Indeed, his tenure was contemporaneous with the version of "the sun never setting on the British Empire." As an educated man elevated in 1869 to peerage by Queen Victoria as well as a liberal Roman Catholic, Acton was able to comment on numerous trends he observed as indicative of the age of colonialism. Acton was able to view Europe both through the eyes of an educated man and a philosophical liberal -- he criticized the doctrine of papal infallibility, and also understood that the prospect of gross nationalism engendered fascism and totalitarianism and a movement away from democracy and republicanism. His famous phrase, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," was indicative of his view that hyper-nationalism could be used as not only an excuse for genocide, but as a means to control and usurp power based on absolutely nothing tangible.

In recent history, one can find a...
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