Page:History of Freedom.djvu/34

 xxx

ESSAYS ON LIBEH.TY

there was a very deep sense of the need of actin'g on principles universally valid, and a distrust of any merely emotional enthusiasm \vhich Inight, in the future, create more evils than it cured. Acton was, in truth, the incarnation of the II spirit of Whiggism," although in a very different sense of the phrase from that in which it became the target for the arrows of Disraeli's scorn and his mockery of the Venetian constitution. \ He \vas not the Conservative Whig of the II glorious revolution," for to him the memory of William of Orange might be immortal but was certainly not pious: yet it was "revolu- tion principles" of which he said that they were the great gift of England to the world. By this he meant the real principles by \vhich the events of 1688 could be philo- sophically justified, \vhen purged of all their vulgar and interested associations, raised above their connection with a territorial oligarchy, and based on reasoned and uni- versal ideals. Acton's liberalism was above all things historical, and rested on a consciousness of the past. He knew very well that the roots of modern constitutionalism were mediæval, and declared that it was the stolid con- servatism of the English character, which had alone enabled it to preserve what other nations had lost in the passion for autocracy that characterised the men of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Constitutional govern. ment \vas for him the sole eternal truth in politics, the rare but the only guardian of freedom. He loved to trace the growth of the principle of po\ver limiting itself and law triumphant alike over king, aristocracies, and majorities; and to show how it arose out of the cruel conflicts of the religious wars and rested upon the achieve- ments of Constance and the efforts of Basle and how it , was influenced in expression by the thinkers of the ancient world and the theologians of the modern, by the politics of Aristotle, by the maxims of Ulpian and of Gaius, by the