John Acton

“ About the year 1770 things had been brought back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition which the Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State,—ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios,—burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. ”

“ It is the boast of modern civilisation to have undone this system and to have substituted for it that which experience proves to be most favourable to justice. But the absolutists of Democracy and monarchy rank their principles of government at a higher value than the purposes of society and civilisation, and create an idol to which they are ready to sacrifice the safeguards of property, the protection of virtue, and the sanctity of private life. ”

“ They thought it unscientific to destroy a real political force. Monarchy, Aristocracy, Prelacy, were things that could be made innocuous, that could be adjusted, limited, and preserved. The very essence of the new Party was compromise. They saw that it is an error to ride a principle to death, to push things to an extreme, to have an eye for one thing only, to prefer abstractions to realities, to disregard practical conditions. ”

“ They saw that in critical times good men have seldom strength for their goodness, and yield to those who have grasped the meaning of the maxim that you cannot make an omelette if you are afraid to break the eggs. They saw that public morality differs from private, because no Government can turn the other cheek, or can admit that mercy is better than justice. And they could not define the difference or draw the limits of exception; or tell what other standard for a nation’s acts there is than the judgment which Heaven pronounces in this world by success. ”

“ It was the time when Goethe was amazed that any sane person should think the revolution of July a topic of interest, and when William Humboldt, the most central figure in Germany, the confidant of Schiller and Goethe, of Wolf and Niebuhr, who had fought Talleyrand at Vienna on the memorable day on which legitimacy was born, who had forged the link between science and force by organising a university at Berlin, and who, until the murder of Kotzebue, had been the pride and the hope of intelligent Prussia, devoted the maturity of his powers to Malay roots. ”

“ La liberté n’est pas dès qu’on la subordonne. Elle n’est pas un principe purement négatif, un simple élément de contrôle et de critique. Elle est le principe actif, créateur organisateur par excellence. Elle est le moteur et la règle, la source de toute vie, et le principe de l’ordre. Elle est, en un mot, le nom que prend la conscience souveraine, lorsque, se posant en face du monde social et politique, elle émerge du moi pour modeler les sociétés sur les données de la raison.—Brisson, Revue Nationale, xxiii. ”

“ To say that because of the union between Church and State it is right to persecute, would condemn all toleration; and to say that the objects of the State have nothing to do with religion, would condemn all persecution. But persecution and toleration are equally true in principle, considered politically; only one belongs to a more highly developed civilisation than the other. At one period toleration would destroy society; at another, persecution is fatal to liberty. The theory of intolerance is wrong only if founded absolutely upon religious motives ”

“ If the past is not judged by the present, it must be judged by the event, which is the verdict of the power that governs the universe. Our view must be based not on theory but experience. History conveys no wisdom to men who refuse to verify and register its conclusions. Failure is always deserved, and that which perishes perishes by its own fault. Nothing in the memory of mankind broke down more disastrously than the scheme of ruling Western Europe by the combined Empire and Papacy. It brought upon the German and Italian people a long succession of sorrows and humiliations ”

“ The knowledge of good and evil was not an exclusive and sublime prerogative assigned to states, or nations, or majorities. When it had been defined and recognised as something divine in human nature, its action was to limit power by causing the sovereign voice within to be heard above the expressed will and settled custom of surrounding men. By that hypothesis, the soul became more sacred than the state, because it receives light from above, as well as because its concerns are eternal, and out of all proportion with the common interests of government. ”

“ On a memorable occasion the assembled Athenians declared it monstrous that they should be prevented from doing whatever they chose. No force that existed could restrain them; and they resolved that no duty should restrain them, and that they would be bound by no laws that were not of their own making. In this way the emancipated people of Athens became a tyrant; and their Government, the pioneer of European freedom, stands condemned with a terrible unanimity by all the wisest of the ancients. They ruined their city by attempting to conduct war by debate in the market-place. ”

“ When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope. We think we shall run well when we have the full use of our limbs and the bracing air of independence, and we believe that we shall soon obtain something positive which will not only more than compensate us for what we have renounced, but will be so well worth offering to others that we may venture to proselytise as fast as our zeal for truth may prompt us. ”

“ In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fénelon, the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and another, that genius poured in torrents from his eyes. ”

“ Since that time a philosophy of history has been attempted upon the principles of almost every system. The result has not always been to the advantage of history, or to the credit of the philosophers. "When things are known and found out, then they can descant upon them ; they can knit them into certain causes, they can reduce them to their principles. If any instance of experience stands against them, they can range it in order by some distinctions. But all this is but a web of the wit ; it can work nothing." ”

“ Unity and liberty are the only legitimate principle on which the position of a Church in a State can be regulated, but the distance between them is immeasurable, and the transition extremely difficult. To pass from religious unity to religious liberty is to effect a complete inversion in the character of the State, a change in the whole spirit of legislation, and a still greater revolution in the minds and habits of men. So great a change seldom happens all at once. The law naturally follows the condition of society, which does not suddenly change. ”

“ C’est l’erreur, c’est l’iniquité, c’est le vice, que la civilisation tend à emporter dans sa marche irrésistible; mais la vie des individus et des peuples est devenue pour elle une chose sacrée. Elle transforme plutôt qu’elle ne détruit les choses qui s’opposent à son développement; elle procède par absorption graduelle plutôt que par brusque exécution; elle aime à conquérir par l’influence des idées plutôt que par la force des armes, un peuple, une classe, une institution qui résiste au progrès.—Vacherot, Essais de Philosophie Critique, 443. ”

“ But in the United States no such design seems to have presided over the work of emancipation. It has been an act of war, not of statesmanship or humanity. They have treated the slave-owner as an enemy, and have used the slave as an instrument for his destruction. They have not protected the white man from the vengeance of barbarians, nor the black from the pitiless cruelty of a selfish civilisation. ”

“ Revolution is a malady, a frenzy, an interruption of the nation's growth, sometimes fatal to its existence, often to its independence. In this case revolution, by making the nation subject to others, may be the occasion of a new development. But it is not conceivable that a nation should arbitrarily and spontaneously cast off its history, reject its traditions, abrogate its law and government, and commence a new political existence. ”

“ As the Church declined the ancient State appeared, a State which knew no Church, and was the greatest force on earth, bound by no code, a law to itself. As there is no such thing as right, politics are an affair of might, a mere struggle for power. Such was the doctrine which Venice practised, in the interest of a glorious and beneficent government, and which two illustrious writers, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, made the law of modern societies.
The one thing common to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship of beauty. ”

“ To the cogency of the unwritten law, to the stern power of the disinterested idea for which men died with a passion of sacred joy in the land of the almighty dollar and the cotton-king, justice is not done. That which made the conflict terrible, and involved Europe in its complications, was not the work of premeditating slave-owners, but of men to whom State rights, not slavery, were supreme, who would have given freedom to the slaves in order, by emancipation, to secure independence. ”

“ To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased to be an aspiration of patient reasoners, and was made the perpetual charge and care of the most energetic institution and the most universal association in the world. The new law, the new spirit, the new authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed in the philosophy or in the constitution of Greece or Rome before the knowledge of the truth that makes us free. ”

“ His principles are the eternal snare of those who investigate their actions; while a flippant cynicism is the common homage paid by youth to the duty of reflection. Now no hearer, however intelligent, no student, however anti-sentimental, could fail to find in Acton's austere judgments, in the dignity of his language, in the tones of his voice, a warning against any treatment of history that was mean or utilitarian, and any view of human nature that demands of it less than "may become a man." ”

“ The ancient monarchy does not stand higher in political ethics than the republic, and it is only from the habits and sympathies of a society accustomed to monarchy that we judge more leniently the partition of Poland, the suppression of the Jesuits, the lettres de cachet, and the royal police — which enforced, like the master in the fable, a perpetual tribute of the daughters of the defenceless class of Frenchmen — than we judge the horrors of the period of vengeance. ”

“ In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every State and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. ”

“ For History must be our deliverer not only from the undue influence of other times, but from the undue influence of our own, from the tyranny of environment and the pressure of the air we breathe. It requires all historic forces to produce their record and submit to judgment, and it promotes the faculty of resistance to contemporary surroundings by familiarity with other ages and other orbits of thought. ”

“ The Government is so enlightened, the clearness of intellect is so apparent in its operations, that the people, educated and thoughtful as they are, consent to barter away some of the political privileges which the inhabitants of more free but less well governed countries cherish more than life. Other commonwealths have submitted sometimes to the fascination of eloquence. The spell that holds Prussia captive is the charm of a good administration. The re-modelled military system has been fatal to the Constitution. ”

“ Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs, exercised its demoralising influence on the illustrious democracy of Athens. It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist. ”

“ The true science of war is the history of war, the true science of religion is, I believe, the history of religion.—M. Müller, Theosophy, 3, 4. La théologie ne doit plus être que l’histoire des efforts spontanés tentés pour résoudre le problème divin. L’histoire, en effet, est la forme nécessaire de la science de tout ce qui est soumis aux lois de la vie changeante et successive. ”

“ Now liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life. Increase of freedom in the State may sometimes promote mediocrity, and give vitality to prejudice; it may even retard useful legislation, diminish the capacity for war, and restrict the boundaries of Empire. ”

“ If, taking other examples and other methods into account, historians occupy themselves with all that goes to weave the web of social life, then the work of Giesebrecht, like the work of Ranke, will appear neither sufficient nor efficient, but characteristic of a passing stage in the progress of science. But if politics and history are one, so that the historian has only to record, in absolute purity, the action of organised public forces, then he deserves to be remembered, among the best men of Germany, as one who during his lifetime was unsurpassed in mediæval narrative. ”

“ To men in general I would justify the stress I am laying on Modern History, neither by urging its varied wealth, nor the rupture with precedent, nor the perpetuity of change and increase of pace, nor the growing predominance of opinion over belief, and of knowledge over opinion, but by the argument that it is a narrative told of ourselves, the record of a life which is our own, of efforts not yet abandoned to repose, of problems that still entangle the feet and vex the hearts of men. ”

“ Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. ”

“ There is no escape from the dogma that history is the conscience of mankind unless for those who reject the collective growth, the canons that rivet the future to the past, and take their stand aloof with Archimedes. All the successions of thought during three generations constitute the shaft whose shining point is made by the Berlin interpreters of enlightened and triumphant Germany. ”

“ This applies not merely to the Christian religion, with its unfathomable mysteries and its inexhaustible fund of truth, but to the fruits of human speculation. Nobody has ever succeeded in writing a history of philosophy without incurring either the reproach that he is a mere historian, incapable of entering into the genius of any system, or a mere metaphysician, who can discern in all other philosophies only the relation they bear to his own. In religion the difficulty is greater still, and greatest of all with Catholicism. For the Church is to be seen, not in books, but in life. ”

“ There will be more perfect novels and truer systems. But she has little rivalry to apprehend until philosophy inspires finer novels, or novelists teach nobler lessons of duty to the masses of men. If ever science or religion reigns alone over an undivided empire, the books of George Eliot might lose their central and unique importance, but as the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief, they will live to the last syllable of recorded time. ”

“ Something was wanted beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience—a faculty of self-government and self-control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. This vital element, which many centures of warfare, of anarchy, of oppression had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in the pomp of ancient civilisation, was deposited on the soil of Christendom by the fertilising stream of migration that overthrew the empire of the West. ”

“ No more memorable attempt was ever made by men. If they succeeded in their momentous pleading—if they proved by experiment that a vast community, rich, intellectual, and civilised as those of Europe, guided by the accumulated experience of the older hemisphere and without its special difficulties, prejudices, and dangers, could be governed by the principles of pure Democracy, without any sacrifice of those more exalted objects which political forms exist to serve, they would inevitably exercise an overwhelming pressure on the ancient society of Europe. ”

“ For a long time the English had, perhaps, no other superiority over the Irish; yet this alone would have made the conquest a great blessing to Ireland, but for the separation of the races. Conquering races necessarily bring with them their own system of government, and there is no other way of introducing it. A nation can obtain political education only by dependence on another. Art, literature, and science may be communicated by the conquered to the conqueror; but government can be taught only by governing, therefore only by the governors; politics can only be learnt in this school. ”

“ The leaders of the movement that sprang up in the second quarter of the century were animated by the conviction that the genius and learning of the modern world went to work the wrong way, and missed its aim, not from incapacity, but from interest, influence, and prejudice. It was their belief that literature had long been an arduous and comprehensive conspiracy against truth, and that much envenomed controversy could be set at rest by exposing the manifold arts that veil substantial falsehood—suppression, distortion, interpolation, forgery, legend, myth. ”

“ For this purpose, the whole nation ought to have a share in governing itself; the Constitution ought to combine a limited and elective monarchy, with an aristocracy of merit, and such an admixture of democracy as shall admit all classes to office, by popular election. No government has a right to levy taxes beyond the limit determined by the people. All political authority is derived from popular suffrage, and all laws must be made by the people or their representatives. There is no security for us as long as we depend on the will of another man. ”

“ Above all, a Democracy has never even attempted to adopt the system of representative government which is the supreme and characteristic invention of the British monarchy. Therefore it had become almost an axiom in political science that that which ancient Rome and modern France attempted and failed to accomplish is really impossible; that Democracy, to be consistent with liberty, must subsist in solution and combination with other qualifying principles, and that complete equality is the ruin of liberty, and very prejudicial to the most valued interests of society, civilisation, and religion. ”

“ That which we must obey, that to which we are bound to reduce all civil authorities, and to sacrifice every earthly interest, is that immutable law which is perfect and eternal as God Himself, which proceeds from His nature, and reigns over heaven and earth and over all the nations.
The great question is to discover, not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind. Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free ”

“ To say that particular contingencies shall justify separation is the same thing as to say that the Confederate government is bound within certain limits, under certain conditions, and by certain laws. It is a distinct repudiation of the doctrine that the minority can enforce no rights, and the majority can commit no wrong. It is like passing from the dominion of an able despot into a constitutional kingdom. ”