Foreign affairs were the field of Disraeli's most brilliant
exploits. "He had two ruling ideas," says the historian Oman,
"the first was the conception of England as an imperial world-
power, interested in European politics, but still more interested
in the maintenance and development of her vast colonial and
Indian empire. This is the notion which friends and enemies now
using the word in different senses call 'imperialism.' The second
ruling thought in Disraeli's mind was the conviction that the
Conservative party ought to step forward as rival to the Liberal
party in commanding the sympathies and allegiance of the masses."
In pursuance of this second idea he took the "leap in the dark,"
in 1867, carrying a reform bill which was but little short of
democratic in its extension of the right to vote. This was
followed up by legislation favoring the English tenant-farmers,
and improving the condition of workingmen in towns. Even after
Disraeli's death, Lord Salisbury continued his domestic policy,
instituting local government by means of county councils in 1888,
making the schools free in 1891, and refunding the national debt
in 1888.
It was a great day for the British empire when Disraeli's
telegram to the hard-pressed Khedive of Egypt, in 1875, bought
for England the controlling interest in the Suez canal, the
water-gate to India. It was a bold stroke of Disraeli's also
which, at the close of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78,
compelled the victor to take his paw from the throat of his
victim and submit the treaty to a congress of the powers at
Berlin, where its terms were modified and England was admitted to
its benefits. The Second Afghan War (1878-80), and the Zulu War
(1878-79), and the Boer War, which brought little glory to
Britain, were the direct result of the Prime Minister's desire to
extend the empire and strengthen its frontiers. It may have been
theatrical, but it was certainly impressive to the assembled
princes of India when Lord Lytton, the Viceroy, proclaimed
Victoria Empress of India in Delhi, the old capital of the
Moguls, on January 1, 1877. And though Disraeli (raised to the
peerage as Lord Beaconsfield) was in his grave, his spirit
dominated the pageantry of 1887 and 1897, when every nation and
tribe and kindred and people of the Greater Britain sent
representatives to London to celebrate the jubilee and diamond
jubilee of the Empress-Queen, to whose aggrandizement he had
contributed so effectively.