Copyright, 1948
THE FREE PRESS
Second printing, November, 1949

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Macmillan Company for permission to reprint material from the following books: The History of Freedom and Other Essays, Historical Essays and Studies, Lectures on the French Revolution, Lectures on Modern History and Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone.

Those who read Acton today will treble Lord Morley’s praise of him and affirm that they would undertake to find on every page of Acton at the very least one pregnant, pithy, luminous, suggestive saying. For Acton’s is the splendid voice of charity and informed wisdom heard from above the merciless and warring extremists of a sorely perplexed time. His reputation as a master historian, elevated as a mountain of constancy above the flat wastelands, attests that the greatness of a soul is measurable by the duration — the undefeatable vitality — of its moral force.

I

WHEN LORD ACTON died in 1902 his name was unfamiliar to the general public. The assiduous reader of the London Times might have identified him as reputedly the most erudite man of his era. He might have remembered the rumors, some thirty years before, of Acton’s possible excommunication from the Catholic church. He might have recalled occasional items in the society, court and literary columns in which Acton had figured as the week-end guest of Mr.

FELLOW STUDENTS—I look back to-day to a time before the middle of the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh and fervently wishing to come to this University. At three colleges I applied for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all. Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in a happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at last fulfilled.

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. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilisation; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free.

WHEN CONSTANTINE THE GREAT carried the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople he set up in the marketplace of the new capital a porphyry pillar which had come from Egypt, and of which a strange tale is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems of the Roman state, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched.

THE MANNER IN which Religion influences State policy is more easily ascertained in the case of Protestantism than in that of the Catholic Church: for whilst the expression of Catholic doctrines is authoritative and unvarying, the great social problems did not all arise at once, and have at various times received different solutions.

SCARCELY THIRTY YEARS separate the Europe of Guizot and Metternich from these days of universal suffrage, both in France and in United Germany; when a condemned insurgent of 1848 is the constitutional Minister of Austria; when Italy, from the Alps to the Adriatic, is governed by friends of Mazzini; and statesmen who recoiled from the temerities of Peel have doubled the electoral constituency of England.