Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/435

 REVIEWS 421

of responsible creatures; and to discuss them, while he need not take out an advocate's brief or cultivate the vituperative style of Judge Jeffries or the insane ravings of old Lias, the crazy schoolmaster of David Greive, he must mount the judgment seat. He deals with persons, not things.

Goldwin Smith represents his school at its best. He is not an advocate; he is a judge, and a severely honest judge at that; yet he knows no law save the common law of the later nineteenth century. Hence his judgments are often severe ; and a severe judgment is always an unjust judgment. He forgets that in history, as in current life, right is always concrete, never abstract ; always relative, never absolute; always assuming new form and color, never changeless; that a prin- ciple of action which may be right today might not have been right eight hundred years ago, and vice versa; that political and social con- ditions might have justified certain forms of violence in the eleventh century, which in the end of the nineteenth would be deemed worthy of the hangman's cord. Hence he has little sympathy with William the Conqueror, and fails utterly to understand the gay, the roistering, the unbelieving William Rufus, the freethinking agnostic on the throne, who in his own rough, wild way struggled with the forces of disrup- tion, and sought to bring order out of the chaos of his time.

As may be supposed, this terrible judge has short shrift for poor old John Lackland, or Henry VIII. , while upon the "Hanoverian swine" he exhausts the vocabulary of gentlemanly vituperation. He pays tribute to the genius of Strafford, but refuses to remove a single shadow from the obloquy of his great apostasy. To him he is still ''the renegade Wentworth." On the other hand, Elliot, Hampden, Pym, and above all Cromwell, appeal powerfully to the hero-worshiper. He can even condone the brutal massacres of Drogheda and Wexford, and seems to think it was something in Cromwell's favor that only a part of the garrisons were native Irish ; as though Cromwell ever boggled at the killing of an Irishman.

Throughout, the book is colored by the author's political sym- pathies; and though he wisely closes his chapter on " The Empire," his last chapter, before he reaches the stirring questions of contem- porary history, the reader feels that these questions are never absent from his mind. Of the Norman and his conquest, for which he has nothing of the admiration of the average Englishman, he writes : " The Norman was a favorite of the papacy. Though a marauder, he was ecclesiastical, and everywhere pious and papal in his rapine. To bring