rty is not a means to a higher
end, it is itself the highest political end." His preference was,
therefore, not for any sovereign one or number, such as formed the ideal
of Rousseau or the absolutists; but for a monarchy of the English type,
with due representation to the aristocratic and propertied classes, as
well as adequate power to the people. He did not believe in the doctrine
of numbers, and had no sympathy with the cry _Vox populi Vox Dei_; on
the other hand, he felt strongly that the stake in the country argument
really applied with fullest force to the poor, for while political error
means mere discomfort to the rich, it means to the poor the loss of all
that makes life noble and even of life itself. As he said in one of his
already published letters:--

The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of those
who earn them, for laws should be adapted to those who have the
heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not
mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain and degradation,
and risk to their own lives and to their children's souls.

While he felt the dangers of Rousseau's doctrine of equality, declaring
that in the end it would be destructive alike of liberty and religion,
he was yet strongly imbued with the need of reconciling some of the
socialists' ideals with the regard due to the principles which he
respected. He was anxious to promote the study of Roscher and the
historical economists, and he seems to have thought that by their means
some solution of the great economic evils of the modern world might be
found, which should avoid injustice either to the capitalist or the
wage-earner. He had a burning hatred of injustice and tyranny, which
made him anxious to see the horrors of the modern proletariat system
mitigated and destroyed; but combined with this there was a very deep
sense of the need of acting on principles universally valid, and a
distrust of any merely emotional enthusiasm which might, in the future,
create more evils than it cured. Acton was, in truth, the incarnation of
the "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 was
not the Conservative Whig of the "glorious revolution," for to him the
memory of William of Orange might be immortal but was certainly not
pious: yet it was "revolution