d no sympathy with the
North, which seemed to him to make majority rule the only measure of
right: and he wrote, if not in favour, at least in palliation, of
slavery. It may be doubted how far he would have used the same language
in later life, but his reasons were in accord with all his general
views. Slavery might be rendered harmless by the State, and some form of
compulsion might be the only way of dealing with child-races, indeed, it
might be merely a form of education no more morally blameworthy than the
legal disabilities of minors. But the absolute state recognising no
limits but its own will, and bound by no rule either of human or Divine
law, appeared to him definitely immoral.

Acton's political conscience was also very broad on the side technically
called moral. No one 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 would have condemned Pope Paul the Fourth more than Rodrigo
Borgia, and the inventor of the "dragonnades" 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, we
think, be admitted that he applied these doctrines with a rigidity which
human affairs will not admit, 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 "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 with 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 relativ