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bility of one man and those of another, in the general world of na–
ture, is so idle a question and so nice a point that it is not worth
the wear of our fine intellects to discuss it in any imaginable con–
juncture of life or history." And, finally, even if we could arrive at
moral judgments, we oughtn't to. For the will to judge springs from
a demand for an illegitimate kind of power over others, it leads to
the corruption of those who exemplify it, and it makes the under–
standing of human beings by human beings an ever-receding
possibility.
From all of which it emerges that Butterfield's objections to
moralistic history derive not from any general antinomianism but,
on the contrary, from the high esteem in which he holds the moral
element in life and the consequent concern that nothing should be
allowed to degrade it. The only moral judgments that a fallible hu–
man being is justified in making are either general principles about
the rightness or wrongness of certain kinds of acts or particular ver–
dicts on actual actions but when and only when the actions are his:
"Moral judgments of actual people cannot defensibly or usefully
exist in concrete cases save in the form of self-judgments." The back–
ground to all this doubt and skepticism and uncertainty on one level
is unswerving faith on a higher level. There is a place where moral
judgments of an authoritative and unambiguous and unqualified kind
can be made, but just because that place is not the earth on which
we live we must practice restraint and humility, we must not pre–
sume to a power and insight that isn't ours. "The kind of ethical
judgment," Butterfield writes, and this is perhaps his last word on
the subject-"which historians like Acton have been so anxious to
achieve is possible only to God."
Now what, it might be asked, has any of this to do with politics
and right-wing politics in particular? At the outset it must be ad–
mitted that the connection is not direct. In the first place, I have no
reason at all to think that Butterfield himself is a man of the Right:
I do not know what political views he holds, and would not be
seriously surprised to learn that he voted Labour in every election.
Moreover, he does not himself, in his written works at least, extend
his skepticism into the sphere of politics: it is confined by him to
the writing of history and to the conduct of diplomacy. My point,
however, is that it could, without any very great difficulty, be ex-
