In Vivian Grey, Disraeli mocks at the attitude of the early political economists towards Labour in the person of “Mr. Toad,” who defined it as “that exertion of mind or body which is not the involuntary effect of the influence of natural sensations.” In the second of his long series of election addresses, he promised to “withhold his support from every ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders, ... to liberate our shackled industry....” The subject is closely allied to much already surveyed. Here, however, I shall for the most part leave politics alone, and confine myself mainly to the social aspects of the question, for from this standpoint he himself approached it. On Mr. Villiers’ resolutions in 1852, he distinctly stated that he and his friends had opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws on the main ground that it would “prove injurious to the interests of Labour;” on the subsidiary ground that it would injure “considerable interests in the country.” He had, two years before, urged that it “was a question of labour, or it was nothing.” Even in the Revolutionary Epick, fifteen years earlier, he had sung, “The many labour, and the few enjoy.”

The extracts given in the preceding chapter from Disraeli’s speech on Mr. Hume’s motion in 1848, illustrate the central ideas which he enforced with singular pertinacity in all his published works and public utterances.

They are mainly these.

It was an age of emancipation, and Peel liberated commerce. In so doing he disjointed Labour. His two great reforms—that of the Tariff and that of the Corn Laws—designed as inter-remedial, were certainly calculated to disturb and dislocate Labour, the one by unloosing the full forces of straining competition; the other by revolutionising the centres of industry, by transferring population from the country to the city, by impairing the landed interests, both high and low, by shifting the distribution of toil. At the very moment before his relaxation of the Corn Laws, Peel, conscious that he would disorganise Labour,75 had been unconsciously converted to the “right to physical happiness” system of Manchester—the dryest embodiment of the theory of the French “physical” equalitarians, on which I touched in my last chapter. His economics of “cheapness,” the results of which he feared in relation to the distribution of employment, thus became associated with a principle that, as I have shown, demands “unlimited employment of labour.” He freed Commerce, but he unsettled Labour, already rebelling against the harsh workings of the new Poor Laws. Disraeli asked himself if reduced tariffs would augment purchasing power, if dethroned land would be succeeded by any novel power for alleviating the Labour thus unhinged. And, further, he asked whether the middle class of 1846 would not reap the benefit without bearing the burden, just as it had done in the Reform of 1832. What would be the effect of discontent on the institutions of the country? The two great problems during the whole decade of 1830–40, when there had occurred a real renaissance, an awakening, had been Democracy and the Church. Was Democracy to be detached from the order and orders of the State? was it to be an anti-national solvent? And was the Church to realise its mission as a society of believers instead of being perverted into a library of assent? So far Chartism and Apostasy had been the answers. Were Sir Robert Peel’s arithmetical measures, excellent as they were in theory, any practical power for regeneration? Chartism’s inner causes had been both the want of employment and the despair of the employed. In 1840, he proclaimed, to his leader’s dismay, his deep sympathy, not with Chartism, “but with the Chartists,” preyed on by ambitious leaders, and victimised by official indifference. Throughout he regarded the whole “condition of England” question from its moral and social standpoints—to which economics should be subordinate—as touching Labour at one end and Leadership at the other.

The claims of Labour, he says, are paramount as those of property. Property and Labour should be allies, and not foes; nay, Labour is itself the property of the poor, out of which the property of the rich is accumulated. The gentlemen of England should form the advanced guard of Labour; and, moreover, the master-workmen themselves compose “a powerful aristocracy.” So long as property was allied both to land and manufacture, a feeling of public spirit and public duty in the main characterised the large employers. But a financial oligarchy was bound to arise, and has arisen, linked by no visible ties to the workers, and generous more by gifts of “ransom” than by personal participation; a system of commerce, too, without leaders, which now works in groups and merely on “cheapest market” principles, has sprung into being. And, moreover, the vast multiplication of machines tended all along, and tends more and more with the huge increase of intercommunication, to exalt mechanism into life and to degrade the labourer into a machine, himself devoid alike of powers and of duties. Over and over again Disraeli championed, not only the employment of the people, but variety in their employments. He is never wearied of scathing any system which might enhance the grinding monotony of mechanical toil. And all this, while the clamour for material enjoyment rises higher hour by hour; and the labourer is driven, in his hard quest after squalid enjoyments, more into the dark corners of organisations for coercing a State expected to pauperise him, than to philanthropists eager to raise his condition by preaching over his head, before the roof that covers it is decent.

To combat the latter evils—among others—Disraeli started the “Young England Movement,” and afterwards protested that the old system of trade reciprocity, with tariffs as levers, had proved a better guarantee for social happiness than the retail wealth system of “free imports.” At the same time, as I shall notice, after the repeal of the Corn Laws had cheapened commodities, he was decidedly of opinion that to go back would be too violent an upheaval, unless sanctioned by the deliberate voice of an instructed nation under absolutely new conditions. To forestall the dangers of financial and commercial plutocracy,76 he planned and supported the many alleviative measures with which his name and Lord Shaftesbury’s are connected, in the teeth, be it remembered, of the Radical and Utilitarian opposition; while he proclaimed in the ’seventies, as he had before proclaimed in the ’fifties, his programme of Sanitas sanitatum—Health before Wealth. He foresaw, too, the overcrowding of huge cities through the waste of the soil, with all its attendant miseries; even so early as 1846 he had urged that “nothing is so expensive as a vicious population;” and he felt, also, that if life without toil is “a sorry sort of lot,” toil without life is an infinitely worse one. Above all, he looked in this matter, as throughout, far more to the regeneration of society than to State interference, so easily evaded and so devitalising. And he lamented the colossal enlargement of the towns, which isolates while it excites.

“... In cities,” he protests in Sybil, “that condition is aggravated. A density of population implies a severer struggle for existence, and a consequent repulsion of elements brought into too close contact. In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest, they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbours as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.” But he descried already a rift in the gloom. “Society, still in its infancy, is beginning to feel its way.”

The late ’thirties and early ’forties, with their agitations against middle-class apathy and aristocratic neglect, witnessed to the reality of the disease which was known as the “condition-of-England question.” Many of the nobles were not noble; never had been “so many gentlemen, and so little gentleness.”77 Exclusion from the suffrage prevented the natural representation of injuries, and compelled Labour to band itself covertly, and often under leaders embittered and embittering with personal and clashing ambitions. The Reform Act, contended Disraeli, had not reposed the government in abler hands, nor elevated the head or enlarged the heart of Parliament. “... On the contrary, one House of Parliament” (he is writing in 1845) “has been irremediably degraded into the decaying position of a mere court of registry, possessing great privileges, on condition that it never exercises them; while the other Chamber, that at the first blush and to the superficial exhibits symptoms of almost unnatural vitality, ... assumes on a more studious inspection somewhat of the character of a select vestry fulfilling municipal rather than imperial offices, and beleaguered by critical and clamorous millions who cannot comprehend why a privileged and exclusive senate is requisite to perform functions which immediately concern all....”

Undoubtedly Labour is far better situated in 1904 than it was in 1844, and undoubtedly this improvement is partly due to Disraeli’s influence and action. The ideals of “Young England” have borne fruit. Our “Toynbee Halls” and university settlements, the recognition of noblesse oblige, the trained public opinion that superior light and leading are in duty bound to lead and enlighten as well as help the poor; that the poor are their tenants; that—

—these and their tone are its outcome. His policies of health and humanisation, of wholesome housing before technical teaching, for first emancipating Labour from carking cares and then entrusting it with public duties, have prospered. Chartism and its allied mutinies have subsided into citizenship. The artisans of to-day are princes in comparison with what they were. The contracted sloth of the utilitarian middle class has been shaken to follow what emanated from the universities. In his Guildhall speeches of 1874 and 1875 Disraeli could point with pride to Capital at one with Labour, and to operatives in sympathy with privileges which they shared. At this moment they are catered as well as cared for; and yet their independence is far completer than when it was aggressive because it was cowed.

But none the less, the fatal overcrowding which he foresaw, the self-divestment by Mammon of direct and immediate responsibilities, has produced a fresh class of the “sweated” and rookeried masses, multiplying the unemployed and—what is worse—the unemployable in compound ratio, and still menacing the physique of the nation. The pressure of poverty is ever with us; of its wretchedness research has indeed called forth a science. As what we deemed the lowest ascends, a fresh depth of distress is always bared to our shame. The democratisation of local government through the county councils has indeed done much, and will do more, for the proletariate; but their lack, with notable exceptions, of high leadership, their tendency to municipal centralisation, their careless and inexperienced prodigality with the public purse, their bias towards pauperisation, their tendency to promote the feverish political ambitions of a class, and sometimes to confuse the cause of industry with that of its captains, remain a danger, though, I believe, a vanishing danger, to the State.

Disraeli’s earliest novel—one of the books “written by boys,” vague in its restlessness and untamed in its dazzling extravagance, contains in its episode of “Poor John Conyers” the germ of that genuine sympathy with Labour which he afterwards more seriously developed. Apart from his human instincts and from his desire for a real national unity, it was founded on his contempt for the merely mechanical or formal in society; and in 1845, on that tour of experience in Lancashire which brought home to him anew the terrible gulf between “the two nations” of rich and poor, and which the pathos, the humour, the wit and the thought of Sybil have immortalised.

Few that have read Coningsby will forget the vivid impressions of Manchester machinery in its pages. They are, perhaps, too familiar for quotation, and I prefer here to cite some sentences from Sybil.

“... Twelve hours of daily labour at the rate of one penny each hour; and even this labour is mortgaged,” groans the loom-worker. “... Then why am I here?... It is that the capitalist has found a slave that has supplanted the labour and ingenuity of man. Once he was an artisan; at the best he only now watches machines; and even that occupation slips from his grasp to the woman and the child. The capitalist flourishes, he amasses wealth; we sink, lower and lower; lower than the beasts of burthen; for they are fed better than we are, cared for more. And it is just, for according to the present system they are more precious. And yet they tell us that the interests of Capital and of Labour are identical. If a society that has been created by labour suddenly becomes independent of it, that society is bound to maintain the race whose only property is labour, out of the proceeds of that other property which has not ceased to be productive.... We sink among no sighs except our own. And if they give us sympathy—what then? Sympathy is the solace of the Poor; but for the Rich there is Compensation.

“You (the nobles) govern us still with absolute authority, and you govern the most miserable people on the face of the globe. ‘And is this a fair description of the people of England?’ said Lord Valentine. ‘A flash of rhetoric, I presume, that would place them lower than ... the serfs of Russia or the lazzaroni of Naples.’

“‘Infinitely lower,’ said the delegate, ‘for they are not only degraded, but conscious of their degradation. They no longer believe in any difference between the governing and the governed classes of this country. They are sufficiently enlightened to feel they are victims. Compared with the privileged of their own land, they are in a lower state than any other population compared with its privileged classes.’

“‘The people must have leaders,’ said Lord Valentine.

“‘And they have found them,’ said the delegate.

“‘When it comes to a push, they will follow their nobility,’ said Lord Valentine.

“‘Will their nobility lead them?’ said the other delegate.... “‘We have an aristocracy of wealth,’ said the delegate who had chiefly spoken. ‘In a progressive civilisation wealth is the only means of class distinction; but a new disposition of wealth may remove even this.’

“‘Ah! You want to get at our estates,’ said Lord Valentine, smiling, ‘but the effort on your part may resolve society into its original elements, and the old sources of distinction may again develop themselves.’

“‘Tall barons will not stand against Paixhans’ rockets,’ said the delegate. ‘Modern science has vindicated the natural equality of man.’

“‘And I must say I am very sorry for it,’ said the other delegate; ‘for human strength always seems to me the natural process of settling affairs.’”

To cherish national unison as a higher form of human harmony than the discordant bond of automatic groups; to force the governing to sympathise with the governed; to establish that “Labour requires regulation as much as Property;” to raise, train, improve and establish labour “rather,” as he wrote in 1870, “by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolutions founded on abstract ideas,” were Disraeli’s aims. In all except the important one of the last, the means for accomplishing them, Carlyle’s message is the same. There is a passage in Coningsby where Disraeli dreams that a day may come when industry will cease to obey mere industrialism. There is another in Carlyle’s “Past and Present”78 to the same effect. For both, the nobility of labour was a central idea; for both, the conviction that the cavaliers of England should prove its captains; for both, Sanitas sanitatum was a practical ideal. “Deliver me,” cries Carlyle, “these rickety perishing souls of infants, and let your cotton trade take its chance.” Disraeli and Carlyle alike abominated the doctrine that national happiness consists merely in material wealth. A shared or common wealth of endeavour and influence was a goal for each; for each, too, the main problem remained, “How, in conjunction with inevitable democracy, indispensable sovereignty is to exist.”

“... If there be a change,” said Sybil, “it is because in some degree the People have learnt their strength.”

“Ah! Dismiss from your mind those fallacious fancies,” said Egremont. “The People are not strong; the People never can be strong. Their attempts at self-vindication will end only in their suffering and confusion. It is civilisation that has effected, that is effecting, this change. It is that increased knowledge of themselves that teaches the educated their social duties. There is a day-spring in the history of this nation which perhaps those only who are on the mountaintops can as yet recognise. You deem you are in darkness, and I see a dawn. The new generation of the aristocracy of England are not tyrants, not oppressors, Sybil.... Their intelligence, better than that, their hearts, are open to the responsibility of their situation. But the work that lies before them is no holiday work. It is not the fever of superficial impulse that can remove the deep-fixed barriers of centuries of ignorance and crime. Enough that their sympathies are awakened; time and thought will bring the rest. They are the natural leaders of the People, Sybil....”

I may be permitted to point out a likeness and a contrast. The seething ferment on the Continent was pricking Labour into an insurgent materialism which, in the dearth of ancient and active institutions fraught with the balm of healing, leagued itself to attack all forms of authority, kingship and capital alike.

“Ah, the People, this poor King in tatters,” wrote Heine from Paris in 1848, “has fallen on flatterers far more shameless, as they swing their censers around his head, than the courtiers of Byzantium or Versailles. These court lackeys of the People incessantly vaunt its virtues and excellences, crying aloud: ‘How beautiful is the People! how good is the People! how intelligent is the People!’ No, you lie. The People is not beautiful; on the contrary, it is very ugly. But its ugliness is due to its dirt, and will vanish with public baths for the free ablutions of his Majesty. A piece of soap, too, will do no harm; and we shall then see a People in the beauty of cleanliness—a washen People. The People whose goodness is thus magnified is not good at all. It is often as bad as other potentates. But its baseness flows from hunger. When once it has well eaten and drunk, it will smile, gracious and well-favoured as the rest. Nor is his Majesty over-intelligent. He is possibly stupider than the others—stupid with the bestiality of his minions; he will only love or heed the speakers, or howlers, of the jargon of his passions: he hates every brave soul that converses in the speech of reason, and that would ennoble and enlighten him.”

Heine was leading “Young Germany.” A few years earlier, Disraeli was leading “Young England.” The contrast between the atmosphere of the two countries deserves a passing comment. “Young England” aimed at betterment in that very feudal spirit which the poet—the “unfrocked Romantic”—by turns breathed and spurned. In Germany the weird medley of the “Romantic School” had for fifty years been striving to rewaken the myths, the chivalry, the wistfulness of the past. But its direct influences were merely Æsthetic, and mainly sentimental; while they eventually became actually anÆmic—a vague reverie of mediÆval moonlight and pallid ghosts. The uprooting French Revolution had swept away both castle and cobwebs, and in Germany the “folk-song” was the sole antiquity to which this Romantic attachment could cling, and by which it could touch the patriotism of a disunited people. But in England, Scott’s “buff-jerkin” revival, at which Carlyle so unjustly scoffed, was more than a literary sport; it had already braced the nation with the fresh breeze of an invigorating tradition. It brought back and home the inheritance of a real throne and a real nobility, of chivalry, of daring, and of prowess; it reminded the people that the humblest was once protected by the highest; and though it perhaps burked or omitted much that disgraced the age of the tournament, the foray, and the cloister, it quickened its best, its most hopeful and most cheerful elements. It took the dry bones from their mouldering tomb and put the breath of life, the wholesome laughter of humour, and the brightness of beauty into and about their scattered fragments; whereas in Germany the Romantics rather embalmed and buried the living energies of the present in a Gothic mausoleum, weird with wan emblems, and chill and solemn as a cathedral vault.

Disraeli recognised that our country thrives by adaptation and adjustment; that it is the region of natural growth, and not of sudden blossom; of the oak, not the aloe. In inter-dependence, even more than independence, in the mutual ties of classes, Disraeli discerned the English root for democratic ideas which had all along lurked in the soil. England is great because of that same insular inaccessibility to ideas which repelled Heine. Her slowness of insight vanishes gradually, and not by leaps and bounds—through growth and conduct rather than through universal theories. An idea knocks at our gates for generations before it wins admittance; but when it once enters, it becomes naturalised and ceases to be alien; it becomes actualised; it dwells and walks and votes, and has commerce at large. It becomes part of the popular life and parcel of the national behaviour.

“Young England” prepared the ground for social regeneration. It sought to raise the conditions of labour. It was no rose-water club, but, short-lived as it proved, was a real forerunner of measures. A word, therefore, upon it may be pardoned in this connection. Many in the past century have played the part of “saviours of society.” Robert Owen, Ferdinand Lassalle, Napoleon III., Karl Marx, and the eccentric Mr. Urquhart, who furnished some of the traits for Disraeli’s “Sidonia.”79 But none in this country have been at once so genuine and effective as this association of “Young England;” for, enlisting the enthusiasm of the high and the young, it struck into the roots of national character, without which no development is feasible. Young England aimed further, at rendering leadership sympathetic with labour. It wanted to revive in the lowly a sense of privilege, and in the noble to quicken higher standards of obligation; it wished to recall the heroic; and this it tried to accomplish, not by social disturbance, but by seeking to arouse ancient ideals still slumbering in national traditions. For this purpose it appealed to youth—“the trustees of posterity;”80 to the power of personal influence and example; and above all, it hoped, as I have already noticed, to counteract the soullessness of utilitarianism.

“Ah, yes!” (Disraeli makes Gerard observe in Sybil); “I know that style of speculation.... Your gentlemen who remind you that a working man now has a pair of cotton stockings, and that Harry the Eighth was not so well off. At any rate, the condition of classes must be judged of by the age and by their relations with each other.”

It was also a vigorous protest against that retort of the Liberal on the Radical—the sluggish doctrine of laissez-faire, the principle of “stew-in-your-own-juice,” “devil take the hindmost,” “muddling through,” and “let ill alone.” Disraeli had combated it from the first:—

“In Vraibleusia” (I quote from his early satire of Popanilla) “we have so much to do that we have no time to think—a habit which only becomes nations who are not employed. You are now fast approaching the great shell question; a question which, I confess, affects the interest of every man in this island more than any other.... No one, however, can deny that the system works well; and if anything at any time go wrong, why, really Mr. Secretary Periwinkle is a wonderful man, and our most eminent conchologist—he no doubt will set it right; and if by any chance things are past even his management, why, then, I suppose, to use our national motto, something will turn up.”

It further served as antidote to the self-complacence and retail outlook of the bourgeoisie. The “Middle-Middles,” healthfully and powerfully as they symbolise decency, order, and common sense, too often lack, even in their educated varieties, perception and sympathy. At present they pervade Parliament, while the Press—which since 1867 appeals more and more to the gallery—controls opinion. Hence the dearth of accord between the prate of Parliament and a nation that realises its unity. Hence springs the momentary decay of Parliament itself—not from party spirit, but from the inanition of parties representing principles, without which party sinks into faction.

Of the anti-middle class attitude of “Young England,” a notable instance occurs in “Angela Pisani,” the brilliant fiction of George Smythe, afterwards seventh Lord Strangford (in Disraeli’s words), “a man of brilliant gifts; of dazzling wit, infinite culture and fascinating manners,” who “could promulgate a new faith with graceful enthusiasm.” The tirade is placed on the lips of Napoleon, denouncing the “puddle-blooded” whom he had “made great men, but could not make gentlemen,” and its reproaches—certainly not characteristic of Disraeli—apply, of course, in an infinitely less degree to England.

The nucleus of “Young England” had begun in a close association of university friends. The Cambridge “Apostles” comprised Tennyson and Hallam, Monteith and Doyle, and “Cool-of-the-evening” Monckton-Milnes. Disraeli, Lord Strangford, and Lord John Manners reinforced this nucleus with Faber, Hope, Baillie Cochrane (afterwards Lord Lamington), and others; they gave them an ampler scope and a longer view, but not without murmuring jealousies. They taught that the spirit of reform transcended its letter, and that the English “romantic school”—just as later on the English pre-Raphaelites in Art—must reseek the fountainhead of original principles. Milnes wrote in 1844: “You must have been amused at the name of ‘Young England,’ which we started so long ago, being usurped by opinions so different and so inferior a tone of thought. It is, however, a good phenomenon in its way, and one of its products—Lord John Manners—a very fine, promising fellow. The worst of them is that they are going about the country talking education and liberality, and getting immense honour for the very things for which the Radicals have been called all possible blackguards and atheists a few years ago.”

The newer Radical reforms, however, were based on “the greatest happiness” principle of utility; whereas the league of “Young England” was founded on the expansion of traditions, and more especially on the immemorial rights of Labour. What “Young England” really effected was to infuse enthusiasm into institutions. In 1838 this same “Mr. Vavasour” of Tancred, and “Mr. Tremaine Bertie” of Endymion, had also written: “We have set agoing a new dining club which promises well. Twenty of the most charming men in the universe met last Tuesday. They won’t call it ‘Young England,’ however.” It is no disrespect to the memory of the late Lord Houghton to say that the vague eclecticism of his youth scarcely fostered a robust energy or a keen insight. His “remarks” on Coningsby in Hood’s Magazine under the name of “Real England” were a sympathetic commentary; but, a born dilettante, he “lionised” ideas as he “lionised” genius. He patted intuition on the back. He was the Mrs. Leo Hunter of politics; and he played admirably the part of “Bennet Langton” to Carlyle’s “Dr. Johnson.” He somewhat prattled of “silences” and “eternities.” Well does Disraeli make “Waldershare” in Endymion exclaim of him: “... What I do like in him ... is this revival of the Pythagorean system, and heading a party of silence. That is rich.”

Lord Lamington—the “Buckhurst” of Coningsby—who in his pleasant glimpse of the movement has supplemented its muster-roll by the names of Borthwick and Stafford, quotes Serjeant Murphy’s pasquinade of “Jack Sheppard.” Its last verse runs as follows:—

The “Puseyite leavening” recalls the strictures of Carlyle on the High Church proclivities of a portion of the movement. Coleridge’s great book on the Church had undoubtedly stirred both thought and enthusiasm. Disraeli, as I shall show hereafter, wished to make the Church a living social regenerator of the “national spirit,” to see it at once disciplined and enthusiastic, to restore its original functions, to render it really “Anglican;” and in his old age—strenuously opposed as he ever was to the “mass in masquerade,” firmly resolved as he remained to uphold orderly Protestantism—he has outlined at once a portrait and a type of his permanent meaning in the person of “Nigel Penruddock;” just as he has drawn a picture of “Young England” Anglicanism in the “St. Lys” of Sybil, the prototype of whom was Faber.

In the spring of 1844, Carlyle thus characteristically addresses Monckton-Milnes—

“... On the whole, if ‘Young England’ would altogether fling its shovel-hat into the lumber-room, much more cast its purple stockings to the nettles, and honestly recognising what was dead, ... address itself frankly to the magnificent but as yet chaotic Future, ... telling men at every turn that it knew and saw for ever clearly the body of the Past to be dead (and even to be damnable, if it pretended to be still alive and to go about in a galvanic state), what achievement might not ‘Young England’ manage for us!” Carlyle was ever a free-thinking Puritan, a creedless Calvinist. “What was dead,” “what pretended still to be alive,” was the Church of England.... It is easy to deride that youthful display of poor metre, but fine enthusiasm, “England’s Trust,” by Lord John Manners.

Carlyle misliked in him what he disliked in Scott, the “properties” of Romanticism. But the earnestness of Manners’s little volume is beyond question. In the Church it recognises the national recuperative force and salve for anarchy. “We laugh at all commandment save our own,” sighs the boyish devotee—

And Labour had ever been the sacred trust of the Church. Divorce Labour from religion, and the State falls. It had been the fault of the Church herself that Labour had gone out of history, as it were, and crossed over to a more primitive form of true religious fervour under the Methodist revival; but the Church alone, as a national growth, could hope, if true to its high destinies, for the preservation of the great mass of the populace from the disruptive elements of unbelief. The Church, too, was the natural educator of the people. True, Manners’s Anglicanism was that of Laud; true, also, to that name he rhymes “adored.” But it is also true that the whole brotherhood felt that if the Church, and through it the State, was to be quickened, it must revert, like the State, to its origin; it must no more be regarded merely as an endowed official or as a consecrated police, but as a divine institution. Moreover, Disraeli also regarded the English Church as the special protectress of popular liberties. I shall return to this subject in its proper place hereafter; but I may here add that these convictions of “Young England” were vehemently advocated by Disraeli in his speeches on the Irish Church more than twenty years after the “Young England” brotherhood came to an end.

Disraeli always urged the immense importance of parochial life as even greater than political. Had the higher classes understood “the order of the peasantry,” ricks and dwellings would not have been burned down in the ’thirties. In advocating the claims of ancient country-side customs, he raised the plea of humanising ceremony—one certainly cherished by the upper classes for themselves. The people would not, it is true, be “fed” by morris revelries, and they starved equally without them.

It was not to be expected that such a cause, with such a leader, followed by aristocratic youth and attended by the revival of maypole dances and tournaments, should escape ridicule and even suspicion. Grey-headed noblemen, who resented any efforts to render institutions real, and for whom enthusiasm meant vulgarity, shook their heads over the follies of their sons, seduced by the wiles of a designing adventurer. But to such as still doubt Disraeli’s sincerity in these matters, and refuse to be convinced by a long chain of after-utterances, I would simply suggest the following fact. Disraeli’s speech of April 11, 1845, on the Maynooth grant81 broke up the “Young England” association, and terminated his leadership of it. What was the main principle of that speech? It was this: “... You find your Erastian system crumbling from under your feet.... I have unfaltering confidence in the stability of our Church, but I think that the real source of the danger which threatens it is its connection with the State, which places it under the control of the House of Commons that is not necessarily of its communion.” He denied that the State had ever “endowed” the Church. The Church owned property which was the patrimony of the poor. He argued that since 1829 the State’s relation to the Church had altered. He implied, as he often afterwards asserted, that the union of Church and State was for the benefit of the State far more than for that of the Church. Now, this attitude was eminently that of his “Young England” professions. And yet its fearless expression dissolved a gathering which his detractors maintained was used merely as a step to personal advancement.

Carlyle, in the passage above cited, evinced the same irritable impatience that he exhibited in 1849, when he cursed parliamentary institutions because a particular Parliament had over-talked itself. He was an iconoclast who, however, often confused the symbol with the faith that underlies it, and in dethroning the image would have dashed the glamour of its shrine. In 1848—the year of anarchy—Disraeli made a famous speech (the speech which procured him his future leadership of the House). He upheld these institutions while he denounced that very Parliament which moved Carlyle’s indignation. The future has proved him right, and the sage wrong. The practical fruits of the future, too, have vindicated the peculiar tinge that Disraeli himself lent to the “Young England” brotherhood.

One closing word on the social aims of “Young England.” I may summarise them by the phrase “Health and Home.” They compassed the relief of industry, and they implied the effort to shame the knights of industry into some chivalry towards it.

“Pitt,” wisely comments Mr. Kebbel, “ended the quarrel between the King and the aristocracy, and reconciled the Whig doctrine of monarchy with the Whig doctrine of Parliament. Peel accommodated Toryism to the new rÉgime established by the Reform Bill, and his name will always be identified with the progress of middle-class reform. Lord Beaconsfield carried Toryism into the next stage, and made it the business of his life to close up the gap in our social system which ... had been gradually widening, and to reconcile the working classes to the Throne, the Church, and the Aristocracy.”

To those who object that beyond Foreign Policy and the last Reform Bill, Disraeli effected little that is lasting, this is the answer. He was prouder of his many social reforms than of his Berlin Treaty. He was a born conciliator. He put a new and powerful leaven into the social lump, and he inspired the generous youth of the country. What he especially sought to mitigate was irresponsible Plutocracy, with a shifting stock of vagrant and unrelated Labour bought in the cheapest market, sold in the dearest; without stability, without ties, without allegiance.

“‘I am not against Capital’ (he makes “Enoch Craggs” declaim in Endymion), ‘what I am against is Capitalists.’

“‘But if we get rid of capitalists, we shall soon get rid of capital.’

“‘No, no,’ said Enoch, with his broad accent, shaking his head and with a laughing eye. ‘Master Thornberry (the Radical) has been telling you that. He is the most inveterate capitalist of the whole lot.... Master Thornberry is against the capitalists in land; but there are other capitalists nearer home, and I know more about them. I was reading a book the other day about King Charles—Charles I., whose head they cut off—I am very liking to that time, and read a good deal about it; and there was Lord Falkland, a great gentleman of those days, and he said when Archbishop Laud was trying on some of his priestly tricks, that “If he were to have a Pope, he would rather the Pope were at Rome than Lambeth.” So I sometimes think, if we are to be ruled by capitalists, I would sooner, perhaps, be ruled by gentlemen of estate, who have been long among us, than by persons who build big mills, who come from God knows where, and, when they have worked their millions out of our flesh and bone, go God knows where....’”

The two river bills carried at Disraeli’s instigation in 1852; the twenty-nine bills for ameliorating the position of factory operatives, passed despite those Radicals who predicted ruin for the manufacturer; the Employers and Workmen Acts, the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act, the Poor Law Amendment Act, the Commons Act, the Artisans’ Dwellings Acts, the Public Health Act, the Rating Act, the Employers’ Liability Acts, the Agricultural Holdings Act, among many others, attest the victory of “popular Toryism” over “class Liberalism,” and the protection of suffering against selfishness. “Young England,” like all Utopian propaganda, was a romantic vision, and exceeded actuality. But in essence it has been eminently practical. Classes (of which England is made) are infinitely more in communion than they were in 1840. The effort to set them by the ears and to oppose the “masses” to the “classes” has ignominiously failed. The Church of England has roused itself to the national needs beyond all comparison with those days. The appeals of Sybil, Coningsby, and Tancred, ridiculed as rodomontade and branded as a charlatan’s dodge, have been rendered into action, and stand confessed as the deeply felt and pondered schemes of a poet and a statesman. “When,” says Bolingbroke, “great coolness of judgment is united to great warmth of imagination, we see that happy combination which we call a genius.” Such has proved Disraeli, and his inmost soul is embodied in that “Young England” which he organised and encouraged in a freezing atmosphere. Over fifty years ago he exhorted youth, at the Manchester AthenÆum, as “the trustees of posterity.” “The man,” he then said, “who did not look up would look down, and he who did not aspire was destined perhaps to grovel.” The youth of to-day is far more conscious of its burden than was the youth of any class in the ’forties. It was mainly on these social grounds that Disraeli resisted that system of free imports which has gone down to history as “Free Trade.” He never denied that it was calculated to enrich manufacturers and manufacturing centres; he grew to admit its benefits to the consumer, although these were by no means wholly due to its action; but he deprecated its “economic frenzy.” He held that it injured the producer82 and played havoc both with land and distribution of labour. He thought it would eventually impair morale and physique, and sacrifice the general welfare to the material interests of a class; and, before it was nationally adopted, he considered that all ends would have been better served by the adoption of that system of reciprocal treaties83—on a principle called by him “at once national and cosmopolitan”—which was termed “Free Trade” in the days of Pitt, and had been inaugurated in 1713 by the abortive tariff of the great Utrecht Treaty; nor will it now be doubted that if in 1846 a comprehensive scheme of technical education had been set on foot, many of the evils engendered by over-competition would have been avoided, whatever fiscal system this country had chosen.

Writing so early as 1832 to the Wycombe electors, he even then declared: “... With regard to the Corn Laws, I will support any change, the basis of which is to relieve the consumer without injuring the farmer.” This was not the “Radical” doctrine of those days.

Disraeli has shown conclusively that in English history such a principle as absolute “protection” never existed. The original principle up to the time of Anne was to feed and supply a population then small enough so to be supported at home, and to encourage the wealth and power of trade. He has shown that Walpole, in this respect imitating the rival whom he destroyed, wisely followed this principle in its colonial applications; though he unwisely divorced productive trade from the land, and set the moneyed against the landed classes, the high finance against the country gentlemen, into whose shoes, however, it soon stepped. He has shown that when the colonial system broke down by the secession of our greatest and worst governed colony, Pitt the Second reverted to the old, the natural principle of exchange with the continent by tariff. The exigencies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars forced an interlude; and for a time England was fed by foreign corn in free competition with her own—the very time when the loaf was dearest. But Lord Liverpool recurred to the principle; and Peel up to 1845—when his hand was confessedly forced by the appalling famine in Ireland—was in favour of the varying duties termed the sliding scale, as opposed to the fixed duties of the Whigs and the no-duties of the Radicals. That scale he eventually surrendered under the impulse of Lord John Russell’s “Edinburgh Letter,” and was suddenly converted by the Manchester School. In logic, and apart from human and national instincts, their theories were as irrefragable as those of our modern bimetallists, and of those ancient economists on whose doctrines they rested. But their lasting usefulness depended on the final achievement of a cosmopolitan confederation. Disraeli presaged with weighty reasons, scouted when they were detailed, that other nations would never fall into the scheme; he analysed the special conditions of France, Germany, and America. He also foretold, concerning corn, in common with all articles of certain and practically unlimited demand (as cotton and tea, for examples), that “the moment you have a settled market, in exact proportion to the demand, prices will fall. This is the inevitable rule.” He pressed further the grave peril, hardly yet realised, of England’s dependence on foreign supplies in time of war. But beyond all, he emphasised the social dangers—the misery for individuals and for classes. In this precipitate measure towards a material class-millennium, he discerned a large element of possible denationalisation, a displacement of labour which must unavoidably deluge the unwieldy towns, and which would to some extent relax the fibre of the nation and weaken its very means of defence, the replacement of excellence by cheapness, and of national welfare by wealth, the substitution for the landed interest which ought to preponderate though never to predominate, not, as seemed for the moment, by a high-toned class of responsible manufacturers, but eventually by an overwhelming clique of irresponsible capitalists with self-interests fluid as their portable property; the decrease of the national, the natural sway of large landowners inheriting a representative sense of accountability to tenants and dependants; a probably great fall in agriculture and its profits, prices and wages; the waste on a large scale and the depopulation of the soil itself; the special aggravation of ruinous elements in Ireland; an ultimate decay, when foreign competition should develop, of that very manufacturing interest the system was protested to advantage and intended to protect; for he divined already in the ’forties that to fight hostile tariffs with “free imports” could only benefit England while continental manufacturers were in comparative infancy.

Most of this in great measure he foresaw, and in all this has been amply justified. What he did not anticipate was the enormous stature which these developments have now reached. Multitudes of telling instances might be given from those remarkable speeches, the pith and point of which were always how this change would affect the labouring classes. I will single out two alone, and both from that great speech of 1846 on Mr. Miles’s amendment, which, in the light of the present, reads like a continuous prophecy. Speaking of the displacement of labour in connection with the then sparse distribution of the precious metals, which he pointed out six years later must again modify the situation owing to the recent and immense discoveries of gold, he said: “... Every year and in every market English labour will receive less in return of foreign articles. But gold and silver are foreign articles; and in every year and in every market English labour will have less command of gold and silver....” “... Supposing you import five millions more from Russia than you ever did before, how will you make your payments, if they take no more additional goods from you than they do now?... I know it will be replied they manage these things by means of bills and so on. But that will not improve the case. Suppose ... you buy Russian bills on Brazil and New York to the amount of those five millions, and you thus complete your transaction. But you have already supplied the Americans and the Brazilians with as much of your goods as you cared to take, and if you want to sell more to them, you must do so at a great sacrifice....”

Once more, as regards foreign competition. He forecasted that of America; and in demolishing the argument that Prussia’s protective Zollverein was being “shaken;” he instanced Mecklenburg, induced by English remonstrances to abstain from joining, but now complaining that: “... After all the sacrifices we have made, if the Zollverein are to have free importation to England, we have no advantage whatever, and the best thing we can now do is to join and ... advance the cause of native industry.”

Disraeli resolved that if the repeal became law, the burdens which had been thrown on the land, because of the privileges which were its ancient trust, should in fairness be mitigated; that it should compete as freely as other manufacturers, for he never ceased to object to a distinction, as manufacturers, between the farmer, the miller, and the mill-owner.

“... I know,” he urged in a speech full of dignity and wisdom, “that we have been told that ... we shall derive from this great struggle not merely the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the transfer of power from one class to another, to one distinguished for its intelligence and wealth—the manufacturers of England. My conscience assures me that I have not been slow in doing justice to the intelligence of that class; certain I am that I am not one of those who envy them their wide and deserved prosperity; but I must confess my deep mortification that in an age of political regeneration, when all social evils are ascribed to the operation of class interests, it should be suggested that we are to be rescued from the alleged power of one class, only to sink under the avowed dominion of another;” and he concluded with the hope that if the monarchy of England, “mitigated by the acknowledged authority of the estates of the realm,” was to prove “a worn-out dream,” if England was to sink “under the thraldom of capital, ... of those who while they boast of their intelligence are prouder of their wealth,” if a new force must be summoned to maintain “the immemorial monarchy of England,” that “novel power” might be found in “the invigorating energies of an educated and enfranchised people.”

All this has happened. A thraldom to the middle class came into being, and was tempered by Disraeli’s own franchise bill, and by an education act sufficient, though not conceived in the decentralised form which Disraeli desired, but never won the opportunity of effecting. And out of this thraldom is springing that other of plutocracy—one which exercises great political power without assuming great political duties; one in the interest of which, it seems to me, some of the new fiscal changes now being mooted are designed.

These wholesale changes I cannot but feel that Disraeli would have withstood. Many features in Mr. Chamberlain’s plan would have enlisted his sympathy, but in their entirety he would have thought them hazardous. Some protection for the grazier he might have upheld; he always laid stress on the importance of home markets. A moderate duty on corn, in partial, though most inadequate, aid of agriculture, he might have favoured as a necessary lever for colonial reciprocity; especially as it would be spread over the untaxed colonial, the foreign dutiable imports. It would scarcely much affect the price of bread, and the very Peelites forewent the fallacy of the dear loaf; although, as in 1852, he would show that even a four shilling duty on imported corn could never restore the land to its former footing. “We ought,” he would again argue, “to go to the country on principle, and not upon details. We say we think there should be measures brought forward” (as since have been brought forward) “to put the cultivators of the soil in a position to allow them to compete with foreign industry.” What, however, he then urged with all his force was that the fiscal revolution had confessedly caused vexatious taxes. “Sir,” he said in 1852, “I do now and ever shall look on the changes which took place in 1846, both as regards the repeal of the Corn Laws and the alteration of the Sugar Duties, as totally unauthorised. I opposed them ... from an apprehension of the great suffering which must be incurred by such a change. That suffering in a great degree, though it may be limited to particular classes, has in some instances been even severer than we anticipated. But I deny that at any time after those laws were passed, either I, or the bulk of those with whom I have the honour to act, have ever maintained a recurrence to the same laws that regulated those industries previously to 1846.” He then showed the difference between Lord Derby’s proposed “fixed duty” and the old state of affairs; while he continued: “... When we come to this question of fixed duty, ... I must say now what I said before in this House, that I will not pin my political career on any policy which is not after all a principle, but a measure. Our wish is, that the interests which we believe were unjustly treated in 1846,84 should receive the justice which they deserve, with as little injury to those who may have benefited more than they were entitled to, as it is possible for human wisdom to devise. Sir, I call that reconciling the interests of the consumer and the producer, when you do not permit the consumer to flourish by placing unjust taxes upon the producer; while at the same time you resort to no tax which gives to the producer; an unjust and artificial price for his production....”

But any prohibitive tax on foreign manufactures—that is another matter, one which would protect certain trades at the expense of the community, and aggravate the very evils which Free Trade introduced. Such a system must press all the harder on that class of consumers whose pay would remain unaffected by its results, and who would, in fact, be subsidising our colonies out of their emptied pockets. The sentiment of the colonies he would have prized beyond measure, but other means for riveting it might be found; and in the undeveloped condition of many among them, would not a Canadian favouritism sow a harvest of jealousies? Moreover, the colonial population as a whole is still far too scanty for the replacement of our markets abroad; and further, the two main channels of cheap capital and British prosperity—our carrying trade and London’s commercial position as the clearing-house of the world—might be revolutionised by changes, to which no limit could be fixed. And again, the remission of Income Tax ought in justice to accompany such a system, for that tax was revived by Peel expressly because the revenue had to be reimbursed for its losses on adopting the measures for free imports. With respect to “dumping,”85 its conditions contain its cure. England, no longer the main workshop of the world, cannot perhaps be so generous as heretofore, but she can still afford to be generous. As for the promise of higher wages through protective duties, wages are more likely to rise through the resumption of gold imports from South Africa; while the joint result of retaliatory tariffs and such imports would be doubly to enhance the price of commodities for the mass. On the other hand, the vision of a self-supporting empire he would honour, and equally the sincere and commanding zeal of its prophet. But he would surely argue that the times were far from ripe, and that small and gradual beginnings might lay firmer foundations than a colossal combination of incompatibles. Again, he would, as the writer fancies, deplore a loud and unsolicited appeal to the passions of a multitude and the greed of a class easily thus led into a lordship of mob despotism. At the same time, he would certainly recognise, as Mr. Chamberlain alone has fully recognised, the crying need for a better distribution of employment.

Disraeli over and over again affirmed that since the nation had endorsed this vital change, its reversal was impracticable unless the considered national demand for it became overwhelming. It was one of his cardinal ideas that without such deliberate demand no great change of national policy should be risked in any department. In 1852, he and Lord Derby appealed to the country on a modified issue of this question—that of a fixed duty. The country’s answer Disraeli considered as final, even in that regard; nor, so far as he was able, would he ever permit these momentous issues to be reopened by any party or section. He remained devoted to the reciprocity principle. He believed that “give and take” is the foundation of trade which is barter. But, though he descried rocks ahead in the future, he recognised that the consumer had benefited by the free opening of our ports, that so far as material wealth was concerned, England had become the emporium and the banker of the world. On the other hand, this very prosperity had aggravated the misery of a class and had raised those problems which are still engaging anxious attention. Utilitarianism, the “cheapest market” theory, had triumphed in the establishment of unrestricted competition, but the upshot of that competition was an increasing strain and disorganisation of native labour. With these evils he left the quickened spirit of “Young England” to cope; while he himself strove to meet them by the remission of the now unjust burdens laid on the land, his industrial franchise bill, and his cherished policy of sanitas sanitatum. He had, at any rate, largely influenced the opinion of his generation in bringing home to men’s minds and consciences the equality of the rights of Labour with those of property, and the adequacy of constitutional forms to enforce them; nor did he ever cease to press them in his writings and speeches. But as a statesman he had always to choose between evils; and of these a forced disturbance of a nationally adopted system, which by hasty expedients might tend to disorder and to dispersal, he ever considered the graver. To experiment he always opposed experience. Speaking only two years before his death, he said—

“So far as I understand ... reciprocity is barter. I have always understood that barter was the first evidence of civilisation86—that it was exactly the state of human exchange that separated civilisation from savagery.... My noble friend (Lord Bateman) read some extracts, ... and he honoured me by reading an extract from the speech I then made in the other House of Parliament. That was a speech in favour of reciprocity—a speech which defined what was then thought to be reciprocity, and indicated the means by which reciprocity could be obtained. I do not want to enter into the discussion whether the principle was right or wrong, but it was acknowledged in public life, favoured and pursued by many statesmen who conceived that by the negotiation of a treaty of commerce, by reciprocal exchange and the lowering of duties, the products of the two negotiating countries would find a freer access and consumption in the two countries than they formerly possessed. But when my noble friend taunts me with a quotation of some rusty phrase of mine forty years ago, I must remind him that we had elements then on which treaties of reciprocity could be negotiated. At that time, although the great changes of Sir Robert Peel had taken place, there were one hundred and sixty-eight articles in the tariff which were materials by which you could have negotiated, if that was a wise and desirable policy, commercial treaties of reciprocity. What is the number you now have in the tariff? Twenty-two. Those who talk of negotiating treaties of reciprocity—have they the materials?... You have lost the opportunity.... The policy which was long ago abandoned, you cannot now resume. You have at this moment a great number of commercial treaties ... nearly forty, with some of the most considerable countries in the world ... in which ‘the most-favoured-nation’ clause is included. Well, suppose you are for a system of reciprocity as my noble friend proposes. He enters into negotiations with a state; he says: ‘You complain of our high duties on some particular articles. We have not many, we have a few left; we shall make some great sacrifice to induce you to enter into a treaty for an exchange of products.’ But the moment you contemplate agreeing with the state, ... every other of the forty states with ‘the most-favoured-nation’ clause claims exactly the same privilege. The fact is, practically speaking, reciprocity, whatever its merits, is dead.... The opportunity, like the means, has been relinquished; and if this is the only mode in which we are to extricate ourselves from the great distress which prevails, our situation is hopeless. I should be very sorry to say, whatever the condition of the country, its condition is hopeless....”

“I cannot for a moment doubt that the repeal of the Corn Laws—on the policy of which I do not enter—has materially affected the condition of those who are interested in land. I do not mean to say that this is the only cause of landed distress. There are other reasons—general distress, the metallic changes,87 have all had an effect. But I cannot shut my eyes to the conviction that the termination of protection to the landed interest has materially tended to the condition in which it finds itself. But that is no reason why we should retrace our steps, and authorise and sanction any violent changes. This state of things is one which has long threatened.... It has arrived.... I cannot give up the expectation that the energy of this country will bring about a condition of affairs more favourable to the various classes which form the great landed interest of this country. I should look upon it as a great misfortune to this country that the character, and power, and influence of the landed interest and its valuable industry, should be diminished, and should experience anything like a fatal and a final blow. It would, in my opinion, be a misfortune, not to this country alone, but to the world, for it has contributed to the spirit of liberty and order more than any other class that has existed in modern times.... But ... I cannot support my noble friend when he asks us to pass resolutions of this great character, and when he himself disclaims the very ground (i.e. protection) on which he might have framed, not what I think was a correct, but a plausible case. It is a very unwise course, in my opinion, when the country is not in a state so satisfactory as we could wish ... to propose any inquiry which has not either some definite object, or is likely to lead to some action on the part of those who bring it forward. It would lead to great disappointment and uneasiness on the part of the country; and the classes who are trying to realise the exact difficulties they have to encounter ... would relapse into a lax state which might render them incapable of making the exertions it is necessary for them to make.... Looking into the state of the country, I do not see there is any great mystery in the causes which have produced a state of which there is undoubted general complaint. What has happened in our own commercial failures during the last ten years will explain it. The great collapse which naturally followed the convulsion of prosperity which seemed to deluge the world and not merely this country—the fact that other countries have been placed in an equally disagreeable situation ... these are circumstances which appear to me to render it quite unnecessary to enter into an inquiry on this subject.... I do not mean to say that there are not moments ... in which an inquiry by Parliament ... into the causes of national distress may not be allowable—may not be necessary; but it must be a distress of a very different kind from that which we are now experiencing. We must have the consciousness that the great body of the people are in a situation intolerable to them....”

Compare with this that passage from his late Endymion—a novel of memories—where “Job Thornberry” (John Bright) discusses this very problem with the hero.

“‘... But, after all,’ said Endymion, ‘America is as little in favour of free exchange as we are. She may send us her bread-stuffs, but her laws will not admit our goods, except on the payment of enormous duties.’

“‘Pish!’ said Thornberry. ‘I do not care this for their enormous duties. Let me have free imports, and I will soon settle their duties.’

“‘To fight hostile tariffs with free imports,’ said Endymion, ‘Is not that fighting against odds?’ “‘Not a bit. This country has nothing to do but to consider its imports. Foreigners will not give us their products for nothing; but as for their tariffs, if we were wise men, and looked to our real interests, their hostile tariffs, as you call them, would soon be falling down like an old wall.’

“‘Well, I confess,’ said Endymion, ‘I have for some time thought the principle of free exchange was a sound one; but its application in a country like this would be very difficult, and require, I should think, great prudence and moderation.’

“‘... Ignorance and timidity,’ said Thornberry, scornfully.

“‘Not exactly that, I hope,’ said Endymion; ‘but you cannot deny that the home market is a most important element in the consideration of our public wealth, and it mainly rests on the agriculture of the country.’”

To which “Thornberry” retorts that “England is to be ruined to keep up rents.”

At all events, it is here, as elsewhere, evident what led Disraeli to oppose the introduction of unregulated competition. Things have long since marched quickly. The wall of tariffs has not tottered; Disraeli never imagined that it would. “Foreigners” now do sometimes “give us their products for nothing” through those colossal “Trusts” that make enormous profits at home to undersell us at a loss and capture our markets abroad. Competition has been reduced to the absurd. Nor is the Continent in that plight which marked it when Disraeli uttered the speech above cited. All these changed conditions require changing remedies, but the heroic remedy lately advocated may well occasion thoughtful retrospect, and the speech I have chosen may be profitably pondered in this connection.

And can any reader of his utterances doubt that, had he lived, he would never have left the problem of the housing of the poor to private experiment, or merely municipal omniscience? Thirty-three years ago he wrote as follows:—

“It is the terror of Europe and the disgrace of Britain,” says “Lothair” of pauperism; “and I am resolved to grapple with it. It seems to me that pauperism is not so much an affair of wages as of dwellings. If the working classes were properly lodged, at their present rate of wages, they would be richer. They would be healthier and happier at the same cost....”

I will conclude with an excerpt from Disraeli’s great Crystal Palace speech of 1872. It concerns the remedies which he had from the first determined to apply to a state of things which the rush of so-called “progress” had induced.

“... It must be obvious to all who consider the condition of the multitude with a desire to improve and elevate it, that no important step can be gained unless you can effect some reduction of their hours of labour and humanise their toil. The great problem is to be able to achieve such results without violating those principles of economic truth upon which the prosperity of all States depends. You recollect that many years ago the Tory party believed that these two results might be obtained ... and at the same time no injury be inflicted on the wealth of the nation. You know how that effort was encountered, how these views and principles were met by the triumphant statesmen of Liberalism. They told you that the inevitable consequence of your policy was to diminish capital; and this, again, would lead to the lowering of wages, to a great diminution of the employment of the people, and ultimately to the impoverishment of the kingdom.... And what has been the result? Those measures were carried; but carried, as I can bear witness, with great difficulty and after much labour and a long struggle. Yet they were carried; and what do we now find? That capital was never accumulated so quickly; that wages were never higher; that the employment of the people was never greater, and the country never wealthier. I ventured to say a short time ago (at Manchester) that the health of the people was the most important subject for a statesman. It is ... a large subject. It has many branches. It involves the state of the dwellings of the people, the moral consequences of which are not less considerable than the physical. It involves their enjoyment of some of the chief elements of nature—air, light, and water. It involves the regulation of their industry, the inspection of their toil. It involves the purity of their provisions, and it touches upon all the means by which you may wean them from habits of excess and brutality.... Well, it may be the ‘policy of sewage’ to a Liberal member of Parliament. But to one of the labouring multitude of England, who has found fever always to be one of the inmates of his household—who has, year after year, seen stricken down the children of his loins, on whose sympathy and support he has looked with hope and confidence; it is not ‘a policy of sewage,’ but a question of life and death. And I can tell you this, gentlemen, from personal conversation with some of the most intelligent of the labouring class, that ... the hereditary, the traditionary policy of the Tory party that would improve the condition of the people, is more appreciated by the people than the ineffable mysteries and all the pains and penalties of the Ballot Bill.... Is that wonderful? Consider the condition of the great body of the working classes of this country. They are in possession of personal privileges—of personal rights and liberties—which are not enjoyed by the aristocracies of other countries. Recently they have obtained—and wisely obtained—a great extension of political rights; and when the people of England see that under the Constitution of this country ... they possess every personal right of freedom, and according to the conviction of the whole country, also an adequate concession of political rights, is it at all wonderful that they should wish to elevate and improve their condition, and is it unreasonable that they should ask the Legislature to assist them in that behest, as far as it is consistent with the general welfare of the realm?...”

The crucial problem still exacts, though it need not baffle, solution. We are still waiting for the complete answer to the question here propounded by Disraeli.