With Italy herself he nourished, indeed, an innate sympathy, and for her a sentimental attachment. In all his reveries Venice and Rome figure no less frequently than do Athens and Jerusalem; and afterwards none applauded Daniel Manin more than he. Italy is the haunting refrain of Venetia, Venice of Contarini Fleming, Rome romanticises Lothair. Perhaps a leaven of his old enthusiasm for “a cluster of small states” and “federal unions” still mingled with the practical outlook which also made him sacrifice many of his personal emotions to the cold requirements of statesmanship. “Federal unions,” he had sighed in Contarini, “would preserve us from the consequences of local jealousy.”—“There would be more genius, and, what is of more importance, much more felicity.”—“Italy might then revive.” However this may be—and I for one regret his forced attitude towards the first flutter of Italian freedom—or whether his late acquaintance with Metternich had coloured his ideas, there can be no doubt of their constraining cause. His public views always confined themselves to what he believed was for the benefit of Great Britain. And in this instance—“... If we, or any other power,” he urged, “should forcibly interfere in the affairs of Italy with the view of changing the political settlement of that country, the result will be, as in the case of an attempt to dismember Russia, one of those protracted wars that might fatally exhaust this country, and which, even supposing it to be successful, would leave Italy very possibly not in the possession of Austria, but under the dominion of some other power as little national.” It should be recollected that 1858–61 were critical years for Anglo-French relations. After Palmerston’s Orsini imbroglio we were more than once on the verge of war with France. Luckily, England was never forced into interference. Luckily, Italy regained her independence, through two commanding individualities. But it was history that warned Disraeli. Italy had been the battle-field of Austria and Spain, and a prolific source of war, disorder, and havoc throughout the eighteenth century. “A war in Italy,” he said in 1859, “is not a war in a corner. An Italian war may by possibility be an European war. The waters of the Adriatic cannot be disturbed without agitating the waters of the Rhine. The port of Trieste is not a mere Italian port. It is a port which belongs to the Italian confederation, and an attack on Trieste is not an attack on Austria alone, but also on Germany. If war springs up beyond the precincts of Italy, England has interests not merely from ... those enlightened principles of civilisation which make her look with an adverse eye on aught that would disturb the peace of the world, but England may be interested from material considerations of the most urgent and momentous character.” It was from England’s vantage-ground alone that he discussed these questions in public. He wished Italy to be free, but he feared the results of ineffective feeling. Italy, he held, must free herself, and her aid, if any, should be French, not English, for France heads the Latin League. In 1859 he rested on a mutual accord and disarmament between Great Britain and France. This would, he pleaded, be “a conquest far more valuable than Lombardy, or those wild dreams of a regeneration ever promised but never accomplished.” “National independence,” he urged in another speech on the same subject, “is not created by protocols, nor public liberty guaranteed by treaties. All such arrangements have been tried before, and the consequence has been a sickly and short-lived offspring. What is going on in Italy—never mind whose may have been the original fault, what the present errors—can only be solved by the will, the energy, the sentiment, and the thought of the population themselves.”
One word before I close this chapter about Greece and Poland. Of his own feeling for Hellas there can be no question. It pervades his works. “All the great things have been done by the little peoples.” He was offered, I have heard, the kingship of that country. But Greek ambitions, he felt, outgrew her capacities. Her hereditary dream has always been Constantinople. He bade her, in a famous passage, take the advice that he would give to a youth of genius and enterprise: “Be patient.” But he also insisted that she should be heard at the Conference of Berlin.
With Poland’s free aspirations he always sympathised, and more than once expressed the grounds of his sympathy in Parliament. The movement in Poland was one, natural, spontaneous, and national. It was not forced by agitators, nor fomented by despots, nor provoked elsewhere from ulterior motives. It was the genuine expression of a combined people, and not the plea of a single race overbearing its fellow components, or the pretence of a single locality to manage itself, both of which have so frequently proved the stalking-horse of “national rights;” pleas that, if sound, would bring back the Heptarchy in England, undo the union of Germany and of Italy, break up the faculty for government, and resolve into petty elements every great nation in Europe. Such an article of “liberal” faith is neither more nor less than political atomism; and its humanitarian guise too often the false philanthropy of “sublime sentiments.” In all his treatment of “Britain’s interests abroad,” Disraeli realised that whereas in England government can still be carried on by “traditionary influences,” the remaining ancient communities of Europe were falling more and more under the veiled sway of “military force.” These were the two alternatives. A “reconstruction” of England “on the great Transatlantic model” would only accentuate the discrepancy between the ineradicable features of her body politic, and the social standard which she would seek to imitate. The result would be that “after a due course of paroxysms for the sake of maintaining order and securing the rights of industry, the State quits the senate and takes refuge in the camp”—
“Let us not be deluded by forms of government. The word may be republic in France, constitutional monarchy in Prussia, absolute monarchy in Austria, but the King is the same. Wherever there is a vast standing army the government is the government of the sword. Half a million of armed men must either be, or be not, in a state of discipline. If not... it is not government but anarchy; if they be in a state of discipline, they must obey one man, and that man is the master.”[133]
I have tried to track a large subject deserving a longer space. At any rate, I hope to have justified Disraeli’s own language in the touching letter which breathed farewell to his constituents when failing health compelled him to accept an earldom—
“Throughout my public life I have aimed at two chief results. Not insensible to the principle of progress, I have endeavoured to reconcile change with that respect for tradition which is one of the main elements of our social strength; and in external affairs I have endeavoured to develop and strengthen our empire, believing that a combination of achievement and responsibility elevates the character and condition of a people.”
It is not a little remarkable that this farewell re-echoes the sentence quoted in my first chapter from his tract What is he? as well as that later Runnymede Letter which, forty years earlier, he addressed to Sir Robert Peel.[134]
“... Spread it then,
And let it circulate through every vein
Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power
Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.”