John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

“ His life marks what, in an age of minute specialism, must always be at once the crown and the catastrophe of those who take all knowledge for their province. His achievement is something different from any book. Acton's life-work was, in fact, himself. Those who lament what he might have written as a historian would do well to reflect on the unique position which he held in the world of letters, and to ask themselves how far he could have wielded the influence that was his, or held the standard so high, had his own achievement been greater. ”

“ He always writes as the student, never as the littérateur. Even the memorable phrases which give point to his briefest articles are judicial, not journalistic. Yet he treats of matters which range from the dawn of history through the ancient empires down to subjects so essentially modern as the vast literature of revolutionary France or the leaders of the romantic movement which replaced it. In all these writings of Acton those qualities manifest themselves, which only grew stronger with time, and gave him a distinct and unique place among his contemporaries. ”

“ Acton's position as a churchman is made clearer by a view of his politics. At once an admirer and an adviser of Mr. Gladstone, he probably helped more than any other single friend to make his leader a Home Ruler. Yet he was anything but a modern Radical: for liberty was his goddess, not equality, and he dreaded any single power in a State, whether it was the King, or Parliament, or People. N either popes nor princes, not even Pro- testant persecutors, did Acton condemn more deeply than the crimes of majorities and the fury of uncontrolled democracy. ”

“ Two other tendencies dominant in Germany—tendencies which had and have a great power in the minds of scholars, yet to Acton, both as a Christian and a man, seemed corrupting—compelled him to a search for principles which might deliver him from slavery alike to traditions and to fashion, from the historian's vice of condoning whatever has got itself allowed to exist, and from the politician's habit of mere opportunist acquiescence in popular standards. ”

“ What wonder then that the pupil of Döllinger should exhaust the intellectual and moral energies of a lifetime, in preaching to those who direct the affairs of men the paramount supremacy of principle. The course of the plebiscitary Empire, and that gradual campaign in the United States by which the will of the majority became identified with that necessity which knows no law, contributed further to educate his sense of right in politics, and to augment the distrust of power natural to a pupil of the great Whigs, of Burke, of Montesquieu, of Madame de Staël. ”

“ To a world in which the very bases of civilisation seemed to be dissolving he preached the need of directing ideals.
Artistic interests were not strong in him, and the decadent pursuit of culture as a mere luxury had no stronger enemy. Intellectual activity, apart from moral, purpose, was anathema to Acton. He has been censured for bidding the student of his hundred best books to steel his mind against the charm of literary beauty and style. ”

“ It was this conviction, universally and unwaveringly applied, and combined with an unalterable faith in Christ, which gave unity to all his efforts, sustained him in his struggle with ecclesiastical authority, accounted for all his sympathies, and accentuated his antipathies, while it at once expanded and limited his interests. It is this that made his personality so much greater a gift to the world than any book which he might have written — had he cared less for the end and more for the process of historical knowledge. ”

“ We note the same value for great books as the source of wisdom, combined with the same enthusiasm for immediate justice which made Acton the despair of the mere academic student, an enigma among men of the world, and a stumbling-block to the politician of the clubs Beyond this, we find that certainty and decision of judgment, that crisp concentration of phrase, that grave and deliberate irony and that mastery of subtlety, allusion, and wit, which make his interpretation an adventure and his judgment a sword. ”

“ To understand the ardour of his efforts it is necessary to bear in mind the world into which he was born, and the crises intellectual, religious, and political which he lived to witness and sometimes to influence. Born in the early days of the July monarchy, when reform in England was a novelty, and Catholic freedom a late-won boon, Acton as he grew to manhood in Munich and in England had presented to his regard a series of scenes well calculated to arouse a thoughtful mind to consideration of the deepest problems, both of politics and religion. ”

“ To all those who reflect on history or politics, it was a gain of the highest order that at the very summit of historical scholarship and profound political knowledge there should be placed a leader who erred on the unfashionable side, who denied the statesmen's claim to subject justice to expediency, and opposed the partisan's attempt to palter with facts in the interest of his creed. It is these principles which both explain Acton's work as a student, and make it so difficult to understand. ”

“ Philosopher had succeeded philosopher, critic had followed critic, Strauss and Baur were names to conjure with, and Hegel was still unforgotten in the land of his birth. Materialistic science was in the very heyday of its parvenu and tawdry intolerance, and historical knowledge in the splendid dawn of that new world of knowledge, of which Ranke was the Columbus. ”

“ While he felt the dangers of Rousseau's doctrine of equality, declaring that in the end it would be destructive alike of liberty and religion, he was yet strongly imbued with the need of reconciling some of the socialists' ideals with the regard due to the principles which he respected. He was anxious to promote the study of Roscher and the historical economists, and he seems to have thought that by their means some solution of the great economic evils of the modern world might be found, which should avoid injustice either to the capitalist or the wage-earner. ”

“ Not even Disraeli painting the leader of that party which he was destined so strangely to "educate" could equal the austere and accurate irony with which Acton, writing as a student, not as a novelist, sums up the characteristics of the class of his birth.
Lord Liverpool governed England in the greatest crisis of the war, and for twelve troubled years of peace, chosen not by the nation, but by the owners of the land. The English gentry were well content with an order of things by which for a century and a quarter they had enjoyed so much prosperity and power. ”

“ Here was a writer at the summit of modern culture, saturated with materialistic science, a convinced and unchanging atheist, who, in spite of this, proclaimed in all her work that moral law is binding, and upheld a code of ethics, Christian in content, though not in foundation. In the same way his admiration for Mr. Gladstone is to be explained. I t was not his successes so much as his failures that attracted Acton, and above all, his refusal to admit that nations, in their dealings with one another, are subject to no law but that of greed. ”

“ His whole life was dedicated to one high end, the aim of preaching the need of principles based on the widest induction and the most penetrating thought, as the only refuge amid the storm and welter of sophistical philosophies and ecclesiastical intrigues. ”

“ He felt, however, that it was more dangerous because more absorbing when exercised in religious matters, and thus condemned the Protestant theory more deeply than the Catholic permission of persecution. He also felt that monarchy was more easily checked than pure democracy, and that the risk of tyranny \vas greater in the latter. Provided that freedom was left to men to do their duty, Acton was not greatly careful of mere rights. He had no belief in the natural equality of men, and no dis- like of the subordination of classes on the score of birth. ”

“ For, to be sure of one's ground, one must meet one's adversaries' strongest arguments, and not be content \vith merely picking holes in his armour. Other\vise one's own belief may be at the mercy of the next clever opponent. The reader may doubt how far Acton succeeded in his own aim, for there was a touch of intolerance in his hatred of absolutism, and he believed himself to be divided from his ecclesiastical and political foes by no mere intellectual difference but by a moral cleavage. ”

“ But their influence on other workers is incalculable, and has not yet determined. To an age doubting on all things, and with the moral basis of its action largely undermined, Acton gave the spectacle of a career which was as moving as it was rare. ”

“ His one belief was the right of every man not to have, but to be, his best. This fact gives the key to what seems to many an unsolved contradiction, that the man who said what he did say and fought as he had fought should yet declare in private that it had never occurred to him to doubt any single dogma of his Church, and assert in public that communion with it was "dearer than life itself." ”

“ It was not easy for Acton to bear in mind that the public is often ignorant of even the names of distinguished scholars, and that "a European reputation" is sometimes confined to the readers of specialist publications. ”

“ In the same spirit he wished his government to include men who were in favour of the Catholic claims and men who were opposed to them. His career exemplifies, not the accidental combination but the natural affinity, between the love of conservatism and the fear of ideas.
The longer essays republished in these volumes exhibit in most of its characteristics a personality which even those who disagreed with his views must allow to have been one of the most remarkable products of European culture in the nineteenth century. ”

“ The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them, for laws should be adapted to those who have the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain and degrada- tion, and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls. ”

“ It is only the barest outline that can be quite objective. In Acton's view the historian as investigator is one thing, the historian as judge another. In an early essay on Döllinger he makes a distinction of this kind. ”

“ He did not believe in the doctrine of numbers, and had no sympathy with the cry Vox þOþ2lli Vox Dei; on the other hand, he felt strongly that the stake in the country argument really applied with fullest force to the poor, for while political error means mere discomfort to the rich, it means to the poor the loss of all that makes life noble and even of life itself. ”

“ I t was because he was not like Lord Pal merston, because Bismarck disliked him, because he gave back the Transvaal to the Boers, and tried to restore Ireland to its people, because his love of liberty never weaned him from loyalty to the Crown, and his politics were part of his religion, that Acton used of Gladstone language rarely used, and still more rarely applicable, to xxvi
ESSAYS ON LIBERTY
religion, and a sinning statesman might one day become converted. ”

“ He respected other men's opinions, fearing to give pain, or to tempt with anger by con- tradiction, and when forced to defend his own he felt bound to assume that everyone would look sincerely for the truth, and would gladly recognise it. ”

“ He had a strong belief in the doctrine of development, and felt that it would prove impossible in the long run to bind the Christian community to any ex- planation of the faith which should have a non-Christian or immoral tendency. ”

“ Another cause retarded production-his determination to know all about the work of others. Acton desired to be in touch with university life all over Europe, to be a ware, if possible through personal knowledge, of the trend of investigation and thought of scholars working in INTRODUCTION
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all the cognate branches of his subject. To keep up thoroughly with other people's work, and do much original writing of one's own, is rarely possible. At any rate we may say that the same man could not have produced the essay on German schools of history, and written a 1nagnum opus of his own. ”

“ But he thought that all men might agree in admitting the sanctity of human life and judging accordingly every man or system which need- lessly sacrificed it. I t is this preaching in season and out of season against the reality of wickedness, and against every interference with the conscience, that is the real inspiration both of Acton's life and of his \vritings. ”

“ The ethics of Nietzsche are the logical exIN1 RODUCTION
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pansion of Machiavelli, and his influence is proof that, in the long-run, men cannot separate their international code from their private one. We must remember that Acton lived in a time when, as he said, the course of history had been U twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime," and when the old ideals of liberty seemed swallowed up by the pursuit of gain. ”

“ I t was, in truth, the un\vavering loyalty of his churchman ship and his far-reaching historical sense that enabled him to attack with such vehemence evils which he believed to be accidental and temporary, even though they might have endured for a millennium. Long searching of the vista of history preserved Acton from the common danger of confusing the eternal with what is merely lengthy. ”