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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that if the oil could have blent with the vinegar, if Peel could ever have coalesced with Lord John Russell, Disraeli would have had less chance in politics, and must have been thrown back on literature. His consistency stands out prominent in review. It is one of ideas. It is only by dint of long retrospect over a whole career that we can decide in the case of any statesman whether he has controlled his phases, or drifted with them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“... Go and preach equality to the deep seas, ... that the oyster is equal to the whale or the starfish to the shark; you will succeed there sooner than you will be able to alter the relative grades of the five races of humanity. It is a law which man must unmake himself, ere he can change, that the Caucasian will aspire as the highest, and the negro will grovel as the basest.” Disraeli’s attitude was the same in Contarini Fleming:— “... The law that regulates man must be founded on a knowledge of his nature, or that law leads him to ruin. What is the nature of man? In every clime and every creed we shall find a new definition.... What then? Is the German a different animal from the Italian? Let me inquire in turn whether you conceive the negro of the Gold Coast to be the same being as the Esquimaux who tracks his way over the Polar snows? The most successful legislators are those who have consulted the genius of the people.... One thing is quite certain, that the system we have pursued to attain a knowledge of man has entirely failed....”

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

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

“... When I examine the state of European society with the unimpassioned spirit which the philosopher can alone command, I perceive that it is in a state of transition—one from feudal to federal principles. This I conceive to be the sole and secret cause of all the convulsions that have occurred and are to occur.”52 All this has proved, and is proving true. The civil and legal “equality” of united nationality and of unifying empire is replacing the material “equality” of classes or of individuals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No student of the Croker Papers can deny that some of the leading Whigs did in the period immediately succeeding the Reform Bill plot for a Republican purpose. No historian will deny that the Reform Bill, by the exclusion of “Labour” from the franchise, and its deprival at the same time of the ancient rights which industry had possessed, left open a rankling sore. In this tract of 1836 Disraeli exposes the machination and probes the wound. Even thus early he feared the predominance of a plutocracy, “the supreme triumph of cash” at an era when, in Carlyle’s phrase also, “Cash Payment” is fast becoming “the universal sole nexus of man to man;” while he determined, if ever he had the power, to redress the balance by including the labouring classes. In 1848 he had spoken in Parliament on these questions to the same effect as he had spoken on the hustings in 1833, even favouring, as he had then advocated, triennial parliaments, except that under the later circumstances it might be an unnecessary change; and denouncing, as he had then denounced, “universal suffrage,” and on the same grounds. In this remarkable speech he forecasted that signal settlement which nearly twenty years later he was to secure. I shall shortly connect many utterances of his, ranging over more than thirty years; but there are three passages from this declaration, made at a time before the re-modelling of the reforms of 1832 had been agreed upon as an open problem, which I ask leave to excerpt as a prelude, for they strike the very keynotes of his domestic policy. Disraeli pointed out that the Radical Hume was taking property as the basis of suffrage fully as much as the Whigs had done in 1832, and that the same bourgeois predominance would ensue. “... Now, sir, for one I think property is sufficiently represented in this House. I am prepared to support the system of 1832 until I see that the circumstances and necessities of the country require a change; but I am convinced that when that change comes, it will be one that will have more regard for other sentiments, qualities, and conditions than the mere possession of property as a qualification for the exercise of the political franchise.” And he then definitely protested against being ranked among those who accepted finality in that “wherein there has been, throughout the history of this ancient country, frequent and continuous change—the construction of this estate of the realm. I oppose this new scheme because it does not appear to be adapted in any way to satisfy the wants of the age, or to be conceived in the spirit of the times.” He opposed it also because this Radical motion, like the great Whig measure, really implied the undue ascendancy of the middle classes—

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

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

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

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

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

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

His history—I speak as a student of the reigns of Queen Anne and the Georges—will bear scrutiny. Indeed, he carries the descent of Whiggism some steps further, and traces its pedigree back to the Roundhead Independents,62 and even the favourites of Henry VIII., enriched by the spoil of the plundered abbeys. But he never denied, or wished to gainsay, the special and signal qualities of the Whigs’ conspicuous service. They had reconciled religious liberty to the consecration of the State, and had constantly proved themselves a “national” party63—that solecism in words but truth in ideas. This he repeatedly acknowledges. Neither did he ever spare the soulless, cramped, hollow, and shrivelled Toryism of the period preceding Bolingbroke’s and Wyndham’s struggle to recall it to its origins; or again of the period after Pitt’s generous concessions were overwhelmed by the Jacobin deluge, and neutralised by the impersonalities of Addington and Perceval; by the Phariseeism of Liverpool’s puzzle-headedness; by the pigheadedness of Eldon and Wetherell. Nor did he ever deny that pseudo-Toryism had often nursed the very vices of the Whig oligarchy.64 What he did contend, from first to last, was that any party which by its elements makes for national growth and union, and favours the free play of custom in institutions, is “national;” while any party encouraging class warfare, class preponderance, and cosmopolitan theories repugnant to the genius of those institutions, will be “anti-national;” that the democratic possibilities of our constitution must be spread, as opportunities arise to enlarge the “estate of the Commons;” yet that this must never mean the enthronement of either Oligarchy or Democracy in place of our mixed government; further, that in all such expansion influence is more important than interest; that theorisers must never blind us to the distinction between the “Rights of Man” and the duties of English citizens, between private and public equality, between the “Sovereignty of the People” and a national government; that over-government is a fatal evil, but that individual leadership is a priceless privilege.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disraeli, on the other hand—

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

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

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

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

“‘I have not, sir.’

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

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

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

“‘I have heard that he is very young, sir,’ remarked the widow. “‘Ah, youth is a very trying time! Let us hope the best. He may turn out well yet, poor soul!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the other—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“... It appears to me that those who are called parliamentary reformers may be divided into two classes. The first are those ... who would adapt the settlement of 1832 to the England of 1859, and would act in the spirit and according to the genius of the existing constitution.... But, sir, it would not be candid, and it would be impolitic not to acknowledge that there is another school of reformers having objects very different from those which I have named. The new school, if I may so describe them, would avowedly effect a parliamentary reform on principles different from those which have hitherto been acknowledged as forming the proper foundations for this House. The new school of reformers are of opinion that the chief, if not the sole, object of representation is to realise the opinion of the numerical majority of the country. Their standard is population, and I admit that their views have been clearly and efficiently placed before the country. Now, sir, there is no doubt that population is, and must always be, one of the elements of our representative system. There is also such a thing as property, and that too must be considered. I am ready to admit that the new school have not on any occasion limited the elements of their representative system solely to population. They have, with a murmur, admitted that property has an equal claim to consideration; but then, they have said that property and population go together. Well, sir, population and property do go together—in statistics, but in nothing else. Population and property do not go together in politics and practice. I cannot agree with the principles of the new school, either if population or property is their sole, or if both together constitute their double, standard. I think the function of this House is something more than merely to represent the population and property of this country. This House ought, in my opinion, to represent all the interests of the country. Now, those interests are sometimes antagonistic, often competing, always independent and jealous; yet they all demand a distinctive representation in this House, and how can that be effected, under such circumstances, by the simple representation of the voice of the majority, or even by the mere preponderance of property? If the function of this House is to represent all the interests of the country, you must, of course, have a representation scattered over the country, because interests are necessarily local. An illustration is always worth two arguments; permit me, therefore, so to explain my meaning, if it requires explanation. Let me take the two cases of the metropolis and that of the kingdom of Scotland.... Their populations are at this time about equal. Their respective wealth is very unequal.... There is between them the annual difference in the amounts of income upon which the schedules are levied of that between £44,000,000 and £30,000,000. Yet who would for a moment pretend that the various classes and interests of Scotland could be adequately represented by the same number of members as represent the metropolis? So much for the population test. Let us now take the property test.... The wealth of the city of London is more than equivalent to that of twenty-five English and Welsh counties returning forty members, and of 140 boroughs returning 232 members. The city of London, the city proper, is richer than Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham put together.... It is richer than Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Hull, Wolverhampton, Bradford, Brighton, Stoke-upon-Trent, Nottingham, Greenwich, Preston, East Retford, Sunderland, York, and Salford combined—towns which return among them no less than thirty-one members. Yet the city of London has not asked me to insert it in the bill, which I am asking leave to introduce, for thirty-one members.... So much ... for the property test.... But the truth is, that men are sent to this House to represent the opinions of a place; and not its power.... “Why, sir, the power of the city of London or that of the city of Manchester in this House is not to be measured by the honourable and respectable individuals whom they send here to represent their opinions. I will be bound to say that there is a score—nay, that there are threescore—members in this House who are as much and more interested, perhaps, in the city of Manchester than those who are in this House its authoritative and authentic representatives.... Look at the metropolis itself, not speaking merely of the city of London. Is the influence of the metropolis in this House to be measured by the sixteen honourable members who represent it?... ... So much for that principle of population, or that principle of property, which has been adopted by some; or that principle of population and property combined, which seems to be the more favourite form.... There is one remarkable circumstance connected with the new school, who would build up our representation on the basis of a numerical majority, and who take population as their standard. It is this—that none of their principles apply except in cases where population is concentrated. The principle of population is ... a very notorious doctrine at the present moment, but it is not novel.... It was the favourite argument of the late Mr. Hume.... The principle, in my opinion, is false, and would produce results dangerous to the country and fatal to the House of Commons. But if it be true, ... then I say you must arrive at conclusions entirely different from those which the new school has adopted. If population is to be the standard, and you choose to disfranchise small boroughs and small constituencies, it is not to the great towns you can, according to your own principles, transfer their members....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“... It may be said you have established a democratic government in England, because you have established household suffrage, and you have gone much further than the measures which you previously opposed.... Now, I am not at all prepared to admit that household suffrage with the constitutional conditions upon which we have established it—namely, residence and rating—has established a democratic government. But it is unnecessary to enter into that consideration, because we have not established household suffrage in England. There are, I think I may say, probably four million houses in England. Under our ancient laws, and under the Act of Lord Grey, about one million of those householders possessed the franchise. Under the Act of 1867, something more than half a million will be added to that million. Well, then, I want to know if there are four million householders, and one and a half million in round numbers possess the suffrage, how can ‘household suffrage’ be said to be established in England?” Thus the proper balance of power, which the bill of 1832 impaired by the exclusion of labour and the enfeeblement of aristocracy, was restored. The people were at last reconciled to their leaders. It had been by accident that the Whigs found themselves arbiters of the national fate in 1832, and it may be conceded that, according to their lights, they honestly did their best. To Lord Grey and his colleagues Disraeli was always just and respectful. But the breach then made demanded the amends which Disraeli had meditated for years. By cancelling qualifications arbitrary and irrational, by conferring political power only in conjunction with social and political responsibility, by regarding society more than the state, and influence than interest, by persistent courage and purpose, this great project succeeded and has endured. The day may come in the process of generations when, as Disraeli has imagined elsewhere, industry may cease to repose upon industrialism alone, and representation may also cease to seem the sole machinery of politics; when enlightenment and public opinion may form a real national conscience; and when leadership may prove itself independent of artificial forms. But till that day arrives, it will be madness in England to give each citizen, irrespective of any qualification but existence, a voice in the Legislature, or entrust them with the sway of an empire. His avowed aim and his accomplished triumph were “to restore those rights which were lost in 1832 to the labouring class of the country,” and to “bring back again that fair partition of political power which the old Constitution of the country recognised.” A year after its enactment, in his great Irish speech he spoke of it as “a most beneficent and noble Act,” and he added that he looked “with no apprehension whatever to the appeal that will be made to the people under the provisions of the Act. I believe you will have a Parliament full of patriotic and national sentiment, whose decisions will add spirit to the community and strength to the State.” “Time,” which was “Contarini Fleming’s” record in the book of “Adam Besso,” has proved the fulness of his foresight and the skill of the adjustment.

The mistrust of this great measure at the time, even by men of intelligence, may be justified by the objection that in the distant future Labour may resume its war against authority in its coming conflict with Capital; and that a rigid conservatism of defiance is preferable to an adaptive conservatism of development. But whenever that hour strikes, it will be seen that Disraeli’s statesmanship has prevented the revolution which a conservatism of defiance must have prepared and entailed. Disraeli will have helped to preserve the English immunity from the violences which mark such upheavals elsewhere. He sought with all his might to quicken Capital into duty, and to hearten Labour by conferring privilege, not as a sop, but as a reward, while, by alleviating misery through creative enactments, he has conservatised Labour and kept it in touch with the national scheme.

It may not, perhaps, have been wholly realised how harmonious Disraeli’s utterances respecting the progressive principles of representation in England have been. That is my excuse for treating the subject with insistence, though by no means with completeness. To have done so would risk the exhaustion of the reader as well as of the subject. Disraeli prevented the raid of alien and disruptive democracy from making England a home. Out of the common he extracted the choice. He revived the democracy long inherent in the English Constitution; he naturalised the democratic idea on the soil of tradition and order; and thereby he cemented the solidarity of the State and the welfare of the nation. He proved that “progress” is not synonymous with push, and that in going forward it is wise also to look back, lest the goal should be a precipice. Still, long as this disquisition has necessarily been, I may hope that it is not dull, since, in Mrs. Malaprop’s aphorism, “I don’t think there is a superstitious article in it.”