not by its own attraction, by
the gradual exhaustion of error, it admits no corresponding promise
for what is ethically right. It deems the canonisation of the historic
Past more perilous than ignorance or denial, because it would
perpetuate the reign of sin and acknowledge the sovereignty of wrong,
and conceives it the part of real greatness to know how to stand and
fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary flood.[95]

[Sidenote: DEBASING THE CURRENCY]

Ranke relates, without adornment, that William III. ordered the
extirpation of a Catholic clan, and scouts the faltering excuse of his
defenders. But when he comes to the death and character of the
international deliverer, Glencoe is forgotten, the imputation of
murder drops, like a thing unworthy of notice.[96] Johannes Mueller, a
great Swiss celebrity, writes that the British Constitution occurred
to somebody, perhaps to Halifax. This artless statement might not be
approved by rigid lawyers as a faithful and felicitous indication of
the manner of that mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings,
that was never profaned by the invading wit of man;[97] but it is
less grotesque than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original
writer of political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between
Harrington and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced
a scheme of limitations which, in substance, if not in form,
foreshadowed the position of the monarchy in the later Hanoverian
reigns. Although Halifax did not believe in the Plot,[98] he insisted
that innocent victims should be sacrificed to content the multitude.
Sir William Temple writes:--"We only disagreed in one point, which was
the leaving some priests to the law upon the accusation of being
priests only, as the House of Commons had desired; which I thought
wholly unjust. Upon this point Lord Halifax and I had so sharp a
debate at Lord Sunderland's lodgings, that he told me, if I would not
concur in points which were so necessary for the people's
satisfaction, he would tell everybody I was a Papist. And upon his
affirming that the plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it
were so or no, in those points that were so generally believed." In
spite of this accusing passage Macaulay, who prefers Halifax to all
the statesmen of his age, praises him for his mercy: "His dislike of
extremes, and a forgiving and compassionate temper which seems to have
been natural to him, preserved him