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THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM AND OTHER ESSAYS
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANSISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA LTD.
TORONTO
[Illustration: Acton]
THE
HISTORY OF FREEDOM
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON
FIRST BARON ACTON
D.C.L., L.L.D., ETC. ETC. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, Litt.D.
SOMETIME LECTURER IN ST. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
AND
REGINALD VERE LAURENCE, M.A.
FELLOW AND LECTURER OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1909
_First Edition 1907_
_Reprinted 1909_
PREFATORY NOTE
The Editors desire to thank the members of the Acton family for their
help and advice during the preparation of this volume and of the volume
of _Historical Essays and Studies_. They have had the advantage of
access to many of Acton's letters, especially those to Doellinger and
Lady Blennerhasset. They have thus been provided with valuable material
for the Introduction. At the same time they wish to take the entire
responsibility for the opinions expressed therein. They are again
indebted to Professor Henry Jackson for valuable suggestions.
This volume consists of articles reprinted from the following journals:
_The Quarterly Review_, _The English Historical Review_, _The Nineteenth
Century_, _The Rambler_, _The Home and Foreign Review_, _The North
British Review_, _The Bridgnorth Journal_. The Editors have to thank Mr.
John Murray, Messrs. Longmans, Kegan Paul, Williams and Norgate, and the
proprietors of _The Bridgnorth Journal_ for their kind permission to
republish these articles, and also the Delegacy of the Clarendon Press
for allowing the reprint of the Introduction to Mr. Burd's edition of
_Il Principe_. They desire to point out that in _Lord Acton and his
Circle_ the article on "The Protestant Theory of Persecution" is
attributed to Simpson: this is an error.
J.N.F.
R.V.L.
_August 24, 1907._
CONTENTS
PAGE
PORTRAIT OF LORD ACTON _Frontispiece_
CHRONICLE viii
INTRODUCTION ix
I. THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY 1
II. THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY 30
III. SIR ERSKINE MAY'S DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE 61
IV. THE MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW 101
V. THE PROTESTANT THEORY OF PERSECUTION 150
VI. POLITICAL THOUGHTS ON THE CHURCH 188
VII. INTRODUCTION TO L.A. BURD'S EDITION OF
IL PRINCIPE BY MACHIAVELLI 212
VIII. MR. GOLDWIN SMITH'S IRISH HISTORY 232
IX. NATIONALITY 270
X. DOeLLINGER ON THE TEMPORAL POWER 301
XI. DOeLLINGER'S HISTORICAL WORK 375
XII. CARDINAL WISEMAN AND THE HOME AND
FOREIGN REVIEW 436
XIII. CONFLICTS WITH ROME 461
XIV. THE VATICAN COUNCIL 492
XV. A HISTORY OF THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE
AGES. BY HENRY CHARLES LEA 551
XVI. THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH. BY JAMES
BRYCE 575
XVII. HISTORICAL PHILOSOPHY IN FRANCE AND FRENCH
BELGIUM AND SWITZERLAND. BY ROBERT FLINT 588
APPENDIX 597
INDEX 599
CHRONICLE
JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON, born at Naples,
10th January 1834, son of Sir Ferdinand Richard Edward
Dalberg-Acton and Marie de Dalberg, afterwards Countess
Granville.
French school near Paris.
1843-1848. Student at Oscott
" " Edinburgh.
1848-1854. " " Munich University, living with Doellinger.
1855. Visits America in company with Lord Ellesmere.
1858-1862. Becomes editor of _The Rambler_.
1859-1865. M.P. for Carlow.
1862-1864. Founds, edits, and concludes _The Home and Foreign
Review_.
1864. Pius IX. issued _Quanta Cura_, with appended _Syllabus
Errorum_.
1865-1866. M.P. for Bridgnorth
1865. Marries Countess Marie Arco-Valley.
1867-1868. Writes for _The Chronicle_.
1869. Created Baron Acton.
1869-1871. Writes for _North British Review_.
1869-1870. Vatican Council. Acton at Rome. Writes "Letters
of Quirinus" in _alleging Zeitung_.
1872. Honorary degree at Munich.
1874. Letters to _The Times_ on "The Vatican Decrees."
1888. Honorary degree at Cambridge.
1889. " " Oxford.
1890. Honorary Fellow of All Souls'.
1892-1895. Lord-in-Waiting.
1895-1902. Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge
Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.
19th June 1902. Died at Tegernsee.
INTRODUCTION
The two volumes here published contain but a small selection from the
numerous writings of Acton on a variety of topics, which are to be found
scattered through many periodicals of the last half-century. The result
here displayed is therefore not complete. A further selection of nearly
equal quantity might be made, and still much that is valuable in Acton's
work would remain buried. Here, for instance, we have extracted nothing
from the _Chronicle_; and Acton's gifts as a leader-writer remain
without illustration. Yet they were remarkable. Rarely did he show to
better advantage than in the articles and reviews he wrote in that
short-lived rival of the _Saturday Review_. From the two bound volumes
of that single weekly, there might be made a selection which would be of
high interest to all who cared to learn what was passing in the minds of
the most acute and enlightened members of the Roman Communion at one of
the most critical epochs in the history of the papacy. But what could
never be reproduced is the general impression of Acton's many
contributions to the _Rambler_, the _Home and Foreign_, and the _North
British Review_. Perhaps none of his longer and more ceremonious
writings can give to the reader so vivid a sense at once of the range of
Acton's erudition and the strength of his critical faculty as does the
perusal of these short notices. Any one who wished to understand the
personality of Acton could not do better than take the published
Bibliography and read a few of the articles on "contemporary literature"
furnished by him to the three Reviews. In no other way could the reader
so clearly realise the complexity of his mind or the vast number of
subjects which he could touch with the hand of a master. In a single
number there are twenty-eight such notices. His writing before he was
thirty years of age shows an intimate and detailed knowledge of
documents and authorities which with most students is the "hard won and
hardly won" achievement of a lifetime of labour. He always writes as the
student, never as the _litterateur_. Even the memorable phrases which
give point to his briefest articles are judicial, not journalistic. Yet
he treats of matters which range from the dawn of history through the
ancient empires down to subjects so essentially modern as the vast
literature of revolutionary France or the leaders of the romantic
movement which replaced it. In all these writings of Acton those
qualities manifest themselves, which only grew stronger with time, and
gave him a distinct and unique place among his contemporaries. Here is
the same austere love of truth, the same resolve to dig to the bed-rock
of fact, and to exhaust all sources of possible illumination, the same
breadth of view and intensity of inquiring ardour, which stimulated his
studies and limited his productive power. Above all, there is the same
unwavering faith in principles, as affording the only criterion of
judgment amid the ever-fluctuating welter of human passions, political
manoeuvring, and ecclesiastical intrigue. But this is not all. We note
the same value for great books as the source of wisdom, combined with
the same enthusiasm for immediate justice which made Acton the despair
of the mere academic student, an enigma among men of the world, and a
stumbling-block to the politician of the clubs. Beyond this, we find
that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of
phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety,
allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and his
judgment a sword.
A few instances may be given. In criticising a professor of history
famous in every way rather than as a student, Acton says, "his Lectures
are indeed not entirely unhistorical, for he has borrowed quite
discriminatingly from Tocqueville." Of another writer he says that
"ideas, if they occur to him, he rejects like temptations to sin." Of
Ranke, thinking perhaps also of himself, he declares that "his intimate
knowledge of all the contemporary history of Europe is a merit not
suited to his insular readers." Of a partisan French writer under Louis
Napoleon he says that "he will have a fair grievance if he fails to
obtain from a discriminating government some acknowledgment of the
services which mere historical science will find it hard to appreciate."
Of Laurent he says, that "sometimes it even happens that his information
is not second-hand, and there are some original authorities with which
he is evidently familiar. The ardour of his opinions, so different from
those which have usually distorted history, gives an interest even to
his grossest errors. Mr. Buckle, if he had been able to distinguish a
good book from a bad one, would have been a tolerable imitation of M.
Laurent." Perhaps, however, the most characteristic of these forgotten
judgments is the description of Lord Liverpool and the class which
supported him. Not even Disraeli painting the leader of that party which
he was destined so strangely to "educate" could equal the austere and
accurate irony with which Acton, writing as a student, not as a
novelist, sums up the characteristics of the class of his birth.
Lord Liverpool governed England in the greatest crisis of the war,
and for twelve troubled years of peace, chosen not by the nation, but
by the owners of the land. The English gentry were well content with
an order of things by which for a century and a quarter they had
enjoyed so much prosperity and power. Desiring no change they wished
for no ideas. They sympathised with the complacent respectability of
Lord Liverpool's character, and knew how to value the safe sterility
of his mind. He distanced statesmen like Grenville, Wellesley, and
Canning, not in spite of his inferiority, but by reason of it. His
mediocrity was his merit. The secret of his policy was that he had
none. For six years his administration outdid the Holy Alliance. For
five years it led the liberal movement throughout the world. The
Prime Minister hardly knew the difference. He it was who forced
Canning on the King. In the same spirit he wished his government to
include men who were in favour of the Catholic claims and men who
were opposed to them. His career exemplifies, not the accidental
combination but the natural affinity, between the love of
conservatism and the fear of ideas.
The longer essays republished in these volumes exhibit in most of its
characteristics a personality which even those who disagreed with his
views must allow to have been one of the most remarkable products of
European culture in the nineteenth century. They will show in some
degree how Acton's mind developed in the three chief periods of his
activity, something of the influences which moulded it, a great deal of
its preferences and its antipathies, and nearly all its directing
ideals. During the first period--roughly to be dated from 1855 to
1863--he was hopefully striving, under the influence of Doellinger (his
teacher from the age of seventeen), to educate his co-religionists in
breadth and sympathy, and to place before his countrymen ideals of right
in politics, which were to him bound up with the Catholic faith. The
combination of scientific inquiry with true rules of political justice
he claimed, in a letter to Doellinger, as the aim of the _Home and
Foreign Review_. The result is to be seen in a quarterly, forgotten,
like all such quarterlies to-day, but far surpassing, alike in
knowledge, range, and certainty, any of the other quarterlies,
political, or ecclesiastical, or specialist, which the nineteenth
century produced. There is indeed no general periodical which comes near
to it for thoroughness of erudition and strength of thought, if not for
brilliance and ease; while it touches on topics contemporary and
political in a way impossible to any specialist journal. A comparison
with the _British Critic_ in the religious sphere, with the _Edinburgh_
in the political, will show how in all the weightier matters of learning
and thought, the _Home and Foreign_ (indeed the _Rambler_) was their
superior, while it displayed a cosmopolitan interest foreign to most
English journals.
We need not recapitulate the story so admirably told already by Doctor
Gasquet of the beginning and end of the various journalistic enterprises
with which Acton was connected. So far as he was concerned, however, the
time may be regarded as that of youth and hope.
Next came what must be termed the "fighting period," when he stood forth
as the leader among laymen of the party opposed to that "insolent and
aggressive faction" which achieved its imagined triumph at the Vatican
Council. This period, which may perhaps be dated from the issue of the
Syllabus by Pius IX. in 1864, may be considered to close with the reply
to Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet on "The Vatican Decrees," and with the
attempt of the famous Cardinal, in whose mind history was identified
with heresy, to drive from the Roman communion its most illustrious
English layman. Part of this story tells itself in the letters published
by the Abbot Gasquet; and more will be known when those to Doellinger are
given to the world.
We may date the third period of Acton's life from the failure of
Manning's attempt, or indeed a little earlier. He had now given up all
attempt to contend against the dominant influence of the Court of Rome,
though feeling that loyalty to the Church of his Baptism, as a living
body, was independent of the disastrous policy of its hierarchy. During
this time he was occupied with the great unrealised project of the
history of liberty or in movements of English politics and in the usual
avocations of a student. In the earlier part of this period are to be
placed some of the best things that Acton ever wrote, such as the
lectures on Liberty, here republished. It is characterised by his
discovery in the "eighties" that Doellinger and he were divided on the
question of the severity of condemnation to be passed on persecutors and
their approvers. Acton found to his dismay that Doellinger (like
Creighton) was willing to accept pleas in arrest of judgment or at least
mitigation of sentence, which the layman's sterner code repudiated.
Finding that he had misunderstood his master, Acton was for a time
profoundly discouraged, declared himself isolated, and surrendered the
outlook of literary work as vain. He found, in fact, that in
ecclesiastical as in general politics he was alone, however much he
might sympathise with others up to a certain point. On the other hand,
these years witnessed a gradual mellowing of his judgment in regard to
the prospects of the Church, and its capacity to absorb and interpret in
a harmless sense the dogma against whose promulgation he had fought so
eagerly. It might also be correct to say that the English element in
Acton came out most strongly in this period, closing as it did with the
Cambridge Professorship, and including the development of the friendship
between himself and Mr. Gladstone.
We have spoken both of the English element in Acton and of his European
importance. This is the only way in which it is possible to present or
understand him. There were in him strains of many races. On his
father's side he was an English country squire, but foreign residence
and the Neapolitan Court had largely affected the family, in addition to
that flavour of cosmopolitan culture which belongs to the more highly
placed Englishmen of the Roman Communion. On his mother's side he was a
member of one of the oldest and greatest families in Germany, which was
only not princely. The Dalbergs, moreover, had intermarried with an
Italian family, the Brignoli. Trained first at Oscott under Wiseman, and
afterwards at Munich under Doellinger, in whose house he lived, Acton by
education as well as birth was a cosmopolitan, while his marriage with
the family of Arco-Valley introduced a further strain of Bavarian
influence into his life. His mother's second marriage with Lord
Granville brought him into connection with the dominant influences of
the great Whig Houses. For a brief period, like many another county
magnate, he was a member of the House of Commons, but he never became
accustomed to its atmosphere. For a longer time he lived at his house in
Shropshire, and was a stately and sympathetic host, though without much
taste for the avocations of country life. His English birth and Whig
surroundings were largely responsible for that intense constitutionalism,
which was to him a religion, and in regard both to ecclesiastical and civil
politics formed his guiding criterion. This explains his detestation of all
forms of absolutism on the one hand, and what he always called
"the revolution" on the other.
It was not, however, the English strain that was most obvious in Acton,
but the German. It was natural that he should become fired under
Doellinger's influence with the ideals of continental scholarship and
exact and minute investigation. He had a good deal of the massive
solidity of the German intellect. He liked, as in the "Letter to a
German Bishop," to make his judgment appear as the culmination of so
much weighty evidence, that it seemed to speak for itself. He had, too,
a little of the German habit of breaking a butterfly upon a wheel, and
at times he makes reading difficult by a more than Teutonic
allusiveness. It was not easy for Acton to bear in mind that the public
is often ignorant of even the names of distinguished scholars, and that
"a European reputation" is sometimes confined to the readers of
specialist publications.
The Italian strain in Acton is apparent in another quality, which is
perhaps his one point of kinship with Machiavelli, the absence of
hesitation from his thought, and of mystery from his writing. Subtle and
ironic as his style is, charged with allusion and weighted with passion,
it is yet entirely devoid both of German sentiment and English
vagueness. There was no haze in his mind. He judges, but does not paint
pictures. It may have been this absence of half-tones in his vein of
thought, and of _chiaroscuro_ in his imagination that made Manning, an
intelligent however hostile critic, speak of "the ruthless talk of
undergraduates."
But however much or little be allowed to the diverse strains of
hereditary influence or outward circumstances, the interest of Acton to
the student lies in his intense individuality. That austerity of moral
judgment, that sense of the greatness of human affairs, and of the vast
issues that lie in action and in thought, was no product of outside
influences, and went beyond what he had learnt from his master
Doellinger. To treat politics as a game, to play with truth or make it
subservient to any cause other than itself, to take trivial views, was
to Acton as deep a crime as to waste in pleasure or futility the hours
so brief given for salvation of the soul would have seemed to Baxter or
Bunyan; indeed, there was an element of Puritan severity in his attitude
towards statesmen both ecclesiastical and civil. He was no "light
half-believer of a casual creed," but had a sense of reality more like
Dante than many moderns.
This, perhaps, it was that drew him ever closer to Mr. Gladstone, while
it made the House of Commons and the daily doings of politicians
uncongenial. There is no doubt that he had learned too well "the secret
of intellectual detachment." Early in his life his shrewd and kindly
stepfather had pointed out to him the danger of losing influence by a
too unrestrained desire to escape worshipping the idols of the
marketplace. There are, it is true, not wanting signs that his view of
the true relations of States and Churches may become one day more
dominant, for it appears as though once more the earlier Middle Ages
will be justified, and religious bodies become the guardians of freedom,
even in the political sphere. Still, a successful career in public life
could hardly be predicted for one who felt at the beginning that "I
agree with nobody, and nobody agrees with me," and towards the close
admitted that he "never had any contemporaries." On the other hand, it
may be questioned whether, in the chief of his self-imposed tasks, he
failed so greatly as at first appeared. If he did not prevent
"infallibility" being decreed, the action of the party of Strossmayer
and Hefele assuredly prevented the form of the decree being so dangerous
as they at first feared. We can only hazard a guess that the mild and
minimising terms of the dogma, especially as they have since been
interpreted, were in reality no triumph to Veuillot and the Jesuits. In
later life Acton seems to have felt that they need not have the
dangerous consequences, both in regard to historical judgments or
political principles, which he had feared from the registered victory of
ultramontane reaction. However this may be, Acton's whole career is
evidence of his detachment of mind, and entire independence even of his
closest associates. It was a matter to him not of taste but of
principle. What mainly marked him out among men was the intense reality
of his faith. This gave to all his studies their practical tone. He had
none of the pedant's contempt for ordinary life, none of the aesthete's
contempt for action as a "little vulgar," and no desire to make of
intellectual pursuits an end in themselves. His scholarship was to him
as practical as his politics, and his politics as ethical as his faith.
Thus his whole life was a unity. All his various interests were inspired
by one unconquered resolve, the aim of securing universally, alike in
Church and in State, the recognition of the paramountcy of principles
over interests, of liberty over tyranny, of truth over all forms of
evasion or equivocation. His ideal in the political world was, as he
said, that of securing _suum cuique_ to every individual or association
of human life, and to prevent any institution, however holy its aims,
acquiring more.
To understand the ardour of his efforts it is necessary to bear in mind
the world into which he was born, and the crises intellectual,
religious, and political which he lived to witness and sometimes to
influence. Born in the early days of the July monarchy, when reform in
England was a novelty, and Catholic freedom a late-won boon, Acton as he
grew to manhood in Munich and in England had presented to his regard a
series of scenes well calculated to arouse a thoughtful mind to
consideration of the deepest problems, both of politics and religion.
What must have been the "long, long thoughts" of a youth, naturally
reflective and acutely observant, as he witnessed the break-up of the
old order in '48 and the years that followed. In the most impressionable
age of life he was driven to contemplate a Europe in solution; the crash
of the kingdoms; the Pope a Liberal, an exile, and a reactionary; the
principle of nationality claiming to supersede all vested rights, and
to absorb and complete the work of '89; even socialism for once striving
to reduce theory to practice, till there came the "saviour of society"
with the _coup d'etat_ and a new era of authority and despotism. This
was the outward aspect. In the world of thought he looked upon a period
of moral and intellectual anarchy. Philosopher had succeeded
philosopher, critic had followed critic, Strauss and Baur were names to
conjure with, and Hegel was still unforgotten in the land of his birth.
Materialistic science was in the very heyday of its parvenu and tawdry
intolerance, and historical knowledge in the splendid dawn of that new
world of knowledge, of which Ranke was the Columbus. Everywhere faith
was shaken, and except for a few resolute and unconquered spirits, it
seemed as though its defence were left to a class of men who thought the
only refuge of religion was in obscurity, the sole bulwark of order was
tyranny, and the one support of eternal truth plausible and convenient
fiction. What wonder then that the pupil of Doellinger should exhaust the
intellectual and moral energies of a lifetime, in preaching to those who
direct the affairs of men the paramount supremacy of principle. The
course of the plebiscitary Empire, and that gradual campaign in the
United States by which the will of the majority became identified with
that necessity which knows no law, contributed further to educate his
sense of right in politics, and to augment the distrust of power natural
to a pupil of the great Whigs, of Burke, of Montesquieu, of Madame de
Stael. On the other hand, as a pupil of Doellinger, his religious faith
was deeper than could be touched by the recognition of facts, of which
too many were notorious to make it even good policy to deny the rest;
and he demanded with passion that history should set the follies and the
crimes of ecclesiastical authority in no better light than those of
civil.
We cannot understand Acton aright, if we do not remember that he was an
English Roman Catholic, to whom the penal laws and the exploitation of
Ireland were a burning injustice. They were in his view as foul a blot
on the Protestant establishment and the Whig aristocracy as was the St.
Bartholomew's medal on the memory of Gregory XIII., or the murder of the
duc d'Enghien on the genius of Napoleon, or the burning of Servetus on
the sanctity of Calvin, or the permission of bigamy on the character of
Luther, or the September Massacres on Danton.
Two other tendencies dominant in Germany--tendencies which had and have
a great power in the minds of scholars, yet to Acton, both as a
Christian and a man, seemed corrupting--compelled him to a search for
principles which might deliver him from slavery alike to traditions and
to fashion, from the historian's vice of condoning whatever has got
itself allowed to exist, and from the politician's habit of mere
opportunist acquiescence in popular standards.
First of these is the famous maxim of Schiller, _Die Welt-Geschichte ist
das Welt-Gericht_, which, as commonly interpreted, definitely identifies
success with right, and is based, consciously or unconsciously, on a
pantheistic philosophy. This tendency, especially when envisaged by an
age passing through revolutionary nationalism back to Machiavelli's
ideals and _Realpolitik_, is clearly subversive of any system of public
law or morality, and indeed is generally recognised as such nowadays
even by its adherents.
The second tendency against which Acton's moral sense revolted, had
arisen out of the laudable determination of historians to be sympathetic
towards men of distant ages and of alien modes of thought. With the
romantic movement the early nineteenth century placed a check upon the
habit of despising mediaeval ideals, which had been increasing from the
days of the Renaissance and had culminated in Voltaire. Instead of this,
there arose a sentiment of admiration for the past, while the general
growth of historical methods of thinking supplied a sense of the
relativity of moral principles, and led to a desire to condone if not to
commend the crimes of other ages. It became almost a trick of style to
talk of judging men by the standard of their day and to allege the
spirit of the age in excuse for the Albigensian Crusade or the burning
of Hus. Acton felt that this was to destroy the very bases of moral
judgment and to open the way to a boundless scepticism. Anxious as he
was to uphold the doctrine of growth in theology, he allowed nothing for
it in the realm of morals, at any rate in the Christian era, since the
thirteenth century. He demanded a code of moral judgment independent of
place and time, and not merely relative to a particular civilisation. He
also demanded that it should be independent of religion. His reverence
for scholars knew no limits of creed or church, and he desired some body
of rules which all might recognise, independently of such historical
phenomena as religious institutions. At a time when such varied and
contradictory opinions, both within and without the limits of Christian
belief, were supported by some of the most powerful minds and
distinguished investigators, it seemed idle to look for any basis of
agreement beyond some simple moral principles. But he thought that all
men might agree in admitting the sanctity of human life and judging
accordingly every man or system which needlessly sacrificed it. It is
this preaching in season and out of season against the reality of
wickedness, and against every interference with the conscience, that is
the real inspiration both of Acton's life and of his writings.
It is related of Frederick Robertson of Brighton, that during one of
his periods of intellectual perplexity he found that the only rope to
hold fast by was the conviction, "it must be right to do right." The
whole of Lord Acton's career might be summed up in a counterphrase, "it
must be wrong to do wrong." It was this conviction, universally and
unwaveringly applied, and combined with an unalterable faith in Christ,
which gave unity to all his efforts, sustained him in his struggle with
ecclesiastical authority, accounted for all his sympathies, and
accentuated his antipathies, while it at once expanded and limited his
interests. It is this that made his personality so much greater a gift
to the world than any book which he might have written--had he cared
less for the end and more for the process of historical knowledge.
He was interested in knowledge--that it might diminish prejudice and
break down barriers. To a world in which the very bases of civilisation
seemed to be dissolving he preached the need of directing ideals.
Artistic interests were not strong in him, and the decadent pursuit of
culture as a mere luxury had no stronger enemy. Intellectual activity,
apart from moral purpose, was anathema to Acton. He has been censured
for bidding the student of his hundred best books to steel his mind
against the charm of literary beauty and style. Yet he was right. His
list of books was expressly framed to be a guide, not a pleasure; it was
intended to supply the place of University direction to those who could
not afford a college life, and it throws light upon the various strands
that mingled in Acton and the historical, scientific, and political
influences which formed his mind. He felt the danger that lurks in the
charm of literary beauty and style, for he had both as a writer and a
reader a strong taste for rhetoric, and he knew how young minds are apt
to be enchained rather by the persuasive spell of the manner than the
living thought beneath it. Above all, he detested the modern
journalistic craze for novelty, and despised the shallowness which rates
cleverness above wisdom.
In the same way his eulogy of George Eliot has been censured far more
than it has been understood. It was not as an artist superior to all
others that he praised the author of _Daniel Deronda_ and the translator
of Strauss. It was because she supplied in her own person the solution
of the problem nearest to his heart, and redeemed (so far as teaching
went) infidelity in religion from immorality in ethics. It was, above
all, as a constructive teacher of morals that he admired George Eliot,
who might, in his view, save a daily increasing scepticism from its
worst dangers, and preserve morals which a future age of faith might
once more inspire with religious ideals. Here was a writer at the summit
of modern culture, saturated with materialistic science, a convinced and
unchanging atheist, who, in spite of this, proclaimed in all her work
that moral law is binding, and upheld a code of ethics, Christian in
content, though not in foundation.
In the same way his admiration for Mr. Gladstone is to be explained. It
was not his successes so much as his failures that attracted Acton, and
above all, his refusal to admit that nations, in their dealings with one
another, are subject to no law but that of greed. Doubtless one who gave
himself no credit for practical aptitude in public affairs, admired a
man who had gifts that were not his own. But what Acton most admired was
what many condemned. It was because he was not like Lord Palmerston,
because Bismarck disliked him, because he gave back the Transvaal to the
Boers, and tried to restore Ireland to its people, because his love of
liberty never weaned him from loyalty to the Crown, and his politics
were part of his religion, that Acton used of Gladstone language rarely
used, and still more rarely applicable, to any statesman. For this very
reason--his belief that political differences do, while religious
differences do not, imply a different morality--he censured so severely
the generous eulogy of Disraeli, just as in Doellinger's case he blamed
the praise of Dupanloup. For Acton was intolerant of all leniency
towards methods and individuals whom he thought immoral. He could give
quarter to the infidel more easily than to the Jesuit.
We may, of course, deny that Acton was right. But few intelligent
observers can dispute the accuracy of his diagnosis, or deny that more
than anything else the disease of Western civilisation is a general lack
of directing ideals other than those which are included in the gospel of
commercialism. It may surely be further admitted that even intellectual
activity has too much of triviality about it to-day; that if people
despise the schoolmen, it is rather owing to their virtues than their
defects, because impressionism has taken the place of thought, and
brilliancy that of labour. On the other hand, Acton's dream of ethical
agreement, apart from religion, seems further off from realisation than
ever.
Acton, however, wrote for a world which breathed in the atmosphere
created by Kant. His position was something as follows: After the
discovery of facts, a matter of honesty and industry independent of any
opinions, history needs a criterion of judgment by which it may appraise
men's actions. This criterion cannot be afforded by religion, for
religion is one part of the historic process of which we are tracing the
flow. The principles on which all can combine are the inviolable
sanctity of human life, and the unalterable principle of even justice
and toleration. Wherever these are violated our course is clear. Neither
custom nor convenience, neither distance of time nor difference of
culture may excuse or even limit our condemnation. Murder is always
murder, whether it be committed by populace or patricians, by councils
or kings or popes. Had they had their dues, Paolo Sarpi would have been
in Newgate and George I. would have died at Tyburn.
The unbending severity of his judgment, which is sometimes carried to an
excess almost ludicrous, is further explained by another element in his
experience. In his letters to Doellinger and others he more than once
relates how in early life he had sought guidance in the difficult
historical and ethical questions which beset the history of the papacy
from many of the most eminent ultramontanes. Later on he was able to
test their answers in the light of his constant study of original
authorities and his careful investigation of archives. He found that the
answers given him had been at the best but plausible evasions. The
letters make it clear that the harshness with which Acton always
regarded ultramontanes was due to that bitter feeling which arises in
any reflecting mind on the discovery that it has been put off with
explanations that did not explain, or left in ignorance of material
facts.
Liberalism, we must remember, was a religion to Acton--_i.e._ liberalism
as he understood it, by no means always what goes by the name. His
conviction that ultramontane theories lead to immoral politics prompted
his ecclesiastical antipathies. His anger was aroused, not by any
feeling that Papal infallibility was a theological error, but by the
belief that it enshrined in the Church monarchical autocracy, which
could never maintain itself apart from crime committed or condoned. It
was not intellectual error but moral obliquity that was to him here, as
everywhere, the enemy. He could tolerate unbelief, he could not tolerate
sin. Machiavelli represented to him the worst of political principles,
because in the name of the public weal he destroyed the individual's
conscience. Yet he left a loophole in private life for religion, and a
sinning statesman might one day become converted. But when the same
principles are applied, as they have been applied by the Jesuit
organisers of ultramontane reaction (also on occasion by Protestants),
_ad majorem dei gloriam_, it is clear that the soul is corrupted at its
highest point, and the very means of serving God are made the occasion
of denying him. Because for Acton there was no comparison between
goodness and knowledge, and because life was to him more than thought,
because the passion of his life was to secure for all souls the freedom
to live as God would have them live, he hated in the Church the politics
of ultramontanism, and in the State the principles of Machiavelli. In
the same way he denied the legitimacy of every form of government, every
economic wrong, every party creed, which sacrificed to the pleasures or
the safety of the few the righteousness and salvation of the many. His
one belief was the right of every man not to have, but to be, his best.
This fact gives the key to what seems to many an unsolved contradiction,
that the man who said what he did say and fought as he had fought should
yet declare in private that it had never occurred to him to doubt any
single dogma of his Church, and assert in public that communion with it
was "dearer than life itself" Yet all the evidence both of his writings
and his most intimate associates confirms this view. His opposition to
the doctrine of infallibility was ethical and political rather than
theological. As he wrote to Doellinger, the evil lay deeper, and
Vaticanism was but the last triumph of a policy that was centuries old.
Unless he were turned out of her he would see no more reason to leave
the Church of his baptism on account of the Vatican Decrees than on
account of those of the Lateran Council. To the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception he had no hostility. And could not understand Doellinger's
condemnation of it, or reconcile it with his previous utterances. He had
great sympathy with the position of Liberal High Anglicans; but there is
not the slightest reason to suppose that he ever desired to join the
English Church. Even with the old Catholic movement he had no sympathy,
and dissuaded his friends from joining it.[1] All forms of Gallicanism
were distasteful to Acton, and he looked to the future for the victory
of his ideas. His position in the Roman Church symbolises in an acute
form what may be called the soul's tragedy of the whole nineteenth
century, but Acton had not the smallest inclination to follow either
Gavazzi or Lamennais. It was, in truth, the unwavering loyalty of his
churchmanship and his far-reaching historical sense that enabled him to
attack with such vehemence evils which he believed to be accidental and
temporary, even though they might have endured for a millennium. Long
searching of the vista of history preserved Acton from the common danger
of confusing the eternal with what is merely lengthy. To such a mind as
his, it no more occurred to leave the Church because he disapproved some
of its official procedure, than it would to an Englishman to surrender
his nationality when his political opponents came into office. He
distinguished, as he said Froschammer ought to have done, between the
authorities and the authority of the Church. He had a strong belief in
the doctrine of development, and felt that it would prove impossible in
the long run to bind the Christian community to any explanation of the
faith which should have a non-Christian or immoral tendency. He left it
to time and the common conscience to clear the dogma from association
with dangerous political tendencies, for his loyalty to the institution
was too deep to be affected by his dislike of the _Camarilla_ in power.
He not only did not desire to leave the Church, but took pains to make
his confession and receive absolution immediately after his letters
appeared in the _Times_. It must also be stated that so far from
approving Mr. Gladstone's attack on Vaticanism, he did his utmost to
prevent its publication, which he regarded as neither fair nor wise.
It is true that Acton's whole tendency was individualistic, and his
inner respect for mere authority apart from knowledge and judgment was
doubtless small. But here we must remember what he said once of the
political sphere--that neither liberty nor authority is conceivable
except in an ordered society, and that they are both relative to
conditions remote alike from anarchy and tyranny. Doubtless he leaned
away from those in power, and probably felt of Manning as strongly as
the latter wrote of him. Yet his individualism was always active within
the religious society, and never contemplated itself as outside. He
showed no sympathy for any form of Protestantism, except the purely
political side of the Independents and other sects which have promoted
liberty of conscience.
Acton's position as a churchman is made clearer by a view of his
politics. At once an admirer and an adviser of Mr. Gladstone, he
probably helped more than any other single friend to make his leader a
Home Ruler. Yet he was anything but a modern Radical: for liberty was
his goddess, not equality, and he dreaded any single power in a State,
whether it was the King, or Parliament, or People. Neither popes nor
princes, not even Protestant persecutors, did Acton condemn more deeply
than the crimes of majorities and the fury of uncontrolled democracy. It
was not the rule of one or many that was his ideal, but a balance of
powers that might preserve freedom and keep every kind of authority
subject to law. For, as he said, "liberty is not a means to a higher
end, it is itself the highest political end." His preference was,
therefore, not for any sovereign one or number, such as formed the ideal
of Rousseau or the absolutists; but for a monarchy of the English type,
with due representation to the aristocratic and propertied classes, as
well as adequate power to the people. He did not believe in the doctrine
of numbers, and had no sympathy with the cry _Vox populi Vox Dei_; on
the other hand, he felt strongly that the stake in the country argument
really applied with fullest force to the poor, for while political error
means mere discomfort to the rich, it means to the poor the loss of all
that makes life noble and even of life itself. As he said in one of his
already published letters:--
The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those
who earn them, for 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.
While he felt the dangers of Rousseau's doctrine of equality, declaring
that in the end it would be destructive alike of liberty and religion,
he was yet strongly imbued with the need of reconciling some of the
socialists' ideals with the regard due to the principles which he
respected. He was anxious to promote the study of Roscher and the
historical economists, and he seems to have thought that by their means
some solution of the great economic evils of the modern world might be
found, which should avoid injustice either to the capitalist or the
wage-earner. He had a burning hatred of injustice and tyranny, which
made him anxious to see the horrors of the modern proletariat system
mitigated and destroyed; but combined with this there was a very deep
sense of the need of acting on principles universally valid, and a
distrust of any merely emotional enthusiasm which might, in the future,
create more evils than it cured. Acton was, in truth, the incarnation of
the "spirit of Whiggism," although in a very different sense of the
phrase from that in which it became the target for the arrows of
Disraeli's scorn and his mockery of the Venetian constitution. He was
not the Conservative Whig of the "glorious revolution," for to him the
memory of William of Orange might be immortal but was certainly not
pious: yet it was "revolution principles" of which he said that they
were the great gift of England to the world. By this he meant the real
principles by which the events of 1688 could be philosophically
justified, when purged of all their vulgar and interested associations,
raised above their connection with a territorial oligarchy, and based on
reasoned and universal ideals. Acton's liberalism was above all things
historical, and rested on a consciousness of the past. He knew very well
that the roots of modern constitutionalism were mediaeval, and declared
that it was the stolid conservatism of the English character, which had
alone enabled it to preserve what other nations had lost in the passion
for autocracy that characterised the men of the Renaissance and the
Reformation. Constitutional government was for him the sole eternal
truth in politics, the rare but the only guardian of freedom. He loved
to trace the growth of the principle of power limiting itself and law
triumphant alike over king, aristocracies, and majorities; and to show
how it arose out of the cruel conflicts of the religious wars and rested
upon the achievements of Constance and the efforts of Basle, and how it
was influenced in expression by the thinkers of the ancient world and
the theologians of the modern, by the politics of Aristotle, by the
maxims of Ulpian and of Gaius, by the theology of St. Thomas and
Ockham, and even by Suarez and Molina.
What Acton feared and hated was the claim of absolutism to crush the
individuality and destroy the conscience of men. It was indifferent to
him whether this claim was exercised by Church or State, by Pope or
Council, or King or Parliament. He felt, however, that it was more
dangerous because more absorbing when exercised in religious matters,
and thus condemned the Protestant theory more deeply than the Catholic
permission of persecution. He also felt that monarchy was more easily
checked than pure democracy, and that the risk of tyranny was greater in
the latter.
Provided that freedom was left to men to do their duty, Acton was not
greatly careful of mere rights. He had no belief in the natural equality
of men, and no dislike of the subordination of classes on the score of
birth. His ideal of freedom as of the Church was in some respects that
of the earlier Middle Ages. He did not object to serfdom, provided that
it safeguarded the elementary rights of the serf to serve God as well as
man. In the great struggle in America, he had no sympathy with the
North, which seemed to him to make majority rule the only measure of
right: and he wrote, if not in favour, at least in palliation, of
slavery. It may be doubted how far he would have used the same language
in later life, but his reasons were in accord with all his general
views. Slavery might be rendered harmless by the State, and some form of
compulsion might be the only way of dealing with child-races, indeed, it
might be merely a form of education no more morally blameworthy than the
legal disabilities of minors. But the absolute state recognising no
limits but its own will, and bound by no rule either of human or Divine
law, appeared to him definitely immoral.