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

2THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
Old Testament History," will recall with satisfaction the lesson
nowhere more effectually taught than in the writings of these authors, that the Bible has had an almost incalculable influence in
swaying political judgments, that it was providentially intended
to have that influence, and that political judgments for all time
can never escape from a referential obligation to the immutable
principles pre-eminently, if not exclusively, revealed to the Jew ish Church.
In spite of these incontestable facts, there is a difference of
some importance and magnitude between the ethical standard
and even the ethical motive when applied to vast communities
consisting of an indefinite and indiscriminate number of individual persons organized for the ends implied in the complex
notion conveyed by the term State, and when applied to the
individual life of private persons. It is obvious, for instance,
that in a despotically governed community, where the king or
emperor is above the law, and makes the law as he will and executes it when and how he pleases, the rightness and wrongness
of the acts of state are in fact synonymous with the rightness
and wrongness of the autocrat's acts, and the critical problem
is reduced to the same mode of determination as in ordinary
judgments on the acts of private men. But where the government is of a more complex kind, or perhaps of an extremely
complex kind-depending, say, in the case of each of its acts, on
a concert of chambers, of representatives, and of various executive authorities, there being much discussion and finally broad
divisions of opinion-the unity of conduct seems to be so disturbed or confused as almost to exclude the idea of moral responsibility as residing anywhere in the nation at large. Considering that the tendency of modern times is certainly in the
direction of an increase of complication in the machinery of government, partly on account of an access of intricacy in the
concerns to be provided for, partly on account of a higher susceptibility to the claims of distributive justice, it would be a
most grave conclusion to arrive at, that moral judgments were to
be paralyzed just at the moment when they need to be quickened into more active life. Fortunately, experience is the other
way; and there is no doubt that the very same causes which have
made modern political constitutions intricate in their structure,
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