The man of conscience
Edmund Campion examines the legacy of that most enigmatic of eminent Victorians, historian-scholar, Lord Acton. (extract)
'Everybody remembers one thing about Lord Acton, who died 100 years ago, this month, on 19 June 1902. He coined the phrase, 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Only their memory shortens the phrase to 'Power corrupts.' Such is the way of phrase-makers, to have their words misquoted or misused - Donald Horne has spent a lifetime hearing people get 'Australia is a lucky country' wrong. The key to Acton's thinking lies in his next sentence: 'Great men are almost always bad men.' Notice: almost always; power tends to corrupt. There is nothing necessary or inevitable about the way power may spoil its users, they have a choice in the matter. Yet the potential is always there, it cannot be denied.
Acton's
sentences occur in a long letter to Mandell Creighton, whom he had helped
to found the English Historical Review and who would later become
an Anglican bishop. Creighton was also the author of a five-volume history
of the papacy at the time of the Reformation, early volumes of which Acton
had reviewed trenchantly. A major complaint of the reviewer was that the
author had been too lenient on the papacy, which believed in killing its
opponents. He accused Creighton of a watered-down morality that excused
the crimes of the great simply because they were great and powerful. A
true historian should go the other way, he argued. Thus Calvin, whom many
revere as their best religious teacher, is rather to be damned because
he had Michael Servetus burnt as a heretic. Historians would hang common
murderers; but what of Queen Elizabeth I, who (they say) asked the jailer
to murder Mary Queen of Scots, or William III, who ordered the massacre
of Glencoe? And what does one make of the medieval papacy, which set up
a system of persecution handing out death and damnation to its opponents?
It may have done many good things but this one fact should condemn it.
If we judge our great ones by special lenient standards, then we have
debased our moral currency.
Australians are comfortable with the idea that great men are almost always bad men. Medieval writers, who taught the reverse doctrine, have had few followers here. Inheritors of Machiavelli's 'whatever it takes' science of politics, we know that power is won by untruths, doctored photographs, mendacious denials and putting the boot into those who cannot kick back. In the debate about an Australian republic, the most compelling contrary argument was that you could not trust politicians to act squarely. Great men are almost always bad men? We know that. '
- For Edmund Campion's full essay, please see Eureka Street June 2002 print edition, available by subscription and at bookshops and newsagents.
Graphic: Above: The Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, c.1896. Photo by Elliott and Fry, London, in Lord Acton, by Roland Hill (Yale University Press, 2000). Below: A specimen of Acton's unchanging handwriting.
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