always been the advocate in theory, and | pledge of a disentanglement from Eurowhich he seems inclined to assert in prac-pean projects and alliances, and symboltice. But the popular power does not now ized the substitution of an insular for a need to shelter itself, like the towns of the continental policy in foreign affairs. Middle Ages, in the shadow of some feudal castle. It is not for Lord Beaconsfield to bring us back to the obsolete struggles of the time of Anne and of the first three Georges. England is no longer merely the spectatress, or the stake, of the game for ascendancy, played by monarchy and aristocracy. The queen succeeded to an era of settled questions, of questions settled that is in principle, though their development and application still had to be contended for. Hence the calm and steady progress which has been the characteristic hitherto of her forty years' reign. The force of facts, that practical logic which may be disputed but The principal charge which Lord Bea- cannot be long disobeyed, made Conserconsfield has made against the Whigs is vative as well as Liberal governments, Peel their indifference to the interests and feel- as well as Melbourne and Russell, the ings of the poor. The condition-of-En- heads and instruments of that progress. gland question did not occupy them. No The Reform Act, and the measures of imputation is more entirely devoid of civil, religious, and commercial freedom truth. The great characteristic of English which immediately preceded and followed, politics since the passing of the Reform called a new England into existence; and Act is the part which social politics have the first business of those who had created played in it. Either in principle or in ac- or discovered it was to survey the country, tual fact the disputes of generations had and trace what manner of land it was on been settled during the years which imme- which they were about to enter. Hitherto diately preceded, or in those which closely it had been a terra incognita to those who followed, the great measure of 1832. Re- ruled it. Its new rulers did their best to ligious liberty, involving in its further find out what it was like. This was the development religious equality, won the period when, according to Sydney Smith, victory which was sure to carry all the rest"the whole earth was in fact in commiswith it, when the tests and corporation sion." Sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas, acts were repealed, and Catholic emancipation was achieved. The system on which Ireland must be governed was decided when the latter measure was passed, and it was further acknowledged in the unsectarian character of the national system of education established in Ireland. The unsuccessful Appropriation Clause contained in principle Irish re-establishment; and the Civil Marriages Act was a further extrusion of the ecclesiastical principle by the secular in human affairs. The ascendancy of the democratic principle in the constitution, though yet waiting its accomplishment, had the promise of its fulfilment in the Reform Act of 1832. The Poor-Relief Act, notwithstanding its imputed harshness, proclaimed to the poor the doctrine of energy and self-reliance, and emancipated them from a degrading and servile dependence on the alms of the rich. The legislation of Huskisson contained within it the germs of that passing of free-trade, which has since been more completely developed than any other ac knowledged principle in our legislation. The Municipal Corporations Act established local self-government, though it did not apply it completely and universally or thoroughly. The final severance, at the accession of the queen, of the crown of Hanover from that of England, was the is the phrase in which Lord Beaconsfield a few years ago summed up his domestic policy. Systematic inquiries into the prevalence of fever in the metropolis; into the need of open spaces; into the practice of interment in towns ; into the conditions of the laboring classes, first in England and Wales, and afterwards in Scotland; into the employment of women and chil dren in mines; the reduction of the hours of labor in factories; grants in aid of education, these are but some of the proofs that the health of the people, physical and moral, from the first engaged the attention of the Liberal governments which ruled England during the opening years of the present reign. That they did not do more, was due in part, no doubt, to their own hesitation and infirmity, but in a greater degree still to the resistance, on most of these questions, which they met from the party to which Lord Beaconsfield attached himself. Lord Beaconsfield's attempts to represent England as governed before the Reform Act by an oligarchy indifferent to the poor, and ruled since by a plutocracy hostile to them, have about as much historic truth as we look for, or at any rate find, in his statements. The Parliament in which Lord Beaconsfield took his seat was elected under the Whig ministry which the failure of King William IV.'s attempt to govern by a Conservative minority in the House of Commons had restored to office with a Parliamentary majority, won at the general election of 1835. Its achievements had been the Municipal Corporation Act, the Tithe Commutation Act, the General Registration Act, the reduction of the stamp duty on newspapers and of the duty on paper, the act allowing counsel to prisoners, and a partial reform of the jail system of the country measures one of them of the first magnitude, and others important as being the first steps taken in a direction in which large advances have been made since. Its great failure was to give effect to the motion for the appropriation to educational purposes of the surplus revenues of the Irish Church, which had brought the Whigs back to office. The ministry itself was in 1837 practically what it had been in 1835. strong ambition took refuge in politics." The "Letters of Runnymede" abound in compliments to its leading members, who are addressed frankly in the second person. Lord Melbourne is "the sleekest swine in epicurean sty." "Contemptible Later in Mr. Disraeli's career, it became as you are," he is told yet so-and-so, and his cue to flatter Lord Russell as resoso, which we need not quote. "With the lutely as in the "Letters of Runnymede " exception of an annual oration against he had bespattered him. In "Coningsby," Parliamentary reform, your career in the his "strong ambition" and "dark and House of Commons was never remarkably dishonorable intrigues" are converted into distinguished." "When I recall to my "this moral intrepidity which prompts him bewildered memory the perplexing circum- ever to dare that which his intellect asstance that William Lamb is prime minis-sures him is politic. He is consequently ter of England, it seems to me that I rec- at the same time sagacious and bold in ollect with labor the crowning incident of council; as an administrator, he is prompt some grotesque dream." "It is perhaps and indefatigable." The "cold and inanhopeless that your lordship should rouse imate" temperament, the "weak voice yourself from the embraces of that siren and mincing manner," "the imbecile acDeridia, to whose fatal influence you are cents that struggle for sound in the chamnot less a slave than our second Charles." ber echoing but a few years back with the Mr. Disraeli's character of Lord Mel- glowing periods of Canning," become bourne is a savage version of the well-"physical deficiencies which even a Deknown banter of Sydney Smith. Lord mosthenic impulse could scarcely overJohn Russell is informed: "Your character is a curious one. . . You were born with a strong ambition and a feeble intellect." He is flattered with the statements that "your intellect produced" in succession "the feeblest tragedy in our language," ,"" the feeblest romance in our literature," and "the feeblest political essay on record." "Your memoirs of the affairs of Europe. . . retailed in frigid sentences, a feeble compilation from the gossip of those pocket tomes of small talk, which abound in French literature This luckless production closed your literary career; you flung down your futile pen in incapable despair; and your feeble intellect having failed in literature, your come." But these disadvantages detract little from the Parliamentary influence of a statesman who "is experienced in debate, quick in reply, fertile in resources, takes large views, and frequently compensates for a dry and hesitating manner by the expression of those noble truths that flash across the fancy, and rise spontaneously to the lips of men of poetic temperament when addressing popular assemblies." "The noble" of the Runnymede letters, "who with a historic name and no fortune, a vast ambition and a baulked career, and soured, not to say malignant, from disappointment," offered "prime materials for the leader of a revolutionary faction," becomes one whose "private life of dignified repute," and "the antecedents | wards to display them in his tirades of whose birth and rank," added to the against Sir Robert Peel, at this period the personal qualities before eulogized, make subject of his unbounded eulogy. "the best leader the Whigs have ever had or could have." The "individual" of Runnymede, "who, on the principle that good vinegar is the corruption of bad wine, has been metamorphosed from an incapable author into an eminent politician," becomes in the biography of Lord George Bentinck an instance, along with Mr. Burke, "Caius Julius," and Frederick the Great, of the union of pre-eminent capacity, both in meditation and in action. It is pretty certain that Lord Beaconsfield never thought as ill or as highly of Lord John Russell as he has at different times pretended to do. The two characters which he has drawn of this eminent statesman throw light upon his treatment of Sir Robert Peel, for whom a different fate was reserved, to be first the victim of Lord Beaconsfield's praise, and then the object of his slander" tooth that poisons as it bites." The beginning of Lord Beaconsfield's Parliamentary career did not give much promise of the distinction he has since obtained. We need not tell the old story of the failure of his first speech, and of the verified prediction of subsequent success which it contained. That was rather a cry of anguish, the breathing of "a hope which was too like despair for patience to smother," than an expression of reasonable and manly self-confidence, which in such circumstances would have waited for the event, rather than have vaunted itself in prospective braggadocio. Lord Beaconsfield discovered that he was a stranger in the House of Commons; and, with the instinct of an intelligent foreigner, he set himself to learn the language and to acquire the usages of this strange community in which he found himself, and in which he was determined to push his fortunes. He spoke with moderate success on some of the principal topics that occupied this Parliament, working with the regular opposition headed by Sir Robert Peel, but not taking a prominent part in it. The organized warfare of regular parties was not at that time suited to Mr. Disraeli's genius, which was then of the guerilla order. He went with what has since been called the "Front Opposition Bench," in resisting Lord John Russell's measures, without much discrimination as to their character. He spoke against the grants in aid of education, and against the repeal of the corn-laws, with respect to which and to free-trade generally he fol lowed the changing tactics and adapted himself to the growing Liberalism of Sir Robert Peel. We need not quote further flowers of speech from the garlands of compliments with which Lord Beaconsfield crowned the smaller members of the Whig cabinet which he found in power when he entered Parliament in 1837. But it may be interesting to recall some of the compliments which he addressed to Lord Palmerston. Lord Palmerston is described as a minister who has maintained himself in power "in spite of the contempt of a whole nation." "Our language commands no expression of scorn which has not been exhausted in the celebration of your character, there is no conceivable idea of deg. radation which has not been at some period or another associated with your career." He is congratulated on "that dexterity which has never deserted you, and which His most remarkable avowal was his seems a happy compound of the smart- declaration, which had some boldness and ness of an attorney's clerk and the intrigue generosity, of sympathy with the Chartists, of a Greek of the lower empire." Lord though he disapproved of the Charter. Palmerston's Parliamentary shortcomings Lord Beaconsfield has shown from time are attributed rather to "a want of breeding to time imaginative sensitiveness for the than to a deficiency of self-esteem. The sufferings of the poor, and an understandleader of the Whig opposition was wont to ing of the motives which impelled the say... that your lordship reminded him Chartist agitation. In "Sybil" we have the of a favorite footman on easy terms with expressions of this sympathy, as in "Lohis mistress." The qualities exhibited in thair" there is certainly an intelligent unthese elegant extracts are those which derstanding, which seems to betray a covert Lord Beaconsfield offered for sale as he liking for the revolutionary projects and stood idle in the political market-place, leaders of the Continent. A very little because as yet no man had hired him. change in circumstances, or perhaps, we These gifts of political scurrility he brought should rather say, a slight but vital modiwith him into the House of Commons. fication of character, might have made He had shown them before in his encoun- Lord Beaconsfield the ally of Fergus ters with O'Connell, and he was after-O'Connor and the partisan of Mazzini. The hand which drew Walter Gerard and Stephen Morley, and Sybil herself, which sketched Mirandola and Captain Bruges and Theodora, the Marianne and the National Convention and the Fenian brotherhood, is not that of a coarse caricaturist and assailant. There is a good deal of true insight and of kindly appreciation in Lord Beaconsfield's sketches of men and organizations, who to the vulgar and scared rich are objects at once of terror and contempt. But the thing never goes beyond an artistic sentiment. Chartists and Maz-a comparatively small minority. Sir Robzinists are to him picturesque figures in a drama. There is as little that is moral in his feelings towards them, as in a sensitiveness to music. Lord Beaconsfield's fatal love of rank and wealth and power has made him always more ready to use the prejudices of their possessors for his own political advancement, than to combat them in the interests of persons and classes for whose sufferings he has shown in his novels and in his speeches a literary and oratorical tenderness, and whose aims he has understood and considerately interpreted. Acts of personal kindness are attributed to him, as in the case of the Chartist poet, Thomas Cooper, and we are glad to believe in their genuineness. The words of kindly compassion which Lord Beaconsfield gives to Mr. Smith O'Brien, in his life of Lord George Bentinck, are creditable to him. He can understand motives and characters which break loose from routine, even into hare-brained and quixotic enterprises. Lord Beaconsfield could write a description of Mazzini, under the name of Mirandola, which even his friends might accept; but he vilified Mazzini in his own name and character, and pursued him in the persons of his friends in the House of Commons. He could make heroes of the Chartist leaders and respectable enthusiasts of Fenian headcentres, but he poured contempt on the obsolete advocates of stale sedition in Parliament. The fine and generous qualities which are not absent from Lord Beaconsfield's writings, are the weightest condemnation of his public conduct. So far as practical politics are concerned, Lord Beaconsfield's sympathy for the sufferings of the poor and his intelligence of their aims, even when most vain and mischievous, does little more than furnish a basis for his denunciations of Whig indifference to these things. ship, or even an under-secretaryship, not unreasonable in the almost certain event of the general election returning a Conservative majority to the House of Commons. On the dissolution of Parliament, Lord Beaconsfield sought the suffrages, not of Maidstone, but of Shrewsbury. After a contest marked by the coarsest personalities, of which this time he was rather the object than the author, he was returned second on the poll, with a Conservative colleague, the Liberals being in ert Peel was still the object of his unmeasured eulogy and of his unqualified confidence. He described himself as "his humble but fervent supporter." He used something like the language of a stage confidant, imparting secrets into which he had been admitted for the sake of reassuring the electors of Shrewsbury. Sir Robert Peel was almost too great a man for the merely finite intelligence of Lord Beaconsfield completely to grasp. He represented himself as baffled, "when he attempted to discover how from the scattered remnants of a political party Sir Robert Peel had collected a power sufficient to direct the fate of an empire. . . and in an age of quick transition he had discovered the tone and spirit of the age." The contemplation of such achievements left him lost in admiration for Sir Robert Peel's "great talents and matchless foresight." It was as a supporter of Sir Robert Peel, and nothing else, that he was elected for Shrewsbury in 1841, and he proclaimed the satisfaction which he had had in "writing to Sir Robert Peel to inform him that the electors of Shrewsbury had done their duty.” The Parliament which the hostile vote of 1841 brought to a close, left Lord Beaconsfield in a political position which might have made hopes of a junior lord In August, 1841, the Whigs, who had appealed to the country, faced on the ministerial benches a Conservative majority in the House of Commons. Practically they had been defeated at the general election upon the question of a modification of commercial legislation in the direction of freer trade, but the amendment to the address which was moved by the opposition did not directly raise that issue. In that fact was an indication, which Lord Beaconsfield at least understood, that Sir Robert Peel was not a candidate for power as a minister pledged to protection. Whoever else may have been deceived, he was not. In the speech which he made on the motion of want of confidence, Lord Beaconsfield took pains to point out that Sir Robert Peel was not pledged to protection, and moreover that it was not an article of the Tory creed. The election, he said, It is clear from what has preceded that Lord Beaconsfield understood perfectly this issue which was placed before the country in the general election of 1841, the principles of commercial policy on which Sir Robert Peel's government was formed, and the character of its first measures of which the repeal of the corn-laws was the natural and inevitable development. In that government, as all the did not turn on the question of the import | orthodox Whigs, still less genuine Tories. duties and of the commercial reforms pro- They were in their characteristic opinions posed by the Whigs, but on their incapac- reformers, who constituted in the eighity for affairs and their inability to carry teenth century the Liberal doctrine of the out their own policy. The progress of nineteenth century. commercial reform had been stopped by the Reform Act. In other words, the principles of Huskisson, of whom Peel had been the colleague, and was, in a certain sense, the successor, had failed to receive their proper development through the accession of the Whigs to power. In the debate on Sir Robert Peel's financial scheme of 1842, a scheme which practically, though timidly, applied the doctrines of free-trade, and which was introduced world knows, he was not included. In one by the prime minister in a speech which stated and defended them theoretically, Lord Beaconsfield again vindicated both the measures and the doctrines of his chief. He repeated his statement that the Tories were the true and original freetraders. Mr. Pitt, in 1787, first promulgated free-trade principles, which were opposed by Fox, Sheridan, and Burke, which Lord Hawkesbury, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Wallace developed, which Mr. Huskisson received from them, and which Sir Robert Peel had taken up from him. The Tories passed from hand to hand the torch of sound economic doctrine which the Whigs strove to blow out. Sir Robert Peel was, in this respect, by a legitimate affiliation through the statesmen just named, the lineal descendant and true representative of Mr. Pitt. Afterwards, when the opportunity arose of heading the revolt against Sir Robert Peel on pretexts of which Lord Beaconsfield himself had years before shown the hollowness, he discovered that the true free-trader was the judicious protectionist; and he invented a phrase to cover this ingenious combination. The phrase was "regulated competition." Mr. Pitt, Mr. Wallace, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Huskisson, and the rest, were "regulated competitors." Competition is regulated when in a race you leave one runner free and tie the legs of the others. The bar ren question whether free-trade owes most to Tories or to Whigs is only part, however, of a larger discussion, of which Lord Beaconsfield has always been fond, and on which we have already spoken at some length. He has from time to time contended that the Tories and not the Whigs are the true reformers. His case consists in a reference to the name of Mr. Pitt, who was the author of a project of household suffrage, and to those of Lord Shelburne and even Lord Chatham. These statesmen, as we have shown, were neither of the speeches which he made, in that saturnalia of personal vilification in which the emancipated slave exceeded the extremest license of his order, Sir Robert Peel referred to the fact that at one time Mr. Disraeli had given practical signs of his confidence in him by his expressed willingness to take office. Overtures, it is believed, were made which were not prosecuted, and the discontinuance of which was not perhaps explained with sufficient courtesy to the expectant minister, and has not been explained to the public. When the memoirs and correspondence of Sir Robert Peel are published, a disclosure, it is believed, will take place which will furnish a fresh illustration of, if it does not throw new light on the characters, of the two eminent men concerned. It is curious to reflect on what might have been Mr. Disraeli's career, had he taken the subordinate office under the new Conservative government, which was dangled before his longing eyes only to be withdrawn from his grasp. It would possibly have been more respectable-it is not likely to have been so distinguished. Mr. Disraeli was scarcely the man to work his way up by Parliamentary docility and administrative industry and success, through an ascending scale of more and more important parts, to a high place in the cabinet. He is a man of surprises and seizures, likely either to gain everything by a bound, or to fall back bruised, and broken, and emptyhanded. It might have been left to him, if Sir Robert Peel had been kinder, to illustrate, after the manner of the late Mr. Wilson Croker, that union of action and contemplation, of literature and affairs, of which Caius Julius, Frederick the Great, "both eminently literary characters," Mr. Burke, and Lord John Russell were signal instances, and to have furnished another Rigby to the mocking pen of some succeeding satirist. Fortune was better dis |