Right and Wrong in Politics [pp. 265-293]

RIGHT AND WRONG IN POLITICS.
HERE is no serious thinker at the present day who, if
pointedly questioned, would deny the applicability of the
terms Right, Wrong, Duty, Conscience, Morality and Immorality
to the conduct of states and governments as well as to that of
individual men and women. It is true, indeed, that if these
terms are used loosely and thoughtlessly enough in pronouncing on the conduct of private persons, where the problem, if any,
is tolerably simple in its elements, and most of the conditions
of it capable of being ascertained and reduced to a certainty, in
the larger political field the inquiry is highly complicated, and
large classes of the most essential facts are wholly out of the
reach of the judicial investigator. Nevertheless it is manifest
that in all quarters in which public criticism resides-whether in
the newspaper press, the more labored and deliberate magazine,
the election hustings, or the political text-book-the rightness
or wrongness of the acts of legislatures or administrators is
brought to the bar of a strict public opinion with quite as much
decision and explicitness as the expediency or prudence of the
same acts. This use of language is at all events a testimony to
the existence of a widely diffused consciousness that states and
governments have no immaculate conception. The fact is, indeed, so obvious when thus stated, that it is almost forgotten
how wholly absent from the ante-Christian theory and practice
of politics in all Western communities was the notion of a purely
moral standard of action, and that perhaps Christianity has
triumphed almost as signally in moralizing secular politics as
in spiritualizing individual and domestic life. The readers of
Coleridge's lay sermon on "The Bible the Statesman's Manual,"
as well as of the late Professor Maurice's "Prophets and Kings of
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