We cannot understand Acton aright, if we do not remember that he was an English Roman Catholic, to whom the penal laws and the exploitation of Ireland were a burning injustice. They were in his view as foul a blot on the Protestant establishment and the Whig aristocracy as was the St. Bartholomew's medal on the memory of Gregory XIII., or the murder of the duc d'Enghien on the genius of Napoleon, or the burning of Servetus on the sanctity of Calvin, or the permission of bigamy on the character of Luther, or the September Massacres on Danton. Two other tendencies dominant in Germany--tendencies which had and have a great power in the minds of scholars, yet to Acton, both as a Christian and a man, seemed corrupting--compelled him to a search for principles which might deliver him from slavery alike to traditions and to fashion, from the historian's vice of condoning whatever has got itself allowed to exist, and from the politician's habit of mere opportunist acquiescence in popular standards. First of these is the famous maxim of Schiller, _Die Welt-Geschichte ist das Welt-Gericht_, which, as commonly interpreted, definitely identifies success with right, and is based, consciously or unconsciously, on a pantheistic philosophy. This tendency, especially when envisaged by an age passing through revolutionary nationalism back to Machiavelli's ideals and _Realpolitik_, is clearly subversive of any system of public law or morality, and indeed is generally recognised as such nowadays even by its adherents.