policy has touched with tolerance and skill problems of the mind and conscience the sphere of liberty for mind and conscience. But more often the success of policy is seen merely in an improvement of the material conditions of life, in greater and better-distributed wealth, in a higher social well-being, and in the welding of the parts of a society into something like a harmonious community—the integrity of the body politic. Twice happy the statesman who not only has a high conception of end in his politics, but can point to great practical achievement in striving to attain the goal; and thrice happy that statesman who, in thus achieving, has not made any unworthy sacrifice of right in the means he has taken for the ends he has had before him.
The relation of means to end is a consideration paramount in the study of history and politics. In the study of history we must always be dispassionate, and in estimate severely just. The Muse is false to her calling if she becomes generous. To be just in estimate is what we are all concerned with in study and writing and teaching: not otherwise can lessons be drawn from the past for the present. But we should be unjust generous or too severe if we did not know the conditions the situation, we do well to call it with which policy, or the men of action, had to deal; and if, knowing the situation, we did not allow for it equitably in the estimate that we form. We must not equate principles or ideal and conditions or fact.[1] Therefore, we cannot accept the stand-
- ↑ ‘It is not by attending to the dry, strict, abstract principles of a point, that a just conclusion is to be arrived at in political subjects. They are not to be determined by mathematical accuracy. Wisdom is to be gained in politics, not by any one rigid principle, but by examining a number of incidents; by looking attentively at causes, and reflecting on the effects they have produced; by comparing a number of events together, and by taking, as it were, an average of human affairs.’—Pitt, April 7, 1794, Speeches (1806), ii. 190.
