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.