Young England and the Oxford Tractarians—Disraeli a Hebrew at heart—‘Coningsby’—Sidonia—‘Sybil; or, the Two Nations’—The great towns under the new creed—Lords of the soil as they were and as they are—Disraeli an aristocratic Socialist—Practical working of Parliamentary institutions—Special importance of ‘Sybil.’

According to Disraeli’s theory of government, the natural rulers of England were the aristocracy, supported by the people. The owners of the soil were the stable element in the Constitution. Capitalists grew like mushrooms, and disappeared as rapidly; the owners of the land remained. Tenants and labourers looked up to them with a feeling of allegiance; and that allegiance might revive into a living principle if the aristocracy would deserve it by reverting to the habits of their forefathers. That ancient forces could be awakened out of their sleep seemed proved by the success of the Tractarian movement at Oxford. The bold motto of the ‘Lyra Apostolica’ proclaimed that Achilles was in the field again, and that Liberalism was to find its master. The Oxford leaders might look doubtfully on so strange an ally as a half-converted Israelite. But Disraeli and the Young Englanders had caught the note, and were endeavouring to organise a political party on analogous lines. It was a dream. No such regeneration, spiritual or social, was really possible. Times were changed, and men had changed along with them. The Oxford movement was already undermined, though Disraeli knew it not. The English upper classes were not to be persuaded to alter habits which had become a second nature to them, or the people to be led back into social dependence by enthusiasm and eloquence. Had any such resurrection of the past been on the cards, Disraeli was not the necromancer who could have bid the dead live again. No one had a keener sense of the indications in others than he had. Fuller self-knowledge would have told him that the friend of D’Orsay and Lady Blessington, of Tom Duncomb and Lytton Bulwer, was an absurd associate in an ecclesiastical and social revival. He seemed to think that if Newman had paid more attention to ‘Coningsby,’ the course of things might have been different. Saints had worked with secular politicians at many periods of Christian history; why not the Tractarian with him? Yet the juxtaposition of Newman and Disraeli cannot be thought of without an involuntary smile. It would be wrong to say that Disraeli had no sincere religious convictions. He was a Hebrew to the heart of him. He accepted the Hebrew tradition as a true account of the world, and of man’s place in it. He was nominally a member of the Church of England; but his Christianity was something of his own, and his creed, as sketched in his ‘Life of Lord George Bentinck,’ would scarcely find acceptance in any Christian community.

I have mentioned ‘Coningsby.’ It is time to see what ‘Coningsby’ was. Disraeli’s novels had been brilliant, but he had touched nowhere the deeper chords of enduring feeling. His characters had been smart, but trivial; and his higher flights, as in the ‘Revolutionary Epic,’ or his attempts to paint more delicate emotion, as in ‘Henrietta Temple’ or in ‘Venetia,’ if not failures, were not successes of a distinguished kind. He had shown no perception of what was simple, or true, or tender, or admirable. He had been at his best when mocking at conventional humbug. But his talent as a writer was great, and, with a subject on which he was really in earnest, might produce a powerful effect. To impress the views of the Young Englanders upon the public, something more was needed than speeches in Parliament or on platforms. Henry Hope, son of the author of ‘Anastasius,’ collected them in a party at his house at Deepdene, and there first ‘urged the expediency of Disraeli’s treating in a literary form those views and subjects which were the matter of their frequent conversations.’ The result was ‘Coningsby’ and ‘Sybil.’

‘Coningsby; or, the New Generation’ carried its meaning in its title. If England was to be saved by its aristocracy, the aristocracy must alter their ways. The existing representatives of the order had grown up in self-indulgence and social exclusiveness; some excellent, a few vicious, but all isolated from the inferior ranks, and all too old to mend. The hope, if hope there was, had to be looked for in their sons.

As a tale, ‘Coningsby’ is nothing; but it is put together with extreme skill to give opportunities for typical sketches of character, and for the expression of opinions on social and political subjects. We have pictures of fashionable society, gay and giddy, such as no writer ever described better; peers, young, middle-aged, and old, good, bad, and indifferent, the central figure a profligate old noble of immense fortune, whose person was easily recognised, and whose portrait was also preserved by Thackeray. Besides these, intriguing or fascinating ladies, political hacks, country gentlemen, mill-owners, and occasional wise outsiders, looking on upon the chaos and delivering oracular interpretations or prophecies. Into the middle of such a world the hero is launched, being the grandson and possible heir of the wicked peer. Lord Monmouth is a specimen of the order which was making aristocratic government impossible. To tax corn to support Lord Monmouth was plainly impossible. The story opens at Eton, which Disraeli describes with an insight astonishing in a writer who had no experience of English public school life, and with a fondness which confesses how much he had lost in the substitutes to which he had been himself condemned. There Coningsby makes acquaintance with the high-born youths who are to be his companions in the great world which is to follow, then in the enjoyment of a delightful present, and brimming with enthusiastic ambitions. They accompany each other to their fathers’ castles, and schemes are meditated and begun for their future careers; Disraeli letting fall, as he goes on, his own political opinions, and betraying his evident disbelief in existing Conservatism, and in its then all-powerful leader. He finds Peel constructing a party without principles, with a basis therefore necessarily latitudinarian, and driving into political infidelity. There were shouts about Conservatism; but the question, What was to be conserved? was left unanswered. The Crown was to keep its prerogatives provided they were not exercised; the House of Lords might keep its independence if it was never asserted; the ecclesiastical estate if it was regulated by a commission of laymen. Everything, in short, that was established might remain as long as it was a phrase and not a fact. The Conservatism of Sir Robert ‘offered no redress for the present, and made no preparations for the future. On the arrival of one of those critical conjunctures which would periodically occur in all States, the power of resistance would be wanting; the barren curse of political infidelity would paralyse all action, and the Conservative Constitution would be discovered to be a caput mortuum.

‘Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. He asked himself why governments were hated and religions despised, why loyalty was dead and reverence only a galvanised corpse. He had found age perplexed and desponding, manhood callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time, others that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from lax chance medley maxims that would, in their consequence, reduce men to the level of brutes.’

He falls in with all varieties of men bred in the confusion of the old and the new. An enthusiastic Catholic landlord tries to revive the customs of his ancestors, supported by his faith, but perplexed by the aspect of a world no longer apparently under supernatural guidance. ‘I enter life,’ says Mr. Lyle, ‘in the midst of a convulsion in which the very principles of our political and social system are called in question. I cannot unite myself with the party of destruction. It is an operative cause alien to my being. What, then, offers itself? The duke talks to me of Conservative principles, but he does not inform me what they are. I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule it is to consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to yield: but those are concessionary, not Conservative, principles. This party treats our institutions as we do our pheasants. They preserve only to destroy them. But is there a statesman among these Conservatives who offers us a dogma for a guide, or defines any great political truth which we should aspire to establish? It seems to me a barren thing, this Conservatism; an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics, that engenders nothing.’

Coningsby had saved the life of a son of a Northern mill-owner at Eton. They became attached friends, though they were of opposite creeds. Coningsby’s study of the social problem carries him to Manchester, where he hears from Millbank the views entertained in the industrial circles of the English aristocracy. Mr. Millbank dislikes feudal manners as out of date and degenerate.

‘I do not understand,’ he says, ‘how an aristocracy can exist, unless it is distinguished by some quality which no other class of the community possesses. Distinction is the basis of aristocracy. If you permit only one class of the population, for example, to bear arms, they are an aristocracy: not much to my taste, but still a great fact. That, however, is not the characteristic of the English peerage. I have yet to learn that they are richer than we are, better informed, or more distinguished for public or private virtue. Ancient lineage! I never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the country are to be found among the peasantry. The gentry, too, may lay claim to old blood: I know of some Norman gentlemen whose fathers undoubtedly came in with the Conqueror. But a peer with an ancient lineage is to me quite a novelty. The thirty years’ Wars of the Roses freed us from these gentlemen, I take it. After the battle of Tewkesbury a Norman baron was almost as rare a being as a wolf.... We owe the English peerage to three sources—the spoliation of the Church, the open and flagrant sale of its honours by the elder Stuarts, and the borough-mongering of our own times. These are the three main sources of the existing peerages of England, and in my opinion disgraceful ones.’

‘And where will you find your natural aristocracy?’ asked Coningsby. ‘Among those,’ Millbank answers, ‘whom a nation recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you will, birth and standing in this land. They guide opinions, and therefore they govern. I am no leveller; I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy, both depressing the energies and checking the enterprise of a nation. I am sanguine. I am the disciple of progress, but I have cause for my faith. I have witnessed advance. My father often told me that in his early days the displeasure of a peer of England was like a sentence of death.’

A more remarkable figure is Sidonia, the Hebrew financier, who is represented very much in the position of Disraeli himself, half a foreigner, and impartial onlooker, with a keen interest in the stability of English institutions, but with the insight possible only to an outsider, who observes without inherited prepossessions. Sidonia, the original of whom is as easily recognised, is, like Disraeli, of Spanish descent. His father staked all that he was worth on the Waterloo Loan, became the greatest capitalist in Europe, and bequeathed his business and his fortune to his son.

The young Sidonia ‘obtained, at an early age, that experience of refined and luxurious society which is a necessary part of a finished education.

‘It gives the last polish to the manners. It teaches us something of the powers of the passions, early developed in the hotbed of self-indulgence. It instils into us that indefinable tact seldom obtained in later life, which prevents us from saying the wrong thing, and often impels us to do the right. He was admired by women, idolised by artists, received in all circles with great distinction, and appreciated for his intellect by the very few to whom he at all opened himself; for, though affable and generous, it was impossible to penetrate him: though unreserved in his manners, his frankness was limited to the surface. He observed everything, thought ever, but avoided serious discussion. If you pressed him for an opinion, he took refuge in raillery, and threw out some grave paradox with which it was not easy to cope.... He looked on life with a glance rather of curiosity than contempt. His religion walled him out from the pursuits of a citizen. His riches deprived him of the stimulating anxieties of a man. He perceived himself a lone being without cares and without duties. He might have discovered a spring of happiness in the sensibilities of the heart; but this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organisation there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency: he was a man without affection. It would be harsh to say that he had no heart, for he was susceptible of deep emotions; but not for individuals—woman was to him a toy, man a machine.’

Though Sidonia is chiefly drawn from another person, Disraeli himself can be traced in this description. The hand is the hand of Esau; the voice is the voice of Jacob. ‘The secret history of the world was Sidonia’s pastime.’ ‘His great pleasure was to contrast the hidden motive with the public pretext of transactions.’ This was Disraeli himself, and through Sidonia’s mouth Disraeli explains to Coningsby the political condition of England. The Constitution professed to rest on the representation of the people. Coningsby asks him what a representative system means. He replies: ‘It is a principle of which only a limited definition is current in this country. People may be represented without periodic elections of neighbours who are incapable to maintain their interests, and strangers who are unwilling.... You will observe one curious trait in the history of this country. The depositary of power is always unpopular: all combine against it: it always falls. Power was deposited in the great barons; the Church, using the king for its instrument, crushed the great barons. Power was deposited in the Church; the king, bribing the Parliament, plundered the Church. Power was deposited in the king; the Parliament, using the people, beheaded the king, expelled the king, changed the king, and finally for a king substituted an administrative officer. For a hundred and fifty years Power has been deposited in Parliament, and for the last sixty or seventy years it has been becoming more and more unpopular. In 1832, it endeavoured by a reconstruction to regain the popular affection; but, in truth, as the Parliament then only made itself more powerful, it has only become more odious. As we see that the barons, the Church, 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 devoured; and he is a sagacious statesman who may detect in what form and in what quarter the great consumer will arise.’

‘Whence, then,’ Coningsby asks, ‘is hope to be looked for?’ Sidonia replies:

‘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 or 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. In this country, 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 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: doubly grateful in this country where for so long a period our statesmen were in so pitiable an arrear of public intelligence. 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 engineers 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 Crusader, that instituted the monastic orders. It was not reason that created the French revolution. Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions, never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham. The tendency of advanced civilisation is, in truth, to pure monarchy. Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilisation for its full development. It needs the support of free laws and manners, and of a widely-diffused intelligence. Political compromises are not to be tolerated except at periods of rude transition. An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what is called representative government. Your House of Commons, that has absorbed all other powers in the State, will in all probability fall more rapidly than it rose. Public opinion has a more direct, a more comprehensive, a more efficient organ for its utterance than a body of men sectionally chosen. The printing-press absorbs the duties of the sovereign, the priest, the Parliament. It controls, it educates, it discusses.’

No attempt can be made here to analyse ‘Coningsby.’ The object of these extracts is merely to illustrate Disraeli’s private opinions. Space must be made for one more—a conversation between Coningsby and the younger Millbank. ‘Tell me, Coningsby,’ Millbank says, ‘exactly what you conceive to be the state of parties in this country.’

Coningsby answers:

‘The principle of the exclusive Constitution of England having been conceded by the Acts of 1827-1832, a party has arisen in the State who demand that the principle of political Liberalism shall consequently be carried to its full extent, which it appears to them is impossible without getting rid of the fragments of the old Constitution which remain. This is the destructive party, a party with distinct and intelligible principles. 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 long as they can; and these will manage them 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 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, though everyone knows it no longer exists. Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some 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 inevitable results of the measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented. This is the Conservative party.

‘As to the first school, I 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 imaginations and strengthened our wills? I perceive none of the elements of government that should secure the happiness of a people and the greatness of a realm. But if democracy be combated only by Conservatism, democracy must triumph and at no distant date. The man who enters political life at this epoch has to choose between political infidelity and a destructive creed.’

‘Do you declare against Parliamentary government?’

‘Far from it: I look upon political change as the greatest of evils, for it comprehends all. But if we have no faith in the permanence of the existing settlement ... we ought to prepare ourselves for the change which we deem impending.... I would accustom the public mind to the contemplation of an existing though torpid power in the Constitution capable of removing our social grievances, were we to transfer to it those prerogatives which the Parliament has gradually usurped, and used in a manner which has produced the present material and moral disorganisation. The House of Commons is the house of a few: the sovereign is the sovereign of all. The proper leader of the people is the individual who sits upon the throne.’

‘Then you abjure the representative principle?’

‘Why so? Representation is not necessarily, or even in a principal sense, Parliamentary. Parliament is not sitting at this moment: and yet the nation is represented in its highest as well as in its most minute interests. Not a grievance escapes notice and redress. I see in the newspapers this morning that a pedagogue has brutally chastised his pupil. It is a fact known over all England—opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print. The representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament. Parliamentary representation was the happy device of a ruder age, to which it was admirably adapted. But it exhibits many symptoms of desuetude. It is controlled by a system of representation more vigorous and comprehensive, which absorbs its duties and fulfils them more efficiently.... Before a royal authority, supported by such a national opinion, the sectional anomalies of our country would disappear. Under such a system even statesmen would be educated. We should have no more diplomatists who could not speak French, no more bishops ignorant of theology, no more generals-in-chief who never saw a field. There is a polity adapted to our laws, our institutions, our feelings, our manners, our traditions: a polity capable of great ends, and appealing to high sentiments: a polity which, in my opinion, would render government an object of national affection, would terminate sectional anomalies, and extinguish Chartism.’

Disraeli was singularly regardless of the common arts of party popularity. He had spoken in defence of the Chartists when he was supposed to be bidding for a place under Sir Robert Peel; he had used language about Ireland, sweeping, peremptory, going to the heart of the problem, which Whig and Tory must have alike resented; and he had risked his seat by his daring. He was now telling the country, in language as plain as Carlyle’s, that Parliament was an effete institution—and the House of Commons which he treated so disdainfully was in a few years to choose him for its leader. The anomalies in Disraeli’s life grow more astonishing the deeper we look into them.

‘Sybil,’ published the next year, is more remarkable than even ‘Coningsby.’ ‘Sybil; or, the Two Nations,’ the two nations being the Rich and the Poor. Disraeli had personally studied human life in the manufacturing towns. He had seen the workman, when trade was brisk and wages high, enjoying himself in his Temple of the Muses; he had seen him, when demand grew slack, starving with his family in the garret, with none to help him. He had observed the insolent frauds of the truckmaster. He had seen the inner side of our magnificent industries which legislation was struggling to extend: he had found there hatred, anarchy, and incendiarism, and he was not afraid to draw the lurid picture in the unrelieved colours of truth.

The first scene opens on the eve of the Derby, when, in a splendid club-room, the languid aristocrats, weary of the rolling hours, are making up their betting-books—they the choicest and most finished flowers of this planet, to whom the Derby is the event of the year. They are naturally high-spirited young men, made for better things, but spoilt by their education and surroundings.

From the youth we pass to the mature specimens of the breed who are in possession of their estates and their titles. Lord Marney’s peerage dates from the suppression of the monasteries, in which his ancestor had been a useful instrument.

The secretary of Henry VIII.’s vicar-general had been rewarded by the lands of a northern abbey. The property had grown in value with the progress of the country. The family for the three centuries of its existence had never produced a single person who had contributed any good thing to the service of the commonwealth. But their consequence had grown with their wealth, and the Lord Marney of ‘Sybil’ was aspiring to a dukedom. He is represented (being doubtless drawn from life) as the harshest of landlords, exacting the utmost penny of rent, leaving his peasantry to squalor and disease, or driving them off his estates to escape the burden of the poor-rate, and astonished to find Swing and his bonfires starting up about him as his natural reward. The second great peer of the story, Lord Mowbray, of a yet baser origin and character, owns the land on which has grown a mushroom city of mills and mill-hands. The ground-rents have made him fabulously rich, while, innocent of a suspicion that his wealth has brought obligations along with it, he lives in vulgar luxury in his adjoining castle.

On both estates the wretchedness is equal, though the character of it is different. Lord Marney rules in a country district. A clergyman asks him how a peasant can rear his family on eight shillings a week. ‘Oh, as for that,’ said Lord Marney, ‘I have generally found the higher the wages, the worse the workmen. They only spend their money in the beershops. They are the curse of the country.’ The ruins of the monastery give an opportunity for a contrast between the old England and the new, by a picture of the time when the monks were the gentlest of landlords, when exactions and evictions were unknown, and when churches were raised to the service of God in the same spots where now rise the brick chimneys and factories as the spires and temples of the modern Mammon-worship.

In Mowbray, the town from which the earl of that name drew his revenue, the inhabitants were losing the elementary virtues of humanity. Factory-girls deserted their parents, and left them to starve, preferring an independence of vice and folly; mothers farmed out their children at threepence a week to be got rid of in a month or two by laudanum and treacle. Disraeli was startled to find that ‘infanticide was practised as extensively and legally in England as it was on the banks of the Ganges.’ It is the same to-day: occasional revelations lift the curtains, and show it active as ever; familiarity has led us to look upon it as inevitable; the question, what is to be done with the swarms of children multiplying in our towns, admitting, at present, of no moral solution.

With some elaboration, Disraeli describes the human creatures bred in such places which were growing up to take the place of the old English.

‘Devilsdust’—so one of these children came to be called, for he had no legitimate name or parentage—having survived a baby-farm by toughness of constitution, and the weekly threepence ceasing on his mother’s death, was turned out into the streets to starve or to be run over.

Even this expedient failed. The youngest and feeblest of the band of victims, Juggernaut spared him to Moloch. All his companions were disposed of. Three months’ play in the streets got rid of this tender company, shoeless, half-naked, and uncombed, whose ages varied from two to five years. Some were crushed, some were lost; some caught cold and fever, crept back to their garrets or their cellars, were dosed with Godfrey’s Elixir, and died in peace. The nameless one, Devilsdust, would not disappear: he always got out of the way of the carts and horses, and never lost his own. They gave him no food: he foraged for his own, and shared with the dogs the garbage of the streets. But still he lived: stunted and pale, he defied even the fatal fever which was the only habitant of his cellar that never quitted it, and slumbering at night on a bed of mouldering straw, his only protection against the plashy surface of his den, with a dung-heap at his head and a cesspool at his feet, he still clung to the only roof that sheltered him from the tempest. At length, when the nameless one had completed his fifth year, the pest which never quitted the nest of cellars of which he was a citizen raged in the quarter with such intensity that the extinction of its swarming population was menaced. The haunt of this child was peculiarly visited. All the children gradually sickened except himself: and one night when he returned home he found the old woman herself dead and surrounded only by corpses. The child before this had slept on the same bed of straw with a corpse; but then there were also breathing things for his companions. A night passed only with corpses seemed to him itself a kind of death. He stole out of the cellar, quitted the quarter of pestilence, and, after much wandering, lay down near the door of a factory.

The child is taken in, not out of charity, but because an imp of such a kind happens to be wanted, and Devilsdust grows up, naturally enough, a Chartist and a dangerous member of society. But was there ever a more horrible picture drawn? It is like a chapter of Isaiah in Cockney novelist dress. Such things, we are told, cannot happen now. Can they not? There was a recent revelation at Battersea not so unlike it. The East-end of London produces crimes which are not obliterated because they are forgotten; and rag bundles may be seen on frosty nights at London house-doors, which, if you unroll them, discover living things not so unlike poor Devilsdust. For the future, these waifs and strays are at least to be sent to school. The school will do something, especially if one full meal a day is added to the lessons; but what is the best of Board schools compared to the old apprenticeship? The apprentice had his three full meals a day, and decent clothes, and decent lodging, and was taught some trade or handicraft by which he could earn an honest living when his time was out. The school cannot reach the miserable home. The school teaches no useful occupation, and when school-time is over the child is again adrift upon the world. He is taught to read and write. His mind is opened. Yes. He is taught to read the newspapers, and the penny dreadfuls, and his wits are sharpened for him. Whether this will make him a more useful or more contented member of society, time will show.

Devilsdust was but one of many products of the manufacturing system which Disraeli saw and meditated upon.

He found a hand-loom weaver starving with his children in a garret, looking back upon the time when his loom had given him a cottage and a garden in his native village. The new machinery had ruined him, and he did not complain of the inevitable. But, as it was too late for him to learn another trade, he argued that if a society which had been created by labour suddenly became independent of it, that society was bound to maintain those whose only property was labour, out of the profits of that other property which had not ceased to be productive.

He talks with a superior artisan, who says to him:

‘There is more serfdom in England now than at any time since the Conquest. I speak of what passes under my daily eyes when I say that those who labour can as little change or choose their masters now as when they were born thralls. There are great bodies of the working classes of this country nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at any time since the Conquest. Indeed, I see nothing to distinguish them from brutes, except that their morals are inferior. Incest and infanticide are as common among them as among the lower animals. The domestic principle wanes weaker and weaker every year in England: nor can we wonder at it when there is no comfort to cheer and no sentiment to hallow the home.

‘I am told a working man has now a pair of cotton stockings, and that Henry VIII. himself was not as well off.... I deny the premisses. I deny that the condition of the main body is better now than at any other period of our history—that it is as good as it has been at several. The people were better clothed, better lodged, and better fed just before the Wars of the Roses than they are at this moment. The Acts of Parliament, from the Plantagenets to the Tudors, teach us alike the prices of provisions and the rate of wages.’

‘And are these the people?’ the hero of the story asks himself, after such conversations. ‘If so, I would I lived more among them. Compared with this converse, the tattle of our saloons has in it something humiliating. It is not merely that it is deficient in warmth and depth and breadth; that it is always discussing persons instead of principles; choking its want of thought in mimetic dogmas, and its want of feeling in superficial raillery. It is not merely that it has neither imagination, nor fancy, nor sentiment, nor knowledge to recommend it, but it appears to me, even as regards manners and expressions, inferior in refinement and phraseology, trivial, uninteresting, stupid, really vulgar.’

The tattle of politics was no better than the tattle of the saloons. Disraeli’s experience in the northern towns had shown him what a problem lay before any Government of England which deserved the name. The Reform Bill was now twelve years old, and political liberty, so far, had not touched the outside of the disease. London, with its cliques and parties, its balls and festivities, seemed but an iridescent scum over an abyss of seething wretchedness. Here was work for rulers, if ruling was ever again to mean more than intrigue for office and manipulation of votes. Devilsdusts by thousands were generating in the vapour of Free Trade industry, while the Tadpoles and the Tapers, the wirepullers of the House of Commons, were in a fever of agitation whether the Great Bedchamber question was to bring back the Melbourne Ministry, or whether Peel was to have his way.

Tadpole: The malcontent Liberals who have turned them out are not going to bring them in again. That makes us equal. Then we have an important section to work upon, the Sneaks, the men who are afraid of a dissolution. I will be bound we make a good working Conservative majority of twenty-five out of the Sneaks.

Taper: With the Treasury patronage, fears and favours combined, and all the places we refuse our own men, we may count on the Sneaks.

Tadpole: There are several religious men who have wanted an excuse for a long time to rat. We must get Sir Robert to make some kind of a religious move, and that will secure Sir Litany Lax and young Mr. Salem.

Taper: It will never do to throw over the Church Commission. Commissions and committees ought always to be supported.

Tadpole: Besides, it will frighten the saints. If we could get Sir Robert to speak at Exeter Hall, were it only a slavery meeting!—that would do.

Taper: It is difficult: he must be pledged to nothing, not even to the right of search. Yet if we could get up something with a good deal of sentiment and no principle involved, referring only to the past, but with his practical powers touching the present! What do you think of a monument to Wilberforce or a commemoration of Clarkson?

Tadpole: There is a good deal in that. At present go about and keep our fellows in good humour. Whisper nothings that sound like something. But be discreet. Do not let there be more than half-a-hundred fellows who believe they are going to be Under-Secretaries of State. And be cautious about titles. If they push you, give a wink and press your finger to your lips. I must call here on the Duke of FitzAquitaine. This gentleman is my particular charge. I have been cooking him these three years. I had two notes from him yesterday, and can delay no longer. The worst of it is he expects I shall bear him the non-official announcement of his being sent to Ireland, of which he has about as much chance as I have of being Governor-General of India. It must be confessed ours is critical work sometimes, friend Taper. But never mind: we have to do with individuals; Peel has to do with a nation; and therefore we ought not to complain.

Is this a libel, or is it a fair account of the formation and working of English governments? Let those answer who have read the memoirs of the leading statesmen of the present century. Is there anywhere to be found, in the records of the overthrow or building-up of Cabinets, any hint, even the slightest, of an insight into the condition of the country, or of a desire to mend it? Forces were at work shattering the bodily frames and destroying the souls of millions of those whom they were aspiring to guide. Do we find anything at all, save manoeuvres for a new turn of the political kaleidoscope? Might not Sidonia, might not Disraeli himself, reasonably doubt whether such methods of selecting administrations would be of long continuance?

Enough of ‘Sybil.’ Disraeli skilfully contrives to distribute poetical justice among his imaginary characters—to bring his unworthy peers to retribution, and to reward the honest and the generous. He could do it in a novel. Unfortunately, the reality is less tractable. ‘A year ago,’ he says, in concluding the story, ‘I presumed to offer to the public some volumes (“Coningsby”) that aimed at calling their attention to the state of political parties, their origin, their history, their present position. In an age of mean passions and petty thoughts, I would have impressed upon the rising race not to despair, but to seek in a right understanding of the history of their country, and in the energies of heroic youths, the elements of national welfare. The present work advances a step in the same emprise. From the state of parties it would draw public thought to the state of the people whom those parties for two centuries have governed. The comprehension and the cure of this greater theme depend upon the same agencies as the first. It is the past alone that can explain the present, and it is youth alone that can mould the remedial future.... The written history of our country for the last ten years has been a mere phantasm.... Oligarchy has been called Liberty; an exclusive priesthood has been christened a National Church. Sovereignty has been the title of something that has had no dominion, while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves the servants of the people. In the selfish strife of factions, two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England: the monarch and the multitude. As the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared, till at length the sceptre has become a pageant, and the subject has degenerated again into a serf....

‘That we may live to see England once more possess a free monarchy, and a privileged and prosperous people, is my prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our youth, is my persuasion.... The claims of the future are represented by suffering millions, and the youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity.’