law of succession by continued limitations, that now even the
religion of a prince has become one amongst his indispensable
qualifications. But how matters once stood, we see written in letters of
blood. And yet to this state of perilous uncertainty would Kant have
reduced every nation under the conceit of mending their politics. 'Orbis
terrarum dominatio'--_that_, says Casaubon, was the prize at stake. And
how was it awarded? '_In parricidii praemium cedebat._' By tendency, by
usage, by natural gravitation, this Imperial dignity passed into a
bounty upon murder, upon treasonable murder, upon parricidal murder. For
the oath of fealty to the _sacra Caesaria majestas_ was of awful
obligation, although the previous title of the particular Caesar had been
worth nothing at all. And the consequent condition of insecurity, the
shadowy tenure of all social blessings, is described by Casaubon in
language truly forcible.

Kant's purpose, as elsewhere we shall show, was not primarily with the
maxim: that was but a secondary purpose. His direct and real object lay
in one or two of the illustrative cases under the maxim. With this
particular obliquity impressed upon the movement of his own essay, we
can have no right to quarrel. Kant had an author's right to deal with
the question as best suited his own views. But with one feature of his
treatment we quarrel determinately. He speaks of this most popular (and,
we venture to add, most wise and beneficial) maxim, which arms men's
suspicions against all that is merely speculative, on the ground that it
is continually at war with the truth of practical results, as though it
were merely and blankly a vulgar error, as though _sans phrase_ it might
be dismissed for nonsense. But, because there is a casual inaccuracy in
the wording of a great truth, we are not at liberty to deny that truth,
to evade it, to 'ignore' it, or to confound a faulty expression with a
meaning originally untenable. Professor Kant, of all men, was least
entitled to plead blindness as to the substance in virtue of any vice
affecting the form. No man knew better the art of translating so wise
and beneficial a sentiment, though slightly disfigured by popular usage,
into the appropriate philosophic terms. To this very sentiment it is,
this eternal _protest_ against the plausible and the speculative, not
as a flash sentiment for a gala dinner, but as a principle of action
operative from age to age in all parts of the natio