peuvent etre, dans une infinite de rencontres, les
vertus d'un chef de parti." The expounder of Adam Smith to France, J.B.
Say, confirms the ambitious coadjutor: "Louis XIV. et son despotisme et
ses guerres n'ont jamais fait le mal qui serait resulte des conseils de
ce bon Fenelon, l'apotre et le martyr de la vertu et du bien des
hommes." Most successful public men deprecate what Sir Henry Taylor
calls much weak sensibility of conscience, and approve Lord Grey's
language to Princess Lieven: "I am a great lover of morality, public and
private; but the intercourse of nations cannot be strictly regulated by
that rule." While Burke was denouncing the Revolution, Walpole wrote:
"No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not
go the lengths that may be necessary." All which had been formerly
anticipated by Pole: "Quanto quis privatam vitam agens Christi similior
erit tanto minus aptus ad regendum id munus iudicio hominum
existimabitur." The main principle of Machiavelli is asserted by his
most eminent English disciple: "It is the solecism of power to think, to
command the end, and yet not to endure the means." And Bacon leads up to
the familiar Jesuit: "Cui licet finis, illi et media permissa sunt."

The austere Pascal has said: "On ne voit rien de juste ou d'injuste qui
ne change de qualite en changeant de climat" (the reading _presque_ rien
was the precaution of an editor). The same underlying scepticism is
found not only in philosophers of the Titanic sort, to whom remorse is a
prejudice of education, and the moral virtues are "the political
offspring which flattery begat upon pride," but among the masters of
living thought. Locke, according to Mr. Bain, holds that we shall
scarcely find any rule of morality, excepting such as are necessary to
hold society together, and these too with great limitations, but what is
somewhere or other set aside, and an opposite established by whole
societies of men. Maine de Biran extracts this conclusion from the
_Esprit des Lois_: "Il n'y a rien d'absolu ni dans la religion, ni dans
la morale, ni, a plus forte raison, dans la politique." In the
mercantile economists Turgot detects the very doctrine of Helvetius: "Il
etablit qu'il n'y a pas lieu a la probite entre les nations, d'ou
suivroit que la monde doit etre eternellement un coupe-gorge. En quoi il
est bien d'accord avec les panegyristes de Colbert."

These things survive, transmuted, in the edifying and popula