The Project Gutenberg eBook, Disraeli, by Walter Sydney Sichel

Kenneth Macleay

The Young Disraeli.

DISRAELI

DISRAELI

A STUDY IN
PERSONALITY AND IDEAS

BY
WALTER SICHEL
AUTHOR OF “BOLINGBROKE AND HIS TIMES”

WITH THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
LONDON: METHUEN & CO.
1904

ERRATUM

Page 22, line 2 note, for “called to the bar” read “entered at Lincoln’s Inn”

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“TIME IS REPRESENTED WITH A SCYTHE AS WELL AS WITH AN HOUR-GLASS. WITH THE ONE HE MOWS DOWN, WITH THE OTHER HE RECONSTRUCTS.”—Disraeli, in The Press, 1853.

“GREAT MINDS MUST TRUST TO GREAT TRUTHS AND GREAT TALENTS FOR THEIR RISE, AND NOTHING ELSE.”

“TRUE WISDOM LIES IN THE POLICY THAT WOULD EFFECT ITS AIMS BY THE INFLUENCE OF OPINION, AND YET BY THE MEANS OF EXISTING FORMS.”

“... THE PAST IS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF OUR POWER.”—Speech on Mr. Cobden’s death, April 3, 1865.

DISRAELI

INTRODUCTION
ON THE IMAGINATIVE QUALITY

The power of imagination is essential to supreme statesmanship. Indeed, no really originative genius in any domain of the mind can succeed without it. In literature it reigns paramount. Of art it is the soul. Without it the historian is a mere registrar of sequence, and no interpreter of characters. In science it decides the end towards which the daring of a Verulam, a Newton, a Herschel, a Darwin, can travel. On the battle-field, in both elements, it enabled Marlborough, Nelson, and Napoleon to revolutionise tactics. In the law its influence is perhaps less evident; but even here a masterful insight into the spirit of precedent marks the creative judge. By lasting imagination, far more than by the colder weapon of shifting reason, the world is governed. “Even Mormon,” wrote Disraeli, “counts more votaries than Bentham.” For imagination is a vivid, intellectual, half-spiritual sympathy, which diverts the flood of human passion into fresh channels to fertilise the soil; just as fancy again is the play of intellectual emotion. Whereas reason, the measure of which varies from age to age, can only at best dam or curb the deluge for a time. Reason educates and criticises, but Imagination inspires and creates. The magnetic force which is felt is really the spell of personal influence and the key of public opinion. It solves problems by visualising them, and kindles enthusiasm from its own fascinating fires. And more: Imagination is in the truest sense prophetic. Could one only grasp with a perfect view the myriad provinces of suffering, enterprise, and aspiration with which the Leader is called upon to grapple, not only would the expedients to meet them suggest themselves as by a divine flash, but their inevitable relations and meanings would start into vision. For what the herd call the Present, is only the literal fact, the shell, of environment. Its spirit is the Future; and the highest imagination in seeing it foresees. Imagination, once more, is the mainspring of spontaneity. Its vigour enables the will to beget circumstance, instead of being the creature of surroundings; “for Imagination ever precedeth voluntary motion,” says Bacon. It empowers the will of one to sway and mould the wills of many. And it is the very source of that capacity for idealism which alone distinguishes man from the brute. Viewing in 1870 the general purport of his message, Disraeli wrote with truth that it “... ran counter to the views which had long been prevalent in England, and which may be popularly, though not altogether accurately, described as utilitarian;” that it “recognised imagination in the government of nations as a quality not less important than reason;” that it “trusted to a popular sentiment which rested on an heroic tradition, and was sustained by the high spirit of a free aristocracy;” that its “economical principles were not unsound,” but that it “looked upon the health and knowledge of the multitude as not the least precious part of the wealth of nations;” that “in asserting the doctrine of race,” it “was entirely opposed to the equality of man, and similar abstract dogmas, which have destroyed ancient society without creating a satisfactory substitute;” that “resting on popular sympathies and popular privileges,” it “held that no society could be durable unless it was built upon the principles of loyalty and religious reverence.”

How comes it, then, that, in the art of governing a free people, this imaginative fellowship with unseen ideas, this power which men call Genius, “to make the passing shadow serve thy will,” is so constantly suspected and mistrusted; that uncommon sense, until it triumphs, is a stone of stumbling to the common sense of the average man? That Cromwell was called a self-seeking maniac for his vision of Theocracy; William of Orange, a cold-blooded monster for his quest after union and empire; Bolingbroke, a charlatan for his fight against class-preponderance, and on behalf of united nationality; Chatham, an actor for his dramatic disdain of shams; Canning, by turns a charlatan and buffoon, for preferring the traditions of a popular crown to the innovations of a crowned democracy, and at the same time seeking to break the charmed circle of a patrician syndicate; that Burke was hounded out by jealous oligarchs for refusing to confound the “nation” with the “people,” and cosmopolitan opinions with national principles? The main answer is simple. What is above the moment is feared by it, and malice is the armour of fear: “It is the abject property of most that being parcel of the common mass, and destitute of means to raise themselves, they sink and settle lower than they need. They know not what it is to feel within a comprehensive faculty that grasps great purposes with ease, that turns and wields almost without an effort plans too vast for their conception, which they cannot move;” and there are always the jealous who—

“... If they find
Some stain or blemish in a name of note,
Not grieving that their greatest are so small,
Inflate themselves with some insane delight,
And judge all Nature from her feet of clay.”

There are the puzzled whom novelty bewilders, and there are the cautious who suspect it. And there is the wholesome instinct of the plain majority to pin itself to immediate “measures” without recognising that a “principle” may change expedients for bringing its idea into effect. Again, there are many—especially in England—who, in their genuine scorn of pinchbeck, mistake the great for the grandiose, and certain that nothing which glitters can be gold, invest imaginative brilliance with the tinsel spangles of Harlequin. There are, too, the second-rate and the second-hand, whose life is one long quotation, and who doubt every coin unissued from the nearest mint; and there is, moreover, a sort of stolid crassness readily dignified into sterling solidity. All this is natural. Institutions and traditions themselves have been aliens until naturalised in and by the community. Imagination gave them birth, national needs accept them; and the contemporary sneer is often succeeded by the posthumous statue.

Perhaps the most curious feature of the prosaic and imperceptive man is his ready confusion of the dramatic with the theatrical, of attitude with posture, of pointed effects for a big purpose with affectations for a small. Flirtation might just as well be confounded with love, or foppery with breeding. And yet these same unimaginative censors have often contradicted their protests by their actions, and squandered great opportunities by futile strokes of the theatre.

So early as 1837, Sheil, who from the first admired the young Disraeli (then Bulwer’s intimate and the meteor of three seasons), whom Disraeli praised in one of his earliest election speeches, and who was surely no mean judge of intellectual eloquence, warned him after his début that “the House will not allow a man to be a wit and an orator, unless they have the credit of finding it out.... You have shown the House that you have a fine organ, that you have an unlimited command of language, that you have courage, temper, and readiness. Now get rid of your genius for a session; speak often, for you must not show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet, try to be dull, only argue and reason imperfectly, for if you reason with precision, they will think you are trying to be witty. Astonish them by speaking on subjects of detail. Quote figures, dates, calculations, and in a short time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence which they all know are in you; they will encourage you to pour them forth, and then you will have the ear of the House, and be a favourite.” Seventeen years afterwards, when the dashing littérateur had become Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, Mr. Walpole thus defended him against his enemies on the Budget. “... Whence is it that these extraordinary attacks are made against my right honourable friend? What is the reason, what is the cause, that he is to be assailed at every point, when he has made two financial statements in one year, which have both met with the approbation of this House, and I believe also with the approbation of the country? Is it because he has laboured hard and long, contending with genius against rank and power and the ablest statesmen, until he has attained the highest eminence which an honourable ambition may ever aspire to—the leadership and guidance of the Commons of England? Is it because he has verified in himself the dignified description of a great philosophical poet of antiquity, portraying equally his past career and his present position—

‘Certare ingenio; contendere nobilitate;
Noctes atque dies niti præstante labore
Ad summas emergere opes, rerumque potiri’?”

Yes! This is the sort of barrier piled in the path of the brilliant by the “practical” man—“the man who practises the blunders of his predecessors,” the “prophet of the past.” Still greater, because deeper laid, are the obstacles which confront him when he has mastered the drudgery of office and the strategy of debate; when, from the vantage-ground of political pre-eminence and public approval, he dares to look over the heads of his compeers and prepare strong foundations for the future of his country. Then that becomes true which Bolingbroke has so splendidly expressed: “The ocean which environs us is an emblem of our government, and the pilot and the minister are in similar circumstances. It seldom happens that either of them can steer a direct course, and they both arrive at their port by means which frequently seem to carry them from it. But as the work advances, the conduct of him who leads it on with real abilities clears up, the appearing inconsistencies are reconciled, and when it is once consummated, the whole shows itself so uniform, so plain, and so natural, that every dabbler in politics will be apt to think that he could have done the same.”

It is this that Disraeli effected by reverting to fundamental elements and substituting the generous, inclusive, and “national” Toryism of Bolingbroke, Wyndham, and Pitt, for the perverted Toryism of Eldon; the “party without principles,” the “Tory men and Whig measures,” the “organised hypocrisy” that followed on the “Tamworth Manifesto;” the Conservatism that “preserved” institutions as men “preserve” game, only to kill them; and the outworn Whiggism that excluded all but a few governing families from power; and, after its great achievement of religious liberty, exploited the extension of civil privileges as the mere muniment of its own title. He ended the confederacies and revived the creed.[1] He repudiated the system under which “the Crown had become a cipher, the Church a sect, the nobility drones, and the people drudges.” “... But we forget,” he urges in Sybil, “Sir Robert Peel is not the leader of the Tory party—the party that resisted the ruinous mystification that metamorphosed direct taxation by the Crown into indirect taxation by the Commons; that denounced the system which mortgaged industry to protect property;[2] the party that ruled Ireland by a scheme which reconciled both Churches, and by a series of parliaments which counted among them lords and commons of both religions; that has maintained at all times the territorial constitution of England as the only basis and security for local government, and which nevertheless once laid on the table of the House of Commons a commercial tariff negotiated at Utrecht, which is the most rational that was ever devised by statesmen; a party that has prevented the Church from being the salaried agent of the State, and has supported the parochial polity of the country which secures to every labourer a home. In a parliamentary sense that great party has ceased to exist; but I will believe that it still lives in the thought and sentiment ... of the English nation. It has its origin in great principles and noble instincts; it sympathises with the lowly, it looks up to the Most High; it can count its heroes and its martyrs.... Even now, ... in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment;[3] as men rifle cargoes on the verge of shipwreck, Toryism will yet rise from the tomb ... to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the subject, and to announce that power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the people.”

And, again, this from the close of Coningsby: “... he looked upon a government without distinct principles of policy as only a stop-gap to a widespread and demoralising anarchy; ... he for one could not comprehend how a free government could endure without national opinions to uphold it.... As for Conservative government, the natural question was, ‘What do you mean to conserve?... Things or only names, realities or merely appearances? Do you mean to continue the system commenced in 1834, and with a hypocritical reverence for the principles and a superstitious adherence to the forms of the old exclusive constitution, carry on your policy by latitudinarian practice?’”

His lifelong purpose as a statesman was to refresh institutions with reality, and to show by practice, as well as by precept, that, in all classes, an aristocracy without inherent superiority is doomed. De Tocqueville, in his famous treatise on “The Old Régime and the Revolution,” does the same.

Eighteenth-century Toryism, a smitten cause espousing popular privileges, taught that unless the Crown ruled for the people as well as reigned over them, unless the nobles led them independently to high issues, unless the people themselves recognised that they were the privileged order in a nation, and that their representatives should form “a senate supported by the sympathy of millions,” the traditional principles of England had dwindled into a sham.

“No one,” says Disraeli in Coningsby, again adverting to the critical issues of 1834, “had arisen either in Parliament, the Universities, or the Press, to lead the public mind to the investigation of principles; and not to mistake in their reformations the corruption of practice for fundamental ideas. It was this perplexed, ill-informed, jaded, shallow generation, repeating cries which they did not comprehend, and wearied with the endless ebullitions of their own barren conceit, that Sir Robert Peel was summoned to govern. It was from such materials, ample in quantity, but in all spiritual qualities most deficient; with great numbers, largely acred, consoled up to their chins, but without knowledge, genius, thought, truth, or faith, that Sir Robert Peel was to form ‘a great Conservative party on a comprehensive basis....’” Even Sir Robert’s single-mindedness and supremacy over Parliament failed to secure strength of Government. By universal consent, including his own avowal, he wrecked a great party in a country where great parties form the main pledge for the due representation of political opinion, and under a system where they remain the chief preventive against public corruption.

The first two Georges had reigned over the towns, but not over the country. After the Reform Bill it seemed as though the great cities themselves would swamp the land. How was Sir Robert to save the situation in 1834? Speaking with respect for Sir Robert, but with contempt for his “Tamworth Manifesto,” Disraeli, in his discussion of that famous document, repeats his message once more: “... There was indeed considerable shouting about what they called Conservative principles; but the awkward question naturally arose, ‘What will you conserve?’ The prerogatives of a Crown, provided they are not exercised; the independence of the House of Lords, provided it is not asserted; the ecclesiastical estate, provided it is regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that is established, as long as it is a phrase and not a fact.”[4]

It is thus that the man of ideas is, in the long run, eminently practical; and it is thus, too, that in the realm of art ideas are the surest realities. But here also the immediate appeal constantly falls to the lot of what is called “realism,” and few feel what they cannot touch until the popular voice tells them that it is “real.” “Madame,” says Heine in his “Buch Legrand,” “have you the ghost of an idea what an idea is? ‘I have put my best ideas into this coat,’ says my tailor. My washerwoman says the parson has filled her daughter’s head with ideas, and unfitted her for anything sensible; and coachman Pattensen mumbles on every occasion, ‘That is an idea.’ But yesterday, when I inquired what he meant, he snarled out, ‘An idea is just an idea; it is any silly stuff that comes into one’s head.’”

No memorial of Disraeli’s magical career can be adequate without access to the papers confided to the late Lord Rowton, as well as to much private and unpublished correspondence. It is no slur on the “Lives” that have already appeared to say that they lack the materials for a complete picture. The best of these beyond question is Mr. Froude’s; but not only is it tinged with considerable prejudice, but it is very faulty in its facts; and, moreover, in common with Mr. Bryce’s cursory essay and Herr Brandes’s minuter study, it has perhaps fallen into the error of misreading Disraeli’s mature character and career from isolated and indiscriminate use of such sidelights as they are pleased to discover in his earliest novels. To trace Disraeli’s development, it is necessary to follow the long and continuous thread of his words and actions, to consider the changes experienced during the fifty years of his political outlook in England and in Europe, and to ascertain how many of these tendencies were foreseen, produced, or modified by him. The criticisms current are either those of men (often partisans) who lack this length of view, and interpret the latter manifestations of Disraeli’s genius, with which alone they are even outwardly acquainted, in the light of preconceived notions, or the few circulated comparatively early in his career, before its eventual drift was revealed, and while the full blaze of hostile bitterness was raging. There exists, it is true, a most able, a most appreciative, a most detailed account of his political career, compiled by Mr. Ewald shortly after Lord Beaconsfield’s death, but this is mainly a long parliamentary chronicle. Mr. Kebbel’s enlightening edition of selected speeches is illustrative though limited. To both of these, among many other sources, direct and indirect, I here gratefully acknowledge my obligation.

A real biography, therefore, is at present impossible. Disraeli’s acknowledged debt to his darling sister and devoted wife (“Women,” he has said, “are the priestesses of pre-destination”); his correspondence and commerce with many eminent men, including both Louis Philippe and Napoleon III.; his letters to our late Queen; his notes of policy; the rough drafts for compositions, both literary and parliamentary; his State papers and official memoranda; his relations to many men of letters and leading; such known, though unpublished, correspondence as even that with Mrs. Williams; the glimpses of him as a youth through Mrs. Austin, Bulwer, Lord Strangford, the Sheridans, with many others; in his age, through a privileged circle of distinguished and devoted associates—all these, and many more, must be pressed into service if even the rudiments are to be portrayed. And none of these are yet available.

I have therefore thought that, pending such an enterprise, some account, however imperfect, of the ideas that governed him throughout—a slight biography, as it were, of his mind—might prove acceptable. It will endeavour to depict the spirit of his attitude to the world in which he moved and for which he worked. It will aim at representing the temperature of his opinions immanent alike in his writings and speeches. His utterance was never bounded by the mere occasion, and light and guidance may be found in it for the problems of to-day. In most that he wrote or said, a certain swell of soul, a sweep and stretch of mind are strikingly manifest.

“How very seldom,” he has written, “do you encounter in the world a man of great abilities, acquirements, experience, who will unmask his mind, unbutton his brains, and pour forth in careless and picturesque phrase all the results of his studies and observations, his knowledge of men, books, and nature!”

Such a contribution is anyhow feasible, and is fraught with more than even the glamour linked with the person by whom these ideas were clothed in words and deeds. For principles are applied ideas; habits are applied principles. Disraeli’s ideas have, to some extent, become ruling principles, several of them are at this moment national habits; while some of them, unachieved during his lifetime, seem in process of accomplishment. Disraeli was a poet—one of those “unacknowledged legislators of the world” described by “Herbert” in Venetia; but his imaginative fancy was allied to a very strong character. It is a rare combination. To Bolingbroke’s youthful genius he united that force of will and purpose for which Bolingbroke had long to wait, and which, perhaps, he never fully attained. This analogy was pressed on Disraeli on the threshold of his career by a distinguished friend.

Above all things Disraeli was a personality. Personality is independent of training, except in the rare cases where education accords with predisposition. It is the will. And in authorship, when expression chimes with intention, it is the style. Personality is the clue to history, for events proceed from character, more than character from events. Commenting on the adoption of the “Charter” by non-chartists groaning under the injustice of industrial slavery, Disraeli observes most truly: “... But all this had been brought about, as most of the great events of history, by the unexpected and unobserved influence of individual character.” Personality is the salt of politics; it is the spirit of our party system; and woe betide every era in England when figure-heads replace head-figures. It is an atmosphere enchanting the landscape. “... It is the personal that interests mankind, that fires their imagination and wins their hearts. A cause is a great abstraction, and fit only for students: embodied in a party, it stirs men to action; but place at the head of that party a leader who can inspire enthusiasm, he commands the world....” Association, groups, co-operative principles, these are the mechanisms invented by the brain, and guided by the hand of individuality, the fuel that individuality gathers and enkindles. Without it they remain dead lumber, and can never of themselves prove originative forces. What men crave is, once more in Disraeli’s parlance, “... A primordial and creative mind; one that will say to his fellows, ‘Behold, God has given me thought, I have discovered truth, and you shall believe.’” Personality is the contradiction of the mechanical and of the dead level; it is the soul of influence. How depressing is the reverse side of the medal!—“Duncan Macmorrogh” (the utilitarian in The Young Duke), “cut up the Creation and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality that he had come from the lowlands. He demonstrated the inability of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he rather patronised, but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved them to be the most useless of existences.... He informed us that we were quite wrong in supposing ourselves to be the miracle of the Creation. On the contrary, he avowed that already there were various pieces of machinery of far more importance than man; and he had no doubt in time that a superior race would arise, got by a steam-engine on a spinning-jenny....”

To impress his ideas through his will on his generation, was Disraeli’s ruling purpose from the first; but to attain the position which would entitle him to do so he never regarded as more than a ladder towards his main ambition. Ambition[5] spurred him from the first. But, as the present Duke of Devonshire generously owned in the heat of party contest, Disraeli was never prompted by mean or unworthy motives; and—added the speaker—it would be the merest cant to pretend that honourable and honest ambition is not a main incitement to public life. At the outset he was convinced of a mission, and the visions over which he had long brooded in silent solitude became realised in the world of action. Both reverie and energy alternated even in his boyish being. “I fully believed myself the object of an omnipotent Destiny over which I had no control”—and yet “Destiny bears us to our lot, and Destiny is perhaps our own will.” “... There arose in my mind a desire to create things beautiful as that golden star;” and yet “... Nor could I conceive that anything could tempt me from my solitude ... but the strong conviction that the fortunes of my race depended on my effort, or that I could materially forward that great amelioration, ... in the practicability of which I devoutly believe.” As a boy he dreamed of “shaking thrones and founding empires;” and yet, he felt that he must not “pass” his “days like a ghost gliding in a vision.” These are among the echoes and glimpses afforded by his earliest fiction of his earliest self, and to this topic I shall recur in my last chapter. I mention them here for a material reason. In treating his thoughts we must distinguish between those notions which merely concern success or career, and those ideas which assured victory was to achieve. Nor should we omit the very vital distinction between personality and egotism, for confusion in this regard constantly obscures our estimates. Individuality with the forces that make for it is not “individualism;” yet the two are often confused.

The essential egotist is a sort of buccaneer. He roams the seas to rifle cargoes, and his conquests are the spoils of a freebooter. He seeks to exploit society for his own benefit—to burn down his neighbour’s roof-tree that he may boil his egg. He gives nothing that he can keep, and takes all he can grasp by whatever methods may advantage him. He leaves the world poorer when he goes, and as he leaves it, he wishes it. In Cowper’s words—

“Cruel is all he does. ’Tis quenchless thirst
Of ruinous ebriety that prompts
His every action, and imbrutes the man.”

The man, on the other hand, of overwhelming personality, aspires honourably to power, the very condition of which in his eyes is to guide and elevate the country which entrusts him with it. The responsibility of privilege, great position on the tenure of great duties, ambition not as a right but as the sole means of enforcing his ideals—these are his characteristics. He never covets place without power, and never power without influence; whereas some kind of covetousness is essential to the egotist. “He who has great honours,” Disraeli has urged, “must have great burdens.” And again: “... My conception,” he said, in a signal speech during 1846, “of a great statesman is of one who represents a great idea; an idea which he may and can impress on the mind and conscience of a nation.... That is a grand, that is indeed an heroic position. But I care not what may be the position of a man who never originates an idea—a watcher of the atmosphere, a man who ... takes his observations, and when he finds the wind in a certain quarter trims to suit it. Such a person may be a powerful Minister, but he is no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. Both are disciples of progress; both perhaps may get a good place. But how far the original momentum is indebted to their powers, and how far their guiding prudence regulates the lash or the rein, it is not necessary for me to notice.”

Disraeli never stooped to trim; he always aspired to steer. When he started as a brilliant author, electric with ideas derided but since accepted—as an imaginative originator, “full of deep passions and deep thoughts”—it would have been easy for him to have followed the triumphal car of the Whigs who invited him.[6] It would have been easy for him to have suited himself to Sir Robert Peel’s vicissitudes of private, and desertion of public opinion, embodied in a great party which had raised him to power. In obeying again the central ideas which quickened him from the first, Disraeli broke up the “Young England” party, which looked up to and cheered him, whose main objects he inspired, and eventually realised. And in 1867, as we shall see, so far from “dishing” the Liberals with their own measure of Reform, he carried, in the teeth of his own supporters, one on lines peculiar to his own perpetual view of the subject, and at length achieved what he had urged in the ’thirties, the ’forties, and the ’fifties.

In the stubborn pursuit of his aims Disraeli even courted unpopularity. On every occasion when the object of the Jew bill was involved with other measures which he considered prejudical to its due interests, he risked misconstruction by withholding his vote. During the long spell of 1859–66, when a dispirited, and sometimes disloyal following often left him alone in his seat, he continued the pronouncements alike and the reticence which they disrelished. During the six years previous he dared to offend them equally by hammering the Government’s foreign policy, and insisting on his own convictions. Nobody, again, more regretted the precipitancy of Lord Derby in 1852, although his rash assumption of office afforded Disraeli his first hard-won opportunity of leadership. During three separate sets of discreditable intrigues to dethrone him, he kept place, counsel, and temper without wheedling concessions or recriminating revenges, though none could strike home harder when he chose.

“... Ah, why should such enthusiasm ever die? Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervour.”

The fact that both the mere egotist, and the man of intense personality, must, from the need of their respectively low and lofty concentrations, be self-centred, and infuse their temperaments into the objects of their energy, favours, it is true, the mistake to which I have referred. But the one is pettily fixed on self, the other intent on ideals. He leads a life of ideas which form his atmosphere, and which emanate from it. He mounts the chariot to drive it to a distant goal, while the other borrows or pilfers it for his own immediate convenience. Egoism—if I may coin a distinction—is one thing, egotism another. Goethe was an egoist—he is full of a radiating self; but such egoism is, if we reflect, the very opposite of the egotist, who is full of a shrivelled selfishness. Such were the later phases of Napoleon, who changed from a generous imparter into an absorbing monopolist. That was egotism. All genius, however, has been egoist, and ever will be; for genius is at once the ear, sensitive to the subtlest appeals of existence, and the voice which constrains others to enter the realm of its ideas. Its sensitiveness is part of its strength, and in this respect it shares the self-consciousness of the artist. It is in the real sense auto-suggestive; it implants ideas which its will generates into events. It is in some degree that—

“... which many people take for want of heart.
They err.—’Tis merely what is called mobility,
A thing of temperament, and not of art,
Though seeming so from its supposed facility;
And false though true; for surely they’re sincerest
Who are strongly acted on by what is nearest.”

And its faults, as I shall show in my closing chapter, are associated with its very qualities.

Genius is both light and heat; it combines enthusiasm with insight. Such a genius was Disraeli. He was eminently a man of ideas, and not merely of abnormal perceptions. This distinction again is material, and too often ignored.

The eminently perceptive man is at root a critic, while the man of ideas is by prerogative a creator; and yet the quick perceiver is often mistaken for a creative genius, and keenness confused with originality. In politics, for instance, this was the case with such different beings as Peel and Gambetta; in literature, with Addison and Arnold; in art, with Kneller and Lawrence. Disraeli’s ideas were at once his creations and companions, and he moved in their inner circle with a sort of extravagant intensity. They were no shadows. He was convinced of their substance almost to fatalism, and his immense will-power forced and projected them into movement. In his extreme youth, before his character had matured, these ideas flickered as fantasies. The restlessness of a volition felt, but not yet freed or directed, caused some masquerade of guise, and a perpetual strain on the intuition that sought to forestall experience. Realisation alone, with power and experience, brought repose. But at all periods an idea that had once seized him tinged his whole being. Its reality haunted him till he had given it place and shape.[7] An inward and ideal energy possessed him. Ideas were for him far more tangible, even far more sociable, than the outward and fleeting phantasms around him, as is evidenced in his fiction by his constant habit of transferring environment and transplanting personalities to accentuate their ideal essence. Thus, in Venetia, the soul of Lady Byron animates the form of Shelley’s wife, while the very date is put back some thirty years, that Shelley himself might be enabled to have braved in action what he mused in poetry. So, again, in Contarini, the hero’s development blends something of his own with something of his father’s character; while Baron Fleming is his grandfather reincarnated as a noble.[8] About the ironies of these, the arabesques of his playful fancy flickered. For him they were mostly the pretexts of things, but ideas were the causes, and he loved to contrast “the pretext with the cause;” but even here romance blent with irony, and invested the seemingly trivial with wonder. Some, too, of his ideas hovered, as it were, over the present scene, in a flight bound other-whither and beyond. In a word, Disraeli was an artist, conscious and confident of an over-mastering call. As he has written in a striking passage from the work of his youth, Contarini Fleming: “I never labour to delude myself; and never gloss over my own faults. I exaggerate them; for I can afford to face truth, because I feel capable of improvement.... I am never satisfied.... The very exercise of power teaches me that it may be wielded for a greater purpose.... No one could be influenced by a greater desire of knowledge, a greater passion for the beautiful, or a deeper regard for his fellow-creatures.... I want no false fame. It would be no delight to me to be considered a prophet, were I conscious of being an impostor. I ever wish to be undeceived; but if I possess the organisation of a poet, no one can prevent me from exercising my faculty, any more than he can rob the courser of his fleetness, or the nightingale of her song.”

The “ill-regulated will,” “the undercurrent of feelings he was then unable to express,” portrayed in Vivian Grey, developed into the higher and more elevating purposes of which his transforming imagination was all along capable. That very book contained the germs of what its composition revealed to his own mind—that out of a young adventurer with purpose and genius, the school of life forms a strong character and a great man. In Contarini Fleming the irresistible power of predisposition, the hollowness of a nurture which ignores it and substitutes “words” for “ideas,” the interactions of imagination and experience, the fatuity of contradicting or overstraining Nature, are pursued; nor, as regards this novel, should it be forgotten that in some portions of its analysis there are traces in allusive undertone to the fatalities of the great and stricken Dean of St. Patrick’s.[9]

In Disraeli’s case, as so often before him, “the dreaming part of mankind” has “prevailed over the waking.” His flouted dreams came true. They still hold sway. To give effectual substance to these higher and abiding dreams, those other dreams of ascendency, through which alone his will could realise his ideas, were also verified. “It is the will”—he speaks by the lips of the young “Alroy”—“that is father to the deed, and he who broods over some long idea, however wild, will find his dream was but the prophecy of coming fate.” “All is ordained,” he had said as a stripling, “yet man is master of his own actions.”[10] Disraeli’s career was itself a romance—a romance of the will that defies circumstance, and moulds the soil where ideas are to flourish. An inward, personal energy is the parent of faith, and faith in oneself is the sole security for the issue of faith among others. He lived to triumph, but not in order to triumph; and he remains a standing protest against those who believe in cliques and disbelieve in personal influence. The former are only compact in appearance; they are unsympathetic associations, welded together by interest alone. Joint-stock enterprise is not fellowship, and the test of direction is liability. Nor is it without significance that “Fortune,” even in the ancient world a real though blind goddess, has come, in the modern, to mean little more than cash; so that capital leans away from labour, plutocracy is cemented, solidarity declines, and worth too often is resolved by the question, “Worth how much?”

It is this idea of personality that lies at the very root of united nationality; for a nation is an idealised individual, no aggregate of atoms. Still less is it the experimenting room of doctrinaires or the dumping-ground of the Tapers and Tadpoles, the Paul Prys of politics, who “whisper nothings that sound like somethings;” or of those “Marneys,” “Fitz-Aquitaines,” and “Mowbrays” who deem that the end of an administration is “two garters to begin with;” or again of “the good old gentlemanlike times, when Members of Parliament had nobody to please, and Ministers of State nothing to do;” of those who, like “Rigby,” mistake peddling with constituencies for representing the country; or of those petty placemen to whom, as he has said, party means the machinery for receiving “£1200” a year, career the pursuit of it, and success its attainment.

“... I prefer” (the passage is from Sybil) “association to gregariousness.... It is a community of purpose that constitutes society ... without that men may be drawn into contiguity, but they will continue virtually isolated....” What does this imply but the sympathetic power of personality? The more individual societies become, the greater their efficacy. The less individual they are the more they display the tameness and unfruitfulness that enfeeble a copy.

“But what is an individual,” exclaimed “Coningsby,” “against a vast public opinion?”

“Divine,” said the stranger. “God made man in His own image; but the Public is made by newspapers, Members of Parliament, excise officers, Poor Law guardians. Would Philip have succeeded, if Epaminondas had not been slain? And if Philip had not succeeded? Would Prussia have existed, had Frederick not been born? And if Frederick had not been born? What would have been the fate of the Stuarts, if Prince Henry had not died, and Charles I., as was intended, had been Archbishop of Canterbury?”

This was written in 1844. Since then, would Germany have been united if Bismarck had not been born? And if Bismarck had not been born? In 1865 a powerful party, promising success, reinforced by commanding talent, and concerting an intelligible plan with immense vigour, began to demand the disintegration of Great Britain. And if Disraeli had not been born?——

* * * * *

Nothing is more striking in modern parliamentary life than the growing neglect of the past. Great issues are mooted by men ignorant of, or ignoring, their historical origin. Young members discuss weighty problems with no study save that of omniscience. The ancestry of events is disregarded. Development is relegated to musty students and mouldy volumes. The fact that statesmanship is able to look forward because it has already looked back, is flouted or forgotten. Public interest is gradually being withdrawn from debate, just because it is getting out of touch with the organic changes of national life. The genius which transfigures facts with imagination has been replaced by the opportunism which invests emptiness with solemnity; and this, in a country where national growth depends on continuous tradition.

The utterances of Disraeli from the early ’twenties to the latest ’seventies display a wonderful harmony of coherence in progress. They form one long suite of variations on the central motif of persistent and consistent ideas. To understand them aright one must view them successively, both in his books and his speeches, which illustrate each other; nor in so doing should the contexts of personal development, events private as well as public, be lost from sight.

This I have endeavoured to accomplish in the following chapters. I have classified their themes in groups broad enough to admit of kindred topics. After a fresh portrait of Disraeli’s personality, I treat first of his constitutional ideas, because these are at the root of his political standpoint; they underlie, too, his conception of the State. Then follows his attitude towards Labour and the causes it involved. Next come his distinctive views on Church and Christianity; his views, equally distinctive, on Monarchy occupy a separate chapter. Colonies, Empire, and Foreign Policy are then grouped together; and it may excite surprise to mark the earliness and the correctness of his prophecies. Under this head I also consider his thoughts on India. America and Ireland succeed; and here again his justified originality is most remarkable. Perhaps the light chapters on Society, Literature, Wit, Humour, and Romance, with the closing study of Career, may be considered not the least suggestive. I have not drawn on Mr. Meynell’s delightful “Disraeliana” (the pleasure of reading which I purposely postponed), because I wished this portraiture of the man and his mind to be wholly original.

CHAPTER I
DISRAELI’S PERSONALITY

“A great mind that thinks and feels is never inconsistent and never insincere.... Insincerity is the vice of a fool, and inconsistency the blunder of a knave.... Let us not forget an influence too much underrated in this age of bustling mediocrity—the influence of individual character. Great spirits may yet arise to guide the groaning helm through the world of troubled waters—spirits whose proud destiny it may still be at the same time to maintain the glory of the Empire and to secure the happiness of the people.”

So wrote “Disraeli the Younger” during the perplexed crisis of 1833 in his rare pamphlet, What is he?[11] which embodies his own large attitude. The sentence is characteristic and prophetic. Its last words were repeated more than forty years afterwards in the message of farewell to his constituents, when he quitted the lively scene of his triumphs for that grave assemblage, of which he once said that its aptitudes were best rehearsed among the tombstones.

In my last three chapters I shall touch on some unique phases of his boyhood, and outline several of his relations to his home, to society, to literature, to character, and to career. But here I shall attempt a less detailed account of his individuality and of the main ideas which flowed from it.

And first let me venture on two glimpses—one of his youth, the other of his age.

It is not difficult to collect from many scattered presentments some likeness of

“The wondrous boy
That wrote Alroy.”

Imagine, then, a romantic figure, a Southern shape in a Northern setting, a kind of Mediterranean Byron; for the stock of the Disraelis hailed from the Sephardim—Semites who had never quitted the midland coasts, and were powerful in Spain before the Goths. The form is lithe and slender, with an air of repressed alertness. The stature, above middle height. The head, long and compact; its curls, fantastic. The oval face, pale rather than pallid, with dark almond eyes of unusual depth, size, and lustre under a veil of drooping lashes. The chin, pointed with decision. The expression holds one, by turns keen and pensive; about it hovers a strange sense of inner watchfulness and ambushed irony, half mocking in defiance, half eager with conscious power. A languid reserve marks his bearing; it conceals a smouldering vehemence; its observant silence prepares amazement directly interest excites intercourse. Then indeed the scimitar, as it were, flashes forth unsheathed, and dazzles by its breathless fence of words with ideas. This ardour is not always pleasant; it breathes of storm; it speaks out elemental passions and grates against the smooth edges of civilisation. In the London medley he, like his friend Bulwer, studies a purposed posture. Dandyism and listlessness mask unsleeping energy. But at Bradenham, his constant retreat, the “Hurstley” of his last novel, all is natural and unconstrained. Here at least he is free. Here he “drives the quill” with his famous father, reads and rides, meditates and is mirthful. Here, with that gifted sister “Sa”—“Sa,” a name soon afterwards doubly endeared to him through Lord Lyndhurst’s daughter; “Sa,” who, while others doubt or twit, ever believes in and heartens him—he dreams, improvises, discourses. The rest may treat him as a moonstruck Bombastes,[12] but his lofty visions are real to the gentle insight of affection. In the language of Shakespeare’s fine colloquy:—

“‘Say what thou art that talk’st of Kings and Queens?’—
‘More than I seem, and less than I was born to.’—
‘Aye, but thou talk’st as if thou wert a King!’—
‘Why, so I am in mind, and that’s enough.’”

DISRAELI THE YOUNGER

After a water colour by A. E. Chalon

Already, like one of those his biting pen had satirised, he too, it must be owned, teems with “confidence in the nation—and himself.” There was a daredevilry about him, and in those days a romantic melancholy, akin to that of the Spanish artist Goya. Far behind have faded those consuming pangs of boyish restlessness, when fevered imagination played vaguely on inexperience. Far behind, those schools of “words” which never slaked his thirst for ideas, and where he ran wild as rebel ringleader.[13] Far away now, those boxing bouts witnessed by Layard’s mother. Past, that earliest and unpublished novel of Aylmer Papillon,[14] which Murray praised but would not print. Past, that fugitive satire of the “New Dunciad,” which does not deserve to remain waste-paper.[15] Past, that abortive journal, which in transforming an old periodical while adopting its name was to have revolutionised opinion.[16] Vanished, too, those first outbursts of unchastened brilliance under the favouring auspices of the Layards’ fair kinswoman, Mrs. Austin. And the vista of his two long journeys have receded; the alternate spells of Venice, the Rhine and Rome, and afterwards of Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem. Past, also, the strange malady for which his Eastern travels proved the stranger cure. As he muses, the ball is at his feet. Yet, when the daydream fades, is he, perhaps, after all, only Alnaschar of the broken glass, bemoaning vain reveries amid the ruined litter of his overturned basket in the jeering market-place? The seed-time of reflection is over: he pants for action. No more for him the beaten tracks. Hitherto he had fed on books and dreams. The former had led him to a pondered plan, with Bolingbroke for clue and Pitt as example. The latter fired his ambition—his presumption—to realise them by restoring vanished life to a now mouldering party—by suiting old forms to new phases and heading them.

Next morning the secluded scholar, so friendly a contrast with his daring son, is bound for Oxford to receive his long delayed honours. This very day that son’s earliest election-procession starts from the doorway of the tranquil manor house.[17] Already the budding genius has descried the dim future of his country, which he has proclaimed must be governed for and through the nation; of which, too, he has already sung in halting verse:—

“... ceased the voice
Of Great Britannia; vanished as it ceased
Her glance imperial.”

What matter now the debts, the duns, the embarrassments for which he blushes?[18] What matter the heartless allurements of siren fashion? His course is clear before him. He must win. He “has begun several times many things, and has often succeeded at last.” As for the taunt of “adventurer,” what are all original spirits that “burst their birth’s invidious bar” but adventurers? Such were Chatham,[19] and Burke, and Canning, and Peel himself. But when the “adventurer” is one by temperament as well as occasion, how miraculous becomes his progress! “Adventures are to the adventurous.”

“The man who with undaunted toils
Sails unknown seas to unknown soils,
With various wonders feasts his sight:
What stranger wonders does he write!”

Many of us remember Disraeli in his age as he sauntered dreamily and slowly with the late Lord Rowton, and none who ever heard one of his last orations in the House of Lords can forget how, even when he was in pain, he sprang from his seat with the quick step of youth. The physical charm had disappeared. Few who gazed on that drawn countenance could have discerned in it the poetry and enthusiasm of his prime; only the unworn eyes preserved their piercing fires, and the sunken jaw was still masterful. A long discipline of iron self-control, much disillusion, growing disappointments with crowning triumphs, and latterly a great desolation, had subdued the fiercer force and the elastic buoyancy of his hey-day. Yet the intellectual charm, and the spell of mind and spirit had deepened their outward traces. Fastidious discernment, dispassionate will, penetrating insight, courage,[20] patience, a certain winning gentleness underneath the scorn of shams, stamp every lineament. Below habitual insouciance, intensity, bigness of soul and purpose are prominent. The arch of the noble brow retains its height and curve. Surrounded though he be by friends and flatterers, he looks lonelier than of old. “I do not feel solitude,” he said, “it gives one repose.” Interested in every movement, and even in every trifle that engages thought, his gaze appears more turned within.

We know from Lady John Manners,[21] and from other sources, how he loved flowers, and forestry, and study during the dinner-hour, more than all the social glitter; how he communed with the unseen; how far-reaching were his sympathies; what interest and curiosity he displayed in every form of career and purpose; how often to all the splendour which he had conquered he preferred converse with the weak, the lowly, the suffering; how his wise counsel and inexhaustible resource were sought and coveted by cottagers, by the toilers whose cause he made his own, by princes; how delicately considerate he was in his appointments, and for all in contact with him, how he would sacrifice a keen personal wish rather than disturb a pleasure or abridge a holiday; and yet how his playfulness of fancy mixed in pithy ironies with his very considerateness. A familiar instance—that of the attached servant who was to enjoy “the pleasures of memory”—occurred as he lay dying from the illness long and bravely concealed even from his intimates. He was truly unselfish, and he was never known to blame a subordinate. If things went wrong, he took the whole burden on his own shoulders. He exerted infinite pains to understand the conditions of and the organisations affecting labour.[22] The Buckinghamshire peasants still cherish his memory; and it may be said with truth that the deepest affections of this extraordinary man, whom vapid worldlings sneered at as a callous cynic, were reserved for his country, his county, his home, and his friends, for effort and for distress. Many a young aspirant to fame, moreover, in literature or public life, has owed much to his generous encouragement. He liked to dwell on the vicissitudes of things,[23] and his own motto, “Forti nihil difficile,” represents his conviction. In private, when he was not entertaining, his habits were of the simplest. In two things only he was profuse; books and light. He loved to see every room of Hughenden illuminated with candles. He was utterly careless of money. It is related, that when he accepted the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, he sent for the celebrated Mr. Padwick, and asked for a necessary advance. “On what security?” inquired the sporting speculator. “That of my name and my career,” was the answer. And the money was at once forthcoming, and punctually repaid. As is well known, he would often make his greatest efforts half dinnerless; and his delight was, after the strain and the plaudits had ceased, to betake himself in the dim hours of dawn to the supper which his devoted wife, who spared him every detail of management, had prepared, and there to recount to her the excitements of the debate. The pair would certainly have endorsed those verses of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, of which Byron was so fond—

“But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,
May every fond pleasure that moment endear,
Be banished afar both discretion and fear!
Forgetting or scorning the airs of the crowd,
He may cease to be formal, and I to be proud,
Till lost in the joy, we confess that we live,
And he may be rude, and yet I may forgive.”

His public and touching tribute to Mrs. Disraeli deserves repetition here; nor will the reader forget, among many hackneyed stories, that stern rebuke to the triflers overheard discussing the reasons for his marriage—“Because of a feeling to which such as you are strangers—gratitude.”

It was at Edinburgh, in 1867, when his old ally, Baillie Cochrane (Lord Lamington), toasted Mrs. Disraeli as her illustrious husband’s helper and his own dear friend for many years before Disraeli met her.[24] Disraeli opened with the characteristic remark that their mutual intimate “certainly had every opportunity of studying the subject to which he has drawn attention.” And he went on to say, “I do owe to that lady all I think that I have ever accomplished, because she has supported me with her counsel, and consoled me by the sweetness of her mind and disposition.” Six years after his marriage, he had dedicated the three volumes of his Sybil, “To one whose noble spirit and gentle nature ever prompt her to sympathise with the suffering; to one whose sweet voice has often encouraged, and whose taste and judgment have ever guided their pages; the most severe of critics, but—a perfect wife.”

Several of his nice things were said in Scotland, and one of the nicest was his compliment when he was installed Rector of Glasgow University. He described his visit to Abbotsford, whither he had repaired in his extreme youth with an enthusiastic letter from John Murray the First, his father’s old friend, to Sir Walter Scott, that father’s old acquaintance. “He showed me,” he said of the laird, “his demesne, and he treated me, not as if I was an obscure youth, but as if I were already Lord Rector of Glasgow University.”[25]

Disraeli’s marriage was the happiest turning-point in his career; and that which had begun partly in interest, soon developed into the warmest, the most entire and the most mutual affection. Mrs. Disraeli, at a great country house, always used to commence conversation by the query, “Do you like my Dizzy? Because, if you don’t——” From another, on a visit most advantageous to him, Disraeli departed, despite pressing remonstrance, on the plea that the “air” disagreed with Mrs. Disraeli—because she had complained of their host’s rudeness. It will one day be found that to this gifted and selfless woman, English history owed much at several serious conjunctures. I cannot resist relating a good story in another vein. Shortly after Disraeli’s marriage, a guest at Grosvenor Gate, pointing to a portrait of the late Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mrs. Disraeli’s first husband and with Disraeli member for Maidstone, asked him whom it represented. “Our former colleague,” was the rejoinder. At a much later date Mr. Frith was painting a group in which Disraeli figured. As her husband was going, Mrs. Disraeli whispered to the artist, “Remember one thing, if you don’t mind, his pallor is his beauty.” She was afraid that his complexion would be coloured. To the last she would say, as she did during his interrupted speech at Aylesbury in 1847:—“He mind them! Not a bit of it. He’s a match for them all.” Sir Horace Rumbold has just told us how, at the scene of Disraeli’s investiture as Earl, a sob was heard from the crowd. It was the grief of an old and faithful servant sighing, “Ah! If only she had lived to see him now!”

Like childless men in general, he was devoted to children. More than one still living remembers his happy words of playful intimacy. To women from the days of his pet Sheridans to those of the present Lady Currie, he appealed with magnetism throughout his career, and there are few more romantic episodes than his meetings, after hesitation, with the elderly Mrs. Bridges Williams at the fountain in the Exhibition of 1862, the existing correspondence which ensued, and the thumping legacy which crowned it. One who has read that correspondence has assured me that its gentle chivalry is most striking. In the midst of engrossing occupation he never ceased to cheer the old lady with gossip of his doings, and even to argue with her, as on an affair of state, regarding the advisability of Struve’s seltzer water as a remedy.

Of Queen Victoria’s affection for him I will only say that it was because he treated her as a woman. She grew to lean on his wisdom and his judgment. On more than one occasion he acted as mediator in her family. He was sincerely attached to her. His witticism, when asked for a reason of her favour, will bear repetition: “I never argue, I never contradict, but I sometimes forget.”

His influence over the late Queen was more remarkable even than has hitherto been disclosed. And in this regard I am able to state that, while out of office, he negotiated with extreme tact, under delicate circumstances, the peerage conferred on a most amiable prince, now no more; and further, that at each stage of all its bearings Queen Victoria consulted and deferred to his counsel, kindness, and resource. I may add that he also devised a means of providing the same lamented prince with an absorbing occupation.

He was a firm friend; loyalty he always extolled as a sovereign virtue. Not many have the faculty for friendship in old age as Lord Beaconsfield had it. His passion for mastery, his addiction to mystery were rivalled by his immense faithfulness. If he was always “the man of destiny,” he was also ever “faithful unto death.” And his real friendships were warm as well as constant. While he was at Glasgow to be inaugurated Lord Rector of its University, he heard good tidings of an old associate. “Mrs. Disraeli and I,” he wrote, “were over-joyed, and we danced a Highland fling in our nightgowns.” The picture raises a smile,[26] but it also strikes an unexpected chord.

Of music and of art in general he was a devotee, as many passages in his novels attest. He had his own theories of their influence on composition and on literature. Murillo was his favourite painter, Mozart his favourite composer. He ever deplored the insensibility of the Government to the duty of elevating taste for the beautiful. When the Blacas collection of gems was in the market at the price of £70,000, the Administration of the day at first refused to entertain the purchase, but Disraeli persuaded them by offering to find the money himself, if they persisted. In this case, as in so many others (notably that of the Suez Canal shares), imagination forwarded the public interest; for this collection is now worth some threefold of what was expended. When a great work by Raphael was offered to the Government, and Disraeli’s colleagues were in doubt, Disraeli sent for the leading dealer, in whose hands the commission had been placed, inspected the picture himself, discoursed charmingly and critically of its merits, with the result that it is now in the National Gallery. Since even trifles about the eminent possess interest, I may add the following story of his old age. He was showing a distinguished visitor (still living) his family portraits at Hughenden. He paused before a pastel of a lovely child wafted by seraphs through the skies. “That,” he exclaimed, “is a pet picture; observe how exquisitely the draperies of the angels are arranged. The baby’s me!” His fondness for beautiful form extended to his own handwriting.

In matters of courtesy he was old-fashioned and punctilious. To the last he resented that grotesque disfigurement which was beginning to make manners ugly before he died. Even at an earlier date, “Manners are easy,” said “Coningsby,” “and life is hard.” “And I wish to see things exactly the reverse,” said “Lord Henry,” “the modes of subsistence less difficult, the conduct of life more ceremonious.”

In his fiction it was often objected that he over-depicted great splendour and supreme beauty; that it was thronged with “daughters” and mansions “of the gods.” But, if he erred in these respects, it was from familiarity and not from ostentation, as Lady John Manners has pointed out at some length. “It must be recollected,” she wrote, thinking of Lothair, “that many of those who most appreciated him, and whose friendship he warmly reciprocated, are surrounded in daily life by a certain amount of state which employs their dependants.” So, too, with regard to the peaceful and prosperous marriages of those homes of forty years ago on which he delighted to dwell. He loved the gentle Buckinghamshire landscape, with its treasures of association in every cranny, more than all the remembered luxuriance of the South and glare of the East. And it should also be remembered that his works abound in sympathetic descriptions of all kinds and conditions of men, including the strangest and humblest. They were taken from personal observation, and he himself would penetrate the queerest haunts to gain the most curious insight. The common and the uncommon people fascinated him, for in them he found ideas; the middling charmed him less. He delighted to invest the seemingly commonplace with significance, and also to strip the pretentiously important of its wonder. Not even Dickens, as I shall hint hereafter, knew or loved his London better. I shall also, in the proper place, touch on the exotic element in his style and accent. Mr. John Morley has aptly compared it to Goethe’s dictum about St. Peter’s, that, though it is baroque; it is always the expression of something great and not merely grandiose. His big words are never for little things. Undoubtedly some of his earliest works are deficient in taste; and there is a certain fierce hardness in their abrupt violence. Mrs. Austin advised him in omissions from the original manuscript of Vivian Grey; it was to women that he owed his training in these directions. His knowledge was vast and profound, and he exercised the habit of pursuing long trains of thought in reflection. He seldom worked at night, preferring that season for brooding over his ideas. But at all times, contrary to the superficial opinion, he worked long and hard, sometimes over ten hours a day. His gift of divination never dimmed his passion for study, until old age and ill-health warned him that it must pause. He never ceased to deplore the want of “that boundless leisure which we literary men need.” To the last, as Lord Iddesleigh has pointed out, he studied the Bible in the earliest hours. In church attendance he was what Mr. Gladstone used to call a “oncer.” He was a regular communicant.

By success he was never inflated, by reversals never depressed, although by nature elastic.[27] It was not until 1874 that his power became wholly unfettered, and then foreign crisis claimed the attention that he longed to bestow on social improvements and Colonial Confederation. His three previous spans of office had been equally brief. For some twenty years he headed, at intervals, a despairing Opposition, whose mistrustful murmurs had to be stilled, whose doubts had to be dispelled, and the immense difficulties of whose management he has graphically portrayed in a notable passage from his Life of Lord George Bentinck. To the printed diatribes which assailed him he was indifferent. In parliamentary generalship, demanding an infinite insight and management, an instant recognition of movements in the mass, and “creation of opportunity,” he was unsurpassed even by Peel, who played on Parliament “as on an old fiddle.” To his urgent control even so early as 1854, and when out of office, the correspondence with Spencer Walpole affords a striking insight. “My dear Walpole,” he writes on November 29 of that year, “remember to write to the Queen if anything of interest happens to-night. Tell somebody, Harry Lennox or another, to send me a bulletin by this messenger of what is taking place, but not later than ten o’clock, as I shall retire early, that being my only chance. Be positive that the financial statement will be made on Friday.”[28]

What he really valued in power was its faculty of influence. Otherwise it was bitter-sweet. He once told a high aspirant for high office, that as for its pleasures, they lay chiefly in contrasting the knowledge it afforded of what was really being done with the ridiculous chatter about affairs in the circles that one frequented.

His wit, his brightness of humour, and lightness of touch, long prevented many of his contemporaries from taking him seriously. Literary statesmen are often belittled by their generation; imaginative statesmen, always. They have usually to await a career after death. The stereotyped character imposed on him till his pluck and power appealed to the nation at large was largely due to the old Whigs (“oligarchy is ever hostile to genius”[29]), who for years refused to regard him with anything but amusement, yet whose drawing-rooms had been the readiest to applaud those sparkling sallies of 1845 and 1846 that demolished the premier whom they too wished to destroy; that coterie so long trained to make popular causes preserve their exclusive power, and of whom he wrote in 1833, “A Tory, a Radical, I understand; a Whig, a democratic aristocrat, I cannot comprehend.” It was not due to the Peelites, who frankly hated him as an open foe. Even the Liberals (many of whom he counted as personal friends), when he warned them of the underground rumblings, ominous of social earthquake in Ireland, shrugged their shoulders; and when he was reported, glass in eye, to have answered a duchess inquisitive about the exact date of the dissolution with “You darling,” they split their sides, and guffawed, “There he is again!” They agreed with his old family acquaintance, Bernal Osborne (if it was he), to whom the heartlessness was attributed of saying, when Lord Beaconsfield was stricken with his lingering illness, “Overdoing it, as usual.”

And yet how interesting it is to find Disraeli in the Grant-Duff diaries discoursing eagerly in the faint dawn on Westminster Bridge of Lord John Russell. Perhaps Disraeli’s greatest admirer among opponents was Cobden, and that admiration was warmly returned. Both of them had one great virtue in common, and a rare one, especially in public life—gratitude; and both could afford to be generous. Read the letter now first disclosed by Mr. John Morley, whose literary appreciation of Disraeli is manifest, in which Disraeli sought to win Gladstone with “deign to be magnanimous.”

Disraeli’s own magnanimity—frankly owned by Mr. Gladstone—was conspicuous though it is unfamiliar. During the decade of the ’fifties, on at least four occasions[30] he offered to sacrifice his personal position to Graham, Palmerston, and Gladstone successively for the interests of his country and his party. In 1868 and 1869 he indignantly defended the last against the carping “tail” of his supporters, rebuking alike the “frothy spouters of sedition,” and those who preferred remembrance of “accidental errors” to gratitude for “splendid gifts and signal services.” His unstinted praise of worthy foes, his conduct even towards the ostracised Dr. Kenealy, are constant proofs of a leading trait. He always forebore to strike an opponent to please the whim or the passion of the popular breeze.

À propos of Mr. Gladstone, who himself paid a tribute to the absence of rancour in his rival, I may be permitted to recall an anecdote told me by the late Sir John Millais. When Disraeli stood (though then suffering, he refused to sit) for his last portrait, his “dear Apelles” noticed his gaze riveted on an engraving of the artist’s fine portrait of the great premier. “Would you care to have it?” he inquired. “I was rather shy of offering it to you.” “I should be delighted to have it,” was the reply. “Don’t imagine that I have ever disliked Mr. Gladstone; on the contrary, my only difficulty with him has been that I could never understand him.” And Carlyle himself thawed when Disraeli, whom he had so long hysterically abused, but many of whose ideas, as I shall prove, he shared, offered him public recognition in a letter which gave as a reason for uninheritable honours, “I have remembered that you too, like myself, are childless.” But Carlyle, who had aspersed him, never denied that he looked facts in the face without mistaking phantoms for them. Even from the first he owned length of view. In his old age a certain far-awayness of expression was very noticeable.

I have mentioned Mr. Gladstone. It was well for England that two great attitudes towards great questions should have been thrown into sharp relief for nearly a score of years by the duel between two great personalities; and it was also well for Disraeli that “England does not love coalitions.” We know from Mr. Gladstone’s own lips that much in his rival had won his respect, while from Mr. Morley we glean that Mr. Gladstone even struggled with a sort of subacid liking for one whom he too could “never comprehend.”[31] The letters of both after Lady Beaconsfield’s death are refreshing instances of how sworn enemies of the arena may grasp hands under the softening solemnity of bereavement, and for a moment forget the hard words which, under irritation, they certainly used of each other.

Disraeli was older than Gladstone, and had been early acquainted with him. In the ’thirties he sat next to “young Gladstone” at the Academy dinner, and regretted that he had been relegated from “the wits,” with whom he had been ranged in the year previous, to “the politicians.” In the ’forties Disraeli made one of his few mistakes in prognostic, when he wrote to his sister, “I doubt if he has an ‘avenir’;” but the significance of Gladstone’s resignation at this juncture on “Maynooth,” and the peculiar circumstances of the Peelites must be borne in mind. Disraeli could scarcely then divine the surprises of oscillation in store.

Except in vigour of undaunted character, and in a sort of inward loneliness, their qualities were opposed. The intensity of the one was austere, imperious, imposing, and didactic; of the other, buoyant, lively, and poignant. Frequently the flippancy of certain leaders provoked his gravity; more frequently the solemnity of others upset his own. Gladstone moved by violent reaction and hasty rebound; Disraeli, by a spring of step, it is true, but of a step measured, wary, and equal. Disraeli stamped himself on his age; it was often the “Time-Spirit” that impressed itself on Mr. Gladstone, a list of whose changeful “convictions”[32] from 1836 to 1896 might fill a small volume. Again, Disraeli’s utterance left a stronger sense of reserve power, of something serious behind the veil. Mr. Gladstone’s phases, always sincere, in the main struck more the conscience of certain sections; Disraeli’s ideas, the national feelings. Mr. Gladstone’s subtleties were those of a theologian; they did not quicken the lay mind. Disraeli’s were the subtleties of an artist; they put things in new perspectives. It might be said that by nature and unconscious bent, the one hid simplicity under the form of subtlety, while with the other the process was the converse. In oratory, Mr. Gladstone convinced by height and redundance of enthusiasm, by depth of feeling and weight or wealth of words and gestures; Disraeli, more by grasp, incisiveness, and point; his imagination played all round many sides of his subject. Gladstone’s eloquence resembled the storminess and the mist of the North Sea; Disraeli’s, the strange lights and shadows, the subtle and tideless lustre of the Mediterranean. As Mr. Gladstone warmed to his theme, he increased in eloquence; his perorations are always great. It was in peroration that Disraeli sometimes failed, except in his after-dinner speeches, which never missed fire from start to finish.

Mr. Gladstone was saturated, Disraeli tinctured, with the classics. Mr. Gladstone was essentially the scholar, and he was Homeric, while Disraeli was Horatian and Tacitean. His ready acquaintance with Latin masterpieces was shown when he first took the oaths as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and hit off a most happy quotation on the spur of the moment; nor will it be forgotten that once, when he was citing a classic in the House, he added, “Which, for the sake of the successful capitalists around me, I will now try to translate.”

Again, despite Mr. Gladstone’s immense versatility, there was always something cloistral about him. He himself confessed that till he was fifty he did not “know the world.” I venture to doubt if he ever knew it, and it was just this academic simplicity that so often led his huge brain-power to deal with unsubstantial material.

Mr. Gladstone will not live through his books. He was far more a writer than an author, though he was always distinguished in all his undertakings. But he was doctrinaire; and he was almost devoid of any real sense of humour. On the appearance of “Nicholas Nickleby” he owned its merit, but singled out its pathos with the criticism that he was grieved by the absence from it of the religious sentiment—“No Church!” In this respect Disraeli and Gladstone were brought into amusing contrast during the Bulgarian atrocity campaign. Mr. Gladstone had characterised the Premier’s attitude as “diabolical.” Disraeli, in a speech, referred to Mr. Gladstone’s having called him “a devil.” Mr. Gladstone denied the impeachment, and asked for verse and chapter. Disraeli rejoined by writing that “the gentlemen who so kindly assist me in the conduct of public affairs” had used their best endeavours to ascertain the precise time and place when the Prince of Darkness had been named, but hitherto without success.

A famous bookseller, with whom both statesmen frequently conversed, used to recount that Disraeli once inquired, as was his wont, what of new interest was forthcoming. He mentioned one of Mr. Gladstone’s Vatican pamphlets. “No,” was the answer; “please not that. Mr. Gladstone is a powerful writer, but nothing that he writes is literature.”

In the House of Commons Disraeli had schooled himself from the first to conceal the emotions of a nature naturally quick and sensitive. He early lit on two mechanical devices for this purpose: the one was to stroke his knees regularly with his hand, the other to scan the clock. When he was much angered it was only by a change of colour that his agitation was ever betrayed. It must be confessed that he loved to “draw” Mr. Gladstone, and those who remember how, when Disraeli sat down and relapsed into impassivity, Mr. Gladstone jumped up with a look of rage and a voice of thunder, will admit that both performances were perfect. But the audience expected the scene which became habitual, and even supreme actors are influenced by the expectation of their audience. Neither Gladstone nor Disraeli ever stooped to ill-nature. Great men are not petty. But the moral indignation of the one, and the intellectual indignation of the other, which sometimes exchanged places, lent the semblance of pique or of quarrel. Disraeli’s dislike of spleen is well displayed by what he once said of Abraham Hayward, the caustic reviewer: “If that man were to be run over in the streets, you would see his venom swimming in the gutters.”

In debate, Disraeli’s characteristics were a quick readiness and an inexhaustible power of diverting discussion to new channels and of defeating expectation. The occasion when, in reply to Mr. Whalley concerning the Jesuits, he answered that one of their pet devices was to send over Jesuits in disguise to decry the Jesuits, will recur to the memory. His power of literary illustration needs no comment. Two brilliant instances are that of the boots of the Lion embracing the chambermaid of the Boar in connection with the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, and that charming one about the Abyssinian expedition, where he reminded us that the standard of St. George was flying over the mountains of Rasselas.[33] In retort he was supreme. Two of the best instances are to be noted in the rejoinder to Peel about “candid friends” and Canning, and in the pause he made when in a much later speech he said, “I have never attacked any one” (cries of “Peel”) “unless I was first assailed.” I shall relate some others hereafter. His self-imposed impassiveness of demeanour in the House was that of a sentinel on bivouac; it became exaggerated by the contrast of his illustrious compeer’s extreme excitability. Disraeli was very zealous for the honour of the House in which he passed the greater portion of his life. On one occasion a young and violent adversary insinuated that Disraeli had told a lie. Disraeli calmly cleared himself to the general satisfaction, and his denouncer began to feel uncomfortable; still more so when he was sent for to the great man’s private room. What was his surprise when he was shaken warmly by the hand. “We all make mistakes,” said Disraeli, “when we are young. But please to remember all your life that the House of Commons is a house of gentlemen.”

For sheer insight into the march of ideas and reach of vision there is no comparison between the two. Even in the ’forties Disraeli perceived that the coming choice lay between absolute democracy and a monarchical democracy. Afterwards—in the early ’fifties, while monarchy in England was still far from popular—he laid his plans—as is apparent from his contributions to his organ, The Press, in 1853—to popularise monarchy and educate democracy before enfranchising it; and, not till that was accomplished, to re-imperialise Great Britain. “He has not,” he wrote in 1853 of Lord John Russell, “comprehended that for the last twenty years the choice is between the maintenance of those institutions and habits of thought which preserve monarchy, and that gradual change into absolute democracy to which Tocqueville somewhere rashly considered all the tendencies of our age impel the destinies of Europe.... The Whigs should have been conservative of the reformed constitution, and have developed it....”[34] While Gladstone was refining a rather tortuous conscience into making the forlorn Peelites alternate between the Conservatives and the Whigs, Disraeli was reconstructing and developing a national party. While Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, in righteous indignation at Peel’s memory, were enraged at the delinquency of not struggling for absolute protection when the Derby Ministry assumed office, Disraeli showed that the principle of his struggle (continued as regarded the sugar repeal) had been land and labour. He must now benefit these by alleviations, rather than, as a responsible Minister, attempt an upheaval of what the nation had finally endorsed, and set private opinion as to particular measures at variance with the possibility of government at all. Had he done so he would have been doing what Fox himself had not attempted with regard to Catholic emancipation, what Lord John Russell had not thought of in 1847, what no responsible Minister could have compassed, and what, Lord John Russell added, the Whigs could not do in 1835. And yet, out of sheer honest hatred, he was vilified by those “high and stubborn spirits who, with the severity peculiar to those censors who cannot aspire to be consuls, refuse to acknowledge that there could be any virtue of necessity, ... and could not enlarge their comprehension of the requisites of a statesman beyond quotations from ‘Hansard.’ There were surely some juster thinkers in the House of Commons who must have trembled at the doctrine that men in office are rigidly to carry out the opinions they proposed in opposition.”[35] That, he points out, is the function of opposition, and the duty of supporting opinions which a nation has cancelled never arises unless those opinions have sent you to office. As he puts it, “Themis is the goddess of opposition, but Nemesis sits in Downing Street.” In the overthrow of Peel lay a very different moral, and by that overthrow he wished to lay bare the choice between “Liberal opinions” and “popular principles,” between Peel’s sudden adoption of the “physical enjoyment” theory of regeneration and his own. By that destruction he eventually ended the Whigs and Peelites alike, and set before the country the true choice that awaited it, instead of the perplexity of parties[36] which, joined to detestation of himself, caused the coalition of 1853 and prevented the contrast of the ideas which really divided the minds of men from being prominent in true proportions.

As a practical statesman, Disraeli thought more of those moral elements by which the State can square private duty with public interest; Gladstone, more of those elements above and beyond conduct. Gladstone was perhaps more of an apostle, Disraeli of a seer. Gladstone owned a noble heart with lofty spiritual standards, and an enormous quality of moral resentment; but his Church views coloured his life as much as his religious convictions, while his minute and perplexing scruples too often changed the forms of his enthusiasms, led zeal to chime with prejudice, and sometimes sent him astray altogether into self-deception.

Gladstone was a strange compound of diverse elements—of Highlander and Lowlander, of Scotland, Liverpool, Oxford, and Italy. In some respects he might even be termed the Dante of politics; but in others he was occasionally deemed its Ignatius Loyala. Disraeli, on the other hand, depended on his singular force of independence and of native sight and foresight. Those who admired the early Gladstone as Sir Galahad never wished him to sit on the seat of Merlin; nay, Gladstone himself perpetually deemed Disraeli, Machiavelli, or even Cagliostro. In relation to Disraeli, Gladstone would have perhaps addressed England with “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?” while Disraeli might have retorted by the witticism of Sarah, Duchess of Marborough, on the eagerness of James the Second to drag his country to heaven with him. It was just Disraeli’s originality and length of view that caused him to be maligned as well as misunderstood, though by some his conduct towards Peel was not unnaturally eyed askance. And yet, in Mr. Morley’s “Life,” Lord John Russell is to be found vindicating his own share in that transaction,[37] and Sir James Graham himself admitting that Peel provoked what he suffered.[38] In the eyes of many, Gladstone was Homer’s “old man of the sea” trying to hold Proteus, and yet none proved more Protean through enlarging aspirations than “the old man” himself. Perhaps Gladstone regarded the world more as the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Disraeli more as “Vanity Fair.” Gladstone had more sail,[39] Disraeli more ballast. The one floated on waves of agitation, the other desired a strong government by steadying the people and attaching them to institutions. Moreover, Gladstone constantly viewed the State from the standpoint of his particular Church opinions. Disraeli believed that the principle of the Revolution had never been perfected by the due development of popular institutions. He agreed with Pym that “the best form of government is that which doth dispose and actuate every part and member of a State to the common good.”

Disraeli owned, of course, his foibles, though he was too proud ever to be very vain. As we shall find later on, when I come to his faults of temperament, his grasp of ideas occasionally pressed them too literally both on life and letters. He tended to overstrain his lights and shadows. His imagination sometimes ran riot in its colours, and throughout tended to exaggerate the forms of events, though hardly ever their significance, which he was often the first to divine. He is said to have cherished some superstitions about lucky days and unlucky colours, but for these I cannot vouch. I can, however, for the fact that he was once seen by intimates to wear a green velvet smoking-coat, though one of the few occasions on which he troubled the newspapers was to refute the slander of having, when young, appeared in green trousers.[40] And here I may perhaps be pardoned for inserting a slight story about Mrs. Disraeli, which comes from the same source as the last. Dr. Guthrie was once staying at Grosvenor Gate, and invited his hostess to visit him at Glasgow. “I will,” she smiled, “if you will promise to wear your kilt in the streets.” “Perhaps I will,” he replied, with hesitation. “You had better be careful, Guthrie,” interposed Disraeli, “for that woman, I assure you, means what she says.”

In taste and in phrase he was naturally extravagant, but his epigrams were never for the sake of paradox, and were always the summaries of wisdom and reflection. They were light, not frivolous; they were imaginative proverbs. There never was a wittier man, and his wit lent itself to his ironic humour. He loved effects that struck imagination, but ever for a crucial purpose. It was said of him by an intimate that one of his sentences—and in conversation he was sparing—left more behind than a long talk with others of consummate talent. As for the scathing sarcasm—his weapon of self-defence during his earlier stages—at times over-savage and belying his normal cheeriness—sobriety of judgment is compatible with—

“The stinging of a heart the world hath stung.”

But, undoubtedly, the too quick transitions of a susceptible fancy from—

“Grave to gay, from lively to severe,”

often irritated and even offended not only the dull, but the serious. And yet in life, as in literature, is there more than one step in the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous?

Like all celebrated wits, he suffered both from the ascription of his own bons mots to others, and from those of others being fathered upon him. Thus the “without a redeeming vice” (about Lord Hatherley) was his, not Westbury’s, while the “dinner all cold except the ices,” was said not by him, but by Sir David Dundas. His pithy sentences were simply one manifestation of his naturally laconic turn of mind.

He was occasionally over-adroit, especially in his desire to gain distinguished recruits for his party; and he sometimes, perhaps, magnified the machinations of secret conspiracies, although their hidden tyranny was gauged by him with unerring instinct. His predilection both in art and nature was for extremes. Full of atmosphere himself, he owned the social nerves which suffer overmuch from lack of it in others. He detested bores, those masterpieces of nature’s bad art. One of them (if I may say so without disrespect to his kindness and amiability, since departed) has told with artless humour how at one of the last dinner-parties that Lord Beaconsfield attended, he engaged him in conversation, but was pained to notice how ill and absent he seemed. Suddenly, however, on the arrival of a distinguished guest, a Russian diplomatist, the great man brightened and grew young again, as if by miracle!

After his elevation to the peerage,[41] when he would often revisit the “glimpses of the moon,” and watch new members with rapt interest, on one occasion he listened patiently to a long speech of ideal dreariness from the lips of one unknown to him. He inquired, as usual, who the speaker was, and learned that Mr. —— had no other peculiarity but deafness. “Poor fellow!” he sighed, “and yet he seems unaware of his natural advantages. He cannot hear himself speak.”

Of Disraeli’s attitude towards fashionable society, as well as towards that which really fascinated him, I shall say more in my eighth chapter; but one incident of his old age must be presented here. I can vouch for it, since it was told me by an eye-witness—a political opponent.

It was after “Peace with honour”[42]—after he had “descended from the Teutonic chariot,” after the congress where he discovered the alternative Russian map of Bulgaria, concealed by diplomacy, where he earned Bismarck’s undying praise and admiration. The scene was a magnificent reunion in an historic mansion. All the fine flower of society was gathered in a galaxy of splendour and of grandeur. In one of the saloons a brilliant crowd was awaiting Lord Beaconsfield’s entry. As the big doors opened, a thrill went through them. Haughty ladies in the feeling of the moment made obeisance as if to royalty, while that pale figure with the inscrutable smile passed along their serried ranks. Unmoved and immovable, he went straight forward, his eyes fixed on the future, scarcely conscious of their presence, except for his recognition of their homage.

Such are some of his leading features. They combine and reconcile the seeming contradictions of a nature at once calm and impetuous, deep and light, astute and far-seeing in affairs of importance; in trifles, careless. These contrasts, united by genius, pursue the forms of his mind—his ideas. He was, of course, no monster of consistency, but the ideas that animated his actions and utterance sprang from a singularly consistent outlook and a most definite personality. In every case they were the outcome on the one hand of his race, on the other of his nationality. The antithesis between nationality and mere race is most important, and too often ignored. There is no such thing as a nation of a single strain. The national idea is the fusion of reconcilable races, the creation of an artificial and ideal individuality, of a consolidating pattern; the absorption of discordant races and their replacement by a central idea which subordinates instinct to society. Later civilisation means little else, if we reflect, than a gradual process of this description; and it is not a little curious that the distinctive greatness of English literature is largely due to the admission and naturalisation of foreign influences—to England’s free trade in ideas, to the openness of her literary ports. What would it have proved had it remained purely insular; if Italy, France, and Germany had not infused both form and spirit; above all, if it had not been inspired by the noble rhythm of the Englished Bible and by the supreme models of Greece and Rome? Disraeli’s wit, which is to find a due consideration hereafter, is half eighteenth century in form, half talmudic. The shape of his ideas was also partly determined by the time of his birth and by the circumstances of his home.

He was born at the parting of the ways. His early reading, and, indeed, his cast of mind, were steeped in the style of the eighteenth century; but the movements of the nineteenth, the significance of the French Revolution and of Napoleon, who had made all things new, simmered in him from the first, and his earliest reflections were how to attune the democratic idea to the vital institutions of an ancient empire. As regards his home, he was truly, as he has put it, “born in a library;” and this circumstance contributed as much as others to a certain detachment of thought which in politics afforded him the clue to the character of movements, and, above all, to the movements of character; in fiction, as will be apparent from my ninth chapter, it led him to regard things as they appeared of themselves, and not always as they seemed to others; while under the play of fancy he transposed their outward environments to accentuate their essence. Of his father, himself a most interesting study, I shall have more to say in my eighth chapter. Here, I only wish to draw attention to the fact that Isaac Disraeli’s influence on his son’s ideas was twofold. On the one hand, his views on “predisposition,” on the use of solitude, on the true meaning of education, on historical “cause and pretext,” on the hollowness of “joint-stock felicity,” on the self-recognition of creative minds before their late acknowledgment by contemporaries, with others glanced at in my later chapters, were directly derived by Disraeli from his father. From him, too, he inherited his fondness for Burke. On the other hand, Disraeli’s native leanings reacted against many of that peripatetic philosopher’s opinions. His interpretation of the Bible was, if not at variance with, at any rate different from his father’s,[43] and was, I fancy, shared by his sister. His admiration for Bolingbroke, as genius and constitutional interpreter, was in direct opposition, just as that father’s own dispassionate outlook remained independent and often the reverse of his own early associations. Byron, however, entered Disraeli’s mental being through his father; and of three main influences on his boyhood—the Bible, Bolingbroke, and Byron (strange conjunction!), the last was not the least.

Outside politics, the contradictions combined in Disraeli’s mind are patent throughout his fiction, and they were reconciled by his leading idea that everything great in the world springs from individuality alone. Thus, for example, as regards Destiny, he was both for free will and fatalism—the individual will was for him the universal fate. If a man, he has said, is ready to die for an object, he must attain it unless he has utterly miscalculated his powers. Then again, the twin sympathies of his mind, both with antique authority and modern revolution, its bias towards the Chartism of Sybil, the chivalry of her aristocratic deliverer, and the discipline of her time-honoured creed, towards the noble personality of “Theodora” in Lothair (his finest heroine),[44] and the noble ideals of “Coningsby”—these are reconciled by the national idea, the idea that sets earned privilege and reciprocal duties above and against illimitable and irresponsible “rights.” “Conspiracies are for aristocrats, not for nations.”

In this regard it is most interesting to observe the influence of Shelley on Disraeli—a subject which has been treated by Dr. Richard Garnett in a masterly monograph.[45] From many of his conclusions I dissent, but his facts are most enlightening, and form an entrancing comment on the character of “Herbert” in Venetia. He shows that probably through Trelawny, whom he met often at Lady Blessington’s, Disraeli gleaned many recollections and even thoughts and words, unpublished till the Shelley Papers were given to the world some years afterwards; that his description too of the ethereal poet as “a golden phantom” is probably Trelawny’s own; that subtle shades of admiring appreciation are to be traced throughout; that Disraeli was undoubtedly influenced by Shelley’s thoughts. The discovery of these in some portions of the Revolutionary Epick (where “Demogorgon” is introduced) does not seem to me conclusive; nor are the verbal resemblances singled out for comparison very striking. I cannot close this branch of my subject without noticing a fact almost unknown. In 1825, when Disraeli was a stripling, he published an anonymous pamphlet, which may be found in the British Museum, on the restrictions enforced by the Government upon the British working of American mines. The tract is boldly dedicated “by a sincere admirer” to Canning,[46] as “one who has reformed without bravery or scandal of former times or persons; asking counsel of both times; of the ancient times that which is best, of the modern times, that which is fittest;” and it further contains this remarkable passage, if we remember its date, about America—

“... The prosperity of England mainly depends upon its relations with America, and in proportion as the energies of America are developed and her resources strengthened, will the power and prosperity of England be confirmed and increased.”

In the domain of politics Disraeli, as I shall show at length, divined in the national institutions the chief engine for the revival of unity and for social regeneration. When he denounced the Conservatism of the early ’forties as an “organised hypocrisy,” he did so just because, as it seemed to his eyes, the hopes once centred on Peel as the restorer of a truly “national” party were being shattered by his failure, under ordeal, to govern, to develop the institutions which he was called on to preserve, by his erection of “registration” into a party idol, by his policy of polls, by his cold indifference and suspicion of the youthful regenerators, who confronted the middle classes with the middle ages. “Whenever,” indignantly urged Disraeli in 1845, “whenever the young men of England allude to any great principle of political or parliamentary conduct, are they to be recommended to go to a railway committee?” And he found in his once chief’s temperament of discouraging formality and timorous desire for “fixity of tenure,” for staying power, a reason for the stultification of the House of Lords: “... It is not Radicalism; it is not the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century which has consigned ‘another place’ to illustrious insignificance; it is ‘Conservatism’ and a Conservative dictator.”

Disraeli was one born with aristocratic perceptions, yet with a bent “popular” rather than “democratic” in the strict sense of those terms. “Democracy” in the concrete he considered as the unsettlement of compact nationality through the undue preponderance of a single class; democracy in the abstract he considered as a lever for ambitious tribunes. But the welfare of the people was ever his chief concern, and he knew full well that it is constantly foiled by the side-aims of those vociferous on its behalf. When he first appeared on the political horizon, neither of the great historical parties owned popular sympathies. The Tories dreaded “Radicalism” because they were blind to the possibilities of its adoption into the order of the State. Of the Whigs, democratic enthusiasms were at once the tools and the abhorrence. Disraeli determined to infuse them into those free yet settled institutions of which the Tories were the natural but forgetful guardians. His main purpose from the outset was to implant the new ideas of freedom on the ancient soil of order; to engraft them productively without uprooting the native undergrowth; to harmonise the modern democratic idea with those English traditions which had always harboured its older forms. His work was to accommodate federal to feudal principles; to render democracy in England national and natural; to popularise leadership; to make democracy aristocratic in the truest sense of the term; to undo the closed aristocracy of caste and to revive the open aristocracy of excellence wherever displayed. My next two chapters investigate this idea; and it will be found afterwards, when I discuss his notion of empire and his attitude towards our colonies, that his ideals of Great Britain’s destiny and responsibility flow straight from this ruling outlook. The same consideration applies to the many other problems which I shall discuss in the light of Disraeli’s relations to them. Throughout, in one form or another, and in many applications, the free play of responsible individuality forms the keynote. He constantly opposes it alike to the barren uniformity of republican models, and to the centralising dictatorship whether of groups or of tyrants. He contrasts the personal with the mechanical. The State in his eyes should prove the sympathetic expression of the whole community. These aspects will find ample exposition hereafter. In this place I wish only to quote their bold and broad emphasis in the unfamiliar pamphlet of What is he? with one citation from which I opened this chapter. It will explain those passages in his Runnymede Letters and The Spirit of Whiggism, where he expects and adjures Peel to head a “national party” and to replace confederacies by a creed. It will also illustrate that passage in the election address to High Wycombe during 1832, which preludes his mission as the renewer of a popular Conservatism. “... Englishmen, behold the unparalleled empire raised by the heroic energies of your fathers, rouse yourselves in this hour of doubt and danger, rid yourselves of all that political jargon and factious slang of Whig and Tory, two names with one meaning, used only to delude you, and unite in forming a great national party....”

“The first object of a statesman,” he says (and he was then barely twenty-nine years of age), “is a strong Government, without which there can be no security. Of all countries in the world, England most requires one, since the prosperity of no society so much depends upon public confidence as that of the British nation.”

He then declares that the old principle of exclusion (common alike to the Whig oligarchs and the debased Toryism of Eldon) is dead.

“... The moment the Lords passed the Reform Bill from menace instead of conviction, the aristocratic principle of government in this country, in my opinion, expired for ever.” The democratic principle becomes necessary to maintain a Government at all. “If the Tories,” he continues, “indeed despair of restoring the aristocratic principle, and are sincere in their avowal that the State cannot be governed with the present machinery, it is their duty to coalesce with the Radicals,[47] and permit both political nicknames to merge into the common, the intelligible, and the dignified title of a national party.”[48]

He proceeds to prove in a few decisive strokes that the towns are now the safeguards against any military invasion of rights, and that a coalition between the then Whigs and the then Tories is impossible; the only alternative, therefore, is the inclusion of the democratic principle.

“Without being a system-monger,” he resumes, repeating the refrain of his previous Revolutionary Epick, “I cannot but perceive that the history of Europe for three hundred years has been a transition from feudal to federal principles.” If not their origin, these contending principles have blended with all the struggles that have occurred.—“The revolt of the Netherlands impelled, if it did not produce, our revolution against Charles I. That of the Anglo-American colonies impelled, if it did not produce, the Revolution in France.” “This,” he says, “is not a party pamphlet, and appeals to the passions of no order of the State.” “It is wise,” he concludes, “to be sanguine in public as well as in private life; yet the sagacious statesman must view the present portents with anxiety, if not with terror. It would sometimes appear that the loss of our colonial empire must be the necessary consequence of our prolonged domestic discussions. Hope, however, lingers to the last. In the sedate but vigorous character of the British nation we may place great confidence.” The very pressing unsettlement of those days will afterwards claim a mention; nor should I now omit Disraeli’s sentence in his Crisis Examined, to the effect that “Lord Grey refusing the Privy Seal and Lord Brougham soliciting the Chief Barony” were “two epigrammatic episodes in the history of reform that never can be forgotten.”

Mr. John Morley has well observed that about all Disraeli’s utterance there was something spacious. The ideas that I am about to examine are not to be brushed away by the sneers of triflers. Whatever may be thought of them, and however they may fairly be encountered by criticism, dissented from or condemned by judgment, they are still alive. Disraeli bathed the political landscape in a large and luminous atmosphere. To literature, as I shall hope to show, he lent a fresh and original charm. Over existence he never ceased to spread the glow of endeavour, of aspiration, and of purpose. His heart was with the youth and the labour of England. He made for the strength and union of every divergent class. He struck and stirred the national imagination.

Disraeli’s sincerity was that of a master in the world’s studio, imbuing the fainter shapes around him with the vivid colours of the true pictures in his own brain. It was that, also, of a great man of action who translates dreams into deeds. It is not often that the literary mind is allied to a practical bent. He himself has reminded us that such an union—“as in the case of Caius Julius”—is irresistible. He was always himself, and never under “the dangerous sympathy with the creations of others.” He believed that “every man performs his office, and there is a Power, greater than ourselves, that disposes of all this.”[49]

Disraeli’s European prominence is evidenced through the space occupied by the polyglot literature relating to him in the book catalogue alone of the British Museum. It extends to eleven of those huge pages. His importance at home before he became pre-eminent is shown by a shower of virulent abuse.

Science assures us that the difference between life and death is that the former holds the powers of growth and reproduction, while inanimateness is incapable of either. A great man is surely one who possesses and imparts these qualities of life. Disraeli, without question, powerfully affected the thought of his generation and the destinies of the future.

CHAPTER II
DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION

I wish to head this chapter by a most striking passage hitherto unquoted. It occurs in the fourth of Disraeli’s Letters to the Whigs, published in the first numbers of The Press—an organ founded by him in 1853 for the exposition of his views.[50] It unites the brilliance of his youth to the ripeness of his prime. It is a wonderful forecast of the future, and it embodies his ideas at a time when the “Coalition” alliance of Peelites, Whigs, and Manchester Radicals—one of “suspended opinions”—was entering on the career which closed so disastrously. In 1833, the “aristocratic” principle had been crippled. The problem now was how to bring the new democracy into line with an old monarchy—

“... I see before me a numerous and powerful party, animated by chiefs whose opinions in favour of all that can advance the cause of pure democracy have been openly proclaimed. Amongst that party no doubt there are some more moderate than others, some who march blindfold towards the goal which those of bolder vision see clear through the mists of faction. But all unite in the march of the caravan towards the heart of the desert; and if there be those who then discover that the fountain which allures them on is but the mirage, it will be too late to return, and it will be destruction to pause.... If England is to retain that empire which she owes to no natural resources, but to the various influences of a most complicated and artificial, but most admirable and effective social system, she must gather into one united phalanx all who hold the doctrine that England, to be safe, must be great. To continue free, she must rest upon the intermediate institutions that fence round monarchy, as the symbol of executive force, from that suffrage of unalloyed democracy which represents the invading agencies of legislative change. Our system of policy must be opposed to all those who by rules of arithmetic would reduce the empire on which the sun never sets to the isle of the Anglo-Saxon, and leave our shores without defence against a yet craftier Norman. Our measures of reform must be so framed as to gain all the purposes of good government, yet to admit under the name of reform no agency that tends by its own inevitable laws to the explosion of the machinery whose operations you pretend it will economise and quicken.

“By what plausible arguments were the dwellers in the Piræus admitted to vote in the Athenian assembly?... Hence from that moment arose the dictator and the demagogue, ... the flatterer and the tyrant of mobs; hence, the rapid fluctuations, the greedy enterprises, the dominion of the have-nots, the ruin of the fleet, the loss of the colonies, the thirty tyrants, the vain restoration of a hollow freedom ... licence—corruption—servitude—dissolution. Give the popular assembly of Great Britain up to the controlling influence of the lowest voters in large towns, and you have brought again a Piræus to destroy your Athens.”

We shall see ere the close how he foiled the schemes for representing the refuse of opinion.

* * * * *

A great statesman is a man inspired by great ideas; and, since all history is the visible and particular development of unseen and universal ideas, it must happen that a great statesman versed in experience and intuition forecasts and foreknows. For the prophet is the inverted historian or philosopher: he descries the currents ahead which the other analyses in retrospect. “To be wise before the event,” urged Disraeli more than once, “is statesmanship of the highest order.”

Throughout the preceding century two broad aspects of politics, that is to say of applied national energy, present themselves in England. They were and remain divergent, but they are and remain mutually instructive and indispensable.

The one regards our kingdom as an elastic society, the outcome of native habits expressing national temperament; as a soil of distinctive character and capacity, to which new plants, if destined to flourish, must be acclimatised, but on to which, or against which, they must never be forced.

The other—the “philosophic” school—regards the soil as a mere medium to be exhaustively manured by chemical processes for the introduction of growths of every origin, as a sort of “subtropical garden.” It perceives an idea suitable to other communities or other conjunctures, and immediately hastens to transplant it. In like manner it perceives an institution suitable to the race and temper of England, but unsuitable to some alien race and temper. It is at once for forcible adoption. It prefers the rigid logic of abstract notions to the flexibilities of human nature. Its attitude is mechanical instead of being sympathetic.

The one is in its essence national; the other, if we reflect, international. The aim of the one is the evolution of individuality embodied in a nation; that of the other, the ultimate effacement of nations, and their replacement by cosmopolitanism.

These are the logical issues of each system. With the former Burke identified himself, when he recoiled from following his party into the anti-national abstractions of the French Revolution. With the latter Mr. Gladstone identified himself, when he broke loose from the national idea, and advocated the “right” of every small community to “govern” itself. The one depends on popular privileges and class responsibilities evenly distributed—the outcome of national treaty and compromise, the tact born of struggle, not of upheaval. The other hinges on inherent “rights,” which are infinite, ubiquitous, abstract, and indefinite.

Of the former, from first to last, Disraeli, like Canning before him, was a fearless exponent. “Change,” he said in his famous Edinburgh speech of 1867, “is inevitable, but the point is whether that change shall be caused only in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people, or whether it shall be carried in deference to abstract principles and arbitrary and general doctrines.... The national system, although it may occasionally represent the prejudices of a nation, never injures the national character, while the philosophic system, though it may occasionally improve ... the condition of the country, precipitates progress, may occasion revolution and destroy states....” His attitude to the repeal of the Corn Laws depended, as I shall prove in another chapter, on this dominant idea. It is in close connection with that idea of personality which I have already characterised, for nationality is itself the ideal personality which combines races in communion. It is also in close connection with that mode of government which seeks salvation from society and not from the State; and it is bound up with all the characteristics that distinguish a “nation” from a “people.” Disraeli’s achievement was to adjust the spirit of England to the spirit of the age.

Our two parties are, after all, only the strategical forces in the big campaign of ideas. Without great generals they constantly tend to forget the issues which nominally enlist them.

At the period when Disraeli first stood on the hustings, “Reform” had been forced on the Whigs by the “Radicals,” just as “Repeal” was to be forced some twelve years later on the Conservatives by the Cobdenites. To be a “Radical” committed one to neither of the legitimate camps. The Whigs had entered on their kingdom after long years of hopeless exclusion. They were bent on engrossing office, and none detested the new-fangled doctrines more than Lord Grey. Disraeli’s purpose from the very first was to widen and popularise Toryism, but never to maintain the exclusive system of the Whigs in power by the popular machinery to which they so often resorted. In a purged and quickened Conservatism lurked irresistible possibilities, true benefit to the nation and empire at large, and a golden occasion for himself.

I think that if the oil could have blent with the vinegar, if Peel could ever have coalesced with Lord John Russell, Disraeli would have had less chance in politics, and must have been thrown back on literature.

His consistency stands out prominent in review. It is one of ideas. It is only by dint of long retrospect over a whole career that we can decide in the case of any statesman whether he has controlled his phases, or drifted with them.

From the first Disraeli compassed his reconciliation of new ideas with ancient institutions on definite principles, at once national and constructive, as opposed to destructive and international theories. He desired it through engraftment, not uprootal; through the defence and development of a constitution which is, in fact, the British character expressed by the modulations of the national voice, and not by the shouts of mechanical majorities. He wished in every case to preserve its efficiency by strengthening its tone and enlarging its vents; while, in the process, he displayed an insight into the instincts of classes which the conversance of genius with ideas can alone empower. Of modern, of cosmopolitan “Liberalism,” he said, as late as 1872, that its drift and spirit were “to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform, and to make war on the manners and customs of the people of this country under the pretext of progress.”

What then were the “new ideas” and the “old institutions”?

That form of government which is most national will be best, because the least liable to sudden and social revolutions; and that form will be most national which is most genuinely representative; while true representation is one of power distributed, not centred. It follows that any Government that does not mirror the nation will break down. This was the real meaning of the French Revolution.

“... ‘You will observe one curious trait,’ said Sidonia to Coningsby, ‘in the history of this country—the depository of power is always unpopular. As we see that the Barons, the Church, and the King have in turn devoured each other, and that the Parliament, the last devourer, remains, it is impossible to resist the impression that this body also is doomed to be destroyed.’—‘Where then would you look for hope?’—‘In what is more powerful than laws and institutions, and without which the best laws and the most skilful institutions may be a dead letter and the very means of tyranny, in the national character. It is not in the increased feebleness of its institutions that I see the peril of England; it is in the decline of its character as a community.... You may have a corrupt Government and a pure community; you may have a corrupt community and a pure Administration. Which would you elect?’—‘Neither,’ said Coningsby, ‘I wish to see a people full of faith, and a Government full of duty.’”

Are the modern ideas of untempered democracy—Carlyle’s “despair of finding any heroes to govern you”—compatible with real representation, as contrasted with the mechanism of elective systems or the shams of paper constitutions? Can these ideas ever prove expressive of true nationality—the character of a united people—as opposed to the conflicting instincts of unreconciled races, or the factious claims of divergent groups? Is not the mechanical subordination to the “State” of Socialism hostile to an individual “nationality”? How, in the ferment of modern progress, can the new wine be prevented from bursting the old bottles? How can government and free action, independence and inter-dependence, be allied in living reality? How can opinion be organised into allegiance to leadership? How can traditions be rendered less formal? How can discipline and development, authority and elasticity, combine? How can the machinery of national custom be brought into real accord with popular aspirations, and the mainstay of character with the modern speed of movement? “Certainly,” as Carlyle insisted, “it is the hugest question ever heretofore propounded to mankind.”

In the proem to the Revolutionary Epick, Disraeli says that the French Revolution marks the greatest political crisis since the Siege of Troy. The paroxysm of that Revolution produced two hollow fictions, the “Rights of Man” and “the Sovereignty of the People.”

Before illustrating the train of Disraeli’s ideas, let me touch on these two doctrines.

The Rights of Man. What is the real meaning of a dogma which annihilates the duties of citizens in declaring the licence of their “rights;” in affirming personal claims as distinguished from popular or legal privileges; in destroying the community by exalting the person?

It was based on Rousseau’s figment of a “Return to Nature.”

All “Returns to Nature” are, if we reflect, a harking back to chaos, a denial of the whole self-developing social state which God has ordained for man. They are the protests of instinct against order, of “the People” against “the Nation,” of isolation against fusion, of “naturalism” against “spiritualism.” One way or the other, they signify relapses into brute force and animal conflict.

Rousseau’s “Return” was a sentimental one, for sentimentality often attends materialism. The best side of Rousseau was that he did undoubtedly leaven the irreverence of his generation with some feeling for God. But Rousseau invented a past on which he founded his hopefulness of sensibility—an inverted optimism. He cried aloud in hysterics, “Man is born free; everywhere he is in chains.” To what freedom was man born? The freedom of confusion. The order that he evolves is the parent of his true freedom—the freedom to work and serve, and to receive justice. The real “Rights of Man” are the rights to justice that order creates. And if that order belies its name, and injustice, disorder, masquerade as divine government, why then Fifth-Monarchy men, French Revolutions, ruining cataclysm, witness to the heavenly destinies, and order is born once more. Rousseau’s sobs resembled those of the hero of French melodrama, who under stage moonshine and stage misfortune, always ejaculates, “Ma mère!” His mere emotion worked on nerves of sterner fibre and facts of harder quality.

Since Disraeli’s death, Nietzsche has propounded a physical “Return to Nature,” which, however, excludes the humanitarian side of the French “Equality.” He has sighed for a gigantic brood of antediluvian anarchs. He has tried to make anarchy heroic. But a monster is not even a man, still less a hero.

All such systems must fail, because, as Disraeli has finely said, “Man is born to adore and to obey.” They contradict the spiritual facts of our structure. For the true Right of Man is to lead wisely and be led loyally in public affairs; neither to steal nor be stolen from in private. These are what Carlyle terms his “correctly articulated mights.” Leadership, loyalty, and social honesty belong to no “state of nature” of which record or even guess is possible. And Disraeli agreed with Carlyle when the latter wrote, after the former had in effect said the same: “... ‘Supply and demand’ we will honour also; and yet how many ‘demands’ are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops!”

But Nietzsche’s theories are luckily untranslatable into action, and inconsistent with any form of the “state.” Rousseau’s theories, on the other hand, are the more dangerous because they are feasible. The “Rights of Man” is a doctrine absolutely at issue with the “Rights of Nations.” The abstract notion of universal “rights” is also at variance with the pressing impulses of physical “wants.” Low wages and long hours are not redressed by the apparatus of ballot-boxes or the cant of independence. Physical needs due to economical causes, which can be modified only by the earnest statesmanship of leaders rising to their responsibilities, are not to be dismissed by the vague generalities of “moral force.” This aspect is powerfully emphasised in Sybil.

“... Add to all these causes of suffering and discontent among the workmen the apprehension of still greater evils, and the tyranny of the ’butties,’ or middlemen, and it will with little difficulty be felt that the public mind of this district was well prepared for the excitement of the political agitator, especially if he were discreet enough rather to descant on their physical sufferings and personal injuries, than to attempt the propagation of abstract political principles with which it was impossible for them to sympathise.... It generally happens, however, that where a mere physical impulse urges the people to insurrection, though it is often an influence of slow growth and movement, the effects are more violent and sometimes more obstinate than when they move under the blended authority of moral and physical necessity, and mix up together the rights and the wants of man.”

The pendant to the “rights” is the “equality” of man. Here, again, nothing is more self-evident than man’s natural inequality. The whole development of societies, which we call civilisation, is for the very purpose of redressing or relieving these inequalities of occasion, of equipment. By nature man, like the brute, starts without equality and without rights. By his “mights” he has created these ideas, and acquired something of their substance by his superior faculties, by the spiritual energy which differentiates him. His “rights” spring from the “law” which he has propagated. The political equality which he has founded more than compensates him for the personal inequality of his beginnings. The “personal equation,” indeed, would imply the reversal both of his nature and of his craftsmanship; of all conditions, moreover, compatible with variety of character and freedom of action. It means, in fact, a denial of the existence of that natural aristocracy which we find in every class and every order, and which decides that everywhere the game of “follow my leader” must be played. What is wanted is a real aristocracy which “claims great privileges for great purposes.” What is always dangerous is the monopoly of action by an aristocracy that shirks its duties, that plays at government, that is dilettante in leadership or sybarite in life; or that, as in the three decades preceding the French Revolution, revenges its exclusion from influence by multiplying sinecures. It is such a class, as contrasted with individuals—wherever found—of genuine capacities, that so often evoked Disraeli’s irony, and has lately been satirised by Mr. Barrie in a whimsy accentuating the natural inequality of man. Speaking through the lips of “Egremont,” in that fine passage where he cheers “Sybil”—the noble daughter of the people, disappointed by the Charter and the Chartists—with a vista of the future, Disraeli says: “The mind of England is the mind ever of the rising race. Trust me it is with the People.... Predominant opinions are generally the opinions of the generation that is vanishing.... It will be a product hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension. It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the few, but by elevating the many.” And again, the great manufacturer, “Millbank,” in Coningsby, is made to remark (after giving distinction as the basis of aristocracy), “that ‘natural aristocracy’ ought to be found ... among those men whom a nation recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you please, birth and standing in the land. They guide opinion, and therefore they govern. I am no leveller. I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing and checking the enterprise of a nation. I like man to be free—really free; free in his industry as well as his body....” As Carlyle puts it: “... I say you did not make the land of England; and by the possession of it you are bound to furnish guidance and government to England....”—“A high class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices.”[51]

It should not be forgotten, and I shall afterwards illustrate, that in these and many other respects Carlyle’s teaching chimes with Disraeli’s. “... That speciosities which are not realities can no longer be.... What is an aristocracy? A corporation of the best, of the bravest.... Whatsoever aristocracy does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes of that, is not safe; neither is the land it rules in safe.... We must find a real aristocracy....” And so with priesthood.

In “Angela Pisani”—a dazzling dream-picture of three generations in France—by Disraeli’s early intimate, Lord Strangford, occurs a striking outburst against natural equality, that solecism in ideas, that remainder biscuit of the French Revolution.

“... Go and preach equality to the deep seas, ... that the oyster is equal to the whale or the starfish to the shark; you will succeed there sooner than you will be able to alter the relative grades of the five races of humanity. It is a law which man must unmake himself, ere he can change, that the Caucasian will aspire as the highest, and the negro will grovel as the basest.” Disraeli’s attitude was the same in Contarini Fleming:—

“... The law that regulates man must be founded on a knowledge of his nature, or that law leads him to ruin. What is the nature of man? In every clime and every creed we shall find a new definition.... What then? Is the German a different animal from the Italian? Let me inquire in turn whether you conceive the negro of the Gold Coast to be the same being as the Esquimaux who tracks his way over the Polar snows? The most successful legislators are those who have consulted the genius of the people.... One thing is quite certain, that the system we have pursued to attain a knowledge of man has entirely failed....”

Although “Equality” ignores alike the instinct and the clue of “race,” it asserts in practice the pandemonium of race-warfare; because in imagining that man is born equipped, it ignores his great acquirement of “nationality,” which blends the reconcilables of “race” into one ideal whole—a league of common traditions, language, habits, institutions, duties, and privileges—of “solidarity”—without the bond of blood or the necessity for bloodshed. Nationality thus brings the specific qualities of races into the common stock. Disraeli has often harped on the theme that a “nation” is no “aggregate of atoms,” but a corporate individuality; and indeed the force of individuality lies at the root of all his conceptions. But in truth the whole fiction of “natural equality” springs from a sort of native envy. As Goethe sings—

“Men stick at reaching what is great,
Yet only grudge an equal state.
To deem your equals all you know—
No envy worse the world can show.”

Crises, according to him in 1833, were determined by causes far other than these figments of “natural” laws—

“... When I examine the state of European society with the unimpassioned spirit which the philosopher can alone command, I perceive that it is in a state of transition—one from feudal to federal principles. This I conceive to be the sole and secret cause of all the convulsions that have occurred and are to occur.”[52]

All this has proved, and is proving true. The civil and legal “equality” of united nationality and of unifying empire is replacing the material “equality” of classes or of individuals.

“Natural” equality means “physical” equality, which was the true gist of the many cries of the French Revolution. But its hurricane swept away classes and privilege alone; the “equality” it created, that is to say, was social and civil. Of civil “equality” Disraeli was always the spokesman; for in England, civil equality means abolition of monopolies. Privilege, as the ennobling boon of merit, stands open to all, and the limits of the political orders or social classes to which it is attached, are corrected by the wide freedom of public opinion and discussion. “I hold that civil equality,” said Disraeli at Glasgow in 1873, “the equality of all subjects before the law, and a law which recognises the personal rights of all subjects, is the only foundation of a perfect commonwealth.” His most striking utterances in The Press from 1853 to 1859, and this Glasgow address, are perhaps his most notable commentaries on this theme.

These are no mere subtleties. “Physical equality” has exercised a very practical bearing on the doctrines of the Manchester School and their relations to Sir Robert Peel’s double reform, above all to those interests of Labour which both affected. I shall show this in my next chapter.[53] Suffice it now to say that Disraeli descried that in adopting the “Right to physical happiness” doctrine of Manchester, at the very moment when he unshackled commerce and undid the Corn Laws, Peel had adopted a principle which logically demands an “unlimited employment of labour”—a thing inconsistent at once with his restriction of Labour by removing the restraints on competition, and, as Disraeli thought, with the very existence of states and of nations. Peel thus became unconsciously cosmopolitan, at the very juncture when he settled commerce and unsettled labour—

“The leading principle of this new school,” explained Disraeli, treating of “equality” in 1873, “is that there is no happiness which is not material, and that every living being has a right to share in that physical welfare. The first obstacle to their purpose is found in the rights of private property. Therefore these must be abolished. But the social system must be established on some principle, and therefore for the rights of property they would substitute the rights of Labour. Now these cannot fully be enjoyed, if there be any limit to employment. The great limit to employment, to the rights of Labour, and to the physical and material equality of man is found in the division of the world into states and nations. Thus, as civil equality would abolish privilege, social equality would destroy classes, so material and physical equality strikes at the principle of patriotism, and is prepared to abrogate countries.”

It was just this perception that enabled Disraeli nearly thirty years earlier to predict—as we shall see—so much that has come and is coming to pass.

The third cry of the French Revolution was Human Brotherhood. The Christian ideal of inter-nationality, which, it is to be hoped, may ultimately be realised through the Brotherhood of Nations, is the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God. But the fraternity of revolution eliminated both the Brotherhood of Nations and the Fatherhood of God. The result was a murderous anarchy—a Brotherhood of Cain.

Such disorders compelled their own cure in their own country. Although they flooded Europe with opinions at war with beliefs, and upheld a cosmopolitan model, they brought the French a deliverer who declined into a despot. Personality avenged herself. And the eventual remedy for Napoleonism has in its turn been found in a Republic which, discarding the sovereignty of man, has also discarded the sovereignty of God.

The effects of such a government are best perceived in two recent and remarkable books, M. Demolin’s “À quoi tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons,” and M. Cerfberr’s “Essai sur le Mouvement Social et Intellectuel en France depuis 1789.” The perpetual preponderance of the bourgeoisie has raised a bureaucracy. The Charter of the Revolution has culminated in middle-class officialism. The over-centralisation of government by a few groups, who do not represent the varied elements of a great nation, has caused a dearth of individual initiative, a lack of personal self-reliance and social free-play, a tendency towards the withering dictatorship of state-socialism, which underlies the unfitness of France for colonisation, and which both these acute thinkers depict and deplore; while the late Professor Mommsen, commenting on Cæsar’s union of Democracy with Empire, employs the same arguments.

That state which best represents national character enjoys the freest play of institutions, favours the finest shape of spirit, public and private, will wield the most formative influence among nations, expand the most easily, and propagate itself by expansion. And the state which best embodies the national will, is where the legislature is in keenest touch with the executive, where institutions are organic, where representation is popular, and where centralisation is foreign to the national genius. This has, unfortunately, never been realised in France. She was centralised to an amazing degree long before her memorable outburst; and De Tocqueville has well shown that her attempts to unite judicial with legislative functions were the surest signs of her lack of “solidarity.” Her great upheaval was predicted by Bolingbroke more than forty years before it occurred, just because he discerned that her ancient constitution ignored a popular representation. De Tocqueville himself, too, only proves that the aristocratic centralisation of old France has been replaced by the collectivist centralisation of its new democracy. Both in spirit are the same. Centralisation, whatever its forms, precludes the fair and free distribution of activities. It hoards and absorbs the national character. These are its original sins. But Disraeli has also pointed out that, for many reasons, France remains the sole ancient country that can afford to begin again.

So much for the “Rights of Man.” One word still on “the Sovereignty of the People.”

“A people,” said Disraeli, as early as 1836, in his Spirit of Whiggism, “is a species; a civilised community is a nation. Now a nation is a work of art and a work of time. A nation is gradually created by a variety of influences.... These influences create the nation—these form the national mind.... If you destroy the political institutions which these influences have called into force, and which are the machinery by which they constantly act, you destroy the nation. The nation, in a state of anarchy and dissolution, then becomes a people; and after experiencing all the consequent misery, like a company of bees spoiled of their queen and rifled of their hive, they set to again and establish themselves into a society....”

“The People” is a phrase of physiology, not of politics. It is an abstruse name for a multitude; it ignores temperament and will. Stripped of its high sound, its “Sovereignty” means government by miscellany, the censorship of the census. Its political bearings are as purely arithmetical as are the corresponding ethical bearings of the Utilitarian creed; for they both disregard the many-sided nature of man. Although derived from the speculations of some late seventeenth-century republicans in England, the French application of the theory—Burke’s “Wisdom told by the Head”—was entirely new. It was not republicanism, the government by qualified members of ordered classes: it was a despotism by the crowd as crowd. Such a “Democracy” has never been the permanent scheme of government in any nation, although “Liberal opinion” has relied too often on its simplicity. “One man, one vote,” quantity instead of quality is in truth no principle at all; and this attempt to confuse the Book of Wisdom with the Book of Numbers is a feat reserved for modern periods alone. All earlier systems of democracy were more or less discriminate, for no indiscriminate state can cohere, and both freedom and order are based on discrimination. The Attic Democracy demanded a degraded class of unleisured, unemancipated slaves. The American Republic, which has freed serfs and abolished leisure, possesses a peculiar stability, which will outwear its occasional corruption because it exists through a landed democracy—one impossible in overcrowded Europe—as we shall find Disraeli emphasising in my American chapter.

In a word, the logical outcome of the “Sovereignty of the People” is the tyranny of plebiscite. But a “plebiscite” dispenses with the very principle of representation, for where all decide equally, why should any be represented? Political power exercisable by all can only arise when all are sufficiently qualified. But it is always the some, never the all, who are competent. Even in their proper sphere of merely personal choice, how false and fatal most plebiscites have proved!—“Not this man, but Barabbas.”

Vox populi is only vox Dei through the gradual institutions that nations create; not through the wayward moods and momentary clamours of “the people.” The whole problem is how at once to range and to raise public opinion—the popular conscience; how to preserve moral, without retarding material, progress; how to inspire “progress” itself with the conviction that it consists in following the highest leadership; how, again, to ensure such leadership by the constant association of duty with privilege, and responsibility with power; how to recruit it by every means that the spread of enlightenment can furnish.

“On man alone the fate of man is placed,”

sang Disraeli, in the Revolutionary Epick; and of “opinion”—

“Physical strength and moral were united,
And I, the pledge of their true love was born.”

But for this purpose the national imagination must be reckoned with. “... When that faculty is astir in a nation,” he has insisted, “it will sacrifice even physical comfort to follow its impulses.” The struggle will always continue for national unity, but it takes generations to perceive that colonial federation, for example, is as requisite a means to this idea as native institutions representing real elements. “... A political institution is a machine; the motive power is the national character,” says “Sidonia;” “Society in this country is perplexed, almost paralysed. How are the elements of the nation to be again blended together? In what spirit is that reorganisation to take place?...”

And again, so late as 1870, in the preface to Lothair, summarising his works, Disraeli observes: “... National institutions were the ramparts of the multitude against large estates exercising political power derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory—and once it had been in practice—the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogatives of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwarks of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and, relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated, and their physical quality as a race was threatened....”

On the other hand, the incongruity of modern political machinery was never far from Disraeli’s thoughts. “... Whatever may have been the faults of the ancient governments,” he muses in Contarini Fleming, “they were in closer relation to the times, the countries, and to the governed, than ours. The ancients invented their governments according to their wants. The moderns have adopted foreign policies, and then modelled their conduct upon this borrowed regulation. This circumstance has occasioned our manners and our customs to be so confused and absurd and unphilosophical.... He who profoundly meditates upon the situation of modern Europe, will also discover how productive of misery has been the senseless adoption of Oriental customs by Northern peoples....” And Disraeli also distinguished between the direct democracy of multitude and that of “popular” institutions.

Nothing is less truly “popular” than “the people” as a “democracy,” for the despotism of many is as odious as the arbitrary will of one, and even more fatal than the government by groups of the few. This is the distinction on which he expatiated in a famous speech of 1847 at Aylesbury, where he contrasted “popular principles” with “Liberal opinions”—

“As it is not the interest of the rich and the powerful to pursue popular principles of government, the wisdom of great men and the experience of ages have taken care that these principles should be cherished and perpetuated in the form of institutions. Thus the majesty that guards the multitude is embodied in a throne; the faith that consoles them hovers round the altar of a national Church; the spirit of discussion, which is the root of public liberty, flourishes in the atmosphere of a free Parliament.”

These, in the rough, are some of Disraeli’s ideas as to the new democracy. From the first, as we shall see, he compassed the renewal of the English democratic idea—that of democracy as an element—in opposition alike to the State tutelage of the French, and to that form of democracy which means the undue power of one class in the nation. His Reform Bill of 1867 was the accomplishment of his earliest hopes, and the realisation of principles distinct from the spasms of doctrinaire “Liberalism.”

He regarded our Constitution—the quintessence of the English character immanent in English institutions—as a real though limited monarchy, tempered by a democracy which is in effect neither more nor less than a natural aristocracy.

“Aristocracy,” as a universal principle and not the badge of a particular class, is the committal of political privilege far more to representative influence than to powerful interests. A “natural” aristocracy must comprehend and absorb the superiors of every class in all their varieties.

“The Monarchy of the Tories,” Disraeli exclaimed in his youth,[54] “is more democratic than the Republic of the Whigs.” “The House of Commons,” he exclaimed many years later, “is a more aristocratic body than the House of Lords.” In each House, through all its pronouncements, he recognised that the democratic element is aristocratic, the aristocratic element democratic. That the representative assembly of the Commons, which is elected, should include all that is best from each class which by its qualities has earned the boon of the franchise; that the representative assembly, which is not elected, should include more and more not only those whose aggrandisement stands for the interests of property, but those too whose intellect and attainments entitle them to distinction. Nor, of course, can the fact be ignored that through hereditary honours the Estate of the Commons, which constantly reinforces the Estate of the Peers, is, in its turn, as constantly refreshed from the Estate of the Peers. And from first to last, in theory, as well as in action, he upheld the land as the deepest foundation of England’s greatness of character. I could quote passage after passage, both from books and speeches, and regarding subjects the most various, in which he presses home the substantial importance of a territorial constitution, and the fact that the landed interest is in truth not only a safeguard for freedom in peace and vigour in war, but also an industrial interest of the highest order; and doubly so, because by sentiment, by tradition, by its contribution to local government, to stability, to the social scale of duties conditioning the tenure of property, to physique, its influence is essential and exceptional. I shall content myself with a citation from a speech of 1860, and it may be remembered that the acute De Tocqueville singles out the self-seclusion of the official bourgeoisie from the land as a chief contributory to the French Revolution—

“... I look round upon Europe at the present moment, and I see no country of any importance in which political liberty can be said to exist. I attribute the creation and maintenance of our liberties to the influence of the land, and to our tenure of land. In England there are large properties round which men can rally, and that in my mind forms the only security in an old European country against that centralised form of government which has prevailed, and must prevail, in every European country where there is no such counterpoise. It is our tenure of land to which we are indebted for our public liberties, because it is the tenure of land which makes local government a fact in England, and which allows the great body of Englishmen to be ruled by traditionary influence and by habit, instead of being governed, as in other countries, by mere police.”

Disraeli was always staunch to the land. After the Corn Law repeal, he strove pertinaciously till he succeeded in removing those especial burdens which unfairly hampered their free competition, and which were originally the price of peculiar privileges then removed. But though he always desired a preponderance of the various landed interests, he never wished for their predominance. And to the last he refused to allow any spurious cry for especial measures on their behalf to be raised when a temporary depression due to the seasons arose, which he always distinguished from permanent causes connected with social revolutions.[55]

To develop our ancient institutions was his lifelong specific. From his earliest pronouncements, those in the Letter to Lord Lyndhurst, those in What is he? and in Gallomania, those in the Spirit of Whiggism, those in his first election speeches, extending over a period of five years before he was returned, in his three first political novels, to his latest orations on Conservatism as a “national” cause, he laid the greatest stress on the function and origin of the three co-ordinate Estates of the Realm—“popular classes established into political orders”[56]—which under monarchy form our Constitution. And, while to the end he praised that mighty force of public opinion which has in the person of the Press almost divested Parliament of its ancestral office as “the grand inquest” of national grievances, he still held the “organisation of opinion” to remain the essence of the party system; while he increasingly desired the presence in Parliament of elements at once various and choice,[57] and the absence from its councils of any preponderant sects or sections. Like Burke, he believed that Parliament should be under every changing phase of national development “the express image of the feelings of the nation;” like Bolingbroke, he deemed that it should be also the collective assemblage of its wisdom. He regarded these “estates” as the embodiment of great national interests organised on the principle of distinct duties conditioning privilege; and he desired that, however modified, they should never be altered so as to impair the great national institutions as whose buttresses they were built to serve.

Looking back historically, he discerned that some hundred and twenty years before the birth of English Liberalism, a country and “Old England” party, perplexed by dynastic and economic problems, confronted too by the semi-scientific rationalism of a new age, had been first schooled into comprehensive, generous, and “national” aspirations by a great but lost leader, and had then been baffled by a set of great families. Most of these began by professing Republican principles, and all of them were branded in the literature of Queen Anne as the “Venetian oligarchy.” These families aimed steadily for more than a century at engrossing the whole power of the State. Their bias from 1700 to Sunderland’s peerage bill in 1718, and from 1718 to the Reform Bill of 1831 remained Republican. But so long as a king was content to be a puppet dancing on their wires, and the nation to be cowed into lethargy, they could dispense with theoretical forms, mainly upheld as a ladder towards oligarchical power. From time to time they assumed popular causes, but somehow they never succeeded in themselves being popular, because their chief object as a party organisation was “the establishment of an oligarchical government by virtue of a Republican cry;”[58] because, as Disraeli has again shown, English revolutions have always been in favour of privilege traditionally distributed, while foreign revolutions have been against all privilege whatever; because the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne and the first two Georges sought a tabula rasa—a plain map, as opposed to the picture with perspective of English institutions. They were theoretically for “liberty and property”—the “New Whig” catchword of Queen Anne’s reign that replaced the old one of “Liberty” alone, in which both Whigs and Tories joined at the revolution—but their bias was always more for property than for liberty. They sought to amass money and power through the amassing classes. They never studied the varied interests of the whole nation. Walpole usurped their place, but retained their influence, and by his virtue George I. reigned rather than ruled over the towns instead of over the country. At first these oligarchs kicked against the growing management of a sole minister, but the shrewd steadiness of a superior will overmastered them, and Newcastle remained on Walpole’s side—the insignificant representative of their tamed confederacy. Trade ceased to follow the land, but tended more and more to acquire it by purchase, until a fresh moneyed oligarchy, which acquired fresh titles, was formed. The great Chatham broke it for a time; and afterwards George III. obstinately mutinied against its shackles. The French overthrow transformed the Whig cry of Republicanism to the Whig cry of Jacobinism. “... Between the advent of Mr. Pitt and the resurrection of Lord Grey, ... ever on the watch for a cry to carry them into power, they mistook the yell of Jacobinism for the chorus of an emancipated people, and fancied, in order to take the throne by storm, that nothing was wanting but to hoist the tricolour and to cover their haughty brows with a red cap. This fatal blunder clipped the wings of Whiggism; nor is it possible to conceive a party that had effected so many revolutions and governed a great country for so long a period more broken, sunk, and shattered, more desolate and disheartened, than these same Whigs at the Peace of Paris.” But all proved fruitless, until at last the vast body of the nation—the real “people”—reasserted themselves, and, by emphasising Parliamentary reform, compelled oligarchs, mistrustful of them at heart,[59] to “do something.” What they “did” was to aggrandise the middle classes, on whom they had always relied; and a new revolution was the consequence. Throughout more than a century and a half, despite noble and national intervals, they constantly betrayed themselves as a “faction who headed a revolution with which they did not sympathise, in order to possess themselves of a power which they cannot wield.” In 1718 they “sought to govern the country by swamping the House of Commons.” In 1836 they were for “swamping” the House of Lords. Their drift was continued against the national institutions, the conjoined independence and inter-dependence of which thwarted their inveteracy. Their plan in the end became avowedly cosmopolitan; and when that occurred it became doubly dangerous, for to “centralisation”—monopoly of power—was added the no-principle of “laissez-faire,” the abandonment of leadership to chaos.

The great national struggle against Napoleon practically obliterated party distinctions in England, although there was still a remnant of those who are, in Burke’s words: “... the most pernicious of all factions, one in the interest and under the direction of foreign powers.” A lull ensued. Both Toryism and Whiggism withered; the first from sheer inanition of those popular principles which Canning in vain sought to rekindle; the second from the sheer impossibility of withstanding the name of Wellington and the memories of Waterloo. Toryism turned against freedom and Liberalism against order. Public spirit waned with the decay of party opposition. The great warriors dwindled into petty place-men until

“Where are the Grenvilles? Turned as usual. Where
My friends the Whigs? Exactly where they were;”

until the “Marney” of Sybil expired “in the full faith of dukeism and babbling of strawberry leaves.”

“From that period till 1830,” to resume my citations from his earliest pamphlets, “the tactics of the Whigs consisted in gently and gradually extricating themselves from their false position as the disciples of Jacobinism, and assuming their ancient post as the hereditary guardians of an hereditary monarchy.” To ease the transition, they invented Liberalism, a bridge to regain the lost mainland, and recross on tiptoe the chasm over which they had sprung with so much precipitation. “A dozen years of ‘Liberal principles’ broke up the national party of England—cemented by half a century of prosperity and glory, compared with which all the annals of the realm are dim and lack-lustre. Yet so weak intrinsically was the oligarchical faction, that their chief, despairing to obtain a monopoly of power for his party, elaborately announced himself as the champion of his patrician order, and attempted to coalesce with the Liberalised leader of the Tories. Had that negotiation not led to the result which was originally intended by those interested, the Riots of Paris would not have occasioned the Reform of London. It is a great delusion to believe that revolutions are ever effected by a nation. It is a faction, and generally a small one, that overthrows a dynasty or remodels a constitution. A small party, strong by long exile from power, and desperate of success except by desperate means, invariably has recourse to a coup d’état.... The rights and liberties of a nation can only be preserved by institutions.... Life is short, man is imaginative, our passions high.... Let us suppose our ancient monarchy abolished, our independent hierarchy reduced to a stipendiary sect, the gentlemen of England deprived of their magisterial functions, and metropolitan prefects and sub-prefects established in the counties and principal towns commanding a vigorous and vigilant police, and backed by an army under the immediate order of a single House of Parliament.... But where then will be the liberties of England? Who will dare disobey London?... When these merry times arrive—the times of extraordinary tribunals and extraordinary taxes ... the phrase ‘Anti-Reformer’ will serve as well as that of ‘Malignant,’ and be as valid a plea as the former title for harassing and plundering those who venture to wince under the crowning mercies of centralisation.... I would address myself to the English Radicals. I do not mean those fine gentlemen or those vulgar adventurers who, in this age of quackery, may sail into Parliament by hoisting for the nonce the false colours of the movement; but I mean that honest and considerable party ... who have a definite object which they distinctly avow.... Not merely that which is just, but that which is also practicable, should be the aim of a sagacious politician. Let the Radicals well consider whether in attempting to achieve their avowed object they are not, in fact, only assisting the secret views of a party whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their own than the existing system, whose genius I believe they entirely misapprehend.” And after commenting on the “preponderance of a small class” under the new arrangement, the dangerous tendency towards centralisation and the perils of the reformed municipal corporations, he thus concludes: “If there be a slight probability of ever establishing in this country a more democratic government than the English Constitution, it will be as well, I conceive, for those who love their rights, to maintain that constitution, and if the more recent measures of the Whigs, however plausible their first aspect, have in fact been a departure from the democratic character of that constitution, it will be as well for the English nation to oppose ... the spirit of Whiggism.”

No student of the Croker Papers can deny that some of the leading Whigs did in the period immediately succeeding the Reform Bill plot for a Republican purpose. No historian will deny that the Reform Bill, by the exclusion of “Labour” from the franchise, and its deprival at the same time of the ancient rights which industry had possessed, left open a rankling sore. In this tract of 1836 Disraeli exposes the machination and probes the wound. Even thus early he feared the predominance of a plutocracy, “the supreme triumph of cash” at an era when, in Carlyle’s phrase also, “Cash Payment” is fast becoming “the universal sole nexus of man to man;” while he determined, if ever he had the power, to redress the balance by including the labouring classes. In 1848 he had spoken in Parliament on these questions to the same effect as he had spoken on the hustings in 1833, even favouring, as he had then advocated, triennial parliaments, except that under the later circumstances it might be an unnecessary change; and denouncing, as he had then denounced, “universal suffrage,” and on the same grounds. In this remarkable speech he forecasted that signal settlement which nearly twenty years later he was to secure. I shall shortly connect many utterances of his, ranging over more than thirty years; but there are three passages from this declaration, made at a time before the re-modelling of the reforms of 1832 had been agreed upon as an open problem, which I ask leave to excerpt as a prelude, for they strike the very keynotes of his domestic policy. Disraeli pointed out that the Radical Hume was taking property as the basis of suffrage fully as much as the Whigs had done in 1832, and that the same bourgeois predominance would ensue.

“... Now, sir, for one I think property is sufficiently represented in this House. I am prepared to support the system of 1832 until I see that the circumstances and necessities of the country require a change; but I am convinced that when that change comes, it will be one that will have more regard for other sentiments, qualities, and conditions than the mere possession of property as a qualification for the exercise of the political franchise.” And he then definitely protested against being ranked among those who accepted finality in that “wherein there has been, throughout the history of this ancient country, frequent and continuous change—the construction of this estate of the realm. I oppose this new scheme because it does not appear to be adapted in any way to satisfy the wants of the age, or to be conceived in the spirit of the times.” He opposed it also because this Radical motion, like the great Whig measure, really implied the undue ascendancy of the middle classes—

“... The House will not forget what that class has done in its legislative enterprises. I do not use the term ‘middle class’ with any disrespect; no one more than myself estimates what the urban population has done for the liberty and civilisation of mankind; but I speak of the middle class as of one which avowedly aims at predominance, and therefore it is expedient to ascertain how far the fact justifies a confidence in their political capacity. It was only at the end of the last century that the middle class rose into any considerable influence, chiefly through Mr. Pitt,[60] that minister whom they are always abusing.” He proceeds to praise their abolition of the slave trade: “... A noble and sublime act, but carried with an entire ignorance of the subject, as the event has proved. How far it has aggravated the horrors of slavery, I stop not now to inquire.... The middle class emancipated the negroes, but they never proposed a Ten Hour Bill.... The interests of the working classes of England were not much considered in that arrangement. Having tried their hand at Colonial reform, ... they next turned their hands to Parliamentary reform, and carried the Reform Bill. But observe, in that operation they destroyed, under the pretence of its corrupt exercise, the old industrial franchise, and they never constructed a new one.... So that whether we look to their Colonial, or their Parliamentary reform, they entirely neglected the industrial classes. Having failed in Colonial as well as Parliamentary reform, ... they next tried Commercial reform, and introduced free imports under the specious name of free trade. How were the interests of the working classes considered in this third movement? More than they were in their Colonial or their Parliamentary reform? On the contrary, while the interests of capital were unblushingly advocated, the displaced labour of the country was offered neither consolation nor compensation, but was told that it must submit to be absorbed in the mass. In their Colonial, Parliamentary, and Commercial reforms there is no evidence of any sympathy with the working classes; and every one of the measures so forced upon the country has at the same time proved disastrous. Their Colonial reform ruined the colonies, and increased slavery. Their Parliamentary reform, according to their own account, was a delusion which has filled the people with disappointment and disgust. If their Commercial reform have not proved ruinous, then the picture ... presented to us of the condition of England every day for the last four or five months must be a gross misrepresentation. In this state of affairs, as a remedy for half a century of failure, we are under their auspices to take refuge in financial reform,[61] which I predict will prove their fourth failure, and one in which the interests of the working classes will be as little considered and accomplished.”

The third passage concerns the symptoms of a need and the moment for change. Leaders, he argues, should educate and prepare the people, and not allow mere agitators to manufacture grievances, but rather prick the educated and well-born to remember the duties by virtue of which alone they hold their position.

“... A new profession has been discovered which will supply the place of obsolete ones. It is a profession which requires many votaries.

“‘Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, pictor, aliptes,
Augur, schœnobates, medicus, magus.’

The business of this profession is to discover or invent great questions. But the remarkable circumstance is this—that the present movement has not in the slightest degree originated in any class of the people.... The moral I draw from all this—from observing this system of organised agitation—this playing and paltering with popular passions for the aggrandisement of one too ambitious class—the moral I draw is this: why are the people of England forced to find leaders among these persons? The proper leaders of the people are the gentlemen of England. If they are not the leaders of the people, I do not see why there should be gentlemen. Yes, it is because the gentlemen of England have been negligent of their duties, and unmindful of their station, that the system of professional agitation, so ruinous to the best interests of the country, has arisen in England. It was not always so. My honourable friends around me call themselves the country party. Why, that was the name once in England of a party who were the foremost to vindicate popular rights—who were the natural leaders of the people, and the champions of everything national and popular.... When Sir William Wyndham was the leader of the country party, do you think he would have allowed any chairman or deputy-chairman, any lecturer or pamphleteer, to deprive him of his hold on the heart of the people of this country? No, never! Do you think that when the question of suffrage was brought before the House, he would have allowed any class who had boldly avowed their determination to obtain predominance to take up and settle that question?...”

Nor let him be misconstrued in his views of the ancestral temperament of the Whigs. Nothing is more remarkable in the chronicle of combinations than the fact that for more than a century a party, the most exclusive in its operation, was considered the least. The recent publications of the Portland and Harley Papers establish beyond a doubt that while the “New Whigs” of Queen Anne were in large measure a commercial syndicate that “made a corner” in power, the old Whigs of George III. were an aristocratic oligarchy that subverted rule, both popular and personal, and monopolised government.

“How an oligarchy,” says Disraeli, in the preface to Lothair, “had been substituted for a kingdom, and a narrow-minded and bigoted fanaticism flourished in the name of religious liberty, were problems long to me insoluble, but which early interested me. But what most attracted my musing, even as a boy, was the elements of our political parties, and the strange mystification by which that which was national in its constitution had become odious, and that which was exclusive was presented as popular. What has mainly led to this confusion of public thought, and this uneasiness of society, is our habitual carelessness in not distinguishing between the excellence of a principle and its injurious or obsolete application. The feudal system may have worn out, but its main principle, that the tenure of property should be the fulfilment of duty, is the essence of good government. The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it government sinks into police and a nation is degraded into a mob.” And he continues with reference to the Toryism of a later period: “... Those who in theory were the national party, and who sheltered themselves under the institutions of the country against the oligarchy, had, both by a misconception and a neglect of their duties, become, and justly become, odious; while the oligarchy ... had, by the patronage of certain general principles which they only meagrely applied, assumed, and to a certain degree acquired, the character of a popular party. But no party was national; one was exclusive and odious, and the other liberal and cosmopolitan.”

His history—I speak as a student of the reigns of Queen Anne and the Georges—will bear scrutiny. Indeed, he carries the descent of Whiggism some steps further, and traces its pedigree back to the Roundhead Independents,[62] and even the favourites of Henry VIII., enriched by the spoil of the plundered abbeys. But he never denied, or wished to gainsay, the special and signal qualities of the Whigs’ conspicuous service. They had reconciled religious liberty to the consecration of the State, and had constantly proved themselves a “national” party[63]—that solecism in words but truth in ideas. This he repeatedly acknowledges. Neither did he ever spare the soulless, cramped, hollow, and shrivelled Toryism of the period preceding Bolingbroke’s and Wyndham’s struggle to recall it to its origins; or again of the period after Pitt’s generous concessions were overwhelmed by the Jacobin deluge, and neutralised by the impersonalities of Addington and Perceval; by the Phariseeism of Liverpool’s puzzle-headedness; by the pigheadedness of Eldon and Wetherell. Nor did he ever deny that pseudo-Toryism had often nursed the very vices of the Whig oligarchy.[64] What he did contend, from first to last, was that any party which by its elements makes for national growth and union, and favours the free play of custom in institutions, is “national;” while any party encouraging class warfare, class preponderance, and cosmopolitan theories repugnant to the genius of those institutions, will be “anti-national;” that the democratic possibilities of our constitution must be spread, as opportunities arise to enlarge the “estate of the Commons;” yet that this must never mean the enthronement of either Oligarchy or Democracy in place of our mixed government; further, that in all such expansion influence is more important than interest; that theorisers must never blind us to the distinction between the “Rights of Man” and the duties of English citizens, between private and public equality, between the “Sovereignty of the People” and a national government; that over-government is a fatal evil, but that individual leadership is a priceless privilege.

* * * * *

The Reform Act raised the whole question of Representation. Is its aim monotony or variety? If it is necessarily elective, must it not logically end in becoming a plebiscite? Will a vote open to all be prized by any? And is suffrage any panacea for suffering?

Before the Reform Bill of 1832, Disraeli wrote, musing on Athens, and contrasting the strong simplicity of Greek literature with the imitative splendour of Rome, “... A mighty era, prepared by the blunders of long centuries, is at hand. Ardently I hope that the necessary change in human existence may be effected by the voice of philosophy alone; but I tremble and am silent. There is no bigotry so terrible as the bigotry of a country that flatters itself that it is philosophical.” In introducing the great Act of 1867, he observed: “... The political rights of the working classes which existed before the Act of 1832, and which not only existed, but were acknowledged, were on that occasion disregarded and even abolished, and during the whole period that has since elapsed in consequence of the great vigour that has been given to the Government of this country, and of the multiplicity of subjects commanding interest that have engaged and engrossed attention, no great inconvenience has been experienced from that cause. Still, during all that time there has been a feeling, sometimes a very painful feeling, that questions have arisen which have been treated in this House without that entire national sympathy which is desirable.”

The Reform Bill and its sequels transferred the immemorial franchise of toilers to the middle classes, who were to be further aggrandised by the repeal of the Corn Laws.[65] They raised the revolutionary bitterness of Toil in England and Religion in Ireland, both of which they provoked to physical force. The Act proved rather a measure for the House of Commons than for the Commons themselves. It was the makeshift and stop-gap of oligarchy in distress. Its immediate effects were to wipe out that parliamentary opposition on which the health of party government depends,[66] to encroach on the independent influence of the House of Lords, to end, it is true unintentionally, the “Venetian Constitution” of those who enfeebled their cause in 1837 by resolving to continue as oligarchs when the weapon of oligarchy had vanished; while none the less it left the monarch a doge, and the multitude a cipher; a crown still “robbed of its prerogatives, a Church controlled by a commission, and an aristocracy that does not lead.” Such were the joint results of the two large and once great parties that had lost principles in their search after organisation, the one by thwarting, the other by tricking the popular voice. It sharpened the warfare between rich and poor, afterwards aggravated by the acceptance of the principle of unrestricted competition; it precipitated a plutocracy, it helped to set class against class, and it became a prop of that calculating materialism which exalted “utility.” On the other hand, its indirect benefits were many. “It set men a-thinking” (I quote from Sybil); “it enlarged the horizon of political experience; it led the public mind to ponder somewhat on the circumstances of our national history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which, they found, were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different from what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.” This latter was an especial province of Disraeli. Carlyle also, as a social regenerator appealing to higher sanctions than the “useful,” was able to address the newly awakened “popular intelligence.”

Here again Disraeli is in curious accord with Carlyle, the difference between them being that Disraeli, a doer as well as a seer, discerned in the traditional “orders” or “estates” of the realm real curatives of a sick body politic. Both protested against a state based on statistics and a progress that was arithmetical. Both were quick to discriminate, under the surface of parties, between the influences which made for cementing and those which made for dissolving the nation. Both saw in the conservatism and liberalism of the ’thirties, on the one side a pretence of protecting the forms they enfeebled, on the other a pretext and a sop for the universal suffrage which their professions logically implied. Disraeli perceived that such a French democracy was alien to England, and meant eventually some sort of unenlightened despotism, and the aggravation of a government by favouritism and through interference. He therefore resolved to reinspire the three “estates”—and if possible the Crown—with reality; and thus, in extending franchise, to extend it as the privilege of an order, earned by thrift, education, and intelligence, while he sought to found it on a basis so stable that leadership might never sink into being the sport of a fluid and fickle ignorance. Like Carlyle, he rejoiced that “opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print; the representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament;” he hailed the spread of knowledge among the mass so early as in the Revolutionary Epick. But, unlike Carlyle, he did not deem this increasing power fatal to parliamentary institutions; indeed, he regarded Parliament as a body privileged to lead and leaven “opinion,” and one that should never abandon its proper functions of initiative. Both Parliament and the Press in his eyes were vents for that free discussion inseparable from political health, but the one ought to form a school for statesmen, the other an arena for critics. And Disraeli also held and enforced that parties should never be particularist, but should rest on some national principle instead of on incoherent prejudices. Parties should represent broad attitudes towards working institutions. Only thus can they escape debasement into sets on the one hand, and shams on the other. If parties are split up into intriguing factions, they are solvents; if they become merely the masks of disregarded principles, they grow lifeless and hypocritical. They are at once “humbug and humdrum.”

In his fine speech of February, 1850, on Agricultural Distress (a distress greatly due to the unrestricted competition of English land with foreign acres,[67] and only to be met by what he then proposed and long afterwards carried—the relief of its peculiar burdens), Disraeli dwelt on the sad fact that the labourers of the land made no appeal to Parliament. “Why, what is that,” he urged, “but a want of confidence in the institutions of the country?” Cobden, who definitely and avowedly sought the predominance of one portion alone, of middle-class individual interest, gave an ironical cheer. Carlyle had already published his philippic against Parliament. But Disraeli—and with justice—continued—

“... The honourable gentleman cheers as if I sanctioned such doctrines: I have never sanctioned the expression of such feelings; I never used language elsewhere which I have not been ready to repeat in this House. I never said one thing in one place, and another in another. I have confidence in the justice and wisdom of the House of Commons, although I sit with the minority; I have expressed that confidence in other places.... I have expressed the conviction that I earnestly entertain, that this House, instead of being an assembly with a deaf ear and a callous heart to the sufferings of the agricultural body, would, on the contrary, be found to be an assembly prompt to express sympathy, prompt to repair, if it might be, even the injury, necessary in the main as they might think it, which they had entailed on the agricultural classes of the country.... I have that confidence in the good sense of the English people that ... they will deem we are only doing our duty, we are only consulting their interests in taking every opportunity to alleviate their burdens, in trying to devise remedies for their burdens; and, if we cannot accomplish immediately any great financial result, at least achieving this great political purpose—that we may teach them not to despair of the institutions of their country.”

This purpose he had sought to accomplish two years before, when, in 1848, he proved by a speech which, it is said, won him the eventual leadership of his party, that the breakdown which Carlyle was at that time preparing to denounce, was due to an incapable ministry, and not to an effete Parliament. He always held Parliament to be neither a municipal vestry nor a chamber of commerce, but a national temple of embodied opinion; nor can the wisdom of his view in those dark and despondent times be better tested than by comparing, in the light of what has since occurred, than by contrasting Carlyle’s fulminations in this regard with Disraeli’s discernment.

“... There is a phenomenon,” says Carlyle, in his “Chartism,” “which one might call Paralytic Radicalism in these days, which gauges with statistic measuring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic plummet, the deep, dark sea of trouble, and, having taught us rightly what an infinite sea of trouble it is, sums up with the practical inference and use of consolation, That nothing whatever in it can be done by man, who has simply to sit still and look wistfully to ‘Time and General Laws;’ and thereupon, without so much as recommending suicide, coldly takes its leave of us....”

Disraeli, on the other hand—

“... ‘In this country,’ said ‘Sidonia,’ ‘since the peace, there has been an attempt to advocate a reconstruction of society on a purely rational basis. The principle of Utility has been powerfully developed. I speak not with lightness of the labours of the disciples of that school. I bow to intellect in every form; and we should be grateful to any school of philosophers, even if we disagree with them.... There has been an attempt to reconstruct society on a basis of material motives and calculations. It has failed. It must ultimately have failed under any circumstances; its failure in an ancient and densely peopled kingdom was inevitable. How limited is human reason, the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not Reason that besieged Troy; it was not Reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world, that inspired the crusades, that instituted the monastic order; it was not Reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not Reason that created the French Revolution....”

I may compare with this the light episode of the travelling Utilitarian in the much earlier Young Duke—

“... ‘I think it is not very difficult to demonstrate the use of an aristocracy,’[68] mildly observed the Duke.

“‘Pooh! nonsense, sir! I know what you are going to say, but we have got beyond all that. Have you read this, sir? This article on the aristocracy in The Screw and Lever Review?’

“‘I have not, sir.’

“‘Then I advise you to make yourself master of it, and you will talk no more of the aristocracy. A few more articles like this, and a few more noblemen like the man who has got this park, and people will open their eyes at last.’

“‘I should think,’ said his Grace, ‘that the follies of the man who has got this park have been productive of evil only to himself. In fact, sir, according to your own system, a prodigal nobleman seems to be a very desirable member of the commonwealth, and a complete leveller.’

“‘We shall get rid of them all soon, sir....’

“‘I have heard that he is very young, sir,’ remarked the widow.

“‘Ah, youth is a very trying time! Let us hope the best. He may turn out well yet, poor soul!’

“‘I hope not. Don’t talk to me of poor souls. There is a poor soul,’ said the Utilitarian, pointing to an old man breaking stones on the highway. ‘That is what I call a poor soul, not a young prodigal....’”

No one who has followed the labour movement in England, or the social-democrat organisations in Germany and France, can fail to recognise the immense part that personality, imagination, and desire of power plays in them, and how completely, in their instance, utilitarianism has broken down. Utilitarianism, of course, ignores the moral and imaginative aspects. It mistakes the moon for a cream-cheese. It ignores personal influence. Above all, it confounds happiness with prosperity. “Charcoal,” exclaims Ruskin (here in complete accord with Disraeli), “may be cheap among your roof-timbers after a fire, and bricks may be cheap in your streets after an earthquake; but fire and earthquake may not therefore be national benefits.” Even in a concern purely commercial, reserve must be weighed against dividends.

Again, as regards this very Reform Bill of 1832, and the stagnant formulæ of its pioneer, I will again invoke Carlyle—

“... An ultra-radical, not seemingly of the Benthamee species, is forced to exclaim, ‘The people are at last wearied! They say, “Why should we be ruined in our shops, thrown out of our farms, voting for these men?” Ministerial majorities decline; this Ministry has become impotent, had it even the will to do good. They have long called to us, “We are a Reform Ministry; will ye not support us?” We have supported them, borne them forward indignantly on our shoulders time after time, fall after fall, when they had been hurled out into the street, and lay prostrate, helpless, like dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not the name of one, that we would support.... The public mind says at last, Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform Ministry? Let the Tories be a ministry, if they will; let, at least, some living reality be a ministry!’...”

Let me illustrate Carlyle by two further passages from Disraeli. The first concerns parties in 1837, the second concerns the withered and withering Toryism left to confront the hollow conventions of the Reform Ministry. He is arguing that “the man who enters public life at this epoch has to choose between political infidelity and a destructive creed.”

“... The principle of the exclusive constitution of England having been conceded by the Acts of 1827–28–32, ... a party has arisen in the State who demand that the principle of political liberalism shall consequently be carried to its extent, which it appears to them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old constitution that remain. This is the destructive party—a party with distinct and intelligible principles. They seek a specific for the evils of our social system in the general suffrage of the population. They are resisted by another party who, having given up exclusion, would only embrace as much liberalism as is necessary for the moment; who, without any embarrassing promulgation of principles, wish to keep things as they find them as well as they can; but, as a party must have the semblance of principles, they take the names of the things that they have destroyed. Thus they are devoted to the prerogatives of the Crown, although in truth the Crown has been stripped of every one of its prerogatives; they affect a great veneration for the constitution in Church and State, although every one knows that it no longer exists; they are ready to stand or fall with the independence of the Upper House of Parliament, although in practice they are perfectly well aware that, with their sanction, the ‘Upper House’ has abdicated its initiatory functions, and now serves only as a court of review of the legislation of the House of Commons. Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some violent perplexity, passion, or caprice, this party yields without a struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts to obstruct and obviate the logical, and ultimately the inevitable results of the very measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented. This is the Conservative party. I care not whether men are called Whigs or Tories, Radicals or Chartists, ... but these two divisions comprehend at present the English nation.... With regard to the first school, I for one have no faith in the remedial qualities of a Government carried on by a neglected democracy, who for three centuries have received no education. What prospect does it offer us of those high principles of conduct with which we have fed our imagination and strengthened our will? I perceive none of the elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people and the greatness of a realm.... Many men in this country ... are reconciled to the contemplation of democracy, because they have accustomed themselves to believe that it is the only power by which we can sweep away those sectional privileges and interests that impede the intelligence and industry of the community, ... and yet the only way ... to terminate what, in the language of the present day, is called class legislation, is not to entrust power to classes. You would find a ‘locofoco’[69] majority as much addicted to class legislation as a factitious aristocracy.... In a word, true wisdom lies in a policy that would effect its ends by the influence of opinion, and yet by the means of existing forms.”

And the other—

“Mr. Rigby began by ascribing everything to the Reform Bill, and then referred to several of his own speeches on Schedule A. Then he told Coningsby that want of ‘religious faith’ was solely occasioned by want of churches, and want of loyalty by George IV. having shut up himself too much at the cottage in Windsor Park, entirely against the advice of Mr. Rigby. He assured Coningsby that the Church Commission was operating wonders.... The great question now was their architecture. Had George IV. lived, all would have been right. They would have been built on the model of the Buddhist pagoda. As for loyalty, if the present king went regularly to Ascot races, he had no doubt all would go right. Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention, and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy’s “History of the Late War,” in twenty volumes—a capital work which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.’...”

As regards the principles and conduct of the Reform Ministers themselves, years before he entered Parliament, in that brilliant series of speeches on the hustings of High Wycombe and Taunton, which preluded so many of his ideas, he denounced the incompleteness of the measure and the inadequacy of the men. In 1832 he said—

“... If, instead of filling the humble position of a private individual, I held a post near the person of my King, I should have said to my sovereign, ‘Oppose all change, or allow that change which will be full, satisfactory, and final.’ In the change produced by the professing party now in power, there are omissions of immense importance. These points they promised; these points they have not given you; and now, after all their protestations, they turn round and ask how the people can have the audacity to demand them.”[70]

In 1834 he denounced “the Whig system of centralisation,” and their organised attempt to “overpower” the House of Lords and to despotise the House of Commons, while of their subsequent disorganisation from within, because of the failure of concerted opposition from without, he gave that surpassing simile of Ducrow’s Circus. In 1835 he pursued the subject of constitutional opposition, and he expressed his dread, as he did in 1881, that if the Whigs remained “our masters for life, the dismemberment of the Empire” might follow. And all this in the teeth of what was then considered a system installed for fifty years, and which would have promised him a personal triumph had he appeared then to have chosen to have endorsed it.

But the views he always retained as to the first principles of representation are best heard in a passage from Coningsby.

“... In the protracted discussions to which this celebrated measure gave rise, nothing is more remarkable than the perplexities into which the speakers on both sides are thrown when they touch upon the nature of the representative principle. On the one hand, it was maintained that under the old system the people were virtually represented, while, on the other, it was triumphantly urged that, if the principle was conceded, the people should not be virtually, but actually represented. But who are the people? And where are you to draw a line? And why should there be any? It was urged that a contribution to the taxes was the constitutional qualification for the suffrage.” Here is repeated what he had urged in the ’thirties, and was to reiterate in the ’fifties, that indirect taxation is as much taxation as direct; that “the beggar who chews his quid as he sweeps a crossing is contributing to the imposts; ... he is one of the people, and he yields his quota to the public burthens.” The logical inference of such a qualification must be to convert the suffrage from being a privilege into being a right. Manhood suffrage, in common with all privilege unearned, is usually prized by none, and even disregarded by most.

“Amid these conflicting statements,” he continues, “it is singular that no member of either House should have recurred to the original character of these popular assemblies which have always prevailed among the northern nations.... When the crowned northman consulted on the welfare of his kingdom, he assembled the estates of his realm. Now, an estate is a class of the nation invested with political rights. Then appeared the estate of the clergy, of the barons, of other classes. In the Scandinavian kingdoms to this day the estate of the peasants sends its representatives to the Diet. In England, under the Normans, the Church and the Baronage were convoked together with the estate of the Community, a term which then probably described the inferior holders of land whose tenure was not immediate of the Crown. The Third Estate was so numerous that convenience suggested its appearance by representation, while the others, more limited, appeared, and still appear, personally. The Third Estate was reconstructed as circumstances developed themselves. It was a reform of Parliament when the towns were summoned. In treating the House of the Third Estate as the House of the People, and not as the House of a privileged class, the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 virtually conceded the principle of universal suffrage. In this point of view, the ten-pound franchise was an arbitrary, irrational, impolitic qualification. It had indeed the merit of simplicity, and so had the constitution of Abbé Sièyes. But its immediate and inevitable result was Chartism.

“But if the Ministry and Parliament of 1831 had announced that the time had arrived when the Third Estate should be enlarged and reconstructed, they would have occupied an intelligible position; and if, instead of simplicity of elements in its reconstruction, they had sought, on the contrary, varying and various materials which would have neutralised the painful predominance of any particular interest in the new scheme, and prevented those banded jealousies which have been its consequence, the nation would have found itself in a secure position. Another class, not less numerous than the existing one, and invested with privileges not less important, would have been added to the public estates of the realm, and the bewildering phrase, ‘the People,’ would have remained what it really is, a term of natural philosophy, and not of political science.”

* * * * *

The quality, then, of excellence, instead of the majorities of multitude, the variety of every approved influence, and not the undue weight of any overwhelming interest—these formed for him the true bases of representation. He was ever for levelling up instead of down; and, as we shall see, he was directly opposed to Mr. Hume’s fallacy (still rampant) that by our traditions representation depends only on taxation.

These ideas animated him throughout, and he achieved them in 1867, not, though it has been insinuated, by filching the proposals of his predecessors, but on the opposed principles which he continued to advocate from the ’thirties to the ’sixties. In 1835, two years before he entered Parliament, he expressed the same convictions in his Spirit of Whiggism. He showed that the two Houses were the “House of the Nation,” not the “House of the People,” but that both alike represent the “Nation.” He proceeded to prove by powerful illustration that, under whatever assumed form, political power will follow the distribution of property. He emphasised the “passion for industry” as an instrument of wealth as an English characteristic hostile to any future revolution in the distribution of property. He proved that in England revolution is ever a struggle for privilege, in Europe one against it; and he concluded, therefore, that “... If a new class rises in the State, it becomes uneasy to take its place in the natural aristocracy of the land.... The Whigs in the present day have risen on the power of the manufacturing interest. To secure themselves in their posts, the Whigs have given the new interest an undue preponderance. But the new interest has obtained its object and is content.... The manufacturer begins to lack in movement. Under Walpole the Whigs played the same game with the commercial interest. A century has passed, and the commercial interests are all as devoted to the Constitution as the manufacturers soon will be.... The consequence of our wealth is an aristocratic constitution, founded on an equality of civil rights. And who can deny that an aristocratic constitution resting on such a basis, where the legislative and even the executive office may be obtained by every subject of the realm, is in fact a noble democracy?”

These are no dry theories, but surely a true version of growing facts. Our Constitution is that of a natural aristocracy founded on popular privilege depending on the mutual exercise of duties. This free aristocracy distributes its power through the estates of the realm, and these orders should accord with the institutions to which they have given rise; for, as Disraeli said in 1852, they are “popular” without being absolutely “democratic.” When any one of them degenerates into undue monopoly, the whole body must suffer; and should such a catastrophe attain any permanence, one of the great institutions through which English nationality thrives would be shattered by the very order to which it corresponds. What Disraeli observes of the eventual reduction of each new ascendant interest to aristocratic influence, is beyond question. But that influence must rest on the due performance of civil and social responsibilities which empower it. Stripped of historical verbiage, the “constitution” harmonises classes through special privileges and reciprocal duties. Of the “middle-middles” he always spoke with respect, of the “lower-middles” with much sympathy, not least as victims of the income-tax;[71] but he ever doubted their governing capacity as a class; and when Sir Robert Peel’s “monarchy of the middle classes” came into swing, Disraeli feared the plutocracy which has happened, and which, when financial, is more easily freed from political responsibility. The choice offered between wealth omnipotent and mob-despotism, is a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. To obviate it, Disraeli created in 1867 an artisan franchise, accorded as a boon at length earned by character and intelligence, and based on the rating principle, which affords a pledge of permanence; at the same time, he strove to countervail the growing irresponsibility of wealth by relieving unprotected land of its burdens and unrepresented labour of its degradation. By the first, he strove to retain that sap of the soil which underlies the English character, the English health, the English order, through local government, the English freedom, and the English steadiness; for (and this was said in 1852), “... Laws which, by imposing unequal taxes, discourage that investment (i.e. capital invested in land, the return for which is rent) are, irrespective of their injustice, highly impolitic; for nothing contributes more to the enduring prosperity of a country than the natural deposit of its surplus capital in the improvement of its soil....” By the last, he tried to redress that social misery which the measures of 1846 had not removed and had even increased: the overcrowding of the towns, the displacement of labour, the subsidising of foreign agriculture to the decultivation of English land, the enthronement of Mammon and materialism—all denounced and foreseen by him with wonderful prescience. Very soon after the repeal of the Corn Laws, discerning, as Disraeli did, its drift of denationalising tendencies, its certainty of some social and physical demoralisation, as well as the possible changes in European competition which might necessitate another “commercial and social revolution,” he inveighed against the inference that “we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to fall under the avowed dominion of another;” he believed that “the monarchy of England, its sovereign power mitigated by the acknowledged authority of the estates of the realm, has its root in the hearts of the people, and is capable of securing the happiness of the nation and the power of the State.” His peroration—some of which I shall give in the next chapter—is a noble flight of hope. He discerned at once that the transformation scene of 1846 would affect society more than politics, and that the next extension of the franchise must consequently prove a social antidote as well as a social sedative.

In 1839, refuting Mr. Hume’s hobby already alluded to, he showed that the theory is nowhere inherent in our Constitution, but is a doctrinaire supplement of alien origin; that the “Commons” are a political order invested with power for the performance of duties, just as the Peers are a similar order, but needing no representation; he re-urged that the House of Commons was the representative of the “nation”—an organic whole, and not of the “people”—a vague abstraction. He had even then already pointed out that, historically, the delegates before the Restoration had perverted the national traditions by announcing, more than a century before the French Revolution, the sovereignty of the “people.” He once more stoutly denied that “taxation and representation went hand-in-hand” according to our constitution. There was representation without election, as in the case of the Church in the Lords, for the Crown appointed the bishops, not the clergy. And as regards taxation, it was indirect, as well as, unfortunately, direct. In the same year, protesting against Lord John Russell’s assumption of a “monarchy of the middle classes,” Disraeli repeated that in this country “the exercise of political power must be associated with great public duties,” just as in 1846, when justifying the burdens on land so long as protection was accorded it, he asserted that great honours demand great burdens. Again, in 1848, Disraeli, opposing Mr. Hume once more, and protesting against the finality of the reconstruction of 1832, even before Lord John Russell declared the question free for both parties in 1853 and 1856—strongly condemned the radical scheme just because it did not “... enable the labouring classes to take their place in the Constitution of the country.” “If there be any mistake,” he said, “more striking than another in the settlement of 1832, ... it is, in my opinion, that the bill of 1832 took the qualification of property in too hard and rigid a sense, as the only qualification which should exist in this country for the exercise of political rights.” In 1852, he again dinned into unappreciative ears the necessity for a genuinely industrial franchise, though he was not satisfied that Lord John Russell’s £5 franchise would so operate. In 1859 and 1867, Disraeli tried hard to confer franchises on education and thrift, but Mr. Bright sneered at them as “fancy franchises,” Mr. Gladstone scoffed at them, and in forwarding the great measure of labour suffrage by the compelled co-operation of both sides of the House, Disraeli had to surrender safeguards he never ceased to desire and to regret, for they are founded on the State recognition of individual excellence, instead of on the State manipulation of mere party mechanism.

“Is the possession of the franchise,” demanded Disraeli in 1851, “to be a privilege, the privilege of industry and public virtue, or is it to be a right—the right of every one, however degraded, however indolent, however unworthy?... I am for the system which maintains in this country a large and free Government, having confidence in the energies and faculties of man. Therefore I say, make the franchise a privilege, but let it be the privilege of the civic virtues. Honourable gentlemen opposite would degrade the franchise to the man, instead of raising the man to the franchise. If you want to have a free aristocratic country, free because aristocratic (I use the word ‘aristocratic’ in its noblest sense—I mean that aristocratic freedom which enables every man to achieve the best position in the State to which his qualities entitle him), I know not what we can do better than adhere to the mitigated monarchy of England, with power in the Crown, order in one estate of the realm, and liberty in the other. It is from that happy combination that we have produced a state of society that all other nations look upon with admiration and envy.”

In all these considerations, the social results of measures and formulæ were ever uppermost in his mind. What he had ever been resolute to secure was, as he avowed even in 1850, “the industrial franchise,” which the resettlement of 1832 had thrown to the winds.

Again, in 1865, “... It appears to me,” urged Disraeli, “that the primary plan of our ancient constitution, so rich in various wisdom, indicates the course that we ought to pursue in this matter. It secured our popular rights by entrusting power, not to an indiscriminate multitude, but to the estate, or order, of the Commons. And a wise government should be careful that the elements of that estate should bear a close relation to the moral and material development of the country. Public opinion may not yet, perhaps, be ripe enough to legislate as to the subject, but it is sufficiently interested in the question to ponder over it with advantage; so that, when the time comes for action, we may legislate in the spirit of the English Constitution, which would absorb the best of every class, and not fall into a ‘democracy’ which is the tyranny of one class, and that one the least enlightened.”

Long before 1867, these continuous utterances culminated that typical speech of 1859, which mooted a comprehensive plan of enlarged representation of political power, yet undisturbed balance, and which would have made “a representative assembly that is a mirror of the mind as well as of the material interests of England.”

I shall quote largely from this unfamiliar speech. It illustrates how far his lifelong principles applied to a juncture before the artisans were wholly free from agitation against monarchy, and those institutions which fence it round. All Radical schemes, compassing “manhood suffrage,” all Whig schemes, merely delaying its day by seeking to reduce rental or property qualifications to an arbitrary minimum, were his aversion. Set, as he always was, against including whatever at the moment formed the dregs of ignorance, or the sediment of an unentitled populace, he already favoured that “rating” basis which Lord John Russell, always constitutional, had himself propounded in his abortive plan of 1854, and which Disraeli was to carry out in 1867 as a safeguard of stability in the boroughs. But in 1859 Lord Derby did not consider its application feasible. Disraeli had, therefore, now to forego it. Refusing to make any reductions in the franchise, or yield an inch to “detached” democracy, he now proposed to attain steadiness, to vary the vote, and to represent enlightenment contrasted with mere property by recommending the creation of the “compound householder” (“dwellers in a portion of any house rented in the aggregate at £20”)[72]; by a new suffrage for several small ownerships of property in the funds and savings banks; and for education, by enfranchising graduates, ministers of religion, physicians, barristers, and certain school-masters. He thus both forecasted, so far as was then practicable, household suffrage as against household democracy; and at the same time sought to represent education and ensure variety. By his attendant scheme of redistribution, he tried to prevent the counties from being “swamped” by the towns, while at the same time he jealously guarded the local independence of the boroughs. His purpose was to protect the country districts against that invasion from the cities of agrarian demagogues which, after his death, the stride forward of 1884 was to impel.[73]

But “finality is not the word of politics.” Progress changes possibilities. He had to wait till the pear was ripe; till the working man had been really reconciled to monarchy and its institutions; till the ground had been laid for a generous scheme of national education, and cleared by the sharply defined position of parties, which at last brought into relief the issues between democracy as a due element and as a domineering class. Nor, if he were now alive, would he fail to discern that the appeal of present imperialism to present democracy will be dangerous if made to it as a deciding class before it has acquired the governing faculty by long apprenticeship. Democracy as a leaven, democracy as the lump, are obviously distinct. The one is “popular and national,” the other despotic or cosmopolitan. Our artisans are now intensely national and patriotic; but the “submerged tenth” would soon show themselves tyrants over the community.

* * * * *

The pith of his argument is that mere numbers can never form the ground of representation, which should rest on influence even more than interest.

“... It appears to me that those who are called parliamentary reformers may be divided into two classes. The first are those ... who would adapt the settlement of 1832 to the England of 1859, and would act in the spirit and according to the genius of the existing constitution.... But, sir, it would not be candid, and it would be impolitic not to acknowledge that there is another school of reformers having objects very different from those which I have named. The new school, if I may so describe them, would avowedly effect a parliamentary reform on principles different from those which have hitherto been acknowledged as forming the proper foundations for this House. The new school of reformers are of opinion that the chief, if not the sole, object of representation is to realise the opinion of the numerical majority of the country. Their standard is population, and I admit that their views have been clearly and efficiently placed before the country. Now, sir, there is no doubt that population is, and must always be, one of the elements of our representative system. There is also such a thing as property, and that too must be considered. I am ready to admit that the new school have not on any occasion limited the elements of their representative system solely to population. They have, with a murmur, admitted that property has an equal claim to consideration; but then, they have said that property and population go together. Well, sir, population and property do go together—in statistics, but in nothing else. Population and property do not go together in politics and practice. I cannot agree with the principles of the new school, either if population or property is their sole, or if both together constitute their double, standard. I think the function of this House is something more than merely to represent the population and property of this country. This House ought, in my opinion, to represent all the interests of the country. Now, those interests are sometimes antagonistic, often competing, always independent and jealous; yet they all demand a distinctive representation in this House, and how can that be effected, under such circumstances, by the simple representation of the voice of the majority, or even by the mere preponderance of property? If the function of this House is to represent all the interests of the country, you must, of course, have a representation scattered over the country, because interests are necessarily local. An illustration is always worth two arguments; permit me, therefore, so to explain my meaning, if it requires explanation. Let me take the two cases of the metropolis and that of the kingdom of Scotland.... Their populations are at this time about equal. Their respective wealth is very unequal.... There is between them the annual difference in the amounts of income upon which the schedules are levied of that between £44,000,000 and £30,000,000. Yet who would for a moment pretend that the various classes and interests of Scotland could be adequately represented by the same number of members as represent the metropolis? So much for the population test. Let us now take the property test.... The wealth of the city of London is more than equivalent to that of twenty-five English and Welsh counties returning forty members, and of 140 boroughs returning 232 members. The city of London, the city proper, is richer than Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham put together.... It is richer than Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Hull, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Brighton, Stoke-upon-Trent, Nottingham, Greenwich, Preston, East Retford, Sunderland, York, and Salford combined—towns which return among them no less than thirty-one members. Yet the city of London has not asked me to insert it in the bill, which I am asking leave to introduce, for thirty-one members.... So much ... for the property test.... But the truth is, that men are sent to this House to represent the opinions of a place; and not its power....

“Why, sir, the power of the city of London or that of the city of Manchester in this House is not to be measured by the honourable and respectable individuals whom they send here to represent their opinions. I will be bound to say that there is a score—nay, that there are threescore—members in this House who are as much and more interested, perhaps, in the city of Manchester than those who are in this House its authoritative and authentic representatives.... Look at the metropolis itself, not speaking merely of the city of London. Is the influence of the metropolis in this House to be measured by the sixteen honourable members who represent it?... ... So much for that principle of population, or that principle of property, which has been adopted by some; or that principle of population and property combined, which seems to be the more favourite form.... There is one remarkable circumstance connected with the new school, who would build up our representation on the basis of a numerical majority, and who take population as their standard. It is this—that none of their principles apply except in cases where population is concentrated. The principle of population is ... a very notorious doctrine at the present moment, but it is not novel.... It was the favourite argument of the late Mr. Hume.... The principle, in my opinion, is false, and would produce results dangerous to the country and fatal to the House of Commons. But if it be true, ... then I say you must arrive at conclusions entirely different from those which the new school has adopted. If population is to be the standard, and you choose to disfranchise small boroughs and small constituencies, it is not to the great towns you can, according to your own principles, transfer their members....

“Let us now see what will be the consequence if the population principle is adopted. You would have a House, generally speaking, formed partly of great landowners and partly of great manufacturers. I have no doubt that, whether we look to their property or to their character, there would be no country in the world which could rival in respectability such an assembly. But would it be a House of Commons; would it represent the country; would it represent the various interests of England? Why, sir, after all, the suffrage and the seat respecting which there is so much controversy and contest, are only means to an end.... You want in this House every element that obtains the respect and engages the interest of the country.... You want a body of men representing the vast variety of the English character; men who would arbitrate between the claims of those great predominant interests; who would temper the acerbity of their controversies. You want a body of men to represent that considerable portion of the community who cannot be ranked under any of those striking and powerful heads to which I have referred, but who are in their aggregate equally important and valuable, and perhaps as numerous.”

He then adverted to the borough system as an indirect machinery for this purpose, and contended that those who would sweep it away must substitute “machinery as effective.” “... Now,” he continued, “there is one remarkable feature in the agitation of the new school.... They offer no substitute whatever.... I will tell you what must be the natural consequence of such a state of things. The House will lose, as a matter of course, its hold on the Executive. The House will assemble. It will have men sent to it, no doubt, of character and wealth; and having met here, they will be unable to carry on the Executive of the country. Why? Because the experiment has been tried in every country, and the same result has occurred; because it is not in the power of one or two classes to give that variety of character and acquirement by which the administration of a country can be carried on. Well, then, what happens? We fall back on a bureaucratic system,[74] and we should find ourselves, after all our struggles, in the very same position from which, in 1640, we had to extricate ourselves. Your administration would be carried on by a court minister, perhaps by a court minion. It might not be in these times, but in some future time. The result of such a system would be to create an assembly where the members of Parliament, though chosen by great constituencies, would be chosen from limited classes, and perhaps only from one class of the community....” His own prescription for breaking monotony, he described as “lateral,” not “vertical” extension.

Disraeli determined to settle this question himself, and to settle it by the admission to the franchise of the “working” classes of the country, and not by lowering it to the “man in the street,” or the submerged tenth. In these views he followed the Toryism of Cobbett rather than the Radicalism of Hume. Discussing Lord John Russell’s proposals of 1860 “for the representation of the people” (which, though it adopted the principle of rateability, was, in fact, merely a reduction of the borough franchise to £6, and of the county occupation to £10), Disraeli labelled its “simplicity” as “of a mediæval character, but without any of the inspiration of the feudal system, or any of the genius of the middle ages.” It sought only to scale down a property qualification. The “claims of intelligence, acquirement, and education” were ignored. As regarded the borough franchise, not fitness, but number was the principle; and the numerical addition accrued to one class only.

“... Let us now consider,” Disraeli continued, “whether the particular class upon whom the noble lord is about to confer this great political power, are a class who are incapable, or who are unlikely to exercise it. Are they a class who have shown no inclination to combine? Are they a class incapable of organisation? Quite the reverse. If we look to the history of this country during the present century, we shall find that the aristocracy, or upper classes, have on several very startling occasions shown a great power of organisation. I think it cannot be denied that the working classes, especially since the peace of 1815, have shown a remarkable talent for organisation, and a power of discipline and combination inferior to none. The same, I believe, cannot be said of the middle classes. With the exception of the Anti-Corn Law League, I cannot recall at this moment any great successful political organisation of the middle classes; and living in an age when everything is known, we now know that that great confederation ... owed its success to a great and unforeseen calamity, and was on the eve of dispersion and dissolution only a short time before that terrible event occurred.” The upper and lower classes, he argued, were capable of organisation and ideas, and the organisation of the latter had been secret as well as disciplined. Their intelligence and their discipline, then, were reasons for conferring the franchise, but their traditional organisation was also a reason for care in its bestowal, and such discrimination as would not give them a predominance. “... What has been ... the object of our legislative labours for many years, but to put an end to a class-legislation which was much complained of? But you are now proposing to establish a class legislation of a kind which may well be viewed with apprehension....”

Disraeli discerned that what in England is discontent, on the Continent is disaffection; and that revolution abroad corresponds to reform at home. Chartism verged perilously on the uprisings which endanger countries where government is out of touch with the governed. It was a sign that institutions might be on their trial, and it demanded that those institutions should resume reality, and win once more the affections of the people.

In his resolve to spread the franchise in his own manner, and to neutralise the revolutionary bias of agitators and secret societies, he never lost sight of the growing force of public opinion. He himself was “a gentleman of the press;” in the improved and multiplied newspapers he hailed the great safety-valve afforded to England by that “publicity” on which “the great fabric of political freedom” has been reared. “Free intercourse,” he exclaimed in the ’thirties, “is the spirit of the age!” So late as 1872, he observed, “... That has been the principle of the whole of our policy. First of all, we made our courts of law public, and during the last forty years we have completely emancipated the periodical press of England, which was not literally free before, giving it such power that it throws light upon the life of almost every class in this country, and I might say upon the life of almost every individual.” In the press (the light of which he perhaps valued more than the warmth), he welcomed an antidote against hidden and perilous associations; and believed that if the self-respecting hand-labourer received the vote (as he was entitled to do), he would exercise it in the cause of freedom, of loyalty, and of order. In 1862, he declared “parliamentary discipline founded on its only sure basis, sympathising public opinion,” to be the watchword of his propaganda. The passage summarises much that I have discussed.

“... To build up a community, not upon Liberal opinions, which any man may fashion to his fancy, but upon popular principles which assert equal rights, civil and religious; to uphold the institutions of the country because they are the embodiment of the wants and wishes of the nation, and protect us alike from individual tyranny and popular outrage; equally to resist democracy” (as a form of government) “and oligarchy, and to favour that principle of free aristocracy which is the only basis and security for constitutional government; ... to favour popular education, because it is the best guarantee of public order; to defend local government, and to be as jealous of the rights of the working man as of the prerogative of the Crown and the privileges of the senate;—these were once the principles which regulated Tory statesmen (i.e. Bolingbroke and Wyndham), and I for one have no wish that the Tory party should ever be in power unless they practise them.”

In his great speech during the summer of the following year on “popular principles” and “liberal opinions,” as well as on the introduction of his actual Reform Bill, he gave expression once more to his distinction between “popular privileges” and “democratic rights”—

“... If the measure bears some reference to the existing classes in this country, why should we conceal from ourselves that this country is a country of classes, and a country of classes it will ever remain? What we desire to do is to give every one who is worthy of it a fair share in the government of the country by means of the elective franchise; but at the same time we have been equally anxious to maintain the character of the House....”

As a matter of tactics, Disraeli had of design framed the bill on lines stricter than he was prepared to concede. He desired that the re-settlement should be enduring, and he deliberately appealed to the co-operation of both parties for this purpose. He had “leaped in the dark,” he had “shot Niagara.” The storm of obloquy, desertion, and censure broke over his head, but he was unmoved, because his proposals were based on principles long held and patiently matured. Of the lodger franchise he had long ago been the “father.” An unmitigated household franchise he refused as too “democratic.” The “direct taxation” franchise and the “dual vote,” which were intended as barriers for the middle classes, he surrendered. That educational franchise which was bound up with a cause that from boyhood had been dear to him; that “savings-bank” franchise which established the right of industrial thrift to representation, he was forced to abandon, by the clamour of the very party that desired education without religion, and labour as the mere instrument of capital. Looking back impartially, these derided “fancy franchises” seem to me a deplorable loss, and even now it would be well to recognise that the mind and the character should have representative faculties wholly apart from the power of property. Disraeli was forced to cast them overboard that he might preserve the vessel itself during the party hurricane. But the essential qualifications of residence and rateability he maintained in the teeth of Mr. Gladstone, and under all the modifications of the principle which ensued. His mind was fixed to steer between the extremes alike of those who, under the mask of emancipation, purposed the despotism of a single class, and of those who desired to form the government of this country by the caprice of an irresponsible, an unintelligent, and an indiscriminate multitude. And he proved his earnest sincerity by the appeal which closed his speech on the second reading: “Pass the bill, and then change the ministry if you like.”

It is not within my province to track the maze of altercations which attended every step of a bill on which Disraeli, contrary to his wont, spoke more than three hundred times, or to raise the dust of controversy this year revived. But, were it so, I could prove how faithful Disraeli remained to the central ideas which had animated him from his youth. So far from having passed a “liberal” measure, he had passed under colossal difficulties, that for which he had long striven, and in a manner which remedied the defects of 1832 without endangering the repose of the State. Indeed, for the second time he actually re-created the Conservative party, and, to the surprise of some of his friends and all his enemies, discovered in the unknown region of the toilers, with whom he had ever sympathised, whom he had always trusted, but whom the Whigs had driven to revolt, and to whom the “cheapest market” Radicals perpetually begrudged protection, health, and alleviation—discovered, I say, in these elements—the pawns of ignoble partisanship—his truest props of order and of allegiance. The measure and the events of 1884 were to prove the rightness alike of his confidence and of his caution. The counties with a lowered franchise became a prey to agitators. The towns remained staunch and steadfast. And this, though in 1867 Mr. Bright had sneered at Disraeli for having “lugged” his “omnibus” of stupid squires up the hill of democracy.

In his speech of 1859, Disraeli protested against any “predominance of household democracy.” He kept his word. Speaking at Edinburgh in the autumn of 1867, he remarked on this very topic—