ity had been overdone by historians, and the principles
of Machiavelli had become so common a cry of politicians, that severe
protest was necessary. The ethics of Nietzsche are the logical
expansion of Machiavelli, and his influence is proof that, in the
long-run, men cannot separate their international code from their
private one. We must remember that Acton lived in a time when, as he
said, the course of history had been "twenty-five times diverted by
actual or attempted crime," and when the old ideals of liberty seemed
swallowed up by the pursuit of gain. To all those who reflect on history
or politics, it was a gain of the highest order that at the very summit
of historical scholarship and profound political knowledge there should
be placed a leader who erred on the unfashionable side, who denied the
statesmen's claim to subject justice to expediency, and opposed the
partisan's attempt to palter with facts in the interest of his creed.

It is these principles which both explain Acton's work as a student, and
make it so difficult to understand. He believed, that as an investigator
of facts the historian must know no passion, save that of a desire to
sift evidence; and his notion of this sifting was of the remorseless
scientific school of Germany, which sometimes, perhaps, expects more in
the way of testimony than human life affords. At any rate, Acton
demanded that the historian must never misconceive the case of the
adversaries of his views, or leave in shade the faults of his own side.
But on the other hand, when he comes to interpret facts or to trace
their relation, his views and even his temperament will affect the
result. It is only the barest outline that can be quite objective. In
Acton's view the historian as investigator is one thing, the historian
as judge another. In an early essay on Doellinger he makes a distinction
of this kind. The reader must bear it in mind in considering Acton's own
writing. Some of the essays here printed, and still more the lectures,
are anything but colourless; they show very distinctly the predilections
of the writer, and it is hardly conceivable that they should have been
written by a defender of absolutism, or even by an old-fashioned Tory.
What Acton really demanded was not the academic aloofness of the pedant
who stands apart from the strife of principles, but the honesty of
purpose which "throws itself into the mind of one's opponents, and
accounts for their mistakes," givi