s as though once more the earlier Middle Ages
will be justified, and religious bodies become the guardians of freedom,
even in the political sphere. Still, a successful career in public life
could hardly be predicted for one who felt at the beginning that "I
agree with nobody, and nobody agrees with me," and towards the close
admitted that he "never had any contemporaries." On the other hand, it
may be questioned whether, in the chief of his self-imposed tasks, he
failed so greatly as at first appeared. If he did not prevent
"infallibility" being decreed, the action of the party of Strossmayer
and Hefele assuredly prevented the form of the decree being so dangerous
as they at first feared. We can only hazard a guess that the mild and
minimising terms of the dogma, especially as they have since been
interpreted, were in reality no triumph to Veuillot and the Jesuits. In
later life Acton seems to have felt that they need not have the
dangerous consequences, both in regard to historical judgments or
political principles, which he had feared from the registered victory of
ultramontane reaction. However this may be, Acton's whole career is
evidence of his detachment of mind, and entire independence even of his
closest associates. It was a matter to him not of taste but of
principle. What mainly marked him out among men was the intense reality
of his faith. This gave to all his studies their practical tone. He had
none of the pedant's contempt for ordinary life, none of the aesthete's
contempt for action as a "little vulgar," and no desire to make of
intellectual pursuits an end in themselves. His scholarship was to him
as practical as his politics, and his politics as ethical as his faith.
Thus his whole life was a unity. All his various interests were inspired
by one unconquered resolve, the aim of securing universally, alike in
Church and in State, the recognition of the paramountcy of principles
over interests, of liberty over tyranny, of truth over all forms of
evasion or equivocation. His ideal in the political world was, as he
said, that of securing _suum cuique_ to every individual or association
of human life, and to prevent any institution, however holy its aims,
acquiring more.

To understand the ardour of his efforts it is necessary to bear in mind
the world into which he was born, and the crises intellectual,
religious, and political which he lived to witness and sometimes to
influence. Born in the early days of