NOTES ON POLITICS AND HISTORY
 
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 NOTES ON 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 A UNIVERSITY ADDRESS 
 
 BY 
 
 VISCOUNT MORLEY, O.M. 
 
 CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF MANCHESTER 
 
 Nefo gorft 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1914 
 
 Att rights reterved
 
 COPTBISHT, 1914, 
 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1914. 
 
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 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY bF CALIFORNl 
 SAiNTA BARBARA 
 
 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 ad- 
 dress 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 HISTORY
 
 WHEN I had the pleasure of coming universities 
 
 . -, -r rv i and political 
 
 among you a tew months ago, 1 ottered habitof 
 some remarks upon the obvious truth mind - 
 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 soundness of opinion depends. 
 
 To-night I propose to harp upon the 
 same string, and to say something about
 
 2 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 mis- 
 chief easily spoil both contemporary 
 politician and historian ; both the minis- 
 ter or the elector of to-day, and the 
 interpreter of days long ago. Looseness 
 of mind is one; 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 3 
 
 hearing, before rushing to controversial 
 fire-arms. A receptive 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 pre- 
 cision 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 under- 
 standing 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
 
 4 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 properties belonging to it, just as heat, 
 cold, storm, thunder belong to air and 
 sky. 
 
 signs of the So much to begin with the mood 
 and temper : then the application and 
 occasion. Any reflective observer, if he 
 likes, can sketch some of the signs of the 
 times in rather formidable outline. Let 
 us look at it. Political power is de- 
 scribed 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. Democ- 
 racy, they warn us, is going to insist on 
 writing its own programme. The struc- 
 ture of executive organs and machinery 
 is undergoing half-hidden but profound 
 alterations. The two Houses of our Par- 
 liament are being fundamentally trans- 
 formed before our eyes. The Cabinet,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 5 
 
 keystone of the arch, in size and in pre- 
 rogative 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 repre- 
 sentative 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 pos- 
 sible 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 committee 
 united to a selected body of ministers, 
 to shape conclusions in the sphere of 
 military defence, and therefore of expen- 
 diture; and such conclusions, though 
 nominally advisory or for information 
 only, naturally carry a weight that can-
 
 6 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 not but affect the judgment and respon- 
 sibility of a Cabinet. The appearance, 
 moreover, of a leader of Opposition in this 
 important committee seems to point to 
 the neutralization both 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 constitu- 
 tion 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 7 
 
 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. An- 
 other 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. 
 
 More than all this alteration in National 
 
 i . . p i , , atmosphere 
 
 machinery, are signs or change in national ^ charac . 
 atmosphere. These, we have good rea- ter< 
 son to hope, may be only superficial 
 and transient, for nothing is more certain 
 than that in a survey of the modern
 
 8 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 world, national character is slowest of 
 all things to alter in its roots. Mean- 
 while, we discover a shaken attitude 
 towards law as law ; a decline in rever- 
 ence for institutions as institutions ; a 
 latter-day antinomianism. Even power- 
 ful lawyers use language that treats a 
 statute as a cobweb; and sealed agree- 
 ments by great industrial organizations, 
 are sometimes no better than ropes of 
 sand. Nor is the change peculiar to 
 England. American citizens of a reflec- 
 tive 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 respon- 
 sibility, passionately denouncing the 
 administration of criminal law as a
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 9 
 
 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 founda- 
 tions 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 stronger 
 rather than weaker, and sense of social
 
 10 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 land- 
 scape ? You have all heard how, just 
 before the revolutionary storm broke 
 over France in 1789, Sieves published one 
 of the most effective pamphlets ever writ- 
 ten : its title was this : " What is the Third 
 Estate ? Everything. 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." l 
 
 1 Faguet, Prob. Pol. xvi.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 11 
 
 People capable of serious rumination Some 
 
 11 i i-i causes of 
 
 will ask themselves what is the precise social 
 connection, if any 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 have 
 vanished, and a singular elasticity is 
 working its way into the forms, symbols, 
 and standards of theological creed. 
 Science and the scientific spirit have, for 
 the time at least, mounted into the 
 thrones of literature and art. Finally,
 
 12 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 insist- 
 ently 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 depart- 
 mental labour for the minister, and this 
 makes the task of miscellaneous delibera- 
 tion all the more arduous or impossible. 
 close obser- Nothing is easier than to make a crisis 
 out of this signal conjuncture of interest- 
 
 ofreflec- jjjg^ perplexing, and exciting circum- 
 
 tion. 
 
 stance. Still the long experience of our 
 national history shows it safest, wisest, 
 soundest, in respect of all English-speak- 
 ing communities, to be in no hurry to 
 believe that, in John Bunyan's pithy 
 phrase, "passion will have all things now."
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 13 
 
 Let us pray to be delivered from exaggera- 
 tion, 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 present 
 writer, said Malthus of himself, is in no 
 temper to find plans for the future im- 
 provement 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
 
 14 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 we may expect to see grow up and spread 
 in universities. 
 
 value of Our present case, as to social cause and 
 
 ethoT Slty effect, 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 indus- 
 try. 1 How far this new force will go may 
 be dubious, but whatever strength it has, 
 must be centred in these great teaching cor- 
 porations. 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. 
 
 1 Decadence. Sidgwick Memorial Lecture. By A. J. 
 Balfour. 1908.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 15 
 
 Universities have been boldly ranked 
 by competent historians with trial by jury 
 and parliaments, among leading institu- 
 tions of the Middle Ages. At any rate 
 in England the power of universities and 
 the public schools that feed them, has 
 been immeasurable 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 prejudices 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,
 
 16 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 17 
 
 of reason, in spite of new weapons, altered 
 symbols, changing masks, are what they 
 have always been everywhere. I will 
 spare you the catalogue of man's infirmi- 
 ties, 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
 
 18 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 catch- 
 words 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 circum- 
 stances 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. 
 
 II 
 
 ideals and The most dogmatic agree that truth is 
 prodigiously hard to find. Yet what
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 19 
 
 rouses intenser anger than balanced 
 opinion ? It would be the ruin of the 
 morning paper. It takes fire out of con- 
 versation. 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 every- 
 body to see that most questions have 
 two sides, though it is a pity in a practical
 
 20 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 in volcanic out- 
 breaks 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 ration- 
 alism 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-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 21 
 
 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. 
 
 Ardent spirits have common faults in Generous 
 an expectant age. We know them all. 
 They are so apt to begin where they 
 
 struggle. 
 
 should end. Pierced by thought of the 
 ills in the world around them, they are 
 overwhelmed 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, inde- 
 pendently of evidence, is straightway 
 clothed with all the sanctity of absolute 
 principle. Generous aspiration, exalted
 
 22 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 
 preconceptions hold the helm. They 
 exaggerate. Their sense of proportion 
 is bad. 
 
 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,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 23 
 
 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 Mani- 
 chean struggle between Good and Evil, 
 between 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.
 
 POLITICS AND mSTORY 
 
 Misuse of 
 terms, a 
 main root 
 of con- 
 fusion. 
 
 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 social idealism must break into 
 cardinal issues, and light may be thrown 
 upon the interesting question what pro- 
 portion of the ideas that men live with 
 and live upon, are held open to discussion 
 in their minds, and how many of them are 
 inexorable 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 
 
 It will do us no harm to digest a sober- 
 ing thought from Locke: "If any one 
 shall well consider the errors and obscur- 
 ity, the mistakes and confusion, that are 
 
 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 25 
 
 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 man- 
 kind." 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 for 
 as good as another, -- which even the 
 best of us so often find good enough for
 
 26 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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, rebuked in famous 
 words the ignorant carelessness of man- 
 kind. " People do not distinguish ; with- 
 out 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." 1 
 
 An To these hints of mine an American 
 
 illustration, newspaper supplied an apt illustration. 
 
 1 Thuc. i. 20 ', ovrcas draXadrwpos TO?J woXXots >] f^TTjais rrjs 
 \-rjOetas Kal (irl rd e-roF/xa juaXXov Tpti
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 27 
 
 The number of 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 dissolving the Tobacco Trust? 
 They see eminent lawyers radically dif- 
 fering. They hear politicians railing. 
 Nobody can seriously argue that the 
 intricacies of Trust repression and regula- 
 tion can be mastered by "the wisdom of 
 the people." What the people can do is 
 to form clear and strong convictions upon 
 the fundamental conceptions that under- 
 lie the whole question. A sound public 
 opinion can be formed on the main 
 questions, whether we should try to
 
 28 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 maintain in trade and industry the possi- 
 bility 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 
 quarrels. turn 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 com- 
 
 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, Horce Sabbaticce 
 (1892), full of hard close thinking, needing answer and capable 
 of answer.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 29 
 
 plex, he does not find their contents and 
 applications directly self-contradictory. 
 Of liberty, we have been told on the best 
 authority, there are two hundred defini- 
 tions. Yet, said Lincoln in their war, 
 "the world has never had a good defini- 
 tion 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 lib- 
 erty 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 
 memorable formula "A free Church in a 
 free State." What could be simpler,
 
 30 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 erec- 
 tion of a kingdom of Italy with Rome 
 for its capital, was too momentous an 
 event to be comprised in one political 
 formula. It is no hallucination to de- 
 scribe it as the most important 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 foun- 
 
 1 Le Droit public et V Europe Moderne. De la Guerronniere, 
 i. 332.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 31 
 
 dations 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 Religious 
 phrases in the controversy of our times is 
 Religious Liberty : 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 
 commands ; the other, freedom to pre- 
 scribe the divine precepts at his own 
 discretion. Sometimes religious liberty 
 stands for unfettered freedom in uttering 
 and advocating opinion on issues of 
 theology, its foundations as recorded
 
 32 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 truth, its interpretations of binding doc- 
 trine, its consistency, or its complete and 
 wholesale incompatibility, with accepted 
 standards and methods in the ever- 
 extending area of positive knowledge and 
 intrepid criticism. Sometimes it desig- 
 nates the claim of a religious body to 
 impose upon faithful and voluntary 
 members, what rules as to marriage, 
 education, congregation, and the rest, its 
 commanding ecclesiastics may choose, 
 with no regard either to surrounding 
 social prepossessions, or to the conven- 
 ience 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 33 
 
 ago, pronounces null and void a bequest 
 to a society holding opinions contrary 
 to Christianity ? What of all the strenu- 
 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 dis- 
 belief, but one of those deep, silent 
 transformations that make history endur-
 
 34 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 able 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. 
 Forms of In the vast field of questions connected 
 ment with Forms of Government, terms in the 
 commonest employment abound in con- 
 fusion. 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 exact classification, for instance, of 
 the varieties of republic and monarchy. 
 
 1 Herodotus, iii.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 35 
 
 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 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
 
 36 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 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.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 37 
 
 Then Aristocracy in England has been Aristocracy. 
 too 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 com- 
 petent observers justly describe as one 
 of the greatest improvements in public 
 affairs ever proposed by any govern- 
 ment the change from royal and 
 patrician patronage in the Civil Service 
 to open competition was carried in a 
 cabinet of fifteen, of which Mr. Glad- 
 stone said that no cabinet could have 
 been more aristocratically composed :
 
 38 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 ad- 
 ministrator. 
 
 Monarchy In all the vocabularies and catechisms 
 Re ubiic ^ government, no idea has fired such 
 energy and devotion in the human breast, 
 as the idolized name of Republic, unless, 
 to be sure, it may be the name and the 
 idea of Monarchy. In passionate enthu- 
 siasm, as well as in cogent force of prac- 
 tical reason, Legitimist and Republican 
 have been many a time well matched. 
 Yet how profoundly diverse in essence, 
 record, and mechanism, the multiple
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 39 
 
 systems that are labelled by the common 
 name of Republic. Cromwell was dicta- 
 tor rather than republican. Venice was 
 of radically different type from Florence. 
 The republic 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 
 Republic 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 in-
 
 40 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 vented 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 govern- 
 ment that has acquired possession and 
 authority on the ground of acknowledged 
 title through regular succession, treaties, 
 or conquest recognized as legitimate, 
 what of the European monarchies of 
 to-day satisfy legitimist standards ? In 
 England, as we all know, succession to the 
 throne rests upon a revolution, -- the 
 result of one of those political expediencies 
 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.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 41 
 
 Even the consecrated name of Public Public 
 Opinion, 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 interpre- 
 tation, while Parliament makes laws, 
 imposes taxes, regulates foreign rela- 
 tions, in response to movements out- 
 side. 
 
 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
 
 42 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 electorate ? Are there any better 
 grounds for regarding 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 inter- 
 esting writer of our own time l emphasizes 
 the non-rational element in politics, - 
 impulses, instinct, reaction. Mr. Gra- 
 ham Wallas insists that the empirical 
 art of politics consists largely in the 
 creation of opinion by the deliberate 
 
 1 Human Nature in Politics, by Graham Wallas, 1908.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 43 
 
 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 parliamentary 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 jour- 
 nals went on one side, the great major- 
 ity of electors voted the other. Lord 
 Beaconsfield did not expect his sweeping 
 repulse in 1880. Of Palmers ton it was 
 said by Clarendon that he mistook popu- 
 lar 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 indifference towards new
 
 44 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 ideas to the dogs barking at a 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 judgments 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. Representative 
 government 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,
 
 POLITICS AND fflSTORY 45 
 
 is merely to quarrel with human life. 
 We all know the shortcomings in political 
 opinion and character the fatal con- 
 tentment 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 mis- 
 chiefs are peculiar to parliaments or 
 democracy, he must be strangely ill-read 
 in the annals of military despot- 
 ism, absolute personal power, central- 
 ized bureaucracy, exalted ceremonial 
 courts.
 
 46 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 III 
 
 To-day 1 as it happens, is the anniver- 
 Rousseau. sarv f the 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 Rousseau 
 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 
 
 1 July 12, 1912.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 47 
 
 Wealth of Nations (1776), rank in his- 
 tory as acts, not books. Whether a 
 dozen or a hundred, the Social Contract 
 assuredly was one. The Institutions 
 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 unconquer- 
 able will and unflinching power to meet 
 occasion. This it was, not merely 
 doctrines and forms of theologic faith, 
 that have made him one of the com- 
 manding forces in the annals of the world. 
 Let us note in passing that our fashion- 
 able idolatry of great States cannot blind 
 us to the cardinal fact that self-govern- 
 ment, threatened with death when 
 Protestantism appeared upon the stage,
 
 48 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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. 
 The test of Burke scourged Rousseau's name and 
 mind is* n * s wor k with an energy only less savage 
 actuality. than his onslaught 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 Words- 
 worth saw him, forewarning, denounc- 
 ing, launching forth keen ridicule against 
 all systems built on abstract right, pro- 
 claiming the majesty of Institutes and 
 Laws hallowed by time, "with high dis- 
 dain exploding upstart theory." Yet 
 Maine, the most eminent English mem- 
 ber of the Burkian school I do not
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 49 
 
 forget Sir James Mackintosh tells us 
 that Rousseau, without learning, with 
 few virtues, and with no strength of 
 character, has nevertheless stamped him- 
 self 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 forgiven him. It 
 was Bentham who so well put it that if 
 you want to win mankind, you must 
 make them think you love them, and the 
 best way to make them think you love 
 them, is to love them in reality. Rous- 
 seau'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
 
 50 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 of a fresh world-battle opened. In 
 essence it was not new : it was a re-adjust- 
 ment 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 govern- 
 ment and law, jus naturce, jus gentium, 
 and so forth, all over Europe, a century be- 
 fore. The historian of political philoso- 
 phy takes us back to centuries earlier still. 
 Tradition, custom, usage, convention, es- 
 tablished 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
 
 POLITICS AND mSTORY 51 
 
 of one of the great ages, whose alternation 
 and succession in history mark its lode- 
 stars, and signalize its title to men's praise. 
 
 You know the electrifying sentence of Man free- 
 Rousseau's Social Contract: "Man is 
 born free, and everywhere 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 analyze 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 Euro- 
 pean of to-day is concerned, to say that 
 he is born two thousand years old. 
 That is what history means to our
 
 52 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 miser- 
 able. 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.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 53 
 
 If, however, the critic lets inconsistency 
 detain him, he is lost. Only let us add 
 as a pendant to Rousseau'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. 
 
 It is easy for the judicious observer of a The sower's 
 later day to riddle a book like the Social 
 Contract with 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 re- 
 mained 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 search- 
 ing analysis, of weight and significance. 1 
 
 1 E.g. Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899.
 
 54 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 But what matters more than logic, or 
 dialectic cut-and-thrust, is history, - 
 relations of present to past, leading ante- 
 cedents, external forces, incidents, and 
 the long tale of consummating circum- 
 stance. How often do miscalculations in 
 the statesman, like narrowness and blun- 
 der in the historian, spring from neglect 
 of the pregnant and illuminating truth 
 that deeper than men's opinions are the 
 sentiment and circumstances by which 
 opinion is predetermined. "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." 1 In these words you have a truth, 
 abounding in enrichment, power, insight, 
 
 1 Mark Pattison's Essays, i. 264.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 55 
 
 and self-collection, for every patient stu- 
 dent 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 occa- 
 sions emerge. "What wonderful things 
 are events," cries somebody in one of 
 Disraeli's novels; "the least are of 
 greater importance than the most sub- 
 lime and comprehensive speculations !" 
 Too widely and fantastically 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 con- 
 clusion, but the fact, half-accident, of 
 its happening to supply an exciting, im- 
 pressive, persuasive, attack or defence, 
 or some set of formulae that the passion,
 
 56 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 pre- 
 vails, 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 of Egyptian 
 The event kings. No piece of literature ever had 
 
 decides. 
 
 more instant and wide-reaching power 
 than Chateaubriand's Genie du Chris- 
 tianisme (1802). As an argumentative 
 apology it is counted worthless even by
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 57 
 
 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 ser- 
 mons 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 asso- 
 ciating religion with the State; he had
 
 58 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 signed the peace with England at Amiens ; 
 a rainbow 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 
 Three great and their purpose needs. The possible 
 limitations of logical inference are 
 widened or narrowed or thrust aside 
 pointblank, just as actual necessity 
 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 Command-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 59 
 
 ments, the Sermon on the Mount, and 
 the Declaration of American Indepen- 
 dence. 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 Philadelphia hold com- 
 manding 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 com- 
 munities oppressed by wrong, sunk and 
 sodden in care, fired by passions of re- 
 ligion, race, liberty, property - - those 
 eternal fields of mortal struggle. Noth- 
 ing is easier than to expose fallacies in 
 the Declaration of Independence. The 
 point is that, as an American historian
 
 60 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 revolu- 
 tionary train by the most influential 
 Oracles political piece that ever was composed, 
 '* an( ^ ca ll e d it by the wholesome, persua- 
 sive, and well-justified name 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 61 
 
 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 criticise 
 the words in the famous Gettysburg 
 speech about a nation "conceived in 
 liberty and dedicated to the proposi- 
 tion that all men are created equal " ? 
 But it was, as Burke said, not on ab- 
 stract politics, but on the point of taxes, 
 that the ablest pens and most eloquent 
 tongues have been exercised, the stoutest 
 spirits have acted and suffered. They 
 took infinite pains to set up as a funda- 
 mental principle that in all monarchies 
 the people must in effect themselves 
 mediately or immediately possess the
 
 62 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 power of granting their own money, 
 or no shadow of liberty could subsist. 1 
 Not that rates and taxes are everything, 
 or the taxgatherer the worst of our 
 enemies. Of this, the most powerful 
 example was Burke himself. After his 
 splendid 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 monarchical 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 Metternich at 
 
 1 Speech on Conciliation, March 22, 1775,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 63 
 
 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 survival of 
 of our own country and the world for thefittest 
 the most rudimentary of political observ- 
 ers to realize how possible it is, nay,
 
 64 POLITICS AND fflSTORY 
 
 how inevitable, for tremendous political 
 consequences to flow from books and 
 speculations 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 con- 
 tributory influence upon active and power- 
 ful 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 government 
 from a silver to a bronze age, has been 
 accompanied by the spread, on a less 
 resounding stage, of an intenser humanity
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 65 
 
 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 un- 
 qualified. So complex, subtle, and im- 
 penetrable, are the filaments that se- 
 cretly bind men's thoughts and moods 
 together. 
 
 As with books and principles, so with The ruler as 
 famous actors on the historic stage. * y ' 
 When Victor Hugo returned 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 enthu- 
 siasm of three generations, must be 
 possessed of qualities worthy of exalta-
 
 66 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 tion 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. 
 
 what does It was said to a great English states- 
 man f our day> "You have so lived and 
 wrought as to keep the soul alive in Eng- 
 land." This is something, after all, apart 
 from the clauses of his Bills. It is a
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 67 
 
 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 Comte's con- 
 structive system, that a more compre- 
 hensive and catholic sympathy and rev- 
 erence towards every kind of service to 
 mankind is not to be met with in any 
 other thinker. 1 A calendar without 
 Luther, Calvin, or Napoleon needs ex- 
 planation, but this was founded on his 
 own elaborated and peculiar estimate of 
 positive contribution to the well-being of 
 
 1 The list is to be found in admirable form in the volume 
 edited by Mr. Frederic Harrison, The New Calendar of Great 
 Men, Biographies of the 558 Worthies of all Ages and Nations 
 in the Positivist Calendar. (Macmillan, 1902.)
 
 68 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 human society. Each is connected in 
 place and work with the other. That is 
 a very different thing from the adoration 
 of cloud-compelling 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 beauti- 
 ful 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 69 
 
 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 Sis tine 
 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, 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 Fortui- 
 a deep prepossession, we may as well ^J*^ 1 
 realize that the doctrine of "fortuitous history, 
 variation," in which speculation finds 
 the key to new species, has bearings 
 beyond biology. The commanding man
 
 70 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 in a momentous day seems only to be 
 the last accident in a series ; the unac- 
 countable possessor of skill, talent, 
 genius, will, vision, fitted to create or to 
 control emergencies, or to make revolu- 
 tions in both the machinery and com- 
 modities of life. "After all," said Alexan- 
 der I. of Russia to Madame de Stael, "I 
 am only a happy accident." Military his- 
 tory 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, states- 
 man, captain, thinker, inventor, the 
 precipitating agent appears fortuitous; 
 comet, not great fixed star the acci-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 71 
 
 dent of a peculiar individuality coinciding 
 with opportunity or demand. 
 
 If any one should be scandalized by 
 the proposition that the course of history 
 can be deflected by 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 en- 
 large upon the impenetrable mysterious- 
 ness 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
 
 72 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 affairs of government, than in the appear- 
 ance of the Bachs and Beethovens in 
 music, or Newton, or Watt, or any other 
 of the originating luminaries in art, or 
 science, or productive invention ? 
 The Historic Truly has it been said of the historic 
 
 Method. 111 
 
 method, that among other of its vast 
 influences, it reduces the element of 
 individual accident to its due propor- 
 tions; it conceives of national character 
 and national circumstances as the crea- 
 tive 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 under- 
 stand, without allowing for origins and
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 73 
 
 the genetical side of the agents and con- 
 ditions 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, cus- 
 toms, diffusion of wealth, laws, and all 
 the arts of life. Stripped of formality, 
 this only expands the familiar 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,
 
 74 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 
 interpretation, becomes secondary to 
 inquiry how it came about. Too exclu- 
 sive attention to dynamic aspects, 
 weakens the energetic duties of the 
 static. More than one school thus deem 
 the predominance of historic-minded- 
 ness excessive. It means, they truly 
 say, in its very essence, veto of the abso- 
 lute, persistent substitution of the rela- 
 tive. Your method is non-moral, like 
 any other scientific instrument. So is 
 Nature in one sense, red in tooth and 
 claw, only careful for survival of the 
 strongest. There is no more conscience
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 75 
 
 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 politi- 
 cal truths," or "first principles of govern- 
 ment," has no meaning. Stated sum- 
 marily, is not your history one pro- 
 longed "becoming" (fieri, werderi), an 
 endless sequence of action, reaction, gen- 
 eration, 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,
 
 science. 
 
 76 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 knowl- 
 edge of history, and to fair measure of its 
 actors, is a doctrine not likely to lose its 
 hold. 
 
 Politics as 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 
 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,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 77 
 
 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 nineteenth 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 Vol- 
 taire's day to dwell in China or Persia, 
 
 1 Maitland, Collected Papers, iii. 288.
 
 78 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 arbi- 
 trary fashion to what is distant in time 
 or place. Ethical considerations 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 chang- 
 ing growth of new opinion, the effective- 
 ness 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 79 
 
 his book on the relation between law and 
 opinion in the nineteenth 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 pur- 
 poses of a State, in their amplest bear- 
 ings. 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 
 important bookshelf in any library pre- 
 tending to be on the highest level in this 
 truly important sphere with Green, 
 Pollock, Dicey, Hobhouse, Bosanquet, 
 Wallas, among them. Let nobody sup- 
 pose that speculations as to the State 
 and its various relations to the Individ- 
 ual are immaterial. It is held that the 
 attempts of certain French teachers to
 
 80 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 present German theories of the State 
 in French dress, are directly responsible 
 for Syndicalism in France. 
 
 Politics Politics, in the sense that I am sug- 
 
 gesting, are different from law, because 
 law tends to stereotype thought by forc- 
 ing it into fixed categories, but political 
 science, rightly handled, is for ever 
 reopening these categories, to examine 
 how they answer to contemporary facts. 
 Political science is wider than law, be- 
 cause 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. 
 
 v 
 
 A good Germans have in Weltanschauung a 
 
 word. word for which I know of no English 
 
 equivalent. The French find no easier
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 81 
 
 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 generations 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 inspir- 
 ing prose that are the proem to George 
 Eliot's Romola. Technically meaning a 
 conception of the universe, Weltan- 
 schauung covers a man's outlook upon 
 the world and time and human destinies ; 
 the mental summary of experience, 
 knowledge, duty, affections to his fellows ; 
 relations to mysterious Force and Will, 
 call it Providence, Moira, Fate, or by 
 what name we choose, invisible but 
 supreme. Such an outlook on the world
 
 82 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 and its meanings, varies with each his- 
 toric 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 
 Weltanschauung. For them, the World, 
 in this wide comprehension of that com- 
 monest 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.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 83 
 
 History, in the great conception of it, Range of 
 has often been compared to a mountain 
 chain seen far off 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 sub- 
 merged range. The sailor is the politi- 
 cian. The historian, without prejudice 
 to monographic exploration in interven- 
 ing valleys and ascending slopes, will 
 covet the vision of the bird. 
 
 According to an instructive living 
 scholar, here we come upon the great
 
 84 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 con- 
 catenation of causes and effects stretch- 
 ing forward and back into infinite time, 
 and spreading outwards over immeasur- 
 able 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 85 
 
 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 sub- 
 stitutes for patterns of written history. 
 >till the mighty commander of a later 
 age, himself Italian in stock, declared 
 that Machiavelli 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 comprehensible until 
 it came to pass. Think, for example, 
 
 1 Thucydides Mythistoricus, by F. M. Cornford (1907), 
 pp. 66-68.
 
 86 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 accept- 
 ance had been rare and superficial. The 
 protracted battle over the authority of 
 Rome, over toleration, over church gov- 
 ernment by bishops, over rite and sym- 
 bol, had been fought out. The rival 
 creeds identified themselves with politi- 
 cal 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 87 
 
 subdivided Protestantism itself, by the 
 mere fact of its existence as a conflict, 
 apart from its merits and contents, 
 extended, diverted, transformed the out- 
 look. Old worlds and systems disappear, 
 new arise, still men live but in a corner of 
 their own. 
 
 The temper of our present time is The day of 
 adverse to generalization. Harnack says 
 that in 1700 the most universal or ency- 
 clopaedic 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 combined 
 power in thought with responsible prac- 
 tice 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
 
 88 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 we are slow to answer, the reason is that 
 advance of specialization over the whole 
 field of knowledge has made the ency- 
 clopaedic 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 his- 
 tory 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 compre- 
 hended in its fullest dimensions, and for 
 that the historic recorder, like or unlike 
 the actor before him, needs insight and
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 89 
 
 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 in 
 1776, to the Appomattox Court House 
 in 1865 ; Democratic Ordering in Eng- 
 land 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 trans- 
 actions have seemed to men who across 
 long tracts of time had started them. 
 They are all political ; but the same obser- 
 vation would be just as true of the world's 
 march in the sphere of ideas, methods, 
 moral standards, religious creeds.
 
 90 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 From All agree that we have no business to 
 
 tapestries 
 to serge. 
 
 seek more 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." 1 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 muni- 
 ments, 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 
 
 De Oral. ii. 15.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 91 
 
 at our ease. Bismarck, reading a book 
 of superior calibre, once came upon a 
 portrait of an 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 singu- 
 larly 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 ac- 
 count of anything, even when they have
 
 92 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 seen it with their own eyes, except when 
 they copy from one another." l 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 weak- 
 ness of the flesh, and protesting that 
 bibliographies are sometimes so enormous 
 as to be rather a nuisance than a help, 
 unity of The unity of history is now orthodox 
 
 doctrine, 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 
 the heroic assurance that history deals 
 not with the rivalry, "but the brother- 
 
 1 Life and Letters, \. 238.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 93 
 
 hood 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 .presentation of history can 
 be adequate which neglects the growths 
 of the religious consciousness, of litera- 
 ture, 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
 
 94 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 places himself away from the State, as 
 he maintains, the farther he goes from 
 historic life. To bring descriptions of 
 the soul of a people into history, is to 
 deal with last year's snow. Who, he 
 asks, does not feel Culturgeschichte im- 
 perfect and unsatisfying, even when 
 handled by a master ? Even in Burck- 
 hardt's famous book on the Italian Re- 
 naissance, 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 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 sinis- 
 ter school of political historians, who
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 95 
 
 insist that the event is its own justifica- 
 tion. 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 mas- 
 ter-conception in men's minds and habits. 
 Of this strong meat, you will let me say 
 something later. 
 
 I have just quoted words about reli- churches 
 
 i i i as political 
 
 gious consciousness, and regions beyond realities . 
 the sphere of State. 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.
 
 96 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 West- 
 minster during the civil wars, the Four 
 Declarations of the French clergy in 
 1682, with all the array of pontiffs, 
 church princes, saints, doctors, congrega- 
 tions, presbyteries, preachers, friars, in- 
 quisitors, missioners, creeds, symbols, 
 bulls, canon laws, catechisms, -- were 
 not in truth the very essence and main- 
 spring of the vast and subtle political 
 commotions that for age after age fol- 
 lowed in their perpetual train. Is it 
 mere distortion to say that "hardly a 
 more momentous resolution can be found 
 in history" than the decision at Nicsea 
 in the fourth century ? 1 If it be right to 
 
 1 Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, 43.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 97 
 
 judge that no false system ever struck 
 more directly at the very life of Chris- 
 tianity than Arianism, then the pro- 
 scription 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 
 Revolution. 
 
 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 Author- 
 ity, say, an infallible Pope or an im- 
 pregnable Book. The political affinities 
 of religious and ecclesiastic creeds offer 
 to the historic student some of his stand- 
 ing puzzles. How comes it, for example,
 
 98 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 that the fatalism implied in Calvinistic 
 Protestantism 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 
 circumstance bearing down the most 
 stringent of logical arguments. 
 Political Our own day offers a singular kaleido- 
 
 scope. Men thought it a crushing 
 scandal in the sixteenth century when 
 Francis I. was suspected of making terms 
 for himself with the arch enemy of Chris- 
 tian mankind, the Khalif of Turkey. 
 Richelieu, one of the half-dozen sovereign 
 names in the European record, system- 
 atically 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 99 
 
 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 in- 
 stitutions, 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,
 
 100 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Mahommedans, Parsees. Politics are ad- 
 mittedly as if from the necessity of the 
 thing, 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. 
 Religion as Sympathy, again, in principles of gov- 
 
 cause and j t t 
 
 pretext ernment 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 secu- 
 larized Republic in France, and an 
 absolutist Monarchy that is half theoc- 
 racy in Russia. Ecclesiastical historians 
 themselves have taught us how constantly 
 church machinery has been used as a
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 101 
 
 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 persecutions in Bohemia, 
 as designed to fortify German dominion 
 over the Czechs ; the Spanish Inquisi- 
 tion, 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 is no cynicism. The 
 enthusiasm, no doubt, is the more attrac-
 
 102 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 live and exciting to reflective minds. 
 Yet policy, hidden or avowed, may be a 
 master-key. 
 
 History and According to some scientific historians * 
 with a right to speak, history does not 
 solve questions ; 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 sel- 
 dom 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 
 foreshortens. To contemporaries events 
 are confused, obscured by passing 
 accidents, mixed with all sorts of foreign 
 elements. Even men of the compass of 
 
 1 For instance, Fustel de Coulanges, Questions Historiques, 
 Preface (1893).
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 103 
 
 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 Bis- 
 marck's once reminded him that Scho- 
 penhauer used to sit with him at dinner 
 every day in the hotel at Frankfurt. 
 "No, I had no business with him, I had 
 neither time nor inclination for philos- 
 ophy," said Bismarck, "and I know 
 nothing of Schopenhauer's system." It 
 was summarily explained to him as vest- 
 ing the primacy of the will in self-con-
 
 104 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 sciousness. "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 Improvisation has far more 
 to do in politics than historians or other 
 people think. 
 
 Dubious History's direct lessons are few, its 
 
 historic specific morals rare. To say this is not 
 parallels. j. Q disparage the grand inspiration that 
 present may draw from past, or the price- 
 less value of old examples of lofty public 
 deeds and magnanimous men. Plu- 
 tarch'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. 
 
 1 Lebenserinnerungen von Julius v. Eckhardt, ii. 122-8.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 105 
 
 This, however, is a very different ques- 
 tion. 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 Revolu- 
 tion and of the Empire. The Old Testa- 
 ment was often made to play the same 
 part in our own Rebellion. They are 
 convenient to the 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 Revolution 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 Frenchman than he has with
 
 106 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 extinct 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 pro- 
 fessor, 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 politi-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 107 
 
 cians 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.' 'Cer- 
 tainly,' he replied, 'the teachings of 
 history are plain.' 'You mean, of 
 course,' I said, scenting some signs of 
 disagreement, ' 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 ele- 
 ments of human nature, the general 
 body of two political cases is never 
 exactly the same. Nations are not the National 
 
 , i . . , -, . -, .-i ideals never 
 
 same, their ideals are wide apart, their thesame . 
 standing aims and preoccupations are 
 different. It is inconceivable to Eng-
 
 108 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 lishmen and Germans and especially 
 Scotsmen, most idealist of all, that men 
 should not care for great industrial enter- 
 prises, persistent experiment, wide mer- 
 cantile adventure. They reproach the 
 Latin countries with lack of energy, and 
 cannot understand 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 
 
 1 Sabatier, V Orientation relig. de la France, p. 166.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 109 
 
 may be forgiven at the ingenious paral- 
 lel discovered by a 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 
 Demosthenes had won the battle, a 
 desperate state of things would have 
 survived. So if Sadowa and Sedan had 
 gone amiss, the resplendent orb of Ger- 
 man radiance and intellectual power 
 would never have broken through the 
 nebulous skies of a disunited fatherland, 
 
 1 Droysen, as cited in Guilland's L'Allemagne Nouvelle et sea 
 Historiens,p. 191.
 
 110 
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Germany 
 and France 
 as rival 
 civilizing 
 forces. 
 
 and diffused its beams over the civilized 
 world. The same singular parallel finds 
 still more emphatic expression in that 
 admirable man and historic thinker, 
 Dollinger. For once forgetting 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 em- 
 phasis 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 approach the German people in 
 many-sidedness ; no other possesses in 
 so great a measure, side by side with this
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY HI 
 
 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 
 priesthood, and to this high vocation they 
 have done no dishonour." 1 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 encountering the proposition 
 that "vanity is the accepted characteris- 
 tic 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 
 
 1 Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, Eng. Trans. (1892), p. 205.
 
 112 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 that the ascendancy of a ruder civiliza- 
 tion, and the subjection by brute strength 
 of a superior civilization, is sheer mis- 
 chief 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. 1 So harshly 
 may illustrious philosophic oracles fall 
 out of tune. 
 
 Goethe on Leaving ancient history aside, I can- 
 reca h* the Macedonian Goethe's 
 
 generous recognition of his debt to the 
 supposed Graeculi of France; 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 
 
 1 Representative Government, chap. xvi.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 113 
 
 tone of good manners in French transla- 
 tion of his own books, due, as he sup- 
 poses, 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, Ency- 
 clopaedists, Rousseau. In the nineteenth, 
 without ignoring the fame of Goethe, 
 Schiller, Heine, the French are not with- 
 out some reason for the vanity that is
 
 114 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 imputed to them. French writers con- 
 spicuously engaged the attention of man- 
 kind. 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 Proudhon, Saint Simon (not 
 the famous journalist of Versailles, but 
 the earliest name in the socialistic fer- 
 ment a hundred years ago), and Comte, 
 unapproached by any of them in the 
 power, originality, and intellectual 
 resource with which he wove together 
 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,
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 115 
 
 and one of those who by force of per- 
 sonality apart from literary contribution 
 exercise a potent influence on their time. 
 Renan brought wide learning and infinite 
 fascination of form to a theological dis- 
 solution 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 extrava- 
 gances, 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.
 
 116 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 an The last of these shining names 
 
 illustrative , ,. . . 
 
 digression, prompts a word or digression on a point 
 in what I have already said on the 
 fortunes of books. Taine was a strenu- 
 ous worker and high-hearted man if 
 ever man was. His six volumes on the 
 French Revolution, its antecedents, 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 fol- 
 lowed 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 117 
 
 school. "The document does not speak 
 to Taine," says his critic ; " it is he who all 
 the time is speaking to the document." 1 
 
 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 consum- 
 mate. The elements are skilfully com- 
 
 1 Taine, Historien de la Rev. Franc. 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.
 
 118 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. 
 Distri- Let us repeat : sovereign gifts of brain 
 
 national an ^ heart have not been so unequally 
 gifts. 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 119 
 
 means say the extinction, but the 
 changed hold, of the cosmopolitan sense 
 of human relations that sounded a sil- 
 ver 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 altru- 
 ism, one at any rate of the correctives 
 is the thought how in the glories of 
 our common civilization, each nation has 
 its own particular share, how marked the 
 debt of all to each. How disastrous 
 would have been the gap if European 
 history had missed the cosmopolitan 
 radiation of 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
 
 120 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 of grand worlds in thought, wisdom, 
 knowledge, the poetic beauty, civil 
 life, humane pity, immortally asso- 
 ciated 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, Mon- 
 taigne : Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo : 
 Kant, Goethe, Beethoven : Cervantes, 
 Columbus, 1 Las Casas : Hume, Scott, 
 
 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.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 121 
 
 Adam Smith, Burns : Erasmus, Grotius, 
 Rembrandt : Franklin, Hamilton, Wash- 
 ington, 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 mankind. To deride 
 patriotism marks impoverished 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
 
 122 
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 of those who have the public ear in 
 Europe, the scale of armament reveals 
 the unwelcome fact that we live in a 
 military age. 
 TheEng- Evolution, for reasons easily under- 
 
 as political stood, is the most overworked word in all 
 vernacular, 
 
 l an g ua g e o f the hour. But we can- 
 not do without it, and those are right who 
 say that in the evolution of politics noth- 
 ing 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 aspira- 
 tions 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 123 
 
 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 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, constitu- 
 tional government in terms of thought, 
 and furnished the mainspring of political 
 philosophy for long ages after. 1 Fred- 
 erick the Great says that his illumination 
 and emancipation came from Locke, 
 though we cannot be sure that our care- 
 ful and candid sage would have found the 
 career of his Prussian disciple a pattern 
 
 1 Prof. Sorley in Camb. Hist, of Eng. Lit. viii.
 
 124 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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, 1 and 50 of Spanish. Mark 
 the change from Bacon, who sent his 
 
 1 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 posses- 
 sions and elsewhere, one might make the total sixty-five 
 millions. Finally, the modest addition of something under 
 100 millions in the United States.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 125 
 
 Advancement 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 for- 
 get 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
 
 126 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 propagation 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 comparison with the diffusion of Eng- 
 lish. 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 onwards the use of Latin 
 was pretty complete, even in northern 
 Africa. Greek was common through- 
 out the Empire as the language of com-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 127 
 
 merce in the fourth century. St. Augus- 
 tine 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 com- 
 ing 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 de- 
 serve 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.
 
 128 
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Nationalist 
 sentiment 
 changed to 
 political 
 idea. 
 
 VI 
 
 From reflections on the contributions 
 of great nations to various aspects and 
 phases of general civilization, it is no 
 abrupt transfer of thought to 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 nation- 
 ality there is nothing new. It was one 
 of the main keys of Luther's Reforma- 
 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, intoler- 
 able economic disorder, governmental 
 failure, senseless wars, senseless ambi- 
 tions, and the misery that was their
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 129 
 
 baleful fruit, quickened the instinct of 
 Nationality. First it inflamed vision- 
 aries, 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 principle; then fervid prepos- 
 session ; ending where it is to-day, in 
 dogma, whether accepted or evaded. 
 
 A man who wishes to trace perplexities Partition 
 
 , MI P 11- 
 
 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 Po- 
 land was only a breakfast for the great 
 armed powers, but where would they 
 dine? "After all our love of tranquil- 
 lity," he exclaimed, "and all our
 
 130 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 expedients to preserve it, alas ! poor 
 Peace !" And well does the historian 
 to-day 1 declare, in a poignant 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 whirl- 
 pool 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. 
 Advent of Among the glowing spirits who have 
 been pillars of cloud by day and pillars 
 of fire by night agents in transform- 
 ing abstract social idealism into violent 
 
 _ l Sorel, La Question Orient au XVI II" Siecle (1878), p. 306.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 131 
 
 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 Ger- 
 many, 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 genera- 
 tion, and Hungary shook Western Europe 
 with her story. But the Congress of 
 Vienna achieved a European settlement
 
 132 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 extinction of all the light and sacred 
 fire of that very spirit. It was this 
 systematized defiance, that outraged his 
 whole nature in Mazzini. 
 
 Without forgetting the splendid eleva- 
 tion 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 133 
 
 unreason into the flagrantly irrational. 
 Italian genius more characteristically 
 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 
 antechamber, 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
 
 134 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 that the devil and wicked men can make. 
 "Machiavelli," he cried, "has for long 
 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 argu- 
 The Italian ment was inexorable. In other countries 
 
 Prophet and . . . . 
 
 geometrical impatience of inequality and sunering 
 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."
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 135 
 
 No fallacy has ever wrought more dis- 
 astrous 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, dis- 
 cord 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 dogmatic 
 and secularized Churches, but to set up
 
 136 
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 a new spiritual gospel in their place, and 
 to light up human life and public duty 
 with new meaning. 
 
 Nationality As men with an instinct or a reasoned 
 "volution- f eeun g f r emancipation, even now turn 
 ary secret over Mazzini's burning 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 degra- 
 dations of foreign rule in Italy, were 
 cruel haunting spectres of their own days. 
 Nationality became the deepest and most 
 powerful of revolutionary secrets. Of
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 137 
 
 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 states- 
 man. Four Italians played high parts in 
 modern history, and Cavour, endowed 
 with the union of force and brains that 
 is named virtu, is called as supple as 
 Mazarin, as ingenious as Alberoni, as 
 intrepid and swift as Napoleon. 
 
 Though no term in politics is of more what is 
 frequent use than Nation, it is not easy 
 to define. There 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 hu- 
 
 a 
 Nation ?
 
 138 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 maner things than definition, when he 
 spoke his famous sentence of such moving 
 simplicity the polar star of civilized 
 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 compensa- 
 tion after the Prussian victory at Sadowa, 
 important men denounced it as "blas- 
 phemy against the principle of national- 
 ities." Let us theorize for a moment. 
 Here is what the dictionary has to tell 
 us of a Nation : "An extensive aggregate
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 139 
 
 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 
 speak twenty-four languages in the Aus- 
 trian army. Another authority finds 
 in usage, quern penes arbitrium est et 
 jus et norma loquendi, that "wherever 
 a community has both political inde- 
 pendence and a distinctive character 
 recognizable in its members, as well as
 
 140 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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, com- 
 mon pride in past incidents. But no 
 single element in the list makes a decisive 
 test. Language will not answer the pur- 
 pose; for Switzerland has three lan- 
 guages, 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 141 
 
 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 decided by the politi- 
 cal 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, as we may discern 
 in Balkan perplexities. Devotion to a 
 dynasty has made nations. So has pas- 
 sion for a creed. So, perhaps, most of 
 all, that ingenita erg a patriam caritas, 
 the natural fondness for the land where 
 we are born. 
 
 The lineal descent of national stocks, Ethnologic 
 through dim ages with no sure or intelli- 
 gible chronicler, offers a boundless open- 
 ing for ethnologic disputation. Learned
 
 142 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 Roman 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 population of new modifying elements 
 appears an obscure and mysterious pro- 
 cess. The problem is at this day pre- 
 senting itself on a truly colossal scale in 
 the United States, where the old floods of 
 immigration from Ireland and Germany 
 are now replenished by swelling hosts 
 from Southern and Central Europe, 
 Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russian
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 143 
 
 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 United States, 
 their high and strong self-consciousness 
 as a nation, is one of the supreme factors 
 in the modern world's affairs. 
 
 The resistance of Spain to Napoleon Spain and 
 from 1808 to 1813 has been called the Nap le n ' 
 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 reli- 
 gious passion, the inheritance of common 
 language, ferocious common pride in
 
 144 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 triumphant warfare for ten long centuries 
 against hated faith and blood, all awoke 
 and maintained in full blaze, on Napo- 
 leon's uncalculating provocation, 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 politi- 
 cal 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 Lom- 
 bard kingdom, a thousand years before, 
 established unity of government in the 
 Italian peninsula, and laid the founda- 
 tions of modern Italy. 
 Sicily. Sicily has found a dwelling-place for
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 145 
 
 many nations, but as the most learned of 
 our historians 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 Nation- 
 ality, from the Sicilian Vespers in the 
 thirteenth century down to Garibaldi and 
 Crispi in the nineteenth. 
 
 Let me venture on a parting observa- National 
 tion as to Nationality. It has been on 
 the whole a commanding and accepted
 
 146 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 diplo- 
 matic 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 
 inventions stimulate and nourish. Even 
 those who are least disposed to share the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 147 
 
 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. 
 
 VII 
 
 Another question that I can here do progress as 
 little more than note, has long had irre- 
 
 sistible interest for powerful minds. It andfiied 
 
 historic 
 
 could not be otherwise. Is the track all law. 
 upward ? That is not all. The question 
 strikes far deeper than merely social and
 
 148 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 political interest. It goes to the very 
 quick of modern interpretation of the 
 working of past history and our present 
 universe. There are, we may suppose, 
 three explanations, theories, or hypothe- 
 ses of the course of human things, and 
 the power that guides them, shapes them, 
 and controls them. One assigns this 
 supreme mysterious control to Provi- 
 dence ; 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 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 Prog- 
 ress, in its ordinary mundane accepta- 
 tion. Progress, like Toleration, or Equal- 
 ity, is one of the reigning words most
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 149 
 
 familiar in common use, yet having 
 extremely diverse significance. It stands 
 for a hundred different things. Whether 
 we mean advance in material civiliza- 
 tion 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 contemporary causes are 
 assumed to be constantly at work, tend- 
 ing 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
 
 150 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 progress, in feelings and opinions. 1 
 Close examination forces us to be con- 
 tent 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 prob- 
 lem, for instance, in the region of modern 
 historic speculation, than the 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 Eng- 
 lish, Scotch, Irish, and French stocks 
 among their northern neighbours. Prog- 
 ress, says one grave thinker, not over- 
 stating a plain historic truth, "is the rare 
 exception ; races may remain in the 
 lowest barbarism, or their development 
 be arrested at some more advanced 
 
 1 Mill's Letters, ii. 359.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 151 
 
 stage; actual decay may alternate with 
 progress, and even true progress implies 
 some admixture of decay." l An extraor- 
 dinarily 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 think- 
 ing about, than can be found in any other 
 book of the same period. 2 
 
 From vast tracts and periods of litera- A modem 
 ture, it is almost startling to think that 
 the idea of progress, which is the animat- 
 ing force of so much of the thought, 
 
 1 Leslie Stephen, English Thought in the 18th Century, i. 17. 
 
 2 National Life and Character : a Forecast, by Charles H. 
 Pearson, 1893.
 
 152 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 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 govern- 
 ment, there burned a fervid hope that 
 somehow declension would be arrested, 
 though the conditions that produced 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 153 
 
 to prepare a future that should be all 
 right ? Bishop Berkeley, for example, 
 the most ardent philanthropist of his 
 day, despaired of the distempered civiliza- 
 tion of his country, and showed in prac- 
 tice by missionary emigration to Rhode 
 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 realize 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
 
 154 POLITICS [AND HISTORY 
 
 the difference to the eagles and falcons 
 Modem who survey history. We know more 
 ments. an d more of Nature in the world of 
 matter; we have more power over its 
 energies ; men have increased and multi- 
 plied 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 Eu- 
 ropean history. Forgive me for mention- 
 ing 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 ex- 
 tended and ramified in a truly extraor- 
 dinary way during the last fifty years, 
 until it is now one of the subtlest inter- 
 national agencies, uniting distant interests
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 155 
 
 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. 
 Towering 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. 
 
 You remember Gibbon's declaration compara- 
 that if a man were called to fix the period perity of the 
 in the history of the world during which ancient 
 
 empire. 
 
 the condition of the human race was
 
 156 POLITICS AND, HISTORY 
 
 most happy and prosperous, he would 
 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 character- 
 istic daring, puts and answers the same 
 question. "If an angel of the Lord," 
 Mommsen assures us, " were to strike the 
 balance whether the domain ruled by 
 Severus Antoninus was governed with the 
 greater intelligence and the greater 
 humanity then or now, whether civiliza- 
 tion 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 157 
 
 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 triumphant Rome 
 had sunk, after the storm of barbaric 
 invasion had abated, after literature had 
 been recovered, 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 Benvenuto Cellini, Boccaccio, 
 Machiavelli, Vasari. "This Italian soci- 
 ety of the sixteenth century," he says, 
 in the literary undress of a private letter, 
 "is an assemblage of ferocious brutes 
 with passionate imagination. The foot- 
 men of to-day would not endure the 
 company of the Duke and Duchess of
 
 158 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Ferrari, of Paul III., Julius II., Borgia, 
 etc. No wit nor grace nor ease nor 
 amiability, no gentleness, no ideas, no 
 philosophy. Pedantry, gross supersti- 
 tion, 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 aver- 
 age morality of any age, "it is question- 
 able whether the average morality of 
 civilized ages has largely varied." Evi- 
 dence enough remains that there was in 
 ancient Rome, as in London or Manches- 
 ter to-day, "a preponderating mass of 
 those who loved their children and their 
 homes, who were good neighbours and
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 159 
 
 faithful friends, who conscientiously dis- 
 charged their civil duties." 1 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 
 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) Reproofs to 
 by what seemed an audacious doubt. supers ti- 
 " Hitherto it is questionable," he said, tion * 
 "if all the mechanical inventions yet 
 made have lightened the day's toil of 
 any human being. They have enabled a 
 
 1 Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the 
 Christian Church, p. 138.
 
 160 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 greater population to live the same life of 
 drudgery and imprisonment, and an in- 
 creased 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 inven- 
 tion. The "drudgery and imprison- 
 ment" is not what it was. Child labour 
 
 1 Polit. Econ. ii. 326.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 161 
 
 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. 
 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 unex- 
 pected bearings, because ratio of popu- 
 lation is one of the main elements in all 
 computations of fighting strength. It 
 is the recruiting sergeant now holds the 
 international scales. 
 
 The decrepitude that ended in the 
 Latin conquest of Constantinople at the 
 
 M
 
 162 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 
 communities are universally bound 
 somehow or another to be progressive. 
 Whether that decrepitude was due to 
 Byzantine incompetence for working 
 government on the vast imperial scale, 
 or to the misuse of intellectual energy in 
 futile and exasperating polemics, or to the 
 gross and crushing subjection of spiritual 
 power to temporal, -- these are questions 
 of the first interest to all who seek philo- 
 sophic 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 
 isiam. contact with Eastern races will increase
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 163 
 
 the sum of human happiness. And what 
 of evolution among Eastern races them- 
 selves ? 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 degrad- 
 ing 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
 
 164 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 generally admitted, and that it is not 
 incompatible with solid intelligence and 
 all manly virtues we know. We hardly 
 find instances 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 nationality 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 procession of changes that have 
 swept through culture, civilization, and 
 the modern world, some stupendous 
 fixities of human things. If we think, 
 
 1 On these points, see Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 136- 
 140 ; Bryce's Studies in History and Jurisprudence, ii., Essay 13.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 165 
 
 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 
 language is, and how immutably the 
 tongues of leading stocks in the world 
 seem to have struck their roots. Then 
 consider the three great faiths Chris- 
 tendom, 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 
 religions in their vast history, how stead- 
 fastly 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. 
 On one thing, at any rate, optimist and
 
 166 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Progress', pessimist agree, that progress is no au- 
 
 no automa- 
 ton, tomaton, 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 
 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 incon- 
 stant moon. Though Greek is not com- 
 pulsory with you here, we may go back 
 for the last poetic word on all this, to the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 167 
 
 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 "The state 
 century is applauded by a German 
 
 1 Antigone, 332-64. Jebb, p. 76.
 
 168 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Machiavel of the nineteenth, for disclos- 
 ing and impressing the mighty funda- 
 mental that "the State is Force." We call 
 Treitschke and Machiavelli by a com- 
 mon name without offence, because both 
 writers have the signal courage and rare 
 merit to proclaim what each of them 
 takes for rigid and relentless truth. 
 Rulers, 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. Politi- 
 cal 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."
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 169 
 
 We all know, to be sure, that in one in what 
 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 funda- 
 mental 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 prin- 
 ciple is no beacon-fire, until we have
 
 170 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 vigilantly explored it. What sort of 
 State, what sort of Force ? What is to 
 be the place of the 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 de- 
 liverers. 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 171 
 
 the Spanish Inquisition. Yet it was in 
 fact a definite branch of the State, and at 
 an auto-da-fe any Familiar with a con- 
 science 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 
 conditions of the Force, by whom, for 
 instance, and on what terms it is wielded. 
 The maxim does not harden into a doc- 
 trine fit for use, until in a given case we 
 know of the force, what are its instru- 
 ments 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, the two 
 great agencies of government ? Above
 
 172 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 all, let us know what price it costs, when 
 the full and final balance has been struck. 
 Cavour for Cavour, to whom a foremost place is not 
 cannon. 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 govern- 
 ment, to Metaphysics in speculation 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 discussion. With un- 
 criticized bureaucracy called to no ac- 
 count by those over whom it is set, he 
 had as little sympathy as with meta- 
 
 1 Scritti, ii. 225.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 173 
 
 politics. Bureaucracy has not to per- 
 suade, 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. Relieved 
 from these wholesome 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 depressing for a people's 
 political energy and not any less so to 
 those who work it than that discussion 
 in a representative assembly, which is 
 the salutary substitute. Such a system 
 Cavour from his heart distrusted. He 
 was the man of parliaments, constitutional 
 minister, murmuring on his death-bed 
 against absolute power and state of siege.
 
 174 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 Bismarck Bismarck was a giant of the older well- 
 known type, working through imposed 
 
 \^mossftt 
 
 authority and armed force. Before he 
 made war, first on Austria, next on 
 France, he declared war upon his parlia- 
 ment. "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 power- 
 ful man was rapidly to learn from his 
 rude encounter with the Church from 
 1875 to 1878. The famous Culturkampf, 
 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 175 
 
 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, recalling 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 with- 
 out the three penitential days under 
 falling snows in the Canossa courtyard, 
 where a German prince eight hundred 
 years before had bent before an ecclesias-
 
 176 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 tic 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 humilia- 
 tion that held a lesson. 
 
 influence in Though the Middle Age is over, though 
 Authority. no 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 177 
 
 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 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 cen- 
 tury 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 establish- 
 ment. 1 The Erastian principle has been 
 
 1 See The Thesis of Erastus touching Excommunication, by 
 Rev. Robert Lee, Edinburgh, 1844.
 
 178 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 greatly transformed in the United King- 
 dom in the last sixty years, and further 
 transformations await it. The internal 
 temper and spirit of the Church of Eng- 
 land 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 exclusive 
 of Protestant communions. A famous 
 French writer, a Piedmontese statesman 
 of the Napoleonic age, wrote a book in 
 1817 upon the Pope, defining and vin- 
 dicating the papal sovereignty, in the 
 same temper and on the same lines as the
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 179 
 
 Machiavellian school in the area of 
 State. De Maistre has been styled one Spiritual 
 of the Vatican's praetorian guard. In organized 
 his dogmatic fixity, his poor opinion of state - 
 mankind, his hatred of all individual 
 claim, his readiness to shape an argument 
 in anger, that tells and hits the mark 
 without wounding 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 compounds are more common 
 
 1 A piece upon De Maistre is to be found in my Critical 
 Miscellanies (ed. of 1886), vol. ii.
 
 180 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 even in a rationalistic age. I only name 
 De Maistre, because it is always an 
 advantage 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 govern- 
 ment. His argument is simple. Any 
 organized society demands a govern- 
 ment. On various grounds, in the 
 organized Catholicism of Rome, that 
 government must be a monarchy, and 
 being infallible it must be absolute over 
 all such as choose to remain its subjects, 
 subjects called by the kinder name of 
 children. In imposing such force as he
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 181 
 
 commands upon remonstrants, the pon- 
 tiff 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 
 dealing with spiritual sovereignty has 
 not been approved by all who find repose 
 or shelter within the Roman fold. Noth- 
 ing, 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,
 
 182 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 Pobedon- 
 ostzeff 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 they deserve the 
 interest of intelligent readers of the 
 newspapers. 
 
 cienchersof "How vague and cloudy," we are told 
 by gd readers, "were many of the 
 German treatises of the last 60 years on 
 
 1 Acton, History of Freedom and other Essays, 1907, p. 192.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 183 
 
 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 bril- 
 liant 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-
 
 184 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 pro- 
 nounced 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 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, 
 
 1 Politik: Vorlesungen, 2 vols. (1899).
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 185 
 
 it nurses selfishness, intrigue, material 
 greed, coarse egotism. War is the great- 
 est 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 dis- 
 cipline in courage, self-respect, and the 
 principle of honour. 
 
 These sanguinary sophistries find re- 
 sounding 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 
 neighbour. Not your sympathies, but 
 your stout-hearted prowess, is what saves
 
 186 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 the unfortunate." * All this glorification 
 of war, although shining poets of our 
 own lent to it the genius of their music 
 not so many years ago, is surely as dis- 
 astrous an outcome for the school that 
 presents it, as was Machiavelli's choice 
 of Caesar Borgia to be the grand example 
 of his Prince. 
 
 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 fore- 
 Kant's most of all his countrymen. Outside of 
 landing philosophy, he owed much to Bayle, 
 peace. Rousseau, St. Pierre, above all to 
 Montesquieu. But he watched the two 
 
 1 Bernhardi, Deutschland und der ndchste Krieg.
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 187 
 
 great affairs of his time, the revolt of 
 the American Colonies, and the over- 
 throw of the French monarchy, with an 
 interest hardly less keen than that of 
 Burke himself, with whose later views he 
 warmly sympathized. 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 dogmatic, 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 prepara- 
 tion for war. He presses the evil conse-
 
 188 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 
 exhaustion of energy, comes a peace on 
 terms that plain reason would have sug- 
 gested from the first. The remedy is a 
 federal league of nations in which even 
 the weakest member looks for protection 
 to the united power, and the adjudication 
 of the collective will. States, Kant pre- 
 dicts, 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 189 
 
 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 government. 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 The two 
 
 . PI* i Schools. 
 
 high view or their tellow-creatures. 
 Mazzini says of the historian of the Coun- 
 cil of Trent, "Like most statesmen, 
 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 they
 
 190 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 deserve. In England, save in bad periods, 
 our most politic princes and rulers, 
 though circumspect 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 education 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 pre- 
 vailed 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 191 
 
 great politics as no more than a game of 
 skill, do not flatter their human material. 
 Tocqueville, for instance, was philos- 
 
 on the 
 
 opher, member of parliament, and for- political 
 
 , TT* man. 
 
 eign 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 empti- 
 ness 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 
 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
 
 192 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 
 substantial things from their vanity, 
 while giving little substance back. You 
 will not do half so well with their ambi- 
 tion 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 remem- 
 ber, though in his earlier day he was the 
 approving critic and skilful analyst of 
 certain forms of democracy, was well 
 described as an aristocrat who accepted 
 his defeat. And far less conscientious, 
 careful, and well -trained thinkers than
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 193 
 
 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 autoc- 
 racy, which had twice ruined the French 
 State in his own lifetime, 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 ought to Maxim for 
 have a heart full of sensibility. He ought 
 to love and respect mankind, and to 
 fear himself. . . . Political arrange- 
 ment, 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
 
 194 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 proc- 
 lamation that the true lawgiver ought 
 to love and respect mankind and fear 
 himself, sets a cardinal mark of division 
 between two schools of modern govern- 
 ment. Men like Rousseau, Fichte, 
 Mazzini, Burke, whose eloquence has 
 wielded supreme influence in the politi- 
 cal sphere within the last 150 years ; 
 or the men like Byron, Shelley, Burns, 
 and the poets of freedom in continental 
 Europe, had not much in common with 
 the sword-bearer of English Puritanism, 
 though what they had in common was
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 195 
 
 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 mind 
 that is the man approved itself uncon- 
 querable by force. 
 
 What a withering mistake it is if we The Mind 
 
 i j i P j -.is the Man." 
 
 let indolence ot mood tempt us into 
 regarding all ecclesiastical or 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,
 
 196 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 princi- 
 ple, that constitute the fascination, in- 
 struction, 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 govern- 
 ment, 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 197 
 
 stubborn prejudice; it cannot be ad- 
 justed in an instant, or it may be a gener- 
 ation, to spin and weave new material 
 into a well-finished cloth. There is a 
 virtuous and not uninfluential school, 
 and Mill leaned in their direction, who 
 think that there exists in every com- 
 munity 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 exhor- 
 tation to a university. But this is not 
 to say that the State will be fortified in its
 
 198 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 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 theatre have been, it is true, most 
 sensible of everlasting ironies in the 
 drama. : 'The most malicious demo- 
 crat," Bismarck said, "can have no idea 
 what nullity and charlatanry are con- 
 cealed 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
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 199 
 
 Waterloo to bind one another to make the 
 precepts of the Christian religion, as set 
 forth in Holy Scripture, the sole guide 
 of their public conduct, with what edify- 
 ing 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 lie. English diploma- 
 tists 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 inter-
 
 200 POLITICS AND HISTORY 
 
 pretations 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 cheerful tricks of fortitude. Such 
 moods have nothing in common with 
 Leopardi's poetic gloom over the hypoc- 
 risies of destiny ; or the dare-devil wit of 
 Don Juan; or the mockeries of Heine; 
 least of all with Swift, a born politi-
 
 POLITICS AND HISTORY 201 
 
 cian, if ever there was one, but one who 
 had no political chance, and avenged 
 himself by letting irony blacken into 
 savage and impious misanthropy. With- 
 out making the mistake 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.
 
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