thankful that he did not live to see 1914.

Lord Goschen reminds me of Lord Acton, another new friend of the
'eighties. Yet Lord Acton had been my father's friend and editor, in the
_Home and Foreign Review_, long before he and I knew each other. Was
there ever a more interesting or a more enigmatic personality than Lord
Acton's? His letters to Mrs. Drew, addressed, evidently, in many cases,
to Mr. Gladstone, through his daughter, have always seemed to me one of
the most interesting documents of our time. Yet I felt sharply, in
reading them, that the real man was only partially there; and in the new
series of letters just published (October, 1917) much and welcome light
is shed upon the problem of Lord Acton's mind and character. The
perpetual attraction for me, as for many others, lay in the contrast
between Lord Acton's Catholicism and the universalism of his learning;
and, again, between what his death revealed of the fervor and simplicity
of his Catholic faith, and the passion of his Liberal creed.
Oppression--tyranny--persecution--those were the things that stirred
his blood. He was a Catholic, yet he fought Ultramontanism and the
Papal, Curia to the end; he never lost his full communion with the
Church of Rome, yet he could never forgive the Papacy for the things it
had done, and suffered to be done; and he would have nothing to do with
the excuse that the moral standards of one age are different from those
of another, and therefore the crimes of a Borgia weigh more lightly and
claim more indulgence than similar acts done in the nineteenth century.

There is one moral standard for all Christians--there has never been
more than one [he would say, inexorably]. The Commandments and the
Sermon on the Mount have been always there. It was the wickedness of
men that ignored them in the fifteenth century--it is the wickedness
of men that ignores them now. Tolerate them in the past, and you