John Acton

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it is also a noble sight to see the chief of a mighty and victorious nation, who was not trained to greatness, but was taken from the tailor's board and raised to his high place when passions were inflamed by an intoxicating triumph and an awful crime, staying the hand of vengeance, remitting punishment and disbanding armies, and treating as an equal the man who had been so lately and so long the most terrible of enemies, and whose splendid talents had inflicted on the people of the Union a gigantic loss in treasure, blood, and fame. ”

“ 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." ”

“ If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. ”

“ So pleasant a temper has not been granted to every German. When Reinhold said that a philosopher should bear in mind that he may err and be ready to learn from others, Fichte told him that he spoke like a man who had never been convinced in his life.
The last twenty years have made the Germans careful in the economy of force, and they waste less powder in salutes. Their soldiers were on the Loire when they began to say that their scholars were to be no more the humble servants of the foreigner. Nothing, said Mommsen, is so hollow as the pretence of humility. ”

“ But it seems clear to me that if slavery had never existed, a community divided by principles so opposite as those of Jefferson and Hamilton will be distracted by their antagonism until one of them shall prevail; and that a theory that identifies liberty with a single right, the right of doing all that you have the actual power to do, and a theory which secures liberty by certain unalterable rights, and founds it on truths which men did not invent and may not abjure, cannot both be formative principles in the same Constitution. ”

“ This is the ebb and flow of history, the perpetual flux to which, by the laws of our nature, we are subject. Above all this, there is a far higher movement ; and as the tide rolls on, now advancing, now receding, there is, amid its endless fluctuations, one thing, and one alone, which endures for ever. ”

“ The provinces, which had failed to deliver the capital from the German armies, were striving to reconquer it from the Revolution. But the victory of the lawful Government over the dreaded enemy who must always remain within the walls and cannot be got rid of, cannot end in a settlement compatible with freedom. No absolute republic can reconcile the conflict between wealth and labour in arms, for it must lead to the domination of one class of society and the economic subjugation of the other. ”

“ The scientific era had its own lesson for historians. The world proceeded on its new path with increasing velocity, there was no stopping, and no step backward; and the law of progress, which had been a crude and vague speculation, became a manifest reality. With this new aspect of the life of men and of societies, a conception of history arose of which Du Bois Reymond is the prophet. The future depends on truths and forces being, and to be, discovered. The past survives only by supplying available material that may be a guide for science and an equivalent of power. ”

“ The events which have dissolved society in France have consolidated Germany. For the first time since Frederick Barbarossa was drowned in the Crusade, it has become a powerful Empire, under a National Emperor. While the centrifugal forces make France their prey, the danger of the Germans lies in the immense preponderance of the Prussian Crown. But a Federation between Sovereign States is perhaps of all forms of government the one that promises to provide, in the long-run, the strongest and safest securities for the liberty and progress of the world. ”

“ All governments in which one principle dominates, degenerate by its exaggeration. The unity of monarchy gravitates towards the despotism of a single will. Aristocracy which is governed by a minority, inclines to restrict that minority into an oligarchy. In pure Democracies the same course is followed, and the dominion of majority asserts itself more and more extensively and irresistibly. We understand liberty to consist in exemption from control. In America it has come to mean the right to exercise control. ”

“ He scorned the tame spirit, the obscure labours, the negative results of fleshless scholars whose cares are bounded by scholarship, who aim at no target, and are incurious of things to come. He was always combative, homiletic, clamorous for quick returns, and, like men too eager, verbose and violent. He shed his Hegelian skin in the Middle Ages, and emerged from them detesting the three last centuries as an epoch of selfishness and decay. History became subservient to politics, to a policy of reaction against economists, humanitarians, and all men seeking happiness before authority. ”

“ The better part of the nation's mind works in pursuit of truth, and its thought, its knowledge, its errors, constitute the object of literary history as well as those things which may be lawfully told in verse. The flowery empire of æsthetics did not flourish under this amalgamation as it had done in less practical days. The best work is a history of Italian literature; but of the greatest living critics—Haym, Bernays, and Scherer—not one is great alike in the tracing of ideas, in perfect knowledge of biographical and bibliographical fact, and in taste. ”

“ Buckle, therefore, does not contemplate the action, but the result ; not the life or thinking of the man, but the work he has done, or the theory he has thought out. Where no trace remains of the work, nothing was done worth speaking of.
Having thus made the individual soul of no account in his investigations on the history of human progress, it is clear that only one manner of looking at mankind remains : if they are not to be viewed as persons in detail, they must be considered as bodies in mass. Hence not individual acts, but their statistics engage his attention. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must bear in mind the one decisive contrast between Europe and America, that there society is cut adrift from the traditions and influence of an ancient civilisation. The nations of Western Europe are so bound to each other by their origin, by their close intercourse, and the similarity of social interests and character, that a comprehensive public opinion extends over their boundaries, and sustains in each the habits, ideas, and constitutions which are common to all. ”

“ Having seen the four most eloquent French writers of the century outlive their works, and disprove the axiom that style confers immortality, she might well doubt whether writings inspired by distinct views and dedicated to a cause could survive by artistic qualities alone. If the mist that shrouded her horizon should ever rise over definite visions of accepted truth, her doctrine might embarrass her renown. ”

“ At first sight it should seem a paradox to say that two centuries which have accomplished so much for the science of conscience, for the theory of morals, for the testing of certainty and the analysis of motive, which have learnt to probe the springs of error with instruments of precision as little known to the logic of Port Royal as fluxions to Hipparchus, have added nothing to the notion of truth. Men without fastidiousness in their political tastes imagine that liberty flourished under Alfred, under Charlemagne, or even in the Hercynian forest. ”

“ To be without party is to be without principle, according to that saying of an English statesman, that a man who denies party belongs to a party he is ashamed of. To be impartial is to follow a very wide induction, to acknowledge the manifest destiny of monarchy, with a mind prepared, if it must be, to follow "the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet." ”