112. Such is the necessary imperfection under which all historical judgments labour, though historians are not apt to recognise it and would be thought much more dull if they did. They would have fewer readers if they confined themselves to the analysis of situations, which may be correctly made, and omitted judgments on the morality of individuals for which, in the proper sense, the data can never be forthcoming. We scarcely have them for ourselves (except that we know that we are none of us what we should be), still less for our intimate acquaintance; not at all for men whom we only know through history, past or present, in regard to them, we can only fall back on the generalisation, that the best man--the man most disinterestedly devoted to the perfecting of humanity, in some form or other, in his own person or that of others--is more likely to act in a way that is good as measured by its results, those results again being estimated with reference to an ideal of character, and that this is so even under circumstances of political complication. Appearances to the contrary, appearances of harm done from good motives, may be met by the considerations, (1) that there is often much egotism in what calls itself conscientiousness, and that the 'conscientious' motives which lead to mischievous acts may not be in the highest sense disinterested; (2) that to what we call the consequences of an action many influences contribute besides the action which we call the cause, and if evil seems to clog the consequences of action pure in motive, this may be due to other influences connected with motives less worthy, while the consequences which in the rough we call bad might have been worse but for the intervention of the purely-motived action; (3) that the beneficent results are often put to the credit of the actions of selfish men when they should rather be credited to influences more remote and complex, without which those actions would have been impossible or had no good effect, and which have arisen out of unselfish activities. We see the evil in a course of events and lay the blame on someone who should have acted differently, and whom perhaps we take as an instance of how good men cause mischief; but we do not see the greater evil which would otherwise have ensued. In regard to the questions stated above as those which the good citizen should set himself in contemplation of a possible rebellion, though they are questions to which it is impossible for a citizen in the heat of a revolutionary crisis to give a sufficient answer, and which in fact can only be answered after the event, yet they represent objects which the good citizen will set before himself at such times; and in proportion to the amount of good citizenship, as measured by interest in those objects, interest in making the best of existing institutions, in maintaining social order and the general fabric of rights, interest which leads to a _bona fide_ estimate of the value of the existing government in its relation to public good, will be the good result of the political movement.