The History of Freedom, and Other Essays

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 Döllinger'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 Döllinger 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 Döllinger, 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 Döllinger'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[Pg xxviii] 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 mediæval, 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.

Acton's political conscience was also very broad on the side technically called moral. No one had higher ideals of purity. Yet he had little desire to pry into the private morality of kings or politicians. It was by the presence or absence of political principles that he judged them. He would have condemned Pope Paul the Fourth more than Rodrigo Borgia, and the inventor of the "dragonnades" more than his great-grandson. He did not view personal morality as relevant to political judgment.

In this, if in nothing else, he agreed with Creighton. His correspondence with the latter throws his principles into the strongest light, and forms the best material for a judgment. For it must, we think, be admitted that he applied these doctrines with a rigidity which human affairs will not admit, and assumed a knowledge beyond our capacity. To declare that no one could be in a state of grace who praised S. Carlo Borromeo, because the latter followed the evil principle of his day in the matter of persecution, is not merely to make the historian a hanging judge, but to ignore the great truth that if crime is always crime, degrees of temptation are widely variable. The fact is, Acton's desire to maintain the view that "morality is not ambulatory," led him at times to ignore the complementary doctrine that it certainly develops, and that the difficulties of statesmen or ecclesiastics, if they do not excuse, at least at times explain their less admirable courses. At the very close of his life Acton came to this view himself. In a pathetic conversation with his son, he lamented the harshness of some of his judgments, and hoped the example would not be followed.

Still, Acton, if he erred here, erred on the nobler side. The doctrine of moral relativity had been overdone by historians, and the principles of Machiavelli had become so common a cry of politicians, that severe protest was necessary. The ethics of Nietzsche are the logical ex[Pg xxxiii]pansion of Machiavelli, and his influence is proof that, in the long-run, men cannot separate their international code from their private one. We must remember that Acton lived in a time when, as he said, the course of history had been "twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime," and when the old ideals of liberty seemed swallowed up by the pursuit of gain. To all those who reflect on history or politics, it was a gain of the highest order that at the very summit of historical scholarship and profound political knowledge there should be placed a leader who erred on the unfashionable side, who denied the statesmen's claim to subject justice to expediency, and opposed the partisan's attempt to palter with facts in the interest of his creed.

It is these principles which both explain Acton's work as a student, and make it so difficult to understand. He believed, that as an investigator of facts the historian must know no passion, save that of a desire to sift evidence; and his notion of this sifting was of the remorseless scientific school of Germany, which sometimes, perhaps, expects more in the way of testimony than human life affords. At any rate, Acton demanded that the historian must never misconceive the case of the adversaries of his views, or leave in shade the faults of his own side. But on the other hand, when he comes to interpret facts or to trace their relation, his views and even his temperament will affect the result. It is only the barest outline that can be quite objective. In Acton's view the historian as investigator is one thing, the historian as judge another. In an early essay on Döllinger he makes a distinction of this kind. The reader must bear it in mind in considering Acton's own writing. Some of the essays here printed, and still more the lectures, are anything but colourless; they show very distinctly the predilections of the writer, and it is hardly conceivable that they should have been written by a defender of absolutism, or even by an old-fashioned Tory. What Acton really demanded was not the academic aloofness of the pedant who stands apart from the strife of principles, but the honesty of purpose which "throws itself into the mind of one's opponents, and accounts for their mistakes," giving their case the best possible colouring. For, to be sure of one's ground, one must meet one's adversaries' strongest arguments, and not be content with merely picking holes in his armour. Otherwise one's own belief may be at the mercy of the next clever opponent. The reader may doubt how far Acton succeeded in his own aim, for there was a touch of intolerance in his hatred of absolutism, and he believed himself to be divided from his ecclesiastical and political foes by no mere intellectual difference but by a moral cleavage. Further, his writing is never half-hearted. His convictions were certitudes based on continual reading and reflection, and admitting in his mind of no qualification. He was eminently a Victorian in his confidence that he was right. He had none of the invertebrate tendency of mind which thinks it is impartial, merely because it is undecided, and regards the judicial attitude as that which refrains from judging. Acton's was not a doubting mind. If he now and then suspended his judgment, it was as an act of deliberate choice, because he had made up his mind that the matter could not be decided, not because he could not decide to make up his mind. Whether he was right or wrong, he always knew what he thought, and his language was as exact an expression of his meaning as he could make it. It was true that his subtle and far-sighted intelligence makes his style now and then like a boomerang, as when he says of Ranke's method "it is a discipline we shall all do well to adopt, and also do well to relinquish." Indeed, it is hardly possible to read a single essay without observing this marked characteristic. He has been called a "Meredith turned historian," and that there is truth in this judgment, any one who sees at once the difficulty and the suggestiveness of his reviews can bear witness. He could hardly write the briefest note without stamping his personality upon it and exhibiting the marks of a very complex culture. But the main characteristic of his style is that it represents the ideals of a man to whom every word was sacred. Its analogies are rather in sculpture than painting. Each paragraph, almost every sentence is a perfectly chiselled whole, impressive by no brilliance or outside polish, so much as by the inward intensity of which it is the symbol. Thus his writing is never fluent or easy, but it has a moral dignity rare and unfashionable.