Acton, Conscience and the Modern Nation

To Lord Acton the fantastic events of his own age were so unlike anything in the former experience of mankind that he thought that the modern world ought to be considered as a new order of creation, governed by a totally new law of life; the law of innovation. In the classic Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History which he delivered in 1895 in Cambridge, on his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History, he suggested that the force of the ancient law of stability which had preserved the societies of the past in comparative inertia had been overcome by the transforming power of ideas. This was the secret essence of the people's demand for the Rights of Man. In this new era the patient hope of a better world had erupted into a demand for immediate political action as the transcendent political imagination of a radical intelligentsia exposed the glaring contrast between existing society and its material possibilities. In the innovating industrial world the contrast between what is, and what might have been, was regarded as unnecessary and no longer to be tolerated, and what should be done must be done at once.