Disraeli: A Study in Personality and Ideas

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