oppression as essential to a prosperous community, and sometimes not. In either case, the procedure seems arbitrary. In practice Wood shows that he cannot do without reference to the state of political liberty and at the same time that he does not know what to do with it. Since he relies on the historians’ general appraisals of different periods, it should be observed that the weight assigned to political freedom by historians obviously has varied with their standpoint and philosophy of history. A Mommsen will view a period differently from a Gibbon, a Taine will shrink with horror from the political events that a Michelet applauds. When their judgments are incorporated into a presumably objective over-all description of an era, it masks a value judgment.
Nor is it always apparent why Wood classifies his monarchs as superior, mediocre, and inferior. For his classifications to have any scientific value, the traits that determine a monarch’s particular class must be independent of estimates of the conditions of his reign, since Wood believes that the conditions are in the main consequences of those traits. To infer the monarchs’ traits from the conditions of the country, and then to cite these traits as causal determinants of the conditions, would be gross question-begging. And yet one cannot escape the impression that, if the monarchs classified by Wood had lived in different periods, he would have classified their “innate” qualities differently. Of Charles I. of England Wood says that his chief faults were “duplicity and obstinacy.” Others might say, on the basis of the same data, that Charles I. was “shrewd and principled.” Perhaps Wood with a different political and religious bias, or considering the king in relation to a less difficult time, would have agreed. Here, too, moral judgments enter integrally into the total valuation of individual character.
Perhaps the most obvious objection to Wood’s thesis is its self-imposed restriction to the period before the French Revolution. The whole nineteenth century lay before him with practically inexhaustible materials on the life and fate of monarchs in all countries. But he does not touch it. The reason is clear. Not even the staunchest legitimist would seriously enter a claim for the monarch as hero either in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, except for the non-royal usurper, Napoleon. The decline of the influence of monarchs in the last two centuries is something which Wood is totally at a loss to explain. The conditions and events that account for this decline cannot themselves be
