inclinations personnelles de goût ou d’humeur, ou théories d’aucune sorte. G. Monod, of Faguet, Revue Historique, xlii. 417. On dirait qu’il a peur, et généralisant ses observations, en systématisant ses connaissances, de mêler de luimême aux choses.—Je lis tout un volume de M. Faguet, sans penser une fois à M. Faguet: je ne vois que les originaux qu’il montre.—J’envisage toujours une réalité objective, jamais l’idée de M. Faguet, jamais la doctrine de M. Faguet.—Lanson,Revue Politique, 1894, i. 98.
[65 ]It should teach us to disentangle principles first from parties, and again from one another; first of all as showing how imperfectly all parties represent their own principles, and then how the principles themselves are a mingled tissue.—Arnold,Modern History, 184. I find it a good rule, when I am contemplating a person from whom I want to learn, always to look out for his strength, being confident that the weakness will discover itself.—Maurice,Essays, 305. We may seek for agreement somewhere with our neighbours, using that as a point of departure for the sake of argument. It is this latter course that I wish here to explain and defend. The method is simple enough, though not yet very familiar.—It aims at conciliation; it proceeds by making the best of our opponent’s case, instead of taking him at his worst.—The most interesting part of every disputed question only begins to appear when the rival ideals admit each other’s right to exist.—A. Sidgwick,Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs, 1892, 211. That cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought.—Ruskin,Sesame and Lilies, i. 16. Je offener wir die einzelnen Wahrheiten des Sozialismus anerkennen, desto erfolgreicher können wir seine fundamentalen Unwahrheiten widerlegen.—Roscher,Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, 1849, i. 177.
[66 ]Dann habe ihn die Wahrnehmung, dass manche Angaben in den historischen Romanen Walter Scott’s, mit den gleichzeitigen Quellen im Widerspruch standen, “mit Erstaunen” erfüllt, und ihn zu dem Entschlusse gebracht, auf das Gewissenhafteste an der Ueberlieferung der Quellen festzuhalten.—Sybel,Gedächtnissrede auf Ranke. Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1887, p. 6. Sich frei zu halten von allem Widerschein der Gegenwart, sogar, soweit das menschenmöglich, von dem der eignen subjectiven Meinung in den Dingen des Staates, der Kirche und der Gesellschaft.—A. Dove,Im Neuen Reich, 1875, ii. 967. Wir sind durchaus nicht für die leblose und schemenartige Darstellungsweise der Ranke’schen Schule eingenommen; es wird uns immer kühl bis ans Herz heran, wenn wir derartige Schilderungen der Reformation und der Revolution lesen, welche so ganz im kühlen Element des Pragmatismus sich bewegen und dabei so ganz Undinenhaft sind und keine Seele haben.—Wir lassen es uns lieber gefallen, dass die Männer der Geschichte hier und dort gehofmeistert werden, als dass sie uns mit Glasaugen ansehen, so meisterhaft immer die Kunst sein mag, die sie ihnen eingesetzt hat.—Gottschall,Unsere Zeit, 1866, ii. 636, 637. A vivre avec des diplomates, il leur a pris des qualités qui sont un défaut chez un historien. L’historien n’est pas un témoin, c’est un juge; c’est à lui d’accuser et de condamner au nom du passé opprimé et dans l’intérêt de l’avenir.—Laboulaye on Ranke;Débats, 12th January 1852.
[67 ]Un théologien qui a composé une éloquente histoire de la Réformation, rencontrant à Berlin un illustre historien qui, lui aussi, a raconté Luther et le XVIe siècle, l’embrassa avec effusion en le traitant de confrère. “Ah! permettez,” lui répondit l’autre en se dégageant, “il y a une grande différence entre nous: vous êtes avant tout chrétien, et je suis avant tout historien.”—Cherbuliez,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1872, i. 537.
[68 ]Nackte Wahrheit ohne allen Schmuck; gründliche Erforschung des Einzelnen; das Uebrige, Gott befohlen. — Werke, xxxiv. 24. Ce ne sont pas les théories qui doivent nous servir de base dans la recherche des faits, mais ce sont les faits qui doivent nous servir de base pour la composition des théories.—Vincent,Nouvelle Revue de Théologie, 1859, ii. 252.
[69 ]Die zwanglose Anordnungs—die leichte und leise Andeutungskunst des grossen Historikers voll zu würdigen, hinderte ihn in früherer Zeit sein Bedürfniss nach scharfer begrifflicher Ordnung und Ausführung, später, und in immer zunehmenden Grade, sein Sinn für strenge Sachlichkeit, und genaue Erforschung der ursächlichen Zusammenhänge, noch mehr aber regte sich seine geradherzige Offenheit seine männliche Ehrlichkeit, wenn er hinter den fein verstrichenen Farben der Rankeschen Erzählungsbilder die gedeckte Haltung des klugen Diplomaten zu entdecken glaubte.—Haym,Duncker’s Leben, 437. The ground of criticism is indeed, in my opinion, nothing else but distinct attention, which every reader should endeavour to be master of.—Hare, December 1736; Warburton’s Works, xiv. 98. Wenn die Quellenkritik so verstanden wird, als sei sie der Nachweis, wie ein Autor den andern benutzt hat, so ist das nur ein gelegentliches Mittel—eins unter anderen—ihre Aufgabe, den Nachweis der Richtigkeit zu lösen oder vorzubereiten.—Droysen,Historik, 18.
[70 ]L’esprit scientifique n’est autre en soi que l’instinct du travail et de la patience, le sentiment de l’ordre, de la réalité et de la mesure.—Papillon,R. des Deux Mondes, 1873, v. 704. Non seulement les sciences, mais toutes les institutions humaines s’organisent de même, et sous l’empire des mêmes idées régulatrices.—Cournot,Idées Fondamentales, i. 4. There is no branch of human work whose constant laws have not close analogy with those which govern every other mode of man’s exertion. But more than this, exactly as we reduce to greater simplicity and surety any one group of these practical laws, we shall find them passing the mere condition of connection or analogy, and becoming the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws which govern the moral world. — Ruskin,Seven Lamps, 4. The sum total of all intellectual excellence is good sense and method. When these have passed into the instinctive readiness of habit, when the wheel revolves so rapidly that we cannot see it revolve at all, then we call the combination genius. But in all modes alike, and in all professions, the two sole component parts, even of genius, are good sense and method.—Coleridge, June 1814, Mem. of Coleorton, ii. 172. Si l’exercice d’un art nous empêche d’en apprendre un autre, il n’en est pas ainsi dans les sciences: la connoissance d’une vérité nous aide à en découvrir une autre.—Toutes les sciences sont tellement liées ensemble qu’il est bien plus facile de les apprendre toutes à la fois que d’en apprendre une seule en la détachant des autres.—Il ne doit songer qu’à augmenter les lumières naturelles de sa raison, non pour résoudre telle ou telle difficulté de l’école, mais pour que dans chaque circonstance de la vie son intelligence montre d’avance à sa volonté le parti qu’elle doit prendre.—Descartes,Œuvres Choisies, 300, 301. Règles pour la Direction de l’Esprit. La connaissance de la méthode qui a guidé l’homme de génie n’est pas moins utile au progrès de la science et même à sa propre gloire, que ses découvertes.—Laplace,Système du Monde, ii. 371. On ne fait rien sans idées préconçues, il faut avoir seulement la sagesse de ne croire à leurs déductions qu’autant que l’expérience les confirme. Les idées préconçues, soumises au contrôle sévère de l’expérimentation, sont la flamme vivante des sciences d’observation; les idées fixes en sont le danger.—Pasteur, in Histoire d’un Savant, 284. Douter des vérités humaines, c’est ouvrir la porte aux découvertes; en faire des articles de foi, c’est la fermer.—Dumas,Discours, i. 123.
[71 ]We should not only become familiar with the laws of phenomena within our own pursuit, but also with the modes of thought of men engaged in other discussions and researches, and even with the laws of knowledge itself, that highest philosophy.—Above all things, know that we call you not here to run your minds into our moulds. We call you here on an excursion, on an adventure, on a voyage of discovery into space as yet uncharted.—Allbutt,Introductory Address at St. George’s, October 1889. Consistency in regard to opinions is the slow poison of intellectual life.—Davy,Memoirs, 68.
[72 ]Ce sont vous autres physiologistes des corps vivants, qui avez appris à nous autres physiologistes de la société (qui est aussi un corps vivant) la manière de l’observer et de tirer des conséquences de nos observations.—J. B. Say to De Candolle, 1st June 1827; De Candolle,Mémoires, 567.
[73 ]Success is certain to the pure and true: success to falsehood and corruption, tyranny and aggression, is only the prelude to a greater and an irremediable fall.—Stubbs,Seventeen Lectures, 20. The Carlylean faith, that the cause we fight for, so far as it is true, is sure of victory, is the necessary basis of all effective activity for good.—Caird,Evolution of Religion, ii. 43. It is the property of truth to be fearless, and to prove victorious over every adversary. Sound reasoning and truth, when adequately communicated, must always be victorious over error.—Godwin,Political Justice (Conclusion). Vice was obliged to retire and give place to virtue. This will always be the consequence when truth has fair play. Falsehood only dreads the attack, and cries out for auxiliaries. Truth never fears the encounter; she scorns the aid of the secular arm, and triumphs by her natural strength.—Franklin,Works, ii. 292. It is a condition of our race that we must ever wade through error in our advance towards truth: and it may even be said that in many cases we exhaust almost every variety of error before we attain the desired goal.—Babbage,Bridgewater Treatise, 27. Les hommes ne peuvent, en quelque genre que ce soit, arriver à quelque chose de raisonnable qu’après avoir, en ce même genre, épuisé toutes les sottises imaginables. Que de sottises ne dirions–nous pas maintenant, si les anciens ne les avaient pas déjà dites avant nous, et ne nous les avaient, pour ainsi dire, enlevées!—Fontenelle. Without premature generalisations the true generalisation would never be arrived at.—H. Spencer,Essays, ii. 57. The more important the subject of difference, the greater, not the less, will be the indulgence of him who has learned to trace the sources of human error,—of error, that has its origin not in our weakness and imperfection merely, but often in the most virtuous affections of the heart.—Brown,Philosophy of the Human Mind, i. 48, 1824. Parmi les châtiments du crime qui ne lui manquent jamais, à côté de celui que lui inflige la conscience, l’histoire lui en inflige un autre encore, éclatant et manifeste, l’impuissance.—Cousin,Phil. Mod. ii. 24. L’avenir de la science est garanti; car dans le grand livre scientifique tout s’ajoute et rien ne se perd. L’erreur ne fonde pas; aucune erreur ne dure très longtemps.—Renan,Feuilles Détachées, xiii. Toutes les fois que deux hommes sont d’un avis contraire sur la même chose, à coup sûr, l’un ou l’autre se trompe; bien plus, aucun ne semble posséder la vérité; car si les raisons de l’un étoient certaines et évidentes, il pourroit les exposer à l’autre de telle manière qu’il finiroit par le convaincre également.—Descartes,Règles; Œuvres Choisies, 302. Le premier principe de la critique est qu’une doctrine ne captive ses adhérents que par ce qu’elle a de légitime.—Renan,Essais de Morale, 184. Was dem Wahn solche Macht giebt ist wirklich nicht er selbst, sondern die ihm zu Grunde liegende und darin nur verzerrte Wahrheit.—Frantz,Schelling’s Philosophie, i. 62. Quand les hommes ont vu une fois la vérité dans son éclat, ils ne peuvent plus l’oublier. Elle reste debout, et tôt ou tard elle triomphe, parce qu’elle est la pensée de Dieu et le besoin du monde.—Mignet,Portraits, ii. 295. C’est toujours le sens commun inaperçu qui fait la fortune des hypothèses auxquelles il se mêle.—Cousin,Fragments Phil. i. 51, Preface of 1826. Wer da sieht, wie der Irrthum selbst ein Träger mannigfaltigen und bleibenden Fortschritts wird, der wird auch nicht so leicht aus dem thatsächlichen Fortschritt der Gegenwart auf Unumstösslichkeit unserer Hypothesen schliessen.—Das richtigste Resultat der geschichtlichen Betrachtung ist die akademische Ruhe, mit welcher unsere Hypothesen und Theorieen ohne Feindschaft und ohne Glauben als das betrachtet werden, was sie sind; als Stufen in jener unendlichen Annäherung an die Wahrheit, welche die Bestimmung unserer intellectuellen Entwickelung zu sein scheint.—Lange,Geschichte des Materialismus, 502, 503. Hominum errores divina providentia reguntur, ita ut saepe male jacta bene cadant.—Leibniz, ed. Klopp, i. p. lii. Sainte–Beuve n’était même pas de la race des libéraux, c’est–à–dire de ceux qui croient que, tout compte fait, et dans un état de civilisation donné, le bien triomphe du mal à armes égales, et la vérité de l’erreur.—D’Haussonville,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1875, i. 567. In the progress of the human mind, a period of controversy amongst the cultivators of any branch of science must necessarily precede the period of unanimity.—Torrens,Essay on the Production of Wealth, 1821, p. xiii. Even the spread of an error is part of the wide–world process by which we stumble into mere approximations to truth.—L. Stephen,Apology of an Agnostic, 81. Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them; it is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.—S. Smith,Moral Philosophy, 7. The admission of the few errors of Newton himself is at least of as much importance to his followers in science as the history of the progress of his real discoveries.—Young,Works, iii. 621. Error is almost always partial truth, and so consists in the exaggeration or distortion of one verity by the suppression of another, which qualifies and modifies the former.—Mivart,Genesis of Species, 3. The attainment of scientific truth has been effected, to a great extent, by the help of scientific errors.—Huxley: Ward,Reign of Victoria, ii. 337. Jede neue tief eingreifende Wahrheit hat meiner Ansicht nach erst das Stadium der Einseitigkeit durchzumachen.—Ihering,Geist des R. Rechts, ii. 22. The more readily we admit the possibility of our own cherished convictions being mixed with error, the more vital and helpful whatever is right in them will become.—Ruskin,Ethics of the Dust, 225. They hardly grasp the plain truth unless they examine the error which it cancels.—Cory,Modern English History, 1880, i. 109. Nur durch Irrthum kommen wir, der eine kürzeren und glücklicheren Schrittes, als der andere, zur Wahrheit; und die Geschichte darf nirgends diese Verirrungen übergehen, wenn sie Lehrein und Warnerin für die nachfolgenden Geschlechter werden will.—München Gel. Anzeigen, 1840, i. 737.
[74 ]Wie die Weltgeschichte das Weltgericht ist, so kann in noch allgemeinerem Sinne gesagt werden, dass das gerechte Gericht, d.h. die wahre Kritik einer Sache, nur in ihrer Geschichte liegen kann. Insbesondere in der Hinsicht lehrt die Geschichte denjenigen, der ihr folgt, ihre eigene Methode, dass ihr Fortschritt niemals ein reines Vernichten, sondern nur ein Aufheben im philosophischen Sinne ist.—Strauss,Hallische Jahrbücher, 1839, 120.
[75 ]Dans tous les livres qu’il lit, et il en dévore des quantités, Darwin ne note que les passages qui contrarient ses idées systématiques. — Il collectionne les difficultés, les cas épineux, les critiques possibles.—Vernier,Le Temps, 6th Décembre 1887. Je demandais à un savant célèbre où il en était de ses recherches. “Cela ne marche plus,” me dit–il, “je ne trouve plus de faits contradictoires.” Ainsi le savant cherche à se contredire lui–même pour faire avancer sa pensée.—Janet,Journal des Savants, 1892, 20. Ein Umstand, der uns die Selbständigkeit des Ganges der Wissenschaft anschaulich machen kann, ist auch der: dass der Irrthum, wenn er nur gründlich behandelt wird, fast ebenso fördernd ist als das Finden der Wahrheit, denn er erzeugt fortgesetzten Widerspruch.—Baer,Blicke auf die Entwicklung der Wissenschaft, 120. It is only by virtue of the opposition which it has surmounted that any truth can stand in the human mind.—Archbishop Temple; Kinglake,Crimed, WinterTroubles, app. 104. I have for many years found it expedient to lay down a rule for my own practice, to confine my reading mainly to those journals the general line of opinions in which is adverse to my own.—Hare,Means of Unity, i. 19. Kant had a harder struggle with himself than he could possibly have had with any critic or opponent of his philosophy.—Gaird,Philosophy of Kant, 1889, i. p. ix.
[76 ]The social body is no more liable to arbitrary changes than the individual body.—A full perception of the truth that society is not a mere aggregate, but an organic growth, that it forms a whole, the laws of whose growth can be studied apart from those of the individual atom, supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern speculation.—L. Stephen,Science of Ethics, 31. Wie in dem Leben des einzelnen Menschen kein Augenblick eines vollkommenen Stillstandes wahrgenommen wird, sondern stete organische Entwicklung, so verhält es sich auch in dem Leben der Völker, und in jedem einzelnen Element, woraus dieses Gesammtleben besteht. So finden wir in der Sprache stete Fortbildung und Entwicklung, und auf gleiche Weise in dem Recht. Und auch diese Fortbildung steht unter demselben Gesetz der Erzeugung aus innerer Kraft und Nothwendigkeit, unabhängig von Zufall und individueller Willkür, wie die ursprüngliche Entstehung.—Savigny,System, i. 16, 17. Seine eigene Entdeckung, dass auch die geistige Produktion, bis in einem gewissen Punkte wenigstens, unter dem Gesetze der Kausalität steht, dass jedeiner nur geben kann, was er hat, nur hat, was er irgendwoher bekommen, muss auch für ihn selber gelten.—Bekker,Das Recht des Besitzes bei den Römern, 3, 1880. Die geschichtliche Wandlung des Rechts, in welcher vergangene Jahrhunderte halb ein Spiel des Zufalls und halb ein Werk vernünftelnder Willkür sahen, als gesetzmässige Entwickelung zu begreifen, war das unsterbliche Verdienst der von Männern wie Savigny, Eichhorn und Jacob Grimm geführten historischen Rechtsschule.—Gierke,Rundschau, xviii. 205.
[77 ]The only effective way of studying what is called the philosophy of religion, or the philosophical criticism of religion, is to study the history of religion. The true science of war is the history of war, the true science of religion is, I believe, the history of religion.—M. Müller,Theosophy, 3, 4. La théologie ne doit plus être que l’histoire des efforts spontanés tentés pour résoudre le problème divin. L’histoire, en effet, est la forme nécessaire de la science de tout ce qui est soumis aux lois de la vie changeante et successive. La science de l’esprit humain, c’est de même, l’histoire de l’esprit humain.—Renan,Averroës, Pref. vi.
[78 ]Political economy is not a science, in any strict sense, but a body of systematic knowledge gathered from the study of common processes, which have been practised all down the history of the human race in the production and distribution of wealth.—Bonamy Price,Social Science Congress, 1878. Such a study is in harmony with the best intellectual tendencies of our age, which is, more than anything else, characterised by the universal supremacy of the historical spirit. To such a degree has this spirit permeated all our modes of thinking, that with respect to every branch of knowledge, no less than with respect to every institution and every form of human activity, we almost instinctively ask, not merely what is its existing condition, but what were its earliest discoverable germs, and what has been the course of its development.—Ingram,History of Political Economy, 2. Wir dagegen stehen keinen Augenblick an, die Nationalökonomie für eine reine Erfahrungswissenschaft zu erklären, und die Geschichte ist uns daher nicht Hülfsmittel, sondern Gegenstand selber. — Roscher,Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, 1849, i. 182. Der bei weitem grösste Theil menschlicher Irrthümer beruhet darauf, dass man zeitlich und örtlich Wahres oder Heilsames für absolut wahr oder heilsam ausgiebt. Für jede Stufe der Volksentwickelung passt eine besondere Staatsverfassung, die mit allen übrigen Verhältnissen des Volks als Ursache und Wirkung auf’s Innigste verbunden ist; so passt auch für jede Entwickelungsstufe eine besondere Landwirthschaftsverfassung.—Roscher,Archiv f. p. Oek. viii. 2 Heft 1845. Seitdem vor allen Roscher, Hildebrand und Knies den Werth, die Berechtigung und die Nothwendigkeit derselben unwiderleglich dargethan, hat sich immer allgemeiner der Gedanke Bahn gebrochen, dass diese Wissenschaft, die bis dahin nur auf die Gegenwart, auf die Erkenntniss der bestehenden Verhältnisse und die in ihnen sichtbaren Gesetze den Blick gerichtet hatte, auch in die Vergangenheit, in die Erforschung der bereits hinter uns liegenden wirthschaftlichen Entwicklung der Völker sich vertiefen müsse. — Schonberg,Jahrbücher f. Nationalökonomie und Statistik, Neue Folge, 1867, i. 1. Schmoller, moins dogmatique et mettant comme une sorte de coquetterie à être incertain, démontre, par les faits, la fausseté ou l’arbitraire de tous ces postulats, et laisse l’économie politique se dissoudre dans l’histoire.—Breton,R. de Paris, ix. 67. Wer die politische Oekonomie Feuerlands unter dieselben Gesetze bringen wollte mit der des heutigen Englands, würde damit augenscheinlich nichts zu Tage fördern als den allerbanalsten Gemeinplatz. Die politische Oekonomie ist somit wesentlich eine historische Wissenschaft. Sie behandelt einen geschichtlichen, das heisst einen stets wechselnden Stoff. Sie untersucht zunächst die besondern Gesetze jeder einzelnen Entwicklungsstufe der Produktion und des Austausches, und wird erst am Schluss dieser Untersuchung die wenigen, für Produktion und Austausch überhaupt geltenden, ganz allgemeinen Gesetze aufstellen können.—Engels,Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, 1878, 121.
[79 ]History preserves the student from being led astray by a too servile adherence to any system.—Wolowski. No system can be anything more than a history, not in the order of impression, but in the order of arrangement by analogy. — Davy,Memoirs, 68. Avec des matériaux si nombreux et si importants, il fallait bien du courage pour résister à la tentation de faire un système. De Saussure eut ce courage, et nous en ferons le dernier trait et le trait principal de son éloge.—Cuvier,Éloge de Saussure, 1810.
[80 ]C’était, en 1804, une idée heureuse et nouvelle, d’appeler l’histoire au secours de la science, d’interroger les deux grandes écoles rivales au profit de la vérité.—Cousin,Fragments Littéraires, 1843, 95, on Dégerando. No branch of philosophical doctrine, indeed, can be fairly investigated or apprehended apart from its history. All our systems of politics, morals, and metaphysics would be different if we knew exactly how they grew up, and what transformations they have undergone; if we knew, in short, the true history of human ideas.—Cliffe Leslie,Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, 1879, 149. The history of philosophy must be rational and philosophic. It must be philosophy itself, with all its elements, in all their relations, and under all their laws represented in striking characters by the hands of time and of history, in the manifested progress of the human mind.—Sir William Hamilton,Edin. Rev. l. 200, 1829. Il n’est point d’étude plus instructive, plus utile que l’étude de l’histoire de la philosophie; car on y apprend à se désabuser des philosophes, et l’on y désapprend la fausse science de leurs systèmes.—Royer Collard,Œuvres de Reid, iv. 426. On ne peut guère échapper à la conviction que toutes les solutions des questions philosophiques n’aient été développées ou indiquées avant le commencement du dix–neuvième siècle, et que par conséquent il ne soit très difficile, pour ne pas dire impossible, de tomber, en pareille matière, sur une idée neuve de quelque importance. Or si cette conviction est fondée, il s’ensuit que la science est faite.—Jouffroy, in Damiron,Philosophie du XIXe Siècle, 363. Le but dernier de tous mes efforts, l’âme de mes écrits et de tout mon enseignement, c’est l’identité de la philosophie et de son histoire.—Cousin,Cours de 1829. Ma route est historique, il est vrai, mais mon but est dogmatique; je tends à une théorie, et cette théorie je la demande à l’histoire.—Cousin,Ph. du XVIIIe Siècle, 15. L’histoire de la philosophie est contrainte d’emprunter d’abord à la philosophie la lumière qu’elle doit lui rendre un jour avec usure.—Cousin,Du Vrai, 1855, 14. M. Cousin, durant tout son professorat de 1816 à 1829, a pensé que l’histoire de la philosophie était la source de la philosophie même. Nous ne croyons pas exagérer en lui prêtant cette opinion.—B. St. Hilaire,Victor Cousin, i. 302, Il se hâta de convertir le fait en loi, et proclama que la philosophie, étant identique à son histoire, ne pouvait avoir une loi différente, et était vouée à jamais à l’évolution fatale des quatre systèmes, se contredisant toujours, mais se limitant, et se modérant, par cela même de manière à maintenir l’équilibre, sinon l’harmonie de la pensée humaine.—Vacherot,Revue des Deux Mondes, 1868, iii. 957. Er hat überhaupt das unvergängliche Verdienst, zuerst in Frankreich zu der Erkenntniss gelangt zu sein, dass die menschliche Vernunft nur durch das Studium des Gesetzes ihrer Entwickelungen begriffen werden kann.—Lauser,Unsere Zeit, 1868, i. 459. Le philosophe en quête du vrai en soi, n’est plus réduit à ses conceptions individuelles; il est riche du trésor amassé par l’humanité.—Boutroux,Revue Politique, xxxvii. 802. L’histoire, je veux dire l’histoire de l’esprit humain, est en ce sens la vraie philosophie de notre temps.—Renan,Études de Morale, 83. Die Philosophie wurde eine höchst bedeutende Hülfswissenschaft der Geschichte, sie hat ihre Richtung auf das Allgemeine gefördert, ihren Blick für dasselbe geschärft, und sie, wenigstens durch ihre Vermittlung, mit Gesichtspuncten, Ideen, bereichert, die sie aus ihrem eigenen Schoosse sobald noch nicht erzeugt haben würde. Weit die fruchtbarste darunter war die aus der Naturwissenschaft geschöpfte Idee des organischen Lebens, dieselbe auf der die neueste Philosophie selbst beruht. Die seit zwei bis drei Jahrzehnten in der Behandlung der Geschichte eingetretene durchgreifende Veränderung, wie die völlige Umgestaltung so mancher anderen Wissenschaft . . . ist der Hauptsache nach ihr Werk.—Haug,Allgemeine Geschichte, 1841, i. 22. Eine Geschichte der Philosophie in eigentlichen Sinne wurde erst möglich, als man an die Stelle der Philosophen deren Systeme setzte, den inneren Zusammenhang zwischen diesen feststellte und—wie Dilthey sagt—mitten in Wechsel der Philosophien ein siegreiches Fortschreiten zur Wahrheit nachwies. Die Gesammtheit der Philosophie stellt sich also dar als eine geschichtliche Einheit.—Saul,Rundschau, February 1894, 307. Warum die Philosophie eine Geschichte habe und haben müsse, blieb unerörtert, ja ungeahnt, dass die Philosophie am meisten von allen Wissenschaften historisch sei, denn man hatte in der Geschichte den Begriff der Entwicklung nicht entdeckt.—Marbach,Griechische Philosophie, 15. Was bei oberflächlicher Betrachtung nur ein Gewirre einzelner Personen und Meinungen zu sein schien, zeigt sich bei genauerer und gründlicherer Untersuchung als eine geschichtliche Entwicklung, in der alles, bald näher, bald entfernter, mit allem anderen zusammenhängt.—Zeller,Rundschau, February 1894, 307. Nur die Philosophie, die an die geschichtliche Entwickelung anknüpft kann auf bleibenden Erfolg auch für die Zukunft rechnen und fortschreiten zu dem, was in der bisherigen philosophischen Entwickelung nur erst unvollkommen erreicht oder angestrebt worden ist. Kann sich doch die Philosophie überhaupt und insbesondere die Metaphysik ihrer eigenen geschichtlichen Entwickelung nicht entschlagen, sondern hat eine Geschichte der Philosophie als eigene und zwar zugleich historische und spekulative Disziplin, in deren geschichtlichen Entwickelungsphasen und geschichtlich aufeinanderfolgenden Systemen der Philosophen die neuere Spekulation seit Schelling und Hegel zugleich die Philosophie selbst als ein die verschiedenen geschichtlichen Systeme umfassendes ganzes in seiner dialektischen Gliederung erkannt hat.—Gloatz,Spekulative Theologie, i. 23. Die heutige Philosophie führt uns auf einen Standpunkt von dem aus die philosophische Idee als das innere Wesen der Geschichte selbst erscheint. So trat an die Stelle einer abstrakt philosophischen Richtung, welche das Geschichtliche verneinte, eine abstrakt geschichtliche Richtung, welche das Philosophische verläugnete. Beide Richtungen sind als überschrittene und besiegte zu betrachten. — Berner,Strafrecht, 75. Die Geschichte der Philosophie hat uns fast schon die Wissenschaft der Philosophie selbst ersetzt.—Hermann,Phil. Monatshefte, ii. 198, 1889.
[81 ]La siècle actuel sera principalement caractérisé par l’irrévocable prépondérance de l’histoire, en philosophie, en politique, et même en poésie.—Comte,Politique Positive, iii. 1.
[82 ]The historical or comparative method has revolutionised not only the sciences of law, mythology, and language, of anthropology and sociology, but it has forced its way even into the domain of philosophy and natural science. For what is the theory of evolution itself, with all its far–reaching consequences, but the achievement of the historical method?—Prothero,Inaugural; National Review, December 1894, 461. To facilitate the advancement of all the branches of useful science, two things seem to be principally requisite. The first is, an historical account of their rise, progress, and present state. Without the former of these helps, a person every way qualified for extending the bounds of science labours under great disadvantages; wanting the lights which have been struck out by others, and perpetually running the risk of losing his labour, and finding himself anticipated.—Priestley,History of Vision, 1772, i., Pref. i. Cuvier se proposait de montrer l’enchainement scientifique des découvertes, leurs relations avec les grands évènements historiques, et leur influence sur les progrès et le développement de la civilisation.—Dareste,Biographie Générale, xii. 685. Dans ses éloquentes leçons, l’histoire des sciences est devenue l’histoire même de l’esprit humain; car, remontant aux causes de leurs progrès et de leurs erreurs, c’est toujours dans les bonnes ou mauvaises routes suivies par l’esprit humain, qu’il trouve ces causes.—Flourens,Éloge de Cuvier, xxxi. Wie keine fortlaufende Entwickelungsreihe von nur Einem Punkte aus vollkommen aufzufassen ist, so wird auch keine lebendige Wissenschaft nur aus der Gegenwart begriffen werden können. — Deswegen ist aber eine solche Darstellung doch noch nicht der gesammten Wissenschaft adäquat, und sie birgt, wenn sie damit verwechselt wird, starke Gefahren der Einseitigkeit, des Dogmatismus und damit der Stagnation in sich. Diesen Gefahren kann wirksam nur begegnet werden durch die verständige Betrachtung der Geschichte der Wissenschaften, welche diese selbst in stetem Flusse zeigt und die Tendenz ihres Fortschreitens in offenbarer und sicherer Weise klarlegt.—Rosenberger,Geschichte der Physik, iii. p. vi. Die Continuität in der Ausbildung aller Auffassungen tritt um so deutlicher hervor, je vollständiger man sich damit wie sie zu verschiedenen Zeiten waren, vertraut macht.—Kopp,Entwickelung der Chemie, 814.
[83 ]Die Geschichte und die Politik sind Ein und derselbe Janus mit dem Doppelgesicht, das in der Geschichte in die Vergangenheit, in der Politik in die Zukunft hinschaut.—Gügler’sLeben, ii. 59.
[84 ]The papers inclosed, which give an account of the killing of two men in the country of Londonderry; if they prove to be Tories, ’tis very well they are gone.—I think it will not only be necessary to grant those a pardon who killed them, but also that they have some reward for their own and others’ encouragement.—Essex,Letters, 10, 10th January 1675. The author of this happened to be present. There was a meeting of some honest people in the city, upon the occasion of the discovery of some attempt to stifle the evidence of the witnesses.—Bedloe said he had letters from Ireland, that there were some Tories to be brought over hither, who were privately to murder Dr. Oates and the said Bedloe. The doctor, whose zeal was very hot, could never after this hear any man talk against the plot, or against the witnesses, but he thought he was one of these Tories, and called almost every man a Tory that opposed him in discourse; till at last the word Tory became popular.—Defoe,Edinburgh Review, l. 403.
[85 ]La España serà el primer pueblo en donde se encenderá esta guerra patriotica que solo puede libertar á Europa.—Hemos oido esto en Inglaterra á varios de los que estaban alli presentes. Muchas veces ha oido lo mismo al duque de Wellington el general Don Miguel de Alava, y dicho duque refirió el suceso en una comida diplomatica que dió en Paris el duque de Richelieu en 1816.—Toreno,Historia del Levantamiento de España, 1838, i. 508.
[86 ]Nunquam propter auctoritatem illorum, quamvis magni sint nominis (supponimus scilicet semper nos cum eo agere qui scientiam historicam vult consequi), sententias quas secuti sunt ipse tamquam certas admittet, sed solummodo ob vim testimoniorum et argumentorum quibus eas confirmarunt.—De Smedt,Introductio ad historiam critice tractandam, 1866, i. 5.
[87 ]Hundert schwere Verbrechen wiegen nicht so schwer in der Schale der Unsittlichkeit, als ein unsittliches Princip.—Hallische Jahrbücher, 1839, 308. Il faut flétrir les crimes; mais il faut aussi, et surtout, flétrir les doctrines et les systèmes qui tendent à les justifier. — Mortimer Ternaux,Histoire de la Terreur.
[88 ]We see how good and evil mingle in the best of men and in the best of causes; we learn to see with patience the men whom we like best often in the wrong, and the repulsive men often in the right; we learn to bear with patience the knowledge that the cause which we love best has suffered, from the awkwardness of its defenders, so great disparagement, as in strict equity to justify the men who were assaulting it.—Stubbs,Seventeen Lectures, 97.
[89 ]Caeteris paribus, on trouvera tousjours que ceux qui ont plus de puissance sont sujets à pécher davantage; et il n’y a point de théorème de géométrie qui soit plus asseuré que cette proposition.—Leibniz, 1688. ed. Rommel, ii. 197. Il y a toujours eu de la malignité dans la grandeur, et de l’opposition à l’esprit de l’Évangile; mais maintenant il y en a plus que jamais, et il semble que comme le monde va à sa fin, celui qui est dans l’élévation fait tous ses efforts pour dominer avec plus de tyrannie, et pour étouffer les maximes du Christianisme et le règne de Jésus–Christ, voiant qu’il s’approche.—Godeau,Lettres, 423, 27th March 1667. There is, in fact, an unconquerable tendency in all power, save that of knowledge, acting by and through knowledge, to injure the mind of him by whom that power is exercised.—Wordsworth, 22nd June 1817; Letters of Lake Poets, 369.
[90 ]I cieli han messo sulla terra due giudici delle umane azioni, la coscienza e la storia.—Colletta. Wenn gerade die edelsten Männer um des Nachruhmes willen gearbeitet haben, so soll die Geschichte ihre Belohnung sein, sie auch die Strafe für die Schlechten.—Lasaulx,Philosophie der Künste, 211. Pour juger ce qui est bon et juste dans la vie actuelle ou passée, il faut posséder un criterium, qui ne soit pas tiré du passé ou du présent, mais de la nature humaine.—Ahrens,Cours de Droit Naturel, i. 67.
[91 ]L’homme de notre temps! La conscience moderne! Voilà encore de ces termes qui nous ramènent la prétendue philosophie de l’histoire et la doctrine du progrès, quand il s’agit de la justice, c’est–à–dire de la conscience pure et de l’homme rationnel, que d’autres siècles encore que le nôtre ont connu.—Renouvier,Crit. Phil. 1873, ii. 55.
[92 ]Il faut pardonner aux grands hommes le marchepied de leur grandeur.—Cousin, in J. Simon,Nos Hommes d’État, 1887, 55. L’esprit du XVIIIe siècle n’a pas besoin d’apologie: l’apologie d’un siècle est dans son existence.—Cousin,Fragments, iii. 1826. Suspendus aux lèvres éloquentes de M. Cousin, nous l’entendîmes s’écrier que la meilleure cause l’emportait toujours, que c’était la loi de l’histoire, le rhythme immuable du progrès.—Gasparin,La Liberté Morale, ii. 63. Cousin verurtheilen heisst darum nichts Anderes als jenen Geist historischer Betrachtung verdammen, durch welchen das 19. Jahrhundert die revolutionäre Kritik des 18. Jahrhunderts ergänzt, durch welchen insbesondere Deutschland die geistigen Wohlthaten vergolten hat, welche es im Zeitalter der Aufklärung von seinen westlichen Nachbarn empfangen.—Iodl,Gesch. der Ethik, ii. 295. Der Gang der Weltgeschichte steht ausserhalb der Tugend, des Lasters, und der Gerechtigkeit. — Hegel,Werke, viii. 425. Die Vermischung des Zufälligen im Individuum mit dem an ihm Historischen führt zu unzähligen falschen Ansichten und Urtheilen. Hierzu gehört namentlich alles Absprechen über die moralische Tüchtigkeit der Individuen, und die Verwunderung, welche bis zur Verzweiflung an göttlicher Gerechtigkeit sich steigert, dass historisch grosse Individuen moralisch nichtswürdig erscheinen können. Die moralische Tüchtigkeit besteht in der Unterordnung alles dessen, was zufällig am Einzelnen unter das an ihm dem Allgemeinen Angehörige.—Marbach,Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie, 7. Das Sittliche der Neuseeländer, der Mexikaner ist vielmehr ebenso sittlich, wie das der Griechen, der Römer; und das Sittliche der Christen des Mittelalters ist ebenso sittlich, wie das der Gegenwart.—Kirchmann,Grundbegriffe des Richts, 194. Die Geschichtswissenschaft als solche kennt nur ein zeitliches und mithin auch nur ein relatives Maass der Dinge. Alle Werthbeurtheilung der Geschichte kann daher nur relativ und aus zeitlichen Momenten fliessen, und wer sich nicht selbst täuschen und den Dingen nicht Gewalt anthun will, muss ein für allemal in dieser Wissenschaft auf absolute Werthe verzichten.—Lorenz,Schlosser, 80. Only according to his faith is each man judged. Committed as this deed has been by a pure–minded, pious youth, it is a beautiful sign of the time.—De Wette to Sand’s Mother; Cheyne,Founders of Criticism, 44. The men of each age must be judged by the ideal of their own age and country, and not by the ideal of ours. — Lecky,Value of History, 50.
[93 ]La durée ici–bas, c’est le droit, c’est la sanction de Dieu.—Guiraud,Philosophie Catholique de l’Histoire.
[94 ]Ceux qui ne sont pas contens de l’ordre des choses ne sçauroient se vanter d’aimer Dieu comme il faut.—Il faut toujours estre content de l’ordre du passé, parce qu’il est conforme à la volonté de Dieu absolue, qu’on connoît par l’évènement. Il faut tâcher de rendre l’avenir, autant qu’il dépend de nous, conforme à la volonté de Dieu présomptive.—Leibniz,Werke, ed. Gerhardt, ii. 136. Ich habe damals bekannt und bekenne jetzt, dass die politische Wahrheit aus denselben Quellen zu schöpfen ist, wie alle anderen, aus dem göttlichen Willen und dessen Kundgebung in der Geschichte des Menschengeschlechts.—Radowitz,Neue Gespräche, 65.
[95 ]A man is great as he contends best with the circumstances of his age.—Froude,Short Studies, i. 388. La persuasion que l’homme est avant tout une personne morale et libre, et qu’ayant conçu seul, dans sa conscience et devant Dieu, la règle de sa conduite, il doit s’employer tout entier à l’appliquer en lui, hors de lui, absolument, obstinément, inflexiblement, par une résistance perpétuelle opposée aux autres; et par une contrainte perpétuelle exercée sur soi, voilà la grande idée anglaise.—Taine; Sorel,Discours de Réception, 24. In jeder Zeit des Christenthums hat es einzelne Männer gegeben, die über ihrer Zeit standen und von ihren Gegensätzen nicht berührt wurden.—Bachmann,Hengstenberg, i. 160. Eorum enim qui de iisdem rebus mecum aliquid ediderunt, aut solus insanio ego, aut solus non insanio; tertium enim non est, nisi (quod dicet forte aliquis) insaniamus omnes.—Hobbes, quoted by De Morgan, 3rd June 1858: Life of Sir W. R. Hamilton, iii. 552.
[96 ]I have now to exhibit a rare combination of good qualities, and a steady perseverance in good conduct, which raised an individual to be an object of admiration and love to all his contemporaries, and have made him to be regarded by succeeding generations as a model of public and private virtue.—The evidence shows that upon this occasion he was not only under the influence of the most vulgar credulity, but that he violated the plainest rules of justice, and that he really was the murderer of two innocent women.—Hale’s motives were most laudable.—Campbell’sLives of the Chief Justices, i. 512, 561, 566. It was not to be expected of the colonists of New England that they should be the first to see through a delusion which befooled the whole civilised world, and the gravest and most knowing persons in it.—The people of New England believed what the wisest men of the world believed at the end of the seventeenth century.—Palfrey,New England, iv. 127, 129 (also speaking of witchcraft). Il est donc bien étrange que sa sévérité tardive s’exerce aujourd’hui sur un homme auquel elle n’a d’autre reproche à faire que d’avoir trop bien servi l’état par des mesures politiques, injustes peut–être, violentes, mais qui, en aucune manière, n’avaient l’intérêt personnel du coupable pour objet.—M. Hastings peut sans doute paraître répréhensible aux yeux des étrangers, des particuliers même, mais il est assez extraordinaire qu’une nation usurpatrice d’une partie de l’Indostan veuille mêler les règles de la morale à celles d’une administration forcée, injuste et violente par essence, et à laquelle il faudrait renoncer à jamais pour être conséquent.—Mallet du Pan,Mémoires, ed. Sayous, i. 102.
[97 ]On parle volontiers de la stabilité de la constitution anglaise. La vérité est que cette constitution est toujours en mouvement et en oscillation et qu’elle se prête merveilleusement au jeu de ses différentes parties. Sa solidité vient de sa souplesse; elle plie et ne rompt pas.—Boutmy,Nouvelle Revue, 1878, 49.
[98 ]This is not an age for a man to follow the strict morality of better times, yet sure mankind is not yet so debased but that there will ever be found some few men who will scorn to join concert with the public voice when it is not well grounded.—Savile Correspondence, 173.
[99 ]Cette proposition: L’homme est incomparablement plus porté au mal qu’au bien, et il se fait dans le monde incomparablement plus de mauvaises actions que de bonnes—est aussi certaine qu’aucun principe de métaphysique. Il est donc incomparablement plus probable qu’une action faite par un homme, est mauvaise, qu’il n’est probable qu’elle soit bonne. Il est incomparablement plus probable que ces secrets ressorts qui l’ont produite sont corrompus, qu’il n’est probable qu’ils soient honnêtes. Je vous avertis que je parle d’une action qui n’est point mauvaise extérieurement.—Bayle,Œuvres, ii. 248.
[100 ]A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself.—His religion has brought evil to light in a way in which it never was before; it has shown its depth, subtlety, ubiquity; and a revelation, full of mercy on the one hand, is terrible in its exposure of the world’s real state on the other. The Gospel fastens the sense of evil upon the mind; a Christian is enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not.—Mozley,Essays, i. 308. All satirists, of course, work in the direction of Christian doctrine, by the support they give to the doctrine of original sin, making a sort of meanness and badness a law of society.—Mozley,Letters, 333. Les critiques, même malveillants, sont plus près de la vérité dernière que les admirateurs.—Nisard,Lit. fr., Conclusion. Les hommes supérieurs doivent nécessairement passer pour méchants. Où les autres ne voient ni un défaut, ni un ridicule, ni un vice, leur implacable œil l’aperçoit.—Barbey d’Aurevilly,Figaro, 31st March 1888.
[101 ]Prenons garde de ne pas trop expliquer, pour ne pas fournir des arguments à ceux qui veulent tout excuser.—Broglie,Réception de Sorel, 46.
[102 ]The eternal truths and rights of things exist, fortunately, independent of our thoughts or wishes, fixed as mathematics, inherent in the nature of man and the world. They are no more to be trifled with than gravitation.—Froude,Inaugural Lecture at St. Andrews, 1869, 41. What have men to do with interests? There is a right way and a wrong way. That is all we need think about.—Carlyle to Froude,Longman’s Magazine, December 1892, 151. As to History, it is full of indirect but very effective moral teaching. It is not only, as Bolingbroke called it, “Philosophy teaching by examples,” but it is morality teaching by examples.—It is essentially the study which best helps the student to conceive large thoughts.—It is impossible to overvalue the moral teaching of History.—Fitch,Lectures on Teaching, 432. Judging from the past history of our race, in ninety–nine cases out of a hundred, war is a folly and a crime.—Where it is so, it is the saddest and the wildest of all follies, and the most heinous of all crimes.—Greg,Essays on Political and Social Science, 1853, i. 562. La volonté de tout un peuple ne peut rendre juste ce qui est injuste: les représentants d’une nation n’ont pas le droit de faire ce que la nation n’a pas le droit de faire elle–même.—B. Constant,Principes de Politique, i. 15.
[103 ]Think not that morality is ambulatory; that vices in one age are not vices in another, or that virtues, which are under the everlasting seal of right reason, may be stamped by opinion.—Sir Thomas Browne,Works, iv. 64.
[104 ]Osons croire qu’il seroit plus à propos de mettre de côté ces traditions, ces usages, et ces coutumes souvent si imparfaites, si contradictoires, si incohérentes, ou de ne les consulter que pour saisir les inconvéniens et les éviter; et qu’il faudroit chercher non–seulement les éléments d’une nouvelle législation, mais même ses derniers détails dans une étude approfondie de la morale.—Letrosne,Réflexions sur la Législation Criminelle, 137. M. Renan appartient à cette famille d’esprits qui ne croient pas en réalité la raison, la conscience, le droit applicables à la direction des sociétés humaines, et qui demandent à l’histoire, à la tradition, non à la morale, les règles de la politique. Ces esprits sont atteints de la maladie du siècle, le scepticisme moral.—Pillon,Critique Philosophique, i. 49.
[105 ]The subject of modern History is of all others, to my mind, the most interesting, inasmuch as it includes all questions of the deepest interest relating not to human things only, but to divine.—Arnold,Modern History, 311.
8: Acton on the French Revolution
Acton wrote much on the impact of the French Revolution, on its great hopes and its terrible consequences. Liberty Fund has published his Lectures on the French Revolution.
Source: Acton’s Lectures on Modern History, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906).
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=259 on 2008/2/2
9: The Influence of America on the French Revolution
This is one of the lectures which make up the book on the French Revolution. Here Acton looks at the impact of the American Revolution on the French Revolution.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence, with a foreword by Steven J. Tonsor (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000). Chapter: II: The Influence of America
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/74/45390 on 2008-03-18
The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.
II
The Influence of America
The several structures of political thought that arose in France, and clashed in the process of revolution, were not directly responsible for the outbreak. The doctrines hung like a cloud upon the heights, and at critical moments in the reign of Lewis XV. men felt that a catastrophe was impending. It befell when there was less provocation, under his successor; and the spark that changed thought into action was supplied by the Declaration of American Independence. It was the system of an international extra-territorial universal Whig, far transcending the English model by its simplicity and rigour. It surpassed in force all the speculation of Paris and Geneva, for it had undergone the test of experiment, and its triumph was the most memorable thing that had been seen by men.
The expectation that the American colonies would separate was an old one. A century before, Harrington had written: “They are yet babes, that cannot live without sucking the breasts of their mother-cities; but such as I mistake if, when they come of age, they do not wean themselves; which causes me to wonder at princes that like to be exhausted in that way.” When, in 1759, the elder Mirabeau announced it, he meant that the conquest of Canada involved the loss of America, as the colonists would cling to England as long as the French were behind them, and no longer. He came very near to the truth, for the war in Canada gave the signal. The English colonies had meditated the annexation of the French, and they resented that the king’s government undertook the expedition, to deprive them of the opportunity for united action. Fifty years later President Adams said that the treatment of American officers by the British made his blood boil.
The agitation began in 1761, and by the innovating ideas which it flung abroad it is as important as the Declaration itself, or the great constitutional debate. The colonies were more advanced than Great Britain in the way of free institutions, and existed only that they might escape the vices of the mother country. They had no remnants of feudalism to cherish or resist. They possessed written constitutions, some of them remarkably original, fit roots of an immense development. George III. thought it strange that he should be the sovereign of a democracy like Rhode Island, where all power reverted annually to the people, and the authorities had to be elected anew. Connecticut received from the Stuarts so liberal a charter, and worked out so finished a scheme of local self-government, that it served as a basis for the federal constitution. The Quakers had a plan founded on equality of power, without oppression, or privilege, or intolerance, or slavery. They declared that their holy experiment would not have been worth attempting if it did not offer some very real advantage over England. It was to enjoy freedom, liberty of conscience, and the right to tax themselves, that they went into the desert. There were points on which these men anticipated the doctrines of a more unrestrained democracy, for they established their government not on conventions, but on divine right, and they claimed to be infallible. A Connecticut preacher said in 1638: “The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God’s own allowance. They who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them.” The following words, written in 1736, appear in the works of Franklin: “The judgment of a whole people, especially of a free people, is looked upon to be infallible. And this is universally true, while they remain in their proper sphere, unbiassed by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing men. A body of people thus circumstanced cannot be supposed to judge amiss on any essential points; for if they decide in favour of themselves, which is extremely natural, their decision is just, inasmuch as whatever contributes to their benefit is a general benefit, and advances the real public good.” A commentator adds that this notion of the infallible perception by the people of their true interest, and their unerring pursuit of it, was very prevalent in the provinces, and for a time in the States after the establishment of American independence.
In spite of their democratic spirit, these communities consented to have their trade regulated and restricted, to their own detriment and the advantage of English merchants. They had protested, but they had ended by yielding. Now Adam Smith says that to prohibit a great people from making all they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous for themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind. There was a latent sense of injury which broke out when, in addition to interference with the freedom of trade, England exercised the right of taxation. An American lately wrote: “The real foundation of the discontent which led to the Revolution was the effort of Great Britain, beginning in 1750, to prevent diversity of occupation, to attack the growth of manufactures and the mechanic arts, and the final cause before the attempt to tax without representation was the effort to enforce the navigation laws.” When England argued that the hardship of regulation might be greater than the hardship of taxation, and that those who submitted to the one submitted, in principle, to the other, Franklin replied that the Americans had not taken that view, but that, when it was put before them, they would be willing to reject both one and the other. He knew, however, that the ground taken up by his countrymen was too narrow. He wrote to the French economist, Morellet: “Nothing can be better expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour.”
These early authors of American independence were generally enthusiasts for the British Constitution, and preceded Burke in the tendency to canonise it, and to magnify it as an ideal exemplar for nations. John Adams said, in 1766: “Here lies the difference between the British Constitution and other forms of government, namely, that liberty is its end, its use, its designation, drift and scope, as much as grinding corn is the use of a mill.” Another celebrated Bostonian identified the Constitution with the law of Nature, as Montesquieu called the Civil Law, written Reason. He said: “It is the glory of the British prince and the happiness of all his subjects, that their constitution hath its foundation in the immutable laws of Nature; and as the supreme legislative, as well as the supreme executive, derives its authority from that constitution, it should seem that no laws can be made or executed that are repugnant to any essential law in Nature.” The writer of these words, James Otis, is the founder of the revolutionary doctrine. Describing one of his pamphlets, the second President says: “Look over the declaration of rights and wrongs issued by Congress in 1774; look into the declaration of independence in 1776; look into the writings of Dr. Price and Dr. Priestley; look into all the French constitutions of government; and, to cap the climax, look into Mr. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Crisis, and Rights of Man. What can you find that is not to be found in solid substance in this ‘Vindication of the House of Representatives’?” When these men found that the appeal to the law and to the constitution did not avail them, that the king, by bribing the people’s representatives with the people’s money, was able to enforce his will, they sought a higher tribunal, and turned from the law of England to the law of Nature, and from the king of England to the King of kings. Otis, in 1762, 1764 and 1765, says: “Most governments are, in fact, arbitrary, and consequently the curse and scandal of human nature; yet none are of right arbitrary. By the laws of God and nature, government must not raise taxes on the property of the people without the consent of the people or their deputies. There can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of Nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given all men a right to be free. If a man has but little property to protect and defend, yet his life and liberty are things of some importance.” About the same time Gadsden wrote: “A confirmation of our essential and common rights as Englishmen may be pleaded from charters clearly enough; but any further dependence on them may be fatal. We should stand upon the broad common ground of those natural rights that we all feel and know as men and as descendants of Englishmen.”
The primitive fathers of the United States began by preferring abstract moral principle to the letter of the law and the spirit of the Constitution. But they went farther. Not only was their grievance difficult to substantiate at law, but it was trivial in extent. The claim of England was not evidently disproved, and even if it was unjust, the injustice practically was not hard to bear. The suffering that would be caused by submission was immeasurably less than the suffering that must follow resistance, and it was more uncertain and remote. The utilitarian argument was loud in favour of obedience and loyalty. But if interest was on one side, there was a manifest principle on the other—a principle so sacred and so clear as imperatively to demand the sacrifice of men’s lives, of their families and their fortune. They resolved to give up everything, not to escape from actual oppression, but to honour a precept of unwritten law. That was the transatlantic discovery in the theory of political duty, the light that came over the ocean. It represented liberty not as a comparative release from tyranny, but as a thing so divine that the existence of society must be staked to prevent even the least constructive infraction of its sovereign right. “A free people,” said Dickinson, “can never be too quick in observing nor too firm in opposing the beginnings of alteration either in form or reality, respecting institutions formed for their security. The first kind of alteration leads to the last. As violations of the rights of the governed are commonly not only specious, but small at the beginning, they spread over the multitude in such a manner as to touch individuals but slightly. Every free state should incessantly watch, and instantly take alarm at any addition being made to the power exercised over them.” Who are a free people? Not those over whom government is reasonably and equitably exercised; but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised. The contest was plainly a contest of principle, and was conducted entirely on principle by both parties. “The amount of taxes proposed to be raised,” said Marshall, the greatest of constitutional lawyers, “was too inconsiderable to interest the people of either country.” I will add the words of Daniel Webster, the great expounder of the Constitution, who is the most eloquent of the Americans, and stands, in politics, next to Burke: “The Parliament of Great Britain asserted a right to tax the Colonies in all cases whatsoever; and it was precisely on this question that they made the Revolution turn. The amount of taxation was trifling, but the claim itself was inconsistent with liberty, and that was in their eyes enough. It was against the recital of an act of Parliament, rather than against any suffering under its enactment, that they took up arms. They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They saw in the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief, the germ of unjust power.”
The object of these men was liberty, not independence. Their feeling was expressed by Jay in his address to the people of Great Britain: “Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and we shall ever esteem a union with you to be our greatest glory and our greatest happiness.” Before 1775 there was no question of separation. During all the Revolution Adams declared that he would have given everything to restore things as before with security; and both Jefferson and Madison admitted in the presence of the English minister that a few seats in both Houses would have set at rest the whole question.
In their appeal to the higher law the Americans professed the purest Whiggism, and they claimed that their resistance to the House of Commons and the jurisprudence of Westminster only carried forward the eternal conflict between Whig and Tory. By their closer analysis, and their fearlessness of logical consequences, they transformed the doctrine and modified the party. The uprooted Whig, detached from his parchments and precedents, his leading families and historic conditions, exhibited new qualities; and the era of compromise made way for an era of principle. Whilst French diplomacy traced the long hand of the English opposition in the tea riots at Boston, Chatham and Camden were feeling the influence of Dickinson and Otis, without recognising the difference. It appears in a passage of one of Chatham’s speeches, in 1775: “This universal opposition to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen. It was obvious from the nature of things, and from the nature of man, and, above all, from the confirmed habits of thinking, from the spirit of Whiggism flourishing in America. The spirit which now pervades America is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money in this country, is the same spirit which roused all England to action at the Revolution, and which established at a remote era your liberties, on the basis of that grand fundamental maxim of the Constitution, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent. To maintain this principle is the common cause of the Whigs on the other side of the Atlantic, and on this. It is the alliance of God and Nature, immutable, eternal, fixed as the firmament of heaven. Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission will be found equally impotent to convince or enslave your fellow-subjects in America.”
The most significant instance of the action of America on Europe is Edmund Burke. We think of him as a man who, in early life, rejected all generalities and abstract propositions, and who became the most strenuous and violent of conservatives. But there is an interval when, as the quarrel with the Colonies went on, Burke was as revolutionary as Washington. The inconsistency is not as flagrant as it seems. He had been brought forward by the party of measured propriety and imperative moderation, of compromise and unfinished thought, who claimed the right of taxing, but refused to employ it. When he urged the differences in every situation and every problem, and shrank from the common denominator and the underlying principle, he fell into step with his friends. As an Irishman, who had married into an Irish Catholic family, it was desirable that he should adopt no theories in America which would unsettle Ireland. He had learnt to teach government by party as an almost sacred dogma, and party forbids revolt as a breach of the laws of the game. His scruples and his protests, and his defiance of theory, were the policy and the precaution of a man conscious of restraints, and not entirely free in the exertion of powers that lifted him far above his tamer surroundings. As the strife sharpened and the Americans made way, Burke was carried along, and developed views which he never utterly abandoned, but which are difficult to reconcile with much that he wrote when the Revolution had spread to France.
In his address to the Colonists he says: “We do not know how to qualify millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly revere the principles on which you act. We had much rather see you totally independent of this crown and kingdom, than joined to it by so unnatural a conjunction as that of freedom and servitude. We view the establishment of the English Colonies on principles of liberty, as that which is to render this kingdom venerable to future ages. In comparison of this, we regard all the victories and conquests of our warlike ancestors, or of our own times, as barbarous, vulgar distinctions, in which many nations, whom we look upon with little respect or value, have equalled, if not far exceeded us. Those who have and who hold to that foundation of common liberty, whether on this or on your side of the ocean, we consider as the true and the only true Englishmen. Those who depart from it, whether there or here, are attainted, corrupted in blood, and wholly fallen from their original rank and value. They are the real rebels to the fair constitution and just supremacy of England. A long course of war with the administration of this country may be but a prelude to a series of wars and contentions among yourselves, to end at length (as such scenes have too often ended) in a species of humiliating repose, which nothing but the preceding calamities would reconcile to the dispirited few who survived them. We allow that even this evil is worth the risk to men of honour when rational liberty is at stake, as in the present case we confess and lament that it is.”
At other times he spoke as follows:— “Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by which they were once so much distinguished. The Western world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western, was discovered; and that other will probably be its asylum when it is hunted down in every other part. Happy it is that the worst of times may have one refuge still left for humanity. If the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect. Princes otherwise meritorious have violated the liberties of the people, and have been lawfully deposed for such violation. I know no human being exempt from the law. I consider Parliament as the proper judge of kings, and it is necessary that they should be amenable to it. There is no such thing as governing the whole body of the people contrary to their inclination. Whenever they have a feeling they commonly are in the right. Christ appeared in sympathy with the lowest of the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle that their welfare was the object of all government.
“In all forms of government the people is the true legislator. The remote and efficient cause is the consent of the people, either actual or implied, and such consent is absolutely essential to its validity. Whiggism did not consist in the support of the power of Parliament or of any other power, but of the rights of the people. If Parliament should become an instrument in invading them, it was no better in any respect, and much worse in some, than any other instrument of arbitrary power. They who call upon you to belong wholly to the people are those who wish you to belong to your proper home, to the sphere of your duty, to the post of your honour. Let the Commons in Parliament assembled be one and the same thing with the Commons at large. I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that those representatives are going to overleap the fences of the law and to introduce an arbitrary power. This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy; but if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be used—to be used then only when it is evident that nothing else can hold the Constitution to its true principles. It is not in Parliament alone that the remedy for parliamentary disorders can be completed; hardly, indeed, can it begin there. A popular origin cannot therefore be the characteristic distinction of a popular representative. This belongs equally to all parts of government, and in all forms. The virtue, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation. It was not instituted to be a control upon the people. It was designed as a control for the people. Privilege of the crown and privilege of Parliament are only privilege so long as they are exercised for the benefit of the people. The voice of the people is a voice that is to be heard, and not the votes and resolutions of the House of Commons. He would preserve thoroughly every privilege of the people, because it is a privilege known and written in the law of the land; and he would support it, not against the crown or the aristocratic party only, but against the representatives of the people themselves. This was not a government of balances. It would be a strange thing if two hundred peers should have it in their power to defeat by their negative what had been done by the people of England. I have taken my part in political connections and political quarrels for the purpose of advancing justice and the dominion of reason, and I hope I shall never prefer the means, or any feelings growing out of the use of those means, to the great and substantial end itself. Legislators can do what lawyers can not, for they have no other rules to bind them but the great principles of reason and equity and the general sense of mankind. All human laws are, properly speaking, only declaratory; they may alter the mode and application, but have no power over the substance, of original justice. A conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society.
“The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another. I would give a full civil protection, in which I include an immunity from all disturbance of their public religious worship, and a power of teaching in schools as well as temples, to Jews, Mahometans, and even Pagans. The Christian religion itself arose without establishment, it arose even without toleration, and whilst its own principles were not tolerated, it conquered all the powers of darkness, it conquered all the powers of the world. The moment it began to depart from these principles, it converted the establishment into tyranny, it subverted its foundation from that very hour. It is the power of government to prevent much evil; it can do very little positive good in this, or perhaps in anything else. It is not only so of the State and statesman, but of all the classes and descriptions of the rich: they are the pensioners of the poor, and are maintained by their superfluity. They are under an absolute, hereditary, and indefeasible dependence on those who labour and are miscalled the poor. That class of dependent pensioners called the rich is so extremely small, that if all their throats were cut, and a distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a bit of bread and cheese for one night’s supper to those who labour, and who in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves. It is not in breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure. It is the law of nature, which is the law of God.”
I cannot resist the inference from these passages that Burke, after 1770, underwent other influences than those of his reputed masters, the Whigs of 1688. And if we find that strain of unwonted thought in a man who afterwards gilded the old order of things and wavered as to toleration and the slave trade, we may expect that the same causes would operate in France.
When the Letters of a Pennsylvanian Farmer became known in Europe, Diderot said that it was madness to allow Frenchmen to read such things, as they could not do it without becoming intoxicated and changed into different men. But France was impressed by the event more than by the literature that accompanied it. America had made herself independent under less provocation than had ever been a motive of revolt, and the French Government had acknowledged that her cause was righteous and had gone to war for it. If the king was right in America, he was utterly wrong at home, and if the Americans acted rightly, the argument was stronger, the cause was a hundredfold better, in France itself. All that justified their independence condemned the Government of their French allies. By the principle that taxation without representation is robbery, there was no authority so illegitimate as that of Lewis XVI. The force of that demonstration was irresistible, and it produced its effect where the example of England failed. The English doctrine was repelled at the very earliest stage of the Revolution, and the American was adopted. What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government—their cutting, not their sewing. Many French nobles served in the war, and came home republicans and even democrats by conviction. It was America that converted the aristocracy to the reforming policy, and gave leaders to the Revolution. “The American Revolution,” says Washington, “or the peculiar light of the age, seems to have opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and a spirit of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground everywhere.” When the French officers were leaving, Cooper, of Boston, addressed them in the language of warning: “Do not let your hopes be inflamed by our triumphs on this virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you, but if you try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for centuries, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours. Our liberty has been won with blood; you will have to shed it in torrents before liberty can take root in the old world.” Adams, after he had been President of the United States, bitterly regretted the Revolution which made them independent, because it had given the example to the French; although he also believed that they had not a single principle in common.
Nothing, on the contrary, is more certain than that American principles profoundly influenced France, and determined the course of the Revolution. It is from America that Lafayette derived the saying that created a commotion at the time, that resistance is the most sacred of duties. There also was the theory that political power comes from those over whom it is exercised, and depends upon their will; that every authority not so constituted is illegitimate and precarious; that the past is more a warning than an example; that the earth belongs to those who are upon it, not to those who are underneath. These are characteristics common to both Revolutions.
At one time also the French adopted and acclaimed the American notion that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; that the private individual should not feel the pressure of public authority, and should direct his life by the influences that are within him, not around him.
And there was another political doctrine which the Americans transmitted to the French. In old colonial days the executive and the judicial powers were derived from a foreign source, and the common purpose was to diminish them. The assemblies were popular in origin and character, and everything that added to their power seemed to add security to rights. James Wilson, one of the authors and commentators of the constitution, informs us that “at the Revolution the same fond predilection, and the same jealous dislike, existed and prevailed. The executive, and the judicial as well as the legislative authority, was now the child of the people, but to the two former the people behaved like stepmothers. The legislature was still discriminated by excessive partiality.” This preference, historic but irrational, led up naturally to a single chamber. The people of America and their delegates in Congress were of opinion that a single Assembly was every way adequate to the management of their federal concerns, and when the Senate was invented, Franklin strongly objected. “As to the two chambers,” he wrote, “I am of your opinion that one alone would be better; but, my dear friend, nothing in human affairs and schemes is perfect, and perhaps this is the case of our opinions.”
Alexander Hamilton was the ablest as well as the most conservative of the American statesmen. He longed for monarchy, and he desired to establish a national government and to annihilate state rights. The American spirit, as it penetrated France, cannot well be described better than it was by him: “I consider civil liberty, in a genuine, unadulterated sense, as the greatest of terrestrial blessings. I am convinced that the whole human race is entitled to it, and that it can be wrested from no part of them without the blackest and most aggravated guilt. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
But when we speak in the gross of the American Revolution we combine different and discordant things. From the first agitation in 1761 to the Declaration of Independence, and then to the end of the war in 1782, the Americans were aggressive, violent in their language, fond of abstractions, prolific of doctrines universally applicable and universally destructive. It is the ideas of those earlier days that roused the attention of France, and were imported by Lafayette, Noailles, Lameth, and the leaders of the future revolution who had beheld the lowering of the British flag at Yorktown. The America of their experience was the America of James Otis, of Jefferson, of The Rights of Man.
A change followed in 1787, when the Convention drew up the Constitution. It was a period of construction, and every effort was made, every scheme was invented, to curb the inevitable democracy. The members of that assembly were, on the whole, eminently cautious and sensible men. They were not men of extraordinary parts, and the genius of Hamilton failed absolutely to impress them. Some of their most memorable contrivances proceeded from no design, but were merely half measures and mutual concessions. Seward has pointed out this distinction between the revolutionary epoch and the constituent epoch that succeeded: “The rights asserted by our forefathers were not peculiar to themselves. They were the common rights of mankind. The basis of the Constitution was laid broader by far than the superstructure which the conflicting interests and prejudices of the day suffered to be erected. The Constitution and laws of the Federal Government did not practically extend those principles throughout the new system of government; but they were plainly promulgated in the Declaration of Independence.”
Now, although France was deeply touched by the American Revolution, it was not affected by the American Constitution. It underwent the disturbing influence, not the conservative.
The Constitution, framed in the summer of 1787, came into operation in March 1789, and nobody knew how it worked, when the crisis came in France. The debates, which explain every intention and combination, remained long hidden from the world. Moreover, the Constitution has become something more than the original printed paper. Besides amendments, it has been interpreted by the courts, modified by opinion, developed in some directions, and tacitly altered in others. Some of its most valued provisions have been acquired in this way, and were not yet visible when the French so greatly needed the guiding lessons of other men’s experience. Some of the restrictions on the governing power were not fully established at first.
The most important of these is the action of the Supreme Court in annulling unconstitutional laws. The Duke of Wellington said to Bunsen that by this institution alone the United States made up for all the defects of their government. Since Chief Justice Marshall, the judiciary undoubtedly obtained immense authority, which Jefferson, and others besides, believed to be unconstitutional; for the Constitution itself gives no such power. The idea had grown up in the States, chiefly, I think, in Virginia. At Richmond, in 1782, Judge Wythe said: “Tyranny has been sapped, the departments kept within their own spheres, the citizens protected, and general liberty promoted. But this beneficial result attains to higher perfection when, those who hold the purse and the sword differing as to the powers which each may exercise, the tribunals, who hold neither, are called upon to declare the law impartially between them. If the whole legislature—an event to be deprecated—should attempt to overleap the boundaries prescribed to them by the people, I, in administering the justice of the country, will meet the united powers at my seat in this tribunal, and, pointing to the Constitution, will say to them: ‘Here is the limit of your authority; hither shall you go, but no further.’ ” The Virginian legislature gave way, and repealed the act.
After the Federal Constitution was drawn up, Hamilton, in the seventy-eighth number of the Federalist, argued that the power belonged to the judiciary; but it was not constitutionally recognised until 1801. “This,” said Madison, “makes the judiciary department paramount, in fact, to the legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper. In a government whose vital principle is responsibility, it never will be allowed that the legislative and executive departments should be completely subjected to the judiciary, in which that characteristic feature is so faintly seen.” Wilson, on the other hand, justified the practice on the principle of the higher law: “Parliament may, unquestionably, be controlled by natural or revealed law, proceeding from divine authority. Is not this superior authority binding upon the courts of justice? When the courts of justice obey the superior authority, it cannot be said with propriety that they control the inferior one; they only declare, as it is their duty to declare, that this inferior one is controlled by the other, which is superior. They do not repeal an act of Parliament; they pronounce it void, because contrary to an overruling law.” Thus the function of the judiciary to be a barrier against democracy, which, according to Tocqueville, it is destined to be, was not apparent. In the same manner religious liberty, which has become so much identified with the United States, is a thing which grew by degrees, and was not to be found imposed by the letter of the law.
The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded. It is the one immortal tribute of America to political science, for state rights are at the same time the consummation and the guard of democracy. So much so that an officer wrote, a few months before Bull Run: “The people in the south are evidently unanimous in the opinion that slavery is endangered by the current of events, and it is useless to attempt to alter that opinion. As our government is founded on the will of the people, when that will is fixed our government is powerless.” Those are the words of Sherman, the man who, by his march through Georgia, cut the Confederacy into two. Lincoln himself wrote, at the same time: “I declare that the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend.” Such was the force with which state rights held the minds of abolitionists on the eve of the war that bore them down.
At the Revolution there were many Frenchmen who saw in federalism the only way to reconcile liberty and democracy, to establish government on contract, and to rescue the country from the crushing preponderance of Paris and the Parisian populace. I do not mean the Girondins, but men of opinions different from theirs, and, above all, Mirabeau. He planned to save the throne by detaching the provinces from the frenzy of the capital, and he declared that the federal system is alone capable of preserving freedom in any great empire. The idea did not grow up under American influence; for no man was more opposed to it than Lafayette; and the American witness of the Revolution, Morris, denounced federalism as a danger to France.
Apart from the Constitution, the political thought of America influenced the French next to their own. And it was not all speculation, but a system for which men died, which had proved entirely practical, and strong enough to conquer all resistance, with the sanction and encouragement of Europe. It displayed to France a finished model of revolution, both in thought and action, and showed that what seemed extreme and subversive in the old world, was compatible with good and wise government, with respect for social order, and the preservation of national character and custom. The ideas which captured and convulsed the French people were mostly ready-made for them, and much that is familiar to you now, much of that which I have put before you from other than French sources, will meet us again next week with the old faces, when we come to the States-General.
10: The History of Liberty Part I: In Antiquity
The first part of Acton’s promised, but never completed, history of liberty.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907). Chapter: I: THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY1
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/75/42894 on 2008-03-18
The text is in the public domain.
I
THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY1
Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstitution, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food. During long intervals it has been utterly arrested, when nations were being rescued from barbarism and from the grasp of strangers, and when the perpetual struggle for existence, depriving men of all interest and understanding in politics, has made them eager to sell their birthright for a pottage, and ignorant of the treasure they resigned. At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome, as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge, as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.
A few familiar examples from modern politics will explain why it is that the burden of my argument will lie outside the domain of legislation. It is often said that our Constitution attained its formal perfection in 1679, when the Habeas Corpus Act was passed. Yet Charles II. succeeded, only two years later, in making himself independent of Parliament. In 1789, while the States-General assembled at Versailles, the Spanish Cortes, older than Magna Charta and more venerable than our House of Commons, were summoned after an interval of generations, but they immediately prayed the King to abstain from consulting them, and to make his reforms of his own wisdom and authority. According to the common opinion, indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections. A restricted suffrage is another reputed security for monarchy. But the Parliament of Charles X., which was returned by 90,000 electors, resisted and overthrew the throne; while the Parliament of Louis Philippe, chosen by a Constitution of 250,000, obsequiously promoted the reactionary policy of his Ministers, and in the fatal division which, by rejecting reform, laid the monarchy in the dust, Guizot’s majority was obtained by the votes of 129 public functionaries. An unpaid legislature is, for obvious reasons, more independent than most of the Continental legislatures which receive pay. But it would be unreasonable in America to send a member as far as from here to Constantinople to live for twelve months at his own expense in the dearest of capital cities. Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy, for he is expected to make 70,000 changes in the public service; fifty years ago John Quincy Adams dismissed only two men. The purchase of judicial appointments is manifestly indefensible; yet in the old French monarchy that monstrous practice created the only corporation able to resist the king. Official corruption, which would ruin a commonwealth, serves in Russia as a salutary relief from the pressure of absolutism. There are conditions in which it is scarcely a hyperbole to say that slavery itself is a stage on the road to freedom. Therefore we are not so much concerned this evening with the dead letter of edicts and of statutes as with the living thoughts of men. A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer that it might be well to question and examine with rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear hard mind of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen. It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France.
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation,—religion, education, and the distribution of wealth. In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses. The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities. Liberty, by this definition, is the essential condition and guardian of religion; and it is in the history of the Chosen People, accordingly, that the first illustrations of my subject are obtained. The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of race and faith, and founded, not on physical force, but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel in that momentous protestation and warning which all the kingdoms of Asia and many of the kingdoms of Europe have unceasingly confirmed. The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to restore the original purity of the constitution, and to make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed from the established authorities, from the king, the priests, and the princes of the people, to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the example of the Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development, and not of essential change; and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles, in unison, or in antagonism, occupies the whole of the space we are going over together.
The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. In the year 622 a supreme effort was made at Jerusalem to reform and preserve the State. The High Priest produced from the temple of Jehovah the book of the deserted and forgotten Law, and both king and people bound themselves by solemn oaths to observe it. But that early example of limited monarchy and of the supremacy of law neither lasted nor spread; and the forces by which freedom has conquered must be sought elsewhere. In the very year 586, in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world.
According to a famous saying of the most famous authoress of the Continent, liberty is ancient, and it is despotism that is new. It has been the pride of recent historians to vindicate the truth of that maxim. The heroic age of Greece confirms it, and it is still more conspicuously true of Teutonic Europe. Wherever we can trace the earlier life of the Aryan nations we discover germs which favouring circumstances and assiduous culture might have developed into free societies. They exhibit some sense of common interest in common concerns, little reverence for external authority, and an imperfect sense of the function and supremacy of the State. Where the division of property and labour is incomplete there is little division of classes and of power. Until societies are tried by the complex problems of civilisation they may escape despotism, as societies that are undisturbed by religious diversity avoid persecution. In general, the forms of the patriarchal age failed to resist the growth of absolute States when the difficulties and temptations of advancing life began to tell; and with one sovereign exception, which is not within my scope to-day, it is scarcely possible to trace their survival in the institutions of later times. Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth. What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis, a man of genius and refinement, who avows that he longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. The tyrants were often men of surprising capacity and merit, like some of those who, in the fourteenth century, made themselves lords of Italian cities; but rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.
From this universal degradation the world was rescued by the most gifted of the nations. Athens, which like other cities was distracted and oppressed by a privileged class, avoided violence and appointed Solon to revise its laws. It was the happiest choice that history records. Solon was not only the wisest man to be found in Athens, but the most profound political genius of antiquity; and the easy, bloodless, and pacific revolution by which he accomplished the deliverance of his country was the first step in a career which our age glories in pursuing, and instituted a power which has done more than anything, except revealed religion, for the regeneration of society. The upper class had possessed the right of making and administering the laws, and he left them in possession, only transferring to wealth what had been the privilege of birth. To the rich, who alone had the means of sustaining the burden of public service in taxation and war, Solon gave a share of power proportioned to the demands made on their resources. The poorest classes were exempt from direct taxes, but were excluded from office. Solon gave them a voice in electing magistrates from the classes above them, and the right of calling them to account. This concession, apparently so slender, was the beginning of a mighty change. It introduced the idea that a man ought to have a voice in selecting those to whose rectitude and wisdom he is compelled to trust his fortune, his family, and his life. And this idea completely inverted the notion of human authority, for it inaugurated the reign of moral influence where all political power had depended on moral force. Government by consent superseded government by compulsion, and the pyramid which had stood on a point was made to stand upon its base. By making every citizen the guardian of his own interest Solon admitted the element of Democracy into the State. The greatest glory of a ruler, he said, is to create a popular government. Believing that no man can be entirely trusted, he subjected all who exercised power to the vigilant control of those for whom they acted.
The only resource against political disorders that had been known till then was the concentration of power. Solon undertook to effect the same object by the distribution of power. He gave to the common people as much influence as he thought them able to employ, that the State might be exempt from arbitrary government. It is the essence of Democracy, he said, to obey no master but the law. Solon recognised the principle that political forms are not final or inviolable, and must adapt themselves to facts; and he provided so well for the revision of his constitution, without breach of continuity or loss of stability, that for centuries after his death the Attic orators attributed to him, and quoted by his name, the whole structure of Athenian law. The direction of its growth was determined by the fundamental doctrine of Solon, that political power ought to be commensurate with public service. In the Persian war the services of the Democracy eclipsed those of the Patrician orders, for the fleet that swept the Asiatics from the Egean Sea was manned by the poorer Athenians. That class, whose valour had saved the State and had preserved European civilisation, had gained a title to increase of influence and privilege. The offices of State, which had been a monopoly of the rich, were thrown open to the poor, and in order to make sure that they should obtain their share, all but the highest commands were distributed by lot.
Whilst the ancient authorities were decaying, there was no accepted standard of moral and political right to make the framework of society fast in the midst of change. The instability that had seized on the forms threatened the very principles of government. The national beliefs were yielding to doubt, and doubt was not yet making way for knowledge. There had been a time when the obligations of public as well as private life were identified with the will of the gods. But that time had passed. Pallas, the ethereal goddess of the Athenians, and the Sun god whose oracles, delivered from the temple between the twin summits of Parnassus, did so much for the Greek nationality, aided in keeping up a lofty ideal of religion; but when the enlightened men of Greece learnt to apply their keen faculty of reasoning to the system of their inherited belief, they became quickly conscious that the conceptions of the gods corrupted the life and degraded the minds of the public. Popular morality could not be sustained by the popular religion. The moral instruction which was no longer supplied by the gods could not yet be found in books. There was no venerable code expounded by experts, no doctrine proclaimed by men of reputed sanctity like those teachers of the far East whose words still rule the fate of nearly half mankind. The effort to account for things by close observation and exact reasoning began by destroying. There came a time when the philosophers of the Porch and the Academy wrought the dictates of wisdom and virtue into a system so consistent and profound that it has vastly shortened the task of the Christian divines. But that time had not yet come.
The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired authorities, which was then beginning to absorb the energies of the Greek intellect, is the grandest movement in the profane annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy and far the better part of the political knowledge we possess. Pericles, who was at the head of the Athenian Government, was the first statesman who encountered the problem which the rapid weakening of traditions forced on the political world. No authority in morals or in politics remained unshaken by the motion that was in the air. No guide could be confidently trusted; there was no available criterion to appeal to, for the means of controlling or denying convictions that prevailed among the people. The popular sentiment as to what was right might be mistaken, but it was subject to no test. The people were, for practical purposes, the seat of the knowledge of good and evil. The people, therefore, were the seat of power.
The political philosophy of Pericles consisted of this conclusion. He resolutely struck away all the props that still sustained the artificial preponderance of wealth. For the ancient doctrine that power goes with land, he introduced the idea that power ought to be so equitably diffused as to afford equal security to all. That one part of the community should govern the whole, or that one class should make laws for another, he declared to be tyrannical. The abolition of privilege would have served only to transfer the supremacy from the rich to the poor, if Pericles had not redressed the balance by restricting the right of citizenship to Athenians of pure descent. By this measure the class which formed what we should call the third estate was brought down to 14,000 citizens, and became about equal in numbers with the higher ranks. Pericles held that every Athenian who neglected to take his part in the public business inflicted an injury on the commonwealth. That none might be excluded by poverty, he caused the poor to be paid for their attendance out of the funds of the State; for his administration of the federal tribute had brought together a treasure of more than two million sterling. The instrument of his sway was the art of speaking. He governed by persuasion. Everything was decided by argument in open deliberation, and every influence bowed before the ascendency of mind. The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it; to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property; to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece. It hardly survived the great patriot who conceived it; and all history has been occupied with the endeavour to upset the balance of power by giving the advantage to money, land, or numbers. A generation followed that has never been equalled in talent—a generation of men whose works, in poetry and eloquence, are still the envy of the world, and in history, philosophy, and politics remain unsurpassed. But it produced no successor to Pericles, and no man was able to wield the sceptre that fell from his hand.
It was a momentous step in the progress of nations when the principle that every interest should have the right and the means of asserting itself was adopted by the Athenian Constitution. But for those who were beaten in the vote there was no redress. The law did not check the triumph of majorities or rescue the minority from the dire penalty of having been outnumbered. When the overwhelming influence of Pericles was removed, the conflict between classes raged without restraint, and the slaughter that befell the higher ranks in the Peloponnesian war gave an irresistible preponderance to the lower. The restless and inquiring spirit of the Athenians was prompt to unfold the reason of every institution and the consequences of every principle, and their Constitution ran its course from infancy to decrepitude with unexampled speed.
Two men’s lives span the interval from the first admission of popular influence, under Solon, to the downfall of the State. Their history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks. They venerated the Constitution which had given them prosperity, and equality, and freedom, and never questioned the fundamental laws which regulated the enormous power of the Assembly. They tolerated considerable variety of opinion and great licence of speech; and their humanity towards their slaves roused the indignation even of the most intelligent partisan of aristocracy. Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs, exercised its demoralising influence on the illustrious democracy of Athens. It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. The humblest and most numerous class of the Athenians united the legislative, the judicial, and, in part, the executive power. The philosophy that was then in the ascendant taught them that there is no law superior to that of the State—the lawgiver is above the law.
It followed that the sovereign people had a right to do whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of right or wrong but its own judgment of expediency. On a memorable occasion the assembled Athenians declared it monstrous that they should be prevented from doing whatever they chose. No force that existed could restrain them; and they resolved that no duty should restrain them, and that they would be bound by no laws that were not of their own making. In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their Government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients. They ruined their city by attempting to conduct war by debate in the marketplace. Like the French Republic, they put their unsuccessful commanders to death. They treated their dependencies with such injustice that they lost their maritime Empire. They plundered the rich until the rich conspired with the public enemy, and they crowned their guilt by the martyrdom of Socrates.
When the absolute sway of numbers had endured for near a quarter of a century, nothing but bare existence was left for the State to lose; and the Athenians, wearied and despondent, confessed the true cause of their ruin. They understood that for liberty, justice, and equal laws, it is as necessary that Democracy should restrain itself as it had been that it should restrain the Oligarchy. They resolved to take their stand once more upon the ancient ways, and to restore the order of things which had subsisted when the monopoly of power had been taken from the rich and had not been acquired by the poor. After a first restoration had failed, which is only memorable because Thucydides, whose judgment in politics is never at fault, pronounced it the best Government Athens had enjoyed, the attempt was renewed with more experience and greater singleness of purpose. The hostile parties were reconciled, and proclaimed an amnesty, the first in history. They resolved to govern by concurrence. The laws, which had the sanction of tradition, were reduced to a code; and no act of the sovereign assembly was valid with which they might be found to disagree. Between the sacred lines of the Constitution which were to remain inviolate, and the decrees which met from time to time the needs and notions of the day, a broad distinction was drawn; and the fabric of a law which had been the work of generations was made independent of momentary variations in the popular will. The repentance of the Athenians came too late to save the Republic. But the lesson of their experience endures for all times, for it teaches that government by the whole people, being the government of the most numerous and most powerful class, is an evil of the same nature as unmixed monarchy, and requires, for nearly the same reasons, institutions that shall protect it against itself, and shall uphold the permanent reign of law against arbitrary revolutions of opinion.
Parallel with the rise and fall of Athenian freedom, Rome was employed in working out the same problems, with greater constructive sense, and greater temporary success, but ending at last in a far more terrible catastrophe. That which among the ingenious Athenians had been a development carried forward by the spell of plausible argument, was in Rome a conflict between rival forces. Speculative politics had no attraction for the grim and practical genius of the Romans. They did not consider what would be the cleverest way of getting over a difficulty, but what way was indicated by analogous cases; and they assigned less influence to the impulse and spirit of the moment, than to precedent and example. Their peculiar character prompted them to ascribe the origin of their laws to early times, and in their desire to justify the continuity of their institutions, and to get rid of the reproach of innovation, they imagined the legendary history of the kings of Rome. The energy of their adherence to traditions made their progress slow, they advanced only under compulsion of almost unavoidable necessity, and the same questions recurred often, before they were settled. The constitutional history of the Republic turns on the endeavours of the aristocracy, who claimed to be the only true Romans, to retain in their hands the power they had wrested from the kings, and of the plebeians to get an equal share in it. And this controversy, which the eager and restless Athenians went through in one generation, lasted for more than two centuries, from a time when the plebs were excluded from the government of the city, and were taxed, and made to serve without pay, until, in the year 285, they were admitted to political equality. Then followed one hundred and fifty years of unexampled prosperity and glory; and then, out of the original conflict which had been compromised, if not theoretically settled, a new struggle arose which was without an issue.
The mass of poorer families, impoverished by incessant service in war, were reduced to dependence on an aristocracy of about two thousand wealthy men, who divided among themselves the immense domain of the State. When the need became intense the Gracchi tried to relieve it by inducing the richer classes to allot some share in the public lands to the common people. The old and famous aristocracy of birth and rank had made a stubborn resistance, but it knew the art of yielding. The later and more selfish aristocracy was unable to learn it. The character of the people was changed by the sterner motives of dispute. The fight for political power had been carried on with the moderation which is so honourable a quality of party contests in England. But the struggle for the objects of material existence grew to be as ferocious as civil controversies in France. Repulsed by the rich, after a struggle of twenty-two years, the people, three hundred and twenty thousand of whom depended on public rations for food, were ready to follow any man who promised to obtain for them by revolution what they could not obtain by law.
For a time the Senate, representing the ancient and threatened order of things, was strong enough to overcome every popular leader that arose, until Julius Cæsar, supported by an army which he had led in an unparalleled career of conquest, and by the famished masses which he won by his lavish liberality, and skilled beyond all other men in the art of governing, converted the Republic into a Monarchy by a series of measures that were neither violent nor injurious.
The Empire preserved the Republican forms until the reign of Diocletian; but the will of the Emperors was as uncontrolled as that of the people had been after the victory of the Tribunes. Their power was arbitrary even when it was most wisely employed, and yet the Roman Empire rendered greater services to the cause of liberty than the Roman Republic. I do not mean by reason of the temporary accident that there were emperors who made good use of their immense opportunities, such as Nerva, of whom Tacitus says that he combined monarchy and liberty, things otherwise incompatible; or that the Empire was what its panegyrists declared it, the perfection of Democracy. In truth it was at best an ill-disguised and odious despotism. But Frederic the Great was a despot; yet he was a friend to toleration and free discussion. The Bonapartes were despotic; yet no liberal ruler was ever more acceptable to the masses of the people than the First Napoleon, after he had destroyed the Republic, in 1805, and the Third Napoleon at the height of his power in 1859. In the same way, the Roman Empire possessed merits which, at a distance, and especially at a great distance of time, concern men more deeply than the tragic tyranny which was felt in the neighbourhood of the Palace. The poor had what they had demanded in vain of the Republic. The rich fared better than during the Triumvirate. The rights of Roman citizens were extended to the people of the provinces. To the imperial epoch belong the better part of Roman literature and nearly the entire Civil Law; and it was the Empire that mitigated slavery, instituted religious toleration, made a beginning of the law of nations, and created a perfect system of the law of property. The Republic which Cæsar overthrew had been anything but a free State. It provided admirable securities for the rights of citizens; it treated with savage disregard the rights of men; and allowed the free Roman to inflict atrocious wrongs on his children, on debtors and dependants, on prisoners and slaves. Those deeper ideas of right and duty, which are not found on the tables of municipal law, but with which the generous minds of Greece were conversant, were held of little account, and the philosophy which dealt with such speculations was repeatedly proscribed, as a teacher of sedition and impiety.
At length, in the year 155, the Athenian philosopher Carneades appeared at Rome, on a political mission. During an interval of official business he delivered two public orations, to give the unlettered conquerors of his country a taste of the disputations that flourished in the Attic schools. On the first day he discoursed of natural justice. On the next he denied its existence, arguing that all our notions of good and evil are derived from positive enactment. From the time of that memorable display, the genius of the vanquished held its conquerors in thrall. The most eminent of the public men of Rome, such as Scipio and Cicero, formed their minds on Grecian models, and her jurists underwent the rigorous discipline of Zeno and Chrysippus.
If, drawing the limit in the second century, when the influence of Christianity becomes perceptible, we should form our judgment of the politics of antiquity by its actual legislation, our estimate would be low. The prevailing notions of freedom were imperfect, and the endeavours to realise them were wide of the mark. The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty. They concentrated so many prerogatives in the State as to leave no footing from which a man could deny its jurisdiction or assign bounds to its activity. If I may employ an expressive anachronism, the vice of the classic State was that it was both Church and State in one. Morality was undistinguished from religion and politics from morals; and in religion, morality, and politics there was only one legislator and one authority. The State, while it did deplorably little for education, for practical science, for the indigent and helpless, or for the spiritual needs of man, nevertheless claimed the use of all his faculties and the determination of all his duties. Individuals and families, associations and dependencies were so much material that the sovereign power consumed for its own purposes. What the slave was in the hands of his master, the citizen was in the hands of the community. The most sacred obligations vanished before the public advantage. The passengers existed for the sake of the ship. By their disregard for private interests, and for the moral welfare and improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital elements on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the decay of families and the depopulation of the country. They survive not in their institutions, but in their ideas, and by their ideas, especially on the art of government, they are—
- The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
- Our spirits from their urns.
To them, indeed, may be tracked nearly all the errors that are undermining political society—Communism, Utilitarianism, the confusion between tyranny and authority, and between lawlessness and freedom.
The notion that men lived originally in a state of nature, by violence and without laws, is due to Critias. Communism in its grossest form was recommended by Diogenes of Sinope. According to the Sophists, there is no duty above expediency and no virtue apart from pleasure. Laws are an invention of weak men to rob their betters of the reasonable enjoyment of their superiority. It is better to inflict than to suffer wrong; and as there is no greater good than to do evil without fear of retribution, so there is no worse evil than to suffer without the consolation of revenge. Justice is the mask of a craven spirit; injustice is worldly wisdom; and duty, obedience, self-denial are the impostures of hypocrisy. Government is absolute, and may ordain what it pleases, and no subject can complain that it does him wrong, but as long as he can escape compulsion and punishment, he is always free to disobey. Happiness consists in obtaining power and in eluding the necessity of obedience; and he that gains a throne by perfidy and murder, deserves to be truly envied.
Epicurus differed but little from the propounders of the code of revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said, are founded on contract for mutual protection. Good and evil are conventional terms, for the thunderbolts of heaven fall alike on the just and the unjust. The objection to wrongdoing is not the act, but in its consequences to the wrongdoer. Wise men contrive laws, not to bind, but to protect themselves; and when they prove to be unprofitable they cease to be valid. The illiberal sentiments of even the most illustrious metaphysicians are disclosed in the saying of Aristotle, that the mark of the worst governments is that they leave men free to live as they please.
If you will bear in mind that Socrates, the best of the pagans, knew of no higher criterion for men, of no better guide of conduct, than the laws of each country; that Plato, whose sublime doctrine was so near an anticipation of Christianity that celebrated theologians wished his works to be forbidden, lest men should he content with them, and indifferent to any higher dogma—to whom was granted that prophetic vision of the Just Man, accused, condemned and scourged, and dying on a Cross—nevertheless employed the most splendid intellect ever bestowed on man to advocate the abolition of the family and the exposure of infants; that Aristotle, the ablest moralist of antiquity, saw no harm in making raids upon a neighbouring people, for the sake of reducing them to slavery—still more, if you will consider that, among the moderns, men of genius equal to these have held political doctrines not less criminal or absurd—it will be apparent to you how stubborn a phalanx of error blocks the paths of truth; that pure reason is as powerless as custom to solve the problem of free government; that it can only be the fruit of long, manifold, and painful experience; and that the tracing of the methods by which divine wisdom has educated the nations to appreciate and to assume the duties of freedom, is not the least part of that true philosophy that studies to
- Assert eternal Providence,
- And justify the ways of God to men.
But, having sounded the depth of their errors, I should give you a very inadequate idea of the wisdom of the ancients if I allowed it to appear that their precepts were no better than their practice. While statesmen and senates and popular assemblies supplied examples of every description of blunder, a noble literature arose, in which a priceless treasure of political knowledge was stored, and in which the defects of the existing institutions were exposed with unsparing sagacity. The point on which the ancients were most nearly unanimous is the right of the people to govern, and their inability to govern alone. To meet this difficulty, to give to the popular element a full share without a monopoly of power, they adopted very generally the theory of a mixed Constitution. They differed from our notion of the same thing, because modern Constitutions have been a device for limiting monarchy; with them they were invented to curb democracy. The idea arose in the time of Plato — though he repelled it — when the early monarchies and oligarchies had vanished, and it continued to be cherished long after all democracies had been absorbed in the Roman Empire. But whereas a sovereign prince who surrenders part of his authority yields to the argument of superior force, a sovereign people relinquishing its own prerogative succumbs to the influence of reason. And it has in all times proved more easy to create limitations by the use of force than by persuasion.
The ancient writers saw very clearly that each principle of government standing alone is carried to excess and provokes a reaction. Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers. They therefore imagined that to restrain each element by combining it with the others would avert the natural process of self-destruction, and endow the State with perpetual youth. But this harmony of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy blended together, which was the ideal of many writers, and which they supposed to be exhibited by Sparta, by Carthage, and by Rome, was a chimera of philosophers never realised by antiquity. At last Tacitus, wiser than the rest, confessed that the mixed Constitution, however admirable in theory, was difficult to establish and impossible to maintain. His disheartening avowal is not disowned by later experience.
The experiment has been tried more often than I can tell, with a combination of resources that were unknown to the ancients—with Christianity, parliamentary government, and a free press. Yet there is no example of such a balanced Constitution having lasted a century. If it has succeeded anywhere it has been in our favoured country and in our time; and we know not yet how long the wisdom of the nation will preserve the equipoise. The Federal check was as familiar to the ancients as the Constitutional. For the type of all their Republics was the government of a city by its own inhabitants meeting in the public place. An administration embracing many cities was known to them only in the form of the oppression which Sparta exercised over the Messenians, Athens over her Confederates, and Rome over Italy. The resources which, in modern times, enabled a great people to govern itself through a single centre did not exist. Equality could be preserved only by Federalism; and it occurs more often amongst them than in the modern world. If the distribution of power among the several parts of the State is the most efficient restraint on monarchy, the distribution of power among several States is the best check on democracy. By multiplying centres of government and discussion it promotes the diffusion of political knowledge and the maintenance of healthy and independent opinion. It is the protectorate of minorities, and the consecration of self-government. But although it must be enumerated among the better achievements of practical genius in antiquity, it arose from necessity, and its properties were imperfectly investigated in theory.
When the Greeks began to reflect on the problems of society, they first of all accepted things as they were, and did their best to explain and defend them. Inquiry, which with us is stimulated by doubt, began with them in wonder. The most illustrious of the early philosophers, Pythagoras, promulgated a theory for the preservation of political power in the educated class, and ennobled a form of government which was generally founded on popular ignorance and on strong class interests. He preached authority and subordination, and dwelt more on duties than on rights, on religion than on policy; and his system perished in the revolution by which oligarchies were swept away. The revolution afterwards developed its own philosophy, whose excesses I have described.
But between the two eras, between the rigid didactics of the early Pythagoreans and the dissolving theories of Protagoras, a philosopher arose who stood aloof from both extremes, and whose difficult sayings were never really understood or valued until our time. Heraclitus, of Ephesus, deposited his book in the temple of Diana. The book has perished, like the temple and the worship, but its fragments have been collected and interpreted with incredible ardour, by the scholars, the divines, the philosophers, and politicians who have been engaged the most intensely in the toil and stress of this century. The most renowned logician of the last century adopted every one of his propositions; and the most brilliant agitator among Continental Socialists composed a work of eight hundred and forty pages to celebrate his memory.
Heraclitus complained that the masses were deaf to truth, and knew not that one good man counts for more than thousands; but he held the existing order in no superstitious reverence. Strife, he says, is the source and the master of all things. Life is perpetual motion, and repose is death. No man can plunge twice into the same current, for it is always flowing and passing, and is never the same. The only thing fixed and certain in the midst of change is the universal and sovereign reason, which all men may not perceive, but which is common to all. Laws are sustained by no human authority, but by virtue of their derivation from the one law that is divine. These sayings, which recall the grand outlines of political truth which we have found in the Sacred Books, and carry us forward to the latest teaching of our most enlightened contemporaries, would bear a good deal of elucidation and comment. Heraclitus is, unfortunately, so obscure that Socrates could not understand him, and I won’t pretend to have succeeded better.
If the topic of my address was the history of political science, the highest and the largest place would belong to Plato and Aristotle. The Laws of the one, the Politics of the other, are, if I may trust my own experience, the books from which we may learn the most about the principles of politics. The penetration with which those great masters of thought analysed the institutions of Greece, and exposed their vices, is not surpassed by anything in later literature; by Burke or Hamilton, the best political writers of the last century; by Tocqueville or Roscher, the most eminent of our own. But Plato and Aristotle were philosophers, studious not of unguided freedom, but of intelligent government. They saw the disastrous effects of ill-directed striving for liberty; and they resolved that it was better not to strive for it, but to be content with a strong administration, prudently adapted to make men prosperous and happy.
Now liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life. Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire. It might be plausibly argued that, if many things would be worse in England or Ireland under an intelligent despotism, some things would be managed better; that the Roman Government was more enlightened under Augustus and Antoninus than under the Senate, in the days of Marius or of Pompey. A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved. It is better to be the citizen of a humble commonwealth in the Alps, without a prospect of influence beyond the narrow frontier, than a subject of the superb autocracy that overshadows half of Asia and of Europe. But it may be urged, on the other side, that liberty is not the sum or the substitute of all the things men ought to live for; that to be real it must be circumscribed, and that the limits of circumscription vary; that advancing civilisation invests the State with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraint on the subject; that a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable; that liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage; that a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power; and that the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. We are seeking out the influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or by the appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among those influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.
It is the Stoics who emancipated mankind from its subjugation to despotic rule, and whose enlightened and elevated views of life bridged the chasm that separates the ancient from the Christian state, and led the way to freedom. Seeing how little security there is that the laws of any land shall be wise or just, and that the unanimous will of a people and the assent of nations are liable to err, the Stoics looked beyond those narrow barriers, and above those inferior sanctions, for the principles that ought to regulate the lives of men and the existence of society. They made it known that there is a will superior to the collective will of man, and a law that overrules those of Solon and Lycurgus. Their test of good government is its conformity to principles that can be traced to a higher legislator. That which we must obey, that to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from His nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all the nations.
The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind. Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of that universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God. The true guide of our conduct is no outward authority, but the voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our souls, who knows all our thoughts, to whom are owing all the truth we know, and all the good we do; for vice is voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the heavenly spirit within.
What the teaching of that divine voice is, the philosophers who had imbibed the sublime ethics of the Porch went on to expound: It is not enough to act up to the written law, or to give all men their due; we ought to give them more than their due, to be generous and beneficent, to devote ourselves for the good of others, seeking our reward in self-denial and sacrifice, acting from the motive of sympathy and not of personal advantage. Therefore we must treat others as we wish to be treated by them, and must persist until death in doing good to our enemies, regardless of unworthiness and ingratitude. For we must be at war with evil, but at peace with men, and it is better to suffer than to commit injustice. True freedom, says the most eloquent of the Stoics, consists in obeying God. A State governed by such principles as these would have been free far beyond the measure of Greek or Roman freedom; for they open a door to religious toleration, and close it against slavery. Neither conquest nor purchase, said Zeno, can make one man the property of another.
These doctrines were adopted and applied by the great jurists of the Empire. The law of nature, they said, is superior to the written law, and slavery contradicts the law of nature. Men have no right to do what they please with their own, or to make profit out of another’s loss. Such is the political wisdom of the ancients, touching the foundations of liberty, as we find it in its highest development, in Cicero, and Seneca, and Philo, a Jew of Alexandria. Their writings impress upon us the greatness of the work of preparation for the Gospel which had been accomplished among men on the eve of the mission of the Apostles. St. Augustine, after quoting Seneca, exclaims: “What more could a Christian say than this Pagan has said?” The enlightened pagans had reached nearly the last point attainable without a new dispensation, when the fulness of time was come. We have seen the breadth and the splendour of the domain of Hellenic thought, and it has brought us to the threshold of a greater kingdom. The best of the later classics speak almost the language of Christianity, and they border on its spirit.
But in all that I have been able to cite from classical literature, three things are wanting, — representative government, the emancipation of the slaves, and liberty of conscience. There were, it is true, deliberative assemblies, chosen by the people; and confederate cities, of which, both in Asia and Africa, there were so many leagues, sent their delegates to sit in Federal Councils. But government by an elected Parliament was even in theory a thing unknown. It is congruous with the nature of Polytheism to admit some measure of toleration. And Socrates, when he avowed that he must obey God rather than the Athenians, and the Stoics, when they set the wise man above the law, were very near giving utterance to the principle. But it was first proclaimed and established by enactment, not in polytheistic and philosophical Greece, but in India, by Asoka, the earliest of the Buddhist kings, two hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ.
Slavery has been, far more than intolerance, the perpetual curse and reproach of ancient civilisation, and although its rightfulness was disputed as early as the days of Aristotle, and was implicitly, if not definitely, denied by several Stoics, the moral philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, as well as their practice, pronounced decidedly in its favour. But there was one extraordinary people who, in this as in other things, anticipated the purer precept that was to come. Philo of Alexandria is one of the writers whose views on society were most advanced. He applauds not only liberty but equality in the enjoyment of wealth. He believes that a limited democracy, purged of its grosser elements, is the most perfect government, and will extend itself gradually over all the world. By freedom he understood the following of God. Philo, though he required that the condition of the slave should be made compatible with the wants and claims of his higher nature, did not absolutely condemn slavery. But he has put on record the customs of the Essenes of Palestine, a people who, uniting the wisdom of the Gentiles with the faith of the Jews, led lives which were uncontaminated by the surrounding civilisation, and were the first to reject slavery both in principle and practice. They formed a religious community rather than a State, and their numbers did not exceed 4000. But their example testifies to how great a height religious men were able to raise their conception of society even without the succour of the New Testament, and affords the strongest condemnation of their contemporaries.
This, then, is the conclusion to which our survey brings us: There is hardly a truth in politics or in the system of the rights of man that was not grasped by the wisest of the Gentiles and the Jews, or that they did not declare with a refinement of thought and a nobleness of expression that later writers could never surpass. I might go on for hours, reciting to you passages on the law of nature and the duties of man, so solemn and religious that though they come from the profane theatre on the Acropolis, and from the Roman Forum, you would deem that you were listening to the hymns of Christian Churches and the discourse of ordained divines. But although the maxims of the great classic teachers, of Sophocles, and Plato, and Seneca, and the glorious examples of public virtue were in the mouths of all men, there was no power in them to avert the doom of that civilisation for which the blood of so many patriots and the genius of such incomparable writers had been wasted in vain. The liberties of the ancient nations were crushed beneath a hopeless and inevitable despotism, and their vitality was spent, when the new power came forth from Galilee, giving what was wanting to the efficacy of human knowledge to redeem societies as well as men.
It would be presumptuous if I attempted to indicate the numberless channels by which Christian influence gradually penetrated the State. The first striking phenomenon is the slowness with which an action destined to be so prodigious became manifest. Going forth to all nations, in many stages of civilisation and under almost every form of government, Christianity had none of the character of a political apostolate, and in its absorbing mission to individuals did not challenge public authority. The early Christians avoided contact with the State, abstained from the responsibilities of office, and were even reluctant to serve in the army. Cherishing their citizenship of a kingdom not of this world, they despaired of an empire which seemed too powerful to be resisted and too corrupt to be converted, whose institutions, the work and the pride of untold centuries of paganism, drew their sanctions from the gods whom the Christians accounted devils, which plunged its hands from age to age in the blood of martyrs, and was beyond the hope of regeneration and foredoomed to perish. They were so much overawed as to imagine that the fall of the State would be the end of the Church and of the world, and no man dreamed of the boundless future of spiritual and social influence that awaited their religion among the race of destroyers that were bringing the empire of Augustus and of Constantine to humiliation and ruin. The duties of government were less in their thoughts than the private virtues and duties of subjects; and it was long before they became aware of the burden of power in their faith. Down almost to the time of Chrysostom, they shrank from contemplating the obligation to emancipate the slaves.
Although the doctrine of self-reliance and self-denial, which is the foundation of political economy, was written as legibly in the New Testament as in the Wealth of Nations, it was not recognised until our age. Tertullian boasts of the passive obedience of the Christians. Melito writes to a pagan Emperor as if he were incapable of giving an unjust command; and in Christian times Optatus thought that whoever presumed to find fault with his sovereign exalted himself almost to the level of a god. But this political quietism was not universal. Origen, the ablest writer of early times, spoke with approval of conspiring for the destruction of tyranny.
After the fourth century the declarations against slavery are earnest and continual. And in a theological but yet pregnant sense, divines of the second century insist on liberty, and divines of the fourth century on equality. There was one essential and inevitable transformation in politics. Popular governments had existed, and also mixed and federal governments, but there had been no limited government, no State the circumference of whose authority had been defined by a force external to its own. That was the great problem which philosophy had raised, and which no statesmanship had been able to solve. Those who proclaimed the assistance of a higher authority had indeed drawn a metaphysical barrier before the governments, but they had not known how to make it real. All that Socrates could effect by way of protest against the tyranny of the reformed democracy was to die for his convictions. The Stoics could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the force to execute it. To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased to be an aspiration of patient reasoners, and was made the perpetual charge and care of the most energetic institution and the most universal association in the world. The new law, the new spirit, the new authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed in the philosophy or in the constitution of Greece or Rome before the knowledge of the truth that makes us free.
[1 ]An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 26th February 1877.
11: The History of L:iberty Part II: In Christianity
The second part of Acton’s promised, but never completed, history of liberty.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907). Chapter: II: THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY1
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II
THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY1
When Constantine the Great carried the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople he set up in the market-place of the new capital a porphyry pillar which had come from Egypt, and of which a strange tale is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched. On the summit he raised a statue of Apollo, representing himself, and enclosing a fragment of the Cross; and he crowned it with a diadem of rays consisting of the nails employed at the Crucifixion, which his mother was believed to have found at Jerusalem.
The pillar still stands, the most significant monument that exists of the converted empire; for the notion that the nails which had pierced the body of Christ became a fit ornament for a heathen idol as soon as it was called by the name of a living emperor indicates the position designed for Christianity in the imperial structure of Constantine. Diocletian’s attempt to transform the Roman Government into a despotism of the Eastern type had brought on the last and most serious persecution of the Christians; and Constantine, in adopting their faith, intended neither to abandon his predecessor’s scheme of policy nor to renounce the fascinations of arbitrary authority, but to strengthen his throne with the support of a religion which had astonished the world by its power of resistance, and to obtain that support absolutely and without a drawback he fixed the seat of his government in the East, with a patriarch of his own creation.
Nobody warned him that by promoting the Christian religion he was tying one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative of the Cæsars. As the acknowledged author of the liberty and superiority of the Church, he was appealed to as the guardian of her unity. He admitted the obligation; he accepted the trust; and the divisions that prevailed among the Christians supplied his successors with many opportunities of extending that protectorate, and preventing any reduction of the claims or of the resources of imperialism.
Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church. According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the emperors the entire plentitude of its authority, and, therefore, the Emperor’s pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law. Even in the fervent age of its conversion the Empire employed its refined civilisation, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the reasonableness and sublety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of the Jewish, the Pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience—a faculty of self-government and self-control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centures of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilisation, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West.
In the height of their power the Romans became aware of a race of men that had not abdicated freedom in the hands of a monarch; and the ablest writer of the empire pointed to them with a vague and bitter feeling that, to the institutions of these barbarians, not yet crushed by despotism, the future of the world belonged. Their kings, when they had kings, did not preside at their councils; they were sometimes elective; they were sometimes deposed; and they were bound by oath to act in obedience with the general wish. They enjoyed real authority only in war. This primitive Republicanism, which admits monarchy as an occasional incident, but holds fast to the collective supremacy of all free men, of the constituent authority over all constituted authorities, is the remote germ of Parliamentary government. The action of the State was confined to narrow limits; but, besides his position as head of the State, the king was surrounded by a body of followers attached to him by personal or political ties. In these, his immediate dependants, disobedience or resistance to orders was no more tolerated than in a wife, a child, or a soldier; and a man was expected to murder his own father if his chieftain required it. Thus these Teutonic communities admitted an independence of government that threatened to dissolve society; and a dependence on persons that was dangerous to freedom. It was a system very favourable to corporations, but offering no security to individuals. The State was not likely to oppress its subjects; and was not able to protect them.
The first effect of the great Teutonic migration into the regions civilised by Rome was to throw back Europe many centuries to a condition scarcely more advanced than that from which the institutions of Solon had rescued Athens. Whilst the Greeks preserved the literature, the arts, and the science of antiquity and all the sacred monuments of early Christianity with a completeness of which the rended fragments that have come down to us give no commensurate idea, and even the peasants of Bulgaria knew the New Testament by heart, Western Europe lay under the grasp of masters the ablest of whom could not write their names. The faculty of exact reasoning, of accurate observation, became extinct for five hundred years, and even the sciences most needful to society, medicine and geometry, fell into decay, until the teachers of the West went to school at the feet of Arabian masters. To bring order out of chaotic ruin, to rear a new civilisation and blend hostile and unequal races into a nation, the thing wanted was not liberty but force. And for centuries all progress is attached to the action of men like Clovis, Charlemagne, and William the Norman, who were resolute and peremptory, and prompt to be obeyed.
The spirit of immemorial paganism which had saturated ancient society could not be exorcised except by the combined influence of Church and State; and the universal sense that their union was necessary created the Byzantine despotism. The divines of the Empire who could not fancy Christianity flourishing beyond its borders, insisted that the State is not in the Church, but the Church in the State. This doctrine had scarcely been uttered when the rapid collapse of the Western Empire opened a wider horizon; and Salvianus, a priest at Marseilles, proclaimed that the social virtues, which were decaying amid the civilised Romans, existed in greater purity and promise among the Pagan invaders. They were converted with ease and rapidity; and their conversion was generally brought about by their kings.
Christianity, which in earlier times had addressed itself to the masses, and relied on the principle of liberty, now made its appeal to the rulers, and threw its mighty influence into the scale of authority. The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States. The clergy supplied the means of conducting the new governments, and were made exempt from taxation, from the jurisdiction of the civil magistrate, and of the political administrator. They taught that power ought to be conferred by election; and the Councils of Toledo furnished the framework of the Parliamentary system of Spain, which is, by a long interval, the oldest in the world. But the monarchy of the Goths in Spain, as well as that of the Saxons in England, in both of which the nobles and the prelates surrounded the throne with the semblance of free institutions, passed away; and the people that prospered and overshadowed the rest were the Franks, who had no native nobility, whose law of succession to the Crown became for one thousand years the fixed object of an unchanging superstition, and under whom the feudal system was developed to excess.
Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. Having no other source of wealth than the produce of the soil, men depended on the landlord for the means of escaping starvation; and thus his power became paramount over the liberty of the subject and the authority of the State. Every baron, said the French maxim, is sovereign in his own domain. The nations of the West lay between the competing tyrannies of local magnates and of absolute monarchs, when a force was brought upon the scene which proved for a time superior alike to the vassal and his lord.
In the days of the Conquest, when the Normans destroyed the liberties of England, the rude institutions which had come with the Saxons, the Goths, and the Franks from the forests of Germany were suffering decay, and the new element of popular government afterwards supplied by the rise of towns and the formation of a middle class was not yet active. The only influence capable of resisting the feudal hierarchy was the ecclesiastical hierarchy; and they came into collision, when the process of feudalism threatened the independence of the Church by subjecting the prelates severally to that form of personal dependence on the kings which was peculiar to the Teutonic state.
To that conflict of four hundred years we owe the rise of civil liberty. If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king whom it anointed, or if the struggle had terminated speedily in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism. For the aim of both contending parties was absolute authority. But although liberty was not the end for which they strove, it was the means by which the temporal and the spiritual power called the nations to their aid. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchises, France got her States-General, and England her Parliament out of the alternate phases of the contest; and as long as it lasted it prevented the rise of divine right. A disposition existed to regard the crown as an estate descending under the law of real property in the family that possessed it. But the authority of religion, and especially of the papacy, was thrown on the side that denied the indefeasible title of kings. In France what was afterwards called the Gallican theory maintained that the reigning house was above the law, and that the sceptre was not to pass away from it as long as there should be princes of the royal blood of St. Louis. But in other countries the oath of fidelity itself attested that it was conditional, and should be kept only during good behaviour; and it was in conformity with the public law to which all monarchs were held subject, that King John was declared a rebel against the barons, and that the men who raised Edward III. to the throne from which they had deposed his father invoked the maxim Vox populi Vox Dei.
And this doctrine of the divine right of the people to raise up and pull down princes, after obtaining the sanctions of religion, was made to stand on broader grounds, and was strong enough to resist both Church and king. In the struggle between the House of Bruce and the House of Plantagenet for the possession of Scotland and Ireland, the English claim was backed by the censures of Rome. But the Irish and the Scots refused it, and the address in which the Scottish Parliament informed the Pope of their resolution shows how firmly the popular doctrine had taken root. Speaking of Robert Bruce, they say: “Divine Providence, the laws and customs of the country, which we will defend till death, and the choice of the people, have made him our king. If he should ever betray his principles, and consent that we should be subjects of the English king, then we shall treat him as an enemy, as the subverter of our rights and his own, and shall elect another in his place. We care not for glory or for wealth, but for that liberty which no true man will give up but with his life.” This estimate of royalty was natural among men accustomed to see those whom they most respected in constant strife with their rulers. Gregory VII. had begun the disparagement of civil authorities by saying that they are the work of the devil; and already in his time both parties were driven to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people, and appealed to it as the immediate source of power.
Two centuries later this political theory had gained both in definiteness and in force among the Guelphs, who were the Church party, and among the Ghibellines, or Imperialists. Here are the sentiments of the most celebrated of all the Guelphic writers: “A king who is unfaithful to his duty forfeits his claim to obedience. It is not rebellion to depose him, for he is himself a rebel whom the nation has a right to put down. But it is better to abridge his power, that he may be unable to abuse it. For this purpose, the whole nation ought to have a share in governing itself; the Constitution ought to combine a limited and elective monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular election. No government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit determined by the people. All political authority is derived from popular suffrage, and all laws must be made by the people or their representatives. There is no security for us as long as we depend on the will of another man.” This language, which contains the earliest exposition of the Whig theory of the revolution, is taken from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, of whom Lord Bacon says that he had the largest heart of the school divines. And it is worth while to observe that he wrote at the very moment when Simon de Montfort summoned the Commons; and that the politics of the Neapolitan friar are centuries in advance of the English statesman’s.
The ablest writer of the Ghibelline party was Marsilius of Padua. “Laws,” he said, “derive their authority from the nation, and are invalid without its assent. As the whole is greater than any part, it is wrong that any part should legislate for the whole; and as men are equal, it is wrong that one should be bound by laws made by another. But in obeying laws to which all men have agreed, all men, in reality, govern themselves. The monarch, who is instituted by the legislature to execute its will, ought to be armed with a force sufficient to coerce individuals, but not sufficient to control the majority of the people. He is responsible to the nation, and subject to the law; and the nation that appoints him, and assigns him his duties, has to see that he obeys the Constitution, and has to dismiss him if he breaks it. The rights of citizens are independent of the faith they profess; and no man may be punished for his religion.” This writer, who saw in some respects farther than Locke or Montesquieu, who, in regard to the sovereignty of the nation, representative government, the superiority of the legislature over the executive, and the liberty of conscience, had so firm a grasp of the principles that were to sway the modern world, lived in the reign of Edward II., five hundred and fifty years ago.
It is significant that these two writers should agree on so many of the fundamental points which have been, ever since, the topic of controversy; for they belonged to hostile schools, and one of them would have thought the other worthy of death. St. Thomas would have made the papacy control all Christian governments. Marsilius would have had the clergy submit to the law of the land; and would have put them under restrictions both as to property and numbers. As the great debate went on, many things gradually made themselves clear, and grew into settled convictions. For these were not only the thoughts of prophetic minds that surpassed the level of contemporaries; there was some prospect that they would master the practical world. The ancient reign of the barons was seriously threatened. The opening of the East by the Crusades had imparted a great stimulus to industry. A stream set in from the country to the towns, and there was no room for the government of towns in the feudal machinery. When men found a way of earning a livelihood without depending for it on the good will of the class that owned the land, the landowner lost much of his importance, and it began to pass to the possessors of moveable wealth. The townspeople not only made themselves free from the control of prelates and barons, but endeavoured to obtain for their own class and interest the command of the State.
The fourteenth century was filled with the tumult of this struggle between democracy and chivalry. The Italian towns, foremost in intelligence and civilisation, led the way with democratic constitutions of an ideal and generally an impracticable type. The Swiss cast off the yoke of Austria. Two long chains of free cities arose, along the valley of the Rhine, and across the heart of Germany. The citizens of Paris got possession of the king, reformed the State, and began their tremendous career of experiments to govern France. But the most healthy and vigorous growth of municipal liberties was in Belgium, of all countries on the Continent, that which has been from immemorial ages the most stubborn in its fidelity to the principle of self-government. So vast were the resources concentrated in the Flemish towns, so widespread was the movement of democracy, that it was long doubtful whether the new interest would not prevail, and whether the ascendency of the military aristocracy would not pass over to the wealth and intelligence of the men that lived by trade. But Rienzi, Marcel, Artevelde, and the other champions of the unripe democracy of those days, lived and died in vain. The upheaval of the middle class had disclosed the need, the passions, the aspirations of the suffering poor below; ferocious insurrections in France and England caused a reaction that retarded for centuries the readjustment of power, and the red spectre of social revolution arose in the track of democracy. The armed citizens of Ghent were crushed by the French chivalry; and monarchy alone reaped the fruit of the change that was going on in the position of classes, and stirred the minds of men.
Looking back over the space of a thousand years, which we call the Middle Ages, to get an estimate of the work they had done, if not towards perfection in their institutions, at least towards attaining the knowledge of political truth, this is what we find: Representative government, which was unknown to the ancients, was almost universal. The methods of election were crude; but the principle that no tax was lawful that was not granted by the class that paid it—that is, that taxation was inseparable from representation — was recognised, not as the privilege of certain countries, but as the right of all. Not a prince in the world, said Philip de Commines, can levy a penny without the consent of the people. Slavery was almost everywhere extinct; and absolute power was deemed more intolerable and more criminal than slavery. The right of insurrection was not only admitted but defined, as a duty sanctioned by religion. Even the principles of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the method of the Income Tax, were already known. The issue of ancient politics was an absolute state planted on slavery. The political produce of the Middle Ages was a system of states in which authority was restricted by the representation of powerful classes, by privileged associations, and by the acknowledgment of duties superior to those which are imposed by man.
As regards the realisation in practice of what was seen to be good, there was almost everything to do. But the great problems of principle had been solved, and we come to the question, How did the sixteenth century husband the treasure which the Middle Ages had stored up? The most visible sign of the times was the decline of the religious influence that had reigned so long. Sixty years passed after the invention of printing, and thirty thousand books had issued from European presses, before anybody undertook to print the Greek Testament. In the days when every State made the unity of faith its first care, it came to be thought that the rights of men, and the duties of neighbours and of rulers towards them, varied according to their religion; and society did not acknowledge the same obligations to a Turk or a Jew, a pagan or a heretic, or a devil worshipper, as to an orthodox Christian. As the ascendency of religion grew weaker, this privilege of treating its enemies on exceptional principles was claimed by the State for its own benefit; and the idea that the ends of government justify the means employed was worked into system by Machiavelli. He was an acute politican, sincerely anxious that the obstacles to the intelligent government of Italy should be swept away. It appeared to him that the most vexatious obstacle to intellect is conscience, and that the vigorous use of statecraft necessary for the success of difficult schemes would never be made if governments allowed themselves to be hampered by the precepts of the copy-book.
His audacious doctrine was avowed in the succeeding age by men whose personal character stood high. They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no Government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s acts there is than the judgment which Heaven pronounces in this world by success.
Machiavelli’s teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. But it gave an immense impulse to absolutism by silencing the consciences of very religious kings, and made the good and the bad very much alike. Charles V. offered 5000 crowns for the murder of an enemy. Ferdinand I. and Ferdinand II., Henry III. and Louis XIII., each caused his most powerful subject to be treacherously despatched. Elizabeth and Mary Stuart tried to do the same to each other. The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.
The clergy, who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now with the interest of royalty. Attempts had been made to reform the Church on the Constitutional model; they had failed, but they had united the hierarchy and the crown against the system of divided power as against a common enemy. Strong kings were able to bring the spirituality under subjection in France and Spain, in Sicily and in England. The absolute monarchy of France was built up in the two following centuries by twelve political cardinals. The kings of Spain obtained the same effect almost at a single stroke by reviving and appropriating to their own use the tribunal of the Inquisition, which had been growing obsolete, but now served to arm them with terrors which effectually made them despotic. One generation beheld the change all over Europe, from the anarchy of the days of the Roses to the passionate submission, the gratified acquiescence in tyranny that marks the reign of Henry VIII. and the kings of his time.
The tide was running fast when the Reformation began at Wittenberg, and it was to be expected that Luther’s influence would stem the flood of absolutism. For he was confronted everywhere by the compact alliance of the Church with the State; and great part of his country was governed by hostile potentates who were prelates of the Court of Rome. He had, indeed, more to fear from temporal than from spiritual foes. The leading German bishops wished that the Protestant demands should be conceded; and the Pope himself vainly urged on the Emperor a conciliatory policy. But Charles V. had outlawed Luther, and attempted to waylay him; and the Dukes of Bavaria were active in beheading and burning his disciples, whilst the democracy of the towns generally took his side. But the dread of revolution was the deepest of his political sentiments; and the gloss by which the Guelphic divines had got over the passive obedience of the apostolic age was characteristic of that mediæval method of interpretation which he rejected. He swerved for a moment in his later years; but the substance of his political teaching was eminently conservative, the Lutheran States became the stronghold of rigid immobility, and Lutheran writers constantly condemned the democratic literature that arose in the second age of the Reformation. For the Swiss reformers were bolder than the Germans in mixing up their cause with politics. Zürich and Geneva were Republics, and the spirit of their governments influenced both Zwingli and Calvin.
Zwingli indeed did not shrink from the mediæval doctrine that evil magistrates must be cashiered; but he was killed too early to act either deeply or permanently on the political character of Protestantism. Calvin, although a Republican, judged that the people are unfit to govern themselves, and declared the popular assembly an abuse that ought to be abolished. He desired an aristocracy of the elect, armed with the means of punishing not only crime but vice and error. For he thought that the severity of the mediæval laws was insufficient for the need of the times; and he favoured the most irresistible weapon which the inquisitorial procedure put into the hand of the Government, the right of subjecting prisoners to intolerable torture, not because they were guilty, but because their guilt could not be proved. His teaching, though not calculated to promote popular institutions, was so adverse to the authority of the surrounding monarchs, that he softened down the expression of his political views in the French edition of his Institutes.
The direct political influence of the Reformation effected less than has been supposed. Most States were strong enough to control it. Some, by intense exertion, shut out the pouring flood. Others, with consummate skill, diverted it to their own uses. The Polish Government alone at that time left it to its course. Scotland was the only kingdom in which the Reformation triumphed over the resistance of the State; and Ireland was the only instance where it failed, in spite of Government support. But in almost every other case, both the princes that spread their canvas to the gale and those that faced it, employed the zeal, the alarm, the passions it aroused as instruments for the increase of power. Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses, but the masses were rarely fanaticised, and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians. When the King of France undertook to kill all the Protestants, he was obliged to do it by his own agents. It was nowhere the spontaneous act of the population, and in many towns and in entire provinces the magistrates refused to obey. The motive of the Court was so far from mere fanaticism that the Queen immediately challenged Elizabeth to do the like to the English Catholics. Francis I. and Henry II. sent nearly a hundred Huguenots to the stake, but they were cordial and assiduous promoters of the Protestant religion in Germany. Sir Nicholas Bacon was one of the ministers who suppressed the mass in England. Yet when the Huguenot refugees came over he liked them so little that he reminded Parliament of the summary way in which Henry V. at Agincourt dealt with the Frenchmen who fell into his hands. John Knox thought that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death, and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless temper. But his counsel was not followed.
All through the religious conflict policy kept the upper hand. When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached and Bellarmine lectured, but Machiavelli reigned. Before the close of the century three events occurred which mark the beginning of a momentous change. The massacre of St. Bartholomew convinced the bulk of Calvinists of the lawfulness of rebellion against tyrants, and they became advocates of that doctrine in which the Bishop of Winchester had led the way,1 and which Knox and Buchanan had received, through their master at Paris, straight from the mediæval schools. Adopted out of aversion to the King of France, it was soon put in practice against the King of Spain. The revolted Netherlands, by a solemn Act, deposed Philip II., and made themselves independent under the Prince of Orange, who had been, and continued to be, styled his Lieutenant. Their example was important, not only because subjects of one religion deposed a monarch of another, for that had been seen in Scotland, but because, moreover, it put a republic in the place of a monarchy, and forced the public law of Europe to recognise the accomplished revolution. At the same time, the French Catholics, rising against Henry III., who was the most contemptible of tyrants, and against his heir, Henry of Navarre, who, as a Protestant, repelled the majority of the nation, fought for the same principles with sword and pen.
Many shelves might be filled with the books which came out in their defence during half a century, and they include the most comprehensive treatises on laws ever written. Nearly all are vitiated by the defect which disfigured political literature in the Middle Ages. That literature, as I have tried to show, is extremely remarkable, and its services in aiding human progress are very great. But from the death of St. Bernard until the appearance of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, there was hardly a writer who did not make his politics subservient to the interest of either Pope or King. And those who came after the Reformation were always thinking of laws as they might affect Catholics or Protestants. Knox thundered against what he called the Monstrous Regiment of Women, because the Queen went to mass, and Mariana praised the assassin of Henry III. because the King was in league with Huguenots. For the belief that it is right to murder tyrants, first taught among Christians, I believe, by John of Salisbury, the most distinguished English writer of the twelfth century, and confirmed by Roger Bacon, the most celebrated Englishman of the thirteenth, had acquired about this time a fatal significance. Nobody sincerely thought of politics as a law for the just and the unjust, or tried to find out a set of principles that should hold good alike under all changes of religion. Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity stands almost alone among the works I am speaking of, and is still read with admiration by every thoughtful man as the earliest and one of the finest prose classics in our language. But though few of the others have survived, they contributed to hand down masculine notions of limited authority and conditional obedience from the epoch of theory to generations of free men. Even the coarse violence of Buchanan and Boucher was a link in the chain of tradition that connects the Hildebrandine controversy with the Long Parliament, and St. Thomas with Edmund Burke.
That men should understand that governments do not exist by divine right, and that arbitrary government is the violation of divine right, was no doubt the medicine suited to the malady under which Europe languished. But although the knowledge of this truth might become an element of salutary destruction, it could give little aid to progress and reform. Resistance to tyranny implied no faculty of constructing a legal government in its place. Tyburn tree may be a useful thing, but it is better still that the offender should live for repentance and reformation. The principles which discriminate in politics between good and evil, and make States worthy to last, were not yet found.
The French philosopher Charron was one of the men least demoralised by party spirit, and least blinded by zeal for a cause. In a passage almost literally taken from St. Thomas, he describes our subordination under a law of nature, to which all legislation must conform; and he ascertains it not by the light of revealed religion, but by the voice of universal reason, through which God enlightens the consciences of men. Upon this foundation Grotius drew the lines of real political science. In gathering the materials of international law, he had to go beyond national treaties and denominational interests for a principle embracing all mankind. The principles of law must stand, he said, even if we suppose that there is no God. By these inaccurate terms he meant that they must be found independently of revelation. From that time it became possible to make politics a matter of principle and of conscience, so that men and nations differing in all other things could live in peace together, under the sanctions of a common law. Grotius himself used his discovery to little purpose, as he deprived it of immediate effect by admitting that the right to reign may be enjoyed as a freehold, subject to no conditions.
When Cumberland and Pufendorf unfolded the true significance of his doctrine, every settled authority, every triumphant interest recoiled aghast. None were willing to surrender advantages won by force or skill, because they might be in contradiction, not with the Ten Commandments, but with an unknown code, which Grotius himself had not attempted to draw up, and touching which no two philosophers agreed. It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions, which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every State and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side. Year after year, the assemblies that represented the self-government of provinces and of privileged classes, all over the Continent, met for the last time and passed away, to the satisfaction of the people, who had learned to venerate the throne as the constructor of their unity, the promoter of prosperity and power, the defender of orthodoxy, and the employer of talent.
The Bourbons, who had snatched the crown from a rebellious democracy, the Stuarts, who had come in as usurpers, set up the doctrine that States are formed by the valour, the policy, and the appropriate marriages of the royal family; that the king is consequently anterior to the people, that he is its maker rather than its handiwork, and reigns independently of consent. Theology followed up divine right with passive obedience. In the golden age of religious science, Archbishop Ussher, the most learned of Anglican prelates, and Bossuet, the ablest of the French, declared that resistance to kings is a crime, and that they may lawfully employ compulsion against the faith of their subjects. The philosophers heartily supported the divines. Bacon fixed his hope of all human progress on the strong hand of kings. Descartes advised them to crush all those who might be able to resist their power. Hobbes taught that authority is always in the right. Pascal considered it absurd to reform laws, or to set up an ideal justice against actual force. Even Spinoza, who was a Republican and a Jew, assigned to the State the absolute control of religion.
Monarchy exerted a charm over the imagination, so unlike the unceremonious spirit of the Middle Ages, that, on learning the execution of Charles I., men died of the shock; and the same thing occurred at the death of Louis XVI. and of the Duke of Enghien. The classic land of absolute monarchy was France. Richelieu held that it would be impossible to keep the people down if they were suffered to be well off. The Chancellor affirmed that France could not be governed without the right of arbitrary arrest and exile; and that in case of danger to the State it may be well that a hundred innocent men should perish. The Minister of Finance called it sedition to demand that the Crown should keep faith. One who lived on intimate terms with Louis XIV. says that even the slightest disobedience to the royal will is a crime to be punished with death. Louis employed these precepts to their fullest extent. He candidly avows that kings are no more bound by the terms of a treaty than by the words of a compliment; and that there is nothing in the possession of their subjects which they may not lawfully take from them. In obedience to this principle, when Marshal Vauban, appalled by the misery of the people, proposed that all existing imposts should be repealed for a single tax that would be less onerous, the King took his advice, but retained all the old taxes whilst he imposed the new. With half the present population, he maintained an army of 450,000 men; nearly twice as large as that which the late Emperor Napoleon assembled to attack Germany. Meanwhile the people starved on grass. France, said Fénelon, is one enormous hospital. French historians believe that in a single generation six millions of people died of want. It would be easy to find tyrants more violent, more malignant, more odious than Louis XIV., but there was not one who ever used his power to inflict greater suffering or greater wrong; and the admiration with which he inspired the most illustrious men of his time denotes the lowest depth to which the turpitude of absolutism has ever degraded the conscience of Europe.
The Republics of that day were, for the most part, so governed as to reconcile men with the less opprobrious vices of monarchy. Poland was a State made up of centrifugal forces. What the nobles called liberty was the right of each of them to veto the acts of the Diet, and to persecute the peasants on his estates—rights which they refused to surrender up to the time of the partition, and thus verified the warning of a preacher spoken long ago: “You will perish, not by invasion or war, but by your infernal liberties.” Venice suffered from the opposite evil of excessive concentration. It was the most sagacious of Governments, and would rarely have made mistakes if it had not imputed to others motives as wise as its own, and had taken account of passions and follies of which it had little cognisance. But the supreme power of the nobility had passed to a committee, from the committee to a Council of Ten, from the Ten to three Inquisitors of State; and in this intensely centralised form it became, about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analysed the wants and resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is poison. As late as a century ago, Venetian senators of honourable and even religious lives employed assassins for the public good with no more compunction than Philip II. or Charles IX.
The Swiss Cantons, especially Geneva, profoundly influenced opinion in the days preceding the French Revolution, but they had had no part in the earlier movement to inaugurate the reign of law. That honour belongs to the Netherlands alone among the Commonwealths. They earned it, not by their form of government, which was defective and precarious, for the Orange party perpetually plotted against it, and slew the two most eminent of the Republican statesmen, and William III. himself intrigued for English aid to set the crown upon his head; but by the freedom of the press, which made Holland the vantage-ground from which, in the darkest hour of oppression, the victims of the oppressors obtained the ear of Europe.
The ordinance of Louis XIV., that every French Protestant should immediately renounce his religion, went out in the year in which James II. became king. The Protestant refugees did what their ancestors had done a century before. They asserted the deposing power of subjects over rulers who had broken the original contract between them, and all the Powers, excepting France, countenanced their argument, and sent forth William of Orange on that expedition which was the faint dawn of a brighter day.
It is to this unexampled combination of things on the Continent, more than to her own energy, that England owes her deliverance. The efforts made by the Scots, by the Irish, and at last by the Long Parliament to get rid of the misrule of the Stuarts had been foiled, not by the resistance of Monarchy, but by the helplessness of the Republic. State and Church were swept away; new institutions were raised up under the ablest ruler that had ever sprung from a revolution; and England, seething with the toil of political thought, had produced at least two writers who in many directions saw as far and as clearly as we do now. But Cromwell’s Constitution was rolled up like a scroll; Harrington and Lilburne were laughed at for a time and forgotten, the country confessed the failure of its striving, disavowed its aims, and flung itself with enthusiasm, and without any effective stipulations, at the feet of a worthless king.
If the people of England had accomplished no more than this to relieve mankind from the pervading pressure of unlimited monarchy, they would have done more harm than good. By the fanatical treachery with which, violating the Parliament and the law, they contrived the death of King Charles, by the ribaldry of the Latin pamphlet with which Milton justified the act before the world, by persuading the world that the Republicans were hostile alike to liberty and to authority, and did not believe in themselves, they gave strength and reason to the current of Royalism, which, at the Restoration, overwhelmed their work. If there had been nothing to make up for this defect of certainty and of constancy in politics England would have gone the way of other nations.
At that time there was some truth in the old joke which describes the English dislike of speculation by saying that all our philosophy consists of a short catechism in two questions: “What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.” The only accepted appeal was to tradition. Patriots were in the habit of saying that they took their stand upon the ancient ways, and would not have the laws of England changed. To enforce their argument they invented a story that the constitution had come from Troy, and that the Romans had allowed it to subsist untouched. Such fables did not avail against Strafford; and the oracle of precedent sometimes gave responses adverse to the popular cause. In the sovereign question of religion, this was decisive, for the practice of the sixteenth century, as well as of the fifteenth, testified in favour of intolerance. By royal command, the nation had passed four times in one generation from one faith to another, with a facility that made a fatal impression on Laud. In a country that had proscribed every religion in turn, and had submitted to such a variety of penal measures against Lollard and Arian, against Augsburg and Rome, it seemed there could be no danger in cropping the ears of a Puritan.
But an age of stronger conviction had arrived; and men resolved to abandon the ancient ways that led to the scaffold and the rack, and to make the wisdom of their ancestors and the statutes of the land bow before an unwritten law. Religious liberty had been the dream of great Christian writers in the age of Constantine and Valentinian, a dream never wholly realised in the Empire, and rudely dispelled when the barbarians found that it exceeded the resources of their art to govern civilised populations of another religion, and unity of worship was imposed by laws of blood and by theories more cruel than the laws. But from St. Athanasius and St. Ambrose down to Erasmus and More, each age heard the protest of earnest men in behalf of the liberty of conscience, and the peaceful days before the Reformation were full of promise that it would prevail.
In the commotion that followed, men were glad to get tolerated themselves by way of privilege and compromise, and willingly renounced the wider application of the principle. Socinus was the first who, on the ground that Church and State ought to be separated, required universal toleration. But Socinus disarmed his own theory, for he was a strict advocate of passive obedience.
The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century. Many years before the names of Milton and Taylor, of Baxter and Locke were made illustrious by their partial condemnation of intolerance, there were men among the Independent congregations who grasped with vigour and sincerity the principle that it is only by abridging the authority of States that the liberty of Churches can be assured. That great political idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own, and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years. The cause of religion, even under the unregenerate influence of worldly passion, had as much to do as any clear notions of policy in making this country the foremost of the free. It had been the deepest current in the movement of 1641, and it remained the strongest motive that survived the reaction of 1660.
The greatest writers of the Whig party, Burke and Macaulay, constantly represented the statesmen of the Revolution as the legitimate ancestors of modern liberty. It is humiliating to trace a political lineage to Algernon Sidney, who was the paid agent of the French king; to Lord Russell, who opposed religious toleration at least as much as absolute monarchy; to Shaftesbury, who dipped his hands in the innocent blood shed by the perjury of Titus Oates; to Halifax, who insisted that the plot must be supported even if untrue; to Marlborough, who sent his comrades to perish on an expedition which he had betrayed to the French; to Locke, whose notion of liberty involves nothing more spiritual than the security of property, and is consistent with slavery and persecution; or even to Addison, who conceived that the right of voting taxes belonged to no country but his own. Defoe affirms that from the time of Charles II. to that of George I. he never knew a politician who truly held the faith of either party; and the perversity of the statesmen who led the assault against the later Stuarts threw back the cause of progress for a century.
When the purport of the secret treaty became suspected by which Louis XIV. pledged himself to support Charles II. with an army for the destruction of Parliament, if Charles would overthrow the Anglican Church, it was found necessary to make concession to the popular alarm. It was proposed that whenever James should succeed, great part of the royal prerogative and patronage should be transferred to Parliament. At the same time, the disabilities of Nonconformists and Catholics would have been removed. If the Limitation Bill, which Halifax supported with signal ability, had passed, the Monarchical constitution would have advanced, in the seventeenth century, farther than it was destined to do until the second quarter of the nineteenth. But the enemies of James, guided by the Prince of Orange, preferred a Protestant king who should be nearly absolute, to a constitutional king who should be a Catholic. The scheme failed. James succeeded to a power which, in more cautious hands, would have been practically uncontrolled, and the storm that cast him down gathered beyond the sea.
By arresting the preponderance of France, the Revolution of 1688 struck the first real blow at Continental despotism. At home it relieved Dissent, purified justice, developed the national energies and resources, and ultimately, by the Act of Settlement, placed the crown in the gift of the people. But it neither introduced nor determined any important principle, and, that both parties might be able to work together, it left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the words of Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended for seventy years, under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of government by the gentry. Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his ideas; and his narrow materialistic belief in the connection between liberty and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.
By his idea that the powers of government ought to be divided according to their nature, and not according to the division of classes, which Montesquieu took up and developed with consummate talent, Locke is the originator of the long reign of English institutions in foreign lands. And his doctrine of resistance, or, as he finally termed it, the appeal to Heaven, ruled the judgment of Chatham at a moment of solemn transition in the history of the world. Our Parliamentary system, managed by the great revolution families, was a contrivance by which electors were compelled, and legislators were induced to vote against their convictions; and the intimidation of the constituencies was rewarded by the corruption of their representatives. About the year 1770 things had been brought back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition which the Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State,—ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios,—burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. Whether the British legislature had a constitutional right to tax a subject colony was hard to say, by the letter of the law. The general presumption was immense on the side of authority; and the world believed that the will of the constituted ruler ought to be supreme, and not the will of the subject people. Very few bold writers went so far as to say that lawful power may be resisted in cases of extreme necessity. But the colonisers of America, who had gone forth not in search of gain, but to escape from laws under which other Englishmen were content to live, were so sensitive even to appearances that the Blue Laws of Connecticut forbade men to walk to church within ten feet of their wives. And the proposed tax, of only £12,000 a year, might have been easily borne. But the reasons why Edward I. and his Council were not allowed to tax England were reasons why George III. and his Parliament should not tax America. The dispute involved a principle, namely, the right of controlling government. Furthermore, it involved the conclusion that the Parliament brought together by a derisive election had no just right over the unrepresented nation, and it called on the people of England to take back its power. Our best statesmen saw that whatever might be the law, the rights of the nation were at stake. Chatham, in speeches better remembered than any that have been delivered in Parliament, exhorted America to be firm. Lord Camden, the late Chancellor, said: “Taxation and representation are inseparably united. God hath joined them. No British Parliament can separate them.”
From the elements of that crisis Burke built up the noblest political philosophy in the world. “I do not know the method,” said he, “of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. The natural rights of mankind are indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. Only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate.” In this way, just a hundred years ago, the opportune reticence, the politic hesitancy of European statesmanship, was at last broken down; and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control. The Americans placed it at the foundation of their new government. They did more; for having subjected all civil authorities to the popular will, they surrounded the popular will with restrictions that the British legislature would not endure.
During the revolution in France the example of England, which had been held up so long, could not for a moment compete with the influence of a country whose institutions were so wisely framed to protect freedom even against the perils of democracy. When Louis Philippe became king, he assured the old Republican, Lafayette, that what he had seen in the United States had convinced him that no government can be so good as a Republic. There was a time in the Presidency of Monroe, about fifty-five years ago, which men still speak of as “the era of good feeling,” when most of the incongruities that had come down from the Stuarts had been reformed, and the motives of later divisions were yet inactive. The causes of old-world trouble,—popular ignorance, pauperism, the glaring contrast between rich and poor, religious strife, public debts, standing armies and war,—were almost unknown. No other age or country had solved so successfully the problems that attend the growth of free societies, and time was to bring no further progress.
But I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves, the only known forms of liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy, have made their way over the world. It would have been interesting to trace the reaction of America on the Monarchies that achieved its independence; to see how the sudden rise of political economy suggested the idea of applying the methods of science to the art of government; how Louis XVI., after confessing that despotism was useless, even to make men happy by compulsion, appealed to the nation to do what was beyond his skill, and thereby resigned his sceptre to the middle class, and the intelligent men of France, shuddering at the awful recollections of their own experience, struggled to shut out the past, that they might deliver their children from the prince of the world and rescue the living from the clutch of the dead, until the finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away, because the passion for equality made vain the hope of freedom.
And I should have wished to show you that the same deliberate rejection of the moral code which smoothed the paths of absolute monarchy and of oligarchy, signalised the advent of the democratic claim to unlimited power,—that one of its leading champions avowed the design of corrupting the moral sense of men, in order to destroy the influence of religion, and a famous apostle of enlightenment and toleration wished that the last king might be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. I would have tried to explain the connection between the doctrine of Adam Smith, that labour is the original source of all wealth, and the conclusion that the producers of wealth virtually compose the nation, by which Sieyès subverted historic France; and to show that Rousseau’s definition of the social compact as a voluntary association of equal partners conducted Marat, by short and unavoidable stages, to declare that the poorer classes were absolved, by the law of self-preservation, from the conditions of a contract which awarded to them misery and death; that they were at war with society, and had a right to all they could get by exterminating the rich, and that their inflexible theory of equality, the chief legacy of the Revolution, together with the avowed inadequacy of economic science to grapple with problems of the poor, revived the idea of renovating society on the principle of self-sacrifice, which had been the generous aspiration of the Essenes and the early Christians, of Fathers and Canonists and Friars; of Erasmus, the most celebrated precursor of the Reformation; of Sir Thomas More, its most illustrious victim; and of Fénelon, the most popular of bishops, but which, during the forty years of its revival, has been associated with envy and hatred and bloodshed, and is now the most dangerous enemy lurking in our path.
Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom of our ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion that burned what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic mount up as high as those of the monarchy, having shown that Legitimacy, which repudiated the Revolution, and Imperialism, which crowned it, were but disguises of the same element of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order that my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral, to relate by whom, and in what connection, the true law of the formation of free States was recognised, and how that discovery, closely akin to those which, under the names of development, evolution, and continuity, have given a new and deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient problem between stability and change, and determined the authority of tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory, which Sir James Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions are not made, but grow; the theory that custom and the national qualities of the governed, and not the will of the government, are the makers of the law; and therefore that the nation, which is the source of its own organic institutions, should be charged with the perpetual custody of their integrity, and with the duty of bringing the form into harmony with the spirit, was made, by the singular co-operation of the purest Conservative intellect with red-handed revolution, of Niebuhr with Mazzini, to yield the idea of nationality, which, far more than the idea of liberty, has governed the movement of the present age.
I do not like to conclude without inviting attention to the impressive fact that so much of the hard fighting, the thinking, the enduring that has contributed to the deliverance of man from the power of man, has been the work of our countrymen, and of their descendants in other lands. We have had to contend, as much as any people, against monarchs of strong will and of resources secured by their foreign possession, against men of rare capacity, against whole dynasties of born tyrants. And yet that proud prerogative stands out on the background of our history. Within a generation of the Conquest, the Normans were compelled to recognise, in some grudging measure, the claims of the English people. When the struggle between Church and State extended to England, our Churchmen learned to associate themselves with the popular cause; and, with few exceptions, neither the hierarchical spirit of the foreign divines, nor the monarchical bias peculiar to the French, characterised the writers of the English school. The Civil Law, transmitted from the degenerate Empire to be the common prop of absolute power, was excluded from England. The Canon Law was restrained, and this country never admitted the Inquisition, nor fully accepted the use of torture which invested Continental royalty with so many terrors. At the end of the Middle Ages foreign writers acknowledged our superiority, and pointed to these causes. After that, our gentry maintained the means of local self-government such as no other country possessed. Divisions in religion forced toleration. The confusion of the common law taught the people that their best safeguard was the independence and the integrity of the judges.
All these explanations lie on the surface, and are as visible as the protecting ocean; but they can only be successive effects of a constant cause which must lie in the same native qualities of perseverance, moderation, individuality, and the manly sense of duty, which give to the English race its supremacy in the stern art of labour, which has enabled it to thrive as no other can on inhospitable shores, and which (although no great people has less of the bloodthirsty craving for glory and an army of 50,000 English soldiers has never been seen in battle) caused Napoleon to exclaim, as he rode away from Waterloo, “It has always been the same since Crecy.”
Therefore, if there is reason for pride in the past, there is more for hope in the time to come. Our advantages increase, while other nations fear their neighbours or covet their neighbours’ goods. Anomalies and defects there are, fewer and less intolerable, if not less flagrant than of old.
But I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that Heaven’s light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over the dreary and heart-breaking course by which men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.
[1 ]An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 28th May 1877.
[1 ][Poynet, in his Treatise on Political Power.]
12: Acton on Machiavelli’s The Prince
This is Acton’s long introduction to Burd’s Italian edition of Machiavelli’s notorious book on political power The Prince
John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays, ed. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907). Chapter: VII: INTRODUCTION TO L. A. BURD’S EDITION OF IL PRINCIPE BY MACHIAVELLI
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/75/42906 on 2008-03-18
The text is in the public domain.
VII
INTRODUCTION TO L. A. BURD’S EDITION OF IL PRINCIPE BY MACHIAVELLI
Mr. Burd has undertaken to redeem our long inferiority in Machiavellian studies, and it will, I think, be found that he has given a more completely satisfactory explanation of The Prince than any country possessed before. His annotated edition supplies all the solvents of a famous problem in the history of Italy and the literature of politics. In truth, the ancient problem is extinct, and no reader of this volume will continue to wonder how so intelligent and reasonable a man came to propose such flagitious counsels. When Machiavelli declared that extraordinary objects cannot be accomplished under ordinary rules, he recorded the experience of his own epoch, but also foretold the secret of men since born. He illustrates not only the generation which taught him, but the generations which he taught, and has no less in common with the men who had his precepts before them than with the Viscontis, Borgias, and Baglionis who were the masters he observed. He represents more than the spirit of his country and his age. Knowledge, civilisation, and morality have increased; but three centuries have borne enduring witness to his political veracity. He has been as much the exponent of men whom posterity esteems as of him whose historian writes: “Cet homme que Dieu, après l’avoir fait si grand, avait fait bon aussi, n’avait rien de la vertu.” The authentic interpreter of Machiavelli, the Commentarius Perpetuus of the Discorsi and The Prince, is the whole of later history.
Michelet has said: “Rapportons-nous-en sur ceci à quelqu’un qui fut bien plus Machiavéliste que Machiavel, à la republique de Venise.” Before his day, and long after, down almost to the time when a price was set on the heads of the Pretender and of Pontiac, Venice employed assassins. And this was not the desperate resource of politicians at bay, but the avowed practice of decorous and religious magistrates. In 1569 Soto hazards an impersonal doubt whether the morality of the thing was sound: “Non omnibus satis probatur Venetorum mos, qui cum complures a patria exules habeant condemnatos, singulis facultatem faciunt, ut qui alium eorum interfecerit, vita ac libertate donetur.” But his sovereign shortly after obtained assurance that murder by royal command was unanimously approved by divines: “A los tales puede el Principe mandarlos matar, aunque esten fuera de su distrito y reinos.—Sin ser citado, secretamente se le puede quitar la vita.—Esta es doctrina comun y cierta y recevida de todos los theologos.” When the King of France, by despatching the Guises, had restored his good name in Europe, a Venetian, Francesco da Molino, hoped that the example would not be thrown away on the Council of Ten: “Permeti sua divina bontà che questo esempio habbi giovato a farlo proceder come spero con meno fretta e più sodamente a cose tali e d’ importanza.” Sarpi, their ablest writer, their official theologian, has a string of maxims which seem to have been borrowed straight from the Florentine predecessor: “Proponendo cosa in apparenza non honesta, scusarla come necessaria, come praticata da altri, come propria al tempo, che tende a buon fine, et conforme all’ opinione de’ molti.—La vendetta non giova se non per fugir lo sprezzo.—Ogn’ huomo ha opinione che il mendacio sia buono in ragion di medicina, et di far bene a far creder il vero et utile con premesse false.” One of his countrymen, having examined his writings, reports: “I ricordi di questo grand’ uomo furono più da politico che da christiano.” To him was attributed the doctrine of secret punishment, and the use of poison against public enemies: “In casi d’ eccessi incorrigibili si punissero secretamente, a fine che il sangue patrizio non resti profanato.—Il veleno deve esser l’ unico mezzo per levarli dal mondo, quando alla giustizia non complisse farli passare sotto la manaia del carnefice.” Venice, otherwise unlike the rest of Europe, was, in this particular, not an exception.
Machiavelli enjoyed a season of popularity even at Rome. The Medicean popes refused all official employment to one who had been the brain of a hostile government; but they encouraged him to write, and were not offended by the things he wrote for them. Leo’s own dealings with the tyrant of Perugia were cited by jurists as a suggestive model for men who have an enemy to get rid of. Clement confessed to Contarini that honesty would be preferable, but that honest men get the worst of it: “Io cognosco certo che voi dicete il vero, et che ad farla da homo da bene, et a far il debito, seria proceder come mi aricordate; ma bisognerebbe trovar la corrispondentia. Non vedete che il mondo è ridutto a un termine che colui il qual è più astuto et cum più trame fa il fatto suo, è più laudato, et estimato più valente homo, et più celebrato, et chi fa il contrario vien detto di esso; quel tale è una bona persona, ma non val niente? Et se ne sta cum quel titulo solo di bona persona.—Chi va bonamente vien trata da bestia.” Two years after this speech the astute Florentine authorised The Prince to be published at Rome.
It was still unprinted when Pole had it pressed on his attention by Cromwell, and Brosch consequently suspects the story. Upon the death of Clement, Pole opened the attack; but it was not pursued during the reaction against things Medicean which occupied the reign of Farnese. Machiavelli was denounced to the Inquisition on the 11th of November 1550, by Muzio, a man much employed in controversy and literary repression, who, knowing Greek, was chosen by Pius V. for the work afterwards committed to Baronius: “Senza rispetto alcuno insegna a non servar ne fede, ne charità, ne religione; et dice che di queste cose, gli huomini se ne debbono servire per parer buoni, et per le grandezze temporali, alle quali quando non servono non se ne dee fare stima. Et non è questo peggio che heretica dottrina? Vedendosi che ciò si comporta, sono accetate come opere approvate dalla Santa Madre chiesa.” Muzio, who at the same time recommended the Decamerone, was not acting from ethical motives. His accusation succeeded. When the Index was instituted, in 1557, Machiavelli was one of the first writers condemned, and he was more rigorously and implacably condemned than anybody else. The Trent Commissioners themselves prepared editions of certain prohibited authors, such as Clarius and Flaminius; Guicciardini was suffered to appear with retrenchments; and the famous revision of Boccaccio was carried out in 1573. This was due to the influence of Victorius, who pleaded in vain for a castigated text of Machiavelli. He continued to be specially excepted when permission was given to read forbidden books. Sometimes there were other exceptions, such as Dumoulin, Marini, or Maimbourg; but the exclusion of Machiavelli was permanent, and when Lucchesini preached against him at the Gesù, he had to apply to the Pope himself for licence to read him. Lipsius was advised by his Roman censors to mix a little Catholic salt in his Machiavellism, and to suppress a seeming protest against the universal hatred for a writer qui misera qua non manu hodie vapulat. One of the ablest but most contentious of the Jesuits, Raynaud, pursued his memory with a story like that with which Tronchin improved the death of Voltaire: “Exitus impiissimi nebulonis metuendus est eius aemulatoribus, nam blasphemans evomuit reprobum spiritum.”
In spite of this notorious disfavour, he has been associated with the excesses of the religious wars. The daughter of the man to whom he addressed The Prince was Catharine of Medici, and she was reported to have taught her children “surtout des traictz de cet athée Machiavel.” Boucher asserted that Henry III. carried him in his pocket: “qui perpetuus ei in sacculo atque manibus est”; and Montaigne confirms the story when he says: “Et dict on, de ce temps, que Machiavel est encores ailleurs en crédit.” The pertinently appropriate quotation by which the Queen sanctified her murderous resolve was supplied, not by her father’s rejected and discredited monitor, but by a bishop at the Council of Trent, whose sermons had just been published: “Bisogna esser severo et acuto, non bisogna esser clemente; è crudeltà l’ esser pietoso, è pietà l’ esser crudele.” And the argument was afterwards embodied in the Controversies of Bellarmin: “Haereticis obstinatis beneficium est, quod de hac vita tollantur, nam quo diutius vivunt, eo plures errores excogitant; plures pervertunt, et majorem sibi damnationem acquirunt.”
The divines who held these doctrines received them through their own channels straight from the Middle Ages. The germ theory, that the wages of heresy is death, was so expanded as to include the rebel, the usurper, the heterodox or rebellious town, and it continued to develop long after the time of Machiavelli. At first it had been doubtful whether a small number of culprits justified the demolition of a city: “Videtur quod si aliqui haeretici sunt in civitate potest exuri tota civitas.” Under Gregory XIII. the right is asserted unequivocally: “Civitas ista potest igne destrui, quando in ea plures sunt haeretici.” In case of sedition, fire is a less suitable agent: “Propter rebellionem civitas quandoque supponitur aratro et possunt singuli decapitari.” As to heretics the view was: “Ut hostes latronesque occidi possunt etiamsi sunt clerici.” A king, if he was judged a usurper, was handed over to extinction: “Licite potest a quolibet de populo occidi, pro libertate populi, quando non est recursus ad superiorem, a quo possit iustitia fieri.” Or, in the words of the scrupulous Soto: “Tunc quisque ius habet ipsum extinguendi.” To the end of the seventeenth century theologians taught: “Occidatur, seu occidendus proscribatur, quando non alitur potest haberi tranquillitas Reipublicae.”
This was not mere theory, or the enforced logic of men in thrall to mediæval antecedents. Under the most carnal and unchristian king, the Vaudois of Provence were exterminated in the year 1545, and Paul Sadolet wrote as follows to Cardinal Farnese just before and just after the event: “Aggionta hora questa instantia del predetto paese di Provenza a quella che da Mons. Nuntio s’ era fatta a Sua Maestà Christianissima a nome di Sua Beatitudine et di Vostra Reverendissima Signoria, siamo in ferma speranza, che vi si debbia pigliare qualche bono expediente et farci qualche gagliarda provisione.—È seguito, in questo paese, quel tanto desiderato et tanto necessario effetto circa le cose di Cabrieres, che da vostra Signoria Reverendissima è stato si lungamente ricordato et sollicitato et procurato.” Even Melanchthon was provoked by the death of Cromwell to exclaim that there is no better deed than the slaughter of a tyrant; “Utinam Deus alicui forti viro hanc mentem inserat!” And in 1575 the Swedish bishops decided that it would be a good work to poison their king in a basin of soup—an idea particularly repugnant to the author of De Rege et Regis Institutione. Among Mariana’s papers I have seen the letter from Paris describing the murder of Henry III., which he turned to such account in the memorable sixth chapter: “Communicò con sus superiores, si peccaria mortalmente un sacerdote que matase a un tirano. Ellos le diceron que non era pecado, mas que quedaria irregular. Y no contentandose con esto, ni con las disputas que avia de ordinario en la Sorbona sobre la materia, continuando siempre sus oraciones, lo preguntò a otros theologos, que le afirmavan lo mismo; y con esto se resolviò enteramente de executarlo. Por el successo es de collegir que tuvo el fraile alguna revelacion de Nuestro Señor en particular, y inspiracion para executar el caso.” According to Maffei, the Pope’s biographer, the priests were not content with saying that killing was no sin: “Cum illi posse, nec sine magno quidem merito censuissent.” Regicide was so acceptable a work that it seemed fitly assigned to a divine interposition.
When, on the 21st of January 1591, a youth offered his services to make away with Henry IV., the Nuncic remitted the matter to Rome: “Quantunque mi sia parso di trovarlo pieno di tale humilità, prudenza, spirito et cose che arguiscono che questa sia inspiratione veramente piuttosto che temerità e leggerezza.” In a volume which, though recent, is already rare, the Foreign Office published D’Avaux’s advice to treat the Protestants of Ireland much as William treated the Catholics of Glencoe; and the argument of the Assassination Plot came originally from a Belgian seminary. There were at least three men living far into the eighteenth century who defended the massacre of St. Bartholomew in their books; and it was held as late as 1741 that culprits may be killed before they are condemned: “Etiam ante sententiam impune occidi possunt, quando de proximo erant banniendi, vel quando eorum delictum est notorium, grave, et pro quo poena capitis infligenda esset.”
Whilst these principles were current in religion as well as in society, the official censures of the Church and the protests of every divine since Catharinus were ineffectual. Much of the profaner criticism uttered by such authorities as the Cardinal de Retz, Voltaire, Frederic the Great, Daunou, and Mazzini is not more convincing or more real. Linguet was not altogether wrong in suggesting that the assailants knew Machiavelli at second hand: “Chaque fois que je jette les yeux sur les ouvrages de ce grand génie, je ne saurais concevoir, je l’avoue, la cause du décri où il est tombé. Je soupçonne fortement que ses plus grands ennemis sont ceux qui ne l’ont pas lu.” Retz attributed to him a proposition which is not in his writings. Frederic and Algernon Sidney had read only one of his books, and Bolingbroke, a congenial spirit, who quotes him so often, knew him very little. Hume spoils a serious remark by a glaring eighteenth-century comment: “There is scarcely any maxim in The Prince which subsequent experience has not entirely refuted. The errors of this politician proceeded, in a great measure, from his having lived in too early an age of the world to be a good judge of political truth.” Bodin had previously written: “Il n’a jamais sondé le gué de la science politique.” Mazzini complains of his analisi cadaverica ed ignoranza della vita; and Barthélemy St. Hilaire, verging on paradox, says: “On dirait vraiment que l’histoire ne lui a rien appris, non plus que la conscience.” That would be more scientific treatment than the common censure of moralists and the common applause of politicians. It is easier to expose errors in practical politics than to remove the ethical basis of judgments which the modern world employs in common with Machiavelli.
By plausible and dangerous paths men are drawn to the doctrine of the justice of History, of judgment by results, the nursling of the nineteenth century, from which a sharp incline leads to The Prince. When we say that public life is not an affair of morality, that there is no available rule of right and wrong, that men must be judged by their age, that the code shifts with the longitude, that the wisdom which governs the event is superior to our own, we carry obscurely tribute to the system which bears so odious a name. Few would scruple to maintain with Mr. Morley that the equity of history requires that we shall judge men of action by the standards of men of action; or with Retz: “Les vices d’un archevêque peuvent être, dans une infinité de rencontres, les vertus d’un chef de parti.” The expounder of Adam Smith to France, J. B. Say, confirms the ambitious coadjutor: “Louis XIV. et son despotisme et ses guerres n’ont jamais fait le mal qui serait résulté des conseils de ce bon Fénelon, l’apôtre et le martyr de la vertu et du bien des hommes.” Most successful public men deprecate what Sir Henry Taylor calls much weak sensibility of conscience, and approve Lord Grey’s language to Princess Lieven: “I am a great lover of morality, public and private; but the intercourse of nations cannot be strictly regulated by that rule.” While Burke was denouncing the Revolution, Walpole wrote: “No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go the lengths that may be necessary.” All which had been formerly anticipated by Pole: “Quanto quis privatam vitam agens Christi similior erit tanto minus aptus ad regendum id munus iudicio hominum existimabitur.” The main principle of Machiavelli is asserted by his most eminent English disciple: “It is the solecism of power to think, to command the end, and yet not to endure the means.” And Bacon leads up to the familiar Jesuit: “Cui licet finis, illi et media permissa sunt.”
The austere Pascal has said: “On ne voit rien de juste ou d’injuste qui ne change de qualité en changeant de climat” (the reading presque rien was the precaution of an editor). The same underlying scepticism is found not only in philosophers of the Titanic sort, to whom remorse is a prejudice of education, and the moral virtues are “the political offspring which flattery begat upon pride,” but among the masters of living thought. Locke, according to Mr. Bain, holds that we shall scarcely find any rule of morality, excepting such as are necessary to hold society together, and these too with great limitations, but what is somewhere or other set aside, and an opposite established by whole societies of men. Maine de Biran extracts this conclusion from the Esprit des Lois: “Il n’y a rien d’absolu ni dans la religion, ni dans la morale, ni, à plus forte raison, dans la politique.” In the mercantile economists Turgot detects the very doctrine of Helvetius: “Il établit qu’il n’y a pas lieu à la probité entre les nations, d’où suivroit que la monde doit être éternellement un coupegorge. En quoi il est bien d’accord avec les panégyristes de Colbert.”
These things survive, transmuted, in the edifying and popular epigram: “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.” Lacordaire, though he spoke so well of “L’empire et les ruses de la durée,” recorded his experience in these words: “J’ai toujours vu Dieu se justifier à la longue.” Reuss, a teacher of opposite tendency and greater name, is equally consoling: “Les destinées de l’homme s’accomplissent ici-bas; la justice de Dieu s’exerce et se manifeste sur cette terre.” In the infancy of exact observation Massillon could safely preach that wickedness ends in ignominy: “Dieu aura son tour.” The indecisive Providentialism of Bossuet’s countrymen is shared by English divines. “Contemporaries,” says Hare, “look at the agents, at their motives and characters; history looks rather at the acts and their consequences.” Thirlwall hesitates to say that whatever is, is best; “but I have a strong faith that it is for the best, and that the general stream of tendency is toward good.” And Sedgwick, combining induction with theology, writes: “If there be a superintending Providence, and if His will be manifested by general laws, operating both on the physical and moral world, then must a violation of those laws be a violation of His will, and be pregnant with inevitable misery.”
Apart from the language of Religion, an optimism ranging to the bounds of fatalism is the philosophy of many, especially of historians: “Le vrai, c’est, en toutes choses, le fait.” Sainte-Beuve says: “Il y a dans tout fait général et prolongé une puissance de démonstration insensible”; and Scherer describes progress as “une espèce de logique objective et impersonelle qui résout les questions sans appel.” Ranke has written: “Der beste Prüfstein ist die Zeit”; and Sybel explains that this was not a short way out of confusion and incertitude, but a profound generalisation: “Ein Geschlecht, ein Volk löst das andere ab, und der Lebende hat Recht.” A scholar of a different school and fibre, Stahr the Aristotelian, expresses the same idea: “Die Geschichte soll die Richtigkeit des Denkens bewähren.” Richelieu’s maxim: “Les grands desseins et notables entreprises ne se vérifient jamais autrement que par le succès”; and Napoleon’s: “Je ne juge les hommes que par les résultats,” are seriously appropriated by Fustel de Coulanges: “Ce qui caractérise le véritable homme d’état, c’est le succès, on le reconnaît surtout à ce signe, qu’il réussit.” One of Machiavelli’s gravest critics applied it to him: “Die ewige Aufgabe der Politik bleibt unter den gegebenen Verhältnissen und mit den vorhandenen Mitteln etwas zu erreichen. Eine Politik die das verkennt, die auf den Erfolg verzichtet, sich auf eine theoretische Propaganda, auf ideale Gesichtspunkte beschränkt, von einer verlorenen Gegenwart an eine künftige Gerechtigkeit appellirt, ist keine Politik mehr.” One of the mediæval pioneers, Stenzel, delivered a formula of purest Tuscan cinquecento: “Was bei anderen Menschen gemeine Schlechtigkeit ist, erhält, bei den ungewöhnlichen Geistern, den Stempel der Grösse, der selbst dem Verbrechen sich aufdrückt. Der Maassstab ist anders; denn das Ausserordentliche lässt sich nur durch Ausserordentliches bewirken.” Treitschke habitually denounces the impotent Doctrinaires who do not understand “dass der Staat Macht ist und der Welt des Willens angehört,” and who know not how to rise “von der Politik des Bekenntnisses zu der Politik der That.” Schäfer, though a less pronounced partisan, derides Macaulay for thinking that human happiness concerns political science: “Das Wesen des Staates ist die Macht, und die Politik die Kunst ihn zu erhalten.” Rochau’s Realpolitik was a treatise in two volumes written to prove “dass der Staat durch seine Selbsterhaltung das oberste Gebot der Sittlichkeit erfüllt.” Wherefore, nobody finds fault when a State in its decline is subjugated by a robust neighbour. In one of those telling passages which moved Mr. Freeman to complain that he seems unable to understand that a small State can have any rights, or that a generous or patriotic sentiment can find a place anywhere except in the breast of a fool, Mommsen justifies the Roman conquests: “Kraft des Gesetzes dass das zum Staat entwickelte Volk die politisch unmündigen, das civilisirte die geistig unmündigen in sich auflöst.” The same idea was imparted into the theory of ethics by Kirchmann, and appears, with a sobering touch, in the Geschichte Jesu of Hase, the most popular German divine: “Der Einzelne wird nach der Grösse seiner Ziele, nach den Wirkungen seiner Thaten für das Wohl der Völker gemessen, aber nicht nach dem Maasse der Moral und des Rechts.—Vom Leben im Geiste seiner Zeit hängt nicht der sittliche Werth eines Menschen, aber seine geschichtliche Wirksamkeit ab.” Rümelin, both in politics and literature the most brilliant Suabian of his time, and a strenuous adversary of Machiavelli, wrote thus in 1874: “Für den Einzelnen im Staat gilt das Princip der Selbsthingabe, für den Staat das der Selbstbehauptung. Der Einzelne dient dem Recht; der Staat handhabt, leitet und schafft dasselbe. Der Einzelne ist nur ein flüchtiges Glied in dem sittlichen Ganzen; der Staat ist, wenn nicht dieses Ganze selbst, doch dessen reale, ordnende Macht; er ist unsterblich und sich selbst genug.—Die Erhaltung des Staats rechtfertigt jedes Opfer und steht über jedem Gebot.” Nefftzer, an Alsatian borderer, says: “Le devoir suprême des individus est de se dévouer, celui des nations est de se conserver, et se confond par conséquent avec leur intérêt.” Once, in a mood of pantheism, Renan wrote: “L’humanité a tout fait, et, nous voulons le croire, tout bien fait.” Or, as Michelet abridges the Scienza Nuova: “L’humanité est son œuvre à elle-même. Dieu agit sur elle, mais par elle.” Mr. Leslie Stephen thus lays down the philosophy of history according to Carlyle, “that only succeeds which is based on divine truth, and permanent success therefore proves the right, as the effect proves the cause.” Darwin, having met Carlyle, notes that “in his eyes might was right,” and adds that he had a narrow and unscientific mind; but Mr. Goldwin Smith discovers the same lesson: “History, of itself, if observed as science observes the facts of the physical world, can scarcely give man any principle or any object of allegiance, unless it be success.” Dr. Martineau attributes this doctrine to Mill: “Do we ask what determines the moral quality of actions? We are referred, not to their spring, but to their consequences.” Jeremy Bentham used to relate how he found the greatest happiness principle in 1768, and gave a shilling for it, at the corner of Queen’s College. He found it in Priestley, and he might have gone on finding it in Beccaria and Hutcheson, all of whom trace their pedigree to the Mandragola: “Io credo che quello sia bene che facci bene a’ più, e che i più se ne contentino.” This is the centre of unity in all Machiavelli, and gives him touch, not with unconscious imitators only, but with the most conspicuous race of reasoners in the century.
English experience has not been familiar with a line of thought plainly involving indulgence to Machiavelli. Dugald Stewart raises him high, but raises him for a heavy fall: “No writer, certainly, either in ancient or in modern times, has ever united, in a more remarkable degree, a greater variety of the most dissimilar and seemingly the most discordant gifts and attainments.—To his maxims the royal defenders of the Catholic faith have been indebted for the spirit of that policy which they have uniformly opposed to the innovations of the reformers.” Hallam indeed has said: “We continually find a more flagitious and undisguised abandonment of moral rules for the sake of some idol of a general principle than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel.” But the unaccustomed hyperbole had been hazarded a century before in the obscurity of a Latin dissertation by Feuerlein: “Longe detestabiliores errores apud alios doctores politicos facile invenias, si eidem rigorosae censurae eorum scripta subiicienda essent.” What has been, with us, the occasional aphorism of a masterful mind, encountered support abroad in accredited systems, and in a vast and successful political movement. The recovery of Machiavelli has been essentially the product of causes operating on the Continent.
When Hegel was dominant to the Rhine, and Cousin beyond it, the circumstances favoured his reputation. For Hegel taught: “Der Gang der Weltgeschichte steht ausserhalb der Tugend, des Lasters, und der Gerechtigkeit.” And the great eclectic renewed, in explicit language, the worst maxim of the Istorie Fiorentine: “L’apologie d’un siècle est dans son existence, car son existence est un arrêt et un jugement de Dieu même, ou l’histoire n’est qu’une fastasmagorie insignifiante.—Le caractère propre, le signe d’un grand homme, c’est qu’il réussit.—Ou nul guerrier ne doit être appelé grand homme, ou, s’il est grand, il faut l’absoudre, et absoudre en masse tout ce qu’il a fait.—Il faut prouver que le vainqueur non seulement sert la civilisation, mais qu’il est meilleur, plus moral, et que c’est pour cela qu’il est vainqueur. Maudire la puissance (j’entends une puissance longue et durable) c’est blasphémer l’humanité.”
This primitive and everlasting problem assumed a peculiar shape in theological controversy. The Catholic divines urged that prosperity is a sign by which, even in the militant period, the true Church may be known; coupling Felicitas Temporalis illis collata qui ecclesiam defenderunt with Infelix exitus eorum qui ecclesiam oppugnant. Le Blanc de Beaulieu, a name famous in the history of pacific disputation, holds the opposite opinion: “Crucem et perpessiones esse potius ecclesiae notam, nam denunciatum piis in verbo Dei fore ut in hoc mundo persecutionem patiantur, non vero ut armis sint adversariis suis superiores.” Renan, outbidding all, finds that honesty is the worst policy: “En général, dans l’histoire, l’homme est puni de ce qu’il fait de bien, et récompensé de ce qu’il fait de mal.—L’histoire est tout le contraire de la vertu récompensée.”
The national movement which united, first Italy and then Germany, opened a new era for Machiavelli. He had come down, laden with the distinctive reproach of abetting despotism; and the men who, in the seventeenth century, levelled the course of absolute monarchy, were commonly known as novi politici et Machiavellistae. In the days of Grotius they are denounced by Besold: “Novi politici, ex Italia redeuntes qui quavis fraude principibus a subditis pecuniam extorquere fas licitumque esse putant, Machiavelli plerumque praeceptis et exemplis principum, quorum rationes non capiunt, ad id abutentes.” But the immediate purpose with which Italians and Germans effected the great change in the European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli’s time had come. The problems once more were his own: and in many forward and resolute minds the spirit also was his, and displayed itself in an ascending scale of praise. He was simply a faithful observer of facts, who described the fell necessity that governs narrow territories and unstable fortunes; he discovered the true line of progress and the law of future society; he was a patriot, a republican, a Liberal, but, above all this, a man sagacious enough to know that politics is an inductive science. A sublime purpose justifies him, and he has been wronged by dupes and fanatics, by irresponsible dreamers and interested hypocrites.
The Italian Revolution, passing from the Liberal to the national stage, at once adopted his name and placed itself under his invocation. Count Sclopis, though he declared him Penseur profond, écrivain admirable, deplored this untimely preference: “Il m’a été pénible de voir le gouvernement provisoire de la Tuscane, en 1859, le lendemain du jour où ce pays recouvrait sa liberté, publier un décret, portant qu’une édition complète des œuvres de Machiavel serait faite aux frais de l’état.” The research even of our best masters, Villari and Tommasini, is prompted by admiration. Ferrari, who comes so near him in many qualities of the intellect, proclaims him the recorder of fate: “Il décrit les rôles que la fatalité distribue aux individus et aux masses dans ces moments funestes et glorieux où ils sont appelés à changer la loi et la foi des nations.” His advice, says La Farina, would have saved Italy. Canello believes that he is disliked because he is mistaken for a courtier: “L’ orrore e l’ antipatia che molti critici hanno provato per il Machiavelli son derivati dal pensare che tutti i suoi crudi insegnamenti fossero solo a vantaggio del Principe.” One biographer, Mordenti, exalts him as the very champion of conscience: “Risuscitando la dignità dell’ umana coscienza, ne affermò l’ esistenza in faccia alla ragione.” He adds, more truly, “È uno dei personaggi del dramma che si va svolgendo nell’ età nostra.”
That is the meaning of Laurent when he says that he has imitators but no defenders: “Machiavel ne trouve plus un seul partisan au XIXe siècle.—La postérité a voué son nom à l’infamie, tout en pratiquant sa doctrine.” His characteristic universality has been recognised by Baudrillart: “En exprimant ce mauvais côté, mais ce mauvais côté, hélas, éternel! Machiavel n’est plus seulement le publiciste de son pays et de son temps; il est le politique de tous les siècles.—S’il fait tout dépendre de la puissance individuelle, et de ses facultés de force, d’habileté, de ruse, c’est que, plus le théâtre se rétrécit, plus l’homme influe sur la marche des événements.” Matter finds the same merits which are applauded by the Italians: “Il a plus innové pour la liberté que pour le despotisme, car autour de lui la liberté était inconnue, tandis que le despotisme lui posait partout.” And his reviewer, Longpérier, pronounces the doctrine “parfaitement appropriée aux états d’Italie.” Nourrisson, with Fehr, one of the few religious men who still have a good word for the Secretary, admires his sincerity: “Le Prince est un livre de bonne foi, où l’auteur, sans songer à mal, n’a fait que traduire en maximes les pratiques habituelles à ses contemporains.” Thiers, though he surrendered The Prince, clung to the Discorsi—the Discorsi, with the pointed and culminating text produced by Mr. Burd. In the archives of the ministry he might have found how the idea struck his successful predecessor, Vergennes: “Il est des choses plus fortes que les hommes, et les grands intérêts des nations sont de ce genre, et doivent par conséquent l’emporter sur la façon de penser de quelques particuliers.”
Loyalty to Frederic the Great has not restrained German opinion, and philosophers unite with historians in rejecting his youthful moralities. Zimmerman wonders what would have become of Prussia if the king had practised the maxims of the crown prince; and Zeller testifies that the Anti-Machiavel was not permitted to influence his reign: “Wird man doch weder in seiner Staatsleitung noch in seinen politischen Grundsätzen etwas von dem vermissen, worauf die Ueberlegenheit einer gesunden Realpolitik allem liberalen oder conservativen, radikalen oder legitimistischen, Doktrinarismus gegenüber beruht.” Ahrens and Windelband insist on the virtue of a national government: “Der Staat ist sich selbst genug, wenn er in einer Nation wurzelt,—das ist der Grundgedanke Machiavelli’s.” Kirchmann celebrates the emancipation of the State from the moral yoke: “Man hat Machiavelli zwar in der Theorie bekämpft, allein die Praxis der Staaten hat seine Lehren immer eingehalten.—Wenn seine Lehre verletzt, so kommt diess nur von der Kleinheit der Staaten und Fürsten, auf die er sie verwendet.—Es spricht nur für seine tiefe Erkenntniss des Staatswesens, dass er die Staatsgewalt nicht den Regeln der Privatmoral unterwirft, sondern selbst vor groben Verletzungen dieser Moral durch den Fürsten nicht zurückschreckt, wenn das Wohl des Ganzen und die Freiheit des Vaterlandes nicht anders vorbereitet und vermittelt werden kann.” In Kuno Fischer’s progress through the systems of metaphysics Machiavelli appears at almost every step; his influence is manifest to Dr. Abbott throughout the whole of Bacon’s political writings; Hobbes followed up his theory to the conclusions which he abstained from; Spinoza gave him the benefit of a liberal interpretation; Leibniz, the inventor of the acquiescent doctrine which Bolingbroke transmitted to the Essay on Man, said that he drew a good likeness of a bad prince; Herder reports him to mean that a rogue need not be a fool; Fichte frankly set himself to rehabilitate him. In the end, the great master of modern philosophy pronounces in his favour, and declares it absurd to robe a prince in the cowl of a monk: “Ein politischer Denker und Künstler dessen erfahrener und tiefer Verstand aus den geschichtlich gegebenen Verhältnissen besser, als aus den Grundsätzen der Metaphysik, die politischen Nothwendigkeiten, den Charakter, die Bildung und Aufgabe weltlicher Herrschaft zu begreifen wusste. — Da man weiss, dass politische Machtfragen nie, am Wenigsten in einem verderbten Volke, mit den Mitteln der Moral zu lösen sind, so ist es unverständig, das Buch vom Fürsten zu verschreien. Machiavelli hatte einen Herrscher zu schildern, keinen Klosterbruder.”
Ranke was a grateful student of Fichte when he spoke of Machiavelli as a meritorious writer, maligned by people who could not understand him: “Einem Autor von höchstem Verdienst, und der keineswegs ein böser Mensch war. — Die falsche Auffassung des Principe beruht eben darauf, dass man die Lehren Machiavells als allgemeine betrachtet, während sie bloss Anweisungen für einen bestimmten Zweck sind.” To Gervinus, in 1853, he is “der grosse Seher,” the prophet of the modern world: “Er errieth den Geist der neuern Geschichte.” Gervinus was a democratic Liberal, and, taken with Gentz from another quarter, he shows how widely the elements of the Machiavellian restoration were spread over Europe. Gentz had not forgotten his classics in the service of Austria when he wrote to a friend: “Wenn selbst das Recht je verletzt werden darf, so geschehe es, um die rechtmässige Macht zu erhalten; in allem Uebrigen herrsche es unbedingt.” Twesten is as well persuaded as Machiavelli that the world cannot be governed “con Pater nostri in mano,” and he deemed that patriotism atoned for his errors: “Dass der weltgeschichtliche Fortschritt nicht mit Schonung und Gelindigkeit, nicht in den Formen des Rechts vollzogen werden konnte, hat die Geschichte aller Länder bestätigt.—Auch Machiavellis Sünden mögen wir als gesühnt betrachten, durch das hochsinnige Streben für das Grosse und das Ansehen seines Volkes.” One censor of Frederic, Boretius, makes him answerable for a great deal of presuming criticism: “Die Gelehrten sind bis heute in ihrem Urtheil über Machiavelli nicht einig, die öffentliche Meinung ist hierin glücklicher.—Die öffentliche Meinung kann sich für alle diese Weisheit beim alten Fritz bedanken.” On the eve of the campaign in Bohemia, Herbst pointed out that Machiavelli, though previously a republican, sacrificed liberty to unity: “Der Einheit soll die innere Freiheit—Machiavelli war kurz zuvor noch begeisterter Anhänger der Republik — geopfert werden.” According to Feuerlein the heart of the writer was loyal, but the conditions of the problem were inexorable; and Klein detects in The Prince, and even in the Mandragola, “die reformatorische Absicht eines Sittenspiegels.” Chowanetz wrote a book to hold up Machiavelli as a teacher of all ages, but especially of our own: “Die Absicht aber, welche Machiavel mit seinem Buche verband, ist trefflich für alle Zeiten.” And Weitzel hardly knows a better writer, or one less worthy of an evil name: “Im Interesse der Menschheit und gesetzmässiger Verfassungen kann kaum ein besseres Werk geschrieben werden. — Wohl ist mancher in der Geschichte, wie in der Tradition der Völker, auf eine unschuldige Weise um seinen verdienten, oder zu einem unverdienten Rufe gekommen, aber keiner vielleicht unschuldiger als Machiavelli.”
These are remote and forgotten names. Stronger men of the imperial epoch have resumed the theme with better means of judging, and yet with no harsher judgment. Hartwig sums up his penetrating and severe analysis by confessing that the world as Machiavelli saw it, without a conscience, is the real world of history as it is: “Die Thatsachen selbst scheinen uns das Geheimniss ihrer Existenz zu verrathen; wir glauben vor uns die Fäden sich verknüpfen und verschlingen zu sehen, deren Gewebe die Weltgeschichte ist.” Gaspary thinks that he hated iniquity, but that he knew of no righteousness apart from the State: “Er lobte mit Wärme das Gute und tadelte mit Abscheu das Böse; aber er studirte auch dieses mit Interesse.—Er erkennt eben keine Moral, wie keine Religion, über dem Staate, sondern nur in demselben; die Menschen sind von Natur schlecht, die Gesetze machen sie gut.—Wo es kein Gericht giebt, bei dem man klagen könnte, wie in den Handlungen der Fürsten, betrachtet man immer das Ende.” The common opinion is expressed by Baumgarten in his Charles the Fifth, that the grandeur of the purpose assures indulgence to the means proposed: “Wenn die Umstände zum Wortbruch, zur Grausamkeit, Habgier, Lüge treiben, so hat man sich nicht etwa mit Bedauern, dass die Not dazu zwinge, sondern schlechtweg, weil es eben politisch zweckmässig ist und ohne alles Bedenken so zu verhalten. — Ihre Deduktionen sind uns unerträglich, wenn wir nicht sagen können: alle diese schrecklichen Dinge empfahl Machiavelli, weil er nur durch sie die Befreiung seines Vaterlandes zu erreichen hoffte. Dieses erhabene Ziel macht uns die fürchterlichen Mittel annehmbar, welche Machiavelli seinem Fürsten empfiehlt.” Hillebrand was a more international German; he had swum in many European waters, and wrote in three languages. He is scarcely less favourable in his interpretation: “Cette dictature, il ne faut jamais le perdre de vue, ne serait jamais que transitoire, et devrait faire place à un gouvernement libre dès que la grande réforme nationale et sociale serait accomplie. — Il a parfaitement conscience du mal. L’atmosphère ambiante de son siècle et de son pays n’a nullement oblitéré son sens moral. — Il a si bien conscience de l’énormité de ces crimes, qu’il la condamne hautement lorsque la dernière nécessité ne les impose pas.”
Among these utterances of capable and distinguished men, it will be seen that some are partially true, and others, without a particle of truth, are at least representative and significant, and serve to bring Machiavelli within fathomable depth. He is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world. Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion, have not reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. He obtains a new lease of life from causes that are still prevailing, and from doctrines that are apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. Without sparing censure, or employing for comparison the grosser symptoms of the age, we find him near our common level, and perceive that he is not a vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence. Where it is impossible to praise, to defend, or to excuse, the burden of blame may yet be lightened by adjustment and distribution, and he is more rationally intelligible when illustrated by lights falling not only from the century he wrote in, but from our own, which has seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime.