The New Gospel—Effect on English character—The Manchester School—Tendencies of Sir Robert Peel—The Corn Laws—Peel brought into office as a Protectionist—Disraeli and Peel—Protracted duel—Effect of Disraeli’s speeches—Final declaration of Peel against the Corn Laws—Corn Laws repealed—Lord George Bentinck—Irish Coercion Bill—The Canning episode—Defeat and fall of Peel—Disraeli succeeds to the Leadership of the Conservative Party.

With the light which is thrown by ‘Sybil’ on the workings of Disraeli’s mind, it is easy to understand the feelings with which he regarded the words and actions of Sir Robert Peel. He had seen, or supposed himself to have seen, a poisonous fungus eating into the heart of English life. In town and country, among the factory operatives, and on the estates of the rich and the noble, there was one rapid process of degeneracy. The peasantry were serfs, without the redeeming features of serfdom; the town artisans were becoming little better than brutes. In the cities, family and the softer influences of home were ceasing to exist. Children were being dragged up in misery or were left to die, and life was turned into a flaring workshop in which the higher purposes of humanity were obliterated or forgotten. The cause was everywhere the same. The gospel of political economy had been substituted for the gospel of Christ. The new law was to make money; the new aim of all classes, high and low alike, was to better their condition, as it was called, and make the most of their opportunities. Each must look out for himself: one man was not another’s keeper; labour was an article of trade, which the employer was to buy as cheap as he could get it, and the workman was to sell for the most that he could get. There their duties to each other ended, and the results were the scenes which he had witnessed in Marley and Mowbray. The further trade was extended under the uncontrolled conditions demanded by the ‘Manchester school,’ the more these scenes would multiply.

With the powerful Protectionist majority returned by the elections of 1841, Peel, in Disraeli’s opinion, had an opportunity of bringing these demoralising tendencies under the authority of reason and conscience. The Corn Laws were but one feature of the problem. The real question was whether England was to remain as she had been, the nursing mother of a noble breed of men, or whether the physical and moral qualities of a magnificent race were to be sacrificed to a rage for vulgar wealth. Disraeli had not flattered his party. In Trafford and in the elder Millbank, he had drawn manufacturers who were splendidly alive to their duties. The ennobled landowners he had left to be represented by such men as Lord Marley. He was a Radical of the Radicals, a Radical who went to the root of the mischief. Like Carlyle, he was telling his country that unless they brought authority to deal with it, the England which we were so proud of would speedily forfeit her place among the nations of the world. It is likely enough that Peel would have failed if he had tried. His own followers were thinking more of their rents than of the moral condition of the people. But at any rate he was not trying, and evidently had no thought of trying. He took the course which promised most immediate success. To restore authority required an aristocracy who could be trusted to use it, and there was none such ready to hand. Wages must be left to the market where he found them. All that he could do to help the people was to cheapen the food which was bought with them, to lay taxation on the shoulders best able to bear it, and by education and such other means as he could provide to enable the industrious and the thoughtful to raise themselves, since neither legislation nor administration could raise them. Cheap food and popular education was his highest ideal. Peel could see what was immediately before him clearer than any man. His practical sagacity forbade him to look farther or deeper.

But the difficulty of his position lay in his having been brought into power as a Protectionist. The constituencies had given him his majority in reply to his own Protectionist declarations. If Free Trade was to be made the law of the land was Peel to repeat the part which he had played in Catholic emancipation? All reasonable Conservatives knew that the corn laws must be modified; but the change, if inevitable, need not be precipitate. Peel’s great defect, Disraeli said in his ‘Life of Lord George Bentinck,’ was that he wanted imagination, and in wanting that he wanted prescience. No one was more sagacious when dealing with the circumstances before him. His judgment was faultless, provided that he had not to deal with the future. But insight into consequences is the test of a true statesman, and because Peel had it not Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary Reform, and the abrogation of the commercial system were carried in haste or in passion, and without conditions or mitigatory arrangements. On Canning’s death the Tories might have had the game in their hands. A moderate reconstruction of the House of Commons, the transfer of the franchises of a few corrupt boroughs to the great manufacturing towns, would have satisfied the country. Peel let the moment pass, and the Birmingham Union and the Manchester Economic School naturally followed. His policy was to resist till resistance was ineffectual, and then to grant wholesale concessions as a premium to political agitation. The same scene was being enacted over again. Sir Robert had rejected Lord John Russell’s eight-shilling duty. It appeared now, from the course in which he was drifting, that the duty would be swept away altogether.

In whatever way Peel had acted it is not likely that the state of England at present would have differed materially from what it is. The forces which were producing either the decay or the renovation of the Constitution, whichever it proves to be, were too powerful for the wisest statesman either to arrest or materially direct. Plato thought that had he been born a generation sooner he might have saved Greece. The Olympian gods themselves could not have saved Greece. But when untoward events arrive they are always visited on the immediate actors in them, and Disraeli visited on Peel the ruin of his own party and the disappointment of his own hopes. Perhaps, as he was but half an Englishman, his personal interest in the question at issue was not extreme. It is possible that he had resented Peel’s neglect of him. At any rate he saw his opportunity and used it to make his name famous. Hitherto he had been known in the House of Commons as a brilliant and amusing speaker, but of such independent ways that even the Conservatives gave him but a limited confidence. So little had he spared his own friends in vote, speech, or writing that he may be acquitted of having dreamt of becoming their immediate leader. But Peel had laid himself open. The Premier’s policy, supported as it was by his political pupils and the Liberal Opposition, Disraeli knew to be practically irresistible. He was therefore spared the necessity of moderating his own language. At least he could avenge his party and punish what he could not prevent. It was his pride when he made an attack to single out the most dangerous antagonist. Sir Robert Peel was the most commanding member of the House of Commons, and the most powerful oratorical athlete.

Disraeli’s speeches during Peel’s Ministry and the effects which they produced can be touched but superficially in a narrative so brief as this, but they formed the turning-point of his public life. His assaults when he began were treated with petulant contempt, but his fierce counter-hits soon roused attention to them. The Liberals were entertained to see the Conservative chief dared and smitten by one of his own followers. The country members felt an indignant satisfaction at the deserved chastisement of their betrayer. The cheers in Parliament were echoed outside the walls and rang to the farthest corner of the Continent. With malicious skill Disraeli touched one after the other the weak points of a character essentially great but superficially vulnerable. Like Laertes he anointed his point, but the venom lay in the truth of what he said, and the suffering which he inflicted was the more poignant because administered by a hand which Peel had unfortunately despised. Disraeli was displaying for the first time the peculiar epigrammatic keenness which afterwards so much distinguished him, and the skill with which he could drive his arrows through the joints in the harness. Any subject gave him an opening. Peel supposed that he had rebuked and silenced him by quoting in a dignified tone Canning’s lines upon ‘A Candid Friend.’ The allusion was dangerous, for Peel’s conduct to Canning had not been above reproach. Disraeli took an occasion when the general policy of the Ministry was under discussion to deliver himself in his clear, cold, impassive manner of a few sentences which hit exactly the temper of the House. Peel was generally accused of having stolen the Liberal policy. The right honourable gentleman, he said, had caught the Whigs bathing and had walked away with their clothes. He had tamed the shrew of Liberalism by her own tactics. He was the ‘political Petruchio who had outbid them all.’ Then came the sting. Peel had a full memory, and was rather proud of the readiness with which he could introduce quotations. Disraeli first touched his vanity by complimenting him on the success with which he used such weapons, ‘partly because he seldom quoted a passage which had not previously received the meed of Parliamentary approbation, partly because his quotations were so happy.... We all admire Canning,’ he said; ‘we all, or at least most of us, deplore his untimely end. We sympathised with him in his fierce struggle with supreme prejudice and sublime mediocrity, with inveterate foes and with candid friends. Mr. Canning! and quoted by the right honourable gentleman. The theme, the poet, the speaker!—what a felicitous combination!’

The shaft which Peel had lightly launched was returned into his own breast and quivered there. The House of Commons, bored with dulness, delights in an unusual stroke of artistic skill. The sarcasm was received with cheers the worse to bear because while the Radicals laughed loud Peel’s own side did not repress an approving murmur. He was like the bull in the Spanish arena when the chulos plant their darts upon his shoulders. ‘He hoped,’ he said, ‘that the honourable member, having discharged the accumulated virus of the last week, now felt more at his ease;’ but the barb had gone to the quick, and Peel, however proudly he controlled himself, was the most sensitive of men.

The tormentor left him no rest. A few days later came Mr. Miles’s motion for the application of surplus revenue to the relief of agriculture. Peel, when in opposition, had argued for the justice of this proposal. In office he found objections to it; and Disraeli told his friends that they must not be impatient with Sir Robert Peel. ‘There is no doubt,’ he said, ‘a difference in the right honourable gentleman’s demeanour as leader of the Opposition and as Minister of the Crown. But that is the old story. You must not contrast too strongly the hours of courtship with the years of possession. I remember the right honourable gentleman’s Protection speeches. They were the best speeches I ever heard. But we know in all these cases when the beloved object has ceased to charm it is vain to appeal to the feelings.’

Sidney Herbert had spoken of the agricultural members as whining to Parliament at every recurrence of temporary distress. Disraeli again struck at Peel, dealing Sidney Herbert an insolent cut by the way.

‘The right honourable gentleman,’ he continued, ‘being compelled to interfere, sends down his valet, who says in the genteelest manner, “We can have no whining here.” But, sir, that is exactly the case of the great agricultural interest, that beauty which everyone wooed and one deluded. Protection appears to me to be in the same condition that Protestantism was in 1828. For my part, if we are to have Free Trade, I, who honour genius, prefer that such measures should be proposed by the honourable member for Stockport [Mr. Cobden] than by one who, though skilful in Parliamentary manoeuvres, has tampered with the generous confidence of a great people and a great party. For myself, I care not what may be the result. Dissolve, if you please, the Parliament, whom you have betrayed, and appeal to the people, who I believe mistrust you. For me there remains this at least, the opportunity for expressing thus publicly my belief that a Conservative Government is an organised hypocrisy.’

This speech became famous. O’Connell, who, like Disraeli himself, bore no malice, when asked his opinion of it said it was all excellent except the peroration, and that was matchless. Disraeli, who had calmly watched the effect of his assaults, told his sister that ‘Peel was stunned and stupefied, lost his head, and vacillating between silence and spleen, spoke much and weakly, assuring me that I had not hurt his feelings, that he would never reciprocate personalities, having no venom, &c. &c.’

A wasp which you cannot kill buzzing round your face and stinging when it has a chance will try the patience of the wisest. The Maynooth grant might have been a safe subject, for no one had advocated justice to Ireland more strongly than Disraeli; but he chose to treat it as a bid for the Irish vote. He called Peel ‘a great Parliamentary middleman,’ swindling both the parties that he professed to serve, and with deadly ingenuity he advised the Roman Catholic members to distrust a man ‘whose bleak shade had fallen on the sunshine of their hopes for a quarter of a century.’

Driven beside himself at last, either on this or on some similar occasion, I have been assured that Peel forgot his dignity and asked a distinguished friend to carry a challenge from him to his reviler. The friend, unwilling to give Disraeli such a triumph and more careful of Peel’s reputation than Peel himself, did not merely refuse, but threatened, if the matter was pursued farther, to inform the police.[9]

Disraeli asked Lord John Russell if he was not weary of being dragged at the triumphal car of a conqueror who had not conquered him in fair fight. ‘Habitual perfidy,’ he said, ‘was not high policy of state.’ He invited the Whig leader to assist him ‘in dethroning the dynasty of deception and putting an end to the intolerable yoke of official despotism and Parliamentary imposture.’

Though the Free-Traders were revolutionising the tariff old-fashioned statesmen on both sides still hesitated at the entire abolition of the Corn Laws. It had been long assumed that without some protection the soil of England must fall out of cultivation. The Corn Law Leaguers were prepared even for that consummation, although they denied the probability of it. Disraeli, laying aside his personalities, showed in a noble passage that when he chose he could rise to the level of a great subject. He said—

‘The leading spirits on the benches I see before me have openly declared their opinion that if there were not an acre of land cultivated in England it would not be the worse for this country. You have all of you in open chorus announced your object to be the monopoly of the commerce of the universe, to make this country the workshop of the world. Your system and ours are exactly contrary. We invite union; we believe that national prosperity can only be produced by the prosperity of all classes. You prefer to remain in isolated splendour and solitary magnificence. But, believe me, I speak not as your enemy when I say it will be an exception to the principles which seem hitherto to have ruled society if you can maintain the success at which you aim without the possession of that permanence and stability which the territorial principle alone can afford. Although you may for a moment flourish after their destruction, although your ports may be filled with shipping, your factories smoke on every plain, and your forges flame in every city, I see no reason why you should form an exception to that which the page of history has mournfully recorded, that you should not fade like Tyrian dye and moulder like the Venetian palaces.’

The great Whig peers, who were the largest of the territorial magnates, were not yet prepared to cut their own throats. Lord John was still for his eight-shilling duty. Peel was for a sliding scale which would lower the duty without extinguishing it. But, as Disraeli observed, ‘there is nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident than in politics. They baffle the forethought of statesmen and control even the apparently inflexible laws of national development and decay.’ In the midst of the debate on the customs duties came the Irish famine, and the Corn Laws in any shape were doomed. Protection might have been continued in a moderate form if this catastrophe had not occurred, provided the lords of the soil could have reverted to the practice of their forefathers and looked on their rents as the revenue of their estates, to be expended on the welfare of their dependents. But it was not in them and could not come out of them. On the top of distress in England followed the destruction of the sole means of support which the recklessness of the Irish proprietors had left to five millions of peasants. Sir Robert Peel informed his Cabinet that the duties on grain must be suspended by order of Council, and that if once removed they could never be reimposed. The Cabinet split; Lord Stanley left him. He felt himself that if the Corn Laws were to be repealed he was not the statesman who ought to do it. He resigned, but he could not escape his fate. Lord John Russell could not form a Ministry and ‘handed the poisoned chalice back to Peel,’ who was forced to return and fulfil his ungracious office. He announced at the opening of the session of 1846 that the debates had convinced him not only of the impolicy but of the injustice of the Corn Laws, and he warned his followers that if they defeated him on a question of their personal interests ‘an ancient monarchy and a proud aristocracy might not be found compatible with a reformed House of Commons.’ The intimation and the threat were received with silent dismay. Disraeli alone was able to give voice to their indignation, and in the style of which he had made himself such a master he said that he at least was not one of the converts; he had been sent to the House to advocate protection, and to protection he adhered. In bitter and memorable words he compared Peel to the Turkish admiral who had been sent out to fight Mehemet Ali, and had carried his fleet into the harbour at Alexandria, alleging as his excuse that he had himself an objection to war, that the struggle was useless, and that he had accepted the command only to betray his master. Up to this time the Tory party had but half liked Disraeli. Many of his utterances in the House and out of it had a communistic taint upon them. Now, forlorn and desperate, a helpless flock deserted by the guardian whom they trusted, they cheered him with an enthusiasm which is only given to an accepted chief. ‘So keen was the feeling and so spurring the point of honour that a flock deserted by their shepherds should not be led, as was intended, to the slaughter-house without a struggle, that a stimulus to exertion was given which had been rarely equalled in the House of Commons.’

Lord George Bentinck sold his racehorses and converted himself into a politician with a vigour of which no one had suspected him of being the possessor. Bentinck in youth had been Canning’s secretary. He was then a moderate Whig, but had deserted politics for the turf. He was roused out of his amusements by the menaced overthrow of the principles in which he had been bred. His sense of honour was outraged by this second instance of what he regarded as Peel’s double-dealing, and the Tories, whose pride would have been wounded by submitting avowedly to be led by an adventurer, were reconciled to Disraeli as second in command while they had Bentinck for his coadjutor and nominal chief. After the Peelites had separated from them they were still a powerful minority. If parties could but be forced back into their natural positions ‘they could still exercise the legitimate influence of an Opposition in criticising details and insisting on modifications.’ Free trade ‘could be better contended against when openly and completely avowed than when brought forward by one who had obtained power by professing his hostility to it.’ They were betrayed and they had a right to be angry; for Peel only, as parties stood, could carry repeal complete, and it was they who had given Peel his power.

Complaint, resistance were equally vain. The Bill for the repeal of the Corn Laws went through its various stages. On the third reading on May 15, when the battle was practically over, Disraeli again delivered a speech in which, dispensing with his epigrams and sarcasms, he displayed the qualities of a great and far-seeing statesman.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘that there are many who believe that the time has gone by when one can appeal to those high and honest impulses that were once the mainstay and the main element of the English character. I know, sir, that we appeal to a people debauched by public gambling, stimulated and encouraged by an inefficient and shortsighted Minister. I know that the public mind is polluted by economic fancies, a depraved desire that the rich may become richer without the interference of industry and toil. I know that all confidence in public men is lost. But, sir, I have faith in the primitive and enduring elements of the English character. It may be vain now in the midnight of their intoxication to tell them that there will be an awakening of bitterness. It may be idle now in the springtide of their economic frenzy to warn them that there may be an ebb of trouble. But the dark and inevitable hour will arrive. Then when their spirit is softened by misfortune they will recur to those principles which made England great, and which, in our belief, alone can keep England great. Then too, perhaps, they may remember, not with unkindness, those who, betrayed and deserted, were neither ashamed nor afraid to struggle for the good old cause, the cause with which are associated principles the most popular, sentiments the most entirely national, the cause of labour, the cause of the people, the cause of England.’

The Bill passed both Houses, the noble Lords preferring their coronets to their convictions. The Conservative defeat was complete and irreparable. ‘Vengeance, therefore, had succeeded in most breasts to more sanguine sentiments; the field was lost, but at any rate there was retribution for those who betrayed it.’ The desire of vengeance was human. Perhaps there was a feeling, more respectable, that if Peel was allowed to triumph some other institution might be attacked on similar lines; but it cannot be said that the occasion which the Conservatives used to punish him was particularly creditable to them. Ireland was starving, and Ireland was mutinous. Ordinary law proving, as usual, unequal to the demand upon it, Peel was obliged to bring in one of the too familiar Coercion Bills. Both parties when in office are driven to this expedient. The Liberals when in opposition generally denounce it. The Conservatives, as believing in order and authority, are in the habit of supporting the Administration, even if it be the Administration of their rivals. However discontented Peel might know his followers to be, he had no reason to expect that they would desert him on such a ground as this. His Coercion Bill passed the Lords without difficulty. It was read a first time in the House of Commons in an interval in the Corn Laws debate. A Conservative Opposition at such a crisis was at least factious, for there was danger of actual rebellion in Ireland. It was factious and it was not easy to organise. The opportunity was not a good one, but if it was allowed to escape a second was not likely to offer. Disraeli was a free-lance, and had opposed Coercion before. Lord George had committed himself by his vote on the first reading. But he had a private grudge of his own against Peel. They resolved to try what could be done, and called a meeting of the Conservative party. They found their friends cold. ‘There is no saying how our men will go,’ Lord George said to Disraeli. ‘It may be perilous, but if we lose this chance the traitor will escape. I will make the plunge.’ Lord George’s avowed ground was that he could no longer trust Peel and ‘must therefore refuse to give him unconstitutional powers.’ On the merits he would probably have been defeated; but the main point was lost sight of in the personal quarrel to which the debate gave rise. Peel’s conduct on the Corn Laws had revived the recollection of his treatment of Catholic Emancipation. When Canning, in 1827, was proposing to deal with it Peel had refused to join his Ministry on this avowed ground, and Canning’s death was popularly connected with his supposed mortification at his failure on that occasion. Disraeli, as we have seen, had given Peel one sharp wound by referring to this episode in his career. Lord George dealt him another and a worse. The object was to prove that Peel’s treachery was an old habit with him. He insisted that while he had refused to support Emancipation if introduced by Canning in 1827 he had himself changed his opinion about it two years before, and that he had himself heard him avow the alteration of his sentiments.

‘We are told now,’ Lord George said, speaking on the Coercion Bill—‘we hear it from the Minister himself—that he thinks there is nothing humiliating in the course which he has pursued, that it would have been base and dishonest in him, and inconsistent with his duty to his Sovereign, if he had concealed his opinions after he had changed them; but I have lived long enough, I am sorry to say, to remember the time when the right honourable Baronet chased and hunted an illustrious relative of mine to death, and when he stated that he could not support his Ministry because, as leading member of it, he was likely to forward the question of Catholic Emancipation. That was the conduct of the right honourable Baronet in 1827, but in 1829 he told the House he had changed his opinion on that subject in 1825 and had communicated that change of opinion to the Earl of Liverpool.’ ‘Peel,’ he said, ‘stood convicted by his own words of base and dishonest conduct, conduct inconsistent with the duty of a Minister to his Sovereign.’ ‘He’ (Lord George) ‘was satisfied that the country would not forgive twice the same crime in the same man. A second time had the right honourable Baronet insulted the honour of Parliament and of the country, and it was now time that atonement should be made to the betrayed constituencies of the Empire.’

This had nothing to do with the Coercion Bill, and the motive of a charge so vindictive could only have been to irritate passions which did not need any further stimulus. The manners of Parliament are not supposed to have improved in recent periods, but the worst scenes in our own day are tame reproductions of the violence of forty years ago. The House of Commons was then the real voice of the country, and the anger of the Conservatives was the anger of half a nation. Lord George’s charge was based on a speech alleged to have been made in the House itself. It was therefore absurd to accuse Peel of secret treachery. Any treachery which there might have been was open and avowed. But did Peel ever make such a speech? He rose as if stunned by the noise, and said peremptorily that the accusation was destitute of foundation. ‘It was as foul a calumny as a vindictive spirit ever directed against a public man.’ The House adjourned in perplexity and astonishment. Lord George was positive; he had been himself present, he said, when the words were spoken. The question became more perplexed on reference to the reports in the newspapers. The incriminated passage was not in the report in ‘Hansard,’ which had been revised by Sir Robert; but it was found in the ‘Mirror of Parliament,’ and also in the ‘Times.’ It was discovered also that Sir Edward Knatchbull had drawn attention to Peel’s words at the time, and had enquired why he had not supported Canning if, as he alleged, he had changed his mind as early as 1825. This seemed decisive. Lord George could not speak again by the rules of the House, and handed his authorities to Disraeli to use for him when the debate was renewed. Disraeli was not likely to fail with such materials, and delivered an invective to which the fiercest of his previous onslaughts was like the cooing of a dove. He was speaking as an advocate. It does not follow that he believed all he said, but the object was to make Peel suffer, and in this he undoubtedly succeeded. Peel made a lame defence, and the matter was never completely cleared up. Sir Edward Knatchbull’s speech could not be explained away. The House, however, was willing to be satisfied. Lord John Russell, winding up the discussion and speaking for the Opposition, accepted Peel’s denial, declaring that both on Catholic Emancipation and on the Corn Laws he had done good service to his country, but agreed that on both occasions he had turned round upon his pledges and ought not to be surprised if his friends were angry with him. Disraeli, in telling the story afterwards in his Life of Lord George, said that the truth was probably this: ‘that Peel’s change on the Emancipation question had not been a sudden resolve—that he had probably weighed the arguments for and against for a considerable time, and that having to make a complicated and embarrassing statement when he announced that he had gone round, and to refer by dates to several periods as to his contingent conduct, had conveyed a meaning to the House different from what he had intended.’ Thus looked at his conduct might be explained to his entire vindication. Disraeli, however, still insisted that both Bentinck and himself had been also right in bringing the charge. The point before the House was Peel’s general conduct. He had twice betrayed the party who had trusted his promises. Lord George said that to denounce men who had broken their pledges was a public duty. ‘If the country could not place faith in the pledges of their representatives the authority of the House of Commons would fall.’ However that might be the storm decided the wavering minds of the Tory army, and with it the fate of Sir Robert Peel. In voting against the Coercion Bill they would be voting against their own principles, and the utmost efforts were made to retain them in their allegiance. Persuasion and menace were alike unavailing. ‘The gentlemen of England,’ of whom it had once been Sir Robert’s proudest boast to be the leader, declared against him. He was beaten by an overpowering majority, and his career as an English Minister was closed.

Disraeli’s had been the hand which dethroned him, and to Disraeli himself, after three years of anarchy and uncertainty, descended the task of again building together the shattered ruins of the Conservative party. Very unwillingly they submitted to the unwelcome necessity. Canning and the elder Pitt had both been called adventurers, but they had birth and connection, and they were at least Englishmen. Disraeli had risen out of a despised race; he had never sued for their favours; he had voted and spoken as he pleased, whether they liked it or not. He had advocated in spite of them the admission of the Jews to Parliament, and many of them might think that in his novels he had held the Peerage up to hatred. He was without Court favour, and had hardly a powerful friend except Lord Lyndhurst. He had never been tried on the lower steps of the official ladder. He was young too—only forty-two—after all the stir that he had made. There was no example of a rise so sudden under such conditions. But the Tory party had accepted and cheered his services, and he stood out alone among them as a debater of superior power. Their own trained men had all deserted them. Lord George remained for a year or two as nominal chief: but Lord George died; the Conservatives could only consolidate themselves under a real leader, and Disraeli was the single person that they had who was equal to the situation. Not a man on either side in the House was more than his match in single combat. He had overthrown Peel and succeeded to Peel’s honours.

His situation was now changed. So far he had remained the Tory Radical which he had first professed himself. He had his own views, and he had freely enunciated them, whether they were practical or only theoretic. No doubt he had thought that use might have been made of the reaction of 1841 to show the working men of England that the Tories were their real friends. He knew that the gulf which was dividing the rich from the poor was a danger to the Constitution. But, instead of far-reaching social legislation, Parliament had decided for the immediate relief of cheap bread. The country was committed to laissez-faire and liberty, and no reversion to earlier principles was now possible until laissez-faire had been tried out and the consequences of it tasted and digested. As an outsider he would have been still free to express his own opinions; as the leader of a party he had now to consider the disposition of his followers and the practical exigencies of the situation. All that was for the present possible was to moderate the pace of what was called Progress, keep the break upon the wheels, and prevent an overturn in the descent of the incline. In the life of nations the periods of change are brief; the normal condition of things is permanence and stability. The bottom would be reached at last, and the appetite for innovation would be satiated.