“He knows,” said Macaulay, speaking in 1833 of the member for the University of Oxford—“he knows that in the infancy of civilisation, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.... Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, or heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.”
CHAPTER V
MONARCHY
“To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne,” Disraeli ranks, with his ideal mission towards the Church, as “the trainer of the nation;” towards Labour, to “the moral and physical condition of the people;” towards Ireland, by governing it “according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell;” to Reform, by emancipating “the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies.”
“Sovereignty,” he says, in the peroration to Sybil, “has been the title of something that has had no dominion, while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves the servants of the people. In the selfish strife of factions, two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England—the Monarch and the Multitude; as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared....” Such was Disraeli’s summary in 1870 of what inspired “Young England” in 1840. The more real is representation, the greater the chances of royalty. De Tocqueville, too, has shown that it was just the decay of mediæval, municipal institutions that loosened the hold of the French Crown on the French nation.
The “real throne,” as against the ornamental, formed a very material part of it. It chimed with Disraeli’s outlook on English institutions as “popular, but not democratic.” Since Sybil was written, the “subject” is no longer “a serf,” but for a long time the “sceptre” tended to remain “a pageant.” The constitutional possibilities and opportunities of kingship under our limited monarchy are even now, perhaps, hardly realised. Before I close this chapter, I intend to say something of their historical lineage.
There is a satirical passage about George the Fourth among the brilliant flippancies of Vivian Grey, which may amuse us before coming to close quarters with the serious side of sovereignty: “The first great duty of a monarch is to know how to bow skilfully. Nothing is more difficult, ... a royal bow may often quell a rebellion, and sometimes crush a conspiracy. Our own Sovereign bows to perfection. His bow is eloquent, and will always render an oration ... unnecessary, which is a great point, for harangues are not regal. Nothing is more undignified than to make a speech. It is from the first an acknowledgment that you are under the necessity of explaining, or conciliating, or convincing, or confuting; in short, that you are not omnipotent, but opposed.”
“The Monarchy of the Tories is more democratic than the Republic of the Whigs!” exclaimed Disraeli, as I have already quoted, in his early Spirit of Whiggism. “I think,” cried Canning in 1812, “that we have the happiness to live under a limited monarchy, not under a crowned republic;” while, six years later, Canning again denounced most forcibly the error of those “who argue as if the constitution of this country was a broad and level democracy inlaid (for ornament’s sake) with a peerage and topped (by sufferance) with a crown.” This belief inspired the same statesman when, towards the agitated close of his days, he speaks in a letter to Mr. Croker of his reliance on the “vigour of the Crown” in conjunction with the “body of the people.”
This, too, was the belief that inspired Disraeli. “The monarch and the multitude.” Monarchy should be neither a gewgaw nor an abstraction, but a centre of national enthusiasm. “It is enthusiasm alone that gives flesh and blood to the skeletons of opinions.” From the beginning of the first to the close of the fifth decade of last century kingship had been on its trial in England. “The Tories,” wrote Disraeli in The Press, “already recognised the necessity of employing all the popular elements of the Constitution in support of its monarchical foundation.”