principles" of which he said that they
were the great gift of England to the world. By this he meant the real
principles by which the events of 1688 could be philosophically
justified, when purged of all their vulgar and interested associations,
raised above their connection with a territorial oligarchy, and based on
reasoned and universal 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 mediaeval, and declared
that it was the stolid conservatism 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 government was 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 power 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 achievements 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 theology of St. Thomas and
Ockham, and even by Suarez and Molina.

What Acton feared and hated was the claim of absolutism to crush the
individuality and destroy the conscience of men. It was indifferent to
him whether this claim was exercised by Church or State, by Pope or
Council, or King or Parliament. He felt, however, that it was more
dangerous because more absorbing when exercised in religious matters,
and thus condemned the Protestant theory more deeply than the Catholic
permission of persecution. He also felt that monarchy was more easily
checked than pure democracy, and that the risk of tyranny was greater in
the latter.

Provided that freedom was left to men to do their duty, Acton was not
greatly careful of mere rights. He had no belief in the natural equality
of men, and no dislike of the subordination of classes on the score of
birth. His ideal of freedom as of the Church was in some respects that
of the earlier Middle Ages. He did not object to serfdom, provided that
it safeguarded the elementary rights of the serf to serve God as well as
man. In the great struggle in America, he ha