Disraeli as Leader of the Opposition—Effects of Free Trade—Scientific discoveries—Steam—Railroads—Commercial revolution—Unexampled prosperity—Twenty-five years of Liberal government—Disraeli’s opinions and general attitude—Party government and the conditions of it—Power of an Opposition Leader—Never abused by Disraeli for party interests—Special instances—The coup d’État—The Crimean War—The Indian Mutiny—The Civil War in America—Remarkable warning against playing with the Constitution.

Mr. Disraeli’s career has been traced in detail from his birth to the point which he had now reached. Henceforward it is neither necessary nor possible to follow his actions with the same minuteness. The outer side of them is within the memory of most of us. The inner side can only be known when his private papers are given to the world. For twenty-five years he led the Conservative Opposition in the House of Commons, varied with brief intervals of power. He was three times Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Derby—in 1852, in 1858-9, and again in 1867—but he was in office owing rather to Liberal dissensions than to recovered strength on his own side. Being in a minority he was unable to initiate any definite policy; nor if the opportunity had been offered him would he have attempted to reverse the commercial policy of Peel. The country had decided for Free Trade, and a long Trade Wind of commercial prosperity seemed to indicate that the Manchester school had been right after all. On this question the verdict had gone against him, and the opinion of the constituencies remained against him. More than all, what Cobden had prophesied came to pass. Science and skill came to the support of enterprise. Railroads cheapened transport and annihilated distance. The ocean lost its terrors and became an easy and secure highway, and England, with her boundless resources, became more than ever the ocean’s lord. Exports and imports grew with fabulous rapidity, and the prosperity which Disraeli had not denied might be the immediate effect exceeded the wildest hopes of the Corn Law League. Duty after duty was abandoned, and still the revenue increased. The people multiplied like bees, and yet wages rose. New towns sprang out of the soil like mushrooms, and the happy owners of it found their incomes doubled without effort of their own. Even the farmers prospered, for time was necessary, before America, and Russia, and India could pull down the market price of corn. Meat rose, farm produce of all kinds rose, and rent rose along with it, and the price of land. The farm labourer had his advance of a weekly shilling or two, and the agricultural interest, which had been threatened with ruin, throve as it had never thriven before. Althea’s horn was flowing over with an exuberance of plenty, and all classes adopted more expensive habits, believing that the supply was now inexhaustible. The lords of the land themselves shook off their panic, and were heard to say that ‘Free Trade was no such a bad thing after all.’

When things are going well with Englishmen they never look beyond the moment.

Our countrymen of the last generation had confidence in themselves. They were advancing by leaps and bounds, and the advance was to continue for ever. Carlyle told them that their ‘unexampled prosperity’ was in itself no such beautiful thing, and was perhaps due to special circumstances which would not continue. Carlyle was laughed at as a pessimist. Yet as time goes on a suspicion does begin to be felt that both he and Disraeli were not as wrong as was supposed. The anticipated fall in wheat, though long delayed, has come at last; at last the land is falling out of cultivation, and the rents go back once more, and the labourers have lost their extra shillings. The English farmer is swamped at last under the competition of the outer world, and the peasantry, who were the manhood of the country, are shrinking in numbers. The other nations, who were to have opened their ports after our example, have preferred to keep them closed to protect their own manufactures and supply their own necessities.

Chimneys still smoke and engines clank, and the volume of our foreign trade does not diminish, but if the volume is maintained the profits fall, and our articles must be produced cheaper and ever cheaper if we are to hold our ground. As employment fails in the country districts the people stream into the towns. This great London of ours annually stretches its borders. Five millions of men and women, more than the population of all England at the time of the Commonwealth, are now collected within the limits of the Bills of Mortality. Once our English artisans were famous throughout Europe. They were spread among the country villages. Each workman was complete of his kind, in his way an artist; his work was an education to him as a man. Now he is absorbed in the centres of industry and is part of a machine. In the division of labour a human being spends his life in making pins’ heads or legs of chairs, or single watch wheels, or feeding engines which work instead of him. Such activities do not feed his mind or raise his character, and such mind as he has left he feeds at the beer shop and music hall. Nay, in the rage for cheapness his work demoralises him. He is taught to scamp his labour and pass off bad materials for good. The carpenter, the baker, the smith, the mason learns so to do his work that it may appear what it professes to be, while the appearance is delusive. In the shop and manufactory he finds adulteration regarded as a legitimate form of competition. The various occupations of the people have become a discipline of dishonesty, and the demand for cheapness is corroding the national character.

Disraeli as a cool looker-on foresaw how it would be, but it was his fate to steer the vessel in the stream when it was running with the impetuosity of self-confidence. He could not stem a torrent, and all that he could do was to moderate the extent of its action. Only he refused to call the tendency of things Progress. ‘Progress whence and progress whither?’ he would ask. The only human progress worth calling by the name is progress in virtue, justice, courage, uprightness, love of country beyond love of ourselves. True, as everyone was saying, it was impossible to go back; but why? To go back is easy if we have missed our way on the road upwards. It is impossible only when the road is downhill.

His function was to wait till the fruit had ripened which was to follow on such brilliant blossom, and to learn what the event would teach him; to save what he could of the old institutions, to avoid unnecessary interference, and forward any useful measures of detail for which opportunity might offer: meantime to watch his opponents and take fair advantage of their mistakes provided he did not injure by embarrassing them the real interests of the country. Party government in England is the least promising in theory of all methods yet adopted for a reasonable management of human affairs. In form it is a disguised civil war, and a civil war which can never end, because the strength of the antagonists is periodically recruited at the enchanted fountain of a general election. Each section in the State affects to regard its rivals as public enemies, while it admits that their existence is essential to the Constitution; it misrepresents their actions, thwarts their proposals even if it may know them to be good, and by all means, fair or foul, endeavours to supplant them in the favour of the people. No nation could endure such a system if it was uncontrolled by modifying influences. The rule till lately has been to suspend the antagonism in matters of Imperial moment, and to abstain from factious resistance when resistance cannot be effectual in the transaction of ordinary business. But within these limits and independent of particular measures each party proceeds on the principle that the tenure of office by its opponents is an evil in itself, and that no legitimate opportunity of displacing them ought to be neglected. That both sides shall take their turn at the helm is essential if the system is to continue. If they are to share the powers of the State they must share its patronage, to draw talent into their ranks. The art of administration can be learnt only by practice; young Tories as well as young Whigs must have their chance of acquiring their lessons. No party can hold together unless encouraged by occasional victory. Thus the functions of an Opposition chief are at once delicate and difficult. He must be careful ne quid detrimenti capiat Respublica through hasty action of his own. He must consider, on the other hand, the legitimate interests of his friends. As a member of a short-lived administration once bluntly expressed to me, ‘you must blood the noses of your hounds,’ but you must not for a party advantage embarrass a Government to the general injury of the Empire.

Under such circumstances the details of past Parliamentary sessions are for the most part wearisome and unreal. The opposing squadrons are arranged as if for battle, exhorted night after night in eloquence so vivid that the nation’s salvation might seem at stake. The leaders cross swords. The newspapers spread the blaze through town and country, and all on subjects of such trifling moment that they are forgotten when an engagement is over, the result of which is known and perhaps determined beforehand. When the division is taken, the rival champions consume their cigars together in the smoking-room and discuss the next Derby or the latest scandal. Questions are raised which wise men on both sides would willingly let alone, because neither party can allow its opponents an opportunity of gaining popular favour. The arguments are insincere. The adulterations of trade pass into Parliament and become adulterations of human speech. It is a price which we pay for political freedom, and a price which tends annually to rise. Thus it is rightly felt to be unfair to remember too closely the words or sentiments let fall in past debates. The modern politician has often to oppose what in his heart he believes to be useful, and defend what he does not wholly approve. He has to affect to be in desperate earnest when he is talking of things which are not worth a second’s serious thought. Everyone knows this and everyone allows for it. The gravest statesman of the century could be proved as uncertain as a weathercock, lightly to be moved as thistle-down, if every word which he utters in Parliament or on platform is recorded against him as seriously meant.

The greater part of our Parliamentary history during the twenty-five years of Disraeli’s leadership of the Tory Opposition in the House of Commons is of this character. The nation was going its own way—multiplying its numbers, piling up its ingots, adding to its scientific knowledge, and spreading its commerce over the globe. Parliament was talking, since talk was its business, about subjects the very names of which are dead echoes of vanished unrealities. It may be claimed for Disraeli that he discharged his sad duties during all this time with as little insincerity as the circumstances allowed, that he was never wilfully obstructive, and that while he was dexterous as a party chief he conducted himself always with dignity and fairness. It cost him less than it would have cost most men, because being not deeply concerned he could judge the situation with coolness and impartiality. He knew that it was not the interest of the Conservative party to struggle prematurely for office, and he had a genuine and loyal concern for the honour and greatness of the country. Any proposals which he considered good he helped forward with earnestness and ability—proposals for shortening the hours of labour, for the protection of children in the factories, for the improvement of the dwelling-houses of the poor. He may be said to have brought the Jews into Parliament a quarter of a century before they would otherwise have been admitted there, for the Conservatives left to themselves would probably have opposed their admission to the end. He could accomplish little, but he prevented harm. The interesting intervals of the long dreary time were when the monotony was broken in upon by incidents from without—Continental revolutions, Crimean campaigns, Indian mutinies, civil wars in America, and such like, when false steps might have swept this country into the whirlpools, and there was need for care and foresight. On all or most of these occasions he signalised himself not only by refraining from taking advantage of them to embarrass the Government, but by a loftiness of thought and language unfortunately not too common in the House of Commons.

The coup d’État of Louis Napoleon did not deserve to be favourably received in England. The restoration of a military Government in France alarmed half of us by a fear of the revival of the Napoleonic traditions. The overthrow of a Constitution exasperated the believers in liberty. All alike were justly shocked by the treachery and violence with which the Man of December had made his way to the throne. The newspapers and popular orators, accustomed to canvass and criticise the actions of statesmen at home, forgot that prudence suggested reticence about the affairs of others with whom we had no right to interfere. The army was master of France, and to speak of its chief in such terms as those in which historians describe a Sylla or a Marius was not the way to maintain peaceful relations with dangerous neighbours. Neither the writers nor the speakers wished for war with France. They wished only for popularity as the friends of justice and humanity; but war might easily have been the consequence unless pen and tongue could be taught caution. Disraeli applied the bit in a powerful speech in the House. He had been acquainted with Louis Napoleon in the old days at Lady Blessington’s. He had no liking for him and no belief in him; but he reminded the House and he reminded the nation that it was not for us to dictate how France was to be governed, and that the language, so freely used might provoke a formidable and even just resentment.

The Crimean war he was unable to prevent, but as good a judge as Cobden believed that if Disraeli and Lord Derby had not been turned out of office in 1852 they would have prevented it, and a million lives and a hundred millions of English money, which that business cost, need not have been sacrificed over a struggle which events proved to be useless. Much was to be said for a policy which would have frankly met and accepted the Emperor Nicholas’s overtures to Sir Hamilton Seymour. If a joint pressure of all the European Powers had been brought to bear on Turkey, internal reforms could have been forced upon her, and preparation could have been made peacefully for the disappearance, ultimately inevitable, of the Turks out of Europe. If the state of public opinion forbade this (and Disraeli himself would certainly never have adopted such a course) something was to be said also for adhering firmly from the first to the traditionary dogmas on the maintenance of the integrity of the Turkish Empire, and this the Conservatives were prepared to do. Nothing at all was to be said for hesitation and waiting upon events. The Tzar was deceived into supposing that while we talked we meant nothing, and we drifted into a war of which the only direct result was a waste of money which, if wisely used, might have drained the Bog of Allen, turned the marshes of the Shannon into pasture ground, and have left in Ireland some traces of English rule to which we could look with satisfaction.

The indirect consequences of fatuities are sometimes worse than their immediate effects. It was known over the world that England, France, Turkey, and Italy had combined to endeavour to crush Russia, and had succeeded only in capturing half of a single Russian city. The sepoy army heard of our failures, and the centenary of the battle of Plassy was signalised by the Great Mutiny. The rebellion was splendidly met. It was practically confined to the army itself, and over the largest part of the peninsula the general population remained loyal; but the murder of the officers, the cruelties to the women and children, and the detailed barbarities which were paraded in the newspapers, drove the English people into fury. Carried away by generous but unwise emotion, they clamoured for retaliatory severities, which, if inflicted, would have been fatal to our reputation and eventually perhaps to the Indian Empire. Disraeli’s passionless nature was moved to a warmth which was rare with him. Such feelings, he said, were no less than ‘heinous.’ We boasted that we ruled India in the interests of humanity; were we to stain our name by copying the ferocities of our revolted subjects?

His influence was no less fortunately exerted at the more dangerous crisis of the American civil war. On all occasions English instinct inclines to take the weaker side, but for many reasons there was in England a particular and wide-spread inclination for the South. There was a general feeling that the American colonies had revolted against ourselves; if they quarrelled, and a minority of them desired independence, the minority had as good a right to shake off the North as the thirteen original States to shake off the mother country. The North in trying to coerce the South was contradicting its own principle. Professional politicians even among the Liberals were of opinion that the transatlantic republic was dangerously strong, that it was disturbing the balance of power, and that a division or dissolution of it would be of general advantage. Those among us who disliked republican institutions, and did not wish them to succeed, rejoiced at their apparent failure, and would willingly have lent their help to make it complete.

The Northern Americans were distasteful to the English aristocracy. The Southern planters were supposed to be gentlemen with whom they had more natural affinity. The war was condemned by three-quarters of the London and provincial press, and when the Emperor Napoleon invited us to join with him in recognising the South and breaking the blockade it perhaps rested with Disraeli to determine how these overtures should be received. Lord Palmerston was notoriously willing. Of the Tory party the greater part would, if left to themselves, have acquiesced with enthusiasm. With a word of encouragement from their leader a great majority in Parliament would have given Palmerston a support which would have allowed him to disregard the objections of some of his colleagues. But that word was not spoken. Disraeli was as mistaken as most of us on the probable results of the conflict. He supposed, as the world generally supposed, that it must leave North America divided, like Europe, into two or more independent States; but he advised and he insisted that the Americans must be left to shape their fortunes in their own way. England had no right to interfere.

Events move fast. Mankind make light of perils escaped, and the questions which distracted the world a quarter of a century ago are buried under the anxieties and passions of later problems. Hereafter, when the changes and chances of the present reign are impartially reviewed, Disraeli will be held to have served his country well by his conduct at this critical contingency.

In domestic politics he was a partisan chief. His speeches in Parliament and out of it were dictated by the exigencies of the passing moment. We do not look for the real opinions of a leading counsel in his forensic orations. We need not expect to find Disraeli’s personal convictions in what he occasionally found it necessary to say.

There did, however, break from him remarkable utterances on special occasions which deserve and will receive remembrance. Two extracts only can be introduced here, one on the state of the nation in 1849, when he spoke for the first time as the acknowledged Conservative leader, the other on Parliamentary Reform in 1865, the subject on which his own action two years later called out Carlyle’s scornful comment. The first referred to the changed condition of things brought about by the adoption of Free Trade.

‘In past times,’ he said, ‘every Englishman was taught to believe that he occupied a position better than the analogous position of individuals of his order in any other country in the world. The British merchant was looked on as the most creditable, the wealthiest, the most trustworthy merchant in the world. The English farmer ranked as the most skilful agriculturist.... The English manufacturer was acknowledged as the most skilful and successful, without a rival in ingenuity and enterprise. So with the British sailor; the name was a proverb. And chivalry was confessed to have found a last resort in the breast of a British officer. It was the same in the learned professions. Our physicians and lawyers held higher positions than those of any other countries.... In this manner English society was based upon the aristocratic principle in its complete and most magnificent development.

‘You set to work to change the basis on which this society was established. You disdain to attempt the accomplishment of the best, and what you want to achieve is the cheapest. The infallible consequence is to cause the impoverishment and embarrassment of the people. But impoverishment is not the only ill consequence which the new system may produce. The wealth of England is not merely material wealth. It does not merely consist in the number of acres we have tilled and cultivated, nor in our havens filled with shipping, nor in our unrivalled factories, nor in the intrepid industry of our miners. Not these merely form the principal wealth of our country; we have a more precious treasure, and that is the character of the people. This is what you have injured. In destroying what you call class legislation you have destroyed the noble and indefatigable ambition which has been the source of all our greatness, of all our prosperity, of all our powers.’

The noble ambition of which Disraeli was speaking was the ambition of men to do their work better and more honestly than others, and the rage for cheapness has indeed destroyed this, and destroyed with it English integrity. We are impatiently told that the schools will set it right again. Character, unfortunately, is not to be formed by passing standards, second or first. It is the most difficult of all attainments. It is, or ought to be, the single aim of every government deserving the name, and there is a curious remark of Aristotle that while aristocratic governments recognised the obligation and acted upon it, democracies invariably forget that such an obligation exists. They assume that character will grow of itself. Of character ?p?s?? ???, ever so little would suffice, and so the old republics went to ruin, as they deserved to go. No subject deserves more anxious reflection. Yet Disraeli is the only modern English statesman who has given it a passing thought.

The second passage referred to the playing with the Constitution which had been going on ever since 1832. Lord Grey had dispossessed the gentry and given the power to the middle classes. The operatives, the numerical majority, were left unrepresented. Neither party wished to enfranchise them, for fear they might be tempted to inroads upon property. Each was afraid to confess the truth, and thus year after year the extension of the suffrage was proposed dishonestly and dropped with satisfaction. Lord John Russell made his last experiment in 1865, and Disraeli gave the House a remarkable warning, which, if he afterwards neglected it himself, the statesmen who are now with light hearts proposing to break the Constitution to pieces may reflect upon with advantage.

‘There is no country at the present moment that exists under the same circumstances and under the same conditions as the people of this realm. You have an ancient, powerful, and richly endowed Church, and perfect religious liberty. You have unbroken order and complete freedom. You have landed estates as large as the Romans, combined with a commercial enterprise such as Carthage and Venice united never equalled. And you must remember that this peculiar country, with these strong contrasts, is not governed by force. It is governed by a most singular series of traditionary influences, which generation after generation cherishes and preserves because it knows that they embalm custom and represent law. And with this you have created the greatest empire of modern times. You have amassed a capital of fabulous amount. You have devised and sustained a system of credit still more marvellous, and you have established a scheme so vast and complicated of labour and industry that the history of the world affords no parallel to it. And these mighty creations are out of all proportion to the essential and indigenous elements and resources of the country. If you destroy that state of society remember this: England cannot begin again. There are countries which have gone through great suffering. You have had in the United States of America a protracted and fratricidal civil war, which has lasted for four years; but if it lasted for four years more, vast as would be the disaster and desolation, when ended, the United States might begin again, because the United States would then only be in the same condition that England was in at the end of the wars of the Roses, when probably she had not three millions of population, with vast tracts of virgin soil and mineral treasures not only undeveloped but undreamt of. Then you have France. France had a real revolution in this century, a real revolution, not merely a political but a social revolution. The institutions of the country were uprooted, the order of society abolished, even the landmarks and local names removed and erased. But France could begin again. France had the greatest spread of the most exuberant soil in Europe, and a climate not less genial. She had, and always had, comparatively a limited population, living in a most simple manner. France, therefore, could begin again. But England, the England we know, the England we live in, the England of which we are proud, could not begin again. I do not mean to say that after great trouble England would become a howling wilderness, or doubt that the good sense of the people would to some degree prevail, and some fragments of the national character survive; but it would not be the old England, the England of power and tradition and capital, that now exists. It is not in the nature of things. And, sir, under these circumstances I hope the House, when the question is one impeaching the character of our Constitution, will hesitate; that it will sanction no step that has a tendency to democracy, but that it will maintain the ordered state of free England in which we live.’