d is _Don't_. But he then proceeds to
jot down some hints and maxims, brief and caustic, for the benefit of
those who nevertheless persist in writing; and to some of these I
commend the attention of readers, since upon readers as well as upon
writers lies the duty of forming careful opinions, of judging
impartially, in working out their conclusions upon the events and
personages of past times. For Lord Acton was an indefatigable
researcher after truth; his standard of public morality was austere,
lofty, and uncompromising. I myself venture to think that he was too
rigid; he admitted no excuse for breaches of the moral law on the
pretext, however urgent, of political necessity; he refused to allow
extenuation of violence or bloodshed even in times of great emergency.
'The inflexible integrity of the moral code,' he said, 'is to me the
secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.' Now
this is hard doctrine for most of us to follow when we set ourselves,
as students, to condemn or acquit, to blame or to praise the prominent
actors in the drama of our national history. On that stage, as we all
know, the real tragedies that stand on record were sanguinary enough,
and the parts occasionally played in them by our ancestors were of a
sort that now appear most unnatural and indefensible to their
descendants. Yet most of us are disposed to regard with some leniency
even the crimes of a violent and lawless age.

But however this may be, some of Lord Acton's counsels are undoubtedly
valuable as warnings or for guidance, either as lamps to show the
right road, or as lighthouses to keep us from going wrong. His
inaugural lecture at Cambridge on the Study of History is full of
precepts, maxims, warnings, injunctions, all of which may be pondered
by students with advantage. We are enjoined, for example, to beware of
permitting our historic judgment to be warped by influences, whether
of Country, Class, Church, College, or Party; and it is said, by way
of driving home the warning, that the most respectable of these
influences is the most dangerous. But very few writers, and, I
suspect, not many readers, can hold their mental balance quite
steadily, can weigh testimony on either side of a question quite
dispassionately, when our Church, or our Country, perhaps even our
University, is concerned. Nor is it easy for students to find
historians who are entirely unmoved by bias of these kinds, who have
neither a theory to pr