pre-eminently mischievous
personage among the guiding influences of a nation will derange the
most sagacious calculations, and the reckless gambler or the obtuse
obstructionist may prove more right than the most cautious, the most
skilful, the most farseeing statesman.

A fatal and very common error is that of judging the actions of the
past by the moral standard of our own age. This is especially the
error of novices in history and of those who without any wide and
general culture devote themselves exclusively to a single period.
While the primary and essential elements of right and wrong remain
unchanged, nothing is more certain than that the standard or ideal of
duty is continually altering. A very humane man in another age may
have done things which would now be regarded as atrociously barbarous.
A very virtuous man may have done things which would now indicate
extreme profligacy. We seldom indeed make sufficient allowance for the
degree in which the judgments and dispositions of even the best man
are coloured by the moral tone of the time or society in which they
live. And what is true of individuals is equally true of nations. In
order to judge equitably the legislation of any people, we must always
consider corresponding contemporary legislations and ideas. When this
is neglected our judgments of the past become wholly false. How often,
for example, has such a subject as the history of the penal laws
against Irish Catholics been treated without the smallest reference to
the contemporary laws against Protestants that existed in every
Catholic nation and the contemporary laws against Catholics that
existed in almost every Protestant country in Europe. How often have
the English commercial restrictions on the American colonies been
treated as if they were instances of extreme and exceptional tyranny,
while a more extended knowledge would show that they were simply the
expression of ideas of commercial policy and about the relation of
dependencies to the mother-country which then almost universally
prevailed.

It is not merely the moral standard that changes. A corresponding
change takes place in the moral type, or, in other words, in the class
of virtues which is especially cultivated and especially valued. To
know an age aright we should above all things seek to understand its
ideal, the direction in which the stream of its self-sacrifice and
moral energy naturally flowed. Few things in history are more
interes