258 THE CECILS
and he set himself to put into practice the principle he had himself laid down. "It is the duty of every Englishman, and of every English party," he had written, " to accept a political defeat cordially, and to lend their best endeavours to secure the success or to neutralise the evil of the principles to which they have been forced to submit." Now, as throughout his career, he was able before long to accept the accomplished fact ; and his fears of the results of Reform not being realised, he succeeded, while zealously upholding the old Tory doctrines of his great exemplars, Pitt and Castlereagh, in giving them a wider interpretation and in adapting them to the changed conditions of modern politics.
So far from being a hide-bound Tory, as he is sometimes painted, he understood, far better than do the doctrinaire Radicals of his or of our time, that change is inevitable in political doctrine. ' The axioms of the last age," he wrote in 1861, " are the fallacies of the present ; the principles which save one generation may be the ruin of the next. There is nothing abiding in political science but the necessity of truth, purity and justice." Like Pitt, he was " far too practical a politician to be given to abstract theories, universal doctrines, watchwords or shib- boleths of any kind. He knew of no political gospel that was to be preached in season and out of season." * And it is this " untheoretic mind "
1 Essay on Stanhope's Life of Pitt. Reprinted in Essays: Biographical.
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