NOTES ON POLITICS AND HISTORY
 
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 NOTES 
 
 ON 
 
 POLITICS & HISTORY 
 
 A UNIVERSITY ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY, O.M. 
 
 CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
 
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 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA BAKU A It A 
 
 NOTE 
 
 THESE pages are a version, amplified and recast, of 
 an Address delivered by the writer as Chancellor 
 of the University of Manchester, in the summer of 
 1912. The strict rules that limit the contents of 
 a Bill in parliament by its Title, would be fatal 
 to an academic address like this. I only hope 
 that my Notes are not too dispersive to prevent 
 some points of thought from being of use in the 
 way of suggestion, interrogatory, and perhaps as 
 spur to curiosity. 
 
 M.
 
 NOTES ON POLITICS AND HISTOKY 
 
 WHEN I had the pleasure of coming among you a 
 few months ago, I offered some remarks upon the 
 obvious truth that democracy in the discussions 
 of the day means government working directly 
 through public opinion ; and upon the equally 
 urgent importance of a body, like this University, 
 making it one part of its office to help in forming 
 those habits of mind and temper upon which, 
 along with knowledge of the right facts, the sound- 
 ness of opinion depends. 
 
 To-night I propose to harp upon the same 
 string, and to say something about politics and 
 history. I intend a double subject with a single 
 object. I need your indulgence, for of history 
 I know too little, and of politics some of you may 
 think I know too much, and know it wrong. 
 Pretty manifest roots of mischief easily spoil both 
 contemporary politician and historian ; both the 
 minister or the elector of to-day, and the interpreter 
 of days long ago. Looseness of mind is one ; 
 
 i B
 
 2 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 narrowness of vision is another. Plenty of 
 infirmities besides are left. You know the worst 
 of them, at least by distant report indolence, 
 impatience, procrastination, incoherence, pugnacity. 
 I include pugnacity among defects, for it is no vice 
 of intellect if our first attitude towards new opinion 
 is one of readiness and attentive response, rather 
 than instantaneous combat ; to give a hearing, 
 before rushing to controversial fire-arms. A recep- 
 tive mind is after all no hindrance to firm love of 
 truth. On the other hand life is short, and there 
 are limits to patience with quackish fungoids. You 
 have not, I would fain believe, forgotten the spirit 
 of a passage from Spinoza that I quoted here last 
 time : " When I applied my mind to politics, so that 
 I might examine what belongs to politics, with the 
 same precision of mind as we use for mathematics, 
 I have taken my best pains not to laugh at the 
 actions of mankind, not to groan over them, not 
 to be angry with them, but to understand them." 
 By understanding them, he says, he means looking 
 at all the motives of human feeling, love, hatred, 
 envy, ambition, pity, not as vices of human 
 nature, but as properties belonging to it, just as 
 heat, cold, storm, thunder belong to air and sky. 
 signs of So much to begin with the mood and temper : 
 
 the times. ... 
 
 then the application and occasion. Any re- 
 flective observer, if he likes, can sketch some of 
 the signs of the times in rather formidable outline.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 3 
 
 Let us look at it. Political power is described as 
 lying in the hands of a vast and mobile electorate, 
 with scanty regard for tradition or history. What 
 is history to me ? asks the plain busy man. Demo- 
 cracy, they warn us, is going to insist on writing 
 its own programme. The structure of executive 
 organs and machinery is undergoing half-hidden 
 but profound alterations. The two Houses of our 
 Parliament are being fundamentally transformed 
 before our eyes. The Cabinet, keystone of the 
 arch, in size and in prerogative is not altogether 
 safe against invasion. The great wholesome system 
 of party is said to be melting into groups and 
 coalitions. The growth of special interests, each 
 claiming for itself a representative Minister in the 
 Cabinet, has turned it into a noun of multitude 
 indeed, and a noun not wholly favourable to that 
 concentrated deliberation which was possible when 
 Pitt had first six, then seven colleagues, Peel twelve, 
 and Gladstone fourteen. To-day we are a score. 
 
 A body of professional experts is now united to committee 
 
 i -i i i r i -I f Imperial 
 
 a selected body of ministers, to shape conclusions Defence. 
 in the sphere of military defence, and therefore of 
 expenditure ; and such conclusions, though nomin- 
 ally advisory or for information only, naturally 
 carry a weight that cannot but affect the judgment 
 and responsibility of a Cabinet. The appearance, 
 moreover, of a leader of Opposition in this important 
 committee seems to point to the neutralisation both
 
 4 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 of military and foreign affairs (for each of these 
 must necessarily depend upon the other), and to 
 their withdrawal from the field of party contention. 
 This would not be the first instance in our history 
 of a vast slow silent disguised transformation in the 
 constitution of the empire, without either embodi- 
 ment in any single instrument, or any coherent and 
 systematic transaction. Everybody knows, though 
 nobody has ever exactly comprehended, the famous 
 plan of Sir William Temple in the time of Charles II. 
 Ingenious observers may trace, if they like, a sort of 
 return to Temple's scheme in what they take to be 
 the slow re-modelling of our cabinet system, turning 
 it into a sort of supreme imperial senate, but 
 always owing its existence to a majority of the 
 House of Commons a vital condition entirely 
 alien to Temple's age and mind. Another important 
 element cannot be left out of even the barest 
 summary. Self-governing commonwealths over the 
 seas are making initial claims for a direct voice in 
 the control of imperial affairs. The most recent 
 move in this direction the adjustment of naval 
 contribution has not so far been decisive. 
 National More than all this alteration in machinery, are 
 8 P eTe and signs of change in national atmosphere. These, we 
 have good reason to hope, may be only superficial 
 and transient, for nothing is more certain than that 
 in a survey of the modern world, national character 
 is slowest of all things to alter in its roots. Mean-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 5 
 
 while, we discover a shaken attitude towards law 
 as law ; a decline in reverence for institutions as 
 institutions ; a latter-day antinomianism. Even 
 powerful lawyers use language that treats a statute 
 as a cobweb ; and sealed agreements by great in- 
 dustrial organizations, are sometimes no better than 
 ropes of sand. Nor is the change peculiar to 
 England. American citizens of a reflective turn 
 sometimes tell us of the same thing even there. If 
 we remember, for instance, that administration of 
 law is the keystone of all civilized government, it is 
 startling to hear American statesmen who have 
 held posts of supreme responsibility, passionately 
 denouncing the administration of criminal law as a 
 disgrace to their country, and declaring the English 
 system of judges appointed for life to be better than 
 their system of elected judges. Or else on the other 
 hand they demand appeal to a popular referendum 
 against decisions of State Courts on constitutional 
 issues, and are for cashiering the judges who made 
 them in either case shattering the foundations of 
 the judicial fabric. Weakened confidence in our 
 parliament would be formidable, but confidence 
 destroyed in courts of justice would be taking out 
 the linch-pin. Yet it would not be at all true to 
 say that sense of political curiosity, interest, and 
 obligation has declined. The case is just the 
 opposite. Political obligation as tested by the 
 numbers who take part at elections is in fact
 
 6 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 stronger rather than weaker, and sense of social 
 duty, which is not by any means the same thing as 
 political obligation, has vastly grown alike in 
 strength and range. 
 
 May I, without peril, here add another engrossing 
 element in the political landscape ? You have all 
 heard how, just before the revolutionary storm 
 broke over France in 1789, Siey&s published one of 
 the most effective pamphlets ever written : its title 
 was this : " What is the Third Estate ? Every- 
 thing. What has it been in politics until now ? 
 Nothing. What does it ask ? To become something" 
 A good critic of to-day warns us that behind the 
 third estate, behind the fourth estate, a fifth estate 
 has risen, with which we have to count. " Women 
 who were nothing, and who rather claim to be 
 everything, to-morrow are going to be something." 
 Some People capable of serious rumination will ask 
 
 SdaT themselves, what is the precise connection, if any 
 Iange ' connection at all, between the embarrassing changes 
 of the hour, and, say, five profound changes in our 
 scheme of national life and thought within the last 
 fifty years ? Such changes are these. Predominant 
 political power has been transferred from a landed 
 and hereditary aristocracy and the middle class to 
 the nation as a whole. A system of compulsory 
 education has been spread over the length and 
 breadth of the land. Old ecclesiastical pretensions 
 
 1 Faguct, Prob. Pol. xvi.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 7 
 
 have vanished, and a singular elasticity is working its 
 way into the forms, symbols, and standards of theo- 
 logical creed. Science and the scientific spirit have, 
 for the time at least, mounted into the thrones of 
 literature and art. Finally, the whole conception of 
 the State has been enormously extended. The exer- 
 tion of all the powers and duties of a State is every 
 day more and more insistently demanded. One 
 result of this last advance concerns that change in 
 the cabinet system to which I have already referred, 
 for it means extension of departmental labour for 
 the minister, and this makes the task of miscellane- 
 ous deliberation all the more arduous or impossible. 
 Nothing is easier than to make a crisis out of close 
 
 , . . , . . , observation 
 
 this signal conjuncture of interesting, perplexing, the 
 and exciting circumstance. Still the long experi- 
 ence of our national history shows it safest, wisest, tlon ' 
 soundest, in respect of all English-speaking com- 
 munities, to be in no hurry to believe that, in John 
 Bunyan's pithy phrase, " passion will have all 
 things now." Let us pray to be delivered from 
 exaggeration, and to have vouchsafed to us that 
 cautious sense of proportion, which is one of the 
 main differences between a wise man and a foolish. 
 Above all, how well it would be for everybody, if 
 you who have a share in the moulding of the future 
 in your hands, would write on the tablets of your 
 minds the words of a man who first brought scientific 
 method effectively to bear on social problems. The
 
 8 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 present writer, said Malthus of himself, is in no 
 temper to find plans for the future improvement of 
 society visionary. " But he has not acquired that 
 command over his understanding which would 
 enable him to believe what he wishes, without 
 evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might 
 be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence." 
 This is the temper that we may expect to see grow 
 up and spread in universities. 
 
 value of Our present case, as to social cause and effect, 
 etho8. rslty offers tempting material for high party dispute, 
 and sectarian recrimination and reproach, but 
 nothing is to be gained on that line here to-night. 
 An important observer of our own day looks for 
 progress to a social force, new in magnitude if not 
 in kind, described by him as the modern alliance 
 between pure science and industry. 1 How far 
 this new force will go maybe dubious, but what- 
 ever strength it has, must be centred in these 
 great teaching corporations. They must be its 
 main organs. It is their ethos, their inner genius, 
 that must, apart from the instruction they provide, 
 lead and sustain us in the march. 
 
 Universities have been boldly ranked by com- 
 petent historians with trial by jury and parliaments, 
 among leading institutions of the Middle Ages. At 
 any rate in England the power of universities and the 
 
 1 Decadence. Sidgwick Memorial Lecture. By A. J. Balfour. 
 1908.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 9 
 
 public schools that feed them, has been immeasur- 
 able in the working of other institutions. They 
 have been main agents in moulding both our secular 
 and ecclesiastical politics. They have worked too 
 often for darkness as well as light. Too often and 
 too long have they been the mirror of stolid pre- 
 judices and childish conventions ; the appendages 
 of old social form and institution, rather than great 
 luminaries dispensing knowledge, and kindling that 
 ardent love of new truth for which youth is the 
 irrevocable season. Power of this high dimension 
 is not likely to be missing in our new universities, 
 though its forms are undergoing rapid revolution. 
 Well was it said, " C'est toujours le beau monde qui 
 gouverne le monde" That is still a great deal more 
 true than people think, even in countries like our 
 own where aristocratic polity has in large degree 
 gone down. But the privileges of the fine world 
 of social class must yield henceforth to the forces 
 that shape temper, judgment, and range of public 
 interest, in educational centres such as yours. 
 
 The infusion of their thought and temper is what 
 will impart its colour to the general discussion. 
 It will reduce the number of those who think 
 they have opinions, when in truth they have not. 
 Universities, besides imparting special knowledge, 
 are meant for reason's refuge and its fortress. 
 The standing enemies of reason, in spite of new 
 weapons, altered symbols, changing masks, are what
 
 10 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 they have always been everywhere. I will spare 
 you the catalogue of man's infirmities, of which I 
 said enough when I began. It is both pleasanter 
 and sounder to turn our eyes the other way, to 
 man's strength, and not his weakness towards 
 equity, candour, diligence, application, charity, 
 disinterestedness for public ends, courage without 
 presumption, and all the other rare things that are 
 inscribed in epitaphs on men of whom kind friends 
 thought well. Wide and stirring is the field. 
 
 There is no unkindness, and there is useful 
 truth, especially under popular governments, in 
 pressing people to realize the whole bearings of the 
 commonplace, that time and mutations of political 
 atmosphere are incessantly attaching a different 
 significance to the same ideas and the same words. 
 We are so apt to go on with our manful battles as 
 if the flags and banners and vehement catchwords 
 all stood for old causes. This is only one side of all 
 the changing aspects of the time. I ventured to 
 speak of narrowness of vision. The vision would 
 indeed be narrow, that overlooked the reaction 
 on our own affairs of circumstances outside the 
 new map of Europe, the shifting balances of 
 fighting strength, Hague tribunals, tariffs, the 
 Panama Canal, strange currents racing in full 
 blast through the rolling worlds of white men, 
 black men, brown men, yellow men.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 11 
 
 n 
 
 The most dogmatic agree that truth is pro- 
 digiously hard to find. Yet what rouses intenser " 
 anger than balanced opinion ? It would be the 
 ruin of the morning paper. It takes fire out of 
 conversation. It may destroy the chance of a seat 
 in the Cabinet, and, if you are not adroit, may 
 weary constituents. The reason is simple. For 
 action, for getting things done, the balanced 
 opinion is of little avail or no avail at all. " He 
 that leaveth nothing to chance," said the shrewd 
 Halifax, " will do few things ill, but he will do 
 very few things." As King Solomon put it, " He 
 that considereth the wind shall not sow, and he 
 that looketh to the clouds shall not reap." Modera- 
 tion is sometimes only a fine name for indecision. 
 The partisan temperament is no gift in a judge, and 
 it is well for everybody to see that most questions 
 have two sides, though it is a pity in a practical world 
 never to be sure which side is right, and to remain 
 as " a cake that is not turned." You even need 
 the men of heroic stamp with whom " a hundred 
 thousand facts do not prevail against one idea." 
 Nations are lucky when the victorious idea happens 
 to have at its back three or four facts that weigh 
 more than the hundred thousand put together. 
 Some well-trained observers find history abounding
 
 12 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 in volcanic outbreaks of fire and flame, seeming 
 only to leave behind hardened lava and frozen 
 mud. Only too true. Only too familiar is the 
 exaggerated and mis-shapen rationalism that shuts 
 out imagination, distrusts all sentiment, despises 
 tradition, and makes short work alike of the past, 
 and of anything like collective or united faith and 
 belief in the present. But to be over-impatient 
 with what may prove by and bye to be fertilizing 
 Nile floods, is pure foolishness. They will subside, 
 and a harvest well worth saving remain for the 
 hand of the reaper. 
 
 Generous Ardent spirits have common faults in an expect- 
 and the ant age. We know them all. They are so apt to 
 struggle, begin where they should end. Pierced by thought 
 of the ills in the world around them, they are over- 
 whelmed by a noble impatience to remove, to lessen, 
 to abate. Before they have set sail, they insist 
 that they already see some new planet swimming 
 into their ken, they already touch the promised land. 
 An abstract a priori notion, formed independently of 
 experience, independently of evidence, is straight- 
 way clothed with all the sanctity of absolute 
 principle. Generous aspiration, exalted enthusiasm, 
 is made to do duty for reasoned scrutiny. They 
 seize every fact or circumstance that makes their 
 way, they are blind to every other. Inflexible pre- 
 conceptions hold the helm. They exaggerate. 
 Their sense of proportion is bad.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 13 
 
 If party politicians are with us, they will observe, 
 that in this place to-night I am bound to carry 
 political impartiality to the point of passion, and 
 they will not quarrel with me for saying that such 
 vices of political method as I have hinted at the 
 substitution of generous illusion for cool induction 
 are just as common among glowing conservatives as 
 among glowing liberals. Nobody in any camp will 
 quarrel with the view that one of the urgent needs 
 of to-day is a constant attempt to systematize 
 political thoughts, and to bring ideals into closer 
 touch with fact. There can be no reason why that 
 should turn brave and hopeful men into narrow, 
 dry, or cold-hearted. The French Revolution has 
 not realized its ideals. But then no more has the 
 Reformation. Even as to Christianity itself, one of 
 the most famous sayings of the eighteenth century 
 that " Christianity had been tried and failed, the 
 religion of Christ remained to be tried," is not even 
 now quite out of date. In a thousand forms, the 
 Manichean struggle between Good and Evil, be- 
 tween Good and Better, persists. About one-third 
 of the inhabitants of our planet are Christian, the 
 adherents of the Roman Communion being put at 
 240 millions, the Protestant Communions at 150, 
 the Greek Church at 100 millions. The Jews, only 
 10 millions, lowest in number, but possessing a 
 vast effective power of various kinds in the politics 
 of Europe. The relation of creeds to new phases of
 
 14 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 social idealism must break into cardinal issues, 
 and light may be thrown upon the interesting 
 question what proportion of the ideas that men 
 live with and live upon, are held open to discussion 
 in their minds, and how many of them are inexor- 
 able and sacrosanct. There is good promise that 
 the common temper of willingness to try all things, 
 and hold fast that which is good, will prevail. 1 
 Misuse of It will do us no harm to digest a sobering 
 mlhf'root thought from Locke : "If any one shall well 
 fusion. consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes 
 and confusion, that are spread in the world by an 
 ill use of words, he will find some reason to doubt 
 whether language, as it has been employed, has 
 contributed more to the improvement or hindrance 
 of knowledge among mankind." Dismal as this 
 may be at any time, how especially perturbing to 
 people with such questions before them, as we are 
 called upon to face to-day. Now, if ever, what 
 mistakes and confusion are likely to follow an 
 ill use of political words, and of the ideas that 
 words stand for. What would become of a lawyer 
 in the Courts who argued his cases with the 
 looseness in point and language, the disregard of 
 apt precedents, the slack concatenation of premiss 
 and conclusion, the readiness to take one authority 
 
 1 For a remarkable consideration of Religion in respect of Politics, 
 see Lord Hugh Cecil's little volume, Conservatism (Williams and 
 Norgate, 1912).
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 15 
 
 for as good as another, which even the best 
 of us so often find good enough for politics ? 
 Is there any other field where Bacon's hoary 
 idols of Theatre, Tribe, Market Place, and Cave, 
 keep such contented house together ? Five-and- 
 twenty centuries have passed since one great Greek 
 historian, perhaps casting a stone at another, re- 
 buked in famous words the ignorant carelessness 
 of mankind. " People do not distinguish ; without 
 a test they take things from one another : even on 
 things of their own day, not dulled in memory by 
 time, Hellenes are apt to be all wrong. So little 
 pains will most men take in search for truth : so 
 much more readily they turn to what comes first." * 
 
 To these hints of mine an American newspaper An 
 supplied an apt illustration. The number of mustr" 
 questions, says the writer, now before the American 
 people, on which it is urgent that they should have 
 an intelligent opinion, is staggering. Take one of the 
 most intricate of them all, what to do with Trusts. 
 How are the masses going to know the precise legal 
 and financial effect of the decree of the court dissolv- 
 ing the Tobacco Trust ? They see eminent lawyers 
 radically differing. They hear politicians railing. 
 Nobody can seriously argue that the intricacies of 
 Trust repression and regulation can be mastered 
 by " the wisdom of the people." What the people 
 
 1 Thuc. i. 20 ; OVTWS araAaiTrwpos TO?S TroAAoi? 17 1771^7-15 T^S 
 s, KCU 7rt TO. Toi/ia /iaAAov
 
 16 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 can do is to form clear and strong convictions upon 
 the fundamental conceptions that underlie the 
 whole question. A sound public opinion can be 
 formed on the main questions, whether we should 
 try to maintain in trade and industry the possibility 
 of effective competition, or whether combination 
 and monopoly should be undertaken, controlled, 
 and supervised by the State. Get these essentials 
 settled, then legislative, executive, and tribunals 
 can find proper and effective form. Such is an 
 American case. It would be easy, though more 
 delicate, for us to find illustrations quite as apt 
 in the United Kingdom as in the United States. 
 Easy words The ideas and words that seem simplest turn 
 quarrels, out most complex. If anybody doubts, ask him 
 to try his hand, say on Liberty, Equality, and 
 Fraternity. 1 He will be very lucky if, besides being 
 complex, he does not find their contents and applica- 
 tions directly self-contradictory. Of liberty, we 
 have been told on the best authority, there are two 
 hundred definitions. Yet, said Lincoln in their 
 war, " the world has never had a good definition of 
 the word liberty, and the American people, just 
 now, are much in want of one. We all declare for 
 liberty ; but in using the same word we do not all 
 mean the same thing. We assume the word liberty 
 
 1 Any one who seeks to explore this all-important field, should 
 not miss F. W. Maitland, Collected Papers, i. 1-161 ; nor Sir 
 James Stephen's three little volumes, Horae Sabbaticae (1892), full 
 of hard close thinking, needing answer and capable of answer.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 17 
 
 may mean for each man to do as he pleases with 
 himself, and the product of his labour ; while with 
 others the same word may mean for some men to 
 do as they please with other men, and the product of 
 other men's labour." 
 
 Then men will not soon forget Cavour's memor- 
 able formula " A free Church in a free State." What 
 could be simpler, what more direct, what more 
 pleasant and easy jingle to the politician's ear ? Yet 
 of what harsh and intractable discords was that 
 theme the prelude ? The erection of a kingdom of 
 Italy with Home for its capital, was too momentous 
 an event to be comprised in one political formula. It 
 is no hallucination to describe it as the most import- 
 ant fact in European history for two centuries, 1 that 
 is to say since the Peace of Westphalia. One aspect 
 of commanding significance these two supreme 
 landmarks present in common. Each sets the seal 
 upon a transmutation as memorable for States as 
 Churches : from each of them, the system and 
 relations between political authority and spiritual 
 emerge with changed foundations and renovated 
 ordering. The system of the middle age is over, 
 though ponderous links of the broken chain still 
 hang round the emancipated ruler's neck. 
 
 The most living and familiar of all the phrases Religious 
 
 , . . .. . * Liberty. 
 
 in the controversy of our times is Keligious Liberty : 
 
 1 Le Droit public et V Europe moderne. De la Guerronniere, 
 i. 332.
 
 18 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 in France and Italy a burning question ; in Ireland, 
 Scotland, and even England, by no means a mere 
 handful of dead historic ashes. Familiar as it is, the 
 designation covers entirely diverse meanings. Leo 
 XIII. found two of them in liberty of conscience : 
 one, liberty of the individual to follow God's com- 
 mands ; the other, freedom to prescribe the divine 
 precepts at his own discretion. Sometimes re- 
 ligious liberty stands for unfettered freedom in 
 uttering and advocating opinion on issues of 
 theology, its foundations as recorded truth, its 
 interpretations of binding doctrine, its consistency, 
 or its complete and wholesale incompatibility, with 
 accepted standards and methods in the ever-ex- 
 tending area of positive knowledge and intrepid 
 criticism. Sometimes it designates the claim of a 
 religious body to impose upon faithful and volun- 
 tary members, what rules as to marriage, educa- 
 tion, congregation, and the rest, its commanding 
 ecclesiastics may choose, with no regard either to 
 surrounding social prepossessions, or to the con- 
 venience of the State. Is the principle of religious 
 liberty violated when the police forbid a Catholic 
 procession through the streets of Westminster ? 
 Or when a congregation of French monks or nuns 
 is sent packing ? Or when an English court of law, 
 as happened only a few years ago, pronounces null 
 and void a bequest to a society holding opinions 
 contrary to Christianity ? What of all the strenu-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 19 
 
 ous laws and unflinching executive acts in both 
 hemispheres, for a century and a half, against the 
 dreaded Society of Jesus ? Greeks and other 
 people in the seventh and eighth centuries, in their 
 struggle with imperial authority, were fond of using 
 religious watchwords that were really inspired by 
 political and racial resentments. And such mal- 
 practice has not even yet quitted highly civilized 
 communities not so remote from us as is Stamboul. 
 Still, we may fairly say that in our State at least, 
 within a single generation, a law of tolerance not 
 indifference, not scepticism, not disbelief, but one 
 of those deep, silent transformations that make 
 history endurable has really worked its way not 
 merely into our statutes and courts of justice, but 
 into manners, usage, and the common habits of 
 men's minds. 
 
 In the vast field of questions connected with Forms of 
 Forms of Government, terms in the commonest ment. 
 employment abound in confusion. Sir George 
 Lewis, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 
 1857, and the most widely learned man that ever 
 held that office, wrote a little book on what he 
 styled the use and abuse of political terms. 
 He does not really carry things much further 
 than the primitive debate of the seven Persian 
 noblemen five centuries before Christ. 1 The book 
 has little sap, but it puts useful posers as to the 
 
 1 Herodotus, iii.
 
 20 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 exact classification, for instance, of the varieties of 
 republic and monarchy. It is democracy where a 
 majority of adult males have direct legal influence 
 in the formation of the sovereign body. It is 
 aristocracy where this majority have no direct legal 
 influence. Is democracy a system in which the 
 many govern or, as Aristotle supposed, a system 
 in which the poor govern ? Is it enough to dis- 
 patch democracy as a system where the career 
 is open to the talents ? And so forth, with a 
 general suggestion of loose and inapplicable terms 
 being the links that chain men to unreasonable 
 practices. As if in fact, our incurable trick of 
 taking a word for a thing were not the root of half 
 Sociocracy. the mischiefs of the world. A new term has gained 
 strong hold since Lewis's time, but Sociocracy, the 
 hybrid name sometimes given to our still dubious 
 accommodation between democratic expansion and 
 plutocracy, is not yet acclimatized. Our own 
 famous ruling assembly has been called the mother 
 of parliaments, and the congenial image justly stirs 
 our national pride. Yet differences in power and 
 the source of power between parent and progeny, 
 almost surpass resemblances. Take the House of 
 Commons itself. Even writers of the first rank 
 speak of its doings, and temper, and prerogative 
 during the war with the American Colonies, or the 
 long war against Napoleon, as if the House of 
 Commons during either of those two momentous
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 21 
 
 episodes was the same as the House of Commons 
 that rules over us to-day that is to say was 
 chosen by the popular voice and national acclama- 
 tion, instead of being, as it was, the nominee of 
 a handful of a privileged order. 
 
 Then Aristocracy in England has been too 
 
 cr&cv 
 
 essentially political, and for other reasons, to 
 stand out as pure caste. Even the vital caste-mark 
 of refusing commensality has broken down. It is 
 true that as a member of old standing in the House 
 of Lords said to a novice just come up from the 
 Commons, " You know, we are all like friends here/' 
 and in a social sense this may be true enough. 
 But let me remind you that what competent 
 observers justly describe as one of the greatest 
 improvements in public affairs ever proposed by any 
 government, the change from royal and patrician 
 patronage in the Civil Service to open competition 
 was carried in a cabinet of fifteen, of which 
 Mr. Gladstone said that no cabinet could have 
 been more aristocratically composed : only one 
 member of it did not belong to that class, and that 
 was himself. The case is taken by his biographer 
 as showing in how unique a degree that great man 
 combined profound democratic instinct with the 
 spirit of good government, the instinct of popular 
 equality with the scientific spirit of the enlightened 
 administrator. 
 
 In all the vocabularies and catechisms of govern-
 
 22 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Monarchy ment, no idea has fired such energy and devotion in 
 Republic, the human breast as the idolized name of Kepublic, 
 unless, to be sure, it may be the name and the idea 
 of Monarchy. In passionate enthusiasm, as well 
 as in cogent force of practical reason, Legitimist and 
 Eepublican have been many a time well matched. 
 Yet how profoundly diverse in essence, record, and 
 mechanism, the multiple systems that are labelled 
 by the common name of Kepublic. Cromwell was 
 dictator rather than republican. Venice was of 
 radically different type from Florence. The re- 
 public that emerged after the Swiss cantons had 
 thrown off the yoke of Austria, was in form and 
 foundation different from the Dutch system after 
 the overthrow of Spain. The first French Kepublic 
 was a very different structure from the second, and 
 the second from the third, and so are they both 
 from the United States of America. I need not 
 speak of the republics where in South America 
 Latin and Catholic civilization follows a strange 
 and devious course, and where republic means 
 no more as a form of government than is meant 
 by monarchy in the distracted Balkans. 
 
 Take the Legitimist, a name invented for the 
 Bourbon line when the first Republic and first 
 Empire were swept away at Vienna in 1815. If 
 we are to understand by legitimate a government 
 that has acquired possession and authority on the 
 ground of acknowledged title through regular
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 23 
 
 succession, treaties, or conquest recognized as legiti- 
 mate, what of the European monarchies of to-day 
 satisfy legitimist standards ? In England, as we all 
 know, succession to the throne rests upon a revolu- 
 tion, the result of one of those political expedi- 
 encies that amount to a necessity, though masters 
 of reasoned eloquence, from Burke to Macaulay, 
 have put upon it a saving face of continuous law 
 and order. In Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, 
 the sovereign wears a revolutionary crown. 
 
 Even the consecrated name of Public Opinion, Public 
 queen of the world, as it has been so chivalrously 
 called has many values. One constitutional 
 writer in whom learning has been by no means 
 fatal to wit and neither law nor politics is without 
 considerable points of humour puts it that the 
 opinion of Parliament is the opinion of yesterday, 
 and the opinion of judges is that of the day before 
 yesterday. That is, the judges go by precedent 
 and old canons of interpretation, while Parliament 
 makes laws, imposes taxes, regulates foreign rela- 
 tions, in response to movements outside. 
 
 In arguing for or against an institution, who 
 draws due distinctions between its formal and legal 
 character, and its actual work in practice ? Or 
 makes allowance for the spirit of those who carry it 
 on ? Or for the weight of its traditional associa- 
 tions ? In politics, is it the voice of the elector- 
 ate ? Are there any better grounds for regarding
 
 24 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 either a majority or a plurality of votes, than that 
 it is a good working political rule ? Does the rule 
 work well enough in general practice, to make 
 new expedients Plebiscites, Referendums, and 
 the rest pieces of supererogation, calculated to 
 shred away the concentrated force of a governing 
 representative assembly ? A very interesting writer 
 of our own time 1 emphasizes the non-rational 
 element in politics, impulses, instinct, reaction. 
 Mr. Graham Wallas insists that the empirical 
 art of politics consists largely in the creation of 
 opinion by the deliberate exploitation of non- 
 conscious non-rational inference. This at least is 
 true that empirical practitioners find it hard to 
 forecast the decisive elements. The press is no safe 
 barometer. In at least three remarkable parlia- 
 mentary elections since 1874, the result has been an 
 immense surprise to those who had regarded only the 
 line of the most widely read journals in the most 
 important areas : the journals went on one side, 
 the great majority of electors voted the other. Lord 
 Beaconsfield did not expect his sweeping repulse 
 in 1880. Of Palmerston it was said by Clarendon 
 that he mistook popular applause for real opinion. 
 Nothing is so hard, either to reckon or to identify. 
 The idealist is angry or despondent when he finds the 
 public deaf. Literary satire likens popular indiffer- 
 ence towards new ideas, to the dogs barking at a 
 
 1 Human Nature in Politics, by Graham Wallas, 1908.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 25 
 
 stranger. Or the satirist bethinks himself of the 
 ass who prefers a bundle of hay to a dozen gold 
 pieces. It would be easy to make a good case both 
 for the two honest animals and for the public, and 
 in truth the satire is idle. No doubt ripe judg- 
 ments and sensibly trained minds are not always 
 received with open arms. The hard and strenuous 
 pre-occupations of life naturally first bespeak the 
 common eye. But the ripe temper, if apt and 
 patient, slowly soaks its way, and well-stamped 
 coins find their currency. Kepresentative govern- 
 ment exists to-day in a hundred different forms, 
 depending on a hundred differences in social state 
 and history, and nobody claims for public opinion 
 in all or any of them either sanctity or infallibility. 
 But to make a mock of it, is merely to quarrel with 
 human life. We all know the shortcomings in 
 political opinion and character the fatal content- 
 ment with simple answers to complex questions ; 
 the readiness, as Hobbes put it, to turn against 
 reason, if reason is against you ; violent over- 
 estimate of petty things ; vehement agitation one 
 day, reaction as vehement the other way the next ; 
 money freely laid on a flashing favourite this week, 
 deep curses on what has proved the wrong horse 
 the week after ; haste ; moral cowardice ; futility. 
 But if anybody supposes that these mischiefs are 
 peculiar to parliaments or democracy, he must 
 be strangely ill-read in the annals of military
 
 26 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 despotism, absolute personal power, centralized 
 bureaucracy, exalted ceremonial courts. 
 
 m 
 
 Anniver- To-day x as it happens, is the anniversary of the 
 Rousseau, birth of Rousseau a couple of hundred years ago. 
 In the French Chamber, on a proposal last week 
 to vote public money for its celebration, one side 
 argued that it was absurd to magnify the father 
 of anarchist theories, at a moment when police 
 were shooting down anarchist bandits in the 
 suburbs of Paris. The other side insisted that 
 Kousseau was the precursor of modern conceptions 
 of social justice, and achieved for all time decisive 
 and persistent influence over French, German, 
 Russian literature. A dozen books in political 
 literature Grotius, On the Rights of War and 
 Peace (1625), for instance, and Adam Smith's 
 Wealth of Nations (1776), rank in history as 
 acts, not books. Whether a dozen or a hundred, 
 the Social Contract assuredly was one. The Institu- 
 tions of the Christian Religion, launched in Geneva 
 two centuries before Rousseau, was another. But 
 Calvin, the Protestant pontiff from France, was no 
 theorist as Rousseau was. The rock on which he 
 built his Church was his own unconquerable will and 
 unflinching power to meet occasion. This it was, not 
 merely doctrines and forms of theologic faith, that 
 
 1 July 12, 1912.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 27 
 
 have made him one of the commanding forces in the 
 annals of the world. Let us note in passing that our 
 fashionable idolatry of great States cannot blind us 
 to the cardinal fact that self-government, threatened 
 with death when Protestantism appeared upon the 
 stage, was saved by three small communities so 
 little imperial in scope and in ideals as Holland, 
 Switzerland, and Scotland. Taking Rousseau and 
 Calvin together, Geneva stands first of the three. 
 
 Burke scourged Rousseau's name and his work The test of 
 with an energy only less savage than his onslaught mind is 6 
 in the same page upon Charles II. He rejoiced " 
 that Rousseau had none of the popularity here 
 that followed him over the continent of Europe. 
 Burke went on, as Wordsworth saw him, fore- 
 warning, denouncing, launching forth keen ridicule 
 against all systems built on abstract right, pro- 
 claiming the majesty of Institutes and Laws 
 hallowed by time, "with high disdain exploding 
 upstart theory." Yet Maine, the most eminent 
 English member of the Burkian school I do not 
 forget Sir James Mackintosh tells us that Rous- 
 seau, without learning, with few virtues, and with 
 no strength of character, has nevertheless stamped 
 himself ineffaceably on history by the force of a 
 vivid imagination and a genuine love for his fellow- 
 men, for which much will always have to be for- 
 given him. It was Bentham who so well put it, that 
 if you want to win mankind, you must make them
 
 28 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 think you love them, and the best way to make 
 them think you love them, is to love them in reality. 
 Kousseau's idyll of the Savoyard Vicar that 
 fascinated the sensibilities of Europe, and struck a 
 new note in imagination and romance, came from 
 the same brain and heart as the political projectiles 
 that served the turn of Robespierre, and a host of 
 greater and better men. So the storm of a fresh 
 world-battle opened. In essence it was not new : 
 it was a re-adjustment to new occasion of thoughts 
 and schemes that were very old. The names 
 of Hobbes, Filmer, Sidney, Milton, Harrington, 
 are enough to recall the controversies upon the 
 roots of government and law, jus naturae, jus 
 gentium, and so forth, all over Europe, a century 
 before. The historian of political philosophy 
 takes us back to centuries earlier still. Tradition, 
 custom, usage, convention, established institutions 
 History on one side, Law of Nature and Rights 
 of Man on the other. The feud reached not politics 
 only; it penetrated philosophy, art, letters, churches, 
 education, in countless forms ; for, we may be 
 sure, the same aspects and influences that strike 
 deep on politics, strike deep all round. Here is 
 the stamp of one of the great ages, whose alternation 
 and succession in history mark its lodestars, and 
 signalize its title to men's praise. 
 
 You know the electrifying sentence of Rousseau's 
 Social Contract : " Man is born free, and everywhere
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 29 
 
 he is in chains. One supposes himself the master 
 of others, who is none the less for that more of a 
 slave than they are." We need take no pains in 
 our later days of Heredity as one of the established 
 laws of animal existence, to analyse the description 
 of man as born free ; and for that matter the idea 
 was older and played its part in writers older and 
 more respectable than Rousseau. It is nearer the 
 mark, so far at any rate as the civilized European 
 of to-day is concerned, to say that he is born two 
 thousand years old. That is what history means 
 to our plain man, if he had time and patience 
 to meditate beyond the hour. And it is worth 
 observing as we pass the point of freedom, 
 that Rousseau himself insisted that everybody 
 should pledge himself to belief in the existence 
 of an omnipotent and beneficent divinity, in a life 
 to come where the just should be very happy, and 
 the wicked very miserable. To these and other 
 articles, he said, every citizen should adhere, not as 
 dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability. 
 If he broke away from them, a man should be 
 punished by exile or death, and rationalistic heads 
 were actually struck off in 1794, strictly and 
 avowedly on Rousseau's principle, just as Servetus 
 perished in flames that Calvin kindled, and Sir 
 Thomas More's head was cut off by King Henry 
 VIII. If, however, the critic lets inconsistency 
 detain him, he is lost. Only let us add as a
 
 30 , POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 pendant to Eousseau's dictum, a no less bold and 
 much truer dictum, that man is born intolerant, 
 and of all ideas toleration would seem to be in the 
 general mind the very latest. 
 The It is easy for the judicious observer of a later 
 
 sower 
 
 fortune day to riddle a book like the Social Contract with 
 sou. shot and shell of logic, doctrine, figures, history ; just 
 as it was easy for Dr. Johnson to scold Gray's Elegy, 
 but none the less the poem remained an eternal 
 delight and solace for the hearts of wearied men. 
 More than one distinguished master of political and 
 legal philosophy in our own day and generation has 
 subjected it to searching analysis, of weight and 
 significance. 1 But what matters more than logic, 
 or dialectic cut-and-thrust, is history, relations of 
 present to past, leading antecedents, external forces, 
 incidents, and the long tale of consummating circum- 
 stance. How often do miscalculations in the states- 
 man, like narrowness and blunder in the historian, 
 spring from neglect of the pregnant and illuminating 
 truth that deeper than men's opinions are the senti- 
 ment and circumstances by which opinion is prede- 
 termined. " What it is important for us to know 
 with respect to our own age, or every age, is not its 
 peculiar opinions, but the complex elements of that 
 moral feeling and character, in which as in their 
 congenial soil opinions grow." 2 In these words 
 
 1 E.g. Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899. 
 2 Mark Pattison's Essays, i. 264.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 31 
 
 you have a truth, abounding in enrichment, power, 
 insight, and self -collection, for every patient student 
 of mankind, such a student as in our better hours 
 of the diviner mind it is the business of us all to 
 try to be. 
 
 The power of a political book, then, depends on 
 aptness for occasion as occasions emerge. (< What 
 wonderful things are events," cries somebody in 
 one of Disraeli's novels ; " the least are of greater 
 importance than the most sublime and compre- 
 hensive speculations ! " Too widely and fantastic- 
 ally said for cool philosophy, no doubt ; yet a fertile 
 truth for critics. Crop depends on soil as well as 
 seed. It is not abstract or absolute strength in 
 argument or conclusion, but the fact, half-accident, 
 of its happening to supply an exciting, impressive, 
 persuasive, attack or defence, or some set of formulae 
 that the passion, need, or curiosity of the hour 
 demands. Books, doctrines, ideas have been com- 
 pared to the flowers in a garden. 'Tis not always 
 the best argument that prevails, and the gardener 
 wins the prize who chooses his season right. How 
 much of their time do even good writers pass in 
 minting coin that has no currency. And in passing 
 from our glorious dome of printed books in the 
 British Museum, to the sepulchral monuments in 
 another department, we may sometimes think that 
 in vitality there is not much to choose between 
 books that once shook the world, and the mummies
 
 32 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 The event of Egyptian kings. No piece of literature ever had 
 more instant and wide - reaching power than 
 Chateaubriand's Ginie du christianisme (1802). As 
 an argumentative apology it is counted worthless 
 even by those who most welcome its effect. A friend 
 told him that a picturesque stroke of memory from 
 his travels, a passionate phrase, a fine thought, 
 would win him more readers than a mountain of 
 Benedictine erudition. He took the hint, and his 
 historic knowledge is little better than decoration. 
 The Frenchmen who thought seriously about the 
 genius of Christianity, would have found more of 
 what they wanted in half-a-dozen sermons of 
 Bossuet or half-a-dozen pages of Pascal, not to 
 name Augustine or the Imitatio, than in all that 
 was to be found in the genius of Chateaubriand. 
 But then as it happened Bonaparte had just made 
 his Concordat with Pope Pius ; he had played his 
 part in solemn pomp at Notre Dame, once more 
 formally associating religion with the State ; he had 
 signed the peace with England at Amiens ; a rain- 
 bow for the moment shone on storm-driven skies 
 and the dark tribulations of men. No book was 
 ever happier in its time, but to neither book nor 
 influence could there be allotted length of days. 
 
 As with books, so with principles. Men, whether 
 as bodies or individuals, pick out as much from a 
 principle and its plainer corollaries, as convenience 
 and their purpose needs. The possible limitations
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 33 
 
 of logical inference are widened or narrowed or Three great 
 thrust aside pointblank, just as actual necessity in history, 
 dictates. The best syllogism is swept down 
 by trumpet -blasts of Public Safety, Social Order, 
 and other fair names for a Reign of Terror. 
 A learned American judge found three great 
 instruments in human history the Ten Com- 
 mandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the 
 Declaration of American Independence. This was 
 perhaps no more than a flash of obiter dictum, and 
 undoubtedly the bench exposed surface to a telling 
 cross-examination. Yet after all Mount Sinai, the 
 Mount of Olives, and State-House Yard in Phila- 
 delphia hold commanding stations in the courses of 
 the sun. What we have to realize is the effulgence 
 with which hopeful words, glittering ideas, fervid 
 exhortations, and reforming instruments, burst upon 
 communities oppressed by wrong, sunk and sodden 
 in care, fired by passions of religion, race, liberty, 
 property those eternal fields of mortal struggle. 
 Nothing is easier than to expose fallacies in the De- 
 claration of Independence. The point is that, as an 
 American historian records with truth, it was " the 
 genuine effusion of the soul of the country at the time." 
 Yet what a sound instinct for politics addressed 
 to Englishmen of the stamp of the American 
 Colonists, inspired Thomas Paine when he fired the 
 revolutionary train by the most influential political 
 piece that ever was composed, and called it by 
 
 D
 
 34 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Oracles the wholesome, persuasive, and well- justified name 
 foTthe of Common Sense. Quarrels about the best form 
 of government, the balance of orders in the State, 
 even natural rights, were comparatively old stories. 
 Men are wont to use so much of such large oracular 
 deliverances as the moment asks. Moral issues, as 
 if almost by accident, suddenly take fire and set a 
 community in a blaze. Four score and seven years 
 passed, before a nobler President than Jefferson was 
 able to bring his country round to his faith, that if 
 slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Thus it is 
 not abstract books that thrive in the day of trouble 
 on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Who cares to 
 criticize the words in the famous Gettysburg speech 
 about a nation " conceived in liberty and dedicated 
 to the proposition that all men are created equal " ? 
 But it was, as Burke said, not on abstract 
 politics, but on the point of taxes, that the ablest 
 pens and most eloquent tongues have been exer- 
 cised, the stoutest spirits have acted and suffered. 
 They took infinite pains to set up as a fundamental 
 principle that in all monarchies the people must 
 in effect themselves mediately or immediately 
 possess the power of granting their own money, or 
 no shadow of liberty could subsist. 1 Not that rates 
 and taxes are everything, or the tax-gatherer the 
 worst of our enemies. Of this, the most powerful 
 example was Burke himself. After his splendid 
 
 1 Speech on Conciliation, March 22, 1775.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 35 
 
 pieces on the contest with the American colonies, 
 which I still submit to you as the profoundest 
 manual of civil wisdom that our greatest literature 
 possesses, the storm that the colonial victory had 
 helped to gather, broke violently over monarch- 
 ical France. Burke, with marvellous prescience, 
 divined in detail the havoc that would follow ; 
 he became an oracle of the emigrant French 
 nobles on the Rhine, and inspirer of the cogent 
 pamphleteers like Gentz, who served or led Metter- 
 nich at Vienna. Not unjust rates and taxes, but 
 the overthrow of all the high historic common- 
 places, fired the Reflections and the Regicide Peace. 
 All the reactionary forces of Europe found the 
 voice they needed. Only, in seeking cause and 
 effect, let us not confuse the voice with the force. 
 Lamartine's story of the Girondins on the eve of 
 1848, Thiers' story of the first empire on the eve 
 of the second, Mrs. Stowe's picture of slavery, are 
 all books that suffused reason with passion, and 
 turned passion into tumult, but already in each 
 case the train was laid. 
 
 IV 
 
 Especially easy is it in the present state of our survival of 
 
 J j.1. u X ^ J' the'Fitteat. 
 
 own country and the world for the most rudi- 
 mentary of political observers to realize how possible 
 it is, nay,howinevitable, for tremendous political 
 consequences to flow from books and speculations
 
 36 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 that seem to have nothing to do with politics. 
 Who can measure the influence on our contemporary 
 policies of Darwin and the other literature of 
 Survival of the Fittest ; and not only on practical 
 politics, but its decisive contributory influence 
 upon active and powerful schools of written 
 history ? It is no mere literary whim to count 
 Darwin and the prestige of Prince Bismarck, as 
 twin factors in the change of public temper from 
 the nineteenth century to the twentieth. On the 
 other hand, we should not forget how this passing 
 change on the great theatre of states and govern- 
 ment from a silver to a bronze age, has been accom- 
 panied by the spread, on a less resounding stage, 
 of an intenser humanity towards children, animals, 
 victims of cruel disease, men in prisons, black men 
 slaving in African jungles, and all else in need of 
 pity, succour, and common human-heartedness. It 
 has not all been blood and iron, nor has the rigour 
 of political or social logic prevailed unqualified. 
 So complex, subtle, and impenetrable, are the 
 filaments that secretly bind men's thoughts and 
 moods together. 
 
 The ruler As with books and principles, so with famous 
 wdcSt actors on the historic stage. When Victor Hugo re- 
 turned from exile some forty years ago, even 
 competent men who did not much admire either 
 him or his art, felt and admitted that one whose 
 person was circled by the enthusiasm of three
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 37 
 
 generations, must be possessed of qualities worthy 
 of exaltation and honour. Him, they said, who 
 knows how to awaken the noblest feelings and 
 impulses in men's breasts, whatever he may be 
 besides, it is well that we should honour ; he is 
 the hearth at which the soul of the country is 
 kindled and kept alive. This diffusion of warm, 
 lofty, and stimulating interests may be better 
 worth the critic's attention than his book's specific 
 content. Hugo's glory was due as much to the 
 politician as to the poet, and that was the secret 
 of an immense renown, only to be compared with 
 Voltaire's ; with both, the pen was sword. 
 
 It was said to a great English statesman of our what does 
 day, " You have so lived and wrought as to keep the Jtand for? 
 soul alive in England." This is something, after all, 
 apart from the clauses of his Bills. It is a something 
 that may be almost as good as everything. To leave 
 out or lessen personality would be to turn the record 
 of social development into a void. The genius of 
 Comte produced a reasoned list of the heroes and 
 benefactors of mankind, of which it has been justly 
 said by the most eminent opponent of Comtc's 
 constructive system, that a more comprehensive 
 and catholic sympathy and reverence towards 
 every kind of service to mankind is not to be met 
 with in any other thinker. 1 A calendar without 
 
 1 The list is to be found in admirable form in the volume 
 edited by Mr. Frederic Harrison, The New Cakndar of Great Men t
 
 38 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Luther, Calvin, or Napoleon needs explanation, 
 but this was founded on his own elaborated and 
 peculiar estimate of positive contribution to the 
 well-being of human society. Each is connected 
 in place and work with the other. That is a very 
 different thing from the adoration of cloud-com- 
 pelling giants. It is very different, too, from that 
 attachment to the name and person of a teacher 
 and inspirer, which is one of the most beautiful 
 of all traits in human character. Select them 
 as you will, in whatever realm of thought, 
 action, or creation, whether from five hundred 
 or five, the first question, and in one sense the 
 last, is, What does your hero personify ? Nothing, 
 we may be sure, is more fatal than turning history 
 into idolatry. The hero-worship that Carlyle's 
 wayward genius made so popular in our generation, 
 too easily alike in history and in politics, falsifies 
 perspective. Unity of ideas and interests, it is 
 true, in a great man of lofty plan and power of 
 action, affect our imagination with something of 
 the symmetry and attraction of the grandest art 
 drama, epic, symphony, the figures in the Medicean 
 chapel, the Sistine frescoes. But the standards of 
 art are bad guides in choosing political heroes. Of 
 Napoleon it was said by one who knew, that he was 
 all imagination : he created an imaginary Spain, 
 
 Biographies of the 558 Worthies of all Ages and Nations in the 
 Positivist Calendar. (Macmillan, 1902.)
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 39 
 
 an imaginary England, an imaginary Catholicism, 
 imaginary finance, and imaginary France. And 
 Carlyle in time created an imaginary Napoleon 
 for hero-worship. 
 
 Unwelcome as it must be to many a deep 
 prepossession, we may as well realize that the 
 doctrine of " fortuitous variation," in which 
 speculation finds the key to new species, has bear- 
 ings beyond biology. The commanding man in a 
 momentous day seems only to be the last accident 
 in a series ; the unaccountable possessor of skill, 
 talent, genius, will, vision, fitted to create or to 
 control emergencies, or to make revolutions in both 
 the machinery and commodities of life. " After 
 all," said Alexander I. of Russia to Madame de 
 Stael, " I am only a happy accident." Military 
 history shows in a hundred cases some odd turn of 
 chance, fortune, wind and weather, unforeseen and 
 unforeseeable, on a given day deciding battle or 
 campaign. The greatest generals have been first 
 to own the blind jeopardies of their game, the 
 hazards when men play with the iron dice of 
 war. Last accident or first, statesman, captain, 
 thinker, inventor, the precipitating agent appears 
 fortuitous; comet, not great fixed star the accident 
 of a peculiar individuality coinciding with oppor- 
 tunity or demand. 
 
 If any one should be scandalized by the proposi- 
 tion that the course of history can be deflected by
 
 40 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 an accident, or should find in it an impious flavour, 
 we should remember that both devout churchmen 
 and deep statesmen, the loftiest champions of 
 adherence to the profoundest pieties of life and 
 time, have been the first and most constant to 
 enlarge upon the impenetrable mysteriousness that 
 hangs about the origin, the course, the working 
 of human societies and their governing institutions. 
 When the Russian Czar, a mystic of the purest 
 water, called himself an accident, he meant no 
 more than a mystery, a power of inscrutable 
 source. Why should we be more shocked at the 
 fortuitous in affairs of government, than in the 
 appearance of the Bachs and Beethovens in music, 
 or Newton, or Watt, or any other of the originat- 
 ing luminaries in art, or science, or productive 
 invention ? 
 The Truly has it been said of the historic method, that 
 
 Historic . . . 
 
 Method, among other of its vast influences, it reduces the 
 element of individual accident to its due pro- 
 portions ; it conceives of national character and 
 national circumstances as the creative forces that 
 they are. An ironical lawyer assures us that it 
 would be better to be convicted of petty larceny 
 than to be found wanting in " historic-minded- 
 ness." What is the historic method ? Its sway 
 is now universal in the field of social judgment and 
 investigation. It warns us that we cannot explain 
 or understand, without allowing for origins and the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 41 
 
 genetical side of the agents and conditions with 
 which we have all to deal. It substitutes for 
 dogmas deduced from abstract regions, search for 
 two things. The first, the correlation of leading 
 facts and social ideas with one another in a given 
 community at a given time. The second, the 
 evolution of order succeeding to order in common 
 beliefs, tastes, customs, diffusion of wealth, laws, 
 and all the arts of life. Stripped of formality, this 
 only expands the f amiliar truth that laws and 
 institutions are not made but grow, and what is 
 true of them is true of ideas, language, manners, 
 which are in effect their source and touchstone. 
 It is easy to see that the ascendancy of the 
 historic method has its drawbacks. Study of all 
 the successive stages in beliefs, institutions, laws, 
 forms of art, only too soon grows into a substitute 
 for direct criticism of all these things upon their 
 merits and in themselves. Inquiry what the event 
 actually was, vital and indispensable as that of 
 course must be, and what its significance and in- 
 terpretation, becomes secondary to inquiry how it 
 came about. Too exclusive attention to dynamic 
 aspects, weakens the energetic duties of the static. 
 More than one school thus deem the predominance 
 of historic-mindedness excessive. It means, they 
 truly say, in its very essence, veto of the absolute, 
 persistent substitution of the relative. Your 
 method is non-moral, like any other scientific
 
 42 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 instrument. So is Nature in one sense, red in tooth 
 and claw, only careful for survival of the strongest. 
 There is no more conscience in your comparative 
 history than there is in comparative anatomy. 
 You arrange ideals in classes and series, but a 
 classified ideal loses its vital spark and halo. 
 Every page abounds in ironies. Even figures of 
 high mark turn out political somnambulists. Talk 
 of " eternal political truths," or " first principles of 
 government," has no meaning. Stated summarily, 
 is not your history one prolonged " becoming " 
 (fieri, werderi), an endless sequence of action, re- 
 action, generation, destruction, renovation, " a 
 tale of sound and fury signifying nothing." All is 
 flux, said Heraclitus long centuries ago ; no man 
 goes twice down the same stream ; new waters 
 are in constant flow ; they run down, they gather 
 again ; all is overflow and fall. Such argument as 
 this, I know, may be hard pressed, and it is in truth 
 a protest for the absolute that cannot be spared to 
 many active causes. But that relative tests and 
 standards are the keys both to real knowledge 
 of history, and to fair measure of its actors, is a 
 doctrine not likely to lose its hold. 
 Politics To-night is not the time for discussing whether 
 
 there is such a thing as political science. I need 
 not try, for the work has been incomparably well 
 done for our purposes in Sir Frederick Pollock's 
 short volume on the History of the Science of 
 
 as science.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 43 
 
 Politics. Is there any true analogy between the 
 body politic and the body natural ; are the methods 
 and processes of politics to be brought within 
 sight of the methods and processes of biology ? 
 The politician may borrow phrases from the 
 biologist, and talk of embryos, germs, organisms, 
 but surely those are right who insist that we have 
 not come near to the definite creation of an inductive 
 political science. 1 That is certainly no reason why 
 the politician should not reason, nor why the 
 historian should not explore, with the methodical 
 energy, caution, conscience, candour, and deter- 
 mined love of truth, that marked Darwin and the 
 heroes of the natural sciences. 
 
 Political science suffers from the same defect as 
 political economy in the earlier part of the nine- 
 teenth century. There is a strange rarefaction 
 in its atmosphere. The abstract political man 
 wears the same artificial character as the abstract 
 man of the economist. He was usually supposed 
 by the French thinker of Voltaire's day to dwell in 
 China or Persia, or any other chosen land of which, 
 as it actually was, they knew nothing ; any more 
 than they knew of Canada when they ridiculed the 
 war between England and France as a struggle for 
 thousands of square miles of perpetual snow. We 
 know better now, but the standards of human 
 motive are still applied in arbitrary fashion to what 
 
 1 Maitland, Collected Papers, iii. 288.
 
 44 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 is distant in time or place. Ethical considera- 
 tions pass for so much ornament. Matters are too 
 much confined to description of political mechanics, 
 without regard to all the varieties of social fuel on 
 which the driving force depends. The changing 
 growth of new opinion, the effectiveness of political 
 institutions in giving expression to new opinion, are 
 treated as secondary, or not treated at all. The 
 lines laid down by Professor Dicey, in his book on 
 the relation between law and opinion in the nine- 
 teenth century, deserve to be followed, and they 
 are sure to be. The science so conceived will 
 realize that the value of political forms is to be 
 measured by what they do. They must express 
 and answer the mind and purposes of a State, in 
 their amplest bearings. I hope all this is not 
 ungrateful to a group of writers in this country, 
 who in the last few years have filled a really im- 
 portant bookshelf in any library pretending to 
 be on the highest level in this truly important 
 sphere with Green, Pollock, Dicey, Hobhouse, 
 Bosanquet, Wallas, among them. Let nobody 
 suppose that speculations as to the State and its 
 various relations to the Individual are immaterial. 
 It is held that the attempts of certain French 
 teachers to present German theories of the State 
 in French dress, are directly responsible for Syndi- 
 calism in France. 
 Politic. Politics, in the sense that I am suggesting, are
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 45 
 
 different from law, because law tends to stereotype 
 thought by forcing it into fixed categories, but 
 political science, rightly handled, is for ever re- 
 opening these categories, to examine how they 
 answer to contemporary facts. Political science 
 is wider than law, because its work may be said 
 to begin where law ends. It is less wide than 
 sociology, because it starts from the assumption of 
 the State with all its rights, powers, and duties. 
 
 Germans have in Weltanschauung a word for A good 
 which I know of no English equivalent. The word. 
 French find no easier than do we, to convey it in 
 a single word or even in a free circumlocution. 
 It comes of the questions that haunt all ages, that 
 survive all philosophies, that defy continuous genera- 
 tions of chartered soothsayers, that mock rising and 
 sinking schools alike. Our literature possesses at 
 least one poetic presentation of its spirit, in the two 
 or three pages of inspiring prose that are the proem to 
 George Eliot's Romola. Technically meaning a con- 
 ception of the universe, Weltanschauung covers 
 a man's outlook upon the world and time and 
 human destinies ; the mental summary of experi- 
 ence, knowledge, duty, affections to his fellows; 
 relations to mysterious Force and Will, call it 
 Providence, Moira, Fate, or by what name we choose,
 
 46 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 invisible but supreme. Such an outlook on the 
 world and its meanings, varies with each historic 
 age, and marks it for what it is. This is what, 
 if we seek the roots of social existence, distinguishes 
 one period of civilization from another. Men 
 in general are but vaguely conscious of Weltan- 
 schauung. For them, the World, in this wide com- 
 prehension of that commonest and most fluid of all 
 our daily words, is no object of their thoughts. Yet 
 all the time in some established creed, consecrated 
 form, or iron chain of silent habit, this is what fixes 
 vision, moulds judgment, inspires purpose, limits 
 acts, gives its shades, colour, and texture to common 
 language. Even for superior natures, narrow are 
 the windows of the mind ; no wide champaign, but 
 narrow and restricted are the confines of our 
 landscape. 
 Range of History, in the great conception of it, has often 
 
 historic . .. ... _ . 
 
 landscape, been compared to a mountain chain seen far on in 
 a clear sky, where the peaks seem linked to one 
 another towards the higher crest of the group. An 
 ingenious and learned writer the other day amplified 
 this famous image, by speaking of a set of volcanic 
 islands heaving themselves out of the sea, at such 
 angles and distances that only to the eye of a bird, 
 and not to a sailor cruising among them, would 
 they appear as the heights of one and the same 
 submerged range. The sailor is the politician. 
 The historian, without prejudice to monographic
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 47 
 
 exploration in intervening valleys and ascending 
 slopes, will covet the vision of the bird. 
 
 According to an instructive living scholar, here we 
 come upon the great contrast between ancient 
 history and modern. For right comprehension of 
 Thucydides, he says, " the fundamental conception 
 which all our thought about the world implies, 
 must be banished the conception, namely, that 
 the whole course of events of every kind, human 
 or non-human, is one enormous concatenation of 
 causes and effects stretching forward and back into 
 infinite time, and spreading outwards over im- 
 measurable space. The world on which the Greek 
 looked out, presented no such spectacle as this. 
 Human affairs the subject-matter of history 
 were not to him a single strand in the illimitable web 
 of natural evolution ; their course was shaped solely 
 by one or both of two factors : immediate human 
 motives, and the will of gods and spirits, of Fortune 
 or of Fate." All this is just as true of great 
 political historians like Machiavel and Guicciardini ; 
 they looked out upon the Europe of the fifteenth 
 century from the walls of Florence with Livy, 
 Tacitus, Sallust, for their only models. They had 
 the experience of intelligent travel, no doubt, and 
 that is the best of substitutes for patterns of written 
 history. Still the mighty commander of a later 
 age, himself Italian in stock, declared that Machia- 
 
 1 Thucydides Mythistoncua, by F. M. Cornford (1907), pp. 66-68.
 
 48 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 velli wrote about battles as a blind man might write 
 about colours. 
 
 So we might proceed through the " enormous 
 concatenation " of historical names and sweeping 
 change, that was never conceived nor compre- 
 hensible until it came to pass. Think, for example, 
 of the strange new spectacle of world and life 
 that opened to men's minds and shaped their 
 days, after the spiritual struggle between Catholic 
 and Protestant confessions. Heresies had been 
 abundant during the Ages of Faith, but wide dis- 
 turbance of simple unquestioning acceptance had 
 been rare and superficial. The protracted battle 
 over the authority of Rome, over toleration, over 
 church government by bishops, over rite and 
 symbol, had been fought out. The rival creeds 
 identified themselves with political forces, and had 
 become definite and commanding ingredients in 
 organized States. Only then did the purple vision 
 of human societies in western Europe, united by a 
 universal faith, begin to fade. The standing conflict 
 that henceforth divided Christianity, and divided 
 and subdivided Protestantism itself, by the mere 
 fact of its existence as a conflict, apart from its 
 merits and contents, extended, diverted, transformed 
 the outlook. Old worlds and systems disappear, new 
 arise, still men live but in a corner of their own. 
 The day of The temper of our present time is adverse to 
 SHU* ' generalization. Harnack says that in 1700 the most
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 49 
 
 universal or encyclopaedic mind was Leibnitz, and in 
 1800 it was Goethe. I suppose Leonardo da Vinci 
 for 1500, and nobody would dispute that in 1600 it 
 was Bacon the greatest intellect that ever com- 
 bined power in thought with responsible practice in 
 affairs of state. Court affairs at Weimar were 
 little more than playground politics. To whom 
 would competent authorities give the palm in 
 1900 ? If we are slow to answer, the reason is 
 that advance of specialization over the whole field 
 of knowledge has made the encyclopaedic mind an 
 anachronism. The day of the circumnavigator 
 is over the men who strive to round the whole 
 sphere of mind, to complete the circuit of thought 
 and knowledge, and to touch at all the ports. 
 We may find comfort in the truth that though 
 excess of specialization is bad, to make sciolism 
 into a system is worse. In reading history it is 
 our common fault to take too short measure of the 
 event, to mistake some early scene in the play 
 as if it were the fifth act, and so conceive the plot 
 all amiss. The event is only comprehended in 
 its fullest dimensions, and for that the historic 
 recorder, like or unlike the actor before him, needs 
 insight and imagination. French Revolution 
 from Fall of the Bastille to Waterloo; English 
 Revolution from Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Oliver, 
 to Naseby, and from Naseby to William and Mary ; 
 American Union from the Philadelphia State House 
 
 E
 
 50 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 in 1776, to the Appomattox Court House in 1865 ; 
 Democratic Ordering in England from the Reform 
 Act of 1832 to the Parliament Act in 1911 ; Ireland 
 from the enfranchisement of the Roman Catholics 
 in 1793 to some date still uncertain. How 
 desperately chimerical would the end of all these 
 immense transactions have seemed to men who 
 across long tracts of time had started them. They 
 are all political ; but the same observation would be 
 just as true of the world's march in the sphere of 
 ideas, methods, moral standards, religious creeds. 
 From All agree that we have no business to seek more 
 
 to^rge!* from the past than the very past itself. Nobody 
 disputes with Cicero when he asks, " Who does not 
 know that it is the first law of history, not to dare 
 a word that is false ? Next not to shrink from 
 a word that is true. No partiality, no grudge." x 
 Though nobody disputes the obvious answers, have 
 a majority of historical practitioners complied ? 
 To-day taste and fashion have for a season turned 
 away from the imposing tapestries of the literary 
 historian, in favour of the drab serge of research 
 among diplomatic archives, parish registers, private 
 muniments, and everything else so long as it is not 
 print. As Acton put it, the great historian now 
 takes his meals in the kitchen. Even here we are 
 not quite at our ease. Bismarck, reading a book of 
 superior calibre, once came upon a portrait of an 
 
 1 De Oral. ii. 15.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 51 
 
 eminent personage whom he had known well. Such 
 a man as is described here, he cried, never existed ; 
 and he went on in graphic strokes to paint the 
 sitter as he had actually found him. " It is not in 
 diplomatic materials, but in their life of every day 
 that you come to know men." So does a singularly 
 good judge warn us of the perils of archivial research. 
 Nor can we forget the lament of the most learned 
 and laborious of all English historians of our time. 
 " I am beginning to think," said Freeman, " that 
 there is not, and never was any such thing as truth 
 in the world. At least I don't believe that any two 
 people ever give exactly the same account of any- 
 thing, even when they have seen it with their own 
 eyes, except when they copy from one another." 1 
 This is to bring some support for Goethe, that 
 " the only form of truth is poetry." The plethora 
 of printed books, moreover, has troubles of its 
 own ; it is consolatory to find an indefatigable 
 historic worker in Oxford to-day, allowing for 
 the weakness of the flesh, and protesting that 
 bibliographies are sometimes so enormous as to be 
 rather a nuisance than a help. 
 
 The unity of history is now orthodox doctrine, unity of 
 though accepted, as orthodox doctrines sometimes 
 are, in various senses. Freeman protested with 
 almost tiresome iteration against division between 
 ancient history and modern, and summed up in 
 
 1 Life and Letters, i. 238.
 
 52 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 the heroic assurance that history deals not with 
 the rivalry, " but the brotherhood of all periods 
 and all subjects, of all nations and languages, at 
 least within the pale of Aryan Europe." Acton 
 put it that " History derives its best virtue from 
 regions beyond the sphere of State." Mr. Gooch, 
 a younger student, says more fully : " No pre- 
 sentation of history can be adequate which neglects 
 the growths of the religious consciousness, of 
 literature, of the moral and physical sciences, of 
 art, of scholarship, of social life." A third view 
 is that profitable knowledge of history consists less 
 in remembering events or characters of statesmen, 
 than in knowing what men were like in bygone days, 
 their aims, hopes, pleasures, beliefs, and how they 
 thought and felt. There can be little doubt that 
 this would best hit the common taste. Treitschke 
 will not have it so. The farther a man places 
 himself away from the State, as he maintains, the 
 farther he goes from historic life. To bring descrip- 
 tions of the soul of a people into history, is to deal 
 with last year's snow. Who, he asks, does not feel 
 Culturgeschickte imperfect and unsatisfying, even 
 when handled by a master ? Even in Burckhardt's 
 famous book on the Italian Eenaissance, who does 
 not feel a want, the want of active personalities ? 
 History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the 
 presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen. 
 The essential things in the statesman are strength
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 53 
 
 of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate 
 joy in the result. 
 
 It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine 
 as this lends a hand to the sinister school of 
 political historians, who insist that the event 
 is its own justification. Force and Right are 
 one. Fact and reason, they contend, are and 
 must be one and the same : the real and the 
 rational are identic, and it is waste of time to 
 labour differences between them. The disciples 
 are thus led on to that exaltation of the State, 
 which stands for force, into supreme pre-eminence 
 as master-conception in men's minds and habits. 
 Of this strong meat, you will let me say something 
 later. 
 
 I have just quoted words about religious con- Churches 
 sciousness, and regions beyond the sphere of State, realities. 
 How constantly have the immense phenomena 
 of churches, Catholic and Protestant, so imposing 
 and so penetrating, made the gravest chapter 
 in the history of States. As if Churches were 
 not political realities. As if the Council of 
 Constance in the fifteenth century, the Council of 
 Trent in the sixteenth, the Assembly of Divines in 
 the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster during the 
 civil wars, the Four Declarations of the French clergy 
 in 1682, with all the array of pontiffs, church 
 princes, saints, doctors, congregations, presbyteries, 
 preachers, friars, inquisitors, missioners, creeds,
 
 54 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 symbols, bulls, canon laws, catechisms, were not in 
 truth the very essence and mainspring of the vast 
 and subtle political commotions that for age after age 
 followed in their perpetual train. Is it mere distor- 
 tion to say that " hardly a more momentous resolu- 
 tion can be found in history " than the decision at 
 Nicaea in the fourth century ? l If it be right to 
 judge that no false system ever struck more 
 directly at the very life of Christianity than Arian- 
 ism, then the proscription of Arius and the triumph 
 of Athanasius was an infinitely more potent thing 
 in the history of Western mankind, than the 
 fall of the Bastille and all the principles of either 
 French or American Eevolution. 
 
 It may, if anybody likes to have it so, be a good 
 distinction that Force is the principle of the 
 State, while the life and principle of a Church 
 is Belief. For that matter both Church and State 
 rest alike upon a shifting Tertium Quid of Authority, 
 say, an infallible Pope or an impregnable Book. 
 The political affinities of religious and ecclesiastic 
 creeds offer to the historic student some of his 
 standing puzzles. How comes it, for example, 
 that the fatalism implied in Calvinistic Protestant- 
 ism has been the nurse of some of the most 
 strenuous, active, energetic, and independent 
 natures in political history ? There is many 
 another case of national temper and outward 
 
 1 Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, 43.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 55 
 
 circumstance bearing down the most stringent of 
 logical arguments. 
 
 Our own day offers a singular kaleidoscope. Men Political 
 thought it a crushing scandal in the sixteenth P 
 century when Francis I. was suspected of making 
 terms for himself with the arch enemy of Christian 
 mankind, the Khalif of Turkey. Richelieu, one of 
 the half-dozen sovereign names in the European 
 record, systematically worked with English and 
 Dutch against popish Spain for the same reason 
 that made him relentless against his own Huguenots, 
 namely, that they were the foes of monarchical 
 unity in France. The paradox is not absent 
 in our own time. We see Roman Catholic Austro- 
 Hungary the pledged confederate of what we are 
 assured by her own oracles is Protestant Prussia. 
 One third of Prussia, to be sure, is Catholic, but 
 Catholicism in standing contact with Protestant 
 culture and liberalized institutions, as the American 
 Union and our own Quebec are enough to show, is 
 not like the same communion in Latin systems. 
 Then the Sovereign who is head of the Church of 
 England, is the ally of non-Christian Japan. The 
 King-Emperor of India the first European ruler 
 who has ever put on the crown in Asia is 
 neutral and indifferent to the faiths and nearly 
 all the old consecrated practices of the myriads 
 of Hindus, Mahommedans, Parsees. Politics are 
 admittedly as if from the necessity of the thing,
 
 56 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 or privately for the sake of decency, supreme ; and, 
 it may be, whether men wish the process well or ill, 
 such events do more to dissolve dogma and sap its 
 hold, than any number of infidel books. 
 
 Sympathy, again, in principles of government 
 and forms of government, is treated as no more 
 to the point in settling the friendship of States, 
 than sympathy in theology. The balance of 
 power is supposed just now in the diplomatic 
 chanceries to be maintained in Europe, by firm 
 co-operation between a secularized Republic in 
 France, and an absolutist Monarchy that is half 
 theocracy in Russia. Ecclesiastical historians 
 themselves have taught us how constantly church 
 machinery has been used as a source of power for the 
 statesman's objects. They point to the war against 
 the Albigensians as having for its real purpose 
 the strengthening of French monarchy ; the per- 
 secutions in Bohemia, as designed to fortify German 
 dominion over the Czechs ; the Spanish Inquisition, 
 as set up and worked to overcome the disunion of 
 race and history, for the sake of the Spanish 
 monarchy. In these and an untold host of other 
 cases the State was Force, and Belief was not the 
 only point. If we must quantify, it has been said of 
 the long religious wars in France, that in one-fifth 
 of them religion was the cause, in four -fifths it 
 was only the pretext. To search for the secular 
 politician behind an army of spiritual crusaders
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 57 
 
 is no cynicism. The enthusiasm, no doubt, 
 is the more attractive and exciting to reflective 
 minds. Yet policy, hidden or avowed, may be a 
 master-key. 
 
 According to some scientific historians l with History 
 a right to speak, history does not solve questions ; evint. e 
 it teaches us to examine. We often hear that our 
 understanding of history is spoiled by knowledge 
 of the event. A great event, they say, is seldom 
 fully understood by those who worked for it. Our 
 vision is surer about the past ; there we have the 
 whole ; we see the beginning and the end ; we dis- 
 tinguish essential from accessory ; time fore- 
 shortens. To contemporaries events are confused, 
 obscured by passing accidents, mixed with all sorts 
 of foreign elements. Even men of the compass of 
 Caesar, William the Silent, Cromwell, Chatham, 
 pursued resolute general aims, subject only like all 
 men's aims to the uncounted traverses of fortune, 
 and to " leadings " that were half out of sight. 
 Both contemporaries and historians, more often 
 than they suppose, miss a vital point, because 
 they do not know the intuitive instinct that 
 often goes farther in the statesman's mind 
 than deliberate analysis or argument. A visitor 
 of Bismarck's once reminded him that Schopenhauer 
 used to sit with him at dinner every day in the 
 
 1 For instance, Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques, 
 Preface (1893).
 
 58 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 hotel at Frankfurt. " No, I had no business with 
 him, I had neither time nor inclination for philo- 
 sophy," said Bismarck, " and I know nothing of 
 Schopenhauer's system." It was summarily ex- 
 plained to him as vesting the primacy of the will 
 in self-consciousness. " I daresay that may be 
 all right," he said ; "for myself at least, I have 
 often noticed that my will had decided, before my 
 thinking was finished." 1 Improvization has far 
 more to do in politics than historians or other 
 people think. 
 
 Dubious History's direct lessons are few, its specific 
 historic morals rare. To say this is not to disparage the 
 grand inspiration that present may draw from past, 
 or the priceless value of old examples of lofty 
 public deeds and magnanimous men. Plutarch's 
 Lives, parallels and all, are the master proof, one 
 of the too few books that can never be out of date. 
 Heine said that when he read Plutarch, he felt 
 a vehement impulse instantly to take post-horses 
 for Berlin, and turn a hero. This, however, 
 is a very different question. It is to working 
 statesmen that parallels may easily be a snare, and 
 ludicrous misapplications from Greece and Rome 
 inspired some of the worst aberrations both of the 
 French Revolution and of the Empire. The Old 
 Testament was often made to play the same part in 
 our own Rebellion. They are convenient to the 
 
 1 Lebenserinnerungen von Julius v. Eckhardf, ii. 122-3.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 59 
 
 politician. A plausible parallel makes him feel 
 surer of his ground. It is as refreshing as a broad 
 reflective digression in a close narrative. The 
 French Kevolution is down to this day a favourite 
 armoury for parallels, predictions, warnings, even 
 nicknames ; and a harmless English politician 
 finds himself labelled Jacobin or Girondin, though 
 he really has no more in common with the French- 
 man than he has with Adam or Noah. We may 
 often think of Napoleon's dictum, that " there will 
 be no real peace in history, till the whole generation 
 contemporary with the French Revolution is ex- 
 tinct to the very last man," and even later. Mr. 
 Bryce holds that though usually interesting, and 
 often illuminating, what are called historian's 
 parallels, are often misleading. He tells how, 
 during the great dispute in 1876 after the Bulgarian 
 massacres, between those who thought we ought 
 to back the Sultan, and those who were equally 
 convinced the other way, he met one day in the 
 street an eminent historical professor, who was 
 fond of descanting on the value of history as a guide 
 to politics. They talked of the crisis in the East. 
 "I said, ' Here is a fine opportunity for applying your 
 doctrines. Party politicians may be divided, but 
 no student of history can doubt which is the right 
 course for the Government to follow towards Russia 
 and the Turks.' ' Certainly,' he replied, * the 
 teachings of history are plain.' ' You mean, of
 
 60 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 course/ I said, scenting some signs of disagree- 
 ment, ' that we ought to warn the Sultan that he is 
 wholly in the wrong, and can have no support from 
 us/ ' No, indeed,' rejoined my friend, ' I mean 
 just the opposite.' ' 
 
 In truth, say what we will of the unity of history 
 and the identity in the elements of human nature, 
 the general body of two political cases is never 
 National exactly the same. Nations are not the same, their 
 the same, ideals are wide apart, their standing aims and pre- 
 occupations are different. It is inconceivable to 
 Englishmen and Germans and especially Scotsmen, 
 most idealist of all, that men should not care for 
 great industrial enterprises, persistent experiment, 
 wide mercantile adventure. They reproach the Latin 
 countries with lack of energy, and cannot under- 
 stand a French writer who says there is a commercial 
 industry and prosperity that his countrymen do 
 not envy, and actually suggests that those who are 
 alarmed, should ask themselves whether, after all, 
 poverty may not be for nations, what it has so 
 often been for individuals, the mark of the elect. 1 
 So true is it that in more senses than one nations 
 do not use the same language. And what is 
 true of nations, applies just as aptly to historic 
 periods. 
 
 A good-natured international smile may be 
 forgiven at the ingenious parallel discovered by a 
 
 1 Sabatier, IS Orientation relig. df. la France, p. 166.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 61 
 
 learned historian of Hellenism, 1 between Macedonia 
 in the days of Alexander the Great, and Prussia 
 in the time of Prince Bismarck. The Greeks, it 
 seems, mastered by the spirit of the canton and 
 the city-state, thought nothing of their land as a 
 whole, until a barbarian from the north perceived 
 it, made " the synthesis of their civilization," 
 and spread it over the world ; whereas if Demo- 
 sthenes had won the battle, a desperate state of 
 things would have survived. So if Sadowa and 
 Sedan had gone amiss, the resplendent orb of 
 German radiance and intellectual power would never 
 have broken through the nebulous skies of a dis- 
 united fatherland, and diffused its beams over the 
 civilized world. The same singular parallel finds still 
 more emphatic expression in that admirable man Germany 
 and historic thinker, Dollinger. For once for- 
 getting the serene truth that sovereign gifts of 
 thought, imagination, discovery have not been quite 
 unequally distributed among the modern nations 
 of the Western world, Dollinger with strange 
 excess of emphasis insists that Germany is the 
 intellectual centre from which proceed the great 
 ideas that sway the world. She attracts all 
 thought within her scope, shapes it, and sends it 
 forth into the universe clothed with a power that 
 is her own. No other nation, he proceeds, can 
 
 1 Droysen, as cited in Guilland's L'Allemagne nouvelle et see 
 historiens, p. 191.
 
 62 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 approach the German people in many-sidedness ; 
 no other possesses in so great a measure, side by 
 side with this power of adaptation, the qualities 
 of untiring research and original creative genius. 
 Out of all the nations of the modern world, the 
 German people are most " like the Greeks of old." 
 They " have been called to an intellectual priest- 
 hood, and to this high vocation they have done 
 no dishonour." l Greeks or not, nobody will deny 
 the magnificence of German contribution, though 
 much of that grand contribution in Germany, 
 as in Greece, is due to small States. And can we 
 escape an ironic start after all this, on encounter- 
 ing the proposition that "vanity is the accepted 
 characteristic of the French nation " ? The 
 force of the Macedonian parallel, whatever it 
 amounts to, is weakened, if it is not shattered, 
 by Mill's broad declaration that the ascendancy of 
 a ruder civilization, and the subjection by brute 
 strength of a superior civilization, is sheer mischief 
 to the human race, and one that civilized humanity 
 with one accord should rise in arms to prevent. 
 The absorption of Greece by Macedonia, he says, 
 was one of the greatest misfortunes that ever 
 happened to the world. 2 So harshly may illustrious 
 philosophic oracles fall out of tune. 
 
 Leaving ancient history aside, I cannot but 
 
 1 Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, Eng. Trans. (1892), p. 205. 
 2 Representative Government, chap. xvi.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 63 
 
 recall the Macedonian Goethe's generous recognition Goethe on 
 of his debt to the supposed Graeculi of France ; cont 
 
 firm 
 
 how he delighted in Diderot, and even translated 
 one of his famous dialogues, usually found far too 
 broad and tatterdemalion for English taste ; how he 
 admired the tone of good manners in French transla- 
 tion of his own books, due, as he supposes, to their 
 habit of thinking and speaking for a great public, 
 whereas in Germany, he says, " the writer speaks 
 as if he were alone, and you only hear a single 
 voice." In other words, French literature and 
 literature, we should remember, differs from 
 Science as it does from Music is so essentially 
 sociable. We know its masters in the seventeenth 
 century Pascal, La Fontaine, Moliere, Bossuet, 
 Fenelon, de Sevigne, La Bruyere, Saint Simon. 
 We know the writers who stand for main currents 
 in the eighteenth Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, 
 Encyclopaedists, Rousseau. In the nineteenth, 
 without ignoring the fame of Goethe, Schiller, 
 Heine, the French are not without some reason 
 for the vanity that is imputed to them. French 
 writers conspicuously engaged the attention of 
 mankind. They turned thought and interest and 
 curiosity and search for intellectual pleasure into 
 new channels. They led the great changes in mood, 
 standard, and point of view during the three 
 generations after Napoleon Bonaparte, and typified 
 ideals of an active and aspiring age. De Maistre
 
 64 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Proudhon, Saint Simon (not the famous journalist 
 of Versailles, but the earliest name in the socialistic 
 ferment a hundred years ago), and Comte, unap- 
 proached by any of them in the power, originality, 
 and intellectual resource with which he wove to- 
 gether the strands of knowledge into the web of 
 social duty were all effective writers as well as 
 fresh thinkers. There was Guizot, founder of new 
 historic schools, and one of those who by force 
 of personality apart from literary contribution 
 exercise a potent influence on their time. E-enan 
 brought wide learning and infinite fascination of 
 form to a theological dissolution that science, and 
 the widening of men's minds by the widening of 
 the known world, made so inevitable. Victor 
 Hugo, amid a thousand colossal extravagances, 
 sounded to an enormous public all over the world 
 a rolling thunderblast against the barbarities 
 of recorded time, and was inspired by a 
 glorious muse, the genius of Pity. It would 
 be easy to vindicate a claim for other names, 
 mirrors of the strong movements or strange 
 phantasies of their age and of human nature in 
 all ages Michelet, Lamartine, George Sand, 
 Balzac, Taine. 
 
 The last of these shining names prompts a word 
 of digression on a point in what I have already said 
 on the fortunes of books. Taine was a strenuous 
 worker and high-hearted man if ever man was. His
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 65 
 
 six volumes on the French Eevolution, its ante- 
 cedents, and its sequel, are admirably attractive 
 as literature. But literary splendour did not 
 prevent it from being a marked case of the 
 fluctuations of men's verdicts on the causes and 
 significance of events, and the authority of their 
 interpreters. The book has enjoyed immense vogue 
 in Europe. It fell in with the reactionary mood 
 that followed the overthrow of the Second Empire, 
 and that desperate catastrophe, political and moral, 
 the Commune. Its claim to be history has been 
 almost painfully exposed by the more authentic 
 writer of another school. ' The document does not 
 speak to Taine," says his critic ; " it is he who all 
 the time is speaking to the document." 
 
 Every method has its own perils, and the perils 
 of Taine's method are plain. He tells us, Whether 
 the man be actor on the great stage of our world's 
 affairs, or an inspirer, creator, discoverer in the 
 realms of knowledge, truth, and beauty, character 
 and work flow from some master faculty within him, 
 in limits set by race, by surroundings, by the hour. 
 But then, alas, such unity is for art, and not for 
 history. As an achievement of literary ingenuity, 
 Taine's hundred pages upon Napoleon Bonaparte 2 
 are consummate. The elements are skilfully com- 
 
 1 Taine, Historien de la Rev, Franq. par M. Aulard, p. 326. 
 Faguet's Questions politiques (1903), pp. 2, 19. 
 
 2 Origines de la France contemporaine, Regime Moderne, 
 vol. i. chap. i. 
 
 P
 
 66 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 pounded, the fusion in the furnace is perfect, the 
 molten stream runs truly into all the channels of 
 the mould, and a form of superhuman might is reared 
 upon its pedestal. This is not the way in which 
 things really happen. For that it is no wonder 
 that the critic takes down a volume of Cardinal 
 de Retz, with the stir and spirit of affairs in full 
 circulation, and the actors, as Retz says, " hot and 
 smoking " with violence and faction. Or he might 
 take some strong pages of Clarendon, Burnet, 
 Bolingbroke, Bacon, Halifax, Swift. 
 
 Distribu- Let us repeat : sovereign gifts of brain and 
 national heart have not been so unequally distributed over 
 the western world, as fits of national vanity incline 
 men to suppose. One of the drawbacks to the 
 great uprising of the spirit of Nationality for a 
 century past, has been I by no means say the 
 extinction, but the changed hold, of the cosmo- 
 politan sense of human relations that sounded 
 a silver trumpet amid all the international piracies 
 of Silesia, Poland, and the rest. To this practical 
 declension of what has been called allegiance to 
 humanity, or the service of man, or over-ruling 
 altruism, one at any rate of the correctives is the 
 thought how in the glories of our common civiliza- 
 tion, each nation has its own particular share, 
 how marked the debt of all to each. How dis- 
 astrous would have been -the gap if European 
 history had missed the cosmopolitan radiation of
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 67 
 
 ideas from France ; or the poetry, art, science of 
 Italy; or the science, philosophy, music of Germany; 
 or the grave heroic types, the humour, the literary 
 force of Spain ; the creation of grand worlds in 
 thought, wisdom, knowledge, the poetic beauty, 
 civil life, humane pity, immortally associated 
 with the past of England in the western world's 
 illuminated scroll. It is not one tributary, but 
 the co-operation of all, that has fed the waters 
 and guided the currents of the main stream. We 
 may ponder some national trilogies or quartettes. 
 Descartes, Voltaire, Montaigne : Dante, Michel- 
 angelo, Galileo : Kant, Goethe, Beethoven : 
 Cervantes, Columbus, 1 Las Casas : Hume, Scott, 
 Adam Smith, Burns : Erasmus, Grotius, Rem- 
 brandt : Franklin, Hamilton, Washington, Lincoln : 
 Shakespere, Newton, Gibbon, Darwin. Choose, 
 vary, amplify the catalogue, as we will and as 
 we must, no nation nor nationality counts alone 
 or paramount among the forces that have shaped 
 the world's elect, and shared in diffusing 
 central light and warmth among the children of 
 
 1 Elaborate attempts are made to show that the discoverer 
 of America was no Genoese, but a Jew from Spanish Galicia ; 
 and President Grevy even did so unfriendly an act as to grant a 
 decree authorizing a statue to him at Calvi in Corsica. Be all 
 this as it may, it was in Spain that the valiant adventurer pro- 
 duced his designs, and found the means of executing them. 
 Whether born at Pontevechio or Genoa, he struck such root in 
 Spain that he lost the Italian tongue, if it was ever his. The 
 controversies are exhaustively handled in Revue Critique, May 3, 
 1913.
 
 68 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 mankind. To deride patriotism marks im- 
 poverished blood, but to extol it as an ideal or an 
 impulse above truth and justice, at the cost of the 
 general interests of humanity, is far worse. Even 
 where men admit as much as this, it is wonderful 
 how easily a little angry shouting makes them 
 oblivious of its sanctity. For in spite of fair words 
 and noble and strenuous endeavour for peace by 
 rulers, statesmen, and most of those who have 
 the public ear in Europe, the scale of armament 
 reveals the unwelcome fact that we live in a 
 military age. 
 
 The Evolution, for reasons easily understood, is the 
 
 tongue as most overworked word in all the language of the 
 ^m^iar. hour. But we cannot do without it, and those are 
 right who say that in the evolution of politics 
 nothing has been more important than the successive 
 emergence into the practical life of States and 
 institutions, of such moral entities as Justice, 
 Freedom, Right. Of these glorious and sacred 
 aspirations in substantial form, history made the 
 English tongue their vernacular. Whether Burke in 
 his best pieces, or Aristotle in his Politics, shows the 
 wider knowledge of human nature, learned men do 
 not decide. At least the philosopher of small 
 city-states, even with the brain of an Aristotle, 
 could not be expected to have any idea of that 
 representative government which at home here is 
 the governing political fact of to-day, and in other
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 69 
 
 lands is the political ideal. It was Locke in the 
 seventeenth century who in connection with the 
 settlement of the monarchy that we are decorously 
 adjured to call a revolution and not a rebellion, first 
 set out, as has been said, constitutional govern- 
 ment in terms of thought, and furnished the main- 
 spring of political philosophy for long ages after. 1 
 Frederick the Great says that his illumination and 
 emancipation came from Locke, though we cannot 
 be sure that our careful and candid sage would 
 have found the career of his Prussian disciple a 
 pattern for princes. From him both Montesquieu 
 and Rousseau, the famous heads of two opposed 
 schools and rival methods, drew their inspiration. 
 Countless are the governing systems all over the 
 globe that have found their model here, and we 
 may record with no ignoble pride that the tongue of 
 our English masters of political wisdom is spoken 
 by 160 millions, as against 130 of German, 100 of 
 Russian, 70 of French, 2 and 50 of Spanish. Mark 
 the change from Bacon, who sent his Advancement 
 
 1 Prof. Sorley in Camb. Hist, of Eng. Lit. viii. 
 
 2 Here is the estimate of a competent authority as to the English- 
 speaking population of the globe over forty-five millions in the 
 United Kingdom ; about twelve millions in Canada and Australia ; 
 at least five millions in various parts of British Africa ; in India 
 1,672,000 literate in English, and rather less than half a million 
 whose English is vernacular, and it is the official language of 
 the annual Congress ; say a million in other British possessions. 
 If we take into account the various forms of pigeon English 
 spoken in British possessions and elsewhere, one might make the 
 total sixty-five millions. Finally, the modest addition of something 
 under 100 millions in the United States.
 
 70 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 of Learning to Prince Charles in a new Latin dress, 
 because a book could only live in the " general 
 language," and English books cannot be " citizens 
 of the world." Cromwell as Protector could only 
 talk to ambassadors in dog-Latin. I do not 
 forget that among 90 or 100 millions of our 
 triumphant figure, the King's writ does not run ; 
 for these expanding millions live, not under our 
 bluff Union Jack, but under Stars and Stripes. 
 Still less can we forget that French is the most 
 oecumenical of all living tongues ; so sociable, so 
 exact, so refined, copious, and subtle, in its diversity 
 of shades in every field, grave and gay ; so apt alike 
 for what is trivial and frivolous, and for high affairs 
 of thought or business. 
 
 The only parallel to the boundless area of the 
 habitable globe conquered by our tongue, is held 
 by some to be Arabic. They tell us that though 
 Arabic in Islamic lands, for some three or four 
 centuries became the medium for an active propa- 
 gation of ideas, and though by the Koran it retains 
 its hold in its own area, and keeps in its literary as 
 distinct from its spoken form the stamp of thirteen 
 centuries ago, yet there is no real analogy or com- 
 parison with the diffusion of English. Latin is a 
 better analogy. It was spoken pretty early in the 
 towns of Spain, Gaul, Britain, and somewhat later 
 in the provinces on the Danube. In the East it 
 spread more slowly, but by the Antonines and
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 71 
 
 onwards the use of Latin was pretty complete, even 
 in northern Africa. Greek was common through- 
 out the Empire as the language of commerce in the 
 fourth century. St. Augustine says, " Pains were 
 taken that the Imperial State should impose not 
 only its political yoke, but its own tongue, upon 
 the conquered peoples, per pacem societatis" 
 This is what is slowly coming to pass in India. 
 Though to-day only a handful, a million or so, of 
 the population use our language, yet English must 
 tend to spread from being the official tongue to be a 
 general unifying agent. Any Englishman who adds 
 to the glory of our language and letters, will deserve 
 Caesar's grand compliment to Cicero, declaring it a 
 better claim to a laurel crown to have advanced the 
 boundaries of Roman genius, than the boundaries 
 of Roman rule. Whether Caesar was sincere or 
 insincere, it is a noble truth for us as well as for old 
 Rome. 
 
 VI 
 
 From reflections on the contributions of great Nationalist 
 
 sentiment 
 
 nations to various aspects and phases of general changed to 
 civilization, it is no abrupt transfer of thought to idea. 
 turn to what is perhaps the most marked of all 
 the agitations of the nineteenth century, the 
 political movement for national autonomy. In 
 the sentiment of nationality there is nothing new. 
 It was one of the main keys of Luther's Reforma-
 
 72 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 tion. What is new is the transformation of the 
 sentiment into a political idea. Old history and 
 fresh politics worked a union that has grown into 
 an urgent and dominating force. Oppression, 
 intolerable economic disorder, governmental failure, 
 senseless wars, senseless ambitions, and the misery 
 that was their baleful fruit, quickened the instinct 
 of Nationality. First it inflamed visionaries, then 
 it grew potent with the multitudes, who thought 
 the foreigner the author of their wretchedness. 
 Thus Nationality went through all the stages. From 
 instinct it became idea ; from idea abstract prin- 
 ciple ; then fervid prepossession ; ending where it 
 is to-day, in dogma, whether accepted or evaded. 
 Partition A man who wishes to trace perplexities to their 
 source will not forget the history of the claims, 
 ambitions and pretensions of Prussia, Austria, 
 Russia, when they partitioned Poland 140 years ago. 
 Well did Burke in 1772 warn Europe that Poland 
 was only a breakfast for the great armed powers, 
 but where would they dine ? " After all our love 
 of tranquillity," he exclaimed, " and all our ex- 
 pedients to preserve it, alas ! poor Peace ! " And 
 well does the historian to-day l declare, in a poig- 
 nant sentence, the partition of Poland might have 
 been a statesmanlike performance if it could have 
 stopped in 1772. " But history never does stop short" 
 and in twenty years Europe found itself in the 
 
 1 Sorel, La Question d'Orient au XVIII e Sieck (1878), p. 306.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 73 
 
 whirlpool of the French revolutionary wars that 
 came to a close at Waterloo. I have spoken of 
 senseless wars. It must be confessed that the 
 passion of Nationality has an ample share in most 
 of them for the last hundred and twenty years, 
 sometimes as cause, sometimes as pretext. 
 
 Among the glowing spirits who have been pillars Advent of 
 of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night agents 
 in transforming abstract social idealism into violent 
 political demand, after Rousseau in date, Mazzini 
 came. What the first was from the fall of the 
 Bastille in 1789 until Napoleon's rise in 1800, 
 this was Mazzini in the era after Waterloo. Each 
 was main inspirer of the commanding impulse of 
 an epoch, each the fervid apostle of a driving 
 principle. We need not overlook Fichte's Addresses 
 to Germany, or the splendid utterances of all the 
 passion and all the reason that broke forth in the 
 ever-memorable uprising against Napoleon in 1813. 
 Spain had been earlier in the same protest, and in 
 a struggle no less victorious. Poland was destined 
 to bear the banner of nationality for desperate 
 generation after generation, and Hungary shook 
 Western Europe with her story. But the Congress 
 of Vienna achieved a European settlement that set 
 nationality at defiance, and the despots whom the 
 national spirit had enabled to overthrow the great 
 French captain, instantly took in hand the extinc- 
 tion of all the light and sacred fire of that very
 
 74 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 spirit. It was this systematized defiance that 
 outraged his whole nature in Mazzini. 
 
 Without forgetting the splendid elevation of 
 Channing, most eloquent of American divines, in 
 the struggles for human freedom in northern 
 America, the Italian was in wider range than 
 politics the most fervid moral genius of his time. 
 No other man of his century ever united intense 
 political activity with such affluence of moral 
 thought and social feeling. Prophets have a right 
 to be unreasonable, and in many a page, as in acts 
 not a few, Mazzini goes beyond unreason into the 
 flagrantly irrational. Italian genius more char- 
 acteristically positive, practical, and supple than 
 Mazzini's was needed for Italian objects. Yet it 
 was fortunate for them that his rare spirit had its 
 ascendancy. He was loud and over-loud against 
 those whom he chose to deride as the busy race 
 of jugglers, petty Machiavels of the antichamber, 
 trading politicians, ready in all countries to swear 
 and to forswear, to launch out boldly or creep 
 ashore according to the wind. It is not such men 
 as these with their crooked ways, court intrigues, 
 and false doctrines of expediency, that will create 
 a people. Do not think that men of that sort 
 will ever rise to such a spiritual heat for the nation, 
 as shall carry forward a cause like this ; as will meet 
 all the oppositions that the devil and wicked men 
 can make. " Machiavelli," he cried, " has for long
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 75 
 
 ages prevailed over Dante. To save Italy and 
 awaken the soul in Europe, you must return to that 
 immortal spring of a people's noblest aspirations." 
 With penetrating eye he was alive to the saving 
 truth of " Italy a Nation." His argument was inex- 
 orable. In other countries impatience of inequality The Italian 
 and suffering had in 1848 driven men in search 
 of a new order. In Italy twenty-five millions of 
 men were rising for an idea ; what they sought was 
 a country. When they had conquered the foreigner, 
 freedom as well as independence would be won. 
 No aim but the creation of Italy, and Mazzini put 
 on his pamphlets an epigraph from Euclid, " The 
 right line is the shortest that can be drawn between 
 two points." No fallacy has ever wrought more 
 disastrous ravages. Euclid lived a good many 
 hundred years ago, but he must at any rate have 
 had too clear a head not to be aware that geometry 
 is not politics. " The papacy," again, " now no 
 more than a symbol for absolutist government, must 
 be dethroned. While the idol stands, its shadow 
 will cast darkness around ; priests, Jesuits, and 
 fanatics will shelter themselves beneath its shade to 
 disturb the world ; while it stands, discord will exist 
 between moral and material society, between right 
 and fact, between the present and the imminent 
 future." It is at least certain that Mazzini's 
 teaching was not merely the most direct attempt 
 to dethrone the temporal Pope and with him
 
 76 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 dogmatic and secularized Churches, but to set up a 
 new spiritual gospel in their place, and to light up 
 human life and public duty with new meaning. 
 Nation- As men with an instinct or a reasoned feeling for 
 
 ality as . ! 
 
 the revoiu- emancipation, even now turn over Mazzini s burning 
 
 tionary ... n i 
 
 secret. pages, in spite of pungent reflections that cannot 
 be suppressed on what would have come of it 
 all but for " political jugglers " like Cavour and 
 Napoleon III., and the guilty errors of expediency, 
 they may still find the passion of it irresistible. 
 How much more can we imagine the flame that it 
 kindled in the breast of generations to whom the 
 hideous dungeons of Naples, and all the other 
 abominations and degradations of foreign rule in 
 Italy, were cruel haunting spectres of their own 
 days. Nationality became the deepest and most 
 powerful of revolutionary secrets. Of the Empire 
 and the Papacy, the two wielders of the forces of 
 cohesion through the middle age, it is truly said 
 that they were neither national nor international, 
 but supra-national. On their decline, and for 
 other causes, nationality grew to be an unsuspected 
 sequel. Happily for the prophet, the time brought 
 a statesman. Four Italians played high parts in 
 modern history, and Cavour, endowed with the 
 union of force and brains that is named virtil, is 
 called as supple as Mazarin, as ingenious as Alberoni, 
 as intrepid and swift as Napoleon. 
 
 Though no term in politics is of more frequent
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 77 
 
 use than Nation, it is not easy to define. There what is a 
 are almost as many accounts of it, as we have 
 found in other terms of the political dialect. John 
 Bright was thinking of kinder and humaner things 
 than definition, when he spoke his famous sentence 
 of such moving simplicity the polar star of civilised 
 statesmen that the nation in every country 
 dwells in the cottage. What constitutes a nation ; 
 what marks it from a Nationality, from a Society, 
 from a State ? The question is not idle or academic. 
 It generates active heat in senates and on platforms, 
 for example, at this moment, whether this or that 
 portion of our United Kingdom is either nation or 
 nationality. When the idea was mooted of France 
 seeking compensation after the Prussian victory at 
 Sadowa, important men denounced it as "blasphemy 
 against the principle of nationalities." Let us 
 theorise for a moment. Here is what the dictionary 
 has to tell us of a Nation : " An extensive aggregate 
 of persons, so closely associated with each other by 
 common descent, language, or history, as to form a 
 distinct race or people, usually organized as a separate 
 political state, and occupying a definite territory." 
 This is adequate enough, and consonant with usage. 
 But, then, Belgium is a political State and yet its 
 Walloon and Flemish provinces are not common 
 in descent, tongue, or history, and their dissidence 
 is at this very day something of an active issue. 
 Austro - Hungary is a great State, though they
 
 78 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 speak twenty-four languages in the Austrian army. 
 Another authority finds in usage, quern penes 
 arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi, that " wher- 
 ever a community has both political independence 
 and a distinctive character recognisable in its 
 members, as well as in the whole body, we call it a 
 nation." For a test to be applied all over the 
 world, this is perhaps too vague. Freeman lays it 
 down in his own imperative way, that the question 
 what language they speak, goes further than any 
 other one question towards giving us an idea of 
 what we call the nationality of a people. We may 
 say, again, that the feeling of nationality is due 
 to identity of descent, common language, common 
 religion, common pride in past incidents. But no 
 single element in the list makes a decisive test. 
 Language will not answer the purpose ; for Switzer- 
 land has three languages, yet is one nation. In South 
 America there are two kindred languages ; mostly 
 common descent, common pride in their wresting 
 of independence from Europe, common religious 
 faith. Yet there are sixteen communities more or 
 less entitled to the rank of nations, and the traveller 
 tells us there is no sense of a common Spanish- 
 American nationality. Is Nationality to be de- 
 cided by the political character of territory, or by 
 the people who inhabit it ? In older days the first 
 was the prevailing theory. The second prevails 
 to-day and is one of the marks of modern system,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 79 
 
 as we may discern in Balkan perplexities. Devo- 
 tion to a dynasty has made nations. So has 
 passion for a creed. So, perhaps, most of all, that 
 ingenita erga patriam caritas, the natural fondness 
 for the land where we are born. 
 
 The lineal descent of national stocks, through Ethnologic 
 dim ages with no sure or intelligible chronicler, 
 offers a boundless opening for ethnologic disputation. 
 Learned men maintain, for instance, and men no 
 less learned deny, that the Hellenic race in Europe 
 has been exterminated, and that the modern 
 Greeks are a mixture of the descendants of Koman 
 slaves and Sclavonian colonists. Yet, however 
 this may be, the Greek name and all its glittering 
 associations, over the whole field of politics, ethics, 
 poetry, and art, seem enough to inspire nationality in 
 its most evident sense. The absorption by a popula- 
 tion of new modifying elements appears an obscure 
 and mysterious process. The problem is at this 
 day presenting itself on a truly colossal scale in 
 the United States, where the old floods of immigra- 
 tion from Ireland and Germany are now replenished 
 by swelling hosts from Southern and Central Europe, 
 Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews, and the 
 rest, changing both racial and religious proportions, 
 while the negro contingent, imported in the 
 old slave-holding days, though increasing at a 
 slower rate than the white, is still some 10 or 11 per 
 cent of the whole. Yet the political nationality of the
 
 80 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 United States, their high and strong self-conscious- 
 ness as a nation, is one of the supreme factors in the 
 modern world's affairs. 
 
 Spain and The resistance of Spain to Napoleon from 1808 
 to 1813 has been called the greatest European event 
 since the French Revolution ; it showed Europe 
 that a conqueror may shake a State to pieces, and 
 yet the nation hold together. The machinery 
 of the Spanish State was violently overthrown, 
 but common religious passion, the inheritance of 
 common language, ferocious common pride in 
 triumphant warfare for ten long centuries against 
 hated faith and blood, all awoke and maintained 
 in full blaze, on Napoleon's uncalculating provoca- 
 tion, those intense elements of national vitality in 
 relation to which the organized State is but 
 secondary. Tyrol, Moscow, Leipzig are names 
 for immortal chapters in the story of national 
 uprisings, that lent their new and overwhelming 
 force to the soldiers and rulers who worked the 
 political systems of the hour. It has been noted 
 as one of the curious ironies of history that it was 
 the victor of Marengo and Austerlitz who first since 
 the Lombard kingdom, a thousand years before, 
 established unity of government in the Italian 
 peninsula, and laid the foundations of modern 
 Italy. 
 
 Sicily. Sicily has found a dwelling-place for many 
 
 nations, but as the most learned of our historians
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 81 
 
 truly assures us, a Sicilian nation there has never 
 been. Europe, Asia, Africa have all met in the 
 great central island of the Mediterranean. Greek, 
 Punic, Roman, Mussulman, Christian, Saracen, Arab, 
 Norman, Spaniard, have all in strange turns been 
 ruling and subject inhabitants. Of the unity of 
 historical antecedents, supposed to be essential to 
 a nationality, there is little trace for a single decade 
 of Sicilian annals until 1859. Yet Sicily has played 
 a part of its own in the records of Nationality, from 
 the Sicilian Vespers in the thirteenth century down 
 to Garibaldi and Crispi in the nineteenth. 
 
 Let me venture on a parting observation as to National 
 Nationality. It has been on the whole a com- 
 manding and accepted impulse for our era. Yet 
 it has been contemporary with a current tendency 
 of equal strength, but directly opposite. One chief 
 mark of the same time has been the advance of 
 Science in all its branches and forms. But Science 
 works not at all for Nationality or its spirit. It 
 makes entirely for Cosmopolitanism. In multi- 
 farious congresses in every capital of the world 
 nationality is effaced. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, 
 meet on common terms, and liberty, equality, and 
 fraternity all prevail, without intermixture from 
 diplomatic sophistries. Science, besides all else 
 that it is and does, is the strongest unifying agent 
 of the time, especially if we include the inventions 
 that science makes possible, and the commerce that 
 
 G
 
 82 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 inventions stimulate and nourish. Even those who 
 are least disposed to share the common exultation 
 over the throng of new inventions due to new 
 scientific knowledge, may perceive that the respect 
 for scientific rules and methods which bring these 
 fresh conveniences to our doors, tends to spread 
 itself in the popular mind through the whole circle 
 of men's opinion, even in matters of daily talk and 
 life far remote from the atmosphere of science. 
 This respect marks the general advent and common 
 diffusion of a new intellectual force and spirit. 
 
 vn 
 
 Progress as Another question that I can here do little more 
 than note, has long had irresistible interest for 
 
 historic 6 powerful minds. It could not be otherwise. Is the 
 track all upward ? That is not all. The question 
 strikes far deeper than merely social and political in- 
 terest. It goes to the very quick of modern interpre- 
 tation of the working of past history and our present 
 universe. There are, we may suppose, three explana- 
 tions, theories, or hypotheses of the course of human 
 things, and the power that guides them, shapes 
 them, and controls them. One assigns this supreme 
 mysterious control to Providence ; a second to laws 
 of Evolution ; a third to a beneficent and steadfast 
 necessity, in which we confidently trust under the 
 name of Progress. Such is the modern aspect of
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 83 
 
 an eternal riddle, far too momentous for us to 
 confront here. But you will let me offer one or 
 two remarks upon the divinity of Progress, in its 
 ordinary mundane acceptation. Progress, like 
 Toleration, or Equality, is one of the reigning 
 words most familiar in common use, yet having 
 extremely diverse significance. It stands for 
 a hundred different things. Whether we mean 
 advance in material civilization during historic time ; 
 or advance in the strength and wealth of human 
 nature ; or advance in ideals of human society and 
 these are evidently neither identical nor always con- 
 temporary causes are assumed to be constantly at 
 work, tending both to raise the high-water mark of 
 civilization, and to spread its various successive 
 gains over a wider level. Do you mean progress 
 in talents and strength of mind ? Clear thinkers 
 have declared that they find no reason to expect 
 it, and that there is as much of these, and often 
 more, in an ignorant than in a cultivated age. 
 But there is, they go on to say, great progress, 
 and great reason to expect progress, in feelings 
 and opinions. 1 Close examination forces us to 
 be content with something far short of this 
 assumption. A universal law, for all times, all 
 States, all Societies, Progress is not. There is no 
 more interesting problem, for instance, in the 
 region of modern historic speculation, than the 
 
 1 Mill's Letters, ii. 359.
 
 84 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 decline of the Latin race in the southern half of the 
 American hemisphere, contrasted with the boundless 
 advance both in material prosperity and mental 
 vigour of the English, Scotch, Irish, and French 
 stocks among their northern neighbours. Progress, 
 says one grave thinker, not over-stating a plain 
 historic truth, "is the rare exception; races may 
 remain in the lowest barbarism, or their develop- 
 ment be arrested at some more advanced stage ; 
 actual decay may alternate with progress, and even 
 true progress implies some admixture of decay." * 
 An extraordinarily copious and impressive elabora- 
 tion of such a line of thought, is to be found in a 
 work of twenty years ago, on National Life and 
 Character, of which, whatever we may decide about 
 its central thesis as a forecast, we may say that it 
 opens, collects, expounds, and illustrates, vast issues 
 in the evolution of States and races, better worth 
 examining and thinking about, than can be found 
 in any other book of the same period. 2 
 A modem From vast tracts and periods of literature, it is 
 almost startling to think that the idea of progress, 
 which is the animating force of so much of the 
 thought, writing, and action of the civilized world 
 to-day, is wholly absent. You only find glimpses 
 of it here and there among Greeks and Romans. 
 Early Christians could care little for a world which 
 
 1 Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the 18th Century, i. 17. 
 
 2 National Life and Character : a Forecast, by Charles H. Pearson, 
 1893.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 85 
 
 they regarded as doomed to extinction at a near 
 date. The thought of retrogression is constant. 
 Sages and poets in every age have warned States 
 and their rulers of the inevitable decay that 
 awaits them, as it awaits each mortal man 
 himself. In some who were most alive to the 
 decline in standards of life and government, there 
 burned a fervid hope that somehow declension 
 would be arrested, though the conditions that pro- 
 duced it were to be essentially unaltered. If the 
 past had been all wrong, what certainty of the same 
 agencies that had governed the past, being either 
 dispersed, or forced to prepare a future that should be 
 all right ? Bishop Berkeley, for example, the most 
 ardent philanthropist of his day, despaired of the dis- 
 tempered civilization of his country, and showed in 
 practice by missionary emigration to Khode Island, 
 his faith, after the decay of Europe, in a golden age 
 and a new Fifth Empire in the American West 
 
 The seat of innocence, 
 
 Where Nature guides and virtue rules, 
 Where men shall not impose for truth and sense, 
 
 The pedantry of courts and schools. 
 
 He did not realise how many of the pedantic 
 elements would inevitably be transplanted, and how 
 many of the impediments to virtue, truth, and sense 
 would survive change of scene and clime. Even 
 for ourselves, authority is not all one way. Angles 
 and distances make all the difference to the eagles
 
 86 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Modem and falcons who survey history. We know more 
 meats and more of Nature in the world of matter ; we have 
 more power over its energies ; men have increased 
 and multiplied and spread out over the globe ; 
 life is longer ; vigour and endurance have waxed, 
 not waned. International law, though important 
 chapters are still to come, has made much way 
 since Grotius wrote one of the cardinal books in 
 European history. Forgive me for mentioning 
 what is at the moment a word of wrath. The 
 curse of industrial life is insecurity. The principle 
 of insurance applied to risks of every kind has 
 extended and ramified in a truly extraordinary 
 way during the last fifty years, until it is now 
 one of the subtlest international agencies, uniting 
 distant interests and creating perforce a thousand 
 mutual obligations. A portion of mankind has 
 access to higher standards of comfort and well- 
 being. For a thousand years, Michelet says, 
 Europe was unwashed. That at least is no longer 
 absolutely true. While these happy forward 
 motions please our eye and thought, they demon- 
 strate no determined law of social history. Tower- 
 ing States have vanished, like shooting stars. 
 Rome is not, in Byron's plangent line, the only 
 lone mother of dead empires. The desolation 
 of history at Paestum or Segesta, at Ephesus, 
 Olympia, Syracuse, is more awful than the sublime 
 desolation of nature in tracts of Alpine ice.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 87 
 
 You remember Gibbon's declaration that if a compara- 
 man were called to fix the period in the history of prosperity 
 the world during which the condition of the human ancient 
 race was most happy and prosperous, he would ei 
 without hesitation name the period between the 
 death of Domitian and the accession of Commodus. 
 It is nearly a century and a half since Gibbon 
 wrote. The trenchant historian of Rome of our 
 own day and generation, with characteristic daring, 
 puts and answers the same question. "If an angel 
 of the Lord," Mom m sen assures us, " were to strike 
 the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus 
 Antoninus was governed with the greater intel- 
 ligence and the greater humanity then or now, 
 whether civilization and general prosperity have 
 since then advanced or retrograded, it is very 
 doubtful whether the decision would favour the 
 present." That there is another side, everybody 
 knows. Slavery was the horrid base. Pagan 
 satirists and Christian apologists alike have drawn 
 dark pictures of the imperial world. From opposing 
 points, exaggeration of its wickedness was their 
 common cue. Long after the old stern and trium- 
 phant Rome had sunk, after the storm of barbaric 
 invasion had abated, after literature had been re- 
 covered, take an ensuing span of Italian history, what 
 was the progress ? Some of you may have come 
 across a vivid picture of the memorable sixteenth 
 century in Italy, drawn by Taine after reading
 
 88 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Benvenuto Cellini, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Vasari. 
 " This Italian society of the sixteenth century," he 
 says, in the literary undress of a private letter, " is 
 an assemblage of ferocious brutes with passionate 
 imagination. The footmen of to-day would not 
 endure the company of the Duke and Duchess of 
 Ferrany of Paul III., Julius II., Borgia, etc. No 
 wit nor grace nor ease nor amiability, no gentleness, 
 no ideas, no philosophy. Pedantry, gross super- 
 stition, risk of death at every instant, the necessity 
 of fighting at every street corner for life or purse, 
 harlotry and worse than harlotry all with a 
 crudity and a brutality beyond belief." And 
 learned modern inquirers, competent in wide 
 range of knowledge, insist that, difficult as it 
 must be to gauge the average morality of any 
 age, " it is questionable whether the average 
 morality of civilized ages has largely varied." 
 Evidence enough remains that there was in ancient 
 Home, as in London or Manchester to-day, " a 
 preponderating mass of those who loved their 
 children and their homes, who were good neigh- 
 bours and faithful friends, who conscientiously 
 discharged their civil duties." l Even the Eastern 
 Roman Empire, that not many years ago was 
 usually dismissed with sharp contempt, is now 
 recovered to history, and many centuries in its 
 
 1 Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian 
 Church, p. 138.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 89 
 
 fluctuating phases are shown to have been epochs 
 of an established State, with well-devised laws 
 well administered, with commerce prosperously 
 managed, and social order conveniently worked 
 and maintained. 
 
 Mill puzzled us many years ago (1857) by what 
 
 seemed an audacious doubt. " Hitherto it is supersti- 
 tion. 
 
 questionable," he said, " if all the mechanical 
 inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil 
 of any human being. They have enabled a greater 
 population to live the same life of drudgery and 
 imprisonment, and an increased number to make 
 fortunes. But they have not yet begun to effect 
 those great changes in human destiny, which it is 
 in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish." 1 
 This doubt, when quickened into fervid activity of 
 mixed pity and anger, by its clash with new ideals 
 of the human lot, has bred a fresh Socialism, the 
 immense perplexity of ruling men to-day. Whether 
 Socialism can be the assured key to progress, is still 
 a secret. Meanwhile, it is unjust to history to 
 overlook the strenuous efforts that have softened 
 the hardships incident to spread of mechanical 
 invention. The " drudgery and imprisonment " is 
 not what it was. Child labour has been abolished. 
 The labour of women is guarded. The hours of 
 men are reduced. I need not tell over again 
 all that beneficent tale ; it saved the nation. 
 
 1 Polit. Econ. ii. 326.
 
 90 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Its full effects are still uncounted. Mill was 
 not afraid of an economically " stationary state," 
 but then he appended the emphatic proviso that 
 the question of population should always be held 
 in due regard. He did not live to see a Europe 
 where the military rivalry of divided nations has 
 for the moment violently shifted that vital question 
 into unexpected bearings, because ratio of popu- 
 lation is one of the main elements in all computa- 
 tions of fighting strength. It is the recruiting 
 sergeant now holds the international scales. 
 
 The decrepitude that ended in the Latin con- 
 quest of Constantinople at the beginning of the 
 thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest 
 in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward reproof 
 to the optimist superstition that civilized com- 
 munities are universally bound somehow or 
 another to be progressive. Whether that decrepi- 
 tude was due to Byzantine incompetence for work- 
 ing government on the vast imperial scale, or to the 
 misuse of intellectual energy in futile and exasperat- 
 ing polemics, or to the gross and crushing subjection 
 of spiritual power to temporal, these are questions 
 of the first interest to all who seek philosophic 
 history. They are neighbours, too, to a wider 
 question that has no little actuality to-day. For 
 some observers, who know and have thought much 
 about it, pronounce it not clear that Western contact 
 with Eastern races will increase the sum of human
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 91 
 
 happiness. And what of evolution among Eastern 
 races themselves ? From time to time attempts 
 are made by reforming Moslems to discover a basis 
 for " liberalism " in the Koran itself. Only a few 
 years ago, for example, was published an address 
 from Moslems in Tunis to a French official, earnestly 
 assuring him by an ingenious assortment of texts 
 that there was nothing in the Koran incompatible 
 in spirit, if not exactly in letter, with the immortal 
 " principles of '89." Thence they argue that just as 
 Christianity has passed through slavery, intolerance, 
 and degrading incidents connected with the seclusion 
 of women, so the religion of Mahomet may, like 
 Christianity, make its way into a higher and 
 purer air. That Islamism is a marked advance 
 for backward races is generally admitted, and 
 that it is not incompatible with solid intelligence 
 and all manly virtues we know. We hardly find in- 
 stances to-day on any marked scale of its capacity 
 to adapt itself to all the modern requirements 
 of a civilized State. Some observers, however, 
 hold a more sanguine view. Whether nation- 
 ality is likely to take the bond of religion in Moslem 
 countries, is another question not easy to answer. 
 There may be a tendency in that direction, and it 
 may be stimulated by the decline of Turkish power. 1 
 After all, it is well to measure against the pro- 
 
 1 On these points, see Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 136-140 ; 
 Bryce's Studies in History and Jurisprudence, ii., Essay 13.
 
 92 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 cession of changes that have swept through culture, 
 civilization, and the modern world, some stupendous 
 fixities of human things. If we think, for example, 
 of all that Language means ; of the unplumbed 
 depths of mortal thought, mood, aim, appetite, right, 
 duty, kindness, savagery ; and yet how stable lan- 
 guage is, and how immutably the tongues of leading 
 stocks in the world seem to have struck their roots. 
 Then consider the three great faiths Christendom, 
 Judaism, Islam, in spite of endless reformation, 
 counter-reformation, internecine conflict within, 
 displacements by fire and sword from without. Yet 
 if we survey the far-stretching cosmorama of re- 
 ligions in their vast history, how steadfastly the 
 name, the rites, the practices, and traditions, and 
 intense attachment to them all, persist even after 
 reasoning and comparative methods seem to have 
 plucked up or worn away the dogmatic roots. 
 Progress On one thing, at any rate, optimist and pessimist 
 
 , . 
 
 agree, that progress is no automaton, spontaneous 
 and self-propelling. It depends on the play of 
 forces within the community and external to it. 
 It depends on the room left by the State for the 
 enterprise, energy, and initiative of the individual. 
 It depends on the absence from the general mind at a 
 given time, of the sombre feeling, Quota pars omnium 
 sumus, how small a fraction is a man's share in the 
 huge universe of unfathomable things. It depends 
 on no single element in social being, but on the 
 
 no 
 
 autc 
 ton.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 93 
 
 confluence of many tributaries in a great tidal stream 
 of history ; and those tides, like the ocean itself, 
 ebbing and flowing in obedience to the motions of 
 an inconstant moon. Though Greek is not com- 
 pulsory with you here, we may go back for the 
 last poetic word on all this, to the ode in the Greek 
 play where the chorus recounts with glorious 
 enumeration how of all the many wonders of the 
 world, the most wondrous is Man ; he makes a 
 path across the white sea, works the land, captures 
 or tames animals and birds for his daily use ; he 
 has devised language and from language thought, 
 and all the moods that mould a State ; he finds a 
 help against every evil of his lot, save only death ; 
 against death and the grave he has no power. No 
 progress, at any rate, in harmony of words or 
 strength of imagination in the four-and-twenty 
 centuries since Sophocles, dims the force and beauty 
 of these ancient lines. 1 
 
 VIII 
 
 The Italian Machiavel of the fifteenth century is " The state 
 
 f * 
 
 applauded by a German Machiavel of the nineteenth, 
 for disclosing and impressing the mighty funda- 
 mental that "the State is Force." We call 
 Treitschke and Machiavelli by a common name 
 without offence, because both writers have the signal 
 
 1 Antigone, 332-64. Jebb, p. 76. 
 
 is
 
 94 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 courage and rare merit to proclaim what each of 
 them takes for rigid and relentless truth. Kulers, 
 they say, may be shy of owning that the State is 
 Force, and the more respectable or the weaker 
 among them do their best to find a decent veil. Still 
 things are what they are, and the politic augur does 
 not deceive himself. Political right and wrong 
 depends on the practice of your age, and on what is 
 done by other people. Machiavelli did not go beyond 
 common sense when he " saw no reason for fighting 
 with foils against men who fight with poniards." 
 in what We all know, to be sure, that in one vital sense 
 the State is Force. Yet as a bare primordial law of 
 social existence, experience shows how easily it falls 
 into frightfully misleading disproportion. Carlyle 
 brought it to a startling point, when he declared 
 that after all the fundamental question between 
 any two human beings is, " Can I kill thee, or canst 
 thou kill me ? " But is the main truth actually 
 this, that brutality, whether naked or in uniform 
 and peruke, is the fundamental postulate between 
 rulers and ruled, or between governments and 
 nations on the two sides of a frontier ? The 
 judge, the constable, the sheriff, as we know well 
 enough, are indispensable against foes within, and 
 the soldier with his rifle for foes across the frontier. 
 Still the principle is no beacon-fire, until we have 
 vigilantly explored it. What sort of State, what 
 sort of Force ? What is to be the place of the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 95 
 
 Minister of Police in internal government ? Is 
 there to be a jury of twelve honest men in a 
 box, and a writ of habeas corpus, and no privilege 
 conceded to an official of the State against the 
 civil rights of ordinary citizens ? The formula of 
 force would not have been rejected, so far as it 
 goes, by William the Silent, Cromwell, Turgot, 
 Washington, Lincoln, or any other of the small host 
 who pass for mankind's political deliverers. It would 
 have been silently accepted, if they had stooped to 
 theorize, by the most barbarous tyrants in modern 
 history, from Ezzelino in the thirteenth century, 
 down to King Bomba in the nineteenth. There 
 is no more revolting chapter in the annals of 
 Christendom than the Spanish Inquisition. Yet it 
 was in fact a definite branch of the State, and at an 
 auto-da-fe any Familiar with a conscience might 
 have murmured, as he heaped the faggots round his 
 firm-souled victim, that after all the State is Force. 
 So, too, the Jacobin with his guillotine. 
 
 Manifold are the types of State and the condi- 
 tions of the Force, by whom, for instance, and on 
 what terms it is wielded. The maxim does not 
 harden into a doctrine fit for use, until in a given 
 case we know of the force, what are its instruments 
 and origins, the nature of its energies. What is the 
 power of its action for social stability on the one hand, 
 and social motion, whether forward or backward, on 
 the other ? How stands it towards opinion and law,
 
 96 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 the two great agencies of government ? Above all, 
 let us know what price it costs, when the full and final 
 balance has been struck. Cavour, to whom a foremost 
 
 ideas before 
 
 cannon, place is not denied by any of the writers of this school 
 of Force, used to talk of " people like me who 
 have more faith in ideas than in cannon for mending 
 the lot of humanity." 1 Yet not Stein nor any of 
 the builders of Germany had less patience with the 
 abstractions of Metapolitics, the counterpart in 
 theories on government, to Metaphysics in specula- 
 tion upon Being, than had the first effective 
 builder of Italy. The ideas in which he had faith, 
 were ideas with practical aims tested by open dis- 
 cussion. With uncriticized bureaucracy called to 
 no account by those over whom it is set, he had as 
 little sympathy as with metapolitics. Bureaucracy 
 has not to persuade, to compromise, to give and 
 take, to prove and win its case in the course of 
 free personal debate in face of rival ideas and 
 antagonistic interests. Believed from these whole- 
 some exigencies, it may carry and enforce measures 
 efficiently, but with too little security that time 
 will prove them right. And who that has watched 
 bureaucracy at close quarters, will deny that 
 it is in fact more cumbrous, dilatory, and depress- 
 ing for a people's political energy and not any 
 less so to those who work it than that discus- 
 sion in a representative assembly, which is the 
 
 1 ScriUi, ii. 225.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 97 
 
 salutary substitute. Such a system Cavour from his 
 heart distrusted. He was the man of parliaments, 
 constitutional minister, murmuring on his deathbed 
 against absolute power and state of siege. 
 
 Bismarck was a giant of the older well- Bismarck 
 known type, working through imposed authority 
 and armed force. Before he made war, first on 
 Austria, next on France, he declared war upon his 
 parliament. " I recognize no authority save that 
 of his Majesty the King, I oppose all attacks aimed 
 at the sovereignty of the monarch, like bronze or 
 granite." That the maxim of the State being 
 Force does not carry us magisterially through the 
 more subtle and delicate branches of national 
 business, this powerful man was rapidly to learn 
 from his rude encounter with the Church from 
 1875 to 1878. The famous CuUurkampf, or fight 
 for modern civilization, for obvious reasons is no 
 favourite topic in Germany, but it is one of the most 
 striking episodes in the deepest conflict of our time. 
 The motives of its author are obscure, whether, 
 like France and Belgium, he meant it for a counter 
 to the Vatican Council; or a stroke against the 
 Poles and Catholic particularismus in southern 
 Germany ; or a searching test of imperial unity ; or 
 an iron-handed sequel to Luther and Germanism 
 against the Tiara beyond the mountains. Be this 
 as it may, after a grand parliamentary drama the 
 repulse was severe. " To Canossa," he said, re- 
 
 H
 
 98 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 calling the mighty struggle between the Emperor 
 and Hildebrand, " I will not go either in flesh or 
 spirit." Yet in five years to Canossa Bismarck 
 figuratively went, though without the three peni- 
 tential days under falling snows in the Canossa 
 courtyard, where a German prince eight hundred 
 years before had bent before an ecclesiastic as 
 daring, immovable, and potent as Prince Bismarck 
 himself. To find that miscalculated provocation 
 has ended in reducing your bills to a dead letter ; 
 and rallying a strong and permanent parlia- 
 mentary force, was an enduring humiliation that 
 held a lesson. 
 
 influence Though the Middle Age is over, though no 
 Authority. Hildebrand nor Innocent can now survive, yet 
 Influence retains a share of the power so long 
 upheld by the bolder pretensions of Authority. 
 Well may the Roman Church be described as the 
 most wonderful structure that " the powers of 
 human mind and soul, and all the elemental forces 
 at mankind's disposal have yet reared " (Acton). 
 Here we meet a branch of politics that only too 
 plainly deserves attention from those who care in 
 the fullest sense to comprehend the problems of 
 their time. History has brought the relation of 
 spiritual power and temporal into many aspects 
 and bearings all over Europe. It touches vivid 
 controversies on schools, religious congregations, 
 endowments, churches, "exalting their mitred
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 99 
 
 front in court and parliament," and is not likely 
 soon to disappear. It is not for me here to do 
 more than glance at it. I will not linger on Erastus, 
 the Heidelberg doctor of ill-omened name, who 
 in the sixteenth century propounded (or did not 
 propound) the doctrine of the supremacy of the 
 civil magistrate in things ecclesiastical, that raises 
 many violent disputations in relation to English 
 and Scotch establishment. 1 The Erastian prin- 
 ciple has been greatly transformed in the United 
 Kingdom in the last sixty years, and further trans- 
 formations await it. The internal temper and 
 spirit of the Church of England has undergone 
 immense changes within the same period, and to 
 what extent these internal changes have altered 
 the value set upon secular privilege, either by her 
 members or in external opinion, remains an active 
 issue. 
 
 However that may stand, the Roman Church, for 
 good or for evil, has in itself qualities of a State that 
 do not belong even to the most vigorous and exclu- 
 sive of Protestant communions. A famous French 
 writer, a Piedmontese statesman of the Napoleonic 
 age, wrote a book in 1817 upon the Pope, de- 
 fining and vindicating the papal sovereignty, in 
 the same temper and on the same lines as the 
 Machiavellian school in the area of State. De 
 
 1 See The Thesis of Erastus touching Excommunication, by 
 Rev. Robert Lee, Edinburgh, 1844.
 
 100 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 spiritual Maistre has been styled one of the Vatican's 
 wJSz^d praetorian guard. In his dogmatic fixity, his poor 
 opinion of mankind, his hatred of all individual 
 claim, his readiness to shape an argument in 
 anger, that tells and hits the mark without wound- 
 ing this most brilliant of all theocrats recalls 
 many a chapter of the indomitable Treitschke. If 
 there were time, an illuminating comparison might 
 be worked out between them. 1 Like some of the 
 greatest pontiffs whose power he exalted, he was 
 that compound of the profound mystic with man 
 of the world, which often causes us so much sur- 
 prise unreasonable and unconsidered, for few com- 
 pounds are more common even in a rationalistic age. 
 I only name De Maistre, because it is always an advan- 
 tage to have theories systematically set out ; and his 
 initial proposition that infallibility in the spiritual 
 order, and sovereignty in the temporal order are 
 pure synonyms, is a useful warning to those who 
 suppose that the principle of the State being Force 
 is a conclusive, satisfying, comprehensive formula, 
 finally summing up the case of civilized government. 
 His argument is simple. Any organized society 
 demands a government. On various grounds, in 
 the organized Catholicism of Home, that govern- 
 ment must be a monarchy, and being infallible it 
 must be absolute over all such as choose to remain 
 
 1 A piece upon De Maistre is to be found in my Critical 
 Miscellanies (ed. of 1886), vol. ii.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 101 
 
 its subjects, subjects called by the kinder name of 
 children. In imposing such force as he commands 
 upon remonstrants, the pontiff will be careful to avoid 
 collision with domestic laws of temporal sovereigns, 
 just as Prince Bismarck found out that they will 
 be wise to avoid collision with him. Treitschke's 
 doctrine provoked plenty of antagonism in the 
 temporal world, and the corresponding way of deal- 
 ing with spiritual sovereignty has not been approved 
 by all who find repose or shelter within the Roman 
 fold. Nothing, say eminent men among them, can be 
 more remote from the political notions of monarchy 
 than pontifical authority. That authority is not 
 the will of the rulers, but the law of the Church, 
 binding those who have to administer it as strictly 
 as those who have to obey. Arbitrary power is 
 made impossible by that prodigious system of 
 canon law, which is the ripe fruit of the experience 
 and inspiration of eighteen hundred years. 1 So 
 be it. Yet the attempt by theocratic partisans, 
 from the majestic Bossuet down to the meagre 
 Pobedonostzeff in our own day, to insist upon a 
 difference, whether the government be legitimate 
 or revolutionary, Prince, Pope, or Demos, between 
 absolute and arbitrary, tested by demands of 
 practice is little more than sophistry. You will 
 be glad to escape to safer and more secular ground, 
 but these topics are by no means out of date, and 
 
 1 Acton, History of Freedom and other Essays, 1907, p. 192.
 
 102 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 they deserve the interest of intelligent readers of 
 the newspapers. 
 
 cienchere " How vague and cloudy," we are told by good 
 Poiitik. readers, "were many of the German treatises of the 
 last 60 years on the theory of the State." Even those 
 who insist most strongly that the abstract paves the 
 way for the concrete, that the transcendental is the 
 only secure basis for order by government, and 
 that evolution of the Absolute is the right precursor 
 of Sadowa and Sedan, cannot but admit that in 
 Germany at least it was the dynasty of historians, 
 and not the abstract men, who supplied the final 
 clenchers for public opinion and national resolution. 
 Treitschke, the most brilliant of the dynasty, 
 one day fell upon a volume of the letters of 
 Cavour. Admiring Cavour's clearness of mind, 
 cheerful simplicity, common sense and measure, he 
 goes on : " Nothing for a long time has chained my 
 attention so fast. This intensely practical genius 
 is of course different by a whole heaven's-breadth 
 from the great poets and thinkers that are so 
 trusted by us Germans. Yet he stands in his own 
 way before the riddles of the world as great as Goethe 
 or Kant." After Sadowa Treitschke pronounced 
 any dragoon who struck down a Croat to have done 
 more at that moment for the German cause, than 
 the subtlest political head with the best cut quill. 
 To such lengths do brilliant men push things in their 
 humour for Real-Politik and hurrying to be quit of
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 103 
 
 the abstract. With this writer, reaction went far. 1 
 In an iron age, he urges, and our age is iron, to 
 make peace your steadfast aim, is not only a dream, 
 but a blind resistance to the supreme law of life that 
 the strong must overcome the weak. It is a futile 
 attempt to evade stern facts, it nurses selfishness, 
 intrigue, material greed, coarse egotism. War is the 
 greatest school of duty, and to preach against it is 
 not only foolish, but immoral. Frederick the Great 
 is right, that war opens the most fruitful field for 
 all the virtues ; for steadfastness, compassion, for 
 the lofty soul, the noble heart, for charity ; every 
 moment in war is an opportunity for one or other 
 of these virtues. Even duelling is manly discipline 
 in courage, self-respect, and the principle of honour. 
 These sanguinary sophistries find resounding 
 echoes. One recent writer of the school inscribes 
 for motto on his title-page " War and brave spirit 
 have done more great things than love of your neigh- 
 bour. Not your sympathies, but your stout-hearted 
 prowess, is what saves the unfortunate." 2 All this 
 glorification of war, although shining poets of OUT 
 own lent to it the genius of their music not so 
 many years ago, is surely as disastrous an outcome 
 for the school that presents it, as was Machiavelli's 
 choice of Caesar Borgia to be the grand example of 
 his Prince. 
 
 i Politik: Vorlesungen, 2 vols. (1899). 
 2 Bernhardi, Deutschland und der nachste Krieg.
 
 104 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Let us refresh ourselves by recalling the plea 
 for perpetual peace that came from the pen 
 of the great German, who died at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth century, leaving behind him a 
 fame and influence both as metaphysician and 
 moralist, that place him among the foremost of all 
 Kant's his countrymen. Outside of philosophy, he owed 
 standing * much to Bayle, Kousseau, St. Pierre, above all to 
 Montesquieu. But he watched the two great affairs 
 of his time, the revolt of the American Colonies, 
 and the overthrow of the French monarchy, with 
 an interest hardly less keen than that of Burke 
 himself, with whose later views he warmly sym- 
 pathized. Though supreme in the region of the 
 abstract, he had mind left for man as a political 
 creature in the concrete. His tracts on Cosmo- 
 political History, inspired from French sources, 
 in their own day missed fire, nor is his setting of 
 good ideas attractive in its form. It is too dog- 
 matic, abstract, geometric. That notwithstanding, 
 the principles of common sense applied to his ideal 
 of permanent peace in a European federation, are 
 stated with admirable effect. He points to the 
 immoderate exhaustion of incessant and long 
 preparation for war. He presses the evil conse- 
 quence at last entailed by war, even through the 
 midst of peace, driving nations to all manner of 
 costly expedients and experiments. When war 
 ends, after infinite devastation, ruin, and universal
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 105 
 
 exhaustion of energy, comes a peace on terms that 
 plain reason would have suggested from the first. 
 The remedy is a federal league of nations in 
 which even the weakest member looks for pro- 
 tection to the united power, and the adjudication 
 of the collective will. States, Kant predicts, 
 must of necessity be driven at last to the 
 very same resolution to which the savage man of 
 nature was driven with equal reluctance ; namely 
 to sacrifice brutish liberty, and to seek peace and 
 security in a civil constitution founded upon law. 
 This civil constitution must in each State be 
 republican, a point that may have alienated 
 opinion in monarchical Germany, but in fact it 
 was not meant to go beyond some one or more of 
 the many possible shapes of representative govern- 
 ment. As it has unfortunately happened, neither 
 republic nor parliament has yet found itself able to 
 walk in Kant's way, but he marks a bright patch 
 in dubious skies. 
 
 IX 
 
 Statesmen are supposed not to take a high view The two 
 
 t i , n f , i Schools. 
 
 of their fellow-creatures. Mazzmi says of the his- 
 torian of the Council of Trent, " Like most states- 
 men, Sarpi had no great faith in human nature." 
 Too narrow a reading of famous Italians of the 
 age before Sarpi, like Machiavel and Guicciardini, 
 gives them a worse reputation in this respect than
 
 106 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 they deserve. In England, save in bad periods, 
 our most politic princes and rulers, though circum- 
 spect and shrewd, have been no cynics. They 
 took human nature with wise leniency, though 
 George III., himself a consummate politician in the 
 worst sense, declared politics a trade for a rascal, 
 not for a gentleman. " How goes our educa- 
 tion business ? " Frederick the Great asked of an 
 official. " Very well," was the answer ; " in old 
 days, when the notion was that men were naturally 
 inclined to evil, severity prevailed in schools, but 
 now when we realize that the inclination of men is 
 good, schoolmasters are more generous." " Alas, 
 my dear Sulzer," was Frederick's reply, " you 
 don't know that damned race as I do." Even those 
 who would with truth deny that they looked on 
 great politics as no more than a game of skill, do 
 not flatter their human material. Tocqueville, for 
 political instance, was philosopher, member of parliament, 
 and foreign secretary. His experience was ample ; 
 he saw public business and its agents at first hand. 
 His autobiographic pages are liberally strewn with 
 allusions to the volatility of men, and to the 
 emptiness of the great words with which they 
 cover up their petty passions. Nations are like 
 men, he said ; they prefer what flatters their 
 passions to what serves their interests. "I do 
 not despise the mediocre, but I keep out of their 
 way, I treat them like commonplaces : I honour 

 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 107 
 
 commonplaces, for they lead the world, but they 
 weary me profoundly." Of Napoleon III. : " It 
 was his flightiness, rather than his reason, that, 
 thanks to circumstance, made his success and his 
 power ; for the world is a curious theatre, and there 
 are occasions where the worst pieces succeed best." 
 ' I found that it is with the vanity of men you do 
 most good business, for you often gain very sub- 
 stantial things from their vanity, while giving little 
 substance back. You will not do half so well with 
 their ambition or their cupidity. But then it is 
 true that to make the best of the vanity of other 
 people, you must take care to lay aside all your 
 own." 
 
 Tocqueville, however, we must remember, 
 though in his earlier day he was the approving 
 critic and skilful analyst of certain forms of demo- 
 cracy, was well described as an aristocrat who 
 accepted his defeat. And far less conscientious, 
 careful, and well-trained thinkers than he, can with 
 very little trouble lay their hands on weaknesses 
 of human nature, and therefore of democratic 
 systems, since they depend for their success on 
 human nature's strength. As if autocracy, which 
 had twice ruined the French State in his own life- 
 time, was free from the duperies that democracy, 
 still less either landed or plutocrat oligarchy, is not 
 able wholly to escape. In any system, is not what 
 Burke said the real truth ? " The true lawgiver
 
 108 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Maxim for ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought 
 lawgiver, to love and respect mankind, and to fear himself. 
 . . . Political arrangement, as it is a work for social 
 ends, is only to be wrought by social means. Mind 
 must combine with mind. Time is required to 
 produce that union of minds which alone can 
 produce all the good we aim at." This was in 
 keeping with the same great man's dictum, that 
 in any large public connection of men love of 
 virtue and detestation of vice always prevail. 
 To the general truth so broadly stated, history 
 may demand some qualification, but the manful 
 proclamation that the true lawgiver ought to love 
 and respect mankind and fear himself, sets a 
 cardinal mark of division between two schools 
 of modern government. Men like Rousseau, 
 Fichte, Mazzini, Burke, whose eloquence has 
 wielded supreme influence in the political sphere 
 within the last 150 years ; or the men like Byron, 
 Shelley, Burns, and the poets of freedom in con- 
 tinental Europe, had not much in common with 
 the sword-bearer of English Puritanism, though 
 what they had in common was the root of the 
 matter. Cromwell set the case in famous words : 
 " What liberty and prosperity depend upon are the 
 souls of men and the spirits which are the men. 
 The mind is the man." Yes, and the historic 
 epochs that men are most eager to keep in living 
 and inspiring memory, are the epochs where the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 109 
 
 mind that is the man approved itself unconquerable 
 by force. 
 
 What a withering mistake it is if we let indolence "The Mind 
 of mood tempt us into regarding all ecclesiastical or Man!" 
 theological dispute as barren wrangles, all political 
 dispute as egotistic intrigues. Even the common 
 shades and subdivisions of party Right, Left, Right 
 Centre, Left Centre and the rest are more than 
 jargon of political faction. They have their roots, 
 sometimes deep, sometimes very shallow, in varying 
 sorts of character. In forms hard and narrow, still 
 if we have candour and patience to dig deep enough, 
 they mark broad eternal elements in human nature ; 
 sides taken in the standing quarrels of the world ; 
 persistent types of sympathy, passion, faith, and 
 principle, that constitute the fascination, instruc- 
 tion, and power of command in history. 
 
 Everybody who knows anything knows that 
 it is waste of our short lives to insist on ideal 
 perfection. Popular government, or any other 
 for that matter, is no chronometer, with delicate 
 apparatus of springs, wheels, balances, and escape- 
 ments. It is a rough heavy bulk of machinery, 
 that we must get to work as we best can. It goes 
 by rude force and weight of needs, greedy interests 
 and stubborn prejudice ; it cannot be adjusted in 
 an instant, or it may be a generation, to spin and 
 weave new material into a well-finished cloth. There 
 is a virtuous and not uninfluential school, and Mill
 
 110 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 leaned in their direction, who think that there exists 
 in every community a grand reserve of wise, thought- 
 ful, unselfish, long-sighted men and women, who, if 
 you could only devise electoral machinery ingenious 
 enough, if they had only parliamentary chance and 
 power enough, would save the State. That such 
 a reserve should exist, should acquire and exert its 
 influence, should spread the light, is felicity indeed. 
 More than felicity, it is an essential. It must be 
 the main text of every exhortation to a university. 
 But this is not to say that the State will be fortified 
 in its tasks by special electoral artifices, with a 
 scent of algebra and decimals about them. These 
 are not easily intelligible either in principle or 
 working to plain men; they are more likely to 
 irritate than to appease, to throw grit instead of 
 oil among the huge rolling shafts and grinding 
 wheels of public government. 
 ironies in Some of the most effective actors in the world's 
 
 the drama. 1 1 ., 1 . 
 
 theatre have been, it is true, most sensible of ever- 
 lasting ironies in the drama. ; ' The most malicious 
 democrat," Bismarck said, " can have no idea what 
 nullity and charlatanry are concealed in diplomacy." 
 It has somewhere been called the art of passing bad 
 money. The three contracting parties to the Holy 
 Alliance the sinister confederacy that almost 
 makes one regret Napoleon attempted three or four 
 months after Waterloo to bind one another to make 
 the precepts of the Christian religion, as set forth in
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 111 
 
 Holy Scripture, the sole guide of their public conduct, 
 with what edifying results Europe was soon to 
 learn. In the tortuous negotiations among the 
 representatives of the Powers before the battle of 
 Leipzig, it was once proposed deliberately to insert 
 a false citation. The British representative was 
 Lord Aberdeen. He electrified his colleagues by 
 declaring that as a man of honour he would never 
 sign a He. English diplomatists have not seldom 
 found themselves in difficulties from the simple, 
 direct, blunt turn of our average British mind. 
 They are disposed, as it has been put, to take 
 words at their face value, while foreign ministers and 
 publicists of subtler mould and susceptibility, are 
 apt to read interpretations into our plain words 
 that in negotiation prove a stumbling-block and 
 an offence. 
 
 Bismarck was fond of an iron ring from St. 
 Petersburg, with a favourite Russian word inscribed 
 upon it, nitchevo, like the corresponding Irish 
 word that pleased Sir Walter Scott, nabochlish, 
 " What does it matter ? " His table-talk, like 
 Luther's, or Lincoln's, or Cavour's, was coloured by 
 a satiric humour that it would be foolish to count 
 for cynicism, scepticism, pessimism, or any other of 
 that ill-omened family. It was only one of the cheer- 
 ful tricks of fortitude. Such moods have nothing 
 in common with Leopardi's poetic gloom over the 
 hypocrisies of destiny ; or the dare-devil wit of
 
 112 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Don Juan ; or the mockeries of Heine ; least of all 
 with Swift, a born politician, if ever there was one, 
 but one who had no political chance, and avenged 
 himself by letting irony blacken into savage and 
 impious misanthropy. Without making the mis- 
 take of measuring the stature of rulers and leaders 
 of men by the magnitude of transactions in which 
 they found themselves engaged, none at least of 
 those who bear foremost names in the history of 
 nations, ever worked and lived, we may be sure, in 
 the idea that it was no better than solemn comedy 
 for which a sovereign demiurgus in the stars had 
 cast their parts. 
 
 THE END 
 
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