Universities were but subsidiary though very valuable aids to the end. Acton as a teacher, as a lecturer, as a friend, inspired us all with the sense that history was something greater than before we had realised, that the student was engaged upon a task fundamentally sacred, and that while politics are unintelligible without it, yet, rightly understood, it is the surest evidence of religion in general, and "a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ." Such a view of history may be right or wrong, but it is assuredly that created by intercourse with Acton, breathing in every utterance he spoke and every essay he ever wrote.
His influence upon research is best exhibited in the plan of the Cambridge Modern History. That plan at once expresses the ideals of Acton as a historian, and affords the evidence that his conception of History was that of the development of civilised freedom and growth of European culture. In the original plan every chapter was to be written by the most competent available expert, wherever he hailed from; nothing written at second hand was to appear. This was at last feasible, since "the long conspiracy against the knowledge of truth was at an end, and competing scholars all over the civilised world are taking advantage of the change." It might therefore be hoped that Cambridge would produce "the best history of modern times that the published or unpublished sources of information admit." But if each chapter was to be written by the man most thoroughly equipped with first-hand knowledge of its subject, it was idle to expect anything but a minute subdivision of labour. No man could be the first living authority save on a small period. At the same time Acton was here, as elsewhere, the foe of pedantry. That notion of history which reduces it to a form of orthography had no charms for him; he had not, like Freeman, a horror of calling Charles the Great by his
