motives, or put on the right side because it
happens to harmonise with their lower interests. Saints--so we are
told--have been the cruellest persecutors; and kings, acting from
purely selfish ambition, have consolidated nations or crushed effete
and mischievous institutions. If we can make up our minds as to which
was, on the whole, the best cause,--and, generally speaking, both sides
represented some sound principle,--it does not follow that it was also
the cause of all the best men. Before we can judge of the individual,
we must answer a hundred difficult questions: If he took the right
side, did he take it from the right motives? Was it from personal
ambition or pure patriotism? Did he see what was the real question at
issue? Did he foresee the inevitable effect of the measures which he
advocated? If he did not see, was it because he was human, and
therefore short-sighted; or because he was brutal, and therefore
wanting in sympathy; or because he had intellectual defects, which made
it impossible for him to escape from the common illusions of the time?
These, and any number of similar difficulties, arise when we try to
judge of the great men who form landmarks in our history, from the time
of Boadicea to that of Queen Victoria. They are always amusing, and
sometimes important; but there is always a danger that they may warp
our views of the vital facts. The beauty of Mary Queen of Scots still
disqualifies many people from judging calmly the great issues of a most
important historical epoch. I will leave it to you to apply this to our
views of modern politics, and judge the value of the ordinary
assumption which assumes that all good men must be on one side.

Now we may say that the remedy for such illusions points to the
importance of a doctrine which is by no means new, but which has, I
think, bearings not always recognised. We have been told, again and
again, since Plato wrote his _Republic_, that society is an organism. It
is replied that this is at best an analogy upon which too great stress
must not be laid; and we are warned against the fanciful comparisons
which some writers have drawn between the body corporate and the actual
physical body, with its cells, tissues, nervous system, and so forth.
Now, whatever may be the danger of that mode of reasoning, I think that
the statement, properly understood, corresponds to a simple logical
canon too often neglected in historical and political reasonings. It
means, I