bility. I do not in the least mean to express any opinion about such
questions; I desire only to indicate the temper in which I conceive
that they should be approached.

I have lived long enough to be utterly unable to believe--though some
older politicians than I seem still to believe, especially on the eve
of a dissolution--that any of our party lines coincide with the lines
between good and bad, wise and foolish. Every one, of course, will
repudiate the abstract theory. Yet we may notice how constantly it is
assumed; and can see to what fallacies it leads when we look for a
moment at the historical questions which no longer unite party feeling.
Few, indeed, even of our historians, can write without taking party
views of such questions. Even the candid and impartial seem to deserve
these epithets chiefly because they want imagination, and can cast
blame or applaud alternately, because they do not enter into the real
spirit of either party. Their views are sometimes a medley of
inconsistent theories, rather than a deeper view which might reconcile
apparent inconsistencies. I will only mention one point which often
strikes me, and may lead to a relevant remark. Every royalist
historian, we all know, labours to prove that Charles I. was a saint,
and Cromwell a hypocrite. The view was natural at the time of the civil
wars; but it now should suggest an obvious logical dilemma. If the
monarchical theory which Charles represented was sound, and Charles was
also a wise and good man, what caused the rebellion? A perfect man
driving a perfect engine should surely not have run it off the rails.
The royalist ought to seek to prove that Charles was a fool and a
knave, to account for the collapse of royalty; and the case against
royalty is all the stronger, if you could show that Charles, in spite
of impeccable virtue, was forced by his position to end on the
scaffold. Choose between him and the system which he applied. So
Catholics and conservatives are never tired of denouncing Henry VIII.
and the French revolutionists. So far as I can guess (I know very
little about it), their case is a very strong one. I somehow believe,
in spite of Froude, that Henry VIII. was a tyrant; and eulogies upon
the reign of terror generally convince me that a greater set of
scoundrels seldom came to the surface, than the perpetrators of those
enormities. But then the real inference is, to my mind, very different.
Henry VIII. was the product of the pr