Part 19

In his first speech in the Upper House, Lord Beaconsfield said--"The Eastern Question involves some of the elements of the distribution of power in the world, and involves the existence of empires. I plead for a calm statesmanlike consideration of the question." In his second great speech in that House, he made this remark,--"The independence and integrity of Turkey is the traditional policy not only of England but of Europe." This is the absolute truth. It is not he who has invented any brand-new tactics in this matter; he has simply stood upon the old paths, and carried on the settled habits of our statesmanship. The innovators are Mr. Gladstone and the self-styled humanitarians, who were for substituting hysterics for national diplomacy, and thought to solve the Eastern Question by presenting the Turk with a carpet-bag and begging him to retire with it into Asia. But it is stated that Lord Beaconsfield has defied Russia. Well, turn to the famous Guildhall speech, which is the great article in the indictment. It suits his critics to pick words out of it to please them; but it also contains sentences like the following, which they somehow overlook,--"We have nothing to gain by war. We are essentially a non-aggressive Power." In that same speech, too, he alluded to the Emperor of Russia's "lofty character," addressing to him words of the highest compliment. If he added a solemn warning to that monarch as to the extent of England's resources if she was forced into war for the cause of public right, he still was speaking in the interests of peace, not war. It was his bounden duty to prevent the present Czar from falling into the mistake his father was so fatally guided into by the Manchester school--that of thinking England would in no case draw the sword. Construe his words how you will, they amount to no more than this. Mr. Gladstone and his friends, by their factitious public demonstrations, partly did away with the natural effects of that grave intimation, and made it necessary for the Government to prove its seriousness by bringing troops from India, and actually risking the very war which Lord Beaconsfield had wished to avoid. But the Premier had the courage not only of his opinions but of a true policy, and he has had his reward. He successfully checked the sinister progress of Russia, restored the reign of public law in Europe, and while exalting the renown of his own country, he has pointed another empire--that of Austria--to a new career which will benefit the world as well as strengthen and ennoble herself. After the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary was proclaimed, only one thing was left for his Lordship's opponents to go on repeating,--namely, that he had, in upholding Turkey, spared no thought or feeling to the victims of her rule. In the very face of this there was the fact that he had made England the formal protector of the inhabitants of Asia Minor, and had demanded Cyprus as a nearer point of observation of the Turk; but the plain obvious meaning of those arrangements has been tried to be muddled away by misrepresenting the protectorate of Asia Minor as a new insult to Russia. These brave humanitarians got sorely entangled in their logic on all sides. They pleaded in one breath that England had rashly undertaken too much responsibility for these oppressed peoples, and in the next breath said that nothing would ever come of it. Lord Beaconsfield has made it all clear, and in the simplest way. It is not fully explained at the moment of our writing what is the actual extent of the pressure put upon the Porte, nor what precise orders were sent to our admiral, but when the recent news was first published here the opponents of the Ministry must have felt that Lord Beaconsfield had ordered the British Fleet to sail against them when they heard it was instructed to steam back for the Turkish waters. Kindly meant as it might be for those in Asia Minor, it was a very cruel step on the part of Lord Beaconsfield towards some of his own countrymen, for it will necessitate the altering of a good many already prepared electioneering speeches. In the end, as we venture to predict, it will be seen that his Lordship and his colleagues are the true humanitarians.

But let me not lose sight of the fact that this, though a very real plea on the part of the Government, is not the one on which they mainly rely. They have never pretended to be knights-errant for the righting of wrongs throughout the world. What contents them is the humbler _rôle_ of old-fashioned English statesmanship, which seeks first to make sure of the safety of our own empire and the promotion of our proper interests, doing what further good it can to other peoples incidentally in discharging the fair reasonable obligations which may in that way arise, nor disdaining any glory that so falls to it. But an enormous obligation of this sort was already on our shoulders--the preservation of India. We have a strict duty to two hundred millions of human beings in the East, and Lord Beaconsfield and his colleagues, who appeared to be the only public men in England who remembered this, were determined to discharge it. Anything and everything in their policy which may at first sight seem risky or belligerent is explained fully to every one who will keep that pressing need before his mind. It was this which made them purchase the Suez Canal shares, and strengthen their interference in Egypt; it was this that made them wish for a clearer understanding with the Ameer of Afghanistan. But so little did they go about matters with a high hand, that they most carefully humoured France with respect to Egypt, and at the very earliest moment that they could, they made a treaty with a new Afghan ruler. To try to make them appear responsible for what afterwards occurred at Cabul is the most shameless abuse of license on the part of an Opposition which parliamentary records can show. A Russian embassy had been installed in Cabul with no other guarantee for its safety than the word of a friendly Ameer, and our Envoy and his suite were sent thither under the very same guarantee. If we were not to be most dangerously overshadowed by the Russian example, an English embassy had to show its face in Cabul; and to say that our rulers either in Calcutta or in London should have foreseen the pusillanimous break-down of the Ameer and the consequent massacre of our brave countrymen is--well, it may be better not further to try to say what it is.

Our own interests, I repeat, were jeopardized in every quarter where the present Government has stirred hand or foot. That is its broad justification. But I must certainly go a step farther than this. The present Ministry assuredly would not be satisfied with an acquittal on the Liberal arraignment; nor is that the verdict which the public has given. The British people find this Government guilty of having won for it and for themselves much honour. When Lord Beaconsfield saw that in any event he was committed to a contest with Russia for the defence of English interests, he had the courage and the wit to determine that the issue of it should be the better for the world. It is for this noble superfluity of skilful statesmanship, this Imperial scope given to England's ruling, that Europe has thanked him, and the bulk of this nation applauded him. By-and-by, he will reap still further credit, for besides checking Russia he will eventually coerce the Turk. That further obligation naturally arose out of the course he took, and he added it to his proper task of safeguarding our own interests, just as impartially as he did the other aim of arresting the Muscovite. I shall not push this reasoning further: it seems to me sufficiently triumphant as it stands. If Lord Beaconsfield has upheld the Turk, it was because it was necessary, not because he admired him. But there is another remark, coming much nearer home, that I wish to make before concluding this section.

The foreign policy of Lord Beaconsfield has brought to him and to his party much renown; but it has brought them nothing else. That there has been the need for it is for the Conservatives a positive misfortune. It has nearly entirely put aside the domestic legislation on which they reckoned for at once redressing some grievances of their own, and for satisfying the town populations who their true friends were. Let it not be forgotten that it was on this very claim of having a domestic policy that the Conservatives appealed to the people at the last election. Their opponents, who now make a pretence of measures of this kind being lacking, then denounced it loudly enough as a "policy of sewage." But Lord Beaconsfield's rivals have tried hard to make it seem that he sought out, or even invented, these hazardous events abroad which put aside his home policy. The very attempt impugns the common sense of the general public. A sort of pretext might have been found for insinuating such a notion if Lord Beaconsfield had been nearing the end of expending his Parliamentary majority by carrying party measures. But to suppose that a Minister attaining power in the triumphant way he did would wish to be plunged straightway into foreign entanglements, is to imagine him stricken with idiocy. Lord Beaconsfield had had far too much experience to make such a preposterous mistake. He knew at the beginning, as he knows now, that neither Minister nor party has much to gain in any way of permanent power or confirmed home advantage from foreign policies, however successful they may turn out to be. Foreign dangers are half-forgotten as soon as they are past. Directly, these occurrences abroad will be but memories; splendid ones they must ever remain: but they will have against them, in the eyes of the unthinking, the drawback of having necessarily, to some extent, disordered the finances. Lord Beaconsfield's rivals are sure to make the most of that fact on the hustings, as he well knew beforehand they would do; and, to balance its effect, he will have nothing on which to rely but the patriotic recollection of his country. Should everything go for the best, no _prestige_ which these foreign successes can give him and his party will place him more solidly in power than he found himself at the beginning of this Parliament; yet it will only be at the opening of the next that he will be able to push forward the home policy intended for the present Parliament. Apart from a heightening of fortunate reputation, won through much risk, his own party will scarcely have gained a shred of fair legislative or administrative advantage from six years' splendid possession of overwhelming power.

It does not seem needful to waste space in speaking of the Zulu war. Even the Liberals are beginning to be silent on the subject. The affair was forced upon the Government, not sought for by them, and it has ended successfully.

If I now ask what have been the causes of Lord Beaconsfield's unexampled individual success, the remarks must at first seem to narrow to mere personal ones. There has, in truth, been more than one reason for the present Premier's triumphs. First of all, I might state the matter so generally as to say that for half a century he has managed to keep himself the most thoroughly interesting personage in England. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever been dull, which is the one only sufficient explanation of failure wherever it happens. But such a statement of the matter as this is too comprehensive and wants particularizing. I may add, then, that no one has shown so much pluck as he has, and that is a quality which in the end tells with the British public beyond all others. For one starting with his disadvantage of race to dream in those days of a political career was most courageous, but so soon as it began to be seen that he would triumph over all obstacles, his very difficulties turned to his advantage. He soon commanded everybody's sympathies except those of injured partisans on the other side. Not that it was sympathy he begged for; it was admiration he extorted. Especially has he by means of his writings had the generous feeling of youth in his favour, generation after generation. They can never remain untouched by the spectacle of a successful fight against circumstances. But Lord Beaconsfield has not owed all to dash and daring. His industry has been equal to his pluck. If he had only been a politician that would have had to be said; and so it again would if he had only been known as the writer of his works. Put both the careers together and nobody else has shown such fertility of brain. His marvellous intellect has never tired. The versatility, too, has been marvellous: a novelist and a diplomatist, a poet and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a satirist and a successful leader of Opposition. For fifty years, in one or other of these characters, and often in several of them at once, his wit has never ceased blazing, save when he himself, the only one who ever tired of its play--except, indeed, those hit by it--has chosen to smother it in silence; but it was always ready to flash forth upon occasion, and is as bright to-day as ever.

But, to come yet closer to the heart of the secret of Lord Beaconsfield's success, his faithful devotion to the great historic party he allied himself with has been equal to his courage, to his industry, and to his abilities. No politician can make an individual career; he has to find his success in the prosperity of his followers. The loyalty which Lord Beaconsfield has shown to his party and the ungrudging recognition they have paid to him has half-redeemed the hardness of our coarse partisan politics. Some Liberals have had the want of wit, without our going so far as to say the lack of capability of feeling, to express surprise at the faithful respect shown to Lord Beaconsfield by his present colleagues. That Lord Beaconsfield has a personal charm must be admitted, for he has turned every one who was ever brought into any degree of nearness with him into a friend, as well as a colleague. Those who like may believe that he has done it by the use of magic philtres; less credulous people will, perhaps, content themselves with thinking that his spell has been simply that of strength of character, superior experience, and a non-despotic manner. One thing is very patent. This chief of a Cabinet who is said to have imprinted everywhere his own individuality on the Ministerial policy, has never practised the slightest interference with his subordinates. It is not he who has been charged with an uncontrollable wish to be the representative of all the Ministry in his own person. Just as he could show patience when a leader of Opposition, he has been able to be silent when a Minister. However, it has been rather insinuated that he became preternaturally active in the Cabinet Councils--there standing forth a wizard, and cast all his colleagues into a clairvoyant slumber. Strange to say, they remained in the same comatose condition afterwards in both Houses, never waking up though speaking and passing measures. Two members of his Government, however, have broken away--Lords Derby and Carnarvon have escaped from the magician's cell; but they have divulged nothing as to any necromantic violence worked on them. No, Lord Beaconsfield's fair and reasonable ascendency has been more honestly won. But his marvellous friendships have not been the only softening touches in his career. All England felt a strange thrilling about the heart on the morning when it heard that Mr. Disraeli's wife was henceforth to be the Viscountess Beaconsfield. It was a domestic idyll suddenly disclosed in the centre of British politics. A man who can make his own hearth the scene of romance, convert all who know him well into true friends, and win all the young people of a nation, must be something more than a self-seeker.

Still, though these things might explain Lord Beaconsfield being so interesting, something else has yet to be added to account for the overwhelming importance which he has attained in the last period of his career. Not even the success of his party could have given him that unless the policy which secured this prosperity had obtained, also, the exalting of the nation.

It is this which is his final boast; he has uplifted higher the fame of England, and by doing that has made his own renown the greater. Once more, it was achieved in the simplest way. He invented nothing, strained at nothing, but only boldly carried on the traditionary English policy, at a moment when his opponents were willing to forget it; and in merely proving equal to the opportunity, and daring to make Britain act worthily of her history, he has changed by her means the destiny of the Western World. Not only his own countrymen, but Europe and nations more distant still, to-day hail him as the greatest of modern English statesmen. That is a title and dignity somewhat higher than an Earldom, and it is under that larger style that those who wish to do Lord Beaconsfield full honour will have to allude to him hereafter in the national annals.

These are some of the reasons why we honour and follow him.

A TORY.

II.--WHY WE DISBELIEVE IN HIM.

If a Whig had been asked ten or a dozen years ago, or indeed six years back, to write his impressions of Mr. Disraeli, he would have set about it in a strikingly different spirit from that which the task awakens now. Lord Beaconsfield has recently become much too serious a joke in the national history, but for a very long time the jocosity was light enough. In the eyes of all Liberals who had not fully acquired the gravity of their own fundamental principles, there was, down to a very late period, always something diverting about Mr. Disraeli. He might and did vex them, but shortly they were again smiling at him. The explanation was this, that for a long time his presence in Parliament hardly at all hindered the progress of Liberal measures. Whenever a legislative reform was proposed, he invariably spoke against it, and at some stage afterwards the Conservatives voted in a body the same way. From the voting being subsequent to the speaking, there was an illusive appearance of Mr. Disraeli's speechifying being the cause of the Tory division list. But, in reality, there was no such connection, and the Liberals were aware of it. They all knew that the Conservatives would have voted just the same without a word being spoken. If, during all the years Lord Palmerston was in power, almost the whole of Lord Russell's earlier and later official terms, and down to nearly the end of Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, Mr. Disraeli, instead of making speeches, had amused his audience by pirouetting on one leg night after night, the practical result would have been exactly the same. It could not have been so entertaining to the Liberals, because, looking at some members of the Conservative party, it would have exceeded the bounds of belief to suppose that Mr. Disraeli was really twirling for the whole, whereas it did somehow come to be accepted that he was speaking for all of them. The unlooked-for thoughts he pretended to put into their minds, and the preposterous words he did put upon their lips, kept all Englishmen who were not Conservatives shaking their sides with laughter. It was as if a foreign Will-o'-the-Wisp had strayed into the British Parliament, always, however, keeping himself and his antics on the Conservative side, as being, we suppose, the worst-drained part of the House, where the morasses lay. Even when, to the amazement of the country generally, Mr. Disraeli found his way into office, the merriment did not stop. Nobody who has reached mature years can forget what an astounding drollery it was thought to be when Mr. Disraeli was made Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lord Derby. For the time it seemed to convert English politics into pantomime. Will-o'-the-Wisp had been asked by the country party to undertake the post of chief financier. Everybody on the other side was prepared beforehand to laugh at his Budgets; and, when they were propounded, the Liberals did laugh a little more even than they had expected to do. When he brought in his India Bill, the merriment grew perfectly uproarious,--Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, and the other large commercial towns exploding one after the other. It was the same when he proposed to give sixteen millions for Irish railways; it was the same with the first sketches of his Reform Bill. Surely nobody can have forgotten the "fancy franchises?" In a word, every domestic measure that Mr. Disraeli ever proposed was, in the first shape in which it was presented, received with mirth from nearly every quarter excepting his immediate rear. There sat his supporters, usually in those years wearing rather long faces during the earlier period of the statements, and apparently wondering if their ears could possibly be telling them rightly.

But all this, as there is not a single Liberal in the country but will admit, is a good deal altered. Lord Beaconsfield has recently signed foreign treaties on England's behalf, insisting most successfully, he tells us, on what kind of treaties they should be; he has undoubtedly put our armies and fleets into motion; and, while risking war in Europe, has actually waged it in Asia and Africa. The bustle of these events, and a certain dazzle and glitter attending them, cause people in general, at this moment, to forget all that prior long period of non-success on his part in everything else but making successive steps of personal advancement. What has happened lately in Lord Beaconsfield's career has certainly worn a look of importance, and it has undoubtedly embodied political power. If, as the Liberals will have it, he is still really Will-o'-the-Wisp as much as ever, he has managed to get hold of the sword of England, and has for some time been playing with it to the great wonder of foreign nations. But how has this change in his position been worked? This is the question I want now to consider.

A Hebrew by descent, a Christian by profession, and in politics a Tory--such is Lord Beaconsfield. This description, on the very face of it, is a rather mixed one, and implies a singular career. It is, however, the last item which specially fixes my attention. Mr. Disraeli, sparse though the instances are, was not the first of his race who changed his faith. Also, there have been, and indeed still are, other Hebrews who have entered public life in England, and attained conspicuousness in it. But those, while remaining nearly invariably Jews in religion, became Liberals in politics. In fact, Lord Beaconsfield is the only Hebrew of importance known who turned Tory. It was--and at first sight it gives a highly religious air to the Conservative party--indispensable to his doing this that he should first be a Christian. Not being that he would indeed have had to wait till the Liberals carried their Bill for the Removal of Jewish Disabilities before he could have joined the Conservatives inside Parliament. That circumstance, again, seems to give to his career a curious aspect. In fact, the reflection is forced upon one so early as this,--what an utter failure Mr. Disraeli must have been if he had not so amazingly succeeded! To be a Hebrew-Tory left just two issues, either to become the leader of the party or the very humblest member of it. All the circumstances would seem to point to the latter alternative as being the natural one, but it is the other which has somehow come about. Mr. Disraeli has flowered into the Earl of Beaconsfield, and has now twice been, and will remain for a little time longer, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.