principal dates together in a way of prospective summary. Within four
years' time from his entering the House of Commons, which, after vain
attempts at High Wycombe, Marylebone, and Taunton, he did in 1837
for the borough of Maidstone, Mr. Disraeli was at the head of a
party--"The New England Party." The group, if not very numerous, drew
as much public attention as if it had been of any size we like to
name. Lord John Manners and Mr. G. S. Smythe had the generosity of
heart and the keenness of insight to be the first won over by him, and
that against the prejudices of their families. Who has not heard of
their courageous pilgrimage to the Manchester Athenæum to explain to
Cottonopolis how they proposed to re-make the nation? Then came
the "Young England" novels, with which all Europe was shortly
ringing--"Coningsby" in 1844, "Sybil" in 1845, "Tancred" in 1847. In
the meantime Mr. Disraeli had associated himself heart and soul with
Lord George Bentinck, attacked Peel, and done far more than any other
in reorganizing the shattered Conservative party within the House as
well as outside it. By the last-named year, too, Mr. Disraeli had,
after a voluntary exchanging of Maidstone for Shrewsbury, become
member for Buckinghamshire, a seat which he was to keep so long as he
remained in the House of Commons. Suddenly Lord George Bentinck died
(much too early for his country), and very soon after that event,
owing to the generous standing aside of Lord Granby and Mr. Herries,
Mr. Disraeli, within a dozen years of his first entry into Parliament,
stood forth as the recognized leader of the Conservatives. The
publication of the famous Biography of Lord George Bentinck was at
once his noble tribute to the memory of his friend and a valuable help
to the party. Five years later, when Lord Russell fell and the first
Derby Administration was formed, Mr. Disraeli--never having held an
inferior post--became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Shortly followed
Lord Palmerston's triumphant reign, to be succeeded, after a further
resignation of Lord Russell, by the second Derby Ministry, in which
Mr. Disraeli, once more Chancellor of the Exchequer, found time, in
addition to his Budget-making, to dish the Whigs by a final Reform
Bill. By-and-by the nation lost the Earl of Derby, and the last
promotion of official dignity fell naturally to Mr. Disraeli,
who became Prime Minister of England. Mr. Gladstone succeeded in
preventing the Cabinet from having a very long life, and Mr. Disraeli
kept mental self-composure enough, after losing office, to sit down
and write "Lothair." By-and-by his political turn again came: 1874 saw
him Premier for the second time, and this present year of grace still
beholds him in the post, only in the Upper House, instead of the
Lower, as Lord Beaconsfield, and with a Parliamentary majority
scarcely diminished by five years of an imperial rule which brings
back memories of England's most majestic days. He has visited Berlin,
and more than held his own in a Council of the greatest modern
diplomatists; has received a welcome back in London city such as no
living Minister can boast; and has had the high honour of entertaining
his Queen as a guest under his own roof.
Now I may go back to the first of the texts I have chosen.
It is certain that Lord Beaconsfield has always most tenaciously
insisted that he has from first to last been politically consistent.
His opponents, for very good reasons of their own, have unceasingly
affirmed that this assertion is his chiefest, in fact his culminating
audacity. But all the facts favour Lord Beaconsfield's view. In the
first place, he has never held office but on one side, and he is the
only Prime Minister during the last half century who could plead that
circumstance. Earl Russell could not say it; certainly Lord Palmerston
could not; it is quite out of Mr. Gladstone's power to urge it; even
the late Earl of Derby could not make the claim. Next, it is now about
thirty-two years since Mr. Disraeli was formally recognized as the
leader of the Tory party, and he is still at the head of them, without
their confidence having been for a moment shaken or withdrawn. Men,
in fact, have been born and have grown up to middle life with Mr.
Disraeli all the time remaining at the head of the Conservatives. His
inconsistency during at least this somewhat lengthened period must
have been of a strange kind, since it has always coincided with the
wishes and the interests of his party, for he has never split them,
and he has thrice led them into power, But we may go ten years further
back than the dates we have named. From first to last, he never sat
in Parliament but as an avowedly Tory member for a Tory constituency;
during nearly thirty years he sat for one and the same county. If you
sift what his enemies, have to say, you will find that it refers to
something which took place about forty-five years ago, and is to the
effect that he was for five minutes a member of the Westminster
Reform Club, and was willing in his first candidatures to accept
the assistance of Mr. Hume or of any other of the Radicals. Lord
Beaconsfield has the plainest and, as I think, the most sufficient
explanation to give of it all.
He says that he came forward at High Wycombe and afterwards offered
himself to Marylebone as an opponent of the Whigs, determining to do
all he could to bring the Tories into better accord with the masses
of the people by re-establishing the natural social bonds between the
latter and the aristocracy. Certainly, this is exactly what he has
done; it is what he openly said that he aimed at doing from the
very beginning. Moreover, the Tories so understood it from the first
moment. They gave him their support at High Wycombe before he went to
Taunton, and political support cannot be kept very secret. His name
was a popular toast at agricultural banquets, and he was sure of
a welcome at any muster of the Conservatives. Supposing that the
Radicals had not had penetration enough to comprehend the position he
took up, who would have been to blame for that? But the fact is that
it has suited them to pretend in this case to be more stupid than
they were. No Radical constituency ever elected Mr. Disraeli. The
newspapers of the party never spoke of him as one of their sort; and
Messrs. Hume and O'Connell were in a great hurry to withdraw their
letters of recommendation, which had reached the candidate unsought.
It is not denied by Lord Beaconsfield's most rabid defamer that he
presented himself as an Anti-Whig, and it is admitted that long before
he was in the House he was a supporter in public of Lord Chandos,
and a eulogist of Sir Robert Peel. In his address to the Marylebone
electors he described himself as an Independent. But it is really
hardly worth while to discuss Mr. Disraeli's politics on this narrow
basis.
The case may be put into a nutshell thus: if he had postponed seeking
a seat till he went to Taunton, which was in 1835--that is to say
forty-four years ago--no one would have been able to say, even in
a way of cavil, that he had been ever any other than a most openly
understood Tory. It is true that the Radicals would still have been
able to complain that he had been bold enough to pass a Reform Bill
giving household suffrage in the towns, and so spoiled once for all
their party tactics. But that is an allegation of inconsistency which
his Conservative supporters whom it has placed in office need not
be very anxious to defend him against. The other side had made the
question of Reform cease to be one of fair politics; Parliament after
Parliament they were trading upon it in the most huckstering spirit.
Mr. Disraeli's own first narrower proposals were scoffed at by them.
The Bill that was finally passed was avowedly a piece of party tactic,
and admirably it answered its end. Of course, since it succeeded so
well, Lord Beaconsfield's rivals will never forgive him for it.
However, a more rational use of my space will be to ask at what stage
of his career Mr. Disraeli developed the leading political principles
which came to be recognized as characteristically his? That is the
only mode in which it is worth while to discuss a man's consistency.
Lord Beaconsfield has himself done it all in the preface to "Lothair,"
but I may recall a few details. In the very first election address
he ever issued, he styled the Whigs "a rapacious, tyrannical, and
incapable faction." That may be taken, one would suppose, as pretty
clearly marking his point of political departure. At his second
candidature for Wycombe, he quoted Bolingbroke and Windham as his
models; and it was as far back as 1835, in his "Vindication of the
English Constitution," that he first applied the term "Venetian"
to our Constitution, as the Whigs had transformed it. The very
peculiarities of theoretical opinion which are most individually his,
can be traced back into what in respect of a living man's career might
almost be termed antiquity--it is something like two-thirds of half
a century ago since he first spoke of the "Asian Mystery." Nobody's
sayings live as Mr. Disraeli's have done. The truth is, that so far
from his political system having been hatched piecemeal in a way of
after-thought to serve exigencies of personal ambition, he started
with it ready made. His critics themselves unknowingly admit this in
one part of their clumsy strictures, since they can find events so
very recent as his naming of the Queen Empress of India, and his
appropriation of Cyprus, sketched in his early novels. But let me take
the very latest arraignment to which he has been summoned to plead
guilty--that of having invented "Imperialism" just to bolster himself
in office. As far back as 1849, which now is exactly thirty years ago,
in one of his greatest speeches after having fairly settled down as
the leader of his party, he used these words:--"I would sooner my
tongue should palsy than counsel the people of England to lower their
tone. I would sooner leave this House for ever than I would say to the
nation that it has overrated its position.... I believe in the people
of England and in their destiny." In his last Premiership he has
simply put those thirty-year-old utterances into practice. If he
had not done all he has done, he would have been false to the heroic
spirit of that far-back hour. On the hustings at Maidstone Mr.
Disraeli said, "If there is one thing on which I pique myself, it is
my consistency." Lord Beaconsfield in advancing age may repeat the
statement without varying it a syllable, though more than forty years
have elapsed between the times.
The Peel-Disraeli episode has been for a long time now the chief
standard illustration of the political casuistry of our modern
Parliamentary history. Mr. Disraeli, those opposed to him will have
it, acted most cruelly in that matter. It is rather a curious thing
for a young member of Parliament to succeed in being cruel to the
most powerful Minister the House of Commons had seen for more than a
generation. If a giant is overthrown it must be rather the fault
of the colossus somehow, unless, that is, it be a bigger giant who
attacks him; and at that time of day, though Mr. Disraeli was growing
fast, he really was not yet of the same towering height as Peel. How
was it, then, that he succeeded in toppling over the great Minister?
Let me first of all say that the truth seems to be that Sir Robert
Peel's unlooked-for tragic death has given to his memory a pathetic
interest which has caused an unfair heightening of emotion in the
case. Neither all England, nor even the bulk of Parliament, was in
tears, busy with pocket-handkerchiefs, during the delivery of those
famous philippics. If pocket-handkerchiefs were used it was to wipe
away drops caused by laughter, for everybody was roaring from moment
to moment as each stroke told. Peel had taken up a position in
reference to his old supporters which was certain to entail attack;
the only thing special that Mr. Disraeli contributed to the assault
was the splendour of the wit which barbed it. Everything that he said
of Peel, allowing fairly for controversial exigencies, was strictly
true. Nobody wishes to revive those necessarily hard sayings now,
but it must be insisted upon for a second, in passing, that Peel had
treated his party as no Minister before him had ever done. It was the
exactest verity, as well as the keenest sarcasm, when Mr. Disraeli
charged him with having tried to steer his party right into the
harbour of the enemy. Mr. Disraeli was the man to feel this most of
any, for it is one of his leading principles that as this nation now
exists party in our constitution is an apparatus absolutely necessary
to be preserved. He has for a third of a century since then himself
unfailingly worked by that rule. But I scarcely need urge this part
of the matter further here, as another word bearing upon it will come
later. If Peel had lived on, he and his attacker would before the end
have come to terms amicably enough, as Mr. Disraeli has since done
with everybody else whom he has, from obligations of political duty,
had publicly to oppose. That is, unless they were stupid enough not
to remember his known determination that Parliamentary life should be
raised above the level of vestry proceedings, by being dignified by
a play of wit; or else were ill-conditioned enough, as some who have
held high place have been, not to meet his offered open palm when the
weapon was put back into the sheath. Peel himself would have had more
sense; so, too, the present bearer of his name has shown himself
to have. The rather idle statement that the Disraelian assault was
prompted out of spite at not being made an Under-Secretary may at
this time of day be, perhaps, passed over. Mr. Disraeli spoke with and
voted for Peel long after that supposed neglect, and though it may be
said that a spiteful man could nurse his revenge, it is just as true
that the most generous could have done nothing more than go on showing
respect and giving support just as Mr. Disraeli did. Further, no one
was prompter than he was with words of praise so soon as there
was opportunity for them. Indeed, the finest eulogy of Peel stands
recorded in the printed pages of the person who is charged with
pursuing him with unheard-of bitterness. The man who waited for office
till the day when he vaulted at once into the Chancellorship of the
Exchequer, was scarcely the one to be mightily offended, because, when
a first batch of appointments was distributed, an Under-Secretaryship
went by him. It was the leadership of his party for wise ends that Mr.
Disraeli was looking out for.
Here again, however, it is unnecessarily restricting the consideration
of the point to speak of Mr. Disraeli's invective only in reference to
Peel. Acting on his maxim that it is the very ornament of debate, he
at one time or other has let the lightning of his tongue play around
everybody in Parliament who offered fit mark for it. Lord Russell was
scorched by it; so was Lord Palmerston. Mr. Roebuck, who in those
days was thought to have a bitter lip, got singed from it; and Mr.
Gladstone has felt its blaze wrapping around him often. He is, at this
moment, in fact, supposed to be showing some not very ancient scars
from it. But, occasionally even Mr. Disraeli's friends felt a more
lambent play of this glorious irony. It was he who told the late Earl
Derby that he was only "a Prince Rupert of debate," always finding
his camp in the hands of the enemy on returning from his irresistible
charges. He never objected to receive as good as he gave, if only any
one could be found to give it him. Only once in all his career did he
lose his temper--in the challenge arising out of the O'Connell affair;
and that was before he was in Parliament. While in the House, who was
there with steel of any temper that he did not try its edge? Sharp
blows were aimed back, and he always admitted when it was a palpable
hit; but who came up so often as he did--who was there that did not go
down before him at the last? Take Mr. Disraeli and Lord Beaconsfield
out of the record of the Parliamentary debating of the last forty
years, and what a darkening it would give--what a gap it would make!
Something must now be said as to Lord Beaconsfield's systematic
political and social views. It is very certain that he has a system,
and it is also sure that he has never hidden what it is. Nobody has
been at such pains to make his views clear. He has written books in
explanation, as well as made speeches; he has illustrated the system
by fiction, besides backing it up by historical disquisition. Anybody
who chooses may learn what it is, and--as a great modification of
political feeling in this country shows--a vast number have done so,
by reading "Coningsby," "Sybil," and the preface to "Lothair." Indeed,
from this latter exposition itself, all that is vital may be inferred.
But the doctrine has of necessity some elaborateness, and asks
a trifle of thought. It cannot be hit off in as easy a way as
"Radicalism" can, where, when you have uttered the half-platitude,
half-sophism, "equality of man," you are supposed to have said
nearly everything. Lord Beaconsfield has always kept before him the
conception of a _community_, which he distinguishes from a mob, and
if he could get his own way in the matter he would have the society
highly organized; the keeping it real in every part, and strictly and
broadly popular in its entirety, being the only working limit that he
would prescribe to its institutional intricacy.
This system, though on its being gradually promulgated it was held to
be Mr. Disraeli's very own, expressly denies for itself that it is in
any sense Disraelian at all. Lord Beaconsfield avows that he has found
it in history--in our own history. He is content to be regarded as
its discoverer, not its inventor. In a word, Lord Beaconsfield's great
claim upon his countrymen, as he himself puts it, is that he has again
brought to light and forced under the eyes of Englishmen their own
national chronicle.
To begin with, it is his Lordship's firmly avowed belief that there
has been what may be called a break or rift in our great social
traditions. It is not difficult to see that he traces the causes of it
back to the violent subversal of the Church, which, he will have
it, was never in this country at any time in real danger of becoming
Papal. But I may take up the narrative somewhat later. With his own
inimitable terseness, he has thus described the three great evils
which afterwards made a social wreck of modern England: they were, he
says, Venetian politics, Dutch finance, and French wars. All these he
attributes to the Whig nobles. What is called the great Revolution,
which they so hugely turned to their glory and their profit, he, in
"Sybil," ascribes to the fear of those whom he calls "the great lay
impropriators" that King James intended to insist on the Church lands
being restored to their original purposes,--to wit, the education of
the people and the maintenance of the poor. They brought over William
of Orange, along with whom, he ironically says, England had the
happiness of receiving a Corn Law and the National Debt. But the Crown
itself was enslaved in the hands of the Whig families, who converted
themselves into a Venetian oligarchy; and, throwing off the natural
obligations of property, they borrowed money to defray the foreign
wars in which William was entangled before he left his own country.
These are the historical premises from which Lord Beaconsfield's
views are all fundamentally derived. It is open to anybody to try to
disprove them; what they have got to do is simply to show that the
above alleged facts were not the true ones. But no one has done this
as yet. Coming down still later in his history, Mr. Disraeli, in
"Sybil," gave the following condensed description of the social
condition which had resulted,--"a mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling
foreign commerce, a home trade founded on a morbid competition, and a
degraded people." Here, again, the whole case is open to debate, but I
venture to think that he will be a bold man who denies that this was
a vivid picture of England at the moment Mr. Disraeli penned it. The
bold man, at any rate, did not present himself at the time. It was the
last item in that shocking list which fastened most on Mr. Disraeli's
imagination--"a degraded people." When writing "Sybil" he converted
himself into a Commissioner of Inquiry, and visiting the homes of
his humbler countrymen, painted them from sight on the spot. The
descriptions in those pages can never be forgotten of dwellings where
lived fever and consumption and ague as well as human beings; the
three first-named inhabitants being in fact the only tenants who
remained under the roofs long. With agitation unusual for him, but
most consistent in an upholder of the doctrine of race, he affirmed
that "the physical quality" of our people was endangered. But he
further found that in the manufacturing districts there was, to use
his own words, "no society, but only aggregation:" or, again to quote
him, "the moral condition of the people was entirely lost sight of."
Much of this, he believed, was due to the Church having failed in its
obligations. "The Church," he makes one of the characters in his story
say to another in it, "has deserted the people, and from that moment
the Church has been in danger, and the people degraded."
At this point I may very rightly interpolate a remark which has not a
little explanatory value. Just in proportion to the importance
given in Lord Beaconsfield's system to the Church was his natural
disappointment at the failure, regarded from one side, of the
awakening going on within its borders at the time of the "Young
England" movement. A great part of his hopes rested on that stir. He
was expecting from those most prominent in it a grand resuscitation of
the Anglican Church, but in place of that he says Dr. (now
Cardinal) Newman and the other seceders "sought refuge in mediæval
superstitions, which are generally only the embodiment of pagan
ceremonies and creeds." Bearing this in mind, there ought not to be
much difficulty in understanding either Lord Beaconsfield's position
towards the Ritualists, or the course he took as to the Public Worship
Regulation Act.