Although Mr. Lea gives little heed to Pani and Hefele, Gams and Du Boys, and the others who write for the Inquisition without pleading ignorance, he emphasises a Belgian who lately wrote that the Church never employed direct constraint against heretics. People who never heard of the Belgian will wonder that so much is made of this conventional figleaf. Nearly the same assertion may be found, with varieties of caution and of confidence, in a catena of divines, from Bergier to Newman. To appear unfamiliar with the defence exposes the writer to the thrust that you cannot know the strength or the weakness of a case until you have heard its advocates. The liberality of Leo XIII., which has yielded a splendid and impartial harvest to Ehrle, and Schottmüller, and the École Française, raises the question whether the Abbé Duchesne or Father Denifle supplied with all the resources of the archives which are no longer secret would produce a very different or more complete account. As a philosophy of religious persecution the book is inadequate. The derivation of sects, though resting always upon good supports, stands out from an indistinct background of dogmatic history. The intruding maxims, darkened by shadows of earth, fail to ensure at all times the objective and delicate handling of mediæval theory. But the vital parts are protected by a panoply of mail. From the Albigensian crusade to the fall of the Templars and to that Franciscan movement wherein the key to Dante lies, the design and organisation, the activity and decline of the Inquisition constitute a sound and solid structure that will survive the censure of all critics. Apart from surprises still in store at Rome, and the manifest abundance of Philadelphia, the knowledge which is common property, within reach of men who seriously invoke history as the final remedy for untruth and the sovereign arbiter of opinion, can add little to the searching labours of the American.
FOOTNOTES:
[401] English Historical Review, 1888.
XVI
THE AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH.
By James Bryce[402]
The American Commonwealth cancels that sentence of Scaliger which Bacon amplifies in his warning against bookish politicians: "Nec ego nec alius doctus possumus scribere in politicis." The distinctive import of the book is its power of impressing American readers. Mr. Bryce is in a better position than the philosopher who said of another, "Ich hoffe, wir werden uns recht gut verständigen können; und wenn auch keiner den andern ganz versteht, wird doch jeder dem andern dazu helfen, dass er sich selbst besser verstehe." He writes with so much familiarity and feeling—the national, political, social sympathy is so spontaneous and sincere—as to carry a very large measure indeed of quiet reproach. The perfect tone is enough to sweeten and lubricate a medicine such as no traveller since Hippocrates has administered to contrite natives. Facts, not comments, convey the lesson; and I know no better illustration of a recent saying: "Si un livre porte un enseignement, ce doit être malgré son auteur, par la force même des faits qu'il raconte."
If our countryman has not the chill sententiousness of his great French predecessor, his portable wisdom and detached thoughts, he has made a far deeper study of real life, apart from comparative politics and the European investment of transatlantic experience. One of the very few propositions which he has taken straight from Tocqueville is also one of the few which a determined fault-finder would be able to contest. For they both say that the need for two chambers has become an axiom of political science. I will admit that the doctrine of Paine and Franklin and Samuel Adams, which the Pennsylvanian example and the authority of Turgot made so popular in France, is confuted by the argument of Laboulaye: "La division du corps législatif est une condition essentielle de la liberté. C'est la seule garantie qui assure la nation contre l'usurpation de ses mandataires." But it may be urged that a truth which is disputed is not an axiom; and serious men still imagine a state of things in which an undivided legislature is necessary to resist a too powerful executive, whilst two chambers can be made to curb and neutralise each other. Both Tocqueville and Turgot are said to have wavered on this point.
It has been said that Tocqueville never understood the federal constitution. He believed, to his last edition, that the opening words of the first section, "all legislative powers herein granted," meant "tous les pouvoirs législatifs déterminés par les représentants." Story thought that he "has borrowed the greater part of his reflections from American works [meaning his own and Lieber's] and little from his own observation." The French minister at Washington described his book as "intéressant mais fort peu exact"; and even the Nation calls it "brilliant, superficial, and attractive." Mr. Bryce can never be accused of imperfect knowledge or penetration, of undue dependence upon others, or of writing up to a purpose. His fault is elsewhere. This scholar, distinguished not only as a successful writer of history, which is said to be frequent, but as a trained and professed historian, which is rare, altogether declines the jurisdiction of the Historical Review. His contumacy is in gross black and white: "I have had to resist another temptation, that of straying off into history." Three stout volumes tell how things are, without telling how they came about. I should have no title to bring them before this tribunal, if it were not for an occasional glimpse at the past; if it were not for a strongly marked and personal philosophy of American history which looms behind the Boss and the Boom, the Hoodlum and the Mugwump.
There is a valid excuse for preferring to address the unhistoric mind. The process of development by which the America of Tocqueville became the America of Lincoln has been lately described with a fulness of knowledge which no European can rival. Readers who thirst for the running stream can plunge and struggle through several thousand pages of Holst's Verfassungsgeschichte, and it is better to accept the division of labour than to take up ground so recently covered by a work which, if not very well designed or well composed, is, by the prodigious digestion of material, the most instructive ever written on the natural history of federal democracy. The author, who has spent twenty years on American debates and newspapers, began during the pause between Sadowa and Wörth, when Germany was in the throes of political concentration that made the empire. He explains with complacency how another irrepressible conflict between centre and circumference came and went, and how the welfare of mankind is better served by the gathering than by the balance or dispersion of forces. Like Gneist and Tocqueville, he thinks of one country while he speaks of another; he knows nothing of reticence or economy in the revelation of private opinion; and he has none of Mr. Bryce's cheery indulgence for folly and error. But when the British author refuses to devote six months to the files of Californian journalism, he leaves the German master of his allotted field.