32 POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



an admirer of wealth and rank, proud of his country as the best on 

 earth. It is the pleasant England of his day which interests him, as 

 it interested alike his own countrymen and the contemporary world. 

 Setting out to explain this joyous land, he found and his readers 

 found that the fascinating riddle of its existence could be read clearest 

 in the light of the Whig movements then continuing, of the policies 

 of which he himself was an eminent supporter. Not in any sense 

 a philosopher, the truth as he saw it was not an analyzed and dis- 

 sected truth, not an abstraction, but a cognizable reality, to be 

 known and judged by the exercise of wholesome common sense. 



Heeren, as we said earlier, had set forth the characters of the 

 scientific history which reckons with the peoples, the colonies, the 

 economics, the commerce of the world. This had a very direct bearing 

 on the state of the British Empire. Macaulay likewise knew that, to 

 be complete, history must take account of the whole earth within the 

 limits of its period. These conceptions the English historian with 

 magisterial power incorporated in his work the opening chapters 

 are masterpieces of historical generalization. But his genius went 

 further, it took scientific history from the university into the home; 

 for the language, the illustrations, were so clear and so interwoven 

 with the tale that plain men felt as if they had a vision of grandeur 

 not vouchsafed hitherto to them or to their predecessors. 



For years the volumes of Macaulay sold in England as no other 

 book sold, and in America the numbers of copies distributed were 

 second in number only to those of the Bible. There was not an 

 important language of the Continent into which the glowing pages 

 were not translated, and in many there were several rival translations. 

 The truth was made so clear and was so manifestly the truth that 

 the reading world felt a firm foundation beneath its feet. That the 

 author was avowedly utilitarian, openly a British patriot, arid 

 intensely a Whig partisan only served to create the effective chiar- 

 oscuro in which all his work was done. He had been so unwearied 

 a student of folk-song and folk-lore that he made himself what is 

 now called in art " a primitive " in his conception and understanding 

 of the commonplace, in his admiration of the homely. 



It is doubtful whether the relativity of knowledge, either the 

 phrase or the notion, was known to Macaulay. For him the plain 

 truth was the truth. In addition, the state was for him no god, 

 mysterious and omnipotent; it was a secular association existing 

 only to assure the equality of citizens before the law, to protect life, 

 liberty, and property. In the enjoyment of political liberty all other 

 liberties are assured, and Macaulay is proud of that possession because 

 he sees in it the honor of man and of men. He is a patriot because he 

 has inherited this honor from an ancestry which suffered for it. 

 Taine, who gives solid reasons for his opinion, thinks Macaulay 



