In 1859 he was on the point of coming forward as a parliamentary candidate for the borough of Newport in Monmouthshire, and again at the election of 1868 he actually did stand for one of the divisions of Somerset, and showed in his platform speeches a remarkable gift of eloquence, and occasionally, also, of humour, coupled with a want of those minor arts which usually contribute more than eloquence does to success in electioneering. I went round with him, along with his and my friend Mr. Albert Dicey, and few are the candidates who get so much pleasure out of a contest as Freeman did. He was a strenuous advocate of disestablishment in Ireland, the question chiefly at issue in the election of 1868, because he thought the Roman Catholic Church was of right, and ought by law to be, the national Church there; but no less decidedly opposed to disestablishment in England, where it would have pained him to see the uprooting of a system entwined with the ideas and events of the Middle Ages. In his later years he told me that if the Liberal party took up the policy of disestablishment in Wales, he did not know whether he could adhere to them, much as he desired to do so.
Similarly he disliked all schemes for drawing the colonies into closer relations with the United Kingdom, and even seemed to wish that they should sever themselves from it, as the United 274 States had done. This view sprang partly from his feeling that they were very recent acquisitions, with which the old historic England had nothing to do, partly also from the impression made on him by the analogy of the Greek colonies. He held that the precedent of the Greek settlements showed the true and proper relation between a “metropolis,” or mother-city, and her colonies to be one not of political dependence or interdependence, but of cordial friendliness and a disposition to render help, nothing more. These instances are worth citing because they illustrate a remarkable difference between his way of looking historically at institutions and Macaulay’s way. A friend of his (the late Mr. S. R. Gardiner), like Freeman a distinguished historian, and like him a strong Home Ruler, wrote to me upon this point as follows:—
Freeman and Macaulay are alike in the high value they set upon parliamentary institutions. On the other hand, when Macaulay wants to make you understand a thing, he compares it with that which existed in his own day. The standard of the present is always with him. Freeman traces it to its origin, and testifies to its growth. The strength of this mode of proceeding in an historian is obvious. Its weakness is that it does not help him to appreciate statesmanship looking forward and trying to find a solution of difficult problems. Freeman’s attitude is that of the people who cried out for the good laws of King Edward, trying to revive the past.
Freeman was apt to go beyond his own dictum about history and politics, for he sometimes 275 made history present politics as well as past.
By far the strongest political interest—indeed it rose to a passion—of his later years was his hatred of the Turk. In it his historical and religious sentiment, for there was a good deal of the Crusader about him, was blended with his abhorrence of despotism and cruelty. Ever since the beginning of the Crimean war he had been opposed to the traditional English policy of supporting the Sultan. Ever since he had thought about foreign politics at all he had sympathised with the Christians of the East. So when Lord Beaconsfield seemed on the point of carrying the country into a war with Russia in defence of the Turks, no voice rose louder or bolder than his in denouncing the policy then popular with the upper classes in England. On this occasion he gave substantial proof of his earnestness by breaking off his connection with the Saturday Review because it had espoused the Turkish cause. This cost him £600 a year, a sum he could ill spare, and took from him what had been the joy of his heart, opportunities of delivering himself upon all sorts of current questions. But his sense of duty forbade him to write for a journal which was supporting a misguided policy and a minister whom he thought unscrupulous.
His habit of speaking out his whole mind with little regard to the effect his words might 276 produce, or to the way in which they might be twisted, sometimes landed him in difficulties. One utterance raised an outcry at the time, because it was made at a conference held in London in December 1876 to oppose Lord Beaconsfield’s Eastern policy. The Duke of Westminster and Lord Shaftesbury presided at the forenoon and afternoon sessions, and the meeting, which told powerfully on the country, was wound up by Mr. Gladstone. Freeman’s speech, only ten minutes long, but an oratorical success at the moment, contained the words, “Perish the interests of England, perish our dominion in India, rather than that we should strike one blow or speak one word on behalf of the wrong against the right.” This flight of rhetoric was perverted by his opponents into “Perish India”; and though he indignantly repudiated the misrepresentation, it continued to be repeated against him for years thereafter, and to be cited as an instance of the irresponsible violence of the friends of the Eastern Christians.
The most conspicuous and characteristic merits of Freeman as an historian may be summed up in six points: love of truth, love of justice, industry, common sense, breadth of view, and power of vividly realising the political life of the past.
Every one knows the maxim, pectus facit theologum,[40] a maxim accountable, by the way, 277 for a good deal of weak theology. More truly may it be said that the merits of a great historian are far from lying wholly in his intellectual powers. Among the highest of such merits, merits which the professional student has even more reason to appreciate than the general reader, because he more frequently discerns the disturbing causes, are two moral qualities. One is the zeal for truth, with the willingness to undertake, in a search for it, a toil by which no credit will ever be gained. The other is a clear view of, and loyal adherence to, the permanent moral standards. In both these points Freeman stood in the front rank. He was kindly and fair in his judgments, and ready to make all the allowances for any man’s conduct which the conditions of his time suggested, but he hated cruelty, falsehood, oppression, whether in Syracuse twenty-four centuries ago or in the Ottoman empire to-day. That conscientious industry which spares no pains to get as near as possible to the facts never failed him. Though he talked less about facts and verities than Carlyle did, Carlyle was not so assiduous and so minutely careful in sifting every statement before he admitted it into his pages. That he was never betrayed by sentiment into partisanship it would be too much to say. Scottish critics have accused him, perhaps not without justice, of being led by his English patriotism to over-state the claims of the English 278 Crown to suzerainty over Scotland. J. R. Green, as well as the late Mr. C. H. Pearson, thought that the same cause disposed him to overlook the weak points in the character of Harold son of Godwin, one of his favourite heroes. But there have been few writers who have so seldom erred in this way; few who have striven so earnestly to do full justice to every cause and every person. Even the race prejudices which he allowed himself to indulge, in letters and talk, against Irishmen, Frenchmen, and Jews, scarcely ever appear in his books. The characters he has drawn of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, William the Conqueror and William the Red, St. Thomas of Canterbury (none of whom he liked), and, in his History of Sicily, of Nicias, are models of the fairness which historical portraiture requires. It is especially interesting to compare his picture of the unfortunate Athenian with the equally vigorous but harsher view of Grote. Freeman, whom many people thought fierce, was one of the most soft-hearted of men, and tolerant of everything but perfidy and cruelty. Though disposed to be positive in his opinions, he was always willing to reconsider a point when any new evidence was discovered or any new argument brought to his notice, and not unfrequently modified his view in the light of such evidence or arguments. It was this passion for accuracy and for that lucidity of statement which is the 279 necessary adjunct of real accuracy, that made him deal so sternly with confused thinkers and careless writers. Carelessness seemed to him a moral fault, because a fault which true conscientiousness excludes. So also clearness of conception and exact precision in the use of words were so natural to him, and appeared so essential to good work, that he would set down the want of them rather to indolence than to incapacity, and apply to them a proportionately severe censure. Mere ignorance he could pardon, but when it was, as often happens, even in persons of considerable pretensions, joined to presumption, his wrath was the hotter because he deemed it a wholly righteous wrath. Never touching any subject which he had not mastered, he thought it his duty as a critic to expose impostors, and rendered in this way, during the years when he wrote for the Saturday Review, services to English scholarship second only to those which were embodied in his own treatises. It must be confessed that he enjoyed the work, and, like Samuel Johnson, was not displeased to be told that he had “tossed and gored several persons.”
His determination to get to the bottom of a question was the cause of the censure he so freely bestowed both on lawyers, who were wont to rest content with their technicalities, and not go back to the historical basis on which those technicalities rested, and on politicians who fell into 280 the habit of using stock phrases which muddled or misrepresented the principles involved. The expression “national property,” as applied to tithes, incensed him, and gave occasion for some of his most vigorous writing. So the commonplace grumblings against the presence of bishops in the House of Lords, which may be heard from people who acquiesce in the presence of hereditary peers, led him to give the most clear and forcible statement of the origin and character of that House which our time has produced. Here he was on ground he knew thoroughly. But his habits of accuracy were not less fully illustrated by his attitude towards branches of history he had not explored. With a profound and minute knowledge of English history down to the fourteenth century, so far as his aversion to the employment of manuscript authorities would allow, and a scarcely inferior knowledge of foreign European history during the same period, with a less full but very sound knowledge down to the middle of the sixteenth century, and with a thorough mastery of pretty nearly all ancient history, his familiarity with later European history, and with the history of such outlying regions as India or America, was not much beyond that of the average educated man. He used to say when questioned on these matters that “he had not come down to that yet.” But when he had occasion to refer to those periods or countries, he hardly ever made a 281 mistake. If he did not know, he did not refer; if he referred, he had seized, as if by instinct, something which was really important and serviceable for his purpose. The same remark applies (speaking generally) to Gibbon and to Macaulay, and I have heard Freeman make it of the writings of Mr. Goldwin Smith, for whom he had a warm admiration.