I.—WHY WE FOLLOW HIM.
A WRITER in the last number of this Review, when giving a portraiture of Mr. Gladstone, pointed out that that right honourable gentleman was a bundle of persons rather than one. It will not, I hope, be thought a very gross plagiarism if I say that Lord Beaconsfield's fame may be divided into four or five distinct reputations, any one of which, in the case of a smaller man, would be thought enough for enduring celebrity. If Mr. Disraeli had never succeeded in making his way into Parliament, he would still, without needing to add another volume to the books he has written, have had to be taken account of as one of our foremost men of letters. Supposing that, having entered the House of Commons, he had not attained office, he would yet have always been remembered as the keenest Parliamentary debater of his time. If his public life had ended in 1852—that is, more than a quarter of a century ago—without his having become a Minister, he would have stood recorded as the most skilful leader of an Opposition which our history has known. Had he never passed a measure through Parliament, he must have been referred to by all political thinkers as a strikingly original critic of our Constitution. Such trifles as that, being born in the days of dandyism, he ranked among the leaders of fashion directly after he was out of his teens, and that he has been a leading social wit his whole life through, may be thrown in without counting. But add the above items together, and fill in the necessary details, and what a startling result we have!
It is very obvious that I cannot here trace Lord Beaconsfield's career in detail. The chronicle is much too rich for that. The better plan will be to make the subject group itself around three or four chief topics—say these: His public consistency; his personal relations with Peel and other leaders; his political and social views regarded as a system; and his recent foreign policy.
A single paragraph may, however, be interposed, just to bring the principal dates together in a way of prospective summary. Within four years' time from his entering the House of Commons, which, after vain attempts at High Wycombe, Marylebone, and Taunton, he did in 1837 for the borough of Maidstone, Mr. Disraeli was at the head of a party—"The New England Party." The group, if not very numerous, drew as much public attention as if it had been of any size we like to name. Lord John Manners and Mr. G. S. Smythe had the generosity of heart and the keenness of insight to be the first won over by him, and that against the prejudices of their families. Who has not heard of their courageous pilgrimage to the Manchester Athenæum to explain to Cottonopolis how they proposed to re-make the nation? Then came the "Young England" novels, with which all Europe was shortly ringing—"Coningsby" in 1844, "Sybil" in 1845, "Tancred" in 1847. In the meantime Mr. Disraeli had associated himself heart and soul with Lord George Bentinck, attacked Peel, and done far more than any other in reorganizing the shattered Conservative party within the House as well as outside it. By the last-named year, too, Mr. Disraeli had, after a voluntary exchanging of Maidstone for Shrewsbury, become member for Buckinghamshire, a seat which he was to keep so long as he remained in the House of Commons. Suddenly Lord George Bentinck died (much too early for his country), and very soon after that event, owing to the generous standing aside of Lord Granby and Mr. Herries, Mr. Disraeli, within a dozen years of his first entry into Parliament, stood forth as the recognized leader of the Conservatives. The publication of the famous Biography of Lord George Bentinck was at once his noble tribute to the memory of his friend and a valuable help to the party. Five years later, when Lord Russell fell and the first Derby Administration was formed, Mr. Disraeli—never having held an inferior post—became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shortly followed Lord Palmerston's triumphant reign, to be succeeded, after a further resignation of Lord Russell, by the second Derby Ministry, in which Mr. Disraeli, once more Chancellor of the Exchequer, found time, in addition to his Budget-making, to dish the Whigs by a final Reform Bill. By-and-by the nation lost the Earl of Derby, and the last promotion of official dignity fell naturally to Mr. Disraeli, who became Prime Minister of England. Mr. Gladstone succeeded in preventing the Cabinet from having a very long life, and Mr. Disraeli kept mental self-composure enough, after losing office, to sit down and write "Lothair." By-and-by his political turn again came: 1874 saw him Premier for the second time, and this present year of grace still beholds him in the post, only in the Upper House, instead of the Lower, as Lord Beaconsfield, and with a Parliamentary majority scarcely diminished by five years of an imperial rule which brings back memories of England's most majestic days. He has visited Berlin, and more than held his own in a Council of the greatest modern diplomatists; has received a welcome back in London city such as no living Minister can boast; and has had the high honour of entertaining his Queen as a guest under his own roof.
Now I may go back to the first of the texts I have chosen.
It is certain that Lord Beaconsfield has always most tenaciously insisted that he has from first to last been politically consistent. His opponents, for very good reasons of their own, have unceasingly affirmed that this assertion is his chiefest, in fact his culminating audacity. But all the facts favour Lord Beaconsfield's view. In the first place, he has never held office but on one side, and he is the only Prime Minister during the last half century who could plead that circumstance. Earl Russell could not say it; certainly Lord Palmerston could not; it is quite out of Mr. Gladstone's power to urge it; even the late Earl of Derby could not make the claim. Next, it is now about thirty-two years since Mr. Disraeli was formally recognized as the leader of the Tory party, and he is still at the head of them, without their confidence having been for a moment shaken or withdrawn. Men, in fact, have been born and have grown up to middle life with Mr. Disraeli all the time remaining at the head of the Conservatives. His inconsistency during at least this somewhat lengthened period must have been of a strange kind, since it has always coincided with the wishes and the interests of his party, for he has never split them, and he has thrice led them into power, But we may go ten years further back than the dates we have named. From first to last, he never sat in Parliament but as an avowedly Tory member for a Tory constituency; during nearly thirty years he sat for one and the same county. If you sift what his enemies, have to say, you will find that it refers to something which took place about forty-five years ago, and is to the effect that he was for five minutes a member of the Westminster Reform Club, and was willing in his first candidatures to accept the assistance of Mr. Hume or of any other of the Radicals. Lord Beaconsfield has the plainest and, as I think, the most sufficient explanation to give of it all.
He says that he came forward at High Wycombe and afterwards offered himself to Marylebone as an opponent of the Whigs, determining to do all he could to bring the Tories into better accord with the masses of the people by re-establishing the natural social bonds between the latter and the aristocracy. Certainly, this is exactly what he has done; it is what he openly said that he aimed at doing from the very beginning. Moreover, the Tories so understood it from the first moment. They gave him their support at High Wycombe before he went to Taunton, and political support cannot be kept very secret. His name was a popular toast at agricultural banquets, and he was sure of a welcome at any muster of the Conservatives. Supposing that the Radicals had not had penetration enough to comprehend the position he took up, who would have been to blame for that? But the fact is that it has suited them to pretend in this case to be more stupid than they were. No Radical constituency ever elected Mr. Disraeli. The newspapers of the party never spoke of him as one of their sort; and Messrs. Hume and O'Connell were in a great hurry to withdraw their letters of recommendation, which had reached the candidate unsought. It is not denied by Lord Beaconsfield's most rabid defamer that he presented himself as an Anti-Whig, and it is admitted that long before he was in the House he was a supporter in public of Lord Chandos, and a eulogist of Sir Robert Peel. In his address to the Marylebone electors he described himself as an Independent. But it is really hardly worth while to discuss Mr. Disraeli's politics on this narrow basis.
The case may be put into a nutshell thus: if he had postponed seeking a seat till he went to Taunton, which was in 1835—that is to say forty-four years ago—no one would have been able to say, even in a way of cavil, that he had been ever any other than a most openly understood Tory. It is true that the Radicals would still have been able to complain that he had been bold enough to pass a Reform Bill giving household suffrage in the towns, and so spoiled once for all their party tactics. But that is an allegation of inconsistency which his Conservative supporters whom it has placed in office need not be very anxious to defend him against. The other side had made the question of Reform cease to be one of fair politics; Parliament after Parliament they were trading upon it in the most huckstering spirit. Mr. Disraeli's own first narrower proposals were scoffed at by them. The Bill that was finally passed was avowedly a piece of party tactic, and admirably it answered its end. Of course, since it succeeded so well, Lord Beaconsfield's rivals will never forgive him for it.
However, a more rational use of my space will be to ask at what stage of his career Mr. Disraeli developed the leading political principles which came to be recognized as characteristically his? That is the only mode in which it is worth while to discuss a man's consistency. Lord Beaconsfield has himself done it all in the preface to "Lothair," but I may recall a few details. In the very first election address he ever issued, he styled the Whigs "a rapacious, tyrannical, and incapable faction." That may be taken, one would suppose, as pretty clearly marking his point of political departure. At his second candidature for Wycombe, he quoted Bolingbroke and Windham as his models; and it was as far back as 1835, in his "Vindication of the English Constitution," that he first applied the term "Venetian" to our Constitution, as the Whigs had transformed it. The very peculiarities of theoretical opinion which are most individually his, can be traced back into what in respect of a living man's career might almost be termed antiquity—it is something like two-thirds of half a century ago since he first spoke of the "Asian Mystery." Nobody's sayings live as Mr. Disraeli's have done. The truth is, that so far from his political system having been hatched piecemeal in a way of after-thought to serve exigencies of personal ambition, he started with it ready made. His critics themselves unknowingly admit this in one part of their clumsy strictures, since they can find events so very recent as his naming of the Queen Empress of India, and his appropriation of Cyprus, sketched in his early novels. But let me take the very latest arraignment to which he has been summoned to plead guilty—that of having invented "Imperialism" just to bolster himself in office. As far back as 1849, which now is exactly thirty years ago, in one of his greatest speeches after having fairly settled down as the leader of his party, he used these words:—"I would sooner my tongue should palsy than counsel the people of England to lower their tone. I would sooner leave this House for ever than I would say to the nation that it has overrated its position.... I believe in the people of England and in their destiny." In his last Premiership he has simply put those thirty-year-old utterances into practice. If he had not done all he has done, he would have been false to the heroic spirit of that far-back hour. On the hustings at Maidstone Mr. Disraeli said, "If there is one thing on which I pique myself, it is my consistency." Lord Beaconsfield in advancing age may repeat the statement without varying it a syllable, though more than forty years have elapsed between the times.
The Peel-Disraeli episode has been for a long time now the chief standard illustration of the political casuistry of our modern Parliamentary history. Mr. Disraeli, those opposed to him will have it, acted most cruelly in that matter. It is rather a curious thing for a young member of Parliament to succeed in being cruel to the most powerful Minister the House of Commons had seen for more than a generation. If a giant is overthrown it must be rather the fault of the colossus somehow, unless, that is, it be a bigger giant who attacks him; and at that time of day, though Mr. Disraeli was growing fast, he really was not yet of the same towering height as Peel. How was it, then, that he succeeded in toppling over the great Minister? Let me first of all say that the truth seems to be that Sir Robert Peel's unlooked-for tragic death has given to his memory a pathetic interest which has caused an unfair heightening of emotion in the case. Neither all England, nor even the bulk of Parliament, was in tears, busy with pocket-handkerchiefs, during the delivery of those famous philippics. If pocket-handkerchiefs were used it was to wipe away drops caused by laughter, for everybody was roaring from moment to moment as each stroke told. Peel had taken up a position in reference to his old supporters which was certain to entail attack; the only thing special that Mr. Disraeli contributed to the assault was the splendour of the wit which barbed it. Everything that he said of Peel, allowing fairly for controversial exigencies, was strictly true. Nobody wishes to revive those necessarily hard sayings now, but it must be insisted upon for a second, in passing, that Peel had treated his party as no Minister before him had ever done. It was the exactest verity, as well as the keenest sarcasm, when Mr. Disraeli charged him with having tried to steer his party right into the harbour of the enemy. Mr. Disraeli was the man to feel this most of any, for it is one of his leading principles that as this nation now exists party in our constitution is an apparatus absolutely necessary to be preserved. He has for a third of a century since then himself unfailingly worked by that rule. But I scarcely need urge this part of the matter further here, as another word bearing upon it will come later. If Peel had lived on, he and his attacker would before the end have come to terms amicably enough, as Mr. Disraeli has since done with everybody else whom he has, from obligations of political duty, had publicly to oppose. That is, unless they were stupid enough not to remember his known determination that Parliamentary life should be raised above the level of vestry proceedings, by being dignified by a play of wit; or else were ill-conditioned enough, as some who have held high place have been, not to meet his offered open palm when the weapon was put back into the sheath. Peel himself would have had more sense; so, too, the present bearer of his name has shown himself to have. The rather idle statement that the Disraelian assault was prompted out of spite at not being made an Under-Secretary may at this time of day be, perhaps, passed over. Mr. Disraeli spoke with and voted for Peel long after that supposed neglect, and though it may be said that a spiteful man could nurse his revenge, it is just as true that the most generous could have done nothing more than go on showing respect and giving support just as Mr. Disraeli did. Further, no one was prompter than he was with words of praise so soon as there was opportunity for them. Indeed, the finest eulogy of Peel stands recorded in the printed pages of the person who is charged with pursuing him with unheard-of bitterness. The man who waited for office till the day when he vaulted at once into the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, was scarcely the one to be mightily offended, because, when a first batch of appointments was distributed, an Under-Secretaryship went by him. It was the leadership of his party for wise ends that Mr. Disraeli was looking out for.
Here again, however, it is unnecessarily restricting the consideration of the point to speak of Mr. Disraeli's invective only in reference to Peel. Acting on his maxim that it is the very ornament of debate, he at one time or other has let the lightning of his tongue play around everybody in Parliament who offered fit mark for it. Lord Russell was scorched by it; so was Lord Palmerston. Mr. Roebuck, who in those days was thought to have a bitter lip, got singed from it; and Mr. Gladstone has felt its blaze wrapping around him often. He is, at this moment, in fact, supposed to be showing some not very ancient scars from it. But, occasionally even Mr. Disraeli's friends felt a more lambent play of this glorious irony. It was he who told the late Earl Derby that he was only "a Prince Rupert of debate," always finding his camp in the hands of the enemy on returning from his irresistible charges. He never objected to receive as good as he gave, if only any one could be found to give it him. Only once in all his career did he lose his temper—in the challenge arising out of the O'Connell affair; and that was before he was in Parliament. While in the House, who was there with steel of any temper that he did not try its edge? Sharp blows were aimed back, and he always admitted when it was a palpable hit; but who came up so often as he did—who was there that did not go down before him at the last? Take Mr. Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield out of the record of the Parliamentary debating of the last forty years, and what a darkening it would give—what a gap it would make!
Something must now be said as to Lord Beaconsfield's systematic political and social views. It is very certain that he has a system, and it is also sure that he has never hidden what it is. Nobody has been at such pains to make his views clear. He has written books in explanation, as well as made speeches; he has illustrated the system by fiction, besides backing it up by historical disquisition. Anybody who chooses may learn what it is, and—as a great modification of political feeling in this country shows—a vast number have done so, by reading "Coningsby," "Sybil," and the preface to "Lothair." Indeed, from this latter exposition itself, all that is vital may be inferred. But the doctrine has of necessity some elaborateness, and asks a trifle of thought. It cannot be hit off in as easy a way as "Radicalism" can, where, when you have uttered the half-platitude, half-sophism, "equality of man," you are supposed to have said nearly everything. Lord Beaconsfield has always kept before him the conception of a community, which he distinguishes from a mob, and if he could get his own way in the matter he would have the society highly organized; the keeping it real in every part, and strictly and broadly popular in its entirety, being the only working limit that he would prescribe to its institutional intricacy.
This system, though on its being gradually promulgated it was held to be Mr. Disraeli's very own, expressly denies for itself that it is in any sense Disraelian at all. Lord Beaconsfield avows that he has found it in history—in our own history. He is content to be regarded as its discoverer, not its inventor. In a word, Lord Beaconsfield's great claim upon his countrymen, as he himself puts it, is that he has again brought to light and forced under the eyes of Englishmen their own national chronicle.
To begin with, it is his Lordship's firmly avowed belief that there has been what may be called a break or rift in our great social traditions. It is not difficult to see that he traces the causes of it back to the violent subversal of the Church, which, he will have it, was never in this country at any time in real danger of becoming Papal. But I may take up the narrative somewhat later. With his own inimitable terseness, he has thus described the three great evils which afterwards made a social wreck of modern England: they were, he says, Venetian politics, Dutch finance, and French wars. All these he attributes to the Whig nobles. What is called the great Revolution, which they so hugely turned to their glory and their profit, he, in "Sybil," ascribes to the fear of those whom he calls "the great lay impropriators" that King James intended to insist on the Church lands being restored to their original purposes,—to wit, the education of the people and the maintenance of the poor. They brought over William of Orange, along with whom, he ironically says, England had the happiness of receiving a Corn Law and the National Debt. But the Crown itself was enslaved in the hands of the Whig families, who converted themselves into a Venetian oligarchy; and, throwing off the natural obligations of property, they borrowed money to defray the foreign wars in which William was entangled before he left his own country.
These are the historical premises from which Lord Beaconsfield's views are all fundamentally derived. It is open to anybody to try to disprove them; what they have got to do is simply to show that the above alleged facts were not the true ones. But no one has done this as yet. Coming down still later in his history, Mr. Disraeli, in "Sybil," gave the following condensed description of the social condition which had resulted,—"a mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home trade founded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people." Here, again, the whole case is open to debate, but I venture to think that he will be a bold man who denies that this was a vivid picture of England at the moment Mr. Disraeli penned it. The bold man, at any rate, did not present himself at the time. It was the last item in that shocking list which fastened most on Mr. Disraeli's imagination—"a degraded people." When writing "Sybil" he converted himself into a Commissioner of Inquiry, and visiting the homes of his humbler countrymen, painted them from sight on the spot. The descriptions in those pages can never be forgotten of dwellings where lived fever and consumption and ague as well as human beings; the three first-named inhabitants being in fact the only tenants who remained under the roofs long. With agitation unusual for him, but most consistent in an upholder of the doctrine of race, he affirmed that "the physical quality" of our people was endangered. But he further found that in the manufacturing districts there was, to use his own words, "no society, but only aggregation:" or, again to quote him, "the moral condition of the people was entirely lost sight of." Much of this, he believed, was due to the Church having failed in its obligations. "The Church," he makes one of the characters in his story say to another in it, "has deserted the people, and from that moment the Church has been in danger, and the people degraded."
At this point I may very rightly interpolate a remark which has not a little explanatory value. Just in proportion to the importance given in Lord Beaconsfield's system to the Church was his natural disappointment at the failure, regarded from one side, of the awakening going on within its borders at the time of the "Young England" movement. A great part of his hopes rested on that stir. He was expecting from those most prominent in it a grand resuscitation of the Anglican Church, but in place of that he says Dr. (now Cardinal) Newman and the other seceders "sought refuge in mediæval superstitions, which are generally only the embodiment of pagan ceremonies and creeds." Bearing this in mind, there ought not to be much difficulty in understanding either Lord Beaconsfield's position towards the Ritualists, or the course he took as to the Public Worship Regulation Act.
What was the remedy for this state of society into which England had fallen? The cure which seemed natural to Mr. Disraeli was to revert to the principles of our history. Practically, the first thing to be done was to break up the political monopoly of the Whigs, and it was this very task that he set himself to do. I have already extracted a passage denouncing that party in the first election address he issued. But here, too, he had no new course to strike out. He affirmed that both Lord Shelburne and Mr. Pitt had attempted the same work long before. Shelburne, he said, saw in the growing middle-class a bulwark for the throne against the Revolution families; and Pitt, still more determined to curb the power of the patrician party, created a plebeian aristocracy, when they baffled his first endeavours, blending it with the old oligarchy. It has not unlikely begun to dawn upon the reader that Mr. Disraeli, holding these views, was himself a Reformer, of a much more comprehensive kind even than the Radicals. True, Reform as it actually had come about in 1832, most craftily manipulated as it then was by the Whigs to their own advantage, skilfully snatching profit out of what ought to have been a danger to them, was not his notion. For part of what happened then he, indeed, with his usual courage, blamed the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues. His own party have had from no quarter criticism so severe as that he has given them. If Lord Beaconsfield is in favour of an aristocracy, it is because he is for making it actually "lead." He affirms that the Tories, by their conduct in office, precipitated a revolution which might have been delayed for half a century, and which need never have occurred at all in so aggravated a form. All that he could do, all that he has ever claimed to do, by his own partial Reform measure, was to do away with part of the ill effects of that partisan move of the other side, and to prevent fresh ill ones from being worked in just the same way. But there ought to be given a still broader statement of Lord Beaconsfield's political and social doctrines, and, perhaps, I cannot do better than make with that view the following quotation from the preface to "Lothair." He there explains that his general aims were these:—
"To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation, by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wide basis, and not, as has since been done, in the shape of a priestly faction; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his political pupil and heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituencies of 1832 from sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well the moral condition of the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property; and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolution founded on abstract ideas."
This, he goes on to say, appeared to him at the beginning of his career to be the course which the country required, and, he adds, that it was one "which, practically speaking, could only with all their faults and backslidings be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed Tory party."
If I were able to find room for bringing together from Lord Beaconsfield's books and speeches detailed passages to illustrate this summary, it would be seen what a coherent social scheme he has always had present to his mind. The above hints, however, must serve. Any one who, after reading them, thinks that there is any ground for the electioneering cry the Liberals are trying to raise, that this is a Minister who has no domestic policy, will show more stolidity than we hope the bulk of the electors possess. Further on I will return for a moment to this point.
Let me go at once to the fourth topic I have allotted to myself—Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy. This policy, I need not say, is that, of the Cabinet as well, but I am not in this paper writing of the other members of the Government. It is not my purpose to trace the history of the Eastern Question, that of the Afghan War, and the Zulu embroglio. But there is one general aspect of these matters as to which I must offer two or three comments in addition to what has been before said about "Imperialism." A set attempt has been made, and is pretty certain to go on being made all the time between now and the elections—whether they come earlier or later—and to be then finally repeated on the hustings, to give to Lord Beaconsfield the air of a most belligerent, not to say a bloodthirsty, Minister, who, the moment he got into office, began to peep about the world to see where he could pick a quarrel, and who has especially acted defiantly towards Russia. By way of preliminary, I may ask whether his past antecedents show him to be a statesman of this hobgoblin type? Lord Palmerston found no more unyielding opponent of his turbulent foreign policy than Mr. Disraeli, who always contended that the effect of it was to draw the national attention away from home reforms. When the question of coast fortifications was before Parliament, Mr. Disraeli was among the first to protest against panic; he it was who spoke of "bloated armaments;" and on countless occasions he has raised his voice for peace and retrenchment. In 1865 he publicly declared that since he had had to do with politics he had known only one war which was justifiable—that waged in the Crimea. But it may be said that it is a common artifice for men in Opposition to preach peace. Let us, then, turn specially to the Eastern Question, and see what grounds there are for insinuating that Lord Beaconsfield has in that case concocted a war policy for the purpose of exciting and dazzling the country, and keeping himself in power. In 1843—which is now some time ago—in a debate as to the production of papers on Servia, in which Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston were the chief orators, he made a speech which contained this passage:—"What, then, ought to be the Ministerial policy? To maintain Turkey by diplomatic action in such a state that she might be able to hold independently the Dardanelles." Why, this is the literal description of what he has done now. And we have already seen that in 1865, twenty-two years after, the one only war he approved was that which had been fought against Russia for this very purpose. In the early stage of the negotiations which led to that war, his complaint was that the Government was not vigorous enough in defending Turkey. But, in 1857, there arose another occasion for testing whether Mr. Disraeli's feelings naturally were for peace or war. He opposed the war with China, and in the Persian affair he denounced the Russophobia of Lord Palmerston—the very complaint from which, we infer, the Liberals wish him to be understood to be himself suffering now. Or take India as a test. According to the Duke of Argyll and others, Lord Beaconsfield has an insatiable thirst for more territory in that part of the world. Very strangely, it was he who most condemned the annexation of Oude, going so far as to make a motion for a Royal Commission to be sent out to India to inquire into the condition of the people. When the contest between the Northern and Southern States of America broke out, no public man regretted it more than he did, and he was unfalteringly on the side of the North.
In fact, only in one single case has Lord Beaconsfield ever shown the slightest disposition for sacrificing peace, if need be—namely, for the checking of Russia's portentous advance; and this has necessarily implied the maintenance of Turkey in some degree of power. Twice in his lifetime has the need arisen, and he has acted the second time in just the same way that he did the first, the only difference being that he happens now, fortunately, to be in office instead of in Opposition.
In his first speech in the Upper House, Lord Beaconsfield said—"The Eastern Question involves some of the elements of the distribution of power in the world, and involves the existence of empires. I plead for a calm statesmanlike consideration of the question." In his second great speech in that House, he made this remark,—"The independence and integrity of Turkey is the traditional policy not only of England but of Europe." This is the absolute truth. It is not he who has invented any brand-new tactics in this matter; he has simply stood upon the old paths, and carried on the settled habits of our statesmanship. The innovators are Mr. Gladstone and the self-styled humanitarians, who were for substituting hysterics for national diplomacy, and thought to solve the Eastern Question by presenting the Turk with a carpet-bag and begging him to retire with it into Asia. But it is stated that Lord Beaconsfield has defied Russia. Well, turn to the famous Guildhall speech, which is the great article in the indictment. It suits his critics to pick words out of it to please them; but it also contains sentences like the following, which they somehow overlook,—"We have nothing to gain by war. We are essentially a non-aggressive Power." In that same speech, too, he alluded to the Emperor of Russia's "lofty character," addressing to him words of the highest compliment. If he added a solemn warning to that monarch as to the extent of England's resources if she was forced into war for the cause of public right, he still was speaking in the interests of peace, not war. It was his bounden duty to prevent the present Czar from falling into the mistake his father was so fatally guided into by the Manchester school—that of thinking England would in no case draw the sword. Construe his words how you will, they amount to no more than this. Mr. Gladstone and his friends, by their factitious public demonstrations, partly did away with the natural effects of that grave intimation, and made it necessary for the Government to prove its seriousness by bringing troops from India, and actually risking the very war which Lord Beaconsfield had wished to avoid. But the Premier had the courage not only of his opinions but of a true policy, and he has had his reward. He successfully checked the sinister progress of Russia, restored the reign of public law in Europe, and while exalting the renown of his own country, he has pointed another empire—that of Austria—to a new career which will benefit the world as well as strengthen and ennoble herself. After the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary was proclaimed, only one thing was left for his Lordship's opponents to go on repeating,—namely, that he had, in upholding Turkey, spared no thought or feeling to the victims of her rule. In the very face of this there was the fact that he had made England the formal protector of the inhabitants of Asia Minor, and had demanded Cyprus as a nearer point of observation of the Turk; but the plain obvious meaning of those arrangements has been tried to be muddled away by misrepresenting the protectorate of Asia Minor as a new insult to Russia. These brave humanitarians got sorely entangled in their logic on all sides. They pleaded in one breath that England had rashly undertaken too much responsibility for these oppressed peoples, and in the next breath said that nothing would ever come of it. Lord Beaconsfield has made it all clear, and in the simplest way. It is not fully explained at the moment of our writing what is the actual extent of the pressure put upon the Porte, nor what precise orders were sent to our admiral, but when the recent news was first published here the opponents of the Ministry must have felt that Lord Beaconsfield had ordered the British Fleet to sail against them when they heard it was instructed to steam back for the Turkish waters. Kindly meant as it might be for those in Asia Minor, it was a very cruel step on the part of Lord Beaconsfield towards some of his own countrymen, for it will necessitate the altering of a good many already prepared electioneering speeches. In the end, as we venture to predict, it will be seen that his Lordship and his colleagues are the true humanitarians.
But let me not lose sight of the fact that this, though a very real plea on the part of the Government, is not the one on which they mainly rely. They have never pretended to be knights-errant for the righting of wrongs throughout the world. What contents them is the humbler rôle of old-fashioned English statesmanship, which seeks first to make sure of the safety of our own empire and the promotion of our proper interests, doing what further good it can to other peoples incidentally in discharging the fair reasonable obligations which may in that way arise, nor disdaining any glory that so falls to it. But an enormous obligation of this sort was already on our shoulders—the preservation of India. We have a strict duty to two hundred millions of human beings in the East, and Lord Beaconsfield and his colleagues, who appeared to be the only public men in England who remembered this, were determined to discharge it. Anything and everything in their policy which may at first sight seem risky or belligerent is explained fully to every one who will keep that pressing need before his mind. It was this which made them purchase the Suez Canal shares, and strengthen their interference in Egypt; it was this that made them wish for a clearer understanding with the Ameer of Afghanistan. But so little did they go about matters with a high hand, that they most carefully humoured France with respect to Egypt, and at the very earliest moment that they could, they made a treaty with a new Afghan ruler. To try to make them appear responsible for what afterwards occurred at Cabul is the most shameless abuse of license on the part of an Opposition which parliamentary records can show. A Russian embassy had been installed in Cabul with no other guarantee for its safety than the word of a friendly Ameer, and our Envoy and his suite were sent thither under the very same guarantee. If we were not to be most dangerously overshadowed by the Russian example, an English embassy had to show its face in Cabul; and to say that our rulers either in Calcutta or in London should have foreseen the pusillanimous break-down of the Ameer and the consequent massacre of our brave countrymen is—well, it may be better not further to try to say what it is.
Our own interests, I repeat, were jeopardized in every quarter where the present Government has stirred hand or foot. That is its broad justification. But I must certainly go a step farther than this. The present Ministry assuredly would not be satisfied with an acquittal on the Liberal arraignment; nor is that the verdict which the public has given. The British people find this Government guilty of having won for it and for themselves much honour. When Lord Beaconsfield saw that in any event he was committed to a contest with Russia for the defence of English interests, he had the courage and the wit to determine that the issue of it should be the better for the world. It is for this noble superfluity of skilful statesmanship, this Imperial scope given to England's ruling, that Europe has thanked him, and the bulk of this nation applauded him. By-and-by, he will reap still further credit, for besides checking Russia he will eventually coerce the Turk. That further obligation naturally arose out of the course he took, and he added it to his proper task of safeguarding our own interests, just as impartially as he did the other aim of arresting the Muscovite. I shall not push this reasoning further: it seems to me sufficiently triumphant as it stands. If Lord Beaconsfield has upheld the Turk, it was because it was necessary, not because he admired him. But there is another remark, coming much nearer home, that I wish to make before concluding this section.
The foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield has brought to him and to his party much renown; but it has brought them nothing else. That there has been the need for it is for the Conservatives a positive misfortune. It has nearly entirely put aside the domestic legislation on which they reckoned for at once redressing some grievances of their own, and for satisfying the town populations who their true friends were. Let it not be forgotten that it was on this very claim of having a domestic policy that the Conservatives appealed to the people at the last election. Their opponents, who now make a pretence of measures of this kind being lacking, then denounced it loudly enough as a "policy of sewage." But Lord Beaconsfield's rivals have tried hard to make it seem that he sought out, or even invented, these hazardous events abroad which put aside his home policy. The very attempt impugns the common sense of the general public. A sort of pretext might have been found for insinuating such a notion if Lord Beaconsfield had been nearing the end of expending his Parliamentary majority by carrying party measures. But to suppose that a Minister attaining power in the triumphant way he did would wish to be plunged straightway into foreign entanglements, is to imagine him stricken with idiocy. Lord Beaconsfield had had far too much experience to make such a preposterous mistake. He knew at the beginning, as he knows now, that neither Minister nor party has much to gain in any way of permanent power or confirmed home advantage from foreign policies, however successful they may turn out to be. Foreign dangers are half-forgotten as soon as they are past. Directly, these occurrences abroad will be but memories; splendid ones they must ever remain: but they will have against them, in the eyes of the unthinking, the drawback of having necessarily, to some extent, disordered the finances. Lord Beaconsfield's rivals are sure to make the most of that fact on the hustings, as he well knew beforehand they would do; and, to balance its effect, he will have nothing on which to rely but the patriotic recollection of his country. Should everything go for the best, no prestige which these foreign successes can give him and his party will place him more solidly in power than he found himself at the beginning of this Parliament; yet it will only be at the opening of the next that he will be able to push forward the home policy intended for the present Parliament. Apart from a heightening of fortunate reputation, won through much risk, his own party will scarcely have gained a shred of fair legislative or administrative advantage from six years' splendid possession of overwhelming power.
It does not seem needful to waste space in speaking of the Zulu war. Even the Liberals are beginning to be silent on the subject. The affair was forced upon the Government, not sought for by them, and it has ended successfully.
If I now ask what have been the causes of Lord Beaconsfield's unexampled individual success, the remarks must at first seem to narrow to mere personal ones. There has, in truth, been more than one reason for the present Premier's triumphs. First of all, I might state the matter so generally as to say that for half a century he has managed to keep himself the most thoroughly interesting personage in England. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever been dull, which is the one only sufficient explanation of failure wherever it happens. But such a statement of the matter as this is too comprehensive and wants particularizing. I may add, then, that no one has shown so much pluck as he has, and that is a quality which in the end tells with the British public beyond all others. For one starting with his disadvantage of race to dream in those days of a political career was most courageous, but so soon as it began to be seen that he would triumph over all obstacles, his very difficulties turned to his advantage. He soon commanded everybody's sympathies except those of injured partisans on the other side. Not that it was sympathy he begged for; it was admiration he extorted. Especially has he by means of his writings had the generous feeling of youth in his favour, generation after generation. They can never remain untouched by the spectacle of a successful fight against circumstances. But Lord Beaconsfield has not owed all to dash and daring. His industry has been equal to his pluck. If he had only been a politician that would have had to be said; and so it again would if he had only been known as the writer of his works. Put both the careers together and nobody else has shown such fertility of brain. His marvellous intellect has never tired. The versatility, too, has been marvellous: a novelist and a diplomatist, a poet and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a satirist and a successful leader of Opposition. For fifty years, in one or other of these characters, and often in several of them at once, his wit has never ceased blazing, save when he himself, the only one who ever tired of its play—except, indeed, those hit by it—has chosen to smother it in silence; but it was always ready to flash forth upon occasion, and is as bright to-day as ever.
But, to come yet closer to the heart of the secret of Lord Beaconsfield's success, his faithful devotion to the great historic party he allied himself with has been equal to his courage, to his industry, and to his abilities. No politician can make an individual career; he has to find his success in the prosperity of his followers. The loyalty which Lord Beaconsfield has shown to his party and the ungrudging recognition they have paid to him has half-redeemed the hardness of our coarse partisan politics. Some Liberals have had the want of wit, without our going so far as to say the lack of capability of feeling, to express surprise at the faithful respect shown to Lord Beaconsfield by his present colleagues. That Lord Beaconsfield has a personal charm must be admitted, for he has turned every one who was ever brought into any degree of nearness with him into a friend, as well as a colleague. Those who like may believe that he has done it by the use of magic philtres; less credulous people will, perhaps, content themselves with thinking that his spell has been simply that of strength of character, superior experience, and a non-despotic manner. One thing is very patent. This chief of a Cabinet who is said to have imprinted everywhere his own individuality on the Ministerial policy, has never practised the slightest interference with his subordinates. It is not he who has been charged with an uncontrollable wish to be the representative of all the Ministry in his own person. Just as he could show patience when a leader of Opposition, he has been able to be silent when a Minister. However, it has been rather insinuated that he became preternaturally active in the Cabinet Councils—there standing forth a wizard, and cast all his colleagues into a clairvoyant slumber. Strange to say, they remained in the same comatose condition afterwards in both Houses, never waking up though speaking and passing measures. Two members of his Government, however, have broken away—Lords Derby and Carnarvon have escaped from the magician's cell; but they have divulged nothing as to any necromantic violence worked on them. No, Lord Beaconsfield's fair and reasonable ascendency has been more honestly won. But his marvellous friendships have not been the only softening touches in his career. All England felt a strange thrilling about the heart on the morning when it heard that Mr. Disraeli's wife was henceforth to be the Viscountess Beaconsfield. It was a domestic idyll suddenly disclosed in the centre of British politics. A man who can make his own hearth the scene of romance, convert all who know him well into true friends, and win all the young people of a nation, must be something more than a self-seeker.
Still, though these things might explain Lord Beaconsfield being so interesting, something else has yet to be added to account for the overwhelming importance which he has attained in the last period of his career. Not even the success of his party could have given him that unless the policy which secured this prosperity had obtained, also, the exalting of the nation.
It is this which is his final boast; he has uplifted higher the fame of England, and by doing that has made his own renown the greater. Once more, it was achieved in the simplest way. He invented nothing, strained at nothing, but only boldly carried on the traditionary English policy, at a moment when his opponents were willing to forget it; and in merely proving equal to the opportunity, and daring to make Britain act worthily of her history, he has changed by her means the destiny of the Western World. Not only his own countrymen, but Europe and nations more distant still, to-day hail him as the greatest of modern English statesmen. That is a title and dignity somewhat higher than an Earldom, and it is under that larger style that those who wish to do Lord Beaconsfield full honour will have to allude to him hereafter in the national annals.
These are some of the reasons why we honour and follow him.
A Tory.