Returned to Parliament for Maidstone—Takes his place behind Sir R. Peel—Maiden speech—Silenced by violence—Peel’s opinion of it—Advice of Shiel—Second speech on Copyright completely successful—State of politics—England in a state of change—Break-up of ancient institutions—Land and its duties—Political Economy and Free Trade—Struggle on the Corn Laws.

The acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Wyndham Lewis had grown into a close friendship. Mr. Lewis, as has been said, was member for Maidstone, and had large local influence in the borough. The death of William IV., in the summer of 1837, dissolved Parliament; and Disraeli, being adopted by Mr. Lewis as his colleague, was returned by an easy majority. The election again gave the Whigs a majority, but not a large one. The tide was fast ebbing, and the time was near when the Conservatives, as the Tories now called themselves, were to see the balance turn in their favour. Lord Melbourne meanwhile remained Minister, but a Minister who desired to be able to do nothing. Ministers with a powerful party behind them are driven occasionally into measures which they would have preferred to avoid. The electors who have given them power require them to use it. Whigs and Tories alike know that their time will be short unless by some sensational policy they can gratify public expectation. Nothing was expected of Lord Melbourne, and persons who dreaded change of any kind, from whichever side it might come, were satisfied that it should be so. I remember Bishop Philpotts rubbing his hands over the situation, and saying that he hoped never more to see a strong Government.

It was a time of ‘slack water;’ nevertheless Disraeli was supremely happy. He had now a career open before him, and a career in which he was certain that he could distinguish himself. His delight was boyish. He said, ‘It makes a difference in public opinion of me.’ The election was in July, and Parliament met in November. He took his seat on the second bench behind Peel, a place which he intended, if possible, to secure for himself. Peel’s character had rallied the Conservative party, and to Peel personally they looked for guidance. Yarde Buller being asked his opinion on some question, replied that Peel had not made up his mind; Old Toryism was gone with Lord Eldon; the Reform Bill, once passed, was to be the law of the land. Disraeli had no personal interest in any of the great questions which divided English opinion. He owned no land; he was unconnected with trade; he had none of the hereditary prepossessions of a native Englishman. He was merely a volunteer on the side with which, as a man of intellect, he had most natural sympathy. He took a brief from the Conservatives, without remuneration in money, but trusting to win fame, if not fortune, in an occupation for which he knew that he was qualified. He began in the ranks, and Peel was his leader; and his leader, till he had made a place for himself, he loyally prepared to serve.

‘Peel welcomed me very warmly,’ he reported to Bradenham, ‘and all noticed his cordial demeanour. He looks very well, and asked me to join a swell dinner at the Carlton on Thursday—a House of Commons dinner purely,’ he said. ‘By that time we shall know something of the temper of the House.’ A fortnight later he mentioned, with evident pride, that he had met Peel again, and Peel took wine with him.

Success to Disraeli in the House of Commons was the alternative of a financial catastrophe. His debts were large; money had been necessary to him for the position to which he aspired. He had no securities to offer, and never entangled friends in his pecuniary dealings. He had gone frankly to the professional money-lenders, who had made advances to him in a speculation upon his success. There was no deception on either side—Disraeli was running his talents against the chance of failure. If he succeeded the loans would be paid. If he did not succeed, the usurers had played for a high stake and had lost it, that was all. At worst he was but following the example of Burke and the younger Pitt. As his bills fell due, they had been renewed at 8 and 10 per cent. and even more, and when he commenced his political life would have been formidable to anyone but himself. They were all eventually paid, and he was never charged, even in thought, with having abused afterwards the opportunities of power to relieve himself. But it was with this weight upon his back that he began his Parliamentary career. He had started on his own merits, for he had nothing else to recommend him, and he had challenged fate by the pretensions which he had put forward for himself. His birth was a reproach to be got over. He had no great constituency at his back, no popular cause to represent. He was without the academic reputation which so often smooths the entrance to public life, and the Tory gentlemen, among whom he had taken his place, looked upon him with dubious eyes. ‘Had I been a political adventurer,’ he said at Wycombe, ‘I had nothing to do but join the Whigs.’ The Radicals would have welcomed him into their ranks; but the Radicals looked on him as an apostate, as a mischievous insect to be crushed on the first opportunity. The ‘Globe’ had assailed him brutally, and he had replied in kind. ‘The Whig Samson should never silence him with the jaw of an ass. He would show the world what a miserable poltroon, what a craven dullard, what a literary scarecrow, what a mere thing stuffed with straw and rubbish was the soi-disant director of public opinion and official organ of Whig politics.’ A first speech in the House of Commons is usually treated with indulgence. The notoriety which Disraeli had brought on himself by these encounters was to make him a solitary exception. He had told O’Connell that they would meet at Philippi. Three weeks after Disraeli had taken his seat there was a debate upon some election manoeuvres in Ireland. Hard blows had been exchanged. Sir F. Burdett had called O’Connell a paid patriot. O’Connell had replied that he had sacrificed a splendid professional income to defend his country’s rights. ‘Was he for this to be vilified and traduced by an old renegade?’ Immediately after O’Connell Disraeli rose. His appearance was theatrical, as usual. He was dressed in a bottle-green frock coat, with a white waistcoat, collarless, and with needless display of gold chain. His face was lividly pale, his voice and manner peculiar. began naturally and sensibly, keeping to the point of the debate. He was cheered by his own side, and might have got through tolerably enough; but the gentlemen below the gangway had determined that his Philippi should not end with a victory. Of course he did not yet know the House of Commons. Affected expressions, which would have been welcomed at Wycombe or Taunton, were received with scornful laughter. He bore it for a time good-humouredly, and begged them to hear him out. He was answered with fresh peals of mockery. He had to speak of the alliance between the Whigs and the Irish Catholics. With a flourish of rhetoric he described Melbourne as flourishing in one hand the keys of St. Peter, in the other, he was going to say, ‘the cap of Liberty,’ but the close of the sentence was drowned in derisive shouts. The word had gone out that he was to be put down. Each time that he tried to proceed the storm burst out, and the Speaker could not silence it. Peel cheered him repeatedly. The Tory party cheered, but to no purpose. At last, finding it useless to persist, he said he was not surprised at the reception which he had experienced. He had begun several times many things and had succeeded at last. Then pausing and looking indignantly across the House, he exclaimed in a loud and remarkable tone, which startled even the noisy hounds who were barking loudest, ‘I will sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.’

No one suffers long through injustice. His ill-wishers had tried to embarrass him and make him break down. They had not succeeded, and probably even O’Connell himself felt that he had been unfairly dealt with. People watched him curiously the rest of the evening to see how he bore his treatment. He was said to have sat with his arms folded, looking gloomily on the floor. His own account shows that he was not depressed at all, and that indeed the experience was not entirely new.

‘I made my maiden speech last night,’ he tells his sister, ‘rising very late after O’Connell, but at the request of my party and with the full sanction of Sir Robert Peel. I state at once that my dÉbut was a failure—not by my breaking down or incompetency on my part, but from the physical power of my adversaries. It was like my first dÉbut at Aylesbury, and perhaps in that sense may be auspicious of ultimate triumph in the same scene. I fought through all with undaunted pluck and unruffled temper, made occasionally good isolated hits when there was silence, and finished with spirit when I found a formal display was ineffectual. My party backed me well, and no one with more zeal and kindness than Peel, cheering me repeatedly, which is not his custom. The uproar was all organised by the Rads and the Repealers. In the lobby, at the division, Chandos, who was not near me in speaking, came up and congratulated me. I replied I thought there was no cause for congratulation, and muttered “Failure.” “No such thing,” said Chandos; “you are quite wrong. I have just seen Peel, and I said to him, ‘Now tell me exactly what you think of Disraeli.’ Peel replied, ‘Some of my party were disappointed and talk of failure; I say just the reverse. He did all that he could under the circumstances; I say anything but failure: he must make his way.’” The Attorney-General (Campbell), to whom I never spoke in my life, came up to me in the lobby and spoke to me with great cordiality. He said, “Now, Mr. Disraeli, could you just tell me how you finished one sentence in your speech? We are anxious to know. ‘In one hand the keys of St. Peter and in the other ——’” “In the other the cap of Liberty, Sir John.” He smiled and said, “A good picture.” I replied, “But your friends would not allow me to finish my picture.” “I assure you,” he said, “there was the liveliest desire to hear you from us. It was a party at the bar, over whom we have no control; but you have nothing to be afraid of.” Now I have told you all.—Yours, D., in very good spirits.’

Disraeli’s collapse was the next day’s delight at the clubs. Shiel, though an Irish leader, declined to join in it. ‘I have heard what you say,’ he answered to the wits who appealed to him, ‘and what is more, I heard this same speech of Mr. Disraeli; and I tell you this: If ever the spirit of oratory was in a man it is that man. Nothing can prevent him from being one of the first speakers of the House of Commons.’

The speech, however, might have been a failure, Shiel admitted, if Disraeli had been allowed to go on. The manner was unusual; the House of Commons had not grown accustomed to it. ‘Get rid of your genius for a session,’ he said to Disraeli himself. ‘Speak often, for you must not show yourself cowed, but speak shortly. Be very quiet; try to be dull; only argue and reason imperfectly. Astonish them by speaking on subjects of detail; quote figures, dates, and calculations. In a short time the House will sigh for the wit and eloquence they know are in you. They will encourage you to pour them forth, and thus you will have the ear of the House and be a favourite.’

Disraeli’s sense was stronger than his vanity. His whole fate was at stake, and he knew it. He took Shiel’s advice. A week after he had been howled down he spoke again on the Copyright Bill, a subject which he perfectly understood. Again when he rose he was observed with curious attention. It was thought that he would allude to his first misadventure; he made not the least reference to it. His voice, naturally impressive, was in good condition. What he said was exactly to the purpose. His conclusion, if simple, was excellent.

‘I am glad to hear from her Majesty’s Government that the interests of literature have at length engaged their attention. It has been the boast of the Whig party, and a boast not without foundation, that in many brilliant periods of our literary annals they have been the patrons of letters. As for myself, I trust that the age of literary patronage has passed; and it will be honourable to the present Government if under its auspices it is succeeded by that of literary protection.’

The House was willing to be pleased. Lord John Russell cheered the allusion to his Liberal predecessors. The Radicals approved of the independence which he claimed for the future of his own profession. Peel loudly applauded, and never after had Disraeli to complain that he was not listened to with respect. The cabal which would have silenced him had, in fact, made his reputation. His colleague and his Maidstone constituents were delighted. In the remainder of the session he was frequently on his feet, but only to say a few sensible sentences and never putting himself forward on great occasions.

Notwithstanding all that has been said and continues to be said about the outset of his Parliamentary career, he had made solid progress in the estimation of the House and, far more to the purpose, his quick apprehension had learnt the temper and disposition of the House itself.

Before proceeding further a brief sketch must be given of the state of public affairs when Disraeli’s political life commenced. The British Islands were covered with the shells of institutions which no longer answered the purpose for which they were intended. The privileges remained. The duties attaching to them were either unperformed or, from change of circumstances, incapable of performance. Down to the Reformation of the sixteenth century the beliefs and habits of the English nation were formed by the Catholic Church. Men and women of all ranks were brought up on the hypothesis that their business in this world was not to grow rich, but to do their duties in the state of life to which they had been called. Their time on earth was short. In the eternity which lay beyond their condition would wholly depend on the way in which it had been spent. On this principle society was constructed, and the conduct, public and private, of the great body of the people was governed by the supposition that the principle was literally true.

History takes note of the exception of the foolish or tyrannical king, the oppressive baron, the profligate Churchman, the occasional expressions of popular discontent. Irregularities in human life are like the river cataracts and waterfalls which attract the landscape painter. The historian dwells upon them because they are dramatically interesting, but the broad features of those ages must be looked for in the commonplace character of everyday existence, which attracts little notice and can be traced only in the effects which it has produced. It was thus that the soil of this island was cleared and fenced and divided into fields as by a pencil. It was then that in every parish there arose a church, on which piety lavished every ornament which skill could command, and then and thus was formed the English nation, which was to exercise so vast an influence on the fortunes of mankind. They were proud of their liberty. A race never lived more sternly resolute to keep the soil of their sea-girt island untrodden by the foot of the invader. Liberty in the modern sense, liberty where the rights of man take the place of the duties of a man—such a liberty they neither sought nor desired. As in an army, each man had had his own position under a graduated scale of authority, and the work was hardest where the rank was highest. The baron was maintained in his castle on the produce of the estate. But the baron had the hardest knocks in the field of battle. In dangerous times he was happy if he escaped the scaffold. He maintained his state in the outward splendour which belonged to his station, but in private he lived as frugally as his tenants, sleeping on a hard bed, eating hard, plain food, with luxury unheard of and undreamt of. The rule was loyalty—loyalty of the lord to the king, loyalty of lord to peasant and of peasant to lord. So deeply rooted was the mutual feeling that for long generations after the relation had lost its meaning, and one of the parties had forgotten that it ever had a meaning, reverence and respect to the owner of the land lingered on and is hardly extinct to-day.

In the towns the trades were organised under the guilds. The price of food, the rate of wages from household servant to field labourer and artisan, were ordered by statute on principles of equity. For each trade there was a council, and false measure and bad quality of goods were sharply looked to. The miller could not adulterate his flour. The price of wheat varied with the harvest, but the speculator who bought up grain to sell again at famine price found himself in the hands of the constable. For the children of the poor there was an education under the apprentice system, to which the most finished school-board training was as copper to gold. Boys and girls alike were all taught some useful occupation by which they could afterwards honestly maintain themselves. If there were hardships they were not confined to a single class, but were borne equally by the great and the humble. A nation in a healthy state is an organism like the human body. If the finger says to the hand, ‘I have no need of thee; I will go my way, touch what pleases me, and let alone what I do not care to meddle with,’ the owner of the hand will be in a bad way. A commonwealth, or common weal, demands that each kind shall do the work which belongs to him or her. When he or she, when individuals generally begin to think and act for themselves, to seek their rights and their enjoyments, and forget their duties, the work of dissolution has already set in.

The fear of God made England, and no great nation was ever made by any other fear. When the Catholic Church broke down it survived under Protestant forms, till Protestantism too dwindled into opinion and ceased to be a rule of life. We still read our Bibles and went to church; we were zealous for the purity of our faith, and established our societies to propagate it; but the faith itself became consistent with the active sense that pleasure was pleasant and wealth was power, and while our faith would make things right in the next world we might ourselves make something out of the present. From the Restoration downwards the owners of land began to surround themselves with luxuries, and the employers of labour to buy it at the cheapest rate. Selfishness became first a practice and then developed boldly into a theory. Life was a race in which the strongest had a right to win. Every man was to be set free and do the best which he could for himself. The Institutions remained. Dukes and earls and minor dignitaries still wore their coronets and owned the soil. Bishops were the spiritual lords of their dioceses, and the rector represented the Church in his parish. The commercial companies survived in outward magnificence. But in aiming at wealth they all alike forfeited their power. Competition became the sole rule of trade; a new philosophy was invented to gild the change; artisans and labourers were taught to believe that they would gain as largely as the capitalists. They had been bondsmen; they were now free, and all would benefit alike. Yet somehow all did not benefit alike. The houses of the upper classes grew into palaces, and the owners of them lived apart as a separate caste; but the village labourer did not find his lot more easy because he belonged to nobody. As population increased his wages sank to the lowest point at which he could keep his family alive. The ‘hands’ in the towns fared no better. If wages rose the cost of living rose along with them. The compulsory apprentice system was dropped, and the children were dragged up in squalor upon the streets. Discontent broke out in ugly forms: ricks were burnt in the country, and in the northern cities there was riot and disorder. They were told that they must keep the peace and help themselves. Their labour was an article which they had to sell, and the value of it was fixed by the relations between supply and demand. Man could not alter the laws of nature, which political economy had finally discovered. Political economy has since been banished to the exterior planets; but fifty years ago to doubt was heresy, to deny was a crime to be censured in all the newspapers. Carlyle might talk scornfully of the ‘Disraeli science.’ Disraeli might heap ridicule on Mr. Flummery Flum. But Mr. Flummery Flum was a prophet in his day and led the believers into strange places. The race for wealth went on at railroad speed. Vast fortunes were accumulated as the world’s markets opened wider. The working classes ought to have shared the profits, and they were diligently instructed that they had gained as much as their employers. But their practical condition remained unaltered, and they looked with strange eyes upon the progress in which, for one cause or another, they did not find that they participated. The remedy of the economists was to heat the furnace still hotter, to abolish every lingering remnant of restraint, and stifle complaint by admitting the working men to political power. The enlightened among the rich were not afraid, for they were entrenched, as they believed, behind their law of nature. In its contracts with labour capital must always have the advantage; for capital could wait and hungry stomachs could not wait. In the meantime let the Corn Laws go. Let all taxes on articles of consumption go. Trade would then expand indefinitely, and all would be well. ‘The wealth of the nation,’ the Free-Traders of Manchester said, depends on its commerce. The commerce of England is shackled by a network of duties. The consumer pays dear for the necessaries of life, which he might buy cheap but for artificial interference. The raw materials of our industry are burdened with restrictions. But for these we might multiply our mills, expand our connections, provide work and food for the millions who are now hungry. With your Corn Laws you are starving multitudes to maintain the rents of a few thousand Elysians, who neither toil nor spin, who might be blotted off the surface of the soil to-morrow and none would miss them; who consume the labours of the poor on a splendour of living unheard of since the Roman Empire, and extort the means of this extravagance by an arbitrary law. You say you must have a revenue to maintain your fleets and armies, and that it cannot be raised except by customs duties. Your fleets and armies are not needed. Take away your commercial fetters, allow the nations of the earth a free exchange of commodities with us, and you need not fear that they will quarrel with us: wars will be heard of no more, and the complaints of the poor that they are famished to supply the luxuries of the rich will no longer cry to Heaven.

The Free-Traders might have been over-sanguine, but on the Corn Laws it was hard to answer them. The duties attaching to the ownership of land had fallen to shadows. The defence of the country had passed to the army. Internal peace was maintained by the police. Unless they volunteered to serve as magistrates the landlords had but to receive their rents and do as they pleased with their own. An aristocracy whose achievements, as recorded in newspapers, were the slaughter of unheard of multitudes of pheasants, an aristocracy to one of whose distinguished members a granite column was recently erected on a spot where he had slain fifty brace of grouse in half an hour, were scarcely in a position to demand that the poor man’s loaf should be reduced in size, for fear their incomes should suffer diminution. Carlyle said that he had never heard an argument for the Corn Laws which might not make angels weep. If the fear of suffering in their pockets had been the only motive which influenced the landed interest in its opposition to free trade, there would have been nothing to be said for it; but if that had been all, Corn Laws in such a country as England could never have existed at all. Protection for native industry had been established for centuries. It had prevailed and still prevails in spite of the arguments of free-traders all the world over, and under all forms of government. The principle of it has been and is that no country is in a sound or safe condition which cannot feed its own population independent of the foreigner. Peace could not be counted on with an empire so extended as ours. Occasions of quarrel might arise which no prudence could avert. The world had seen many a commercial commonwealth rise to temporary splendour, but all had gone the same road, and a country which depended on its imports for daily bread would be living at the mercy of its rivals. Christianity had failed to extinguish war. It was not likely that commerce would succeed better, and the accidents of a single campaign, the successful blockade of our ports even for a month or a fortnight, might degrade us into a shameful submission. British agriculture was the creation of protection. Under the duties which kept out foreign corn waste lands had been reclaimed, capital had been invested in the soil, and with such success and energy that double the wheat was raised per acre in England as was produced in any country in the world. The farmer prospered, the labourer at least existed, and the country population was maintained. Take protection away and wheat would cease to be grown. The plough would rust in the shed; the peasantry of the villages would dwindle away. They would drift into the towns in festering masses, living precariously from day to day, ever pressing on the means of employment with decaying physique and growing discontent. Cobden said the cost of carriage would partially protect the farmer. His own industry must do the rest. The ocean steamers have made short work of the cost of carriage; the soil could yield no more than it was bearing already. Cobden’s more daring followers said that if the country districts returned to waste and forest the nation itself would be no poorer. In the defence of protection and in the denunciation of it there was alike a base element. The landlords were alarmed for their private interests. The manufacturer did expect that if the loaf was cheaper labour would be cheaper, for by orthodox doctrine labour adjusted itself to the cost of living. But to statesmen, whose business it was to look beyond the day that was passing over them, there was reason to pause before rushing into a course from which there could be no return, and which in another century might prove to have been a wild experiment. The price of food might be gradually reduced without immediate revolution, and the opportunity might be used to attach the colonies more closely to the mother country. The colonies and India, with the encouragement of an advantage in the home market, could supply corn without limit, and their connection with us would be cemented by interest; while if they were placed on the same level as foreigners they would perhaps take us at our word and become foreigners. The traders insisted that if we opened our ports all the world would follow our example. But prophecies did not always prove correct, and, if the world did not follow our example, to fight prohibitive duties with free imports might prove a losing bargain.