Part 18

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.

What was the remedy for this state of society into which England had fallen? The cure which seemed natural to Mr. Disraeli was to revert to the principles of our history. Practically, the first thing to be done was to break up the political monopoly of the Whigs, and it was this very task that he set himself to do. I have already extracted a passage denouncing that party in the first election address he issued. But here, too, he had no new course to strike out. He affirmed that both Lord Shelburne and Mr. Pitt had attempted the same work long before. Shelburne, he said, saw in the growing middle-class a bulwark for the throne against the Revolution families; and Pitt, still more determined to curb the power of the patrician party, created a plebeian aristocracy, when they baffled his first endeavours, blending it with the old oligarchy. It has not unlikely begun to dawn upon the reader that Mr. Disraeli, holding these views, was himself a Reformer, of a much more comprehensive kind even than the Radicals. True, Reform as it actually had come about in 1832, most craftily manipulated as it then was by the Whigs to their own advantage, skilfully snatching profit out of what ought to have been a danger to them, was not his notion. For part of what happened then he, indeed, with his usual courage, blamed the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues. His own party have had from no quarter criticism so severe as that he has given them. If Lord Beaconsfield is in favour of an aristocracy, it is because he is for making it actually "lead." He affirms that the Tories, by their conduct in office, precipitated a revolution which might have been delayed for half a century, and which need never have occurred at all in so aggravated a form. All that he could do, all that he has ever claimed to do, by his own partial Reform measure, was to do away with part of the ill effects of that partisan move of the other side, and to prevent fresh ill ones from being worked in just the same way. But there ought to be given a still broader statement of Lord Beaconsfield's political and social doctrines, and, perhaps, I cannot do better than make with that view the following quotation from the preface to "Lothair." He there explains that his general aims were these:--

"To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into the Church as the trainer of the nation, by the revival of Convocation, then dumb, on a wide basis, and not, as has since been done, in the shape of a priestly faction; to establish a commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled at the time by a Whig Parliament, were subsequently and triumphantly vindicated by his political pupil and heir, Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the political constituencies of 1832 from sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well the moral condition of the people by establishing that labour required regulation as much as property; and all this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration of the past than by political revolution founded on abstract ideas."

This, he goes on to say, appeared to him at the beginning of his career to be the course which the country required, and, he adds, that it was one "which, practically speaking, could only with all their faults and backslidings be undertaken and accomplished by a reconstructed Tory party."

If I were able to find room for bringing together from Lord Beaconsfield's books and speeches detailed passages to illustrate this summary, it would be seen what a coherent social scheme he has always had present to his mind. The above hints, however, must serve. Any one who, after reading them, thinks that there is any ground for the electioneering cry the Liberals are trying to raise, that this is a Minister who has no domestic policy, will show more stolidity than we hope the bulk of the electors possess. Further on I will return for a moment to this point.

Let me go at once to the fourth topic I have allotted to myself--Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy. This policy, I need not say, is that, of the Cabinet as well, but I am not in this paper writing of the other members of the Government. It is not my purpose to trace the history of the Eastern Question, that of the Afghan War, and the Zulu embroglio. But there is one general aspect of these matters as to which I must offer two or three comments in addition to what has been before said about "Imperialism." A set attempt has been made, and is pretty certain to go on being made all the time between now and the elections--whether they come earlier or later--and to be then finally repeated on the hustings, to give to Lord Beaconsfield the air of a most belligerent, not to say a bloodthirsty, Minister, who, the moment he got into office, began to peep about the world to see where he could pick a quarrel, and who has especially acted defiantly towards Russia. By way of preliminary, I may ask whether his past antecedents show him to be a statesman of this hobgoblin type? Lord Palmerston found no more unyielding opponent of his turbulent foreign policy than Mr. Disraeli, who always contended that the effect of it was to draw the national attention away from home reforms. When the question of coast fortifications was before Parliament, Mr. Disraeli was among the first to protest against panic; he it was who spoke of "bloated armaments;" and on countless occasions he has raised his voice for peace and retrenchment. In 1865 he publicly declared that since he had had to do with politics he had known only one war which was justifiable--that waged in the Crimea. But it may be said that it is a common artifice for men in Opposition to preach peace. Let us, then, turn specially to the Eastern Question, and see what grounds there are for insinuating that Lord Beaconsfield has in that case concocted a war policy for the purpose of exciting and dazzling the country, and keeping himself in power. In 1843--which is now some time ago--in a debate as to the production of papers on Servia, in which Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston were the chief orators, he made a speech which contained this passage:--"What, then, ought to be the Ministerial policy? To maintain Turkey by diplomatic action in such a state that she might be able to hold independently the Dardanelles." Why, this is the literal description of what he has done now. And we have already seen that in 1865, twenty-two years after, the one only war he approved was that which had been fought against Russia for this very purpose. In the early stage of the negotiations which led to that war, his complaint was that the Government was not vigorous enough in defending Turkey. But, in 1857, there arose another occasion for testing whether Mr. Disraeli's feelings naturally were for peace or war. He opposed the war with China, and in the Persian affair he denounced the Russophobia of Lord Palmerston--the very complaint from which, we infer, the Liberals wish him to be understood to be himself suffering now. Or take India as a test. According to the Duke of Argyll and others, Lord Beaconsfield has an insatiable thirst for more territory in that part of the world. Very strangely, it was he who most condemned the annexation of Oude, going so far as to make a motion for a Royal Commission to be sent out to India to inquire into the condition of the people. When the contest between the Northern and Southern States of America broke out, no public man regretted it more than he did, and he was unfalteringly on the side of the North.

In fact, only in one single case has Lord Beaconsfield ever shown the slightest disposition for sacrificing peace, if need be--namely, for the checking of Russia's portentous advance; and this has necessarily implied the maintenance of Turkey in some degree of power. Twice in his lifetime has the need arisen, and he has acted the second time in just the same way that he did the first, the only difference being that he happens now, fortunately, to be in office instead of in Opposition.