The History of Freedom, and Other EssaysActon, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
Philosophy
The History of Freedom, and Other Essays
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, Baron
History; History -- Philosophy; Liberty -- History
popular of bishops, but which, during the forty years of its revival,
has been associated with envy and hatred and bloodshed, and is now the
most dangerous enemy lurking in our path.
Last, and most of all, having told so much of the unwisdom of our
ancestors, having exposed the sterility of the convulsion that burned
what they adored, and made the sins of the Republic mount up as high as
those of the monarchy, having shown that Legitimacy, which repudiated
the Revolution, and Imperialism, which crowned it, were but disguises of
the same element of violence and wrong, I should have wished, in order
that my address might not break off without a meaning or a moral, to
relate by whom, and in what connection, the true law of the formation of
free States was recognised, and how that discovery, closely akin to
those which, under the names of development, evolution, and continuity,
have given a new and deeper method to other sciences, solved the ancient
problem between stability and change, and determined the authority of
tradition on the progress of thought; how that theory, which Sir James
Mackintosh expressed by saying that Constitutions are not made, but
grow; the theory that custom and the national qualities of the governed,
and not the will of the government, are the makers of the law; and
therefore that the nation, which is the source of its own organic
institutions, should be charged with the perpetual custody of their
integrity, and with the duty of bringing the form into harmony with the
spirit, was made, by the singular co-operation of the purest
Conservative intellect with red-handed revolution, of Niebuhr with
Mazzini, to yield the idea of nationality, which, far more than the idea
of liberty, has governed the movement of the present age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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