Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/501

Rh socialists are Liberal and some democrats Tory. Impartiality would remain intact, For the strength of a doctrine, that which has to be accounted for, is its truth or semblance of truth ; its errors make themselves known by its consequences and variations. The difficulty is that political symbolism implies symbols, and a party seldom produces or obeys its charter. No manifesto or election programme has the defining authority of a Shorter Catechism ; and political teachers are not representative in the same sense as Hammond or Chillingworth, Baxter or Barclay. Theology differentiates towards exclusiveness, while politics develop in the direction of comprehension and affinity. Men who move along plain lines, like Seward and Castelar, are not often the most efficacious ; and the alchemy that could condense Thiers or Bismarck or Frere Orban into a formula, as Bulwer's French cook put the Prize Durham into a pomatum-pot, is a lost art. History does not work with bottled essences, but with active combinations ; compromise is the soul, if not the whole of politics. Occasional conformity is the nearest practical approach to orthodoxy, and progress is along diagonals. Most of the maxims that have made the time's since 1776 different from what went before are international. Criminal and philanthropic and agrarian legislation is simultaneous in many countries ; the Reform Bill was carried in the streets of Paris, and purchase fell between Metz and Sedan. Pure dialectics and bilateral dogmas have less control than custom and interest and prejudice. The German loves abstractions and the Frenchman definitions, and they are averse from whatever is inconsistent and illogical. But the earliest history which is still read in Germany begins, "There was once a count"; and Ranke is always concrete, seldom puzzling over predestination or the balance of trade. Almost the only man who in France has succeeded with deductive history is the Milanese Ferrari ; even the best historian of the Revolution, Sorel, has not carried out the dogmatic method, and Renan would be likely to lose readers if he required them to understand the Gnostics.