point of that school of history, or of moral philosophers busying themselves with the records and deeds and men of the past—a school of which Lord Acton was a conspicuous example in our own generation—that would lay down an absolute and binding canon in the sphere of right and wrong, and require that no plea of over-mastering and tyrannous conditions can condone deviation from the moral law in the use of means by the politician for the gaining of an end desirable in the interest of the State the living and developing body politic. Such a rule would, assuredly, be a very simple and very clear rule to apply. We need not go, in its stead, to the opposite extreme. We need not say that everything is relative: that that is the only doctrine and rule that is absolute. But the simple, clear, rigid rule of moral estimate is one which even those who almost make of politics a ‘religion may righteously refuse to accept. Its enforcement would result in the doing of gross injustice to the men whose part it has been sternly to achieve by grasping that ‘stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life’, and not merely to think and hope and have visions. But, inasmuch as we repudiate the absolute canon of the moralist in historical estimate, for judgement that shall be just, we have the more need to be scrupulous in our search for historical conditions, in the measure of allowance we make for them, in our scrutiny both of the end that is sought and of the means that are used.
These considerations bear with especial force upon questions of foreign and international policy, owing to the complexity of the conditions that are essentially involved. An ambassador—we have all heard from Sir Henry Wotton and his interpreter, Izaak Walton is ‘an honest man who is sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’.[1] Well: much depends
- ↑ The ‘hinge upon which the conceit was to turn’ is found in the use of the word ‘lieger’ or ‘lieger ambassador’, one who was appointed to
