the Machiavelli, declare "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, [and] that the code shifts with the longitude." "Never lower the standard of rectitude," he warns the students at Cambridge, "but try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives and suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. . . If we lower our standard in history," he impressively adds, "we cannot uphold it in Church or State." Few historical writers adopt this standard of judgment.

Among an historian's qualifications Lord Acton justly prizes "detachment." By it he means objectivity, that quality of selfeffacement by virtue of which the historian loses his own personality and peculiar ideas in order to identify himself with other personalities and the ideas of other times. It is an indispensable prerequisite to critical analysis; as applied to the act of judging it issues in impartiality. Acton learned the art, he says, from Coleridge, but he seems to consider George Eliot its highest exponent. And in fact, she might with much reason be styled the historian's novelist. Acton says that she was one among the eighteen or twenty writers by whom he was conscious that his mind had been formed. To a certain extent the business of their lives was the same: "My life," he writes, "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." George Eliot did. And her subsequent "detachment" was such that she could expose "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." These passages reveal the qualities which Acton prizes in the historian, but usually fails to find penetration, insight into motive-surface and background; the presentation of the opposing case at its strongest; complete

identification followed by complete detachment and ruthless, yet impartial, analysis and judgment.

III. The Relations of History, Politics, Ethics, Religion and Freedom.

It has been said of Lord Acton that he was the most catholic of Catholics and the least papistical of papists. It might also be said that he was the most liberal of Catholics and the most catholic of Liberals. The two ideas which lay most closely at his heart were religion and liberty, and they were his chosen themes for historical exposition.

His works abound in aphorisms on these subjects. "In the revolt of the last ten years against utilitarians and materialists," he wrote in 1886, "the growth of ethical knowledge has become, for the first time, the supreme object of history." "The marrow of civilized history is ethical, not metaphysical, and the deep underlying cause of action passes through the shape of right and wrong." "Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles." Religion is the master key to human action. Politics is the offspring of religion and philosophy. "The ends of liberty are the true ends of politics." "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." But on the other hand, "To have no moral test of duty apart from religion is to be a fanatic."

Religious bias Acton regards as the most insidious bias in both the making and the writing of history. "Subtlest of all such [error-causing] 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 Brook's." All understanding of history, he further declares, depends on knowledge of the forces which make it, "of which religious forces are the most active and the most definite." We cannot follow the mental variations of individuals, but "when we know the religious mo

tive, that the man was an Anabaptist, an Arminian, a Deist, or a Jansenist, we have the master key." This must in large measure be true, but Acton himself, more than another, incurs the danger of allowing the religious idea to absorb the individual. This is particularly true of his attitude toward those whom he calls Ultramontanes. He seems to have his own peculiar definition of the word and he applies his own peculiar standard of criticism with unsparing vigor. He judges the men of the Counter-Reformation apart from the standard of their time, requires his contemporaries to do the same, and includes in one condemnation both the persecutors of the sixteenth century and the men of the present day who do not find them guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances. Newman and Manning are cases in point.

The subject of Acton's Inaugural Lecture was in part, the Unity of Modern History. He regards it as the resultant of the religious motive working in combination with the principle of freedom. In comparison with such a history as Lord Acton would have written in extenso, it seems not unfair to paraphrase this sketch and include it among his Obiter Dicta.

The first of human concerns is religion, and it is the salient feature of the modern centuries. These open with an age of extreme indifference, ignorance and decline, and are succeeded by an age whose key-note was dogmatic conviction-a force which, until the days of Cromwell, remained the supreme influence and motive of public policy. Then followed an era, wearied with struggle of faith and creed, in which the controversial spirit was increasingly displaced by the scientific-although church interests have not even yet completely disappeared from politics. The struggles of the early Reformation resulted in the formation of national churches, followed by the rise of sects in the seventeenth century; the sects were concerned with the individual rather than with the State-Church; they sought to restrict the sphere of enforced command to fixed limits; and to do that which formerly had been done by authority, outward discipline and organized violence, by means of the principle of the division of power, and the use of the intellect and conscience of free The dominion of will over will was thus exchanged for

men.

the dominion of reason over reason.

The zeal formerly display

ed in proclaiming authoritative doctrine was used for liberty of prophesying; rationalism, toleration and political freedom were final results, and today the three most important countries in the globe are numbered among the conquests of the Protestant Reformation.

Beginning with the strongest religious movement and with the most refined despotism ever known, the modern historical cycle has led to the superiority of politics over divinity in the life of nations, and it terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfillment of his duty to God. This is a doctrine laden with storm and havoc, the secret essence of the rights of man, the indestructible soul of Revolution.

It is no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world toward self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded by the religious motive in the seventeeth century. And it is this constancy of progress, of progress in the direction of organized and assured freedom, which is the characteristic fact of modern history and its tribute to the theory of a guiding Providence. The wisdom of divine rule appears, not in the perfection, but in the improvement of the world; and liberty achieved is the one ethical result that emerges from the converging and combined conditions of modern civilization. History thus becomes, as Leibniz says, the true demonstration of religion.

But what does liberty mean?-a word which Acton elsewhere says, "resembles the camel and enjoys more definitions than any object in nature; an idea of which there are two hundred definitions," whose "wealth of interpretation has caused more bloodshed than anything except theology." An answer which would satisfy the rigor of philosophy is not needed here; it can be defined by its results. Where absolutism once reigned, with concentrated possessions, auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more; neither authorities, nor minorities, nor majorities, can command implicit obedience. Societies have come into being, which, by long and arduous experience, have obtained a rampart of tried conviction and accumulated knowledge; these, possessing a fair level of general morality, education, courage and self-restraint, prove that the world is moving

onward and mirror the condition of life to which, through liberty, the world is tending. By outward signs you may know them : the extinction of slavery, the existence of representative government, the reign of public opinion; but better still by less apparent evidence-the security of weaker groups and the liberty of conscience which, once secured, secures the rest.

Such is Lord Acton's formal account of modern history, shaping and shaped by religion and liberty. In the Bridgnorth Lectures of 1877, memorable as the sole printed approach to History of Liberty, is to be found an interesting definition of that word. "By Liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. Liberty. . . is itself the highest political end." This may be supplemented by the golden words in a letter to Mary Gladstone: "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."

This Bridgnorth Lecture also assigns to America her place in the march of the nations. Acton believed that the only known forms of liberty are Republics and Constitutional Monarchies.

Europe [in 1770] 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 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."

IV.

The Relation of Persons and Ideas to Historical Develop

ment.

It is fair to suppose that Lord Acton agreed, in principle, with the manifesto of the English Historical Review concerning the nature of history-that it is the record of human action and of thought only in its direct influence upon action; that it deals more largely with statesmen and politicians than with private