Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Portrait of Lord Acton]
LETTERS OF
LORD ACTON
TO MARY, DAUGHTER OF
THE RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE
EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR, BY
HERBERT PAUL
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1904
[All rights reserved]
COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1904
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press
{iii}
"_Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His Light
For us i' the dark to rise by._"
THIS VOLUME
IS DEDICATED TO
LADY ACTON
BY M. D.
{v}
CONTENTS
PAGE
DEDICATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
EDITOR'S PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
LETTERS OF LORD ACTON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
ILLUSTRATIONS
PORTRAIT OF LORD ACTON (Photogravure) . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
GROUP AT TEGERNSEE, 1879 (Photogravure) . . . . . _to face page_ 1
{vii}
PREFACE
It does not seem likely that any one, after reading these letters,
would question the desirability of their publication. In general they
speak for themselves; a few notes have been added to explain allusions
which by lapse of time have become obscure; some names and passages,
and some letters, have been omitted. After 1885 Lord Acton touched
upon questions which are still matters of controversy, and therefore
the selection closes with that year. The letters were written to the
daughter who lived with Mr. Gladstone from the time of her own birth,
in the middle of the last century, to the day of his death, at its
close. The idea of publishing a selection of them arose in 1898; and
Lord Acton, with certain reservations, assented to it. But it was felt
by competent judges that it would be trespassing in Mr. Morley's
domain; and Mr. Morley himself was strongly of opinion that the
mutilation which at that period would have been necessary, would
seriously impair the interest and the significance of the book. So,
for the time, the project was abandoned. On the other hand, in the
judgment of the eminent authorities to whom the letters were submitted,
their value was of such a nature that it was evident they ought to be
published as soon as Mr. Morley should have completed his task.
With the exception of passages critical of himself or his policy, the
letters were not read by Mr. Gladstone; for, while he made it a rule to
shun all that was laudatory of himself, he always welcomed and
carefully studied anything deliberately thought out or written in an
opposite sense. His own correspondence with Lord Acton extended over a
period of some {viii} thirty years; but it does not cover nearly so
wide a range of subjects, or appeal so much to general interests, as
the series now printed.
To the recipient of these letters from Lord Acton they will always be
precious, not merely for the judgments they contain and the memories
they recall, but also as the outward symbol of an inward and priceless
possession--the treasure of his friendship.
MARY DREW.
10th _January_ 1904.
{ix}
EDITOR'S PREFACE
In compiling the Introductory Memoir which follows I have been chiefly
indebted to Dr. Shaw's excellent "Bibliography of Lord Acton," edited
for the Royal Historical Society, and to a most interesting article in
the _Edinburgh Review_ for April 1903. I have also consulted Mr.
Bryce's "Studies in Contemporary Biography," Sir Mountstuart Grant
Duff's "Out of the Past," and an obituary notice in the _Cambridge
Review_ for October 1902, signed "F.W.M." Mr. Morley was good enough
to lend me the copies of Lord Acton's letters to Mr. Gladstone which
had been made for the purposes of his Biography. Neither the materials
at my command nor the circumstances of the case justified me in
attempting to write a Life of Lord Acton. I have merely sought to
furnish such information as the readers of these letters would
naturally desire to possess.
HERBERT PAUL.
{xi}
INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
Lord Acton was dimly known to the general public as a prodigy of
learning. He left no great work behind him, and is often quoted as an
example of natural gifts buried under an accumulation of excessive, or
ill-digested 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 much less agreeable 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 {xii} 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 sciolism, 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. {xiii} 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 more 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 {xiv} 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 {xv} 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 Emerick 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 {xvi} 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 {xvii} 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, Caesar 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
Doellinger. Doellinger 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 Doellinger 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 {xviii} 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
("Studies in Contemporary Biography," pp. 396-97) has described 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 {xix} 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 Doellinger 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 _Cite 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
{xx} 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 {xxi} 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 fulfilment 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" (_Edinburgh Review_, No. 404, page 502). 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 {xxii} 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 burgh 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, {xxiii} 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, and
nothing at all like them has been known since. 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 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 ninepence to fourpence. 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 {xxiv} losses inflicted upon British commerce by the American
War. The speeches in which Mr. Gladstone's Budgets 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 Thiers. 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
{xxv} 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 spoke. For six years he only put
two questions, and made one speech (May 4, 1860). The questions were
unimportant. The speech 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 {xxvi} 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 questions 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 fulfil 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 ascendency
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
{xxvii} 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"
(_Edinburgh Review_, No. 404, pp. 375-76). 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 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
_Home and Foreign Review_. His first contribution, {xxviii} 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 Mill'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 Caesars. 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 Mill'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."
{xxix}
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 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; {xxx} 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 verum diligo sive {xxxi} 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 Cardinal'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, {xxxii} 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."