V
We know how Disraeli, in those days, saw the full problem. Here was a country, this England, divided into Two Nations, the rich and the poor. Here were the nobles who should, by all devoir, be the saviours of the State, standing by while the middle-class manufacturer held the poor in misery; standing by while the authority of the Crown diminished under steady depression by the Whigs; standing by while Churchmen fought for preferment, neglecting the oppressed, for whom—by every teaching of Christ—a true disciple is a trustee. You all know, I doubt not, the main persons and principles of the Young England party which rallied to Disraeli’s call. The men were all younger than he; mostly of Eton and Cambridge—foremost George Smythe, later Viscount Strangford, most brilliant of all, Lord John Manners, Alexander Baillie Cochrane “the fiery and generous Buckhurst” of Coningsby. All of them figure, under other names, in Coningsby, and, while that novel is remembered, will be identified in its pages; that is, long after human memory has ceased to care for the personal romance of young men once so chivalrous and admired—
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form.
But the tenets of this Young England party which gathered so eagerly about the maturer man, Disraeli, were these, as you know: the King stood over all, with his prerogative to be vindicated. His rightful vindicators were our ancient nobility, and their task was to exalt, to sustain him as protector of the poor, and so to restore the peasantry of England (including its mill-hands, famished families, pauper children) to the supposedly happy conditions once enjoyed in the golden age of the monasteries, but forfeit under the oppression of middle-class “industrialists,” as we should now term them. I find, for my part, no real evidence of this golden age of the monasteries, and suspect the glow they reputedly shed over a consented medieval countryside to be very vastly enlarged by the mist of romance. But whatever they might or might not have been, their lethargy could never have matched, for evil, the active cruelty of the new system. The monasteries were dead, anyhow: the mills and the mines were grinding lives into death by tens of thousands under men’s eyes. Disraeli knew how the bringing up of a Devilsdust turns the grown man into a Chartist, and a danger. Disraeli understood Chartists.