224 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 



value of its own positive contribution may be, and what 

 manner of influence Idealism may naturally be expected 

 to exert on our own future politics it is not as yet easy to 

 discern. But a reader of the writings of Gre_e_n, regarded 

 by Mr. Morley and many more as the last in the line of 

 our great political thinkers, will scarcely conclude that his 

 Idealism can be charged with reactionary tendencies. " No 

 political writer ever valued institutions more. He saw in 

 his country's institutions no mere secular product of many 

 human minds and many human wills, but rather the results 

 of the action of that universal spirit, that ' divine tactic '- 

 as Burke called it which, through the instrumentality of 

 human wills, operates throughout the whole history and 

 growth of States." Yet he did not deny freedom, nor 

 make institutions ends in themselves. Institutions, he 

 held, exist for men and not men for institutions. 'The 

 value of the institutions of civil life lies in their operation 

 as giving reality to the capacities of will and reason, and 

 enabling them to be really exercised. He vitalises them. 

 He humanises them. He moralises them. As we read 

 his pages they cease to be pieces of social structure or 

 bits of social mechanism." The "common good," the 

 ' ' spiritual state," ' ' humanity," were not idle watchwords 

 for him. They were "actual objects of value, endeavour 

 and sacrifice, symbols through which he saw ' the moralised 

 lives of men.'" No political writer in this country 

 believed more thoroughly in democracy, or had a firmer 

 faith in great ideals ; but on the other hand no writer knew 

 better what purifying fires democracy has to endure if the 

 ideals are to be attained. Had English idealists been able 

 to take up and carry forward the torch that fell, alas! so 

 early from Green's hands, or had our statesmen been able 



