Introduction

INTRODUCTION

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. Gladstone at Hawarden, as Lord-in-Waiting to Her late Majesty at Windsor Castle, as professor at Cambridge University and editor of a grand, new, encyclopedic venture, the Cambridge Modern History. It would have been a miscellaneous assortment of facts, likely to confirm Acton’s own sense of the futility of his life.

The current fortune of his reputation would have been more agreeable to Acton. It would have gratified him to know that his maxim, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” has become commonplace enough to serve as the text for editorials in daily newspapers, and that he has been awarded the titles of prophet of liberalism and magistrate of history. If he could claim no particular distinction for his own life, he could claim to have given distinction to the two ideas he valued most, the ideas of liberty and morality.

Now that Acton has attained the status of a minor prophet, it is difficult to reconstruct his life in Victorian England. Not only do his ideas transcend the period in which they were conceived, but the details of his life and background often jar with the familiar picture of that period. Related to a variety of nationalities and aristocracies, he was as far removed as possible from the insularity and even provincialism that seemed to be settling over England by the middle of the nineteenth century.

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton was born in Naples in 1834. His paternal ancestors are recorded as having occupied the family estate of Aldenham in Shropshire as far back as the beginning of the fourteenth century. In the eighteenth century an adventurous junior branch of the family had transferred its allegiance to France and then to Italy. Acton’s grandfather, Sir John Acton, having won the affections of the Queen of Naples, converted the role of adventurer into that of prime minister of Naples. With the extinction of the older branch of the family in 1791, Sir John succeeded to the baronetcy and estate. His grandson, born forty-three years later, disapproved of the unconventional life and career of his grandfather (which included a period as head of a reign of terror in Palermo), and refused to accept money due him from the Italian fortune.

His maternal ancestors were more respectable and more congenial to Acton’s temperament. The Dalbergs had been the first nobles under the emperor in the Holy Roman Empire, and claimed the further and less verifiable distinction of descent from a relative of Jesus Christ himself. (The story of the relationship to Jesus is no doubt apocryphal, but if it does not establish glorious antiquity, it does suggest religious piety.) Like the Actons, the Dalbergs were nationally uprooted and shared the uncertain fate of the Empire. It has been said that a treatise on the law of nationality and domicile could be based on the frequent migrations and changes of position of the dukes of Dalberg who finally threw in their lot with France during the Restoration and were created peers. The family estate continued to be maintained at Herrnsheim on the Rhine.

Acton’s father, Sir Richard, died prematurely, and in his stepfather the family circle acquired yet another illustrious name, that of Lord Leveson, later the second Earl Granville. The Leveson-Gowers had long been prominent in the Whig aristocracy and in English diplomacy and politics, and Acton’s stepfather continued the tradition as foreign minister in the Liberal cabinets of Lord John Russell and William Gladstone. Acton’s cosmopolitanism was more than a matter of principle or training; it was the substance of all his life. His early youth was passed, alternately, at the family residences at Naples, Paris, Herrnsheim, Aldenham and London. He soon spoke and wrote Italian, French, German and English with almost equal fluency. Later in life the conversation at his dinner table was multilingual to accommodate all the members of the family: he chatted in English with his children, in German with his Bavarian-born wife (a daughter of Count Arco-Valley and a first cousin to Acton), in French with his sister-in-law, and in Italian with his mother-in-law.

The Dalbergs, like the great majority of the Bavarian aristocracy, had always been Catholic, and the Actons had been reconverted to Catholicism in the eighteenth century. One of the stipulations in the marriage agreement between Lady Acton and Lord Leveson was that her son should be brought up in her faith. At no time does his stepfather’s Anglicanism seem to have affected the Catholic piety and orthodoxy of Acton’s childhood, although it was important in giving him entrance into the great Protestant houses of England.

His education, in fact, highlights the main personalities and schools of Catholic thought in the last half of the century. He studied for a short time under Monsignor Félix Dupanloup in Paris,1 for a long period at the Catholic college, Oscott, in England, of which Bishop Nicholas Wiseman was president, and he completed his education at the university level under Professor Johann Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich. Dupanloup was involved for a while in one of the most interesting Catholic experiments in modern times, the attempt to restate the relations of church and state so as to satisfy the requirements of political liberalism. Wiseman was the guiding spirit of a new ecclesiastical offensive, Ultramontanism, directed against the liberal state and intended to revive some of the dormant authority of the church. Döllinger was a distinguished scholar who despised the principles Wiseman stood for, and sacrificed his communion in the church by leading the opposition to the papal pretensions asserted by Pius IX.

Acton arrived in Munich in 1850, a decisive date, for the shadow of Döllinger was to hover behind him the rest of his life.2 Had Cambridge agreed to admit him (he had applied to three colleges and had been rejected by all, probably because of the strong prejudice against Catholics), his future career might have been very different. Cambridge at the time prided itself on its prosaic, matter-of-fact common sense. Leslie Stephen recalled that Cambridge men “did not deny the existence of the soul, but they knew that it should be kept in its proper place.” Cambridge might have fashioned Acton in the model of Lord Granville, the practical, urbane and good-humored politician, whose enthusiasm never extended to the point of committing a breach of taste. Instead, Acton came under the influence of Döllinger, the earnest and scrupulous historian and moralist. It was Döllinger who originally inspired him with his respect for learning and scholarship, a respect that later involved both master and disciple in conflict with those in the church who arrogated to themselves the right to pass upon the findings of scholarship and to judge the propriety of making them known. The principle of the autonomy of science, the cardinal point of Döllinger’s teaching, was the core of Acton’s entire philosophy of political liberalism.

It was said of Acton that he knew everyone worth knowing and had read everything worth reading, and both distinctions date from this period. He read voluminously in history, philosophy, literature and theology, started to collect the library which was to grow to such huge proportions, and travelled extensively — vacation trips with Döllinger on the continent, a visit to the United States in 1853 in the company of his relative, the Earl of Ellesmere, and a visit to Russia in 1856 as secretary to Lord Granville. He became personally acquainted with almost every important theologian, historian and Catholic layman in England, on the continent, and even in the United States, and with many prominent statesmen and diplomats. Born into the social aristocracy, he early acquired a similar status in the intellectual, religious and political elite.

In 1859, when he was twenty-five, he assumed the editorship of the Catholic periodical, the Rambler, and proposed, with more enthusiasm than discretion, to instruct his countrymen in the ways of the true learning (in which only the Germans were initiated), and to enlighten them as to their real political interests. The ecclesiastical authorities had long been provoked by what they considered to be the irreverent manner of the Rambler, and just before Acton became associated with the journal, John Henry Newman, England’s most famous convert, had served as editor in the futile hope of placating the authorities. Almost every issue under Acton’s editorship found occasion to point the moral: faith and knowledge, religion and science, were necessarily in harmony and had nothing to fear from each other; the temporal interests of the church must not be confused with its ultimate purpose, and the authorities must resist the temptation to deny unsavory historical truths or to conceal discoveries that might be of comfort to unbelievers; scientific truth could not but vindicate the true religion.

With the journal’s change from a bimonthly to a quarterly in 1862, it appeared under the title of the Home and Foreign Review. Its message, however, remained unchanged, and its very first issue brought down the censure of Wiseman. “Biblical criticism,” Darwinism, frank appraisals of church history and contemporary Catholic governments — the review took them all in its stride. The English Ultramontanes, particularly Cardinal Wiseman, Bishop Manning and W. G. Ward, naturally regarded it as a threat to their authority and teaching. Their task was, as Manning put it, to overcome “the anti-Roman and anti-papal spirit of the English Catholics.” The Home and Foreign Review seemed bent upon aggravating the condition they wished to remedy. Acton himself chose to interpret the quarrels between the Review and the hierarchy as a struggle between Italy and Germany for the soul of England — Italy representing the ecclesiastical organization superstitiously confounding its own will with that of God, and Germany representing the pure spirit of scholarship and truth:

The German writers were engaged in an arduous struggle, in which their antagonists [the Protestants] were sustained by intellectual power, solid learning, and deep thought, such as the defenders of the Church in Catholic countries have never had to encounter. In this conflict the Italian divines could render no assistance. They had shown themselves altogether incompetent to cope with modern science.3

At a Catholic congress in Munich in 1863, Döllinger appealed to the church to bring to an end its hostility towards historical criticism. The pope’s response took the form of a brief to the Archbishop of Munich declaring the opinions of Catholic writers subject to Rome. The Home and Foreign Review, which had enthusiastically reported Döllinger’s speech, could no longer disregard the strictures of the church. “Conflicts with Rome” appeared in the Review in April, 1864, announcing Acton’s decision to suspend publication. He could not change his views, but neither would he continue to flout the hierarchy. That same year Pius IX issued his famous Syllabus of Errors, a list of the heresies disseminated by liberalism; the final heresy reads like a declaration of Acton’s principles: “The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with/progress, liberalism and recent civilization.”

During this time, Lord Granville had tried to introduce Acton into the conventional stream of Liberal party politics. In 1859 he obtained for him the seat of an Irish borough, Carlow. Acton confined his public addresses in the House of Commons to three questions concerning Catholic affairs, and the electorate of Carlow, unimpressed by this record, did not renominate him. Instead, in 1865 he stood for an English borough, Bridgnorth, near Aldenham, and was elected, only to be unseated early the next year on a recount. (Almost a dozen members of parliament were unseated after the general elections of 1859 and 1865 on charges of corruption and bribery by their agents. It is ironic that Acton, so concerned with the problem of public morality, should have been one of them.) Three years later he again stood unsuccessfully for Bridgnorth; this was his last half-hearted attempt to discharge the parliamentary obligation he felt.4 The next year, upon Gladstone’s recommendation, he was created a baron. There had been some talk at this time of the desirability of giving representation in the nobility to the Jews and Catholics, and Acton was raised to the peerage in the same New Year’s announcement that gave the title of baron to Nathaniel Rothschild.

The conflicts with Rome gained in weight and momentum. The plea for intellectual freedom, sponsored by the liberal Catholics, jostled first with the program of the English Ultramontanes and then with the will of the pope. It had long been known that Pius considered himself the infallible instrument of God, and there had been indications that he would attempt to have the dogma of infallibility decreed by a general council of the church. In 1854 he had proclaimed the dogma of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary, and it was because he saw himself under the special providence of Mary that he felt called upon to proclaim his own infallibility. The move was also, perhaps, intended to compensate for the actual loss of authority then impending, as the new Italian national government prepared to deprive him of his temporal power in Italy.

In December, 1869, the first ecumenical council since the Council of Trent, held more than three centuries earlier, assembled in Rome. In 1867, when the council was first announced, Acton, Döllinger, and liberal Catholics generally, hoped, without much conviction, that it would be a genuine council of reform. It was a magnificent opportunity, they felt, to erase the “stamp of an intolerant age,” as Acton put it, which Trent had impressed upon Catholicism, and to reform the organization of the church by distributing among the episcopacy and laity many of the powers concentrated in Rome. However, the Roman court proved to be unrepentant; it was recalcitrant in matters of reform and belligerent in advancing claims even more extreme than those of Trent.

Acton made his position public in the North British Review of October, 1869, when he discussed a book, The Pope and the Council, recently published in Germany under the pseudonym of Janus, who was quickly and rightly identified as Döllinger. The argument of the book, and of Acton’s article, was that the Christian fathers had held the pope to be fallible, and had decided that dogmatic questions could be settled only by a general council of the church. If the doctrine of infallibility, Acton continued, had gained such general adherence, it was because “the passage from the Catholicism of the Fathers to that of the modern Popes was accomplished by willful falsehood; and the whole structure of traditions, laws, and doctrines that supports the theory of infallibility, and the practical despotism of the Popes, stands on a basis of fraud.”5

Acton was in Rome during all but the final six weeks of the council, which lasted until July, 1870, to the discomfort of the pope who had anticipated a speedy decision by acclamation. Although Döllinger was popularly supposed to be the spearhead of the opposition, he remained in Germany all of the time, and Acton was credited with being the source of much of the information that found its way into the press, and the organizer of the “Minority,” as the bishops opposed to infallibility were soon dubbed. The legend has it that Acton walked the streets of Rome in disguise, fearing assassination, and it may have been true that he did, on occasion, try to avoid public recognition. Certainly the feeling against him was bitter enough; the pope even refused to extend his blessing to Acton’s children. It was no secret that Acton had been in correspondence with Gladstone, decrying the activity of the council, although it was not so well known that he had urged Gladstone to appeal to the states of Europe to issue a joint protest against the impending decrees. At the time, too, a series of letters, over the name of “Quirinus,” appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung which revealed an intimate knowledge of the most private sessions of the council. It was suspected that Döllinger was the author and that one of his informants was Acton, a suspicion that today seems well founded.6

The Letters from Rome on the Council are a fascinating study of the techniques used by Rome to impose her will. They were based on daily, personal observations, and because the details are so sharp and unmarred by retrospection, they are a valuable source of material for a sociological study of the institutions and forms of power that can be pressed into the service of a supposedly religious cause. Even in comparison with the exposés available today of more familiar events — the struggles for power within the Communist parties and the techniques by which dissident factions are suppressed — the Letters from Rome are shockingly astute and frank, and were it not for the established integrity of the author and his informants, and the corroboration of most of the more scandalous details by independent authorities, the volume would certainly be suspect. The methods of absolutism, as Acton was fond of pointing out, are the same everywhere — an assertion amply confirmed by the letters. The pope and his entourage, they charge, did not hesitate to apply the most subtle as well as the most open pressure upon the assembly: bishops were threatened with imprisonment and in some cases were deliberately subjected to physical discomfort; they were told that resistance to the dogma of papal infallibility was a blasphemy against the Holy Ghost; the whole stock of papal privileges — the bestowal of sees and titles, special rights, benedictions and dispensations — was tossed into the battle, and fifteen empty cardinal’s hats were dangled over many more vacillating heads. Nine-tenths of the prelates were silenced because they could not speak Latin readily, others by the choice of a hall in which the acoustics were notoriously bad but which provided a regal backdrop for the papal throne. The procedure and the entire order of business were decided upon by commissions appointed by the pope himself. Meetings composed of more than twenty bishops were forbidden and strict secrecy was enjoined, except in the case of Manning and three other infallibilists who enjoyed special papal dispensations to divulge appropriate information to selected confidants. The details of machinations and intrigues crowd upon each other in a dismal spectacle.

In July, 1870, the decrees were formally promulgated: the pope cannot err when he alone defines, ex cathedra and in virtue of his apostolic authority, any doctrine of faith and morals. After much probing of consciences, most of the Minority bishops submitted to the decrees. Others, including Döllinger, who refused to submit, were excommunicated and founded the Old Catholic churches. Acton, as a layman, was not automatically called upon to subscribe to the decrees. In August he addressed an open letter to one of the Minority bishops who had yielded, accusing him of failing to keep faith with his principles. In October he wrote an article on the council for the North British Review (included in this volume), in which he repeated his criticisms in their harshest form. As late as the spring of 1871 his article, “The Pope and the Council,” appeared in his own translation in Germany. Yet when the Old Catholics were formed in September of that year, Acton did not join them.

Döllinger, Acton explained in one of his notes, received the decree of excommunication “as a deliverance,” because he “held very strongly that nobody should voluntarily sever himself from the Roman Communion.”7 Acton, too, felt strongly on this point, and he criticized the French historian, Eugène Michaud, who “did not wait till his archbishop put the knife at his throat but took the initiative of that operation on himself.”8 To leave the church voluntarily at this time, he felt, was to exonerate implicitly the behavior of Rome in all the centuries before the new dogma, because such an act assumed that until the promulgation of infallibility, Rome had been untainted by heresy.

Two years later Acton had occasion to use this argument again, but in a different context. Gladstone had published a pamphlet attacking the Vatican decrees as having altered the status of English Catholics, who, he argued, had received emancipation in 1826 on the assumption that they were loyal citizens of the realm, and who were now obliged to transfer their primary allegiance to Rome. In a letter in the Times Acton replied that the decrees actually assigned to the papacy no greater temporal power than it had always claimed, and that the practical conditions that had previously made those claims ineffectual continued to exist — the “pre-July” church, in other words, had been no better than its “post-July” successor. An editorial statement in the Times described him as having treated the decrees as a nullity. Thereupon Archbishop Manning intervened, calling for Acton’s interpretation of the decrees and for his assurance that he had no heretical intent. Acton responded that he had no private interpretation, intended no heresy, and did not feel obliged or qualified to engage in theological discussion. This did not conciliate Manning, although Acton had already satisfied the bishop of his own diocese as to his orthodoxy. Manning was furious and threatened to take the matter to Rome, but nothing came of it. It has been suggested that Acton was too important a layman to be sacrificed by Rome, and that his excommunication would have played into the hands of the church’s critics.

The reluctance of the church to press the charges against Acton is understandable; what is not so easy to understand is Acton’s submission to the church. The central fact appears to be that he was a pious and practising Catholic for whom separation from the church would have been extremely painful. And in support of his religious instincts, he could call upon two doctrines that gave sanction to both his dissent and his compliance: the doctrine distinguishing between the mortal and fallible ecclesiastical organization and the eternal and true church; and the doctrine of development, adopted from Döllinger and Newman, which maintained that just as organization and dogma changed and developed in the course of time, so whatever was immoral and unchristian would eventually be eliminated. He might also have taken comfort in the thought that the submission of a layman does not have the same meaning as that of a priest. As a priest, Döllinger, for example, would have had to teach a doctrine that he considered false and immoral, and thus risk corrupting the souls of others; Acton was responsible for his own soul alone. He himself deserves the final word on a very delicate personal decision. One of his notes tersely explains: “I could not defend the Council or its action; but I always professed that the acceptance of either by the Church would supply its deficiency. The act was one of pure obedience, and was not grounded on the removal of my motives of opposition to the decrees.” 9

Although his opposition to what he termed ecclesiastical crimes continued, the climax had passed. He devoted himself to his books and research and planned the composition of his chef d’oeuvre, the History of Liberty — the greatest book, it has been suggested, that never was written. (Two essays, “History of Liberty in Antiquity” and “History of Liberty in Christianity,” were delivered as lectures in 1877, and they may be considered a prologue to the monumental study that was to have followed.) Hundreds of files of notes, a fine collection of manuscripts, and the thousands of annotated volumes in his library are evidence of the care, devotion and imagination that he brought to the task. As early as 1880, however, he began to suspect that his life work might go unwritten. Mary Gladstone (later Mrs. Mary Drew) had called his attention to a story by Henry James, “The Madonna of the Future,” about an artist who had dedicated his life to the vision of a magnificent picture he was to paint; after his death, when his studio was entered, a blank canvas was discovered upon the easel. Acton thereupon baptized his History of Liberty, “the Madonna of the Future.”

Many have speculated on the reasons for Acton’s apparent unproductivity. One theory has it that the History of Liberty would certainly have provoked papal censure, and this knowledge persuaded him to abandon the project. Yet his published essays in no way truckled to ecclesiastical prejudices and well merited a place on the Index. According to another theory, he felt that the truth about the French Revolution was not yet available, and the History could not be constructed without an evaluation of one of its central events. The lectures on the French Revolution, however, reveal a reasonable amount of confidence and no great qualms about dealing with the subject. A more popular and satisfactory explanation refers to the grandiose nature of his ambitions. For even if one person could assimilate the vast stock of ideas and facts that Acton considered relevant, it was improbable that he could manipulate them. “He knew too much to write,” Acton once said of Döllinger,10 a judgment that might stand for his own epitaph. Nor was comprehensiveness the only difficulty. To take all history, philosophy, theology, law — in short all of culture — for his province, and then to saddle himself further with the most exacting historical method, was inevitably to invite frustration. Another of Acton’s comments on Döllinger (who did, as a matter of fact, produce a number of sustained works) is revealing: “He would not write with imperfect materials, and to him the materials were always imperfect.”11

Döllinger himself contributed, unintentionally but in no small measure, to Acton’s reluctance to write. He had been Acton’s patron and ally in all of the early disputes with Rome, had taken a firm stand regarding the Vatican council and had been excommunicated as a result. Acton, whose behavior seems to have been not quite so uncompromising, nevertheless soon began to feel that Döllinger’s moral principles were lax. He had become slack, Acton charged, in pressing the claims of morality: he offered explanations in extenuation of crimes, spoke of the understandable pressures of time and place, and failed to realize fully the urgency of the moral issues. The indictment is certainly excessive, both in tone and content, and is made even more singular by the circumstance of what was probably the first major incident in the estrangement of the two men — the contribution by Döllinger of a preface to a paper written upon the death of Dupanloup, a contribution made in a spirit of generosity to the memory of an opponent. Dupanloup, like other French “Liberal Catholics,” had shed most of his liberal principles early in his career, and had supported both the Syllabus of 1864 and the decree of infallibility (although he considered its declaration to have been inopportune.) Acton considered him an Ultramontane, hence “a common rogue and imposter,”12 and anyone tolerant of Ultramontanism, as he now thought Döllinger was, was implicated in its sins. In a pathetic letter, a draft of which is contained among his manuscripts, he described his sense of despair when he became aware of what he felt to be Döllinger’s defection and when he realized the enormity of his isolation. Döllinger, he said, had been in a better position than anyone else to appreciate his ethical ideals, and if he could not accept them, surely no one else would:

I am absolutely alone in my essential ethical position, and therefore useless.... The probability of doing good by writings so isolated and repulsive, of obtaining influence for [my] views, etc., is so small that I have no right to sacrifice to it my own tranquillity and my duty of educating my children. My time can be better employed than in waging a hopeless war. And the more my life has been thrown away, the more necessary to turn now, and employ better what remains.13

It may be difficult to see the scandal in Döllinger’s attitude, but it is impossible to ignore the desperation in Acton’s. The disagreement, while a matter of regret for Döllinger, was one of almost neurotic anxiety and disquiet for Acton. It was not a temper conducive to the writing of a History of Liberty.

After 1879 Acton spent most of his time in London, Bavaria, and on the Riviera, drawing upon his books at Aldenham as he needed them. He maintained a close association with Gladstone and a lively interest in liberal politics. In 1873 he was seriously considered for the post of ambassador to Germany. Between 1878 and 1885, although he published nothing, his reputation as a historian increased. An article on George Eliot appeared in the Nineteenth Century in 1885, and the following year he was one of a small group of men who helped found the English Historical Review. Mandell Creighton, later Bishop Creighton (of the Church of England), editor of the Review, wrote of his association with Acton: “[He] especially is most helpful through his learning, which is probably greater than that of any other Englishman now alive”; and of his contribution to the first issue of the new journal, “German Schools of History”: “I have just received the proof of an excellent article by Lord Acton — the sort of thing that takes your breath away, a philosophical criticism of all German historians of the century, most brilliant.”14 The conventional honors of the scholar also came his way: in 1873 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Munich and three years later he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Munich; in 1888 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Cambridge, and in 1889 the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford; in 1890 he was elected an honorary fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a distinction he shared only with Gladstone.

The year 1890 also brought a financial crisis for Acton, who had already sold or rented most of his estates. One of his tenants was Joseph Chamberlain, the great enemy of Gladstone, who, the story goes, declared himself quite unimpressed with Acton’s library because it contained no works of reference! When that library, with its invaluable manuscript collections and source materials, was announced for sale in an auctioneer’s advertisement, Gladstone, a better judge in these matters than Chamberlain, conveyed his distress to Andrew Carnegie, the American millionaire and philanthropist. Carnegie purchased the library outright and assigned its custodianship to Acton, who was never told the name of his benefactor. Since Acton’s affairs were in a thorough muddle, it was found impossible to reinstate him as legal owner. Carnegie’s biographer, B. J. Hendrick, sententiously comments: “The story was the familiar one of the man of ideas unfit to cope with the realities of a sordid world.”

Among the many ironies of Acton’s career was his appointment in 1892 as Lord-in-Waiting to Queen Victoria, a strange office for the historian. Actually his duties were neither cumbersome nor disagreeable; he was able to explore new libraries and collections of court documents and to mingle with the people he knew so well. Three years later, Lord Rosebery, then prime minister, recommended him to fill the vacancy of the Regius Professorship in History at Cambridge, assuring the Queen that the duties of the position would not interfere with the discharge of his functions in Her Majesty’s household. This too had its minor ironies, for it was Rosebery rather than Acton’s life-long friend Gladstone who was responsible for the appointment, and it was at Cambridge, where he had been denied admission as a student, that he was now greeted as a professor. The appointment came as a surprise to the public and the university; Creighton referred to him as a “dark horse.”

Acton realized, regretfully, that the position of Regius Professor was more a public platform than a chair of research. His inaugural lecture, “The Study of History,” delivered in June, 1895, was in the dense, elliptical style of all his writings, weighted with unidentified names and references, terse in its exposition of ideas, generous in its subtleties and innuendoes. Some of his audience welcomed it as the product of a mature and sophisticated mind. The Saturday Review, however, saw it only as a kind of “mental gymnastics,” full of “pretensions and confused fancies” and the “Batavian splutterings” of an awkward pen. In the lectures that followed, a series on modern history and another on the French Revolution, delivered between 1895 and 1901, Acton mended his ways, at least in the opinion of such critics. Except for his sharp and colorful phrasing, occasional lapses into ellipticism, and a greater insistence upon ideas, the lectures were not very different from others intended for undergraduates. Even so he made more demands upon the intelligence of his audience than was customary, which perhaps flattered the throngs of women who, attracted by his reputation and social standing, attended faithfully.

To Arnold Toynbee, a contemporary historian who shares none of Acton’s inhibitions against writing, Acton is a grotesque sacrifice to the spirit of the age. The sterilizing influence of industrialism, with its constant compulsion to exploit new materials and its faith in the division of labor, thwarted the historian of liberty and made of “one of the greatest minds among modern Western historians” an editor of a compilation unworthy of his talents. The Cambridge Modern History, planned and edited by Acton at the request of the syndics of the University from 1896 until his final illness, has been widely criticized. “Lord Acton’s Encyclical” it was christened by those who resented the idea of issuing a universal history prepared by specialists with a final word to say on every subject. Others complained that the specialists were not specialized enough; there were errors in the history and defects of organization. Whether he undertook the editing of the project because he despaired of doing any further significant work by himself, or whether he undertook it as an obligation associated with the Regius Professorship, it is difficult to determine. In any event, he devoted an enormous amount of thought and time to it, as is revealed by his voluminous notes and correspondence on subjects and contributors. But for good or bad, he cannot be saddled with sole responsibility for the finished work. He became ill in April, 1901, and resigned soon afterwards. At that time only part of the first volume was in type, and it did not appear until the autumn of 1902, four months after his death. He had intended to contribute the first chapter, “The Legacy of the Middle Ages,” but the tasks of editing and teaching left little time for writing and the chapter was absent from the published work. The titles and general subject matter of the twelve volumes were plotted by Acton, but the chapters do not always conform to the original plan and there were many changes in contributors.

When he died in June, 1902, Acton left behind a body of essays, a magnificent library (now in the north wing of the Cambridge University Library), and a mass of notes, transcriptions, drafts of lectures, articles and letters, and personal reflections that he hoped might be useful to others in writing the history he had failed to write. John Morley, who respected him enormously, thought of him as a “standing riddle.” Certainly a later generation, knowing him only by his written work and from casual remarks dropped by his contemporaries, must confess its bewilderment. He was not the scholar so overawed by a multiplicity of facts that he could not deliver judgment; he was, on the contrary, as ready in pronouncing judgment as he was in dispensing fact, and if his essays are luxuriant in detail, they are also copious in superlatives. He could confidently refer to “the greatest man born of a Jewish mother since Titus” (the German statesman and philosopher, Stahl), and could declare without hesitation who had “the most prodigal imagination ever possessed by man” (the Renaissance poet, Ariosto). “When was London in the greatest danger?” someone casually wondered. “In 1803,” came Acton’s prompt reply, “when Fulton proposed to put the French army across the channel in steamboats, and Napoleon rejected the scheme.” His imagination did not balk at the most excessive demands. If his talents went unfulfilled, it was possibly because his will was not as fearless as his imagination.

II

It is customary to relate a thinker to the spirit of his age. With Lord Acton, however intimately he was involved in the affairs of his time, it would be more pertinent to relate him to the spirit of ours. He was fond of saying that he agreed with no one. In the only sense in which he recognized contemporaries, the sense of ideological confrères, there is some truth in his lament. He invites identification with none of the dominant currents of thought in Victorian England: the utilitarian gospel of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the humanitarian campaign for improved social conditions, the rationalist crusade against religious obscurantism and superstition, the imperialist mission to spread Christianity and English civilization, the working class protest against exploitation, or the laissez-faire individualism of the traditional liberal philosophy. All of these were aggressively this-worldly and man-centered in a spirit foreign to Acton. The Victorian period has been called the age of hope, but it was confidence, more precisely than hope, that distinguished it. If only man continued in the self-sufficient and self-inspired path he had already marked out for himself, his fate was assured — in this tenet the diverse creeds were united.

Such was the dominant tone of the age, the tone imposed upon it by the major movements and schools of thought. And it is this tone that gives rise to the familiar charges leveled against Victorianism — the charges of complacency, materialism and philistinism. Even the restlessness of the social reformers and socialist revolutionaries failed to violate the conventional boundaries of interests and values, for it was within the framework of profits, progress and physical well-being that their criticism was formulated.

Yet almost every great thinker of the age despised it — with the notable exception of Thomas Macaulay. His more sophisticated colleagues agreed that he represented all that was vulgar and superficial in the thought of the period. The fact that he was worshiped by the literate public made him only more odious to the select, for it was clear that Macaulay was Victorianism come of age, proud of its accomplishments and humble before no one. As the talented artist of the anonymous middle class, he fashioned history in the image of the early Victorian Whig, representing the contours of British industrial civilization as the essential features of society, and the movement of history as a glorious surge of progress that would bring to materialization the divine will of God. He celebrated material greatness, confident that moral excellence would follow in its wake.

In his diary John Stuart Mill confessed his fears that posterity would remember his age as one that had exulted over the writings of Macaulay. Shallowness and aggressive self-satisfaction repelled Mill, and he sought to replace Macaulay’s ideal of material progress with one of moral and spiritual progress. But the temper of the time exacted its price. Mill found that he could introduce the moral and spiritual only by withdrawing the sanction of divinity from the works of men, and by locating morality and spirit within the empirical methods of science, the secular structure of society and the realm of nature — a more complete capitulation to materialism, in one sense, than even Macaulay had achieved.

From the superior perspective of Matthew Arnold, Mill and Macaulay were together responsible for the ‘“hopeless tangle” of the times. If Mill feared that Macaulay’s name would prejudice the judgment of posterity, Arnold feared that the method of Mill was prejudicing the spiritual condition of the present. He deplored the effort of the scientists and scholars to release men from the commitments of religion in order to make them receptive to the unhindered operations of the intelligence. Devoted as he was to the “sweetness and light” of reason, he did not put his entire trust in reason — at least not in the kind of reason Mill extolled. “The whole work of again cementing the alliance between the imagination and conduct remains to be effected,” he said. Once the useless lumber of dogma and superstition were cleared away, a basic religious faith would remain to give conviction to morality. Without that faith, and without the culture of the historical past, there would be no personality, no sense of connection with one’s own personal past. And along with personality would be surrendered personal, responsible thinking — that is, morality.

In the “high seriousness” of Arnold there is a suggestion of the spirit of Acton. Yet Arnold, the religious humanist and liberal Protestant, the fanatic of moderation as G. K. Chesterton has described him, was not really the sympathetic contemporary Acton sought. Nor were any of the great rebels of the age. Carlyle with his extravagant worship of Frederick the Great and loathing of Catholicism, Ruskin and Morris idealizing the culture of the Middle Ages without being moved to repudiate the Protestantism that overthrew that culture, Newman who sought the cure for religious indifferentism in the dogmas and rites of Roman Catholicism and developed on his own part, at least in the opinion of Acton, a form of moral indifferentism — none of these could appease Acton’s sense of alienation.

His alienation, as he saw it, was the result of his dual allegiance to Catholicism on the one hand and liberalism on the other. He once wrote to Mandell Creighton, then editor of the English Historical Review:

It is a real comfort to know that you suffer from my complaint of not getting people to agree with you. And one likes to be told that one has a philosophy of history. If I have one, there is no secret about it, and no compact with the Evil one. I find that people disagree with me either because they hold that Liberalism is not true, or that Catholicism is not true, or that both cannot be true together. If I could discover anyone who is not included in these categories, I fancy we should get on very well together.15

“Liberal Catholicism” was a familiar enough label in the nineteenth century. In France the school of Lamennais and Montalembert had pushed Liberal Catholicism to the brink of papal excommunication. But theirs was the liberalism of the French state of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.’ It was less a devotion to the moral ideals of liberalism than an admission of the autonomy and rights of the supposedly popular and democratic secular state. Acton’s was a different synthesis of liberalism and Catholicism. His liberalism breathed a religious fervor which can only be described as dogmatic and doctrinaire. Yet his religion was neither dogmatic nor doctrinaire in the conventional sense. He accepted the mysteries and dogmas of Catholicism, particularly those of the primitive church, tranquilly and as a matter of fact, but his missionary zeal was not directed in their defense, still less in the defense of the church or of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. On the contrary, it was diverted to an attack upon the existing church, exposing its deplorable politics and history, its Machiavellian tactics and its unscientific, uncritical habits of mind. His politics were a form of religion and his religion a form of politics, and both were conceived in the likeness of an austere and absolute morality:

Have you not discovered, have I never betrayed, what a narrow doctrinaire I am, under a thin disguise of levity? .... Politics come nearer religion with me, a party is more like a church, error more like heresy, prejudice more like sin, than I find it to be with better men.16

The liberalism of the nineteenth century clearly had little in common with the liberalism that was Acton’s passion. It was not informed by the high moral seriousness, the uncompromising principles, of Acton’s faith. Neither Macaulay nor Mill, the ideological spokesmen for the prevailing mood of liberalism, could have had absolute moral principles, according to Acton, because they did not have absolute religious principles. Among the notes that were to have been the basis of his History of Liberty are a number of cards headed “Enemies of Conscience,” under which Mill’s name is prominent, with occasionally an explanatory phrase such as “Christianity is but a word.”17 Sometimes Mill himself was the target of Acton’s attack, but more often it was an earlier figure, Edmund Burke, whom Acton in his youth had regarded as his political mentor and whom he disowned in his maturity, or John Morley, Mill’s most eminent disciple, with whom Acton entered into a somewhat uneasy friendship. Against Burke and Morley the charge was that they treated political questions “experimentally, by the Baconian methods.” “They think that politics teach what is likely to do good or harm, not what is right and wrong, innocent or sinful.”18 For Acton politics was a science, the application of the principles of morality. For Burke and Morley it was, as Morley once quipped, something like logic — neither a science nor an art but a dodge. Politics for them was a series of expediencies and compromises. True to their empiricism, Acton complained, they could not see the presence of eternal and absolute moral principles because they had no sense of the religious sanctity of those principles. “As there are, for him [Morley], no rights of God, there are no rights of man — the consequence, on earth, of obligation in Heaven. Therefore he never tries to adjust his view to many conditions and times and circumstances, but approaches each with a mind uncommitted to doctrines and untrammelled by analogies.”19

Of the hundred definitions of liberty that Acton amassed, his favorites spoke of the rights of conscience. Of the hundred books that he selected as the greatest of all time, well over half dealt with matters of religion. The connection was obvious to Acton: if liberty is the right of conscience, the first agent in the perfection of conscience is religion. The corollary was equally obvious: if religious faiths should continue to crumble, liberty, dependent upon law and morality, would collapse with it. His description of the decline of Athenian liberty might be taken as a parable of the situation in his own day:

An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation.20

It is here perhaps that Acton speaks to our age more than to his own. At a time when most of his contemporaries were acclaiming their emancipation from religion and the wonderful vistas of progress open to them, Acton saw that “progress [is] the religion of those who have none.”21 His was not the only voice to question the new “religion” of progress, the new exaltation of human capabilities. Matthew Arnold, for one, shared his fears that no intelligence patterned upon the cold reasoning of logic could be a satisfactory substitute for religion. But for the most part the champions of religion were timid minds reluctant to alter a line in the traditional world-picture of the Bible; in their fixed scheme of things, biblical criticism was heresy, and the truths of Christianity stood or fell with the truth of every miracle in its texts. Acton, on the other hand, had mastered the methods of biblical criticism and welcomed the findings of science. He was as “enlightened” as Mill or Morley, who were obliged to respect him even though they disagreed with him. Had it not been for the more commanding authority of the Wisemans and Mannings, Acton might have had some influence in his day. As it was, science and philosophy were ranged against religion, and the voice of Acton was drowned out in the noisy tussle between “enlightenment” and “bigotry.”

Now that the warfare between science and religion has subsided somewhat, Acton’s voice is more audible and carries more assurance. Clerics are not alone in carrying the banner of religion; they have been joined by a multitude of those who, in Acton’s own time, would almost certainly have been in the camp of the opposition. It was not until well into the twentieth century, with its shattering experience of two world wars, its nihilistic political doctrines and barbarous political practices, that a score of volumes clamorously discovered the “crisis of our age.” The anticipated progress has become a rout; the traditional scheme of values has disintegrated, and we are importuned to revitalize old faiths and old authorities to halt the plunge into moral anarchy. The secular hopes of the preceding period have vanished as surely as the religious fears of an earlier one. Conscience has become insensible or irresponsible. In despair, some have called for a self-conscious revival of religious belief, the deliberate resolve to act as though one believed the truths that were once actually and implicitly believed. Others have sought salvation in forms of authority that do not wait upon the individual’s erratic intelligence or dubious good will. Of the organized churches, Catholicism has probably had most success in attracting penitents.

The reaction, indeed, may have gone further than Acton would have liked. For Acton was always careful to keep both adversaries in sight and to enlist in the service of neither. If he thought that the secular liberals were undermining the sanctions of morality, he was also certain that the ecclesiastical hierarchy had committed grave moral offences. A series of unsettling personal experiences in the Catholic church and a careful reading of a score of disagreeable episodes in its history deprived him of the comfort and security of the Catholic Weltanschauung. Although he was not taken in by those who saw an easy way of divorcing the institution of the church from the convictions and practices of morality, he shared the sophistication of those who saw no necessary correlation between the two. Describing the dilemma of the Anglican who was attracted to the Catholic church, Acton once offered the following as a “possible” argument to deter his conversion:

Roman Catholic divines hold that the Thirty-nine Articles may be understood in a favourable sense. Anglicans hold that they are not literally binding on the clergy. Still less on the laity. Therefore his position in the English Church does not involve this layman in any error. It may involve him in certain dangers and difficulties. But these are not greater than the dangers and difficulties which would follow his conversion. For there are many opinions, not only sanctioned but enforced by the authorities of the Church of Rome, which none can adhere to without peril to the soul. The moral risk on one side is greater than the dogmatic risk on the other. He can escape heresy in Anglicanism more easily than he can escape the ungodly ethics of the papacy, the Inquisition, the Casuists, in the Roman Communion. The solicitation, the compulsion, will be more irresistible in the latter. A man who thought it wrong to murder a Protestant King would be left for hell by half the Confessors on the Continent. [The Anglicans] Montagu, Bramhall will not sap this man’s Catholic faith so surely as the Spanish and Italian moralists will corrupt his soul.22

In an essay on George Eliot, he described the fascination he felt for this atheist and iconoclast who had violated the most peremptory social conventions of her day. Eliot, he said, was a “consummate expert in the pathology of conscience.” “It was the problem of her age to reconcile the practical ethics of unbelief and of belief, to save virtue and happiness when dogmas and authorities decay.” Her novels were “the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief.”23 Forfeiting the appeal to the theology and mythology of the Scriptures and the idea of divine retribution, she managed to cull out of atheism a profound sense of morality. Philosophically, he found, it was not as sound as Christianity because it failed to secure the sanctions of morality on unyielding ground. Ethically it was less satisfactory because it ran the risk of being satisfied with the obvious effects of man’s actions rather than seeking out the symptoms of their subtle and hidden effects. But spiritually the doctrine of earthly retribution was a noble attempt to define vice and virtue in uncompromising terms. Indeed its very paganism might be deemed an advantage. “It had no weak places, no evil champions, no bad purpose, to screen or to excuse, unlike almost all forms of Christianity.”24

Renan said that what drove him out of the church was not its philosophy but its history and historians. And so it very nearly was with Acton. The church might have used the social prestige and authority of a believing age to guide men through an unbelieving age; instead it seemed to use what remained of its authority for purposes of a low ambition. The original significance of the church, Acton held, was its doctrine of a higher law prescribing rights and duties transcending those of men and governments. The new dispensation, announced by Jesus, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” gave the individual conscience a vantage point from which it might resist the encroachments of political authority. In the age of martyrdom, the church maintained the purity of its ideal, only to pervert it after attaining recognition and respectability. In the late Roman era and the early Middle Ages the church served as the “gilded crutch of absolutism.” With the advance of feudalism, the ambitions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy collided with those of the feudal hierarchy, and this clash gave birth to the first liberal institutions of the modern world. The towns of Italy and Germany won their franchise and self-government; the beginnings of responsible and constitutional authority were to be seen in France’s States-General and England’s parliament; the principles of taxation by representation, trial by jury and ecclesiastical independence were proclaimed. To be sure, the aim of both parties, church and state, was absolute authority, but fortunately both were thwarted, and the long struggle had as its by-product liberty. This period, which saw the development of a kind of adventitious liberalism, was succeeded by open absolutism; the absolute monarchy of France was created by cardinals of the church, while the kings of Spain appropriated the terrors of the Inquisition to establish their despotism.

The Catholic World once charged that it was common knowledge at Cambridge that Acton had “Inquisition on the brain.” The charge is true, although the petulance of the Catholic critic is undeserved. Scrupulous in all matters relating to the history of liberty, and convinced that the church must occupy a central role in that history, Acton was naturally obsessed with the fact of the Inquisition. At most he could ascribe to the Catholic Inquisitors the diabolical dignity of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man.” Of the Jesuits he once said: “It is this combination of an eager sense of duty, zeal for sacrifice, and love of virtue, with the deadly taint of a conscience perverted by authority, that makes them so odious to touch and so curious to study.”25 But this was in an unusually contemplative mood. More often he experienced a revulsion that carried him far beyond the dispassionate curiosity of the historian:

The Inquisition is peculiarly the weapon and peculiarly the work of the Popes. It stands out from all those things in which they co-operated, followed, or assented as the distinctive feature of papal Rome. It was set up, renewed, and perfected by a long series of acts emanating from the supreme authority in the Church. No other institution, no doctrine, no ceremony, is so distinctly the individual creation of the papacy, except the Dispensing power. It is the principal thing with which the papacy is identified, and by which it must be judged.

.... The principle of the Inquisition is murderous, and a man’s opinion of the papacy is regulated and determined by his opinion about religious assassination.

If he honestly looks on it as an abomination, he can only accept the Primacy with a drawback, with precaution, suspicion, and aversion for its acts.

If he accepts the Primacy with confidence, admiration, unconditional obedience, he must have made terms with murder.

.... That blot [the Inquisition] is so large and foul that it precedes and eclipses the rest, and claims the first attention.26

Acton assumed the office of historian in a serious spirit. History was a trust to be carefully tended, for it was the repository of the moral life of man. The historian, keeper of the conscience of all men, was obliged to mete out rewards and punishments — few rewards and many punishments, because “the uncounted majority of those who get a place in its [history’s] pages are bad.”27 Acton prided himself on being a “hanging judge,” and was disappointed to find, for example, that Tocqueville, in his Memoirs and letters, did not appear in the same light. It was urged upon Acton that he should take into account the moral climate prevalent in a particular age and among a particular people, and the special influences to which men in public affairs —the popes, notably —are subject. He replied that if any indulgence was forthcoming, it should be reserved for those who were not educated to the level of moral comprehension and who were remote from the centers of civilization or Christian culture. Applying this test, Catholics should be judged more severely than non-Catholics, priests more severely than laymen, and prelates more severely than priests.28

If Acton’s judgment was frequently so much more harsh than that of others, it was not, he insisted, because his code was esoteric or idiosyncratic. “It supposes nothing and implies nothing but what is universally current and familiar. It is the common, even the vulgar, code I appeal to.”29 Murder is the “low-water mark,” the “scientific zero,” of the conventional code of morality and the legal code of the courtroom. If that is not uniformly maintained, there is no standard of measurement for all other deviations from morality: corruption, mendacity, treason. Those who admit extenuating pleas “debase the currency”30 and convert history into a monument of sin.

The natural tendency of the historian is to set the seal of approval on the past. Professor Herbert Butterfield, in the Whig Interpretation of History, has brilliantly exposed this temptation. He illustrates the theme in the case of the English historian who was Protestant, progressive and Whig, who glorified revolutions when they were successful, ratified the past, and read into the future the principles of progress by which the past had become the present. It is in the nature of historical study to be, in this sense, Whig. All abridgments of the past necessarily select those features that are relevant to the present. Whether the historian wills it or not, the moral bias in favor of the Whig emerges; the Whig’s success seems to vindicate his ideals and establish them as eternally true and right. The only corrective to “Whig history” is the detailed study of a specialized period or problem, restoring in all of its complexity and fullness the context of the past with its many unspent possibilities, and explaining each event in terms of the specific peculiarities that determined it. It is only very special and limited truths that historians can properly deduce, not the universal truths to which the philosophers of history have pretensions.

Macaulay is a good example of the Whig historian, for he combined a sense of satisfaction towards the course of past affairs with a feeling of moral righteousness that permitted him to project the past into the ideal of the future. Acton was like Macaulay in refusing to observe the past dispassionately. But unlike Macaulay, he tended to judge the past adversely, rather than favorably. Macaulay’s standard was actually derived from history, from its successes and failures; Acton’s was derived from a supra-historical moral code, the code of primitive Christianity, which was in constant conflict with history and could be imposed upon it only by the eternal vigilance and constant intervention of the moralist-historian. Acton repudiated the “canonization of the past” because it would “perpetuate the reign of sin.” He conceived it “the part of real greatness to know how to stand and fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary flood.”31 His interpretation of history, then, is once removed from that of the Whig historian by virtue of its absolute rather than its pragmatic moral judgments — and is at least twice removed from the objectivity and neutrality that Professor Butterfield considers the proper temper of the historian.

Acton belonged rather to the tradition of religious propheticism than to that of English Whiggism. He saw sin where others saw only error because he was constantly confronted by the apparition of original sin, and felt called upon to expose it at every turn. His view of human nature was profoundly pessimistic, in that haunted, tormented spirit generally associated with Calvinism rather than Catholicism. In the Inaugural Lecture, he cited in his behalf James Mozley, the Oxford theologian:

A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself. His religion has brought evil to light in a way in which it never was before; it has shown its depth, subtlety, ubiquity; and a revelation, full of mercy on the one hand, is terrible in its exposure of the world’s real state on the other. The Gospel fastens the sense of evil upon the mind; a Christian is enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not..... He owns the doctrine of original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against all appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognizing anywhere what he knows to be everywhere.32

The priest in the confessional, Acton remarks repeatedly in his notes, has the widest and most intimate knowledge of man; and he seems to wonder how the priest can so placidly bear it.

It was not that he naturally thought ill of people, he hastened to assure a correspondent. On the contrary, it was right to think well of them until forced to think ill. Certainly the majority of “little people” deserve to be thought well of. Those who have no conspicuous role in history escape the temptations in which history abounds. But of those who are prominent, we must be prepared for the obligation to think the worst: “Most assuredly, now as heretofore, the Men of the Time are, in most cases, unprincipled, and act from motives of interest, of passion, of prejudice cherished and unchecked, of selfish hope or unworthy fear.”33

The malignant force that converts “Great Men” into bad men is Power. Two of Acton’s contemporaries, an American and a Swiss, both self-confessed “failures” in the competitive struggle of modern society, agreed that power was the root of the evil. The favorite dictum of Henry Adams was, “Power is poison.” Jacob Burckhardt wrote: “Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it. It is not a stability but a lust, and ipso facto insatiable, therefore unhappy in itself and doomed to make others unhappy.” The emphasis upon power has a long and respectable genealogy, but in the history of political thought its paternity is often fixed upon either Machiavelli or Hobbes. Perhaps that is because both philosophers scandalized the consciences of men when they candidly described the omnivorousness of power and at the same time proposed to base their philosophies upon the desire for it. Machiavelli took for granted the aggressive and acquisitive instincts of men and went on to analyze the best course for the ruler determined to consolidate his power. Hobbes slightly altered the form of the argument, making it more acceptable to those who distrust generalizations about human instincts. Man seeks power, he said, in order to secure his own preservation, but that security being a precarious affair, he must acquire more power to secure that which he has already won. And so proceeds the “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Neither Machiavelli nor Hobbes adopted a censorious tone in speaking of what they considered to be a perfectly natural drive common to all men. But the sensibilities of men like Adams, Burckhardt and Acton were less resilient and could not withstand the shock administered by their study of history. Aware of the universality of the evil they described, they were nevertheless outraged; they retreated and withdrew from its presence so as not to be defiled by the moral guilt emanating from it.

The usual modern assumption of naturalistic philosophies is that power is in itself morally neutral; it acquires moral content only in the context of its performance. To Acton this assumption would have meant a surrender to evil incarnate. “History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active.”34 If pope and king are judged more severely than other men, it is partly because the presumption of evil is upon them, and that presumption increases as their effective power increases.

The remark of Goethe, “The man of action is essentially conscienceless,” is endorsed by most observers of political affairs. Henry Maine, a contemporary of Acton, used to say that a leader of a party, however virtuous his private conduct, could not, in his political position, exercise the common virtues of the honest man. Truth, justice and moral intrepidity came into play only when they were of service to the party. Gladstone, leader of the Liberal party during most of the second half of the century, had the reputation of being a man of stubborn principles; his enemies called him doctrinaire, and Acton lauded his “science of statesmanship.” Yet in his correspondence with Gladstone’s daughter, Acton had occasion to take the prime minister to task for actions that suggested “opportunism.” When his great political opponent, Disraeli, died, Gladstone, in the convention of political magnanimity, delivered a tribute to his memory. Acton, who shared Gladstone’s private sentiments and regarded Disraeli as a demagogue and hypocrite who had stimulated the lowest passions of men and had demoralized public opinion in order to maintain his political power, felt that it was inexcusable of Gladstone to mouth praise that he obviously did not believe. This was a trivial incident, but it is an example of the more or less serious moral predicaments with which the ordinary, even the conscientious, politician casually comes to terms. For Acton each situation of this kind would have assumed the proportions of a moral crisis.

Acton’s attitude toward power might be dismissed as hopelessly Utopian, and there is no doubt that he was often naïve in vilifying the personalities of history and contemporary politics. Yet he was brilliantly perceptive and just in describing the moral degeneration that power sets in motion. His celebrated aphorism, ‘Tower tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,”35 is more realistic than either of two other popular philosophies parading under the guise of realpolitik—naturalistic liberalism and Marxism. Liberalism seeks the specific historical causes of social evils and moral corruption without allowing for a general, more basic and more radical evil. Not only does it repudiate the metaphysical doctrine of original sin, it also shies from empirical generalizations on the corrupting effects of political power. It sometimes even assumes that there can come a time when a mature mass intelligence and the systematic cultivation of the scientific temper will eliminate the problems plaguing politics and morality today. Statesmen, imbued with the proper devotion to the methods of science, would then be rid of the distracting temptations that now besiege them; social policies would be executed exactly as they were planned and would have exactly the consequences they were intended to have. Thus liberalism spurns the metaphysics of pessimism only to embrace the even more chimerical metaphysics of optimism.

Marxism, priding itself on its hard-headedness, takes the problem of power more seriously. For the Marxist all social power is the power of social classes. Power relations can be said to be “distorted” when governmental power is wielded by a class that has lost effective social power — when the unproductive aristocracy in nineteenth century England, for example, attempted to maintain political power in defiance of the economically dominant new bourgeoisie. When the impotent dare to defy history in this way, they are before long put in their place by a corrective revolution, violent or not. Power, then, must conform to the realities of the economic situation; it is a reflection of the economic situation, and the only time it can be said to be distorted is when it fails to reflect that situation truly.

If the moral drama of history tends to be too rich and highly colored in Acton’s hands, it is entirely too impoverished and drab in the Marxist’s. The problems of power that are most crucial today are those in which power seems to generate its own rationale, and produces, at least as much as it mirrors, the social scene outside it. Fascism and communism seem to create, in large measure, the conditions under which they thrive. Power, in these systems of government, has emerged unmistakably as an autonomous and primary factor; it will no longer consent to be treated as a mere reflection of other factors. The apparatus of power is no negligible rival to the means of production in determining the character of a society. The brutalizing, corrupting and degrading effects of the Nazi power have fixed for some time the psychological tone of the world, and have set in motion forces that no amount of economic juggling can immobilize. Fascism is “irrational,” people protest, thus testifying to their inability to subsume it under the traditional, rational categories of sociology. Liberals and socialists, unwilling to grant to fascism the possibility of popular consent, predicted its collapse as soon as the last desperate measures of brutal force were spent. They failed to see that power may create the popular consent it desires, and that brutal force may be the character of a new kind of society whose conventions are accepted as the norms of moral and physical life. Optimistic liberalism, vigorous in the nineteenth century and in our own day up to the recent revelations of the horrors of Nazism, had little appreciation of the possible depths of organized human depravity. It was deluded by an excessive faith in the potentialities of social reorganization. If Acton seems to speak to us with peculiar relevancy, it is because we are today more receptive to the idea that neither human intelligence nor material progress can be relied upon to usher in the millennium.

Acton’s criticism of secular liberalism derived from the religious tradition of the prophets; it depended upon the paradoxical insight that men are sinful creatures, not to be confused with God, and that, created in the likeness of God, they have spiritual needs that no amount of material well-being can satisfy. Conversely, his criticism of religion had its source in the principles of political liberalism. One of his contributions to the Rambler, “The Protestant Theory of Persecution,” set the tone for his subsequent criticism of the church. It was an attack upon Protestantism, to be sure, but the weapons were just as effective against Catholicism, and the guns were turned as soon as the Catholic Church exposed itself in a vulnerable position.

To most non-Catholic historians, the Protestant Reformation appears as a major event in the liberation of the human spirit. “The Protestant Theory of Persecution” is a brilliant argument against this conventional view. The identification of Protestantism and toleration, it declares, was a temporary expedient of the reformers. As long as the secular authorities were behind the Catholic church, the reformers had to assert the theory of religious toleration. “Every religious party, however exclusive or servile its theory may be, if it is in contradiction with a system generally accepted and protected by law, must necessarily, at its first appearance, assume the protection of the idea that the conscience is free.”36 With the growth of dissension in his own ranks — the Zwinglian schism and the rise of the Anabaptists — and the hated Peasants’ War, Luther turned to the princes for support, and the doctrine of obedience to the state was pronounced in its most rigorous form. No injustice could warrant revolt against secular authority, he preached. “The princes of this world are gods.” “Disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft, and dishonesty, and all that these may include.” He also yielded to the state in all religious matters, and it is as a result of this that the Protestants developed a theory of persecution more noxious than the older Catholic theory.

Catholic persecution, Acton argued, had had a practical motive; it had been based on the idea that dissent threatened the moral fabric of Christian society. The state was based upon religious unity, and that unity was incorporated into its laws and administration. The authority of the church and the orthodoxy of her doctrine could not be impaired., said Catholic casuists, because they were the cornerstone of the social and political order. Those who held schismatic views were sometimes tolerated, being allowed to enjoy personal freedom and property rights, but they were not admitted to political rights because they did not profess the religious beliefs and duties upon which political rights were conditional.

The Protestant theory of persecution had a different rationale. It simply asserted the right of the state to suppress religious error — to suppress, not the practical immorality of blasphemy or crime, but a purely speculative, dogmatic error:

Catholic intolerance is handed down from an age when unity subsisted, and when its preservation, being essential for that of society, became a necessity of State as well as a result of circumstances. Protestant intolerance, on the contrary, was the peculiar fruit of a dogmatic system in contradiction with the facts and principles on which the intolerance actually existing among Catholics was founded.37

This is a bald sketch of the argument, which is so cleverly constructed and manipulates ideas so dexterously that one can savor it without giving assent. Acton himself was not entirely taken in by his argument, for he proceeded to point out that the Catholic position was, in fact, untenable. The Protestants might have claimed, as the Catholics did on so many occasions, that speculative differences involved blasphemy and blasphemy obviously undermined the social order, or that a sect was fanatical and consequently subversive. If Catholics and Protestants are judged in terms of their theories alone and in terms of the dangers of false ideologies, the Catholics fare better than the Protestants. On other counts, Acton admitted, there was not much to choose from between them, and if Protestants are reproached for their illiberal theories, Catholics are guilty of the no less grave charge of having perpetrated the more numerous and cruel persecutions. “Those who — in agreement with the principle of the early Church, that men are free in matters of conscience — condemn all intolerance, will censure Catholics and Protestants alike.”38

“The Protestant Theory of Persecution” appeared in 1862, when Acton was twenty-eight. In the course of time his views of Catholic persecution became more harsh and his judgment of Protestantism less harsh. He never condoned Lutheranism and Calvinism as systems of thought, but he did learn to respect the original motives that inspired the Reformation and the philosophies developed by the sects of the seventeenth century. The exchange of letters between Bishop Creighton and Lord Acton, published in this volume, contains a remarkable discussion of the pre-Reformation church, in which the Anglican finds circumstances extenuating the Catholic hierarchy, and the Catholic finds “the authority of tradition and the spiritual interests of man” on the side of the reformers. Even in his early articles, however, his views were far more liberal than those of most liberal Catholics. Compared with the most eminent liberal Catholic today, Jacques Maritain, Acton appears almost heretical.

For political liberals who are also Catholics, one of the most delicate and awkward problems is the relation of church and state. If Catholicism is the true religion, it should be reflected in all features of human existence. As Maritain puts it:

The Catholic Church insists upon the principle that truth must have precedence over error and that the true religion, when it is known, should be aided in its spiritual mission in preference to religions whose message is more or less faltering and in which error is mingled with truth. This is but a simple consequence of what man owes to truth.39

In this respect Maritain is in complete agreement with a typical nineteenth century Ultramontane, Archbishop Maning. Acton, with his strong religious and ethical conscience, was not insensible to the seductiveness of this argument. He granted in two early articles (“Political Thoughts on the Church,” 1859, and “Goldwin Smith’s Irish History,” 1862) that Catholicism had the duty, and therefore the right, of impressing its image upon society. Just as the likeness of God is reflected in man, so the divine order must be made manifest in the world. But this did not necessarily imply the unity of church and state. While Maritain is the more orthodox Catholic, Acton is the more orthodox liberal. For Acton, the unity of church and state in the Middle Ages was justified by the exigencies of a barbarous and lawless society where only the spiritual authority of the church, exercised in close association with the state, could introduce the elementary forms of civilization, let alone the forms of Christianity. Moreover, at that time the acquiescence of the entire nation testified to the rightness of Catholic establishments. The entire nation was Catholic, the church having preceded the state and then having helped sustain it, and the connection between church and state was natural and not arbitrary. But in the nineteenth century the exigencies that once required unity, and the natural conditions that made unity tolerable, were happily absent, and the church could “revert to a policy more suited to her nature.”40 The principle of religious toleration was truer to her oldest traditions and to her present situation. Where the shift from unity to toleration did not occur, the church was caught up in spiritual disaster. It became associated with absolutism and was reduced to a fatal condition of dependence:

In modern times the absolute monarchy in Catholic countries has been, next to the Reformation, the greatest and most formidable enemy of the church..... The church is at this day more free under Protestant than under Catholic governments — in Prussia or England than in France or Piedmont, Naples or Bavaria.....

It is absurd to pretend that at the present day France, or Spain, or Naples, are better governed than England, Holland or Prussia. A country entirely Protestant may have more Catholic elements in its government than one where the population is wholly Catholic. The State which is Catholic par excellence is a by-word for misgovernment, because the orthodoxy and piety of its administrators are deemed a substitute for a better system. The demand for a really Catholic system of government falls with the greatest weight of reproach on the Catholic States..... [The remains of the medieval system and the true idea of the Christian state] will be found in the country [England] which, in the midst of its apostasy, and in spite of so much guilt towards religion, has preserved the Catholic spirit in her political institutions more than any Catholic nation.41

Maritain’s philosophy is, of course, more abstract and systematic than Acton’s. For him the principle of the relationship of church and state is decided in terms of a religious dogma to which the confusions of empirical politics must be accommodated. In effect, therefore, he reverses Acton’s formula. Acton had assigned priority to the principle of religious toleration, to the political principle, that is, of the separation of church and state; the unity of the Middle Ages was a departure from this principle justified by the unusual exigencies of that time. Maritain assigns priority to the principle of religious unity, and it is only the unusual exigencies of our time that prevent the fulfillment of this religious principle. He bases himself upon the medieval theory of the “indirect power” of the church in the temporal sphere — indirect as compared with its direct power in the spiritual. This indirect power is prescribed wherever spiritual interests are involved. And since the state is directed to a temporal good that is also moral and spiritual, it may properly come under the jurisdiction of the church. “One sword is under the other,” this theory holds, and the church’s is the upper sword. Moreover, since “there are in the concrete no morally indifferent human acts,” this indirect power has infinite scope:

Any sort of temporal work — not only a public decree or legislative enactment, the raising of taxes, the declaration of war or a treaty of peace, but also the activity of a professional or syndical or political group, the exercise of some particular civic right — may come into special connection with the good of souls, once it becomes for instance the occasion of some spiritual aberration or happens to affect sufficiently seriously the rights and liberty of the Church or the orientation of the faithful towards eternal salvation. Who is to be the judge of such a connection and the gravity of the spiritual interests involved? Clearly the Church alone.42

Nor does Maritain permit the power to be diluted or made ineffectual; he deplores the error of some modern thinkers who exaggerate the distinction between authority and power, and concede to the church its proper authority in temporal affairs but refuse it a corresponding power.

Up to this point Maritain’s argument is identical with Manning’s: “The spiritual power knows, with divine certainty, the limits of its own jurisdiction.” Manning differed from Maritain only on the practical question — whether the church should attempt to exercise its rightful power. Manning insisted upon the full plenitude of its power; Maritain urges a voluntary and partial abdication. Religious conformity today, Maritain says, is not practicable, and to insist upon it might jeopardize the civil peace of the community. As a concession, then, to the spirit of the age, “the state can and ought in the actual circumstances of our time to tolerate within it modes of worship that diverge to a greater or lesser extent from the true worship.”43

The differences between Acton and the conventional Catholic liberal like Maritain — to say nothing of the Ultramontane Manning — are significant even on the basis of Acton’s early articles. In his later work the differences are much sharper and the points of contact between the two are fewer. Acton considered that he had “renounced everything in Catholicism which was not compatible with Liberty, and everything in Politics which was not compatible with Catholicity.”44 The sentiment is pious but unpersuasive. Another of his maxims may be cited against him: “We may pursue several objects, we may weave many principles, but we cannot have two courts of final appeal.”45 In fact, when the two conflicted, Acton set liberalism above Catholicism, and this was more and more true as time went on.

Acton’s political ideas have been compared with those of Burke and Tocqueville. All three were concerned with the practical conditions favoring liberty, and were suspicious of the rationalist frame of mind which desired to impose liberty, as a ready-made set of doctrines, upon a supposedly compliant and reasonable society. They feared men’s power more than they trusted men’s ideals. They anticipated no miracle of happiness on earth, no “heavenly city” such as the eighteenth century philosophers dreamt of. Instead they distrusted these dreams. For if the heavenly city was a Utopian vision, a hell on earth was not, and in the excesses of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, they saw the inevitable judgment on the sin of pride. They appreciated the enormous complexity of society, feared the destructive and despotic temper of impatient reformers, and preferred instead the multiplicity of forces and ideas represented in the existing constitutions — the distinctions of class, the distribution of political power, personal loyalty divided among family, province and nation, the traditions and idiosyncracies perpetuated by history.46

A phrase has gained currency in recent years, “totalitarian liberalism,” to describe the habit liberals have fallen into of calling upon the state to undertake all the reforms they desire — to protect the rights of labor, enforce the rights of suffrage, extend the privilege of education, provide insurance and social relief, prohibit the dissemination of racist doctrines and bigoted opinions—to control, in short, the welfare of society. However urgent each of these reforms is, it is nevertheless true that the tendency to look upon the state as a vast social-work agency has its dangers, for it invests the state with a formidable power, and makes liberty dependent not upon the rights of autonomous groups and corporations but upon the generosity of an omnipotent government.

In a very early article on “Contemporary Events” written for the Rambler, Acton took the measure of the totalitarian liberal of his day: “No despotism is more complete than that which is the aim of modern liberals.... The liberal doctrine subjects the desire of freedom to the desire of power, and the more it demands a share of power, the more it is averse to exemptions from it.”47 This theme runs through all of his work. It determined his judgment of the classical state in antiquity, Protestantism, democracy and nationalism, the French Revolution, nineteenth century Prussia, the Italian struggle for independence, and the American Civil War. All, he said, were tarred by the same brush. All destroyed every authority except the state, and made the state the custodian of all values and all powers. In religion, nationality and political power, the state became a single unit and the independent authorities that formerly mediated between the individual and the state — churches, local and national loyalties and class affiliations — were swept away.

It has been said that the true liberal reveres God but respects the devil. Acton revered the ideals over which the state might preside, but respected the temptations to which it would be subject and the infinite possibilities of corruption and tyranny to which it would inevitably fall victim. Liberty, he insisted, does not reside in the power of the majority to identify its will with that of the state, but in the security of a minority not to be encroached upon by the state:

The true democratic principle, that none shall have power over the people, is taken to mean that none shall be able to restrain or to elude its power. The true democratic principle, that the people shall not be made to do what it does not like, is taken to mean that it shall never be required to tolerate what it does not like. The true democratic principle, that every man’s free will shall be as unfettered as possible, is taken to mean that the free will of the collective people shall be fettered in nothing.48

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. But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.49

That democracy — in the sense of the unfettered rule of the majority — might be inimical to liberty is an idea prominent enough in the nineteenth century. Many feared what Gerald Massey, a contemporary of Acton, spoke of proudly as “the tramp of Democracy’s earthquake feet.” Matthew Arnold expressed a typical anxiety: “Great qualities are trodden down... and littleness united... is become invincible.” Tocqueville said that the modern idea of leveling the population to a single class would have been pleasing to Richelieu: “This level surface facilitates the exercise of power.” The lesson commonly drawn was that the extension of the suffrage was an evil to be resisted. The English historian Lecky, for example, violently attacked the reform acts enfranchising the urban and rural workers. Yet Acton vigorously, not apologetically, supported them.

The conservatives were apprehensive because they were convinced of the political superiority of “the educated class.” Acton had no such faith. On the contrary, he was certain that if the masses were not divinely inspired, neither was any particular class. It was because Gladstone feared democracy and yet favored universal suffrage that Acton so admired him. Two letters, written in appreciation of Gladstone’s support of the reform acts, deserve to be included among the great documents of modern democratic thought:

The decisive test of his greatness will be the gap he will leave. Among those who come after him there will be none who understand that the men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those who earn them (because 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 degradation and risk to their own lives and to their children’s souls), and who yet can understand and feel sympathy for institutions that incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead.50

As to Democracy, it is true that [the] masses of new electors are utterly ignorant, that they are easily deceived by appeals to prejudice and passion, and are consequently unstable, and that the difficulty of explaining economic questions to them, and of linking their interests with those of the State, may become a danger to the public credit, if not to the security of private property. A true Liberal, as distinguished from a Democrat, keeps this peril always before him.

The answer is, that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs — that politics are not made up of artifices only, but of truths, and that truths have to be told.

We are forced, in equity, to share the government with the working class by considerations which were made supreme by the awakening of political economy. Adam Smith set up two propositions — that contracts ought to be free between capital and labour, and that labour is the source, he sometimes says the only source, of wealth. If the last sentence, in its exclusive form, was true, it was difficult to resist the conclusion that the class on which national prosperity depends ought to control the wealth it supplies, that is, ought to govern instead of the useless unproductive class, and that the class which earns the increment ought to enjoy it. That is the foreign effect of Adam Smith — French Revolution and Socialism. We, who reject the extreme proposition, cannot resist the logical pressure of the other. If there is a free contract, in open market, between capital and labour, it cannot be right that one of the two contracting parties should have the making of the laws, the management of the conditions, the keeping of the peace, the administration of justice, the distribution of taxes, the control of expenditure, in its own hands exclusively. It is unjust that all these securities, all these advantages, should be on the same side. It is monstrous that they should be all on the side that has least urgent need of them, that has least to lose. Before this argument, the ancient dogma, that power attends on property, broke down. Justice required that property should — not abdicate, but — share its political supremacy. Without this partition, free contract was as illusory as a fair duel in which one man supplies seconds, arms, and ammunition.....

They [the opponents of reform] will admit much of my theory, but then they will say, like practical men, that the ignorant classes cannot understand affairs of state, and are sure to go wrong. But the odd thing is that the most prosperous nations in the world are both governed by the masses — France and America. So there must be a flaw in the argument somewhere. The fact is that education, intelligence, wealth, are a security against certain faults of conduct, not against errors of policy. There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men..... The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.51

These citations are from letters written in 1880 and 1881. They represent a decided advance upon his earlier position. If by democracy is meant the participation of the people in the affairs of government, rather than the unlimited power of the people in the affairs of society, Acton may be said to have progressed in the direction of democracy in his later writings.

Earlier in his career, as editor of the Rambler and Home and Foreign Review, his political views had been considerably more conservative. He admired Austrian conservatism, denied that representative institutions and constitutionalism were essential for either good government or liberty, uncritically praised feudalism, and commended England for her alacrity in assuming “the glorious mission of representing in Asia the civilization of Christianity.”52 Austria, he said, was a valuable asset to Europe because she boasted the only real nobility on the continent, and the Old Regime of France with its privileged classes and provincial rights was preferable to the equality and centralization that were the fruit of the revolution. The common denominator of these judgments was the desire to see political power distributed among a host of social groups, to multiply the sources of authority so as to break down the identity of state and society. It was the equivalent for society of the principle of checks and balances in government. A political institution, attitude or doctrine, Acton seemed to imply, must be tested by its practical effect upon the conditions in which liberty prospers. The judgment was not an abstract one: it was not the moral superiority per se of the aristocracy in Austria or France that endeared it to Acton, but its utility as a political force.

“Political Causes of the American Revolution,” reprinted here from the Rambler of 1861, illustrates the attitude of the young Acton. The “American Revolution” to which the title refers is the American Civil War, a revolution, according to Acton, promoted by the northern abolitionists. The essay is interesting not because it is a particularly good account of a contemporary event (its interpretation is sometimes extremely naïve), but because it is a penetrating revelation of Acton’s political thought at the time. It was not the South, he argued, with its threat of secession that destroyed the American union, but the North with its appeal to a law and moral obligation superior to the constitution. The Catholic, Orestes Brownson, is cited in support of the doctrine represented by the South that no one may set up his own conscience as superior to the laws of the state. The South had the law in its favor, Acton found; therefore it was in the right morally as well. Moreover, by defending the institution of slavery, the South took its stand against democracy and the pernicious democratic doctrine of the equal rights of man. Neither on moral nor on political grounds did Acton admit the justice of a categorical prohibition of slavery:

In this, as in all other things, they [the abolitionists] exhibit the same abstract, ideal absolutism, which is equally hostile with the Catholic and with the English spirit. Their democratic system poisons everything it touches. All constitutional questions are referred to the one fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, without consideration of policy or expediency..... Very different is the mode in which the Church labours to reform mankind by assimilating realities with ideals, and accommodating herself to times and circumstances.53

Gradually Acton’s ideas shifted, so that the resemblance to Burke (“Political Causes of the American Revolution” reads like an adaptation of Burke’s “Reflections on the French Revolution”) is blurred and even at times effaced. “Considerations of policy or expediency” became anathema to him. He became less conservative, more critical of Austria and Spain and less favorably disposed to feudalism. He was converted to the view that representative institutions were the prerequisites of good government and liberty, and one of the prominent themes in his later correspondence is the immorality of imperialism. In a journal of 1857 he had spoken proudly of the English Catholics as “the only permanently conservative element in the state.”54 Later, “conservatism,” like “Toryism” (except when it was used casually and loosely), became a term of derogation in his vocabulary, synonymous with immorality, opportunism, and ethical and political depravity. And Burke, whose writings he had once worshipped as “the law and the prophets,”55 was remembered kindly only as the champion of America’s noble revolution; more often, particularly in Acton’s personal notes and letters, he was remembered with bitterness and contempt: “To a Liberal, all the stages between Burke and Nero are little more than the phases of forgotten moons.”56

Yet Acton did not entirely discard his early views. If it is difficult to place him within a recognizable tradition of political liberalism, it is not, as he seemed to have thought, because he was creating a new synthesis of liberalism and Catholicism. It was rather because he failed to create such a synthesis. His insights were brilliant but they were not systematically sustained, and his thought was torn between the claims of a practical political liberalism and a dogmatic religious morality. Upon his early views was imposed an alien, even a contradictory, set of political principles and attitudes which, although dominant in the last twenty years of his life, never succeeded in suppressing the earlier ones. The empirical attitude that he had acquired by studying Burke — the disregard for the metaphysical abstractions of right and justice, the exclusive concern with the practical test of political principles and institutions — yielded more and more to a doctrinaire attitude: an unwillingness to deviate from the absolute ideals of right and justice, and a profound distaste for traffic with the expediencies and compromises of practical politics.

If the essay on the American Civil War illustrates the political thinking of Acton’s youth, his views on the American Revolution illustrate the dominant temper of his thought in maturity. In an extravagant tribute to the American Revolution he ranked 1776 as the first date in the history of liberty. It was then that America demonstrated her faith in liberty as a matter of pure principle and pure idea, and flouted the ignoble solicitations of material interests, practical caution, and the security of life and property. (Acton’s unconventional reading of history may be quarreled with here too, but that is not now the issue.) The American Revolution was significant as “the supreme manifestation of the law of resistance, as the abstract revolution in its purest and most perfect shape.”57 The revolutionists jeopardized their lives, fortunes and even their country; they created a “lake of blood” in their determination to resist their monarch and parliament, the legally constituted authorities, and they erected their commonwealth on a principle subversive of all law and tradition. “Here or nowhere we have the broken chain, the rejected past, precedent and statute superseded by unwritten law, sons wiser than their fathers, ideas rooted in the future, reason cutting as clean as Atropos.”58

Acton’s rupture with Burke and with his own early views could not have been more defiant, it would seem, for he was now identifying morality with the principle of the “abstract revolution.” He even declared himself willing to take the risks of that revolution and all the evils that might attend it. At least he was willing to do so in the case of the American Revolution. In other cases he quite obviously was not. His lectures on the French Revolution, for example, seem to derive, in the main, from his earlier thinking, when he was still under the spell of Burke’s attack on the revolution. Yet even in these lectures there is a noticeable contradiction. For he was attempting to straddle two incompatible principles: the pure, ethical principle that provided the initial incentive for the revolution and its moral justification, and the principle of the liberal society that should have been the outcome of the revolution, with its checks and balances, restrictions on power, corporations independent of the state, and practical securities for liberty.

Burke, more logical and consistent than Acton in this respect, had said that revolution in the service of an absolute idea must necessarily give way to the state in the service of an absolute power. If the laws, traditions and irrationalities of history are subjected to the discretions of men, if they are judged by conscience and higher law, the course of rationalism would lead fatally to absolutism, because there would no longer be any room for the multiplicity of social forces upon which real liberty depends. Acton himself was not unaware of this. One of his notes reads: “Government by Idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, unconvinced, a future danger.”59 More often, however, he ignored Burke’s warnings, dismissing him as an unprincipled opportunist who substituted the expediencies of politics for the precepts of morality.

It is perhaps unfair to insist on the contradictions in Acton’s thought. He was not, after all, a systematic philosopher. It would undoubtedly be more generous to accept his separate insights for what they are worth, without seeking to impose a general structure upon his work. It would be generous, but hardly to Acton’s liking. For Acton was, more than a historian, a political theorist. The actual events of politics and history were for him merely the occasions for the appearance of their true meanings, their ideas, which it was the task of the historian to relate to a universe of discourse consisting of the basic and eternal principles of morality.

So perhaps it is more generous, after all, not to dismiss the contradictions as verbal or minor. Perhaps it might be best to take them in the grand and serious style in which Acton approached all problems. In that case, they must be seen as a profound ambivalence eating away at the very heart of his work. For whatever temporary reconciliations may be effected between an absolute morality and a pragmatic, temporizing liberalism, the tension between them persists.

Matthew Arnold, also obsessed by the antagonism between the actual and the ideal, found in criticism the means of their reconciliation:

Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical importance. It must be patient, and know how to wait; and flexible, and know how to attach itself to things and how to withdraw from them. It must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fullness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent.

“Praise elements that for the fullness of spiritual perfection are wanted....” — praise the spiritual grandeur of pure abstract idealism, even though in practice it generates a hateful absolutism; “Discern the spiritual shortcomings....” — discern the spiritual suicide of a system, however liberal, tolerant and satisfactory in practice, which rests content with an ethics of prudence and a politics of interest. It was this double-edged instrument of criticism that cleaved through Acton’s philosophy.

GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB

New York City

January, 1948

Freedom and Power

I

II