Page:History of Freedom.djvu/36

 xxxii

ESSAYS ON LIBERTY

Acton's political conscience was also very broad on the side technically called moral. Noone had higher ideals of purity. Yet he had little desire to pry into the private morality of kings or politicians. It was by the presence or absence of political principles that he judged them. He \vould have condemned Pope Paul the Fourth more than Rodrigo Borgia, and the inventor of the "dra- gonnades" more than his great-grandson. He did not view personal morality as relevant to political judgment. In this, if in nothing else, he agreed with Creighton. His correspondence with the latter throws his principles into the strongest light, and forms the best material for a judgment. For it must, \ve think, be admitted that he applied these doctrines with a rigidity which human affairs will not adlnit, and assumed a knowledge beyond our capacity. To declare that no one could be in a state of grace who praised S. Carlo Borromeo, because the latter followed the evil principle of his day in the matter of persecution, is not merely to make the historian a hanging judge, but to ignore the great truth that if crime is always crime, degrees of temptation are widely variable. The fact is, Acton's desire to maintain the view that U morality is not ambulatory," led him at times to ignore the complementary doctrine that it certainly develops, and that the difficulties of statesmen or ecclesiastics, if they do not excuse, at least at times explain their less admirable courses. At the very close of his life Acton came to this view himself. In a pathetic conversation wi th his son, he lamented the harshness of some of his judgments, and hoped the example would not be followed. Still, Acton, if he erred here, erred on the nobler side. The doctrine of moral relativity had been overdone by historians, and the principles of Machiavelli had become so common a cry of politicians, that severe protest was necessary. The ethics of Nietzsche are the logical ex-