those which have enabled us to contemplate with distressing
complacency the secret of unhallowed lives. The code that is
greatly modified by time and place, will vary according to the
cause. The amnesty is an artifice that enables us to make
exceptions, to tamper with weights and measures, to deal unequal
justice to friends and enemies.

It is associated with that philosophy which Cato attributes to
the gods. For we have a theory which justifies Providence by the
event, and holds nothing so deserving as success, to which there
can be no victory in a bad cause; prescription and duration
legitimate #93; and whatever exists is right and reasonable; and as
God manifests His will by that which He tolerates, we must
conform to the divine decree by living to shape the future after
the ratified image of the past #94. Another theory, less confidently
urged, regards History as our guide, as much by showing errors to
evade as examples to pursue. It is suspicious of illusions in
success, and, though there may be hope of ultimate triumph for
what is true, if not by its own attraction, by the gradual
exhaustion of error, it admits no corresponding promise for what
is ethically right. It deems the canonisation of the historic
past more perilous than ignorance or denial, because it would
perpetuate the reign of sin and acknowledge the sovereignty of
wrong, and conceives it the part of real greatness to know how to
stand and fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary
flood #95.

Ranke relates, without adornment, that William III ordered the
extirpation of a Catholic clan, and scouts the faltering excuse
of his defenders. But when he comes to the death and character