OLITICAL IDEAS 
 & PERSONS 
 
 . . ::\ v- :. EY
 
 SOME POLITICAL IDEAS 
 AND PERSONS
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 STUDIES IN SOME FAMOUS LETTERS 
 
 [Burleigh]. 
 
 AN ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH ELEGIES 
 [John Lane]. 
 
 THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM 
 
 COWPER. Edited with an Introduction and 
 
 Notes [Methuen & Co., Ltd.]. 
 THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY 
 
 [Constable & Co.]. 
 
 POETS AND POETRY [Clarendon Press]. 
 DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE. 
 
 Home University Library [Williams & Norgate]. 
 MILTON. 
 
 Home University Library [Williams & Norgate]. 
 A DAY BOOK OF LANDOR [Oxf. Univ. Press].
 
 SOME POLITICAL 
 IDEAS AND PERSONS 
 
 BY JOHN BAILEY 
 
 VUTHOK OF "DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE," BTC. 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 
 1922
 
 TO 
 MY WIFE
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ALL but the first of these articles appeared 
 originally in the Literary Supplement of The 
 Times, and I am indebted to the proprietors of 
 that journal for permission to reprint them 
 The essay on Queen Victoria, with the ex- 
 ception of one or two paragraphs, appears now 
 for the first time. Except for a very few 
 corrections and the addition of one or two 
 notes, the reprinted articles appear as originally 
 published. No attempt has been made to 
 rewrite them in the light of subsequent events. 
 
 J. B. 
 
 Sept. 20, 1921.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. QUEEN VICTORIA i 
 
 II. THE POLITICAL LIFE OF DISRAELI, 1837-46 . 45 
 
 III. THE POLITICAL LIFE OF DISRAELI, 1846-55 . 65 
 
 IV. THE POLITICAL LIFE OF DISRAELI, 1855-68 . 79 
 V. THE POLITICAL LIFE OF DISRAELI, 1868-81 . 94 
 
 VI. HENRY Fox 119 
 
 VII. LORD GREY 133 
 
 VIII. LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL . . . 148 
 
 IX. OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST .... 163 
 
 X. THEN AND Now . . ... . . 177 
 
 XI. POLITICAL PROPHECIES 192 
 
 XII. NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL . . . 204 
 
 XIII. OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR . . . .216 
 
 XIV. CONTINUITY IN CHANGE . . . .229 
 INDEX 246
 
 SOME POLITICAL 
 
 IDEAS AND PERSONS 
 
 i 
 
 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 IT is now over twenty years since Queen Victoria 
 died. I remember hearing it remarked by a wise 
 man, who did not himself live beyond middle age, 
 that the newspapers are entirely written for the 
 young and always explain allusions to events or 
 persons whose place in history puts them even 
 a few years behind the birth of the actual rising 
 generation. Well, none of the young to-day, 
 no one under twenty-five, remembers the great 
 Queen who seemed to their fathers and grand- 
 fathers an eternal institution. But she is the one 
 exception to my wise man's rule. No one 
 thinks of explaining the Queen. So great is 
 monarchy even in a democratic age ; so great, 
 we may add, is mere continuance in a world of 
 change. The most famous and popular of her 
 Ministers were disliked or distrusted by one-half 
 or one-third of the nation while they were alive ; 
 and most of them were quickly forgotten after 
 their deaths. The Queen was too evidently 
 honest to be distrusted ; and as for dislike, she
 
 2 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 was too permanent and inevitable, too high and 
 remote, for anything of that kind. You do not 
 dislike the sun even when he refuses to shine. 
 The Queen was always there even when hidden 
 by the distant mists of Balmoral. Others came 
 and went on the great stage. She was always on 
 it, on its throne, the central figure. None of the 
 four statesmen who occupied it longest in her 
 reign, neither Palmerston, nor Russell, nor 
 Disraeli, nor even Gladstone, was quite in its 
 centre by her side for so much as thirty years. 
 She was there for sixty-three years, like a divine 
 and immovable statue on a pedestal : like and 
 yet so unlike ; for the goddess was always very 
 human and could visibly frown and smile. 
 When her figure was at last removed the stage 
 was clear for a new play. With her death 
 another age and another world began. 
 
 The reaction was naturally a sharp one, some- 
 thing like that which occurred in France after the 
 end of the still longer reign of Louis XIV. The 
 Court became lively and amused itself and 
 others ; the political world became disturbed 
 and even, after a little while, what the Queen 
 would certainly have called revolutionary ; art 
 went in for strange experiments ; good women 
 behaved like criminal lunatics ; good men, who 
 themselves lived the most orderly and common- 
 place lives, declared that religion consisted in 
 " living dangerously " ; in fact, all those follies 
 occurred which invariably occur when good 
 sense and good conduct have been too long and 
 too insolently self-complacent. And then came
 
 THE VICTORIAN ERA 3 
 
 the war : and no one can deny that since 1914 
 we have, whether in war or peace, lived danger- 
 ously enough to satisfy the most exacting taste. 
 The result is that it already seems a long time 
 since the Queen died, and the reaction against 
 her outlook and the outlook and even the achieve- 
 ments of her age is probably now at its height. 
 Confident and not entirely uneducated young 
 persons may be heard discussing the Victorian 
 era as mediocre, dull, and unimportant. Of 
 course any one who knows enough of history, 
 and in particular of English history, to compare 
 one period with another, knows that that is 
 simply absurd. The age of Victoria was the age 
 of a Queen who practised social life as little as 
 she could during most of her eighty-two years 
 (during all, perhaps, except the first three or 
 four of her reign), and of a middle class which 
 never learnt to practise it at all ; so it was socially 
 rather dull. But in no other respect was it even 
 dull, still less mediocre or unimportant. On the 
 contrary, if the hundred years that passed be- 
 tween 1790 and 1890 were not only by far the 
 most successful in our history, but also probably 
 the greatest, the fifty of them that belonged to 
 Victoria are at least as great as those that belonged 
 to her grandfather and uncles. Only in poetry 
 and war has the earlier half-century a decided 
 advantage, and that is balanced by the still more 
 decided advantage which the Victorian period 
 has in science. 
 
 When the present very natural reaction has 
 passed away, as it most assuredly will, it will be
 
 4 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 seen that the reign of Queen Victoria was not 
 only more prosperous than any recorded period 
 of equal length in the history of any country, but 
 was also an age of great men in nearly every 
 field. And it was an age which knew how to 
 honour their greatness. Where are the statesmen 
 to-day whom men respect as their grandfathers 
 respected Peel, whom men worship as their 
 fathers worshipped Gladstone, to whose genius 
 they look up in dazzled wonder, pride, and 
 delight as men once looked up to the mysterious 
 figure of Disraeli ? And the same contrast may 
 be seen in other fields. Where to-day is the 
 writer who is heard and reverenced as a seer, not 
 by the readers of popular newspapers, but by 
 the leaders of the thought, the science, the art, 
 the public life of the nation as Tennyson and 
 George Eliot, Carlyle and Ruskin, were heard 
 and reverenced fifty years ago ? Where are the 
 religious leaders who to-day stir hearts and 
 minds as Newman did in one way during the 
 reign of Victoria, and Maurice and Kingsley in 
 another, Pusey and Liddon in yet another, to say 
 nothing of men like Spurgeon and obscurer 
 teachers of obscurer followers ? We may now 
 see the limitations of these men as clearly as 
 their greatness. But the man who sees greatness 
 is himself a greater man than the man who merely 
 sees limitations. And the followers of such men 
 as these were by no means all fools. Still less 
 were they fools who resorted to Carlyle and 
 Tennyson and George Eliot as oracles of wisdom. 
 On the contrary, they were among the acutest
 
 OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 5 
 
 intellects and noblest characters of their day. 
 Where to-day are the successors either of the 
 oracles or of the pilgrims ? Evidently there is 
 loss somewhere. Either we no longer have the 
 great men or we no longer have the will or power 
 to honour greatness. It must be one or the 
 other. And whichever it is, it is clear that the 
 Georgian era will be wise to give itself as yet no 
 airs when talking of the Victorian. 
 
 But all this is a digression. My present 
 business is with Victoria herself, and no one will 
 pretend that she had much directly to do with the 
 literary, scientific, or religious movements of the 
 age to which she gives her name. Still she does 
 give it ; and people who talk about her generally 
 express opinions about her time. So I thought 
 an unrepentant and unashamed Victorian ought 
 not to be afraid of uttering his. I am no pessi- 
 mist ; on the contrary, I have sometimes been 
 accused of being a blind optimist. I am not at all 
 prepared to accept as certainties, far less as gospel, 
 all the gloomy prophecies of such men as my friends 
 Dean Inge and Mr. Bateson.* I comfort my- 
 self with a recollection that they were neither of 
 them very hopeful about winning the war ; and 
 I am far from having given up faith in the 
 capacity of the English people to surprise the 
 pessimists once more by winning the peace in 
 the same slow stubborn way in which they won 
 the war. 
 
 * See" Common Sense in Racial Problems," byW. Bate- 
 son, M.A., F.R.S. ; a lecture delivered to the Eugenics 
 Education Society.
 
 6 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Our universal-suffrage democracy certainly 
 has its grave dangers ; and if it will not steady its 
 emotions and listen to the warning voices of the 
 historians and the political economists and, 
 perhaps most important of all, the biologists, the 
 merits which it has will not save it, and the ship 
 of democracy, which is not at all necessarily the 
 same thing as the ship of England, will run upon 
 the rocks and break up. But democracy in this 
 country is young yet, and that tough and ancient 
 thing English common sense is working upon it, 
 and may very well prune it of its follies as it 
 pruned monarchy and aristocracy. Its youth, 
 too, will suffice, at least for the present, as an 
 excuse for its mediocrity.. The seers and the 
 geniuses have generally appeared after, not 
 during, the times of novelty, war, and confusion. 
 And when we have settled down, our young 
 democracy, our Georgian or post-Georgian age, 
 may produce its sages and seers and master poets 
 as well as another. Only so long as it has not 
 done so it had better not throw stones at its 
 predecessor which did. 
 
 Queen Victoria would certainly have been 
 amazed at its daring to do so. She was accus- 
 tomed to keep her grandchildren, even the 
 conceited William, in very strict awe of her. She 
 had contemplated all the great doings of her age, 
 and on the whole had blessed them all and 
 extended her protecting and consecrating aegis 
 over them. She was quite conscious that they 
 were a part of her glory, not one atom of which 
 would she for one moment surrender. But she
 
 SOVEREIGNS 7 
 
 had nothing whatever directly to do with most 
 of them. She was no philosopher or friend of 
 philosophers like her ancestresses Sophia and 
 Caroline ; no theologian like James I. or 
 Henry VIII. ; no fine judge of art like Charles I. ; 
 no ready dabbler in science, letters, and wit, like 
 Charles II. She was only two things, a woman 
 and a Queen ; but in those two she was remark- 
 able enough. 
 
 There is no class of men who are so seldom 
 fairly judged as sovereigns. During his life- 
 time a king's intellect and character are usually 
 much over-praised by people who do not believe 
 what they say. After his death they are apt to 
 be equally underrated by people who do. The 
 reason of the second fact, though commonly un- 
 perceived, is really not much less obvious than 
 that of the first. Those who, after a king's death 
 or even during his life, are under no moral 
 temptation to flatter him are almost always under 
 an intellectual temptation to belittle him. They 
 are apt to become the victims of a fallacy. They 
 confuse a king with a statesman, a general, a 
 writer of a book. Each of these is visited with 
 just contempt if he fails in a function which he 
 need never have accepted. He has cast himself 
 for the chief part, proves fit only for that of 
 walking gentleman, and cannot complain if he 
 is found ridiculous. But the position of a 
 hereditary king is quite different to this. He is, 
 by the laws of nature, commonly an average 
 man ; but by the laws of his country he is called 
 upon to do what cannot be perfectly done by an
 
 8 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 average man. There are very good reasons for 
 this apparent anomaly. Monarchy is on the 
 whole such a useful institution, and it is on the 
 whole so important that there should be no 
 doubt as to who the monarch is or is to be that 
 it is found worth while to disregard the fact that 
 some monarchs will be knaves or fools, and only 
 a few will prove ideal occupants of the throne. 
 But the result is a confusion of thought which 
 is very hard on monarchs. The king is judged 
 not by the average standard which may fairly be 
 demanded of him, but by the ideal of an office 
 which he could not escape. George III. is 
 scorned for not having understood the Catholic 
 question so well as Pitt, and Victoria for having 
 been slower than Russell or Palmerston to 
 catch the idea of Italian unity. The truth is, of 
 course, that she could not fairly be expected to 
 be anything else. She is all through her life an 
 ordinary woman placed in a very exceptional 
 position ; and the interest of studying her lies 
 largely in watching the play and counterplay of 
 the two the ordinary acting on the exceptional 
 and the exceptional on the ordinary, the Queen 
 dominating the woman, and then again the 
 woman appearing through the Queen. 
 
 What do we think of her now as we begin to 
 get far enough away to see her as she actually 
 was ? The protecting aureole of royalty is now 
 fast fading, and making it possible for us to see 
 the woman apart from the Queen. Or at least 
 making it possible to try, and perhaps partly to 
 succeed. To separate them altogether is im-
 
 KINGS, PRIESTS AND OTHERS 9 
 
 possible in the case of a woman who can scarcely 
 ever, even for a moment, have thought of herself 
 quite apart from her great office, from the day 
 that she first knew she was to hold it. Monarchy 
 is like the priesthood : he who has been once 
 invested with it never puts it off. A lawyer or 
 a soldier can think of himself as a mere man ; 
 not so a priest and not so a king. For good or 
 for evil neither of them is ever a mere man again. 
 And so with Queen Victoria. We have had a 
 great deal published about her ; much of it 
 written by her own hand her own letters and 
 journals. Some of these she herself gave to 
 the public in her lifetime ; others have been 
 published since her death. They are the capital 
 documents, of course ; not only because, by 
 universal admission, she was the most rigidly 
 truthful of human beings, but also because letters 
 and journals almost invariably betray their 
 writer's character even when he most means 
 them to conceal it. Often indeed what they 
 betray is a virtue or a vice, or many of either, of 
 which the writer is himself quite unconscious. 
 Neither Chesterfield in his way nor Fitzgerald in 
 his would have guessed at all the impression the 
 publication of their letters would make on 
 posterity. And even Pope who posed for 
 posterity, who forged and falsified to make his 
 letters carry him down to future generations as a 
 pattern of tenderness, unworldliness, and universal 
 benevolence, even Pope the consummate artist, 
 the untiring labourer, has wasted his skill and 
 pains. He has been found out. About Queen
 
 io QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Victoria there is nothing to find out, nothing at 
 any rate to unmask. Everywhere the picture 
 she gives of herself is one of transparent truth, or 
 at least of transparent sincerity. She describes 
 herself, her actions, her motives, her feelings, 
 simply and sincerely, as what she honestly 
 believed them to be. And what she wished to 
 be and thought she was is with her even more 
 than with everybody else a guide and index to 
 what she was in reality. Whatever is to be 
 written about her, her own writings must in 
 future always be the bedrock on which it is 
 built. Many people, of course, have already 
 discussed and described her : some of them, like 
 the diarists Creevey and Greville, and Sarah 
 Lady Lyttelton, wrote long before her letters 
 were published ; others like Sir Sidney Lee, 
 Lord Esher, and now Mr. Lytton Strachey, with 
 the full advantage of them : and those who are 
 looking for the woman apart from the Queen 
 must go rather to what has been written about 
 her than to her published letters. The journals, 
 it is true, give the girl and the woman. But the 
 letters given to the public are almost entirely the 
 composition of the Queen. What we get in 
 them is her political rather than her private 
 character. There are no letters to her mother, 
 none to her children, and hardly any to anybody 
 that are not almost entirely taken up with public 
 affairs. The three volumes are rather a mass of 
 material for the future historian of the reign than 
 a help to the personal biographer of the child, 
 girl, woman, daughter, wife, mother, friend who
 
 MR. LYTTON STRACHEY 11 
 
 had her private likes and dislikes, joys and 
 sorrows, good points and bad, like other human 
 beings. 
 
 The best book written about her is certainly 
 the last, Mr. Strachey's. To one reader at any 
 rate it was rather a surprise to find it so. I know 
 three books of Mr. Strachey's. The first was a 
 short book on French poetry, of which it is 
 scarcely going too far to say that it is, in the 
 modest way of such books, a little masterpiece. 
 But of course a book of that sort appealed only 
 to a limited public. Then some years later 
 came the clever, ill-natured, very limited, 
 strangely overpraised, volume called " Eminent 
 Victorians." It was amusing, of course ; about 
 as amusing as Voltaire on Joan of Arc, or Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare ; full of that 
 blind and ugly cleverness which never knows 
 when it is handling something too great for it, 
 and is always cutting capers when it had better 
 be on its knees. And then this volume was 
 announced, and one could not but have one's 
 fears. But things have turned out better than 
 might have been expected. Queen Victoria has 
 won the last and not the least of her victories. 
 No one who found himself in that august 
 presence ever had the courage to take a liberty 
 with her in her lifetime. And even her shade 
 has had its effect on Mr. Strachey. He who 
 almost certainly came to scoff has on the whole 
 remained to pray. His book is this time 
 not merely brilliant and amusing; it is also 
 understanding, sympathetic, and just. Of course
 
 12 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 he treats Victoria with perfect freedom, humour, 
 and detachment : the time for that had plainly 
 come ; the time, and the man. And of course 
 he delights himself and us by the cool wit and 
 quiet ironies with which he handles the Queen's 
 limitations and domesticities. But it is not his 
 laugh that has the final word. Both the woman 
 and the Queen silence the satirist in the end. 
 No one has paid more striking tribute to Victoria's 
 essential goodness than this professional scoffer. 
 Indeed, of course it is largely because he is 
 himself that his tribute is so striking. He says 
 at the beginning that her childish words " I will 
 be good " were " more than a conventional 
 protestation " ; they were " an instinctive sum- 
 mary of the dominating qualities of a life." And 
 what he says at the end is only the same thing in 
 other words. He is speaking of the feeling her 
 people had about her. There was her vitality. 
 " She had reigned for sixty years and she was 
 not out." But that was far from all they felt 
 about her. " She was a character." " Goodness 
 they prized above every other human quality ; 
 and Victoria, who, at the age of twelve, had said 
 she would be good, had kept her word. Duty, 
 conscience, morality yes ! in the light of those 
 high beacons the Queen had always lived. She 
 had passed her days in work and not in pleasure 
 in public responsibilities and family cares." And, 
 as he adds, a character is never a mere bundle of 
 qualities ; there is always some one element 
 which is the fundamental thing common to them 
 all and holding them all together. As to what
 
 THE QUEEN'S GOODNESS 13 
 
 that was in Victoria he says there can be no 
 doubt : it was " a peculiar sincerity." All sorts 
 of one-sidedness and lack of the sense of proportion 
 are the natural material of humour, and of course 
 Mr. Strachey does not throw away the oppor- 
 tunities given him by the very virtues of the 
 Queen ; in fact, they provide some of his most 
 entertaining pages. But the present point is 
 that as in her life so after her death her virtues 
 get the last word. She was a good woman 
 from the beginning to the end of her story ; and 
 nobody, not even people who find the amusing 
 rarer and pleasanter than the good, escapes the 
 impression of her goodness. Only a fool could 
 be blind to it ; only a Mephistopheles could 
 remain altogether untouched by it. And a 
 biographer who failed to insist upon it would be 
 like a portrait painter who left out the one 
 feature in his sitter's face by which, before all 
 others, it would always be remembered by all 
 who knew him. 
 
 Perhaps there is only one suggestion in 
 Mr. Strachey's portrait which invites criticism. 
 He has a notion that, in the genial society of 
 Melbourne, the prim pupil of the Baroness 
 Lehzen was catching a kind of throwback to the 
 eighteenth century. He admits that Melbourne's 
 instructions went all the other way. But still 
 Melbourne was a survivor of that old world and 
 showed its qualities at their very best. And she 
 was just emancipated from the confinement of a 
 schoolroom and suddenly introduced to the 
 splendour of palaces, to almost unbounded
 
 14 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 wealth, to universal deference, to the enjoyment 
 of all that youth and health offer so lavishly and 
 so dangerously when, as in her case, they are not 
 reined in by either of their usual bridles and go 
 as they please with no parents to forbid them 
 and no poverty to deny. But all this seems 
 purely fanciful. Sincerity is unity in utterance. 
 And the sincerity of Victoria's speech is not 
 more conspicuous than the unity of her life. 
 The girl of nineteen who met her Council on 
 the morning of her accession with that perfect 
 coolness and dignity ; who immediately, on that 
 day, had her bed moved out of her mother's 
 room ; who instantly, that very morning, the 
 moment the great men left her, told her mother 
 that she would never again sit down to a meal 
 with Sir John Conroy, and in consequence had 
 all her meals that day alone (for I believe Mr. 
 Strachey is mistaken in saying that Stockmar 
 breakfasted with her ; he only came in while 
 she was at breakfast) ; such a girl as this clearly 
 had innate in her one of the strongest of characters 
 and one of the most indomitable of wills. From 
 the first she evidently liked work, liked taking 
 it seriously and being taken seriously herself. 
 She had been carefully and strictly brought up, 
 and a strict bringing up seems to be a gamble : 
 it either makes a child serious for life, or it 
 makes him all his life a hater of seriousness in all 
 its forms. With the Queen it plainly had the 
 first result. As at the end of her life she thought 
 all the world, that is the world of Mayfair and 
 the country houses, " a little mad," so at the
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER UNCLES 15 
 
 beginning she had an innate contempt and dislike 
 of idle people, especially if they were also dis- 
 reputable. She was quite conscious of herself 
 as the embodiment of a reaction against the 
 undignified and immoral courts of her uncles. 
 To their eighteenth century, which was far from 
 the whole of that interesting period, to the 
 eighteenth century of the young Charles Fox and 
 the old Dukes of Queensberry and Norfolk, of 
 the Brighton Pavilion, Carlton House, and other 
 flamboyancies, I do not believe that she was ever 
 for one moment in danger of " looking back " or 
 " wavering." She and all that were always 
 from first to last as opposite to each other as the 
 two Poles. Her danger was in fact just the 
 contrary of that to which her uncles and the men 
 and women of their world succumbed. People 
 thought her, as Melbourne plainly told her, 
 " lofty, high, stern, and decided," but " that's 
 much better than that you should be thought 
 familiar." Nobody ever did find her that. She 
 was all will and character from the first, with a 
 turn for being obstinate and severe. Her uncles, 
 on the other hand, had all the weakness of 
 epicureans, and their lives were a succession of 
 undignified, disorderly, and half involuntary 
 concessions to the momentary demands of their 
 senses. 
 
 No : that was not the possible development 
 which was prevented by the arrival of her 
 husband and the substitution of Peel for Mel- 
 bourne. It is dangerous work guessing at the 
 might-have-beens of personality. But if one
 
 16 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 does dare to make such guesses mine would be 
 of a different sort. No moral change was 
 within the limits of probability. But perhaps 
 an intellectual change was. Is it not possible 
 that if things could have continued as they were 
 between 1837 and 1840 her whole mind and 
 outlook might have widened, opened, and 
 expanded ? The tendency of late has been, I 
 think, to underrate her natural abilities. She 
 never had much education ; all she was taught 
 was some religion, a very little history, and the 
 usual linguistic and aesthetic accomplishments. 
 Her mother spoke of her as a child as possessing 
 " strength of intellect," and though mothers in 
 general are not the best judges in such cases, the 
 Duchess may well have been not far wrong. 
 But a child who till the day of her Accession never 
 went downstairs without some one holding her 
 hand, was not given much chance of developing 
 any kind of strength except the sense of duty. 
 Then came the Accession and those significant, 
 almost formidable, " alones," underlined or 
 written in capital letters which punctuate the 
 journal of the day. And then came Melbourne, 
 and after a week or two he and the faithful 
 Lehzen divided her life. But Lehzen's lessons 
 were schoolroom lessons. The day for them 
 was over. Melbourne was statesman, scholar, 
 and man of the world, a kind of Nestor turned 
 courtier who never forgot either that she was an 
 inexperienced girl, or that she was a Queen and 
 he her subject and servant. And he was friend 
 and almost father as well as tutor : how delightful
 
 THE QUEEN'S INTELLECT 17 
 
 this new way of going to school must have been ! 
 How delightful, in fact, we know it was. But that 
 is an old story. The present point is not its 
 delightfulness but the question whether all we 
 know of it does not prove the Queen to have 
 had a quicker and finer intellect than has 
 commonly been supposed. Would an ordinary 
 girl have hurried to write down all the interesting 
 things Melbourne said to her about politics, 
 history, literature, religion ? Could an ordinary 
 girl have done it if she tried ? Ask such a girl 
 who has just been dining with a party of dis- 
 tinguished men, where there has been striking 
 talk, to write down what was said, and what 
 sort of success does she make of it ? Victoria, 
 on the other hand, occasionally does her Mel- 
 bourne almost as well as Boswell did his Johnson ; 
 and only fools fancy that Boswell's was an easy 
 task or could have been accomplished by a fool. 
 If we know nothing else of Melbourne, this 
 young girl's diary would be enough to make us 
 realise how well informed, how wise, how 
 humorous, how unexpected his conversation 
 was. She gives us a most vivid impression of 
 his manner ; not only of what sort of things he 
 said, but of the way he had of saying them. How 
 many grown women or, for the matter of that, 
 grown men can do that for anybody ? Melbourne 
 could not have talked as he did to a slow or 
 stupid girl ; no one can talk well except to an 
 intelligent listener. He thought her that, and 
 more than that ; and I submit that we who 
 have seen her diary know better than he did
 
 i8 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 how right he was. For the truth is that only 
 a rather unusual girl would have listened to 
 or remembered such talk, or could have repro- 
 duced it with such vivacity, point, and evident 
 truth. One illustration of what I mean will 
 suffice. 
 
 " I asked Lord Melbourne if he didn't think 
 Johnson's poetry very hard ; he said he did, and 
 that Garrick said, ' Hang it, it's as hard as 
 Greek.' His prose he admires, though he said 
 pedantry was to be observed throughout it ; and 
 Lord Melbourne thinks what he said superior to 
 what he wrote. In spite of all that pedantry, 
 Lord Melbourne said, ' a deep feeling and a 
 great knowledge of human nature ' pervaded all 
 he said and wrote." Here is an admirable, 
 almost complete, criticism of Johnson in two or 
 three sentences. But how many girls of nineteen 
 would have cared to listen to it, or, if they had, 
 would have wished to write it down, or, again if 
 they had, would have been able to do the writing 
 down as Victoria has done it ? 
 
 So, perhaps, if those easy, happy years, with 
 that very human old tutor, could have gone on, 
 she might have opened out in a good many 
 directions and discovered more interesting things 
 in the world than she was in fact ever to dis- 
 cover. But Melbourne left her, and Albert 
 came. And though Albert was only too intel- 
 lectual, his was not an inviting or expanding or 
 amusing kind of intellect ; and he liked domi- 
 nation and rigidity, not the free play of the 
 mind which was Melbourne's most delightful
 
 THE QUEEN'S NARROWNESS 19 
 
 characteristic ; and he was husband and soon com- 
 plete master, and the little mind, which might so 
 easily have grown larger, just enclosed itself in 
 his in a way that it never could have enclosed 
 itself in the airy spaces of Melbourne's which 
 had no prison walls of any kind about it, for 
 itself or others. And then nine children came 
 one after another ; and though children are far 
 better things than any intellectual adventures, 
 they have to be paid for like other delights, and 
 their price is commonly a domesticity of mind as 
 well as of life. And so the scarcely begun 
 chapter of expansion closed, and the years 1841- 
 1861 were years of narrow concentration and 
 blind, humble, loving acceptance ; and after 
 Albert's death the acceptance became a kind of 
 religion, blinder than ever, and till Disraeli 
 came Victoria lived in the past, and nothing 
 interesting, joyous, or amusing, nothing that was 
 in any way expansive, was allowed to profane its 
 memories or interfere with the duty of con- 
 sistency, continuance, and consecration. And 
 when Disraeli came, an Oriental Lord Melbourne, 
 even more amusing and quite as expansive, it 
 was too late. The young girl had become a 
 venerable and unchangeable institution, and the 
 jewelled epigrams and audacities of a favourite 
 servant, however daring and brilliant, could no 
 longer do for her what might perhaps once have 
 been done by the lene tormentum of the 
 mind of her first Prime Minister, at once so 
 curious and inquisitive, so easy, tolerant, wise, 
 and humane, and by his companionship, with
 
 20 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 its beautifully blended mixture of deference and 
 authority. 
 
 And so the Queen remained rather a narrow 
 woman all her life. A concentrated mind often 
 makes the will all the stronger. And the cutting 
 short of Lord Melbourne's lessons leaves its 
 mark perhaps in the rather childish vehemence 
 of the letters to her ministers with all their 
 excitability and passionate underlining. As we 
 grow older most of us abound more and more in 
 our own sense. It is the very business of a sane 
 and wide culture to prevent our doing that too 
 much, and to keep the mental windows open. 
 The Queen's windows were early shut, and never 
 reopened. And so authority grew more and 
 more accustomed to itself, closed upon itself, 
 and stiffened ; so that, good mother as she w r as, 
 all her children regarded her with almost as 
 much awe as affection ; and the mutual affection, 
 real as it was, was not incompatible with a certain 
 distance of relation. I have heard, for instance, 
 that her daughters had never seen their mother 
 in bed, or even entered her bedroom, till she lay 
 dying and almost past consciousness. There 
 may be parallels to this habit of privacy in other 
 women of her generation. The practice of 
 turning bedrooms into boudoirs open to both 
 sexes, which one may hope is not common to- 
 day, was not even invented then. But in 
 Victoria's seclusion there was probably not only 
 her generation, nor even only her solitary 
 position as Queen, but a certain stiffness and 
 narrowness of nature and disposition. And this
 
 THE QUEEN'S COURAGE 21 
 
 narrowness, satisfied within its own limitations, 
 showed itself in the ugliness of the homes she 
 made for herself and the dullness of the life she 
 was content to live in them. Exactly dull herself 
 she never was, I imagine ; neither her natural 
 ability, nor her great position, nor all she had 
 seen and known and lived through allowed of 
 that. But if she could not make herself dull she 
 almost seemed to choose dullness for her world, 
 especially the worst dullness of all that of 
 monotony and routine. 
 
 But there is another side to the picture. 
 Women have commonly been greater in heart 
 than in head, and if Victoria's intelligence was 
 a little starved her emotional capacities were 
 full grown and beyond the ordinary stature. 
 Tenderness and bravery often go together, and it 
 is sometimes said that she was rarely excelled in 
 either. Perhaps her courage has been exag- 
 gerated. All the men of her house have been 
 conspicuous for it, from little George II. at 
 Dettingen to her own son at Calais quite 
 undisturbed by the would-be assassin. And 
 she herself showed coolness, it appears, on the 
 several occasions early in her life when mis- 
 creants tried to kill her. It is no blame to a 
 woman if she could not keep that courage up. 
 Only, as a matter of fact, I doubt if she did. I 
 remember an old Home Secretary telling me of 
 his pressing her to make a public appearance, and 
 of her replying, " You would not press me if you 
 knew how frightened I am all the time of being 
 shot at." And I myself was once witness of her 
 
 c
 
 22 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 visible agitation in a London street when she 
 was driving with the Empress Frederick and the 
 carriage was unavoidably stopped for a few 
 minutes by the upset of an omnibus or wagon. 
 One felt that she was asking herself, not at all 
 unnaturally, whether the block had been an 
 arranged thing. In bigger matters, public 
 matters, she was as brave as a lion ; and if a 
 foreign enemy had ever got to England the last 
 person to admit the thought of surrender would 
 have been the Queen. Still her personal courage 
 in her later years, at any rate, may have been 
 exaggerated. On the other hand, her kindness and 
 sympathy no one can exaggerate. If the Queen, 
 and the ever-present consciousness of what she 
 was, sometimes warped the woman a little, as in 
 her relations with her children, the woman may 
 be seen, in a happier way, acting on the Queen 
 in her relations with her people. All their joys 
 and sorrows were hers, as they had never been 
 to any sovereign before her. Everybody felt 
 that the sympathy which she expressed in times 
 of public calamity was perfectly sincere. And 
 she looked for and gained the same from her 
 people in her own private sorrows. This was a 
 new thing of her own creation. When Prince 
 Henry died in 1612 poets and statesmen sincerely 
 grieved over the death of a Prince of the highest 
 promise. But I suppose very few of the people 
 knew much about it ; and neither the court nor 
 the nation cared much about the feelings of 
 James I. Queen Victoria made a family relation 
 between herself and the nation. She was the
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER PEOPLE 23 
 
 mother of her people ; she gave them her heart, 
 especially in their sorrows, and she expected and 
 obtained theirs in return. That was a thing 
 without a precedent in our history ; it was a 
 personal achievement of Victoria's, of the woman 
 guiding and inspiring the Queen. And, though 
 no woman of letters, she was extraordinarily 
 felicitous in the letters which she addressed to 
 her people on these occasions. That on the 
 death of the Duke of Clarence struck many 
 people at the time as in its way a masterpiece ; for 
 what can a masterpiece do more than perform 
 its particular task to perfection ? 
 
 So the Queen, to whom it is now full time to 
 turn, was helped by the woman. For a Sovereign 
 who had no hold on the affections of the people, 
 would in this country under modern conditions 
 be of little importance. The Duke of Cumber- 
 land from whom Victoria saved us would have 
 been a risky experiment in 1837 ; to-day he 
 would probably be impossible. The Crown is 
 no longer regarded as a personal property whose 
 owner is just a legal fact irrespective of his 
 character. It is an inheritance the splendour 
 of whose jewels each succeeding wearer has to 
 justify afresh. The essence of democracy is 
 that everything in it goes by consent. It is yet 
 to be proved whether that sort of sanction will 
 in the long run prove a satisfactory substitute 
 for the older ones of established custom and 
 legal right. But so it at present is. With our 
 unwritten Constitution there is almost nothing 
 that a strong wave of popular desire might not
 
 24 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 accomplish. No doubt if such a wave led to a 
 visible disaster, as it easily might, it would 
 probably produce a return upon itself and a 
 demand for safeguards of some sort, written or 
 unwritten, personal or impersonal. And one 
 of them might easily be some revival of the 
 Royal authority, the only authority whose 
 prestige is at once immense and universal 
 throughout all parts of the Empire. Meanwhile, 
 whatever be the future destiny of the Crown, 
 whether it be lost in a Republic, or restored to 
 some greater measure of personal power, or 
 maintained as it is, the ultimate writer of its 
 history will certainly declare that no one had 
 more to do with the shaping of that future than 
 Queen Victoria. We cannot yet be sure what 
 her shaping will result in. But we can be sure 
 that the historian will ultimately perceive, when 
 the event is accomplished, that the processes 
 which were decisive in producing it are to be 
 looked for chiefly in the reign and partly in the 
 personal character and actions of Victoria. 
 
 What was she as Queen ? What did she do ? 
 How did she exercise her functions as Sovereign, 
 and how did her exercise of them affect the 
 position of the Monarchy ? These are large 
 questions, much too large to receive a full 
 answer in a few pages of a short essay. But 
 there are one or two points which may be 
 touched on. 
 
 Victoria inherited the difficult task of playing 
 the chief titular part in working that vague thing 
 known as the British Constitution which few
 
 THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION 25 
 
 pretend to understand and no one pretends to 
 define. It is like so many English institutions, 
 the child of custom and precedent and com- 
 promise, in which all the actors play parts which 
 have never been written out for them and fill up 
 the piece by impromptus as they go along. 
 Most of such institutions work in practice very 
 well with the invaluable help of the English 
 character. Even the constitution has on the 
 whole worked very well. But it has a dis- 
 advantage which other similar institutions have 
 not, a disadvantage which peculiarly affects the 
 Crown. It is confronted with laws which are 
 in flagrant contradiction with it. The contra- 
 diction was already great enough when the 
 makers of the American Constitution, very 
 naturally supposing the written law to be the 
 best guide to the facts, gave their President 
 astonishing powers which he still has, though 
 George III. had in practice lost them before 
 Washington received them. It became greater 
 still after the Reform Bill of 1832 ; and it is 
 greater now than it was then. The law gives 
 the King to-day, and still more of course gave 
 him in 1837, a very large number of powers 
 which it is tacitly assumed that he will not dream 
 of exercising. In theory he could even declare 
 war by his own decision. 
 
 Queen Victoria, a girl of nineteen, inherited 
 this uncertain and difficult position. Lord 
 Melbourne carefully taught her the customary 
 constitutional limitations of her powers, and on 
 the whole she learnt them very well. But he
 
 26 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 could not tell her precisely what they were, 
 because neither he nor any one else knew. Indeed 
 they were changing, and have continued to change, 
 every few years from that day to this. And a 
 young woman of strong will who had had the 
 Coronation Service said over her, who had often 
 heard the prayers of the Prayer Book about her, 
 who was surrounded by a deferential Court and 
 was in constant correspondence with foreign 
 sovereigns who governed as well as reigned, was 
 sure to think a little more of the past and the 
 letter of the law than was wise, and a little less of 
 the present and the spirit of the constitution. 
 And so no doubt Victoria did. She always not 
 only spoke but thought of " my " Army, " my " 
 Navy, " my " Ministers, even of " my " engage- 
 ments and treaties. There is a great deal of 
 " my " in her journals and letters. And in law 
 she was perfectly right. " In theory the Crown 
 does every act of executive government," says 
 Sir William Anson, in his book on the Consti- 
 tution. So, also, almost everything in England 
 that belongs to the State belongs in law to the 
 King. The very laws themselves are the King's 
 laws " enacted by the King's Most Excellent 
 Majesty by and with the advice and consent of " 
 certain other persons. The very peace which 
 they are designed to protect is the King's peace, 
 and till an unimaginative Act of Parliament, 
 indifferent to poetry and history, was passed in 
 1915, those who broke it were said to offend 
 " against the peace of our Sovereign Lord and 
 King, his Crown and dignity." But law and
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER POWERS 27 
 
 life, law and practice, are in fact very different 
 things, and the King as understood by the Con- 
 stitution is a very different person from the 
 King as defined in the laws. 
 
 All this made a very difficult position for 
 Victoria. Herself of an unimaginative, precise, 
 rather legal habit of mind and of a naturally 
 authoritative temper, she inevitably clung to 
 as much as she could of her legal position and 
 continually resented the ever new encroachment 
 upon it. Her letters, from the earliest to the 
 latest of which we know anything, are full of 
 these clingings and resistances, and they make a 
 curious study in the working of such a system as 
 ours. To be a constitutional Sovereign is in 
 fact to be the most difficult thing in the world. 
 The Sovereignty and the constitutionalism are 
 so very awkward to reconcile, and the differences 
 between them so apt to crop up at every turn. 
 They may be said, in one sense, to fill the Queen's 
 letters. She was from the first, and probably to 
 the last, very tenacious of her rights as Sovereign. 
 She never tried to use them for any personal or 
 selfish objects, but she believed that she held 
 them as trustee for the permanent interests of 
 the nation, and was determined never to see 
 them infringed without protest. In her view, 
 which is the view of the law, Ministers were her 
 servants. They must therefore take no important 
 step without her previous consent ; appointments 
 must not be made, or even talked of, till she had 
 approved the names ; party ties must not be 
 considered against the claims of her service ;
 
 28 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 above all, the Army and Navy were her Army and 
 Navy, and must not become the Army and Navy 
 of the House of Commons. Hence the perpetual 
 rappings over the knuckles administered, all 
 through the letters, to statesman after statesman, 
 especially, of course, to Lord Palmerston, be- 
 tween 1846 and his dismissal in 1851 ; but also, 
 with almost equal vigour, to Lord John Russell 
 on account of his action in the Italian question, 
 and to smaller men about smaller matters, as, 
 for instance, to Mr. Labouchere about a Colonial 
 Governorship, to Lord Panmure about a move- 
 ment of troops, to Lord Stanley about the 
 introduction of competitive examinations, and 
 to the Duke of Newcastle for omitting her name 
 in a despatch to Lord Raglan. Of course she 
 was entirely within her right in all these cases ; 
 no lawyer could have hesitated for a moment 
 between her view of her position and that on 
 which her Ministers often acted, though only a 
 special favourite like Aberdeen could state it frankly 
 to her. Not that she would ever have denied 
 in terms her constitutional and Parliamentary 
 position. On the contrary, she fully admitted 
 it ; and the difficulty of her situation simply 
 consisted in the fact that she at once meant to 
 reign and meant to be constitutional, and that 
 the problem how perfectly to carry out these two 
 intentions is one that remains for the future to 
 solve. She had nearly always a policy of her own ; 
 it was frequently a wiser policy than that sug- 
 gested by any one else, and it very often con- 
 vinced her Ministers ; and, that being so, it
 
 THE QUEEN AND HER MINISTERS 29 
 
 seemed obvious to her that they ought to proceed 
 to carry it out. It took her a long time to 
 realise what even to-day many writers on politics 
 fail to realise, that, in our Parliamentary system, 
 what Ministers can do is not what they wish or 
 even what they think right, but simply as much 
 of either as they think Parliament can be per- 
 suaded to accept. This or that, she was apt to 
 argue, was the legal right of the Crown, the 
 legal function of the Executive ; Ministers must 
 act upon it as the Queen's servants and in the 
 interests of the country ; and, as to the approval 
 of the House of Commons, that must be got 
 somehow, or done without, as it legally might be. 
 No doubt factious members of Parliament do 
 appear very contemptible when seen as the Queen 
 saw them, from the high point of view of the 
 Throne, or from the wide point of view of Europe 
 much, indeed, as they appear to history and 
 truth. But they can never appear negligible to 
 Ministers whose existence and power of useful- 
 ness depend on their votes. The Queen once 
 wrote to Lord Derby : " There is in fact no 
 difference of opinion between the Queen and 
 Lord Derby ; the latter only keeps in view the 
 effect which certain words will have in Parliament 
 and upon the country, whilst she looks to the 
 effect they will produce upon the European 
 conflict." That was her strength, and one of the 
 greatest of the services she rendered to English 
 politics throughout her reign. She supplied 
 the Cabinet with a pair of European eyes, which 
 saw something more than public meetings and
 
 30 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Parliamentary divisions. But it was also her 
 weakness. The natural prejudices of a Sovereign, 
 one of that family of crowned heads which always 
 feels itself a class apart and has a tenderness even 
 for its least worthy members, combined with 
 the legalism of her disposition to make the Queen 
 look sometimes at European changes almost 
 from the point of view of a kind of Royal family 
 solicitor. The notion of the rights of certain 
 august personages, and of the government of 
 certain tracts of land as their heritable property, 
 lingered in her mind rather longer, perhaps, 
 than befitted the devoted niece of the King of 
 the Belgians, who owed his Throne to a popular 
 uprising, or, as Lord John Russell had ultimately 
 to remind her, to the heiress of the Glorious 
 Revolution of 1688. It was this that made her 
 shrink in early days from any idea of touching 
 the small German States, and kept her in almost 
 constant opposition to the efforts made by 
 Palmerston and Russell to drive Austria out of 
 Lombardy and get rid of the effete little duchies 
 that stood in the way of United Italy. 
 
 She was wrong about Italy and wrong about 
 some other important questions. But it is worth 
 noticing how often it was she, or perhaps in reality 
 the Prince Consort, in any case the Crown as 
 opposed to the Ministers, who read the European 
 situation aright. She, for instance, was right 
 and Palmerston wrong about the danger of 
 revolution in the France of Louis Philippe ; she 
 was right again in seeing that the latitude allowed 
 to Stratford de Redcliffeat Constantinople must
 
 THE QUEEN'S WISDOM 31 
 
 lead to war ; she was right both in the caution 
 and prudence which might have prevented that 
 war and in the decision with which she rebuked 
 Lord Aberdeen for keeping the gloves on after 
 the fighting was begun. It was she, again, who 
 laid down in an admirable letter to Palmerston 
 in 1857 the two essential points for the new 
 Government of India, a single Secretary of State 
 to speak in the Queen's name and a single 
 Commander-in- Chief to command the whole 
 army. Above all it was she who, at the crisis of 
 her life, rendered to her country a service, the 
 greatness of which we could not fully realise 
 before 1917, by so altering Lord Russell's 
 despatch on the Trent affair as to leave the 
 United States a loophole for honourable retreat. 
 This last action was admittedly more that of the 
 dying Prince than of the Queen ; and no doubt 
 most of her views between 1841 and 1861 were 
 learnt from him. But it is scarcely possible to 
 separate the two personalities who had long 
 before the end been fused into one by a life in 
 which they were never separated and after the 
 first year or two scarcely ever disagreed. It was 
 no doubt the Prince who guided and the Queen 
 who followed ; but whatever they did was done in 
 the name of the Queen and was, for good or for 
 evil, credit or discredit, the act of the Crown. 
 
 That their devotion to the interests of England, 
 as they saw them, was unbounded, and that they 
 often rendered the highest services to the country, 
 is certain. What effect their activities had on 
 the" position of the Crown is more doubtful.
 
 32 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 Mr. Strachey thinks that from 1840 to 1861 the 
 power of the Crown steadily increased, and he 
 thinks that if the Prince Consort had lived he 
 must have acquired an authority which no 
 minister could resist so that Disraeli's prophecy 
 might perhaps have come true : "If the Prince 
 had outlived some of our old stagers he would 
 have given us the blessings of absolute govern- 
 ment." 
 
 Disraeli, who had to live in a very real world, 
 liked playing at escaping from it into another, 
 the creation of his mind, in which the conceiv- 
 able was the possible and the possible often 
 became the probable. I doubt if he, with his 
 knowledge of English politics, ever seriously 
 thought that " the blessings of absolute govern- 
 ment " were attainable in this country unless 
 and until the prestige of Parliament broke down 
 a great deal more than he ever lived to see. In 
 the sixties, when, according to the prophecy and 
 to Mr. Strachey, this development might have 
 taken place, that prestige was absolutely at its 
 height. Only a man unacquainted with politics 
 like Mr. Strachey or wilfully escaping from his 
 acquaintance like Disraeli could imagine any 
 such achievement as possible. 
 
 Is it even certain that the Queen and Prince 
 really increased the power of the Crown in- 
 herited by her in 1837 ? Of course they im- 
 mensely increased its prestige and popularity 
 with the people at large. But its official and 
 political power ? Had they more or less power 
 to affect the decisions of their Ministers than
 
 THE POWER OF THE CROWN 33 
 
 George IV. or William IV.? Plainly less I 
 think. The Queen could never have dismissed 
 her Ministers of her own will as William IV. 
 did in 1834 ; nor could a great question of 
 policy like Catholic Emancipation have hung 
 uncertain on her attitude as it did on that of 
 George IV. It was the irony, almost the tragedy, 
 of her life that, though she in a sense knew this 
 and always recognised it in the long run, she 
 would not keep it present to her everyday mind. 
 As Mr. Strachey well says, " Her desire to 
 impose her will, vehement as it was and un- 
 limited by any principle, was yet checked by a 
 certain shrewdness. She might oppose her 
 Ministers with extraordinary violence ; she 
 might remain utterly impervious to arguments 
 and supplications ; the pertinacity of her 
 resolution might seem to be unconquerable ; but 
 her innate respect and capacity for business, and 
 perhaps, too, the memory of Albert's scrupulous 
 avoidance of extreme courses, prevented her 
 from ever entering an impasse." She was 
 furious against Mr. Gladstone about Egypt and 
 about Home Rule, and even against her beloved 
 Disraeli for allowing Derby and Carnarvon to 
 sickly o'er his resolution in facing Russia 
 with their own pale cast of thought. But an 
 actual breach with either she had too much good 
 sense, and too much sense of duty, to face. In 
 the long run she knew that it was the Cabinet 
 who must decide large issues of policy. But 
 there lay the tragedy. It was only in the long 
 run that she knew it. Hence she constantly
 
 34 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 overdid the proper part which still remains to 
 the Sovereign in matters of policy. Sir William 
 Anson says : " Kings still remain the instrument 
 without which Ministers cannot act ; they still 
 remain advisers who have enjoyed unusual 
 opportunities for acquiring the knowledge which 
 makes advice valuable, who may be possessed 
 of more than ordinary experience, where warnings 
 must be listened to with more than ordinary 
 courtesy." All this she had ; and in the last half 
 of her reign, her age, her lifelong connection 
 with great affairs, the fact that she was a woman, 
 her unique position as the general grandmother 
 of the Emperors and Kings of Europe, gave her 
 the chance of realising it to a degree which no 
 other constitutional Sovereign is likely to equal. 
 But she largely missed her chance because of her 
 vehemence and passion and because she would 
 overstep this rdle. She would write and speak, 
 often till nearly the last moment, as if the final 
 decision rested with her ; as if she were not, 
 what Anson makes her, the most honoured and 
 august of amid curicv, but what the letter of 
 the law makes her, the actual Court itself. 
 Hence the life and labours recorded in her letters 
 seem partly wasted. 
 
 Sometimes after reading accounts of her 
 laborious hours the feeling which rises in one's 
 mind recalls ancient words : she had toiled all 
 day and taken nothing. Even her legitimate and 
 necessary functions gave her days of work 
 which few women, or men either, could have 
 borne as she bore them. Here is a single day
 
 A DAY OF THE QUEEN'S LIFE 35 
 
 of her life as we see it in her published letters : 
 February 2, 1855. It begins with an elaborate 
 memorandum by the Prince on the interviews 
 of the previous day consequent on the resignation 
 of the Aberdeen Ministry. Then visit of Lord 
 Lansdowne, followed by long memorandum by 
 the Queen. Letter of the Queen to Lord John 
 Russell. Visit of Lord John, followed by 
 memorandum by the Queen and Prince. Lord 
 Lansdowne again. Letter to Lord John by the 
 Queen commanding him to form a Ministry. 
 Reply of Lord John accepting. Surely not 
 many days in any life can show a more crowded 
 succession of responsible labours. And this was 
 her inevitable and unavoidable, though of course 
 only occasional, duty. What she added to it, 
 what she conceived herself also to be bound to 
 do, made a strain that was scarcely ever relaxed. 
 She told the Prince before their marriage that 
 she could find time for only two or three days' 
 honeymoon, and when he lay dying she had to 
 attend to public business the day before his 
 death and resume it a fortnight later. No one 
 can read her life without being moved and a little 
 inspired by her industry and sense of duty. 
 " I will be good." She was not a woman of 
 genius, but she was supremely a woman of 
 character. Indeed, if genius were what the 
 absurd definition called it "an infinite capacity 
 for taking pains," no one would be more a 
 woman of genius than she. And all the pains 
 were taken in the fulfilment of duty and the 
 service of England.
 
 36 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 The duty and the service, that is, as she 
 understood them. She was anxious to do the 
 full work and maintain the full powers of the 
 Crown. But the course she actually took did 
 neither of these things. The work she liked 
 doing was done in secret, and some of it, her 
 private management of such difficult crises as 
 those of 1869 and 1885, and of several difficult 
 changes of Ministry, was admirable, such as no 
 other person could possibly have done. But 
 those successes were possible precisely because 
 her position placed her at an impersonal height 
 above parties and even above policies. It should 
 have helped her to see that it was not her most 
 essential business to have opinions of her own 
 about measures of internal or even of foreign 
 policy. Her most essential function was to be 
 visible, a personification of the nation seen by 
 the people and awakening the people's imagina- 
 tion. She could not govern as Elizabeth 
 governed, but she could still do what Elizabeth 
 had done better than any English Sovereign. 
 Her actual interventions in the field of legislation 
 the most noticeable is, perhaps, the Public 
 Worship Regulation Act, which was more or 
 less forced on Disraeli by her were not com- 
 monly happy. As a rule her pressure on her 
 Ministers simply failed. They received her 
 remonstrances with respect and then went on 
 very much as before. Probably this process has 
 now gone undesirably far. The King ought 
 not to be quite an automaton even in these 
 matters of legislation. He ought to be a kind of
 
 THE QUEEN'S MISTAKE 37 
 
 presence of perpetual common sense, repre- 
 senting permanence as against the transience of 
 Ministers, recalling the past and preparing for 
 the future, as men who only came into office 
 yesterday and are afraid of being turned out 
 to-morrow cannot always be trusted to do. 
 But this can only be by suggestion and not by 
 authority. And the Queen might perhaps have 
 had more authority if she had been more careful 
 to use all her opportunities for strengthening 
 her public position. Only a strong public 
 position could enforce her private influence. 
 As it was she ran too much after the will o' the 
 wisp of direct political power, and tended to 
 neglect the ceremonial and other functions which 
 would have increased her indirect influence. She 
 gave up her predecessors' practice of pro- 
 roguing Parliament and she seldom opened it. 
 She lived constantly away from London, visibly 
 apart from the machine of Government. She 
 went abroad, as none of her predecessors had 
 done, without making any provision for the 
 appointment of persons to perform the Royal 
 functions in her absence. In all these ways she 
 produced the last impression she wished to 
 produce, and quite a false impression too, that 
 the machine worked equally well without the 
 Sovereign. It was not in fact working without 
 the Sovereign. Her laborious and incessant 
 reading and writing saw to that. But to have 
 been seen in London in daily contact with her 
 Ministers would have strengthened her far more 
 than all those official boxes, travelling unseen 
 
 D
 
 38 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 between Windsor or Osborne and Whitehall. 
 And if she would have taken a hint from the 
 " progresses " of Elizabeth, the most popular 
 thing ever done by an English Sovereign ; if she 
 would have sometimes left the boxes unopened 
 for a while and travelled in a carriage by slow 
 stages from Windsor to Balmoral ; what a 
 position, yes and what a power, she would have 
 won ! As it was, by her visible goodness, by 
 her simplicity and tenderness, by her open 
 sympathy with her people's sorrows and her 
 open call for theirs in her own, she gained what 
 no Sovereign had had before her the affections 
 of the whole English people. But if they could 
 have seen her, there is almost no limit to what 
 she might have gained. 
 
 In another way too perhaps, an official and 
 legal way, she might have strengthened the 
 power of the Sovereign, but did in fact allow it 
 to be rather weakened. The Crown is the 
 fountain of all honour and all office. The Queen 
 knew this well, and was more tenacious than her 
 successors have been of the royal rights in 
 those matters. But even she was scarcely as 
 tenacious as she should and could have been. 
 The very height and distance of the Crown 
 makes it the ideal judge of the advice given to 
 it about honours and promotions. If the Queen 
 had from the first and to the last [absolutely 
 refused to grant honours for which her Ministers 
 could not give her really good reasons'she would 
 have strengthened^ the whole weight of the 
 Crown in the working of the constitutional
 
 THE QUEEN AND HONOURS 39 
 
 machine. Ministers would not have dared to 
 quarrel with her, for the country would never 
 have tolerated a political crisis caused by the 
 insistence of the Ministers on the promotion of 
 some vain or ambitious Baron to an Earldom, 
 or of some intriguing journalist or party hack to 
 a Baronetcy or a Knighthood. The victory would 
 always have been with the Queen, and it would 
 have increased her political power in the best 
 way. And it would have been quite easy if she 
 had cared as much about it as she did about 
 correspondence on matters of policy on which 
 she could not prevail. 
 
 On the whole it must be admitted that the 
 choice she made of the work she would do was 
 a tragic mistake. Her temperament and her 
 husband's tastes and example led her to spend 
 a very laborious life in trying to do what she 
 could not do, what was not in fact her function ; 
 and consequently, as the unavoidable result, to 
 neglect other things which were her function 
 and which she could have done. That was 
 again the tragedy of a hereditary position which 
 she did not choose for herself. Most of us, free 
 men and women, are probably right as a rule in 
 thinking that the thing we most like doing, 
 provided the liking be that of our whole and highest 
 nature, is what it is our duty to do. The young 
 man who has the instinct for art or soldiering 
 will generally be a better man as artist or soldier 
 than he will as anything else. But the Queen 
 had her choice made for her at her birth. And 
 it called her to a function capable of two inter-
 
 40 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 pretations. And she chose the one she liked 
 best, which unfortunately was the wrong one. 
 She would like to have been a permanent civil 
 servant, sitting all day in Whitehall, reading and 
 writing official papers and often deciding policies 
 about which others were to make a great figure 
 in public. That is what she tried all her life to 
 be, but of course failed in being. She could 
 and did spend her life over official papers. But 
 she could not decide policies. And she was 
 born to make a great figure in public, and, with 
 all her reluctance, could not always escape doing 
 so. 
 
 Her life, in fact, seems to be divided between 
 a failure and a success. Happily the success is 
 by far the more important. What she failed in 
 was the thing to which she gave almost all her 
 industry and will ; her success, a success beyond 
 all parallel, almost beyond all measure, lay in a 
 direction which she scarcely understood, which 
 perhaps of all her Ministers only Disraeli was 
 capable of understanding. That pathetic daily 
 industry did not very greatly modify either 
 home or foreign policy. But while she was 
 toiling at it in vain, she was, all unaware, be- 
 coming a legend. Her name was a word of 
 veneration all over the earth. I remember 
 being told by a lady who had travelled among 
 Arabs and by some imprudent conduct had got 
 into difficulties with fanatics, that she believed 
 she might have been killed if her assailants had 
 not taken up her box and read on it her name, 
 which, happily for her, was the great name of
 
 A LEGEND AND A MYSTERY 41 
 
 Victoria. The Queen in her old age seems to 
 have conquered both space and time. She 
 once told a friend that she supposed she was the 
 only person who ever outlived four generations 
 of distinguished contemporaries, explaining that 
 by contemporaries she meant those with whom 
 she had daily (and almost exclusively) to work. 
 There are other cases, perhaps Louis XIV. for 
 instance but hers is extraordinary enough. 
 Her own generation, as she said, she never knew. 
 She was brought up with the old, and when she 
 came to the Throne she began by living with 
 Melbourne, and then he died ; then with Peel 
 and Russell and Palmerston, and then they died ; 
 then with Disraeli and Gladstone, and then they 
 died ; and still she lived on with Lord Salisbury 
 and Lord Rosebery and Mr. Balfour. And 
 whether she thought of it or not, what one may 
 call her gradual extension in space was as 
 remarkable as her duration in time. When she 
 came to the Throne, the name of the Queen of 
 England meant little outside this island. When 
 she died an awe of silence fell not only on the 
 whole people of Great Britain from Court to 
 cottage, but on every Royal House in Europe, 
 and far beyond Europe, on Indian palaces, on 
 African and Polynesian huts. Victoria had 
 become a legend and a mystery ; her name 
 called out the affectionate devotion of millions 
 who had never seen her ; it was a charm and a 
 spell throughout the vast world of her Empire. 
 4 The final years," as Mr. Strachey says, " were 
 years of apotheosis." His word makes one
 
 42 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 think of the Sovereigns whose position of all in 
 history was at once most like and most unlike 
 hers. The Roman Emperors ruled as she did 
 over a vast and world- wide Empire. Very few 
 of their subjects had ever seen them ; all 
 reverenced the mysterious majesty of Caesar. 
 For the Senate and the Consuls and all the rest 
 of the still nominally subsisting constitutional 
 paraphernalia of the great Republic they cared 
 next to nothing. The whole greatness of Rome 
 had become embodied in a person, and inevitably, 
 as things were then, that person was conceived 
 as something more than human, as a Divine 
 Presence ruling and protecting the world. 
 Queen Victoria's direct and personal share in 
 governing her Empire was, as we have seen, a 
 small one. Her individual opinions or caprices 
 did not make or unmake laws and fortunes as 
 did those of Augustus and his successors. But 
 like them she, and she alone, held her multiple 
 and various Empire together by the single link 
 of her throne and name, the one thing all held 
 in common veneration. Her genuine modesty 
 " if they only knew me," she would say when 
 she heard of some fulsome newspaper adulation 
 and her sincere piety would of course have 
 shrunk in horror from the deification permitted 
 or encouraged by the Emperors. But it is likely 
 enough that there were not a few primitive 
 places in which she was actually worshipped. 
 And, apart from anything of that kind, she had 
 in reality a kind of religious position. For she 
 was not only the ultimate and mysterious symbol
 
 THE QUEEN AND THE EMPIRE 43 
 
 of the British Empire. The British flag could 
 play that part as the Roman eagle could for Rome. 
 But the Queen was more than the flag. She was 
 more than a mere symbol ; she was what a symbol 
 becomes when it is the thing which it symbolises : 
 she was at once the appearance and the reality, 
 all that the flag is and all that it cannot be, the 
 sacramental unity, visible and embodied, of the 
 British race and Empire. Perhaps she could 
 never have become all that if she had not been a 
 woman and lived to be very old. But what she 
 half unconsciously won, others can receive and 
 maintain. If they do so the Monarchy may 
 play a very high part in shaping the future 
 destiny of our race. But whatever her successors 
 may achieve, to her will always belong the glory 
 of inauguration. It may be that when the 
 ultimate story comes to be told, it will be seen 
 that it was the Monarchy more than anything 
 else which gave imaginative and emotional unity 
 to all the diverse worlds of Britain. If so, 
 many kings may have made their contribution 
 to the great result. But the first tribute and the 
 highest will still have to be paid to the Queen 
 who for sixty-three years reigned in ever greater 
 fame and honour over an ever-widening Empire, 
 and half unconsciously, as great things are often 
 done, gathered to herself its faith and loyalty 
 till she seemed the promise of a destiny of 
 which without her it could not have dreamt. 
 Fate has its unconscious ways and silent pre- 
 monitions. It was not for nothing that by a 
 kind of accident and against her father's will, the
 
 44 QUEEN VICTORIA 
 
 child of destiny who was born in 1819 was at 
 the very last moment, as she lay already in the 
 arms of the archbishop, unexpectedly given the 
 great name of Victoria.
 
 II 
 
 THE POLITICAL LIFE OF 
 DISRAELI, 1837-1846* 
 
 IT will be universally admitted that Mr. Mony- 
 penny's second volume f is far more interesting 
 than his first. The story he tells here is one of 
 the most dazzling in our Parliamentary annals. 
 There is no more trumpeting and skirmishing 
 now ; we are in the thick of the fight, the first, 
 most daring, and most entirely triumphant of all 
 Disraeli's combats. No subsequent victories 
 can ever give back to the victor the exultant 
 delight of the first triumph of youth. David 
 was a man of war all his life, but he can never 
 have been so happy as on the day he slew 
 Goliath. These pages show Disraeli slaying 
 his Goliath. After that, as a political soldier, 
 the highest he could hope for was to live up to his 
 reputation. Chatham was a greater man than 
 Disraeli ; but Disraeli's victorious^ single combat 
 with Peel was a far greater achievement than 
 Chatham's share in the assaults of the brilliant 
 band who at last compelled Walpole and Walpole's 
 successors to surrender. Our knowledge of 
 Chatham's speeches is limited and uncertain ; 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 1912. 
 
 f " The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," 
 by William Flavelle Monypenny. Volume II., 1837- 
 1846. (Murray, izs. net.) 
 
 45
 
 46 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 but, while it is safe to say that he was a greater 
 orator than Disraeli, it is almost equally safe to say 
 that in one kind of oratory, in invective, he can 
 never have equalled the great series of attacks 
 under which Peel writhed between 1843 and 1846, 
 which none of the hearers ever forgot and some 
 of them, not the least important, never forgave. 
 
 There is nothing quite like them in our 
 political history. The nearest parallel is that 
 already mentioned, the assault of the " patriots " 
 on Walpole. Charles Fox did splendid work in 
 the long attack on Lord North, but invective to 
 be really powerful needs more than a touch of 
 venom, and that could not be found in the most 
 good-natured of men attacking the most easy- 
 going of Prime Ministers whom no insults 
 could provoke out of a smile. Lowe's great 
 assaults upon the Reform Ministry of 1866 are 
 a nearer parallel to the power of Disraeli's 
 speeches, but they struck rather at a political 
 theory than at a man. To find a real rival to 
 Disraeli in this use of the highest powers of 
 speech to do to death a personal and political 
 enemy we have to go further afield. The nearest 
 parallel of all is the great series of speeches in 
 which Cicero poured out the hatred of years upon 
 the enemy who in his eyes was both morally and 
 politically the vilest of men. The parallel is 
 unfortunately made the closer by the fact that 
 both Cicero and Disraeli had been in friendly 
 relations, publicly as well as privately, with the 
 victims of their murderous attack. On the other 
 hand Disraeli, unlike Cicero, had to face the
 
 DISRAELI AND PEEL 47 
 
 immense difficulty of assailing a man of estab- 
 lished character without any character of his own 
 to support the attack. The universal opinion 
 of his countrymen, and still more of the House 
 of Commons, set Peel's character in the highest 
 and strongest of positions, defended by forti- 
 fications which were the work of many years. 
 Disraeli was at the bottom and had the whole 
 hill to climb. He had none of the artillery of 
 official experience, or party connexion, or personal 
 character to bring to bear on the enemy's walls, 
 which without them seemed unassailable. Yet 
 he took the fortress in the end, almost alone, by 
 his own unaided genius. The " organised 
 hypocrisy " was destroyed ; and though Peel 
 succeeded in the great task he had in hand he 
 was never again the leader of a great party. To 
 any one who wishes to maintain a real moral 
 standard in political life, the question of Disraeli's 
 character is inevitably raised by this episode. 
 Mr. Monypenny does not shirk it. At least, he 
 makes no pretence of denying that a general 
 distrust of Disraeli existed, or that if his character 
 had stood higher many things would have been 
 different in the history of those years. It is 
 probable, for instance, that in that case he 
 would have received office in 1841. Nor did the 
 difficulty end with these years. When Mr. 
 Monypenny comes to the story of that thirty 
 years' exile in the wilderness which the Conserva- 
 tive Party had to suffer after 1846, he will, no 
 doubt, have to admit that one of the causes of it 
 was the fact that Disraeli was at once indis-
 
 48 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 pensable and impossible. That feeling lingered 
 even after he had been Prime Minister, as is 
 shown by the fact that in the early seventies a 
 secret conclave of Tory magnates met to consider 
 his deposition from the leadership. Only after 
 the victory of 1874 did it entirely disappear. 
 Then, indeed, when he was too old and too tired 
 to do much except enjoy it, he became the idol 
 and autocrat of his party, the almost equal friend 
 of his Sovereign, the accepted and admired ruler 
 of the nation. But, even so, something of the 
 same sort revived after his death. Many people 
 explained the long delay in publishing his bio- 
 graphy by assuming that his papers disclosed too 
 much that his friends could have no desire to 
 make public. As far as one can judge the 
 assumption is entirely untrue. Mr. Monypenny 
 writes with an appearance of perfect candour, 
 and his investigation of all that there is to 
 investigate has evidently not deprived his hero 
 of his respect. 
 
 The worst charge ever made against Disraeli 
 relates to those years. It is certain that in 1841 
 he (and, with or without his knowledge, his wife) 
 wrote to Peel asking for office ; and it is equally 
 certain that in 1844 he said in a speech at Shrews- 
 bury, " I never asked for a place " ; and when, 
 at the height of their duel in 1846, Peel alluded 
 to his application, Disraeli assured the House of 
 Commons that " nothing of the kind ever 
 occurred." What is to be said of these pro- 
 ceedings ? Everybody then, as now, knew that 
 Peel was incapable of falsehood ; nobody was
 
 WAS DISRAELI A LIAR? 49 
 
 very sure about Disraeli. If Lord Althorp or 
 the late Duke of Devonshire had said what 
 Disraeli said, all would have been certain that 
 there was some curious lapse of memory on his 
 side or on Peel's. But Disraeli, as usual, suffered 
 from his lack of character, and the general im- 
 pression was simply that he had lied. And that is 
 still the accepted, and perhaps the correct, view. 
 It is the one frankly taken by his biographer, 
 who states it and comments : " He must pay the 
 full penalty. Let the politician who is without 
 sin in the matter of veracity cast the first stone." 
 On this there are, perhaps, two things to be 
 said. Some of us may not be willing so lightly 
 to surrender the truthfulness of our statesmen, 
 and may claim that an important distinction should 
 be made. No one supposes that politicians 
 always tell the truth. But there are untruths 
 and untruths. A scrupulous man would prefer 
 not to say that he expected to be at the top of the 
 poll when he was fighting a hopeless seat. But 
 such statements deceive nobody and are, perhaps, 
 no more lies than our conventional expressions 
 of regret at our inability to dine with a dull 
 acquaintance. A more important class of 
 political untruth is that almost imposed upon 
 statesmen by the necessities of the State or 
 what they often value nearly as highly of their 
 party. A Minister is asked whether a foreign 
 or colonial Government has made a certain 
 proposal, or whether a governor or a general 
 has desired to resign. The proposal or resigna- 
 tion has in fact been made ; but it is hoped to
 
 50 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 get it withdrawn and restore the status quo, 
 That will be impossible if the facts get known. 
 To decline to deny them is, in fact, often tanta- 
 mount to an admission. It seems necessary 
 here to deny on public grounds, as even the 
 austere Johnson allowed a man might legiti- 
 mately do, when a lawful secret could be kept in 
 no other way. No doubt a man had better be 
 very strict about indulging even in this sort of 
 untruth. But it is fair to say, in answer to 
 Mr. Monypenny, that it is this sort, and not any 
 other, of which statesmen must be admitted to 
 have often been guilty ; and that it is a very 
 different sort from the merely self-interested lie 
 which he believes Disraeli told, and against 
 which it is to be hoped many politicians might 
 justly cast their stone. But is it certain that it 
 was a lie ? The evidence appears at first sight 
 irresistible. But there is something to be said 
 on behalf of a plea for doubt and the benefit of 
 doubt. Whether Disraeli was a knave or not, 
 no one thinks he was a fool. Would any one but 
 a fool have run the tremendous risk of Peel's 
 overwhelming him by the production of his 
 letter ? Is it impossible that Disraeli had for- 
 gotten the letter or that he had the impression 
 that he had been much more guarded in it than 
 in fact he had ? We have seen stranger and 
 more rapid lapses of memory in our time about 
 what was or was not said at meetings between 
 statesmen, and nobody has doubted the bona 
 fides of both the contradictory accounts. There 
 is one other point. Why should so practised a
 
 THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT 51 
 
 debater as Disraeli have resorted to a very 
 dangerous lie in his defence when he had an 
 obvious and perfectly satisfactory debating 
 answer to Peel's point ? Peel asked how Disraeli 
 could have been willing to serve him if he really 
 thought as badly of his earlier career as he now 
 asserted. The answer was obvious. A man 
 may deal in questionable transactions once or 
 twice and his character may be so good that you 
 may be certain he had no wrong intention, and 
 may be perfectly ready to trust him. But when 
 he finally commits forgery you see the earlier 
 proceedings in the light of the later crime. 
 Whether Disraeli was an honest man or not 
 there was nothing incompatible with honesty in 
 trusting Peel in 1841 and yet saying in 1846, 
 after Peel had used a Protectionist majority to 
 force Repeal of the Corn Laws on the country, 
 that that proceeding threw a lurid light on his 
 whole past. 
 
 No wise man, however, would accept a brief 
 to make a saint, even a political saint, of Disraeli. 
 Human motives are mixed things, and no one 
 probably serves his country without being 
 influenced in some degree by the ambition of 
 fame or power for himself. Mr. Gladstone 
 probably fancied that the public service was the 
 only thing he had in view in his political career. 
 But moral men are perhaps even more liable 
 than others to self-deception ; and it is certain 
 that Mr. Gladstone, like all strong and healthy 
 people, liked getting his own way because it was 
 his own way and not at all solely because he
 
 52 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 believed it was a way of safety for his country. 
 Disraeli, a far more clear-sighted man, both 
 about his own character and about other matters, 
 did not conceal the truth from himself or others. 
 When he talks in " Coningsby " of the motives 
 that induce men to enter public life, the highest 
 he mentions is " public reputation." When he 
 speaks to his constituents of the same subject 
 and comes to deal with his own motives, he says, 
 " I will tell you what they are. I love fame ; 
 I love public reputation ; I love to live in the eyes 
 of the country ; and it is a glorious thing for a 
 man to do who has had my difficulties to contend 
 against." That is a frank statement ; an avowal 
 of no ignoble ambition, certainly ; but the desired 
 goal is not one that would have completely 
 satisfied Burke or Peel, Gladstone or Salisbury. 
 All these men, not so much as some of them 
 thought perhaps, but in each case to a very real 
 degree, were in public life because they hoped 
 to serve the country. It is doubtful whether 
 that motive seriously influenced Disraeli. To 
 turn from Peel's papers to Disraeli's political 
 writings or his greater speeches is to turn from the 
 limited outlook of a year or a generation, of a 
 single party or people, to that of all political time 
 and all political existence ; but to turn from 
 Disraeli's letters back to Peel's is to turn from a 
 world of vanity and intrigue and self-seeking to 
 one of unsparing and single-minded devotion to 
 the public service. 
 
 The two men were probably too unlike ever 
 to have acted cordially together. Yet, as Mr.
 
 PEEL AND DISRAELI 53 
 
 Monypenny shows in this volume, it was some 
 time before they drew apart. Peel went out of 
 his usual way to applaud loudly the famous first 
 speech, and to say that it was "just the reverse " 
 of a failure ; he was very civil socially to Disraeli, 
 paid him marked compliments in the Lobby, 
 and in 1840 invited him to a conference of Tory 
 leaders where he was the only man who had not 
 held office. Even so late as 1844 he compli- 
 mented him in a speech, and his sister wrote to 
 Mrs. Disraeli and urged that when they next 
 met the younger man should hold out his hand, 
 promising that the older would gladly accept it. 
 But then it was too late. That may or may not 
 have been originally due to the refusal of office in 
 1841. It is at any rate fair to Disraeli to say that 
 he continued to support Peel very warmly for 
 two years, and in 1843 went down to Shrewsbury 
 and made a great defence of Peel, and especially 
 of his moderate Free Trade measures of 1842, 
 declaring both against high protection and against 
 unconditional abolition of the duties, and in- 
 sisting on commercial reform as the traditional 
 Tory policy from the days of Shelburne and 
 Pitt, with reciprocity as an essential part of it. 
 This and other speeches made at the same time 
 at any rate show that Disraeli was in no hurry 
 to desert Peel, though he publicly promised his 
 constituents that he would do so if Peel broke his 
 pledges. It is far from being proved, therefore, 
 that the motive of his revolt was revenge. But 
 why had Peel excluded him, after so many marks 
 of confidence ? Was it because, as was customary 
 
 E
 
 54 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 in those days, the great families absorbed all the 
 spoils as a matter of course ? Or was it, as is 
 still customary, that the principle of the claim of 
 the man to the office, which makes all bad 
 appointments, was dominant over that of the 
 claim of the office to the best man who can be 
 found, which makes all good ones ? Apparently 
 it was neither. Mr. Monypenny makes two 
 interesting revelations on the subject. First 
 he tells us, on the high authority of George 
 Smythe, Disraeli's intimate friend and Peel's 
 subsequent colleague, that Peel wished to give 
 Disraeli office. And he adds, on the authority 
 of Lord Houghton, that the man who prevented 
 his doing so was Stanley, soon to be Peel's rival 
 and Disraeli's leader, but at that moment so 
 hostile to Disraeli that he declared that " if that 
 scoundrel were taken in he would not remain 
 himself." Three years later, whether in con- 
 scious revenge or not, Disraeli used of Stanley 
 the famous phrase which, first uttered in contempt, 
 has survived as a compliment. " The noble 
 lord is the Prince Rupert of Parliamentary dis- 
 cussion : his charge is resistless : but when he 
 returns from the pursuit he always finds his 
 camp in the possession of the enemy." Such 
 were the strange beginnings of the long association 
 between the two men who were to share the 
 leadership of a party for over twenty years ; and 
 such are the ironies of political life. A still more 
 curious one is given by Mr. Monypenny in a note 
 which relates how in 1877 Peel's daughter-in- 
 law wrote to Lord Beaconsfield, much as Mrs.
 
 DISRAELI'S MARRIAGE 55 
 
 Disraeli had written to Peel, to inform him that 
 her husband was " most anxious to serve " him 
 in the event of a vacancy in his Ministry. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that there is 
 nothing in this volume but the story of the rela- 
 tions between Disraeli and Peel. On the contrary, 
 there are many other things his marriage, 
 two of his three greatest novels, his leadership 
 of " Young England," his curious and rather 
 ambiguous intimacy with Louis Philippe, and a 
 whole series of speeches in which his political 
 genius is seen at its highest. The most inte- 
 resting personal event is, of course, his marriage 
 with Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, the widow of his 
 colleague in the representation of Maidstone. 
 His financial position was always embarrassed, 
 and, when he married a woman twelve years 
 older than himself but endowed with four or 
 five thousand a year, the world of course said 
 that he had married for money. And the world 
 was no doubt so far right that he would probably 
 not have married her if her income had been 
 counted only by hundreds. She herself used to 
 say laughingly in later years," Dizzy married me 
 for my money, but if he had the chance again he 
 would marry me for love." He also sometimes 
 said much the same ; and he wrote to her, six 
 months before the marriage, in the only serious 
 quarrel they ever had, " I avow, when I first 
 made my advances to you, I was influenced by 
 no romantic feelings." But, as Mr. Monypenny 
 well says, it was characteristic of the man, as 
 indeed of all men of the world, to acquiesce in
 
 56 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 explanations of his conduct which attributed 
 more importance than was the fact to lower 
 motives and less to higher ; and no woman says 
 her husband married her for money unless she is 
 quite sure he did not. No doubt he was no more 
 unwilling than any other man that his wife should 
 have a good income ; but the answer to the 
 baser accusation is threefold. First, that he 
 evidently felt a considerable attraction for Mrs. 
 Lewis during her husband's life, when he could 
 not have thought either of her hand or of her 
 money ; second, that during the quarrel already 
 mentioned he wrote her a letter ridiculing her 
 fortune, a risk a mere fortune-hunter would 
 scarcely have run ; and, third, that all through his 
 life he was admittedly the most devoted and 
 admiring of husbands. It is true that none of 
 the three arguments is conclusive ; but together 
 they at least entitle him once more to the " benefit 
 of the doubt." In any case, it is certain that, 
 whatever its motive, his marriage was by far the 
 most fortunate event in his private life with 
 which he had himself anything to do. Its only 
 possible rival was what was done for him by those 
 foolish Elders of the Bevis Marks Synagogue 
 who forced a quarrel on his father and led to 
 the young Benjamin's being carried to the 
 Christian font, which was then a necessary 
 preliminary to a political career. 
 
 Mr. Monypenny has devoted much less space 
 to his hero's private life in this volume than in 
 the last. Perhaps he is right. In some respects, 
 indeed, Disraeli always wanted a public stage
 
 PRIVATE LIFE 57 
 
 to be seen to advantage. Genius, courage, and 
 ability, of which he had so much, find their best 
 or only field in public life. It is other qualities 
 of which he had little such things as simplicity 
 and intimacy which make the charm of 
 descriptions of private life. To be perfectly 
 simple and direct, either in word, act, or feeling, 
 was at all times almost impossible to him, 
 whether in great things or small. And his 
 intimacies were very few. His sister and his 
 wife seem to have been at this time the only 
 people to whom he wrote or spoke with perfect 
 directness, without any ulterior object, in the 
 simple desire of giving and receiving pleasure. 
 All the other letters have a note in them which 
 suggests that the recipients were something more 
 or less than friends, his patrons, his tools, or his 
 present or future political allies. Their interest 
 is public, not private. And few readers will 
 regret to find here fewer letters of foreign travel, 
 the most tedious phase of biography. Even the 
 small social details and some of those given 
 here are very small : " I went down to Rosebank 
 to a petit bal given by the Londonderrys " 
 are more interesting because more significant of 
 the man than the foreign letters. Of course, 
 Disraeli no more travelled than he dressed or 
 dined or spoke exactly like other men. But his 
 letters from abroad necessarily go over common 
 ground and give us less of himself than of the 
 sights he saw. And it is himself that we want. 
 Of that his biographer cannot give us too much. 
 So even the apparently trifling social doings and
 
 5 8 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 feelings recorded here have their importance. 
 For they show us that the mysterious and 
 oracular Disraeli was a man of pleasure as well 
 as a man of genius ; and the difficulties he had 
 to conquer in his political struggle are illustrated 
 by his frank confessions of triumph over the 
 invitations he received from great ladies and the 
 compliments paid him by great men. The 
 taste for material magnificences which he retained 
 to the end, and which, though shared by many 
 Englishmen, was in him regarded as un-English 
 and Oriental, is, of course, conspicuous ; and we 
 hear a good deal in the letters about gold plate 
 and fine liveries. 
 
 Another thing which was in him to the end is 
 also illustrated in this volume, his inborn gifts as 
 a courtier. Nothing in Mr. Monypenny's story 
 is more curious than the account of Disraeli's 
 relations with Louis Philippe. Disraeli went to 
 Paris in 1842, a young and unofficial, though 
 well-known, member of Parliament. The Court 
 was in mourning ; but, though great personages 
 like " the Ailesburys, the Stanhopes, and Russian 
 Princes " could not obtain a reception, Disraeli 
 had several long private audiences with the 
 King. It is strange reading to the present 
 generation to find a foreign Sovereign anxious 
 to balance an uncertain position at home by the 
 support of the English Ministry and House of 
 Commons. And it is stranger still, and not 
 altogether satisfactory, to find Disraeli submitting 
 to the King a Memorandum as to the ways and 
 means of arousing sympathy in England, and
 
 LOUIS PHILIPPE 59 
 
 hinting at the expense involved in action either 
 in Parliament or in the Press. But it is evident 
 that his efforts were entirely devoted to the 
 patriotic object of creating a better understanding 
 between the two countries ; as they were again 
 in 1845, when Louis Philippe's dislike of 
 Palmerston was supposed to make his return to 
 office difficult or impossible, and Disraeli did 
 his best to make things smoother by talking to 
 the King and writing to Palmerston. The whole 
 episode is very curious the most curious point 
 of all being the apparent admission on all hands 
 that a foreign Sovereign's favour could be 
 valuable, and almost necessary, to an English 
 Minister. 
 
 But of course the most important thing in the 
 book is what it shows us of the development of 
 Disraeli's political ideas, and their illustration 
 in his speeches and in the two great novels. 
 It is here also that Mr. Monypenny is seen 
 at his best. His introductory dissertations on 
 such subjects as the " condition of England " 
 after the Reform Act, the Corn Law controversy, 
 the Tory Idea, the character and personality of 
 Peel, and others, are admirably written and lift 
 the book above the level of a mere biographical 
 record. Many of these topics are still matters 
 of dispute, and not everybody will accept Mr. 
 Monypenny 's view of them ; but everybody 
 will agree that what he writes shows real and 
 wide knowledge as well as that living insight 
 into his subject which belongs only to those who 
 care as well as know. And he is at least as
 
 60 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 impartial as can be expected of Disraeli's bio- 
 grapher, who may fairly be excused for not 
 letting " the Whig dogs have the best of it." 
 No man, indeed, who has been living for months 
 among the splendid lights and large spaces of 
 the Disraelian political ideas can be expected 
 to do full justice to the dull probity of Peel and 
 the narrow earnestness of Cobden, or to show 
 any mercy to the emptiness and incapacity of the 
 Whigs. The illumination that comes from 
 Disraeli is no doubt occasionally of the nature 
 of limelight ; but when all deductions have been 
 made it remains true that in the novels and 
 speeches dealt with in this volume alone there 
 is more matter for political thought than in all 
 the utterances of all the other English statesmen 
 of the nineteenth century put together. Alone, 
 almost, of English statesmen, certainly in marked 
 contrast to his two great rivals, Peel and Glad- 
 stone, Disraeli looked upon politics as a universal 
 science. While their East and West meant 
 Norfolk and Devonshire, his meant the Old 
 World and the New. While their before and 
 after meant the last Session and the next, his meant 
 the age of the Patriarchs or the Romans and the 
 final destinies to which free government may be 
 led in the ultimate future. Burke, a far greater 
 mind, partly because a more sober, sincere, and 
 exact, is his only rival among English statesmen as 
 a political thinker. No one who reads Disraeli's 
 books with open eyes can for a moment suppose 
 them to be merely the work of a self-advertising 
 political adventurer. An adventurer would not
 
 COURAGE AND ORIGINALITY 61 
 
 have denounced his own party as " an organised 
 hypocrisy " or irritated the class whom he 
 meant to lead by saying that he had " never 
 heard of a peer with an ancient lineage." Disraeli 
 had many faults but his mind was an ever- 
 flowing fountain of ideas ; and where ideas 
 exist they are never deterred from flowing by 
 the consideration that they may drown their 
 friends. So the young spokesman of the feudal 
 aristocracy did not hesitate to impress upon his 
 noble friends that it was the very essence of 
 feudalism to make the tenure of property depend 
 upon the performance of its duties. So the 
 leader of the protectionist squires put aside the 
 cry of " burdens on the land " and said that 
 those who had great honours must expect great 
 burdens. So the Tory apologist held out his 
 hand to the hated Chartists and had the courage, 
 as well as the brains, to take a view of the social 
 revolution of which Lord Morley has said that 
 it was " wider if it did not go deeper than that of 
 any other contemporary observer." So, once 
 more, the future leader of the party that had 
 opposed the Reform Bill was already contem- 
 plating the bestowal of political power on an 
 " educated and enfranchised people." In all 
 these matters he can scarcely be refused the 
 credit of seeing further than any of his rivals. 
 The author of " Sybil " stood almost alone in 
 his clear-sighted protest against the narrow 
 commercialism of that day, the ugly results of 
 which are the chief difficulty of our own. He 
 more than any one else saw that the Corn Law
 
 62 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 difficulty was no mere economic question of 
 rents, as the Protectionists thought, or of profits, 
 as their opponents thought, but involved large 
 political, social, and international considerations 
 as to what was to be held the healthiest state of 
 national existence. He, again almost alone in 
 that day, knew that history, imagination, and the 
 national idea must play a large part in the 
 politics of any great people. And he saw the 
 potentialities for the highest service that lay, 
 increasingly ignored, in the ancient Monarchy 
 of England. 
 
 The question of most practical interest perhaps, 
 as one looks back on all this after seventy years, 
 is whether the accidents that denied Disraeli any 
 chance of putting his political ideas a creed, as 
 he always called them, not a mere programme 
 to the test of practice was, or was not, one of 
 those great lost opportunities with which the 
 pages of history are strewn. When he did 
 reach power the hour for action was past and 
 the actor's failing energies were fully employed 
 elsewhere. What would have happened if he 
 had had in 1854 tne position which did not 
 come till 1874 ? It is interesting to ask such 
 questions, but, of course, impossible to answer 
 them. Disraeli had courage enough for any- 
 thing ; but had he character enough, had he 
 enough patience of detail, to force upon a 
 " stupid " party the reforms which would have 
 prevented the great towns continuing to develop 
 in the wretched conditions he had set forth in 
 " Sybil " ? He probably really cared about this
 
 WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 63 
 
 question ; and certainly he cared about the 
 maintenance of a healthy and manly rural 
 population. Probably he would not have ignored 
 the whole problem, as the complacent commer- 
 cialism of the Whigs did ; but had he the driving 
 power needed to make the landed class take long 
 views and accept sacrifices for the purpose of 
 creating a peasantry out of a horde of landless 
 labourers ? We are on surer ground where 
 the way was clearer as in the question of national 
 defence. If he had been in power in the sixties 
 England, one may be certain, would not have 
 cut the sorry figure she did in 1864 and in 1870. 
 It is certain, again, that he would have insisted 
 on keeping the House of Lords a living, visible, 
 and active part of the Constitution, and would 
 never have let it fall into that silence of senile 
 decay which was almost imposed upon it by the 
 over-worked indifference of Lord Salisbury. 
 And the Monarchy ? As to that, he certainly 
 would never have admitted the view now given 
 out with semi-official authority, that it is the duty 
 of the Sovereign to accept without demur or 
 question any policy proposed to him by his 
 Ministers ; nor indeed would Queen Victoria 
 or any of her Prime Ministers. He did something 
 for a higher ideal in his last years ; and, if he had 
 had power in his more vigorous days, he might 
 have endeavoured to assert the true position of 
 the Sovereign as no mere conduit pipe for the 
 issue of Cabinet decrees, but a real political 
 force, the permanent adviser of both parties, 
 an adviser almost inevitably preserved by his
 
 64 DISRAELI, 1837-1846 
 
 position from sharing the narrowness of either. 
 But, whether or not he had the capacity for 
 these things, the real opportunity for them was 
 not given him. For posterity he will be greater 
 as a political thinker, and as a gladiator in the 
 Parliamentary arena, than as a constructive 
 statesman.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE POLITICAL LIFE OF 
 DISRAELI, 1846-1855* 
 
 THE third volume of the great Life of Disraeli f 
 has a new name on its title-page. The author 
 of the first two died very soon after the publica- 
 tion of the second. He had laid a good founda- 
 tion for the great edifice, and all his readers 
 heard with regret of the premature death which 
 prevented his building upon it. That task has 
 now fallen to a friend and colleague, much older 
 than himself, who, before Mr. Monypenny had 
 ever written a line of any sort, had already 
 attained what readers of The Times may be 
 pardoned for thinking the highest position open 
 to an English journalist. It was known that 
 Mr. Monypenny had throughout his work been 
 in frequent consultation with Mr. Buckle, and 
 there was no surprise mingled with the general 
 approval which greeted the announcement that 
 Mr. Buckle had been entrusted with the difficult 
 task of completing his friend's work. Mr. 
 Monypenny's name still remains on the title- 
 page of the present volume, but it appears that 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, November 26, 1914. 
 
 t " The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," 
 by William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle. 
 Volume III., 1846-1855. (Murray. 125. net.) 
 65
 
 66 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 nothing in it except part of the chapter on 
 " Tancred " owes more to him than the classifi- 
 cation of its material. 
 
 It is never easy to take up another man's 
 work, but it may be said at once that Mr. Buckle 
 has succeeded. The new volume will be eagerly 
 read by all who read its predecessors, and 
 certainly not with less enjoyment. It has the same 
 lucidity as they, the same fairness of mind, the 
 same wide knowledge of English political history, 
 the same reassuring quietness of judgment. And 
 in continuing a work which he did not plan or 
 begin Mr. Buckle has admirably escaped both 
 the opposite dangers of a breach of continuity 
 and of sinking his personality in that of his 
 predecessor. If he has erred in either direction, 
 it is rather in the latter than the former. Few 
 men have had a closer knowledge than he of 
 the world of English politics since 1886. The 
 interest of the present volume is often heightened 
 by allusions to the later history of questions 
 already discussed in the forties and fifties. But 
 Mr. Buckle might well go farther in this direction 
 in his next volume. The greatness of English 
 politics lies in their continuity. And much of 
 their interest belongs to the same quality. The 
 peculiar success of Lord Rosebery's " Pitt " 
 was by no means all due to its author's literary 
 gift ; it was largely due to the fact that he had 
 been Prime Minister, and that his readers 
 could everywhere detect allusions to the political 
 situation of their own day and to the author's 
 own experiences and opinions. Mr. Buckle has
 
 MR. BUCKLE 67 
 
 not been Prime Minister. But for over twenty 
 years he had special opportunities of knowing 
 the political and personal problems which 
 beset Prime Ministers, the constant difficulty 
 for all public men of adjusting the difficult 
 balance between individual convictions and the 
 just claims of party loyalty, the ignoble intrigues 
 and the honourable self-surrenders which are 
 always going on behind the fair scene of confi- 
 dence and unanimity which all Ministries try 
 to present to the public. These things are the 
 very stuff of this volume, and will be of its 
 successors. Let Mr. Buckle have the courage 
 not to confine himself too rigidly to the role of 
 a narrator. Let him come more frankly forward 
 as a critic and a political thinker. He will be 
 all the better biographer for bringing the light 
 of his own times and his own observation to 
 bear on the contemporary materials out of 
 which he has to construct his book. 
 
 And he may find the needed space for a freer 
 personal intervention by retrenchments in other 
 directions. The only two criticisms that can 
 be made on his work are just those to which 
 Mr. Monypenny was also open. There is too 
 little of himself and too much of Disraeli. He 
 seems often afraid of giving us anything, how- 
 ever interesting, of his own ; he is never afraid 
 of giving us anything and everything, however 
 uninteresting, about his hero. Seventeen pages 
 will be found by most people a good deal more 
 than enough about the history of a weekly 
 newspaper called The Press which Disraeli
 
 68 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 founded and supported for a few years ; and 
 the few words in which Lord Morley dismissed 
 a certain rather sordid squabble between Glad- 
 stone and Disraeli about Downing Street 
 furniture show a juster sense of proportion than 
 the four pages which Mr. Buckle devotes to it. 
 Other instances might be given. Perhaps Mr. 
 Buckle feels himself bound by the biographical 
 scale set by his predecessor. But may he not 
 be overlooking more important considerations ? 
 This volume only carries us over nine years. 
 It shows us Disraeli arriving with difficulty 
 first at the leadership of his party in the Commons, 
 then at the second place in a Cabinet. He was 
 yet to live twenty-six years, during which he 
 was twice Prime Minister and one of the most 
 important figures on the stage of European 
 politics. If the present scale is maintained, 
 can the book ever be finished ? And if it 
 is, will any library be able to find room 
 for it ? 
 
 I 
 
 The new volume gives us Disraeli at last in 
 office, but it contains nothing so exciting as the 
 campaign against Peel which was the principal 
 subject of its predecessor. It takes us through 
 the troubled and uncertain period which lasted 
 from the fall of Peel to the beginning of the ten 
 years' supremacy of Palmerston. For Disraeli 
 it was a time of steadily increasing political 
 importance. In 1846 he was merely the brilliant 
 gladiator who had given the mortal stab to Peel.
 
 DISRAELI'S THREE TASKS 69 
 
 In 1855 he had led his party in the Commons for 
 several years, had led the House itself for several 
 months, and had been Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer. It was no small thing to have got so 
 far ; but nine years are a long slice out of a man's 
 political life, and there is plain evidence that 
 Disraeli often felt that the prize might come 
 too late or never come at all. During these 
 years, and especially after the death of Lord 
 George Bentinck had left the leadership in the 
 Commons vacant, he had three tasks to achieve. 
 He had to convince his party that he, and he 
 alone, could lead them ; he had to make them 
 go his way and not their own ; and he had to 
 win for them the confidence of the country and 
 the resulting victory at the polls. The first two 
 he in the main accomplished : in the third he 
 failed. The surprising thing, as we look back, 
 is not the failure but the success. He had in 
 his path at least five immense obstacles : the 
 inveterate hostility of the Peelites ; the laziness 
 and indifference of Lord Derby ; the damnosa 
 hcereditas of Protection ; the misfortune of having 
 to lead a party which understood few of his 
 ideas and could provide him with no help in 
 debate ; and above all the eccentricity of his own 
 genius and character. In vain did he buy a 
 landed property, discard flowered waistcoats, 
 and attend farmers' dinners. All could see 
 that he was not an English gentleman in the 
 sense that all other statesmen of those days were ; 
 and the majority suspected that flashy clothes, 
 flashy novels, and even Jewish blood were not 
 
 F
 
 70 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 the worst of the things which had separated him 
 from English gentlemen. 
 
 Then the bitter attacks upon Peel which had 
 won him a place in the front rank of politicians 
 were one of the chief causes that kept him out 
 of real power for five and twenty years. The 
 Peelites were cold and self-righteous people of 
 the sort that never finds forgiveness the easiest 
 of the virtues. They never forgave Disraeli, 
 and by so doing they made a strong Conservative 
 Ministry impossible. There is no doubt that 
 if Gladstone, Graham, and Sidney Herbert 
 would have rejoined their party in 1851, 1852, 
 or 1855 it wou ld have at once recovered that 
 position of equality with the Whig-Radical enemy 
 which in the event it did not recover till 1874. 
 But the Peelites hated Disraeli and despised his 
 followers, who in their turn detested the Peelites. 
 Disraeli himself, like all men whose vision 
 extends beyond the passing scene, neither shared 
 nor quite understood these petty animosities. 
 He was prepared to serve under a Peelite or 
 under Palmerston, as was twice proposed, if by 
 so doing he could assist the party. But neither 
 plan proved possible. Both broke on the fatal 
 rock of Protection. Palmerston had no personal 
 prejudices against Disraeli, and would have 
 accepted the leadership in 1852 but for the 
 dubious attitude of Lord Derby on the question 
 of Protection and Free Trade. 
 
 Except his own reputation, this was Disraeli's 
 greatest difficulty. He very soon perceived 
 that Protection in the landlord and farmer
 
 THE RIGHT OF ADAPTATION 71 
 
 meaning of the word was not only " dead but 
 damned." All through the first half of this 
 volume he is seen struggling to deliver his 
 leader and his party from the blindness which 
 still fancied that Peel's work could be undone. 
 In this, let it be said in parenthesis, he was 
 perfectly justified. In the first place, he never 
 had been a believer in the extreme Protectionist 
 theory. But, even if he had been, he had the 
 right to bow to the chose jugie. Political life 
 would be impossible if a man of honour were 
 bound to ruin himself and his party by obstin- 
 ately trying to force on the country a single item 
 of his political creed so universally unpopular 
 that the very mention of it prevents his getting 
 a hearing for the others. A man may even to- 
 day privately believe in absolute monarchy or 
 rotten boroughs, for both of which institutions 
 there is much to be said. But if he is to play a 
 part in public affairs he must leave such things 
 alone. A statesman's duty is to take a large, 
 even a bold, view of the possibilities of a situation, 
 and then to aim at the best he can have any 
 hope of obtaining. With impossibilities he has 
 nothing to do. It is for him to know when the 
 pear is ripe, and then to pluck it instantly. His 
 intervention in the process of ripening it, which 
 belongs to others in less responsible positions, 
 often merely delays or endangers the result. It 
 is at least arguable that Mr. Gladstone's hasty 
 action in 1886 actually delayed Home Rule by 
 the passion of opposition it aroused, and that 
 Mr. Chamberlain's crusade in 1903 merely
 
 72 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 stiffened and hardened the Free Trade sentiment 
 of the country, which had insensibly weakened in 
 the previous generation and would probably 
 have made no fierce resistance to a policy of 
 " broadening the basis of taxation." In each 
 case at any rate the result upon the fortunes of 
 the party and of the other policies for which the 
 party stood is only too evident. Pioneer work 
 of this kind should be done by people who can 
 be repudiated. 
 
 Disraeli's difficulty, however, with Lord Derby 
 was not that he anticipated public opinion, but 
 that he lagged behind it. He clung to Protection 
 long after all chance of reviving it had passed 
 away. Disraeli resisted in private and in public ; 
 but after all Derby, and not he, was leader. 
 Derby was lazy, fonder of Homer and of racing 
 than of politics, and disinclined to those social 
 and public activities which might have at once 
 consolidated his party and taught him the real 
 mind of the country. Consequently his own 
 mind, to the despair of Disraeli, did not move, 
 and naturally ran badly in harness with a mind 
 that did. The result was that the party coach 
 stopped at the Protectionist stage. And the 
 result of that was first the loss of Palmerston and 
 then the loss of the General Election of 1852. 
 Derby, though privately converted, postponed 
 any very public professions of the sort that bind 
 a party till after the elections that is to say, of 
 course, till they were too late to be of any use. 
 It was, in fact, none of his opponents but his 
 leader who prevented Disraeli from having a
 
 THE LOST OPPORTUNITIES 73 
 
 chance of ruling England till he was too old to 
 use it. Derby, like most magnates who have 
 all that this world can offer, did not like to be 
 bothered. He would not work for victory 
 himself, and was not willing to let Disraeli do 
 so. He had not the courage to take office in 
 
 1851, nor the openness of mind to keep it in 
 
 1852. Worst of all, he let the ball pass to 
 Palmerston in 1855. Disraeli could not afford 
 to quarrel with him, and had simply to swallow 
 in silence the bitter cup of a succession of lost 
 opportunities. 
 
 II 
 
 It is the common tragedy of genius to spend 
 life in creating its fit surroundings and die 
 before it can use or enjoy them. That was not 
 quite Disraeli's fate, as it has been the fate of so 
 many poets. But it is part of the essence of 
 genius to be original, which means being unlike 
 other people, and to have an irresistible need of 
 self-expression, which means surprising and 
 offending them. Disraeli had all this in him, 
 quite as conspicuously as that other characteristic 
 of genius which has led to its being defined as 
 a capacity for taking pains. This volume is a 
 picture of the struggle between the two. Disraeli 
 is shown in it taking upon himself all the trouble 
 which Derby will not take. We see him con- 
 ciliating men, encouraging them, driving them ; 
 we see him thinking and reading and working. 
 All prudent and practical measures towards the
 
 74 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 attainment of success he will take. But that is 
 not the whole man. He must be allowed to be 
 imprudent too. He is no mere Parliamentary 
 manager ; he is a man of ideas, and ideas are 
 irrepressible things. Consequently, at the very 
 moment when he is trying to convince a crowd 
 of country squires that he is also a country 
 gentleman and their natural leader, he must 
 publish " Tancred." The greatest of his diffi- 
 culties was that he was a Jew, and he must needs 
 publish a book which is one prolonged glorifi- 
 cation of Judaism. He was distrusted because 
 he was not understood ; and by way of winning 
 the confidence of church-going Tories he offered 
 them an identification of Judaism and Christianity 
 and a solution of both into " a great Asian 
 mystery." 
 
 Nor was his originality content with the 
 comparatively safe channel of fiction. He went 
 out of his way to introduce his views of the 
 mission and greatness of the Hebrew race into 
 his " Life of Lord George Bentinck." Nay, he 
 made his mysterious and unpalatable opinions 
 the matter of a long speech in the very House 
 of Commons itself, which received it in chilling 
 silence. So faith creates the mountains which 
 it has to remove. Whenever Disraeli's imagina- 
 tion was touched he cast prudence to the winds. 
 Neither the grumbling of his party nor the 
 written protest of Derby prevented his insisting 
 that the time had come for the English nation 
 to realize the vastness of the responsibilities it 
 had undertaken in its Indian Empire. From
 
 HIS UNIVERSAL OUTLOOK 75 
 
 first to last Asia could move him more than 
 Europe. India was a part of Asia, and by that 
 bold speech in 1853 he began the work which 
 he crowned twenty-three years later when 
 Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress 
 of India. But at the moment the speech 
 achieved nothing except new difficulties for the 
 speaker. 
 
 That was Disraeli all through. Genius is 
 always greater than the business it undertakes 
 to do. It cannot live without finding for itself 
 its indispensable but often dangerous escapes 
 of the spirit outside and above the field in which 
 it works with other men. So Disraeli, sparring 
 with competent Parliamentarians like Wood and 
 Graham, imposing his leadership on common- 
 place Tories like Herries and Beresford, doing 
 this necessary business and doing it well, cannot 
 submit to be confined to it. The result is that 
 in Mr. Buckle's hands, as in Mr. Monypenny's, 
 he appears again in solitary distinction among 
 English statesmen, as the one man who took a 
 universal view of politics while all the rest, with 
 the partial exception of Burke, never got beyond 
 an English or at widest a European outlook. 
 His mind refused to be shut up in the question 
 of whether Mr. Speaker was or was not to be got 
 out of the Chair. He was the keenest of party 
 leaders, but he never could help looking beyond 
 the prospects of the Session. He thought of 
 the current problems of party disputes in terms 
 of race and religion and the essential elements 
 of human society, and when speaking about
 
 76 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 what was to be done next year in England his 
 foreseeing imagination was often wondering how 
 the expected results might ultimately be affected 
 by what would happen twenty or fifty years later 
 on the Continent of Europe or perhaps in Egypt 
 or India. In the midst of triumphant commer- 
 cialism he turns to the brooding East and scoffs 
 at the European who 
 
 talks of progress, because by an ingenious ap- 
 plication of some scientific acquirements he has 
 established a society which has mistaken comfort 
 for civilization. 
 
 He turns from the Budget of 1848 to tell Cobden, 
 in language which now seems almost prophetic, 
 that it is madness to expect universal peace 
 because America and England are rich and 
 contented ; wars are made, he says, " not by 
 the Powers which are contented and satisfied, 
 but by the race or prince who agitates for a 
 position." So in the same year he made a still 
 more remarkable prophecy. The Schleswig dis- 
 pute was beginning, and Disraeli, with rare but 
 unluckily very transient prescience, brushed 
 aside the ostensible pretexts for the action of 
 Prussia, and pointed out that the policy adopted 
 meant an eventual challenge to England on the 
 sea. There is a still more characteristic prophecy, 
 which also finds its fulfilment in the Germany of 
 Nietzsche, to be found in a curious passage in 
 the " Life of Bentinck," where he foresees that 
 the intellectual anarchy of atheism may lead to
 
 PRIVATE LIFE 77 
 
 " a revival of old national idolatries, modified 
 and mythically dressed up according to the 
 spirit of the age." 
 
 This volume is much more exclusively political 
 than its predecessors. But there are some 
 pictures of Disraeli's private life. There is a 
 chapter, unnecessarily long, about his curious 
 friendship with Mrs. Brydges Willyams, giving 
 the letters by which he entertained and flattered 
 that eccentric old lady, which not every one 
 will find so " graceful " as Mr. Buckle considers 
 them. But there is not much else that is not 
 politics or literature. The best, perhaps, is a 
 pleasant little picture of him as a country gentle- 
 man, a rdle on which he greatly plumed himself. 
 Part of it was, no doubt, a not very successful 
 assumption ; but at least in his woods he was 
 entirely at home in his own special way. One 
 would like to have heard his talks with his 
 woodmen. Not the least characteristic touch 
 in his own account of them is the escape from 
 the plantations of Hughenden to the Forest and 
 the Ocean of a larger world : 
 
 I like very much the society of woodmen. . . . 
 I don't know any men who are so complete masters 
 of their business and of the secluded but delicious 
 world in which they live. They are healthy, their 
 language is picturesque ; they live in the air and 
 Nature whispers to them many of her secrets. A 
 Forest is like the Ocean, monotonous only to the 
 ignorant. 
 
 The man is here, in these few words, quite as 
 truly as in any of the long Parliamentary speeches :
 
 78 DISRAELI, 1846-1855 
 
 a man who really loved both Nature and the 
 things of the mind, as he really loved England, 
 but who could never be quite simple and natural 
 in his language about any of them; a Jew, 
 an exotic, a man of genius, whose imagina- 
 tion was not to be confined within any park 
 palings, whether of Hughenden or of the House 
 of Commons.
 
 IV 
 
 THE POLITICAL LIFE OF 
 DISRAELI, 1855-1868* 
 
 FEW people will find this volume f as interesting 
 as its predecessor. Its defect, to put it plainly, 
 is that there is nothing great in it. There is, 
 indeed, always Disraeli's miraculous fertility of 
 cleverness of all sorts, and that may itself be 
 considered a kind of greatness. But it has no 
 longer anything really great to do. In the 
 second volume we had the magnificent daring 
 of the single-handed assault upon Peel and the 
 invective which was its weapon, a swordlike use 
 of the tongue which, though it could not produce 
 a series of classics like Cicero's Philippics, far 
 surpassed Cicero in the difficulties it had to 
 overcome and the success with which it overcame 
 them. That was greatness of one kind. In the 
 third volume we had greatness of another ; with 
 courage again perhaps as its most striking 
 ingredient, but this time moral courage we had 
 the publication of " Tancred " in 1847 and of 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, May, n, 1916. 
 
 t " The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," 
 by George Earle Buckle, in succession to W. F. Mony- 
 penny. Volume IV., 1855-1868. (Murray. i2J.net.) 
 79
 
 8o DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 " The Life of Lord George Bentinck " in 1851. 
 The whole of the one and the most remarkable 
 chapter in the other were devoted to the proud 
 vindication of the glories of the Jewish race. 
 And they came from a man whose ambition was 
 to be Prime Minister of England and who well 
 knew that the principal obstacle in his path was 
 just that fact that he was a Jew. Is there in all 
 the history of English politics a single instance 
 of a venture of faith greater than this, involving, 
 as it did, the risking of a whole career for the 
 sake of convictions outside politics which most 
 men would have felt they were in no way called 
 upon to obtrude upon the public to their own 
 injury ? 
 
 But in this volume we have neither the 
 courage of the gladiator which won Disraeli 
 his place in politics nor the greater courage 
 which risked it for a higher cause. Here he is 
 throughout in possession of the leadership. 
 There are frequent grumblings, and he is 
 driven more than once to offers of retirement, 
 which may or may not have been sincere. But 
 his seat on his difficult and thankless throne is 
 not in fact seriously challenged. Men might 
 distrust and dislike him, as in fact they did 
 right on till the living apotheosis of 1874. But 
 by this time it was plain to everybody that his 
 genius was absolutely indispensable to his party. 
 The problem now was how to turn a reluctant 
 acquiescence in the fact of his superiority into 
 the perfect confidence, devotion, and union 
 which is the ideal relation of a party to its chief.
 
 DISRAELI AND HIS PARTY 81 
 
 It was obviously not an easy one. Nothing could 
 make a Jew who was half mystic and half 
 adventurer the natural leader of Tory squires 
 and parsons. But if they could not feel the 
 relation a natural one, as indeed they never did, 
 the thing was to make them feel it not only 
 unavoidable, which on the whole they did, but 
 also safe, which as yet on the whole they did not. 
 This volume is the record of Disraeli's attempts 
 to perform a task uncongenial to so daring a 
 genius. " Playing for safety " is not an inspiring 
 business at any time ; and Disraeli's method of 
 doing it by appearing in the House of Commons 
 as the apostle of non-intervention, of general 
 economy, especially in Naval and Military 
 Estimates, and of a Colonial policy which 
 looked upon colonies as " deadweights," may 
 have been all very well as Parliamentary Op- 
 position to Palmerston, but hardly increases our 
 impressions of the greatness of the man. And 
 the practice which he adopted at this time of 
 attending diocesan conferences and farmers' 
 dinners, where, oddly enough, he chose to 
 deliver some of his profoundest speeches, was 
 probably more successful in giving a momentary 
 interest to those functions than in securing the 
 settled and permanent confidence of clergy or 
 farmers in the strange orator who gave them so 
 much more wit and wisdom than they could 
 understand. 
 
 Mr. Buckle, then, has here scarcely had the 
 material for a volume of first-rate interest. 
 Throughout it his hero is merely holding his
 
 82 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 fortress. There is another disadvantage. We 
 are far more confined than before to the walls 
 of the House of Commons. And there never 
 was a period when the House of Commons was 
 less inspiring. Disraeli's famous phrase was 
 far more applicable to the rule of Palmerston in 
 the early sixties than to any other Ministry 
 before or since. Palmerston, in manner the 
 frankest of men, was as Prime Minister the very 
 personification of " organized hypocrisy." No 
 one really knew that better than Gladstone and 
 Bright. Yet Gladstone saved him by becoming 
 his Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Bright 
 twice threw Derby and Disraeli out in his 
 favour. Derby himself would take no steps to 
 turn out a Minister who used the Whig flag and 
 a Liberal army to play the Conservative game 
 far more effectively than any Conservative could 
 play it. The result was, of course, a situation 
 in which nothing could occur except small 
 tactical moves based on opportunism. And 
 the consequence of that is that there is less of 
 the original and spontaneous Disraeli in this 
 volume than there was in those which went 
 before or will be in those which succeed it. In 
 his free and irresponsible youth he might say 
 what he liked because, whatever he said, every- 
 body took it for clever nonsense ; in his old age 
 of incense and adoration he might say what he 
 liked because, whatever he said, everybody took 
 it for profound wisdom. Even in his early 
 middle age he could enjoy the great escape of 
 " Tancred." But in the sixties the only substi-
 
 DISRAELI AND RELIGION 83 
 
 tute for an escape which he could enjoy was an 
 hour in the Sheldonian Theatre cracking jokes 
 against Huxley and Colenso among the rural 
 clergy and the Oxford dons. And even on that 
 occasion, profound and amply vindicated by 
 time as was his instinctive distrust of mere 
 intellectualism in religion and mere materialism 
 in science, there is still a taint of the same 
 " playing for safety " in nearly all he said. The 
 speech was not, like " Tancred," a real escape 
 of the free spirit of Disraeli. It was partly a 
 sincere expression of his deeply held faith in that 
 religion of the spirit which was the gift of his 
 race to the world. But it was partly, also, a 
 piece of more or less dishonest electioneering. 
 For no one knew better than Disraeli that there 
 was much more than " provincial arrogance " in 
 Jowett and much more than " glib assurance " in 
 Huxley and Darwin. " Man is a being born to 
 believe." So he truly told his audience, rightly 
 warning them that if men and women were not 
 allowed to believe in Christianity they would 
 believe in something else which philosophers 
 might find even more irrational : a prophecy 
 the fulfilment of which is to be seen in our 
 streets as well as in our books and newspapers. 
 But a cynic might say that the greatest of all 
 proofs that man was born to believe lay in an 
 audience of clergymen accepting Disraeli as the 
 champion of orthodoxy as they understood it in 
 the year 1865. 
 
 But this Oxford adventure is only an oasis 
 in a desert of political manoeuvring. The book
 
 84 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 is given to thirteen years of the House of Commons 
 about ten of which were spent in an Opposition 
 which had often, by Derby's command, to be 
 half-hearted, and the remaining three in office 
 indeed, but not in power. That is the story, 
 and it cannot be a very exciting one. Mr. Buckle 
 does all that can be done for it by a good selection 
 and arrangement of his materials and by a lucid 
 and pleasant style. More, perhaps, could have 
 been made of it if he had given less space to the 
 chronicling of the details of debates and political 
 intrigues and more to a large discussion, looking 
 before and after, of the really vital issues in 
 home, Imperial, and foreign affairs which lay 
 concealed under these Parliamentary squabbles 
 and for the most part quite unperceived by the 
 squabblers. To that accusation no English 
 politician stands generally less open than Disraeli. 
 More, as we have seen, than any Englishman 
 he had always in mind that Parliament was only 
 a part of England, England of Europe, Europe of 
 the world. And the present never occupied him 
 so entirely as to make him forget that it came out 
 of the past and was leading to the future. There 
 is an interesting letter, quoted here, written to 
 Disraeli by his Saxon friend Vitythum, in which 
 he says that after living fourteen years in England 
 he was " struck by the fact that you appeared the 
 only man in England working for posterity. 
 Your genius bore to my eyes always the historical 
 stamp, and I never listened to a speech of yours 
 without thinking, this word, this sentence, will 
 be remembered a hundred years hence." It is
 
 THE TEMPORARY ECLIPSE 85 
 
 the language of friendship, even of flattery \ 
 but at least it does not seem absurd, as it would 
 now if we found it in a letter to Palmerston or 
 Gladstone. The melancholy truth, however, 
 is that even this greatest of Disraeli's gifts 
 suffered some eclipse at this period of his life. 
 What were the great questions that came up in 
 its course ? The only domestic problem of 
 importance was that of Reform, Disraeli's daring 
 solution of which is the most striking event 
 recorded in this volume. But it was not home 
 affairs, but India and America, Italy and Prussia, 
 that provided the real interest of the time. 
 How did Disraeli's mind respond to these 
 problems ? 
 
 We have always in fairness to remember that 
 he was not altogether a free man, for the simple 
 reason that he had to follow Derby and to 
 oppose Palmerston. That must be borne in 
 mind, and is no doubt the key to many speeches 
 that add nothing to his reputation. But it can- 
 not alter the fact that he sho\vs scarcely a sign of 
 prophetic sympathy with Italy (even refusing to 
 meet Garibaldi), and scarcely a sign of prophetic 
 distrust of Prussia. Like his correspondent 
 King Leopold, he utterly misread the real danger 
 to England and to Europe. He was frightened 
 at the wholly imaginary menace of a unity of the 
 Latin races under France, and was blind to the 
 other, so imminent, and, as it now seems to us, 
 so certain, of a unity of the Germans under 
 Prussia. He was even mad enough in 1863 to 
 imagine Prussia in danger of partition, and to say 
 
 G
 
 86 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 privately in 1864 that she was " a country with- 
 out any bottom and could not maintain a real 
 war for six months." In Parliament, in spite of 
 some misgivings on the part of some of his 
 colleagues, he took the line of peace and non- 
 interference on behalf of Denmark, imagining 
 that to go to war with Germany was to " make 
 France the mistress of Europe." No doubt 
 most other statesmen were equally blind ; but 
 then it is precisely the glory of Disraeli that he 
 invites a higher standard of judgment. In this 
 case he saw rather less than the others, and 
 appears to have been largely influenced by the 
 party situation and the fear of helping Palmerston 
 into a successful war of which he said the Whigs 
 would get all the credit. 
 
 It is pleasanter to turn away from Europe, 
 for the farther a scene lay from the House of 
 Commons the more clearly it was seen by the 
 true Disraeli. Even in this rather drab and 
 dreary period of his life Disraeli was occasionally 
 inspired when his eyes crossed the seas. Did 
 any one except Burke ever make such a speech 
 on the hustings as that Disraeli made in 1859, 
 the year when, as Mr. Buckle aptly notes, both 
 England and Prussia were rejoicing over the birth 
 of the boy who was to be William II. ? Which 
 of the politicians of those days at all understood 
 what he told them in that speech, that, whatever 
 might be the fate of Europe, England would 
 still have " an illustrious future " ? England, 
 he said, is no " mere Power of the Old World. 
 Her geographical position, her laws, her language,
 
 DISRAELI AND THE COURT 87 
 
 and religion connect her as much with the New 
 World as with the Old." So he threw all his 
 weight into keeping the peace with the United 
 States in the crisis of 1862, and not only was it 
 he and his colleagues who against the Radicals 
 created the Dominion of Canada, but he went 
 farther : he insisted that, though no longer 
 bound to us by any legal tie, even the United 
 States were still our Colonies and might still be 
 expected to be our natural allies. 
 
 In this field (though there were private and 
 momentary stupidities like that of talking of 
 Colonies as " deadweights ") we do get glimpses 
 of the great Disraeli. But it is difficult not to 
 suspect that his attitude, in this as in other 
 matters, was partly inspired by a motive to 
 which Mr. Buckle draws no attention. Is it 
 merely a coincidence that on all these questions 
 that of Italy, that of Denmark and Schleswig, 
 that of the difficulty with the United States 
 Disraeli's policy was the policy of the Court ? 
 Like everything else with Disraeli, his attitude 
 towards the Queen was decided by a compound 
 of self-interest and imagination. From the first 
 he set himself to win the favour of the Court. 
 That there was no element of sycophancy or 
 insincerity in his way of doing it no one will 
 assert who has read his letters to the Queen. 
 The one which in this volume compares the 
 Prince Consort to Sir Philip Sidney was neither 
 the first nor the last of its kind. No doubt he 
 felt that the Court alone could give him the 
 element of social strength, the lack of which was
 
 88 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 one of his principal difficulties. But to think 
 that this was all is the easy blunder of common- 
 place cynics who will never understand Disraeli. 
 To him the woman who sat on the throne of the 
 Plantagenets was necessarily a great deal more 
 than she was to men whose vision was limited 
 to the House, the clubs, and the constituencies. 
 The Crown touched his imagination and he 
 believed it had a future as well as a past. And 
 he may well have been partly influenced, even in 
 his blunders about Italy and Prussia, by a 
 deliberate desire to increase the weight of the 
 Sovereign in the shaping of English policy. 
 
 At any rate there is no doubt that there was 
 political wisdom as well as imagination in his 
 prescient suggestions about the right position 
 of the Sovereign of the Indian Empire. Who 
 but he was capable of saying in 1857, " You can 
 only act upon the opinion of Eastern nations 
 through their imagination " ? And who but he 
 understood that, for that reason, you must draw 
 much nearer the visible relations between the 
 peoples of India and " their real Ruler and 
 Sovereign Queen Victoria " ? The speech in 
 which these words occur is by far the greatest 
 in this volume. Almost every word Disraeli 
 uttered in it has since received the visible seal 
 and sanction of the event. It is difficult to 
 overestimate the rich harvest which the British 
 Empire is at this moment reaping from the 
 policy of the Derby Government after the Mutiny, 
 in which the sympathy, the ideas, and the 
 imagination came, of course, from Disraeli,
 
 DISRAELI AND INDIA 89 
 
 while the simple and noble language of the 
 great Proclamation which inaugurated the new 
 era was, it seems, the contribution of the scholarly 
 Derby. From that day the great vision of 
 Burke began to be accomplished. From that 
 day we have seen ourselves, and on the whole 
 been seen by the natives of India, to be in India 
 not as conquerors but, in Disraeli's words, as 
 protectors " of the laws and customs, the property 
 and religion " of the princes and peoples of that 
 vast country. Twenty years later Disraeli put 
 the visible crown to his work when under his 
 auspices Queen Victoria became Empress of 
 India. And that the new relation has been no 
 nominal or merely ceremonial change has been 
 proved by the great success of the present 
 Emperor's visit to India, and still more by 
 India's eager and generous anticipation of the 
 Emperor's call to service when the day of danger 
 came in August, 1914. 
 
 It will seem strange to people of a certain 
 kind that it should have been possible to write 
 so much about this volume without so far saying 
 a word of the Reform Act of 1867. No doubt, 
 looked at through Parliamentary and electioneer- 
 ing spectacles, that was the great event of the 
 time. But the truth is that in these tremendous 
 days, when the future of Europe and the world 
 is being decided on land and sea, it is still possible 
 to regard the birth of Italy and of Prussia, the 
 new birth of the United States, of Canada, and 
 of India as great events, whereas the matter of 
 creating a few thousands, or a few scores of
 
 90 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 thousands, of new voters seems an affair of very 
 parochial importance. The crucial struggle 
 about Reform was decided in 1832. It was 
 impossible to go so far without ultimately going 
 further. So the Reform Bill of 1867 is a 
 secondary event in more senses than that of the 
 order of time. No doubt the admission of the 
 wage-earner to a great, if not at once the greatest, 
 share in political power marks an important 
 stage in our constitutional development. But 
 it was one which had long been foreseen by all 
 men of political intelligence. And by Disraeli 
 it had been welcomed in advance. His personal 
 conviction had always been in favour of going 
 behind and through the middle classes of 1832 
 and calling the nation as a whole to a share in 
 the national counsels. Still, few will feel that 
 the word Reform is one of the safest to inscribe 
 on the banner of his fame. His attitude towards 
 it, like that of everybody else except Bright, 
 lacked sincerity and consistency. And, though 
 his passage of the Bill of 1867 was striking 
 proof of the ascendancy he had obtained over 
 his party, it may be doubted whether it redounds 
 very greatly to the credit either of his intellect 
 or of his character. 
 
 The death of Palmerston made it certain 
 that the question of Reform would speedily 
 come up for settlement. What ought a Con- 
 servative leader to have done ? Surely he ought 
 to have recognized that on the one hand it was 
 necessary to make some advance, while on the 
 other hand it was desirable not to go too fast and
 
 THE REFORM BILL OF 1867 91 
 
 to prevent the country being committed to the 
 control of an electorate based on mere numbers. 
 Both of these were essential Conservative 
 principles and the second was frequently 
 emphasized by Disraeli. What happened ? He 
 might probably have secured both, and he did 
 secure neither. Why ? Because, like the 
 Liberals in 1858, he cared much less about 
 settling the question than about defeating his 
 opponents. If he had let the Russell- Gladstone 
 Bill pass, that moderate measure might have 
 adjourned further controversy for years. But 
 the temptation to a party victory followed by 
 office was too great, and he took up, in alliance 
 with Lowe and the Adullamites, an attitude of 
 more or less uncompromising resistance to the 
 Bill and even to Reform itself. The result was 
 that the Conservatives gained office while the 
 Radicals gained power. Disraeli in office had 
 to go a great deal farther to satisfy Bright than 
 Bright's own friends had been willing to go. 
 The fact is that, being as Mr. Buckle says 
 " always an opportunist on Reform," Disraeli 
 had neither thought out a scheme nor arranged 
 for Parliamentary support when he presented 
 his improvised Bill which never had or deserved 
 to have a real majority in its favour and was 
 transformed into a thoroughly Radical measure 
 in the course of its progress through the House 
 of Commons. The party accepted the daring 
 manoeuvre in the hope of " dishing the Whigs " ; 
 and certainly the history of the next thirty years 
 vindicated Disraeli's confidence in the national
 
 92 DISRAELI, 1855-1868 
 
 spirit of the working man. But the mere 
 counting of heads is not statesmanship, and the 
 Act of 1867 did nothing to solve the fundamental 
 problem of democracy, which is how to give the 
 wage-earning classes a great share, perhaps it 
 should be the greatest, in political power without 
 giving them the whole. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, perhaps, Mr. Buckle is 
 too inclined to hold a brief for his hero, who 
 hardly cuts a very heroic or even a very honour- 
 able figure as he introduces into the Constitution 
 Bright 's principle of numbers, in which neither 
 he nor his party believed. But hero-worship is 
 a venial sin in a biographer. And Mr. Buckle 
 commits it so plausibly and pleasantly that he 
 will win an easy indulgence from nearly all his 
 readers. They will warmly congratulate him on 
 the steady progress he is making in his great 
 task. He is quickening his pace as he advances, 
 and the goal begins almost to be in sight. The 
 last volume covered nine years. This covers 
 thirteen. In 1868 Disraeli had only thirteen 
 more years to live ; so perhaps the next volume 
 may complete the picture. If so, will Mr. 
 Buckle remember, before he lays down his pen, 
 to give us more, much more, than he has yet 
 given of Disraeli's private habits, tastes, and 
 characteristics ? We get in this volume a few 
 meagre glimpses of these small things that tell 
 one more than speeches of what the inner and 
 essential Disraeli was. We see him offering 
 prawns, " the rosy-coloured tribute of Torbay," 
 to Bishop Wilberforce ; we see him complaining
 
 SIGNIFICANT TRIFLES 93 
 
 of official ink and paper, which give his writing 
 " a cheesemongerish look " ; we see him mocking, 
 as Mr. Gladstone could never have mocked, at 
 the bald heads and general hideousness of the 
 members of a Statistical Congress ; we see him 
 turning his back on the cheering Carlton, which 
 wanted him to be its guest at supper, hurrying 
 home to Mrs. Disraeli, who had " got him a 
 raised pie from Fortnum and Mason's and a 
 bottle of champagne," and crying to her as he 
 finished his supper, " Why, my dear, you are 
 more like a mistress than a wife ! " But these 
 are trifles, however significant, and there are only 
 a very few of them. Nor is any of them so 
 amusing as many stories about Disraeli which 
 Mr. Buckle might easily have heard and recorded. 
 Not so amusing, perhaps, as one probably un- 
 known to him, which is told by a lady still 
 living to whom Lady Beaconsfield once said : 
 " Ah, people may say what they like about the 
 courage of public men. All I know is I always 
 have to pull the strings of Dizzy's shower-bath ! " 
 Even absurdities of this kind enliven biography 
 and occasionally illuminate it. Let Mr. Buckle 
 not forget in his last volume that he is writing 
 the life of one who was not only a great states- 
 man and a great political writer, but also one 
 of the most original, curious, interesting, and 
 interested human beings who ever walked through 
 the pageant of life.
 
 THE POLITICAL LIFE OF 
 DISRAELI, 1868-1881* 
 
 MR. BUCKLE has reached the end of his long 
 journey.f He will receive the congratulations 
 of everybody who cares about English political 
 history, and especially of that great majority of 
 them, including nearly all except the youngest, 
 who were readers of The Times during his 
 editorship. He was even more modest and self- 
 effacing as an editor than he is as a biographer. 
 Comparatively few of those who every day read 
 the paper which he edited were so much as 
 aware of his name, which, indeed, was hardly 
 known outside the small world of those who 
 write. But the name of a biographer cannot be 
 concealed ; least of all that of the biographer of 
 a man like Disraeli. And the biographer reveals 
 the editor, and wins for him the long-deferred, 
 one may even say scrupulously avoided, gratitude 
 of those who did not know to whose wisdom 
 and judgment and high sense of responsibility 
 they chiefly owed so much which they valued in 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, June 17, 1920. 
 
 t " The Life of Benjamin Disraeli," by George Earle 
 Buckle, in succession to W. F. Monypenny. Volumes V. 
 and VI. (Murray. 185. net each.) 
 94
 
 THE FIVE ACTS OF THE DRAMA 95 
 
 the great newspaper of which he was for so many 
 years the guiding and directing head. 
 
 It was a wise decision of the biographer to 
 give us his last two volumes together. The 
 interest of the book has certainly suffered by the 
 long intervals between the appearance of the 
 earlier volumes. The mass of material was so 
 great that delays and divisions were perhaps 
 inevitable. But it is good to have no more of 
 them. The last phase of Disraeli is given, as it 
 should be, as a single act, though in two, or 
 perhaps three, scenes. The first act of the 
 drama is the brilliant boy, whose genius was 
 almost hidden under social, literary, and political 
 fopperies. The second is the David who slew 
 Goliath. The third is the Chief of the Staff, in 
 an army whose officers despised him as an out- 
 sider and distrusted him as a genius, under a 
 commander-in-chief who with the reputation of 
 a Rupert was in fact too lazy to keep the army 
 moving and too cautious ever to risk a battle. In 
 the fourth he has succeeded to the chief command, 
 has to fight on ground chosen by the new general- 
 issimo of the enemy, and is defeated. The fifth, 
 given in these two last volumes, is the duel, 
 thirteen years long, with that arch enemy of 
 whom he is first the rival, then the conqueror, 
 and finally the victim. The political history of 
 England between 1868 and 1881 is that of the 
 struggle between Disraeli and Gladstone. 
 
 No two men were ever more unlike. The 
 points of contrast between them would take a 
 volume to enumerate ; the things they had in
 
 96 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 common were just three. Each was a politician, 
 an author, and an affectionate husband. But 
 even here their ways of being these things were 
 so opposite that they were scarcely ever more 
 unlike than when they met on the same ground. 
 The Olympian who pooh-poohed the Bulgarian 
 atrocities as " coffee-house babble " was scarcely 
 more remote from the fervent orator who made 
 Mid-Lothian ring with them than the writer of 
 Mr. Gladstone's innumerable magazine articles 
 from the author of " Coningsby " or " Sybil," 
 or the husband of Mrs. Gladstone from the 
 husband of Lady Beaconsfield. Probably Lady 
 Beaconsfield, or after her death, Lady Bradford, 
 received more of the flattering homages of love 
 in a fortnight than Mrs. Gladstone received in 
 all her life. There are many chapters in Disraeli's 
 novels which contain more ideas than are to be 
 found in all the multifarious publications of 
 Mr. Gladstone. To emphasize the contrast is, 
 of course, to force an open door. But not so, 
 perhaps, to ask what it was that lay at the root 
 of it. The two men were sometimes thought 
 of as just two party leaders like Derby and 
 Russell, or even Pitt and Fox, who took different 
 views of public questions and had different ways 
 of managing Parliament and the country. But 
 the cleavage really goes much deeper. It is that 
 which divides the man of imagination from the 
 practical man, the artist from the moralist, the 
 man who is thinking in perfect freedom, furnish- 
 ing his motives and materials out of his own 
 sources, from the man who is the slave of his
 
 GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI 97 
 
 education and his world, whose thoughts are 
 always occasioned and directed by some impulsion 
 from without ; in a word, that which divides 
 genius from talent however marvellous, or, if 
 you like it better, the genius of ideas from the 
 genius of administration. Akin to this is the 
 contrast between the universal way of looking at 
 things natural to Disraeli and occasionally so 
 disconcerting to his political supporters, and 
 Gladstone's entirely local, national, and traditional 
 habit of mind, always through all changes 
 narrowly English, and English of a particular 
 class and type, the type formed by the Anglican 
 Church, the public schools and the universities, 
 and developed by practical activities, public or 
 private. No doubt the ordinary man of that 
 type does not write books or pamphlets about 
 Homer, or Vaticanism, or Bishop Butler, or 
 Home Rule. But all he would need for doing 
 so is more brains. All those subjects belong to 
 his world and are in the line of his development. 
 But " the two nations " of " Sybil," the 
 " Sidonian " politics of " Coningsby," the 
 " Asian Mystery " of " Tancred " and " Lord 
 George Bentinck " are, or were when Disraeli 
 wrote of them, all quite out of his reach and ken. 
 These are the two men whose rivalry divided 
 England during the thirteen years with which 
 these volumes deal. No such two had filled the 
 air of Parliament with greatness since the days of 
 Pitt and Fox ; perhaps none such will be seen 
 there again. It is a glorious theme for a bio- 
 grapher. We have had it from the side of
 
 98 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 Gladstone. Now we have it from that of 
 Disraeli. Mr. Buckle, of course, makes no 
 pretence of being a Lord Morley. He is neither 
 a great statesman, nor a great student, nor a 
 great critic of life and letters, and he seldom or 
 never drops in passing those pregnant general 
 reflections, often plainly born of personal experi- 
 ences, which are the salt of Lord Morley's book 
 and give the reader a sense of his presence on 
 almost every page. Mr. Buckle keeps in the 
 main to the part of chronicler ; and when he 
 comments he confines himself very closely to 
 the defence of his hero and the business in hand, 
 seldom travelling into the history or philosophy 
 of politics at large. Fate has, in truth, sorted 
 rather strangely the two statesmen and their 
 biographers. The traditional, orthodox, and 
 conventional Englishman and Anglican has been 
 handed over to the cosmopolitan philosopher, 
 while the typical product of Winchester and 
 Oxford deals with the man who was always an 
 alien and a mystery in the land he lived to rule. 
 When one reads Lord Morley one feels that, in 
 discussing Gladstone's policy or speeches, he 
 has in his mind, in the background, if not on the 
 surface, Aristotle or Demosthenes or Burke, the 
 problems and lessons of history, Greek, Roman, 
 and French, as well as English. Mr. Buckle 
 seldom takes us, even by suggestion, outside 
 the circumstances and considerations which 
 immediately influenced those who supported 
 or opposed his hero's actions. The data he 
 deals with are the facts and arguments as they
 
 CHURCH APPOINTMENTS 99 
 
 were at the time ; the Court before which he 
 tries them is that of the results as we can now 
 see them. The consequence is that Gladstone 
 is seen in the light of the universal rather more 
 than he deserves, and Disraeli rather less. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that Mr. Buckle's 
 modest abstentions from general principles make 
 liim a mere hero-worshipper or partisan. Of 
 this his philosophic rival is certainly more 
 guilty than he. The universal has its dangers. 
 It fixes the eyes on general principles, which in 
 Mr. Gladstone's case were certainly lofty and 
 pure, and ignores the pressure of passing 
 occasions and interests, which was as powerful 
 with him as with other men and no more en- 
 nobling. Consequently it is a little unconscious 
 of such things as the Jesuitical casuistry which 
 defended the Collier and Ewelme appointments 
 and a little unaware that other motives beside 
 the ostensible ones had their influence in pro- 
 moting the Bulgarian agitation and the conversion 
 to Home Rule. Mr. Buckle's narrower vision 
 often sees clearer. No doubt his path is easier 
 Disraeli himself made no pretence of being in 
 politics solely for the service of God. But with- 
 out rising to that height he might have taken, 
 and Gladstone did take, a much higher view of 
 his responsibilities than Mr. Buckle shows him 
 actually taking. There is, for instance, the 
 matter of Church appointments. It is amusing 
 to find Disraeli writing in 1875 to Lord Salisbury, 
 who was supposed to represent " High Church " 
 in the Cabinet : " Can you suggest a good
 
 ioo DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 High Church dean who is not a damned fool, 
 and won't make himself ridiculous ? " and to 
 find Lord Salisbury replying, " I have put 
 down all that I know about possible High 
 Church deans ' who are not damned fools ' a 
 formidable restriction ! " But however enter- 
 taining and however well justified this corre- 
 spondence may be, it hardly suggests the ideal 
 spirit in which Church appointments should be 
 approached. Mr. Buckle deserves credit for 
 making no secret of it, nor of the very electioneer- 
 ing grounds on which some ecclesiastical 
 dignitaries, including Bishops, were actually 
 appointed, and more, but for the Queen, would 
 have been, in preparation for the Dissolution 
 of 1868. 
 
 On the whole, then, everybody who is not an 
 extreme partisan will recognise the honesty, the 
 lucidity and ability with which Mr. Buckle has 
 stated his case. A case it is, of course. He 
 writes as frankly from the one point of view as 
 Lord Morley from the other. Perhaps the day 
 of final judgment is not yet ; and neither could 
 have done what neither has much attempted. 
 Meanwhile we have here again one of the most 
 exciting of Parliamentary stories told from 
 inside with fullness and authority. We are 
 present at every stage of the great duel ; we 
 stand by the side of one of the two champions 
 and are witnesses of his triumphs and defeats, 
 and, more than that, auditors and almost par- 
 takers of all his secret hopes and fears. And 
 there is a still greater thing. The duel was no
 
 THE QUEEN AND THE CABINET 101 
 
 mere personal struggle. It " shook realms and 
 nations in its jar," as truly as that which death 
 was just bringing to a close when the older of 
 these later protagonists was being born. The 
 life of England was bound up in it. The destiny 
 even of Europe seemed sometimes to hang on 
 it. It is no small thing to be, as it were, made 
 members of the Cabinet which decided such 
 issues. It is scarcely too much to say that that 
 is what Mr. Buckle has been enabled to make us. 
 The kindness of his Majesty the King has allowed 
 him to publish a very large number of the letters 
 which passed almost daily between Disraeli and 
 Queen Victoria. To the subsequent wrath of 
 Gladstone when he discovered it, Disraeli was 
 in the habit of giving the Queen detailed accounts 
 of Cabinets and of the various opinions of 
 Ministers, a practice in which he was clearly 
 within his rights, for Ministers are individually 
 and not merely collectively the servants and 
 advisers of the Sovereign, and the Sovereign 
 cannot know too much about them. In any case 
 we are now the gainers by it. We see policy 
 being shaped day by day, and those who helped 
 the shaping and those who hindered. Of the 
 Queen's letters what is to be said is that nothing 
 has previously been published which gives any- 
 thing like so vivid a picture of her as she was 
 at this time ; a somewhat strange mixture of 
 passion and common sense, self-will and sense 
 of duty, shrewdness and limited vision ; with, 
 above all, three great qualities possessed without 
 measure or limit or mixture of alloy ; truthful- 
 
 H
 
 102 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 ness, courage, and love of England. To these 
 letters are added those of Derby, Salisbury, and 
 other Ministers. The result is that in this book 
 we hear the words and read the letters not only 
 of the Ministers, but of Bismarck, Gortschakoff, 
 Schouvaloff, and the rest as soon as they were 
 said or written, and are told at once what the 
 Queen and her Ministers thought of them. 
 
 This is the greatest thing in the book, but it 
 is not the newest. That is the curious corre- 
 spondence with Lady Bradford and Lady 
 Chesterfield. Till now scarcely any one has been 
 allowed to see these letters ; even Mr. Mony- 
 penny is said to have been refused a sight of 
 them when he began this Life. Happily, Mr. 
 Buckle has been more fortunate, and all his 
 readers will be full of gratitude to the late 
 Commander Bridgeman and the other owners 
 of the letters for their generosity in allowing 
 this singular, but characteristic, episode of 
 Disraeli's old age to be made public. No one 
 who knows anything of the facts doubts the 
 depth and sincerity of his love for his wife. To 
 the end his regret for her, his loneliness without 
 her, is a frequent theme of his letters. The very 
 love letters with which he embarrassed Lady 
 Bradford 1 100 of them in eight years probably 
 even the letter in which he asked her widowed 
 sister to become his wife, were written on paper 
 which recalled his loss of Lady Beaconsfield by 
 the thickest of black edges. He was once 
 looking with Lord Redesdale at the preparations 
 for an official banquet which he had to give,
 
 ACTOR AND ARTIST 103 
 
 " when all of a sudden," says Lord Redesdale, 
 he turned round, his eyes were dim and his 
 voice husky, as he said, " Ah, my dear fellow, 
 you are happy, you have a wife." He was a 
 born actor ; and this, like the language of 
 Oriental devotion which he addressed to the 
 Queen, like his mystical raptures about race 
 and destiny and religion and England, was no 
 doubt, in one sense, acting. That is to say, it 
 was an imaginative embodiment of the truth. 
 In this, as in everything else, as unlike as possible 
 to the typical English gentleman of whom it was 
 his fate and his pride to be the political leader, 
 he could not rest till he had given his thoughts 
 and feelings a visible shape, an external life of 
 expression, in which he and others could see, 
 enjoy, and admire them. And, of course, the 
 artist in him naturally became what a great 
 writer said it was an artist's function to be 
 " a magnifying mirror of the truth." But, 
 whatever dullards might think, it was the truth, 
 not a lie, whether Lady Beaconsfield or Lady 
 Bradford, England or Queen Victoria, were the 
 picture in the mirror. No doubt Disraeli, who 
 was a man of ideas rather than of principles, 
 would occasionally make untrue statements 
 which Gladstone, the man of principles rather 
 than of ideas, would not have made. This book 
 shows him doing so once or twice, as on the 
 occasion of his first visit to Hatfield and in the 
 amusing story of a compliment he paid to Mr. 
 Mallock, who had then just published " The 
 New Republic." A lady anxious to capture a
 
 104 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 clever recruit for the party asked Disraeli to read 
 his book and send some complimentary message. 
 He seldom read new books, and declined that 
 part of the request. But he was quite equal to 
 producing the compliment without reading the 
 book. He gave the lady a note saying he was 
 going to Hughenden, and only wished it could 
 be " peopled with the bright creations of Mr. 
 Mallock's fancy " ! But few of us altogether 
 escape these polite insincerities even without the 
 excuse of a State or a party to serve by them. 
 And perhaps Gladstone's unconscious untruths, 
 if the more innocent, were the more dangerous. 
 Disraeli might have done the Ewelme job, and 
 might have defended it. But he would have 
 been well aware of what he was doing and 
 defending. Gladstone, with all his exalted and 
 sincere sense of truth and duty, was occasionally 
 afflicted with the kind of lie which Plato thought 
 the worst of all the lie which the liar is unaware 
 of because it is inside the soul. 
 
 However, there is no question of any kind of 
 lying in these love letters. They involve no 
 disloyalty to Lady Beaconsfield and no deceit 
 of Lady Bradford. Nothing in Disraeli seems 
 quite natural to English eyes. But in reality 
 nothing was more natural to him, being what he 
 was, old and lonely, a man who had all his life 
 been dependent on some woman for sympathy, 
 admiration, and affection, than that he should 
 turn, within a few months of his wife's death, 
 for inspiration, as he sincerely called it, to these 
 two great ladies who recalled his youth while
 
 LADY BRADFORD 105 
 
 they gilded, charmed, and consoled his old age. 
 The intimacy grew very rapidly. Before he 
 had been a widower six months Lady Chester- 
 field was already " Dearest Lady Ches.," and 
 he was her " most affectionate D." But though 
 he proposed to Lady Chesterfield, it was Lady 
 Bradford, who soon became " Selina," with 
 whom the intimacy was closest. Indeed, he 
 told her once that he loved her sister but was in 
 love with her ; and that there was all the differ- 
 ence between the two. It was to her, who did 
 not like his novels, as he complained, that the 
 master of irony cryptically dedicated his last 
 book by giving it the name of " Endymion," the 
 human lover of the Moon-Goddess Selene. 
 She naturally resented some of his extravagances, 
 and the lovers' quarrels between the elderly 
 statesman and a lady who was already a grand- 
 mother are sometimes entirely by his fault 
 a little ridiculous. His artistry was not always 
 in perfect taste : one can never enough remember 
 that he was of a race among whose many fine 
 qualities good taste is scarcely ever included. 
 But behind all this there was real sincerity : it is 
 not too much to say that there was a true cry of 
 the heart. He loved Lady Bradford for the 
 right reason : because she was what she was and 
 because he was himself. He knew that her 
 feelings to him were not the same as his to her ; 
 and admits that it was " natural and reasonable " 
 that this should be so. But, as he adds, " un- 
 fortunately for me my imagination did not 
 desert me with my youth." He was not a man
 
 io6 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 of miscellaneous friendships. He hated clubs 
 and cared little for the society of men. 
 
 I require perfect solitude or perfect sympathy. 
 My present life gives me neither of these ineffable 
 blessings. It may be brilliant but it is too frag- 
 mentary. It is not a complete existence. It gives 
 me neither the highest development of the intellect 
 or the heart : neither Poetry nor Love. 
 
 So he wrote to her in 1874 : anc * during the 
 seven years he still had to live she gave him 
 always more and more of the " perfect sympathy " 
 which he craved. She and Lord Bradford 
 gradually forgot his extravagances in their 
 admiration for his genius, in their pity for his 
 loneliness, and, no doubt, in their natural pride 
 in the friendship of a man on whom the eyes of 
 all Europe were fixed. And of course Lady 
 Bradford felt something more. Her letters to 
 him are destroyed. Some of them, as is evident 
 from his replies, complained of his embarrassing 
 attentions. But others, as may be seen in his 
 letter of July 4, 18^5, contained words of 
 affection for which he would have been unreason- 
 able indeed if he had not been willing, as he says, 
 " to bless the being who wrote them." 
 
 No review can hope even to touch on a 
 hundredth part of the topics and events dis- 
 cussed in the thirteen hundred large pages of 
 these two volumes. Disraeli was a many-sided 
 man, and the Premiership is a many-sided 
 office. Mr. Buckle's story is one of public
 
 A CROWDED LIFE 107 
 
 life and private : of the crowded parties of 
 London and the beechen solitudes of Hughenden : 
 of a writer of novels and a reader of the classics : 
 of the Queen and Lady Bradford : of the enemy 
 and the friend of Lord Salisbury : of the House 
 of Commons and the House of Lords : of 
 religion as a world-shaping force, his under- 
 standing of which makes Disraeli pre-eminent 
 among the writers of his day, and of religious 
 parties in the Church of England, his ignorance 
 of which was one of the chief causes of his down- 
 fall : of a policy in Ireland of which he resisted 
 the optimistic beginnings and foresaw the 
 disastrous end : of Abyssinia and Afghanistan, 
 India and South Africa, the Suez Canal and 
 Cyprus, the Franco-Prussian War and the 
 Russo-Turkish War, the Treaty of San Stefano 
 and the Treaty of Berlin. These are only a 
 fraction of the whole. Much of the book, for 
 instance, is occupied with Home affairs. Lord 
 Derby's cowardly refusal of office in 1855 
 prevented the author of " Sybil " from attaining 
 power till he was old and almost constantly ill. 
 Nothing in this book will be newer to the public 
 than the heroic courage with which the spirit of 
 Disraeli steeled itself to manage his Sovereign 
 and his colleagues, in fact, to rule England and 
 guide Europe, while his body, often racked with 
 pain, seemed as if it would refuse its office 
 altogether. But Mr. Buckle has no difficulty in 
 showing that, even at that eleventh hour and in 
 the midst of foreign distractions, Disraeli 
 managed to achieve work which makes his
 
 io8 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 record as a social reformer the very reverse 
 of a blank. His most discussed piece of home 
 legislation, the Public Worship Regulation Act, 
 was indeed a complete failure. But his support 
 of it was not his own choice ; it was almost 
 forced upon him by the Queen, who showed 
 herself as unwise in that matter as she showed 
 herself wise, much wiser and more public- 
 spirited than Disraeli, in the matter of great 
 Church appointments. But Disraeli's position 
 in these things was very much that of a foreigner, 
 and no foreigner has ever felt anything but 
 contempt for the English Ritualists. If a 
 Catholic, he prefers the real thing to the " mass 
 in masquerade " ; if a Protestant, he detests 
 traitors in the camp of the greatest of all the 
 Churches which defy Rome. This, however, 
 was a side issue, in which Disraeli's ignorance 
 and the Queen's prejudices betrayed them to 
 failure. In real social legislation there was no 
 failure, but the contrary. The crying needs of 
 the " condition of the people " were at once 
 taken in hand by Disraeli's Ministry. Measures 
 dealing with housing and Friendly Societies, 
 with the law of " conspiracy " in trade disputes, 
 with the hours of factory labour, with the 
 grievances of seamen and agricultural tenants, 
 soon became law. Lord Morley and Liberals 
 generally have affected to scoff at Disraeli's 
 work in this field. They need no answer but 
 the words of a Labour member of Parliament 
 spoken to his constituents in 1879 : " The 
 Conservative Party have done more for the
 
 EDUCATION OF HIS PARTY 109 
 
 working classes in five years than the Liberals 
 have in fifty." 
 
 But no one will pretend that Disraeli's place 
 in political history will be decided by the merits 
 or demerits of his social legislation. The Acts 
 of Parliament which he passed were only the 
 visible effects of a much larger achievement. So 
 far as his ultimate rank as a statesman is to be 
 fixed by anything occurring in the field of home 
 politics, it is his " education " of his party that 
 must fix it. It is, no doubt, partly due to 
 Canning and Peel, but it is far more due to 
 Disraeli than to both of them together, that we 
 have had in England for the last fifty years a 
 Conservative Party which is progressive and 
 national and not a mere aristocratic " fronde," 
 reactionary, blind, and stupid, such as those of 
 which the continent of Europe has seen too 
 much. The political situation since the war is 
 too controversial and, indeed, uncertain to be 
 discussed. But it is the simple fact that ever 
 since Disraeli gave the vote to the mass of the 
 people Conservative candidates, convinced and 
 avowed supporters of Throne and Church and 
 Empire, have again and again been chosen as 
 the representatives of great popular constituencies, 
 and especially of London, at almost every 
 General Election. And the contrast between 
 this experience and what has commonly happened 
 in Paris and Berlin, Rome and Madrid, is the 
 measure of the genius of Disraeli, even when all 
 allowance has been made for the help he derived 
 from the practical instinct of the English race.
 
 no DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 But no ; the words are scarcely written 
 before one is forced to take them back. The 
 genius of Disraeli was a world-genius, and is not 
 to be measured by anything achieved within 
 the boundaries of a small island. Lord Salisbury 
 well said of him that " zeal for the greatness of 
 England was the passion of his life." But 
 England, in his eyes, was always something much 
 larger than the forty counties of the geography 
 books. He believed in race, and for him England 
 was the English race all over the world. He 
 believed in history, and in his mind England 
 was always much more than the Sovereign or 
 people or achievement of the hour ; it was the 
 England of Elizabeth and Chatham, of the 
 Heights of Abraham and the field of Waterloo. 
 He believed in ideas, and saw in England the 
 visible embodiment on a world-wide scale of 
 the greatest and most hopeful of all political 
 ideas, for which he found or coined his famous 
 Roman phrase, " Imperium et Libertas." So, 
 naturally enough, and indeed inevitably, it will 
 not be with his Housing or Trades Union 
 legislation, no, nor even with the party he 
 transformed and inspired, that history will be 
 occupied when the day comes for the final 
 estimate of his work and influence. It will 
 rather have to contrast the negligible position 
 to which England had sunk among the Powers 
 of Europe between 1864 and 1874 and in part 
 sank again between 1880 and 1885, with the 
 commanding position to which Disraeli at once 
 restored her when he for the first time in his
 
 FOREIGN POLICY in 
 
 life could speak in her name with no fear of 
 contradiction, as the master of an assured 
 Parliamentary majority and the Minister of an 
 admiring and even affectionate Sovereign. 
 It will have to consider whether some large 
 part of the credit for the courage, will, and 
 endurance which enabled England to play the 
 leading part in the deliverance of the world in 
 1914-1918 may not be due to the great man who, 
 whatever his errors in detail, had taught her 
 forty years earlier not to be afraid of her own 
 greatness, and never to dream that the destinies 
 of Europe could possibly be a matter of indiffer- 
 ence to the descendants of the men who had 
 fought Philip II. and Louis XIV. and Napoleon. 
 If we have never again, not even in 1880-1885, 
 cut the sorry figure which we cut in 1864 and in 
 1870, is it not in part because 1878 and Disraeli 
 had proved such cowardice to be unnecessary 
 and had rendered any return to it impossible ? 
 His death did not remove his influence. Some 
 of the details of his policy were abandoned or 
 modified, but that does not alter the fact that he 
 created a tradition. He trained Lord Salisbury 
 in foreign affairs, and Lord Salisbury trained Lord 
 Lansdowne who made the Entente with France 
 and Mr. Balfour who created the Committee of 
 Imperial Defence. And Mr. Asquith and Lord 
 Grey accepted and completed their work. That 
 meant that we should never again, at least as 
 regards Western Europe, be mere impotent 
 spectators of the fait accompli as we had been in 
 1864 and 1870. It meant that we had accepted
 
 ii2 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 the doctrine which Disraeli had laid down as 
 early as 1848 when warning Parliament about 
 Prussian ambitions : 
 
 I never can believe that the peace of Europe is to 
 be maintained by hiding our heads in the sand and 
 comforting ourselves with the conviction that nobody 
 will find us out. 
 
 That doctrine, Disraeli always maintained, 
 does not mean war. It means peace. The 
 last volume of this Life is, of course, largely 
 occupied with the Treaty of Berlin and the 
 events which led to it. Mr. Buckle tells the 
 story in great detail from behind the scenes, 
 where the Queen was always passionately urging 
 forward and Lord Derby always cautiously 
 hanging back ; where Lord Salisbury was gradually 
 changing from the suspicious and suspected 
 critic of his chief to the trusted colleague, ally, 
 and friend ; where Petersburgh and Constanti- 
 nople and Berlin were slowly learning that " the 
 old Jew " was a man who meant business and 
 could not be bluffed. A discussion of the details 
 of Beaconsfield's policy during the Russo- 
 Turkish war and at the Congress would be 
 impossible here. And it is quite unnecessary. 
 But two things emerge with great clearness. 
 One is personal. It is Disraeli's definiteness 
 of purpose and strength of will. Bismarck said 
 of him at Berlin : "It was easy to transact 
 business with him ; in a quarter of an hour you 
 knew exactly how you stood with him ; the 
 limits to which he was prepared to go were
 
 THE CRISIS WITH RUSSIA 113 
 
 clearly defined and a rapid summary soon 
 precised matters." Already, in 1875, when 
 Bismarck was plotting an attack on France, 
 Disraeli had taught him that he had now to deal 
 in England with people who could make up 
 their minds and were not afraid, as Disraeli was 
 always telling Derby, to say " Bo to a goose." 
 So when the Russo-Turkish crisis came Disraeli 
 at once made up his mind how much of what he 
 desired was possible ; and through the long 
 struggle in the Cabinet and afterwards in the 
 negotiations would neither be pushed further 
 than he meant to go by the Queen, nor frightened 
 out of what he meant to have by Lord Derby. 
 The majority of the Cabinet often wanted him 
 to take less, the Queen again and again threatened 
 abdication if she did not get more, but Disraeli 
 stood firm, and the policy he carried out at 
 Berlin was, in substance, the policy he laid down 
 from the first. Its main points were that 
 Russia should neither occupy Constantinople 
 nor destroy Turkey ; and that whatever changes 
 were made should be made by Europe as a whole 
 and with a full recognition of the British claim 
 to a special voice in what might so vitally affect 
 our position in India. His resolute will con- 
 trolled the Queen, drove out Derby, converted 
 Salisbury, defied Gortschakoff, and dominated 
 Bismarck. He was never afraid to run risks ; 
 saw clearly, and from the first, against Lord Salis- 
 bury that you could not resist Russia unless you 
 were plainly prepared for war if necessary and 
 even for the disagreeable alliance with Turkey.
 
 ii4 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 But he never believed in war. He was sure, and 
 the Crimean precedent supports him, as well as 
 the improved situation directly Derby went, that 
 it was drifting and giving the appearance of not 
 meaning business, that was likely to lead to war. 
 At the worst he compelled his Cabinet to submit 
 under threat of resignation, as he made the 
 Berlin Congress submit by ordering his special 
 train and taking care that Bismarck knew he had 
 done so. 
 
 The other thing which emerges from Mr. 
 Buckle's story is that the first object of his 
 policy was one which has been little mentioned, 
 though it proved all-important for the future 
 history of Europe. The details of the Treaty 
 have been much discussed, and often very 
 unfairly. Disraeli certainly did not care as much 
 as he ought to have cared about the sufferings of 
 the Christian subjects of Turkey. But as for 
 those of Asia it was Gladstone, as Mr. Buckle 
 shows, who deprived them of the partial pro- 
 tection which Disraeli had given them. And it 
 is at least very doubtful whether those of Europe 
 would have gained by the making of the Balkan 
 Peninsula practically a Russian province. 
 Certainly, Serbia, Greece, and Rumania (and 
 ultimately all the Allies of 1914) have to thank 
 Disraeli for preventing the creation of a big 
 Bulgaria extending to the /Egean Sea and in- 
 cluding many thousands of Serbs and Greeks. 
 But the real object of Disraeli's policy as sketched 
 beforehand, and claimed by him in retrospect, was 
 nothing merely Balkan, nothing even confined
 
 THE REAL OBJECT OF DISRAELI 115 
 
 to the relations between England and Russia and 
 Turkey. It was a European object. When the 
 Eastern question was reopened in 1875, the three 
 military Powers, Russia, Austria, and Germany, 
 assumed to themselves the right to dictate the 
 policy of Europe. They evidently looked upon 
 France as broken and England as negligible. 
 This was the heritage of Gladstone and Gran- 
 ville. Disraeli at once insisted that British 
 interests in these matters were as great as 
 Russian or Austrian, and said that he would 
 not allow them to be ignored. When the three 
 Powers presented their Memorandum of policy, 
 framed without any consultation of France, 
 Italy, or England, he would not follow France 
 and Italy in swallowing the insult. " If we are 
 stiff we shall gain all our points," he wrote to 
 Derby ; and they did. The Memorandum was 
 withdrawn. So when Salisbury was on his way 
 to the Constantinople Conference, Disraeli wrote 
 to him a long letter of instructions, in the course 
 of which he says : 
 
 If Russia is not checked, the Holy Alliance will 
 be revived in aggravated form and force. Germany 
 will have Holland ; and France, England, and 
 Belgium will be in a position I trust I shall never 
 live to witness. 
 
 This new " Holy Alliance," with all its dangers, 
 he claimed to have prevented. " Our object," 
 he wrote to Drummond Wolff two years and 
 more after the Congress, " was to break up and 
 permanently prevent the Alliance of the three
 
 ii6 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 Empires, and I maintain there never was a general 
 diplomatic result more completely effected." By 
 getting Austria and Germany to assist him in 
 checking Russia he drove a wedge between Central 
 Europe and Russia, the effects of which, as 
 Mr. Buckle says, not all Bismarck's subsequent 
 dexterities could undo. At the same time the 
 free Western Powers had reasserted themselves, 
 and when the militarist danger came to a head 
 in 1914, the rift, begun at Berlin in 1878, had 
 widened, and the three Empires of the 1875 
 Memorandum were divided into two hostile 
 camps. Disraeli's biographer may fairly claim 
 that the sane imperialism of 1878 had its share 
 in promoting the victory of free institutions in the 
 great struggle which ended exactly fifty years later. 
 These are great topics. But, after all, for the 
 biographer of Disraeli the greatest is Disraeli 
 himself. It is the man himself, what he was 
 more than anything that he did, which will 
 provide three-quarters of the readers of this 
 book. He is always his biographer's subject, 
 whatever others, whether men or affairs, give 
 their name to the page. A reviewer cannot 
 pretend to attempt what has taken the biographer 
 six volumes to accomplish. He can only refer 
 the reader who is anxious for a general impression 
 to two summaries, given here, the work of the 
 two biographers. The first, printed at the end 
 of the fifth volume, is Mr. Buckle's estimate of 
 Disraeli as an orator and Parliamentarian. There 
 are few better things of the kind anywhere. It 
 exhibits him, by the testimony of many and
 
 HIS MASTERY OF THE HOUSE 117 
 
 adverse witnesses, as the man who, after over- 
 throwing " the greatest member of Parliament 
 that ever lived," became himself, by patience, 
 by tact, by constant attendance and industry, 
 by wit, irony, invective, eloquence, above all by 
 sheer power of intellect and imagination, the 
 acknowledged master, as well as the pride and 
 delight, of the House of Commons. George 
 Russell, a Whig and a Ritualist, said that the 
 difference between him and others was the 
 difference between genius and talent. Sir 
 William Harcourt wrote that his departure from 
 the House left it a chessboard without the queen, 
 and its game " a petty struggle of pawns." A 
 hostile writer said that no orator had carried 
 further the art of compelling an audience to 
 listen to every word. That, perhaps, gives a 
 hint of the point in which he, like Lord Salisbury 
 after him, was so inferior to Gladstone. His 
 gift was intellect and imagination, which are 
 solitary things, not emotion, and particularly 
 not moral emotion, which insists on sharing and 
 being shared. He could compel his hearers to 
 listen to him ; but he himself stood aloof, more 
 perhaps than Mr. Buckle allows, catching 
 opportunities for impromptu illustration or 
 repartee, but seldom or never catching, or allow- 
 ing himself to be caught by, any of those waves 
 of emotional inspiration which, coming from the 
 hearers, continually renew the speeches of the 
 very greatest orators. That loneliness is also 
 the final impression left by the man. At the 
 end of his last volume Mr. Buckle prints an 
 
 I
 
 ii8 DISRAELI, 1868-1881 
 
 extremely interesting and subtle study of Disraeli, 
 which was found among Mr. Monypenny's 
 papers. Mr. Monypenny begins it by saying 
 
 I have sometimes been asked if my book would 
 at last dispel the mystery that surrounds Disraeli ; 
 and my answer has invariably been that, unless the 
 mystery remained when I had finished my labours, 
 I should have failed in my task of portraiture : for 
 mystery was of the essence of the man. 
 
 That is a profound remark. No better last 
 word could be found for anything, great or 
 small, that is written about Disraeli. It has 
 many meanings, not all of which are to be seized 
 at the first glance. But one of them, and surely 
 the central one, must be that Disraeli was in his 
 chosen field a kind of " man of destiny," and 
 that if he abounded in surprises and incon- 
 sistencies, and often seemed to ignore the 
 ordinary motives and moralities of men, it was 
 partly because he was impelled by a force, of 
 which he himself could scarcely have said whether 
 it was within him or without, that indefinable 
 force which must always remain a secret and a 
 mystery, the force to which we give the name of 
 genius. It is a dangerous force. Its product, 
 occupied with himself, and moving he scarcely 
 knows where, is often half charlatan as well as 
 half prophet. We see it in one way in Cromwell, 
 in another in Chatham. It is what we do not 
 find in Pitt or Peel or Gladstone. It is what 
 makes the eternal fascination of Disraeli.
 
 VI 
 HENRY FOX* 
 
 THE title of Lord Ilchester's book f is a misnomer. 
 It will suggest to most people a book of private 
 life and family gossip. But not one-twentieth 
 part of what he has written is occupied with 
 these things. What he has given is far nearer 
 being a political history of England from 1739, 
 when Henry Fox obtained his first office, that of 
 Surveyor of the Works, till his death in 1774. 
 Of course, the history is primarily a biography. 
 But during at least the first five-and-twenty of 
 these thirty-five years Henry Fox played an 
 important part, either as one of the principal 
 actors or as a spectator on whom the principal 
 actors were obliged to keep watchful eyes, in 
 nearly all the changing scenes of Ministerial 
 tragedy and comedy. Once a politician always 
 a politician, is at least as true a saying as once 
 an author always an author. It has been said 
 that a Cabinet Minister has only two happy days 
 in his Cabinet life the day he takes office and the 
 day he leaves it. But it is the first of the two 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 1920. 
 
 t " Henry Fox, First Lord Holland, His Family and 
 Relations," by the Earl of Ilchester. Two volumes. 
 (Murray. 32*. net.) 
 
 119
 
 120 HENRY FOX 
 
 which he is always trying to recapture. It is 
 quite true that politicians refuse office oftener 
 than the public knows. This book is full of 
 such refusals, which were commoner then than 
 now. For the fifty years which elapsed between 
 Disraeli's Reform Bill and the war the country 
 was alternately governed by the two great parties. 
 Neither Liberal leader nor Conservative could 
 think of forming a Government unless he had a 
 majority in the House of Commons. And as to 
 whether he had one there was no doubt. Nor 
 was there any doubt as to what party any particular 
 politician belonged to ; so that if asked by his 
 leader to take office he seldom refused. But in 
 the eighteenth century all these points were 
 doubtful. First, a man belonged to no party 
 in the modern sense of the word. Practically 
 all called themselves Whigs, and shifted from 
 one group of Whigs to another. Then a politician 
 had no leader in the way that Liberals were led 
 by Mr. Gladstone or Conservatives were led by 
 Lord Salisbury. Further, he could not be sure 
 that the Minister who invited him to take office 
 had any majority in the House of Commons. 
 Anybody who became Minister had a majority 
 of a kind because he was the King's Minister. 
 But because he was only the King's Minister, 
 nominated by the King, and, with rare exceptions, 
 not called for by any organised body of opinion 
 either in Parliament or the country, his position 
 was precarious. He never knew whom he could 
 rely on. Consequently men hesitated to embark 
 in Ministerial boats which were to set sail on
 
 DISUNION OF MINISTERS 121 
 
 such doubtful voyages. The King could send 
 them to sea, but he could not guarantee them 
 against Parliamentary storms. The modern 
 party system, as it worked before the war, could 
 do both. 
 
 All this is illustrated by the story here told 
 of the career of Henry Fox. All or nearly all 
 the politicians of those days were in the game 
 for what they could get out of it. But they 
 could never be sure what was the best card to 
 play. Consequently they never knew whether 
 to accept office or to refuse it. They had no 
 real principles to unite them to one man and 
 separate them from another. Nor was a Ministry 
 a homogeneous body between the time when 
 Walpole expelled all rebels and the time when 
 George III. powerfully assisted by Henry Fox 
 tried to turn out everybody but his own and 
 Bute's friends. The King failed in his scheme, 
 but his action forced the Whigs to become a party 
 based on principles instead of a collection of 
 intriguing factions ; and when in his evil hour 
 Charles Fox returned to the old system and 
 made the Coalition with North, his victory was 
 but momentary. Party this time the Tory 
 Party returned a year later with Pitt, and has 
 remained our system ever since. But during 
 the period covered by this book, members of the 
 same Ministry constantly spoke and voted against 
 each other even on important questions. Pitt 
 was Paymaster under Pelham whose policy he 
 constantly attacked. Fox was Paymaster under 
 Pitt in his glorious Ministry of 1757, but openly
 
 122 HENRY FOX 
 
 scoffed at some of his military expeditions as 
 " breaking windows with guineas," and voted 
 against measures introduced with his approval. 
 Before that, while Secretary at War under New- 
 castle, he was in open opposition to his official 
 chief. In those days such actions caused no 
 surprise. The Ministers were mere holders of 
 offices, very loosely bound to each other. 
 
 This is the world into which this book takes 
 us. The numerous people who are at home and 
 amused in that world will be grateful to Lord 
 Rosebery for having suggested his task to Lord 
 Ilchester and to Lord Ilchester for performing 
 it so well. The book is well written and well 
 arranged. The writer knows his subject and 
 his period and can use his knowledge effectively. 
 He has had access to a great deal of material 
 which has never been used before. Letters and 
 papers at Holland House, at Melbury, at Bowood, 
 and elsewhere have provided a mass of evidence, 
 much of it in Henry Fox's own hand, as to his 
 motives and opinions at various points in his 
 career. Occasionally they enable Lord Ilchester 
 to correct the statements or judgments of previous 
 historians. But on the whole they only fill 
 out the old picture without altering its main 
 lines. Fox remains the best of husbands, the 
 most indulgent of fathers, the most affectionate 
 of brothers, the most indefatigable of friends, 
 the most unpopular, uninspiring, and un- 
 attractive of politicians. A man of ability he 
 undoubtedly was, with only one superior, in that 
 respect, among his contemporaries. But ability
 
 DISTRUST OF FOX 123 
 
 is never enough in a Parliamentary system of 
 government like ours. A man must have 
 character. He must be the kind of man whom 
 other men can trust and work with. That is just 
 what Fox somehow failed to be. He worked in 
 turn with Newcastle and Pitt, Devonshire and 
 Bedford and Shelburne ; but every one of 
 them, and even his great friend and patron, 
 Cumberland, a very honest man, found him 
 impossible and broke with him in the end, or 
 indeed, in several cases, soon after the beginning. 
 George III., in whose service he had made 
 himself the most hated man in England by the 
 ruthless proscription of 1762, never seems to 
 have been grateful to him or to have wished to 
 have him back. Somehow, with very few 
 exceptions, of whom Pelham is the most important 
 (and though Pelham died young he had lived 
 long enough to find Fox a troublesome colleague 
 and to be suspected by Fox of intending to 
 dismiss him), Fox's public and political friend- 
 ships were as uncertain, uncomfortable, and 
 shortlived as his private intimacies and family 
 affections were unchanging and delightful. 
 
 It would almost seem as if he were two 
 different men, following opposite courses and 
 each so violently as to lead to his own misery. 
 In his private relations, especially to his sons, 
 he was all affection and sympathy. There the 
 head had no control at all over the heart, which 
 carried blind indulgence to such lengths as gave 
 the father an old age of bitter disappointment and 
 the sons a youth of recklessness and dishonour.
 
 124 HENRY FOX 
 
 In his public life it was all the other way. There 
 he was all head and, except in persistent efforts 
 to do jobs for his private friends and relations, 
 no heart at all. Shrewdness, common sense, 
 practical capacity, a preference for peace, an 
 eye to the material interests of the nation, at 
 least where they did not conflict with his own, 
 these were his characteristics as they were those 
 of his master, Walpole. But he did not possess 
 his master's greatest gift, an instinctive sense of 
 what was going on in the mind of the nation and 
 a readiness to defer to it when it could not 
 safely be defied. Walpole would never have 
 outraged opinion as Fox did by the proscription 
 of 1762. He was very clear in his distinction 
 between friends and foes, and he liked being 
 master in his house ; but his prudence would 
 have told him that conduct of that sort was 
 likely to leave him with no house to be master of. 
 And then Walpole could safely do what Fox 
 could not, for two reasons. First, he was a 
 greater man ; and then he lived in a smaller 
 age. He had no Pitt to make his cynicism and 
 corruption a mark for the scorn and indignation 
 of England. Fox made his enormous fortune as 
 Paymaster after Pitt had refused to make any- 
 thing out of the same office. Fox in 1762 kept 
 his shop at which members of Parliament came 
 to sell their votes and get the current price for 
 them five years after Pitt had scornfully refused 
 to have anything to do with dirty business of 
 that sort. The change was fatal. Walpole, 
 after ruling England for a whole generation, was
 
 FOX'S FATAL ERROR 125 
 
 never really unpopular. Fox was never, even 
 for a moment, the ruler of England ; and yet 
 managed to get himself hated by both Parliament 
 and people. 
 
 The truth is that from the moment that Pitt 
 had stormed the citadel of power the old system 
 was doomed. The men who worked it and 
 lived by it were, of course, the last to perceive 
 that sentence of death had been passed upon it. 
 And they carried it on as well as they could. 
 There was nothing in principle to separate the 
 methods of George III. and North from those 
 of Walpole. But they were no longer acquiesced 
 in as Walpole 's and Newcastle's were. There 
 were no more elections like that of 1754, when 
 only forty-two of all the seats in the House of 
 Commons were contested. A very few years 
 after that Pitt had taught not only George II., 
 but the House itself, that there was such a 
 thing as a public opinion which would not be 
 ignored. Those years were the turning-point 
 of Fox's career. He had refused before that 
 election to become Newcastle's Secretary of 
 State on Newcastle's terms. He had written to 
 the Duke of Richmond of the impossibility of 
 going back on his refusal : " What can't be done 
 with honour can't be done at all." And, 
 directly afterwards, he was feeling his way to an 
 alliance with Pitt. But only a few months later 
 he made the great mistake of his life. Against 
 the advice of his wise patron, Cumberland, 
 he deserted Pitt and consented, as Lord 
 Ilchester says, to " bolster up the despicable
 
 126 HENRY FOX 
 
 Administration " of Newcastle which, if he had 
 been loyal to Pitt, must soon have fallen and 
 placed them both in power. 
 
 If that had happened, his whole future might 
 have been different. Cumberland had told 
 him, in the very phrase afterwards used by 
 Frederick the Great, " Pitt is, what is scarce, 
 a man." That is, of course, just what New- 
 castle was not. Fox, who might have been the 
 man's colleague and friend, preferred to be the 
 old woman's agent and tool. He paid the price, 
 politically and morally, for the rest of his life. 
 It is true that he and Pitt were men of utterly 
 different natures. But in some ways that made 
 them all the fitter to work together. Pitt had 
 the eagle eye which took in all the world ; the 
 genius of initiative, imagination, and command. 
 His sphere was obviously high politics and the 
 direction of the war. Fox knew and cared 
 nothing about foreign politics ; nor was he a 
 man of ideas in any field. But he was, what 
 Pitt was not, a man of business and a man who 
 had learnt, in Walpole's school, those arts of 
 management which Pitt disdained to practise. 
 Even Pitt, as the failure of the Devonshire 
 Ministry snowed, could not, in those days, afford 
 to do altogether without them. Fox could have 
 done, no man more effectively, whatever was 
 necessary in that line. Or, perhaps, if Pitt had 
 had Fox by his side in that first venture, their 
 united abilities could have defied Newcastle 
 without being forced to imitate his methods. 
 In any case, Fox would have been the gainer.
 
 FOX AND CHATHAM 127 
 
 Some of the rays of Pitt's glory must necessarily 
 have shone on his principal colleague. And 
 perhaps something better still might have 
 happened. One does not live with a man like 
 Pitt for nothing. If Fox had stuck to Pitt in 
 1754 and afterwards, perhaps that year would 
 have marked the upward instead of the down- 
 ward turning-point in his character as well as in 
 his career. Perhaps some such transformation 
 might have come to him from a definite breach 
 with Newcastle and a definite union with Pitt, 
 as came afterwards to his brilliant son when he 
 freed himself finally from the service of the 
 Court and gave his whole heart and brain to the 
 cause of the Whigs. And if moral changes of 
 that kind, however possible at five-and-twenty, 
 are scarcely probable in a man of fifty, yet even 
 without any such miracles it is not inconceivable 
 that an alliance between Pitt and Henry Fox 
 might have lasted and had great results. If it 
 had they would have faced the new reign and its 
 intrigues together, and lived, perhaps, to be- 
 queath the legacy of their unity as not the 
 smallest part of that inheritance of fame which 
 was to fall to their dearly-loved sons, instead of 
 dying, as they did, isolated and alone, the one 
 in a solitary splendour of glory, the other in the 
 gloom of desertion, disappointment, and 
 contempt. 
 
 The two Pitts were unlike in genius ; the one 
 the most willing and most gloriously successful 
 of England's War Ministers, the other the 
 most reluctant and unfortunate. But each was
 
 128 HENRY FOX 
 
 pre-eminently a man ; each forced his way by right 
 of genius to the first place, and ruled England 
 almost like a Sovereign ; no one ever doubted 
 the public patriotism or the private probity of 
 either. The father died in his old age, the son 
 in his prime, but in each case the bell that 
 tolled for the death of William Pitt sounded in 
 the ears of the nation as a knell of departed 
 greatness. There is no such glorious parallel 
 between Henry and Charles Fox. They had 
 the same genius for private friendship, but in 
 their public careers there is little in common. 
 Henry was a mere man of business and practice. 
 Charles was the most generous and famous of 
 political amateurs. Henry had no political 
 ideals, lived among the intrigues of party and 
 faction, and scarcely realised that there was such 
 a thing as a people of England. Charles was as 
 much the first tribune of that people in the 
 things of peace as Chatham had been in those of 
 war ; and, though a much smaller man than 
 Chatham, he was far more loved, because he 
 himself loved others, both those whom he knew 
 and those whom he did not know, with so much 
 more generosity, frankness, and simplicity. 
 Hard as it is to believe when we look at his 
 portraits, it is certain that no one, in all the long 
 line of our statesmen, has been the object of 
 such passionate affection as Charles Fox. In 
 this field his life was an unbroken series of 
 triumphs. The magic which worked first upon 
 the adoring father and affectionate schoolfellows 
 of his boyhood, ended by conquering that
 
 CHARLES FOX 129 
 
 almost personal devotion of half the nation 
 which surrounded his death-bed. That was 
 what, in spite of many serious faults, had come 
 to a heart which, without ever ceasing to love 
 its own, had learned to beat for the whole 
 human race, and especially for all who were the 
 victims of cruelty, injustice, or wrong. Can 
 anything be less like the end or the character of 
 his father ? When Henry Fox died there was 
 no poet to declare that " many thousands " were 
 sad, or to cry : 
 
 A Power is passing from the earth 
 To breathless Nature's dark abyss. 
 
 And if there had been his words would have 
 found no response. It is not to efficiency, not 
 to success in making a fortune, not even to the 
 negative virtues of honesty and plain dealing, 
 that such tributes, coming from such men, are 
 paid. By the side of his son, as by the side of 
 Chatham, Henry Fox shrinks into insignificance. 
 Does he shrink lower still ? Chatham refused 
 the chance of making the very fortune which 
 Fox made : and Fox's sons made away with it 
 even before it was theirs. There is no virtue 
 in dissipating a fortune, least of all as Charles 
 and Stephen Fox dissipated theirs : and there 
 is no vice in making one if it be, as the virtuous 
 Evelyn said of the first Fox's fortune, " honestly 
 gotten and unenvied." But was that the case 
 with the fortune of Henry Fox ? To that 
 question, perhaps, no unqualified answer can 
 be given. He certainly never was consciously
 
 130 HENRY FOX 
 
 dishonest. In many ways he was a much 
 honester man than most of his contemporaries. 
 He never knowingly broke a promise and never 
 forgot a friend. So says Lord Ilchester, with a 
 good deal of truth ; though the friends whom he 
 allowed, and even incited, his colleagues to 
 insult and disgrace in 1762 might not be ready 
 to admit his only possible excuse, the necessities 
 of the King's service. Still his loyalty to his 
 personal if not to his political friends need not 
 be questioned. Nor will his truthfulness. He 
 was too strong a man to be a liar. George II. 
 said of him, " I'll do him justice, I don't believe 
 he ever did tell me a lie " ; adding the illu- 
 minating comment : "he's the only man that 
 ever came into my closet that did not." Yet 
 he accumulated such hatred that when Pitt 
 resigned in 1761, and Bute thought of Fox, he 
 was told it would be madness to "go from the 
 most popular man in England to the most 
 unpopular " ; and a few years later the Livery 
 of London described him, in a petition to the 
 King, as " the public defaulter of uncounted 
 millions." This charge was untrue and collapsed 
 at once before inquiry in the House of Commons. 
 All the claims upon him were met by himself or 
 his executors ; and the delay in settling them 
 was not his or their fault. But the fact remained 
 that he had pocketed sums that could be described 
 as " uncounted millions " out of public funds. 
 The system, which lasted till 1780, allowed the 
 Paymaster to retain in his own hands large sums 
 of public money, and to speculate with them to
 
 FOX'S FORTUNE 131 
 
 his own profit in the interval between receiving 
 them and paying them out. These profits were 
 the lawful and admitted perquisites of the 
 office. But Pitt, and even Henry Pelham, had 
 refused to touch them. What Pitt desired was 
 power, not money, and the last thing he was 
 prepared to sacrifice for the sake of money was 
 any shred of his self-conscious probity and 
 honour. When Fox took the Paymastership in 
 1757 he gave up the chance of power for the 
 certainty of a fortune. How great that fortune 
 would be he could not have dreamed. He could 
 not know that the years during which he held 
 the office were to be mostly years of war, and 
 war carried on with Pitt's splendid profusion. 
 The millions fell unexpected, almost unsought, 
 into Fox's lap. They came to a far greater 
 
 frize than had fallen to any previous Paymaster, 
 t was legal to take them. But would any 
 scrupulously honest man have done so, when 
 they became so immeasurably greater than any 
 figure that could reasonably be regarded as a 
 fair remuneration for the work done ? 
 
 That is the question. Lord Ilchester docs 
 not altogether defend Fox, but pleads that a 
 man's conduct must be judged by the standard 
 of his day. So, perhaps, it may in fairness 
 claim to be, in spite of Acton's indignant repudi- 
 ation of the doctrine when Creighton used it in 
 excuse of the medieval Popes. But the difficulty 
 is that it will not really serve in Fox's case. The 
 truth is that his standard was that of Walpole's 
 day, not that of his own. Public opinion outside
 
 132 HENRY FOX 
 
 the charmed circle of politicians, and within it 
 the shining examples of Pitt and Pelham, had 
 altered the standard. Even Newcastle, who 
 spent his life doing jobs for others, would do 
 none for himself, and, refusing a pension, left 
 office poorer than he entered upon it. That was 
 the secret of Fox's unpopularity. It may have 
 begun in hatred of his patron Cumberland ; it 
 may have been fostered by the intrigues of 
 Leicester House. But what increased it to the 
 odium which surrounded his later years was an 
 immense fortune, provoking, not only the envy 
 which, till men are wiser and better, such 
 fortunes, however innocent, will almost always 
 provoke, but the indignation inevitably aroused 
 by great wealth acquired by light labours, at the 
 public expense, and by methods condemned by 
 the best opinion and the highest examples of the 
 time. 
 
 There it is once more, the contrast between the 
 father and the son : between the most detested 
 of our statesmen and the idol of Parliament and 
 people. The virtues of Henry Fox were almost 
 all private ; his vices all public. The beloved 
 Charles's vices were private and his chief victim 
 himself. His virtues were public and the fruits 
 of them were reaped by his country, by all 
 Europe, and, it is not too much to say, by the 
 whole human race.
 
 VII 
 LORD GREY* 
 
 THE second Earl Grey occupies a unique 
 position among English Prime Ministers. Of 
 all who held that great office in the nineteenth 
 century only Portland, Percival, Canning, Code- 
 rich, Wellington, and Lord Rosebery held it 
 for a shorter time. And of these Portland had 
 already been Prime Minister in 1783, and all had 
 frequently held high offices under other Prime 
 Ministers. Grey alone had to form a Ministry 
 and govern the country with practically no 
 previous official training. Over twenty years 
 before he had been for little more than a year 
 a member of the Ministry of All the Talents. 
 That was all. Yet this elderly, inexperienced 
 nobleman, a man of domestic tastes, apathetic 
 temperament, and no extraordinary intellectual 
 powers, carried the country through the greatest 
 internal crisis it had known since the Revolution 
 and was the author of what still remains, after 
 nearly a hundred years, not only the greatest of 
 Reform Bills but the most famous measure ever 
 passed through Parliament. And both achieve- 
 ments were to an unusual degree his own. He 
 * Times Literary Supplement, March 25, 1920. 
 133 K
 
 134 LORD GREY 
 
 had able colleagues, but it was he, more than 
 any of them more perhaps than all of them put 
 together who first prevented the popular excite- 
 ment from boiling over into a violent revolution, 
 and then, avoiding with a skill which approaches 
 genius all the dangers which beset him from 
 friends and foes, Court and Lords, Commons 
 and people, made the Bill, which was his Bill, 
 the law of the land. The measure of his great- 
 ness may be stated in the ancient words : after 
 him, except for the brief Chartist disturbance, 
 " the land had rest forty years." His measure 
 settled once for all the principle of Reform which 
 till then had been angrily disputed. It endured 
 unaltered till 1867, and all subsequent Bills have 
 been merely extensions of the work it began. 
 More than any other Act of Parliament it marks 
 the beginning of the new era in our history. It 
 meant that King and Parliament, threatened 
 with revolution by those outside the political 
 system, met the threat, for the first time, simply 
 by inviting the discontented to come inside and 
 share with them both power and responsibility 
 That has been our policy ever since ; and it is 
 due to it that we alone among the nations of 
 Europe have passed the ninety years since Grey 
 took office not only without revolution, but almost 
 without such a word as revolution being known 
 in our current political vocabulary. And for 
 that it is not too much to say that the man 
 whom we have primarily and principally to 
 thank is the man who took the decisive step at 
 the moment of danger, the man to whom Mr.
 
 A MAN OF ONE ACHIEVEMENT 135 
 
 George Trevelyan has here * happily given a 
 title unknown to the College of Heralds, Lord 
 Grey of the Reform Bill. 
 
 There is another way in which Grey's position 
 among our Prime Ministers is unique. It is not 
 only that he did a far greater work than any one 
 else whose life as a Cabinet Minister lasted 
 less than five years. It is that while he ranks 
 among the great Prime Ministers he owes his 
 greatness, unlike any of them, entirely to a 
 single achievement. He may have saved us 
 from war with France over the Belgian question 
 in 1830-32. But that though a very important 
 is also a negative and hypothetical service. On 
 the whole, he lives by the Reform Bill alone. 
 Pitt was the destroyer of the Whig oligarchy 
 and the first of reforming Prime Ministers before 
 he became the " pilot that weathered the storm." 
 Peel was the creator of our modern Civil Service 
 before he became the founder of Free Trade. 
 Gladstone had attained his first and most un- 
 disputed title to fame by his financial achieve- 
 ments before he touched either the Irish Church 
 or the franchise or Home Rule. There is 
 nothing of this in Grey. He emerges from 
 comparative obscurity to carry the Reform Bill, 
 and if that had proved a failure his name would 
 have been entirely forgotten in ten years. Even 
 as it is, the Bill has been remembered far better 
 than its author. And the truth is that in a sense 
 
 * " Lord Grey of the Reform Bill : Being the Life of 
 Charles, second Earl Grey," by George Macaulay 
 Trevelyan. (Longmans. 21*. net.)
 
 136 LORD GREY 
 
 he owes as much to it as it to him. It may be 
 that in this case, as sometimes happens, the work 
 was greater than the man. At least it strangely 
 inspired him, magnifying altogether his moral 
 and intellectual stature. Never before, and 
 never again, so far as those who now read his 
 life can judge, was either his will or his judgment 
 what it was in those fateful two years between 
 the day he took office in 1830 and the day the 
 Bill passed into law in 1832. This book is the 
 record of an interesting life and a delightful 
 personality. But except for those two years it 
 would never have been written or even thought 
 of. 
 
 Mr. Trevelyan has many qualifications for 
 his task. The son of his father, the great- 
 nephew of Macaulay, could not but be born 
 with the Whig tradition in his blood, could not 
 but be nurtured in its lore from his very cradle. 
 There are two perhaps only two very great 
 moments in the history of the Whigs the two 
 moments in which they saved England, 1688 
 and 1832. Macaulay wrote the history of the 
 one and played his part in the other. Sir George 
 Trevelyan was brought up at his uncle's feet 
 and wrote his life ; and he himself was one of 
 the chief actors in that movement for the exten- 
 sion of the vote to the agricultural labourer, 
 finally carried out in 1885, which completed the 
 enfranchisement of the householder begun in 
 1832. His son, the writer of this book, has 
 never sat in Parliament. But ever since the 
 world knew anything about him, and probably
 
 MR. GEORGE TREVELYAN 137 
 
 long before, he has shown his devotion to the 
 double family tradition of history and politics. 
 Names change and ideas grow. The Liberal 
 of to-day is not the same thing as the Whig of 
 1688, or even of 1832. But he is after all the 
 son of his father, and, if he is a wise man, is 
 proud of it. That is what Mr. Trevelyan 
 certainly is. The creed which his father in- 
 herited from Macaulay, which Macaulay imbibed 
 at Holland House and expounded in his History, 
 the creed of religious and political liberty, has 
 always been his creed. And few in this genera- 
 tion have served it better than the historian of 
 Wycliffe, of the Long Parliament, of Garibaldi, 
 of John Bright, and now of Lord Grey of the 
 Reform Bill. 
 
 At first sight these would appear to be strange 
 heroes for a historian nursed in the Whig 
 tradition. But observe one thing. They are 
 all practical men. They are all men who prefer 
 half a loaf to no bread. But for the opposition 
 of the Army the Long Parliament would have 
 come to terms with Charles I. Garibaldi 
 worked with Victor Emmanuel as soon as he saw 
 that Monarchy could do for Italy what a Republic 
 could not do. And both Wycliffe and Bright 
 were nearer to Garibaldi and the moderate 
 majority of the Long Parliament than they were 
 to the Fifth Monarchy men, the Levellers, or 
 Mazzini. That spirit of practical compromise, 
 of being content to take what one can get and 
 move step by step, advancing to the future 
 without losing touch with the past, is the very
 
 138 LORD GREY 
 
 essence of Whiggism. It is the first article in 
 the creed which the Whigs taught England in 
 1688, and which all English parties, with varying 
 degrees of willingness and intelligence, have 
 practised ever since : the creed which for 200 
 years has made the English combination of 
 stability and progress the wonder and envy of a 
 Europe almost always in danger of falling a prey 
 either to stereotyped conservatism or to imprac- 
 ticable idealism. Its records do not make such 
 picturesque reading as those of the uncom- 
 promising dreamers and revolutionaries. But 
 if its colours are not so rich, they have the 
 advantage of wearing well. Cromwell is a more 
 interesting figure than the Whig lords of 1688, 
 but his work disappeared with him, while theirs 
 lasted for 150 years. Indeed, it may be said to 
 have contained within it not only 1832 but 1867, 
 1885, and 1917. So, some would say, in 
 matters of religion. Luther and Calvin were 
 greater men than Cranmer, but England retains 
 to-day much more of Cranmer than Germany 
 or France retain of his greater rivals. And so, 
 to come back to Mr. Trevelyan, with his latest 
 hero, Lord Grey. The men who revolutionised 
 France when he was a young member of Parlia- 
 ment will always be much more famous, or 
 notorious, than he. But their political edifice 
 crumbled at once into dust at the breath of 
 Napoleon, and they left their country to be the 
 sport for eighty years of alternate revolution and 
 reaction. Lord Grey's less original structure 
 still stands unshaken. Some of its chief features
 
 ENGLISH POLITICAL HISTORY 139 
 
 have been modified or developed to meet new 
 needs. But not one has been destroyed, and 
 there is no difficulty in recognizing the building 
 of to-day as that which he reconstructed with 
 such an admirable mixture of boldness and 
 reverence. 
 
 Mr. Trevelyan's book is a record of the long 
 apprenticeship served by Lord Grey and of the 
 four hurried and crowded years in which he at 
 last had the chance of practising his art with 
 the freedom and authority of a master. Every 
 one who knows Mr. Trevelyan's previous books 
 will be sure beforehand that this tale, like the 
 others, loses nothing in the telling. Of course 
 it cannot compare in interest for a moment with 
 the story of the Liberation of Italy. Lord Grey 
 is no rival to Garibaldi, and the greatest of 
 Parliamentary struggles makes very tame reading 
 after the immortal adventure of the Thousand. 
 The appeal of the new book is altogether narrower. 
 It is to England instead of to the world. It is 
 to those who like the study of Parliamentary 
 history instead of to those who like " moving 
 accidents by flood and field." But within its 
 own limits and for its own public the work could 
 not be better done, and will confirm and establish 
 its author's reputation as a biographer and 
 historian. It is brilliantly written, and the right 
 reader, especially the lover of English political 
 history, so much the most interesting and 
 important in the world, will not willingly lay it 
 down till he has drunk his cup of pleasure to the 
 last drop. It is full, too, of interesting judgments
 
 140 LORD GREY 
 
 on matters which only incidentally come within 
 its scope. Pitt and Fox, for instance, are an old 
 story. But the contrast between them has not 
 often been better put than it is here : 
 
 The wits of Brooks's jested about Pitt's youth. 
 But in fact he was prematurely old in spirit 
 cautious, dignified, formidable,'experienced, laborious, 
 wise ; but with a mind that, after a splendid spring- 
 time, too soon became closed to generous enthu- 
 siasms and new ideas, and ceased to understand 
 human nature save as it is known to a shrewd and 
 cynical Government Whip. He was still being 
 twitted as " the schoolboy " when he had acquired 
 all the characteristics of the schoolmaster. While 
 Fox always retained the faults and merits of youth, 
 Pitt early acquired those of old age. 
 
 More original, though not more interesting 
 for nothing political ever equalled the interest 
 of the story of Pitt and Fox except the story of 
 Pitt's father is a judgment of the great political 
 world of that day. Mr. Trevelyan is a Liberal, 
 even a Radical, as all his books show. But he 
 remarks of Grey's first speech that 
 
 by a brilliant piece of invective on the wrong side 
 of a subject that he did not understand Grey at 
 once became one of the most envied in that most 
 enviable of all the aristocracies of history, the men 
 and women who look out from the can vases of Reynolds 
 and Romney with a divine self-satisfaction, bred of 
 unchallenged possession of all that was really best 
 in a great civilization. 
 
 A little later he describes the transformation of 
 that splendid society, which, as he says, had
 
 THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY 141 
 
 " neither the virtues nor the vices of the austere " 
 till it was frightened by the French Revolution 
 and reclaimed by the Evangelical movement. 
 He gives it in an interesting parallel. " The 
 change from the high society that Fox led to 
 that of the generation which ostracised Byron 
 is an English version of the change from the 
 Renaissance Courts of the early Cinque Cento 
 to the Italy of the Jesuit reaction." So again it 
 is a striking remark that if the Whigs who fought 
 Pitt's measures of repression had not been great 
 aristocrats they " would not then have dared to 
 side with democracy." Only their aristocratic 
 indifference to unpopularity made it possible 
 for them to maintain in the darkest days such 
 causes as those of Reform and Catholic Emanci- 
 pation. From the heights of Devonshire House 
 they could look down with contempt on the 
 hostility of all the squires and manufacturers in 
 the country. Occasionally these judgments of 
 Mr. Trevelyan's invite question or qualification. 
 He makes the interesting remark that up to the 
 death of Queen Anne General Elections were 
 decided by the changes of political opinion in 
 the country, so that England was able to enforce 
 her will in every big question that came up, but 
 that afterwards the nation was helpless in the 
 hands of the boroughmongers. This is largely 
 true, of course ; but, without holding Burke's 
 strange doctrine of the sacrosanctity of rotten 
 boroughs, one may admit that it was by the 
 pressure of public opinion that Chatham rose to 
 power and Bute and North fell ; that it was the
 
 142 LORD GREY 
 
 unreformed constituencies who gave Pitt his 
 great majority in 1784, and that it was still they, 
 with all the rotten boroughs intact, which 
 elected the Parliament that reformed itself and 
 destroyed the old system. The truth surely is 
 that the reason why the French had revolution 
 while we had reform was that in France before 
 1789 the Government could totally disregard 
 public opinion, however strong, while in England 
 it never altogether could. Even the all-powerful 
 Pitt of 1794 had to draw back from his prose- 
 cutions for sedition when London juries taught 
 him that public opinion felt he was going too 
 far. 
 
 These illustrations show that the book is 
 more than a mere Life of Grey. It was under- 
 taken at the request of the late Earl Grey, and 
 in writing it Mr. Trevelyan has had free access 
 to the family papers at Howick as well as to 
 others referring to his subject at Holland House 
 and Lambton Castle ; and he acknowledges his 
 obligations to Sir Algernon West, Lord Spencer, 
 and Lord Grey's grandson, the present Lord 
 Halifax, for the communication of other docu- 
 ments and family traditions. But from the first 
 he intended to go, and he has gone, outside the 
 merely biographical field. He has used materials 
 provided by the British Museum and the Home 
 Office to show the state of public opinion, and 
 especially the feelings of the working classes, 
 throughout Grey's life, and especially during 
 the two critical periods, that of 1793-97, wnen 
 he was making Reform motions in a hostile
 
 GREY AND THE PEOPLE 143 
 
 Parliament, and that of 1830-32, when his 
 firmness forced his Bill through Parliament 
 unaltered, and in the judgment of Mr. Trevelyan, 
 " averted civil war and saved the State from 
 entering on the vicious circle of revolution and 
 reaction." 
 
 On both these occasions Grey was very 
 closely concerned with the excited state of 
 working-class opinion, on the first as the 
 Parliamentary leader of the Reformers, on the 
 second as the head of the Government responsible 
 for the King's peace. Perhaps Mr. Trevelyan, 
 seeing things from the point of view of his hero, 
 underrates the danger in 1794 and exaggerates 
 it in 1832. Finding as he does that in " the 
 days of May," 1832, neither the private corre- 
 spondence of Wellington, Peel, and Croker, nor 
 that of Grey, Althorp, and Holland, contains 
 any allusion to the fear of armed rebellion if the 
 Duke took office, he concludes that " noblesse 
 obliged them to avoid allusion to a subject so 
 indecorous." But this seems rather far-fetched. 
 Wellington, at any rate, was never afraid of 
 calling a spade a spade. A likelier explanation 
 is that he, and the others, believed that the 
 danger was not so great as Mr. Trevelyan thinks, 
 and that any armed rebellion could have been 
 put down. It was the attitude of the House of 
 Commons, not the threats of the agitators, which 
 forced the Duke to retreat. It may seem to a 
 good many readers that Mr. Trevelyan makes 
 the opposite mistake about 1794. Nobody now 
 defends all the measures then taken by Pitt, still
 
 144 LORD GREY 
 
 less all, one might almost say any, of the pro- 
 ceedings of the Scottish Judges. But nobody 
 who judges Pitt ought to forget, as Mr. Trevelyan 
 is too much inclined to do, the contrast between 
 1830 and 1794. It is the contrast between 
 Louis Philippe and Robespierre. The Revolu- 
 tion of 1830 excited England, but it was a very 
 different thing from its predecessor, which, as 
 Lord Rosebery has pointed out, was " encouraging 
 revolt in England and promising support to 
 rebellion before any exceptional measures were 
 taken by the British Government." It seems 
 certain now that Pitt exaggerated the danger. 
 The folly of the Reformers who consorted with 
 the Paris Jacobins and called themselves 
 " citizens " at once involved them in the extreme 
 unpopularity of the French, and Pitt's measures 
 of repression were, as his enemies themselves 
 admit, popular even among the mass of the 
 working classes. Pitt would be a greater man if 
 he had known his countrymen better and trusted 
 them more. But the French Revolution was a 
 portent without precedent or parallel. Pitt saw 
 France prostrate at the feet of a small body of 
 cruel fanatics ; he was resolved to take no risks 
 in England ; and, if he is to be blamed, it is not 
 for that resolve, but for not being so far in advance 
 of his time as to perceive that against revolution 
 the best weapon is generally not repression, but 
 reform. 
 
 Grey, unfettered by the responsibilities of 
 office, was free to advocate a more generous 
 policy. He made motions for reform in 1792,
 
 WHIGS BECOME LIBERALS 145 
 
 1793, and in 1797. He opposed Pitt's policy of 
 fear and repression. And, what was more 
 important still, he, more than any man, pre- 
 pared the Whigs to become the Liberal Party. 
 If Burke and Portland had carried the Whigs 
 with them, Reform could only have come from 
 the Radicals, and our present dangerous hori- 
 zontal divisions of party would have been 
 anticipated by a hundred years. As it was, when 
 Grey founded the Friends of the People in 
 April, 1792, he took as momentous a step as 
 when, forty years later, he insisted on his Reform 
 Bill. There was not, indeed, anything abso- 
 lutely new in the existence of such a body, for 
 there had been Reform associations, to which 
 Pitt had belonged, before it. What was new 
 was the connexion of such an association with a 
 great party, which was achieved as soon as Grey 
 had secured the support of Fox. The anti- 
 Reform Whigs then left the party and the 
 Whigs were definitely committed to Reform. 
 
 One other point, the last that can be touched 
 on here. The ultimate significance of a step is 
 often unperceived by those who take it. The 
 Friends of the People were a small body, only 
 about 150 in all. They were all " noblemen 
 and gentlemen." But when Grey and Lauder- 
 dale placed their aristocratic names at the head 
 of a body of that kind they started on a course 
 from which there could be no turning back. In 
 vain they dissociated themselves from other and 
 more democratic societies which shared their 
 aims and added others not theirs. The Tories
 
 146 LORD GREY 
 
 who denounced them knew better. The decisive 
 step had been taken. From that day forward 
 the Whig Party would throw itself slowly but 
 increasingly on the public opinion of the country, 
 and would ultimately force all parties to do the 
 same. When Peel was victorious in 1841, 
 Disraeli in 1874, Salisbury in 1886, their victories 
 were not those of the old forces by which North 
 and even Pitt had ruled the country. They 
 were the victories of public opinion, of free 
 debate and discussion, of a method less and less 
 easily distinguished from what was once de- 
 nounced as political agitation. The germs of all 
 these things, and of how much else that he 
 could not dream of, lay in Grey's Friends of 
 the People. The end is not yet. The will of 
 the nation, ascertained by the polling booth 
 after open discussion, is now the acknowledged 
 arbiter of all political issues. If its title is ever 
 disputed, it is no longer by the Right but by 
 the Extreme Left. But we did not adopt a 
 French solution of our difficulties 130 years ago, 
 and the English character must have greatly 
 changed if we adopt a Russian solution to-day. 
 It is not likely that even the earthquake shock 
 of the war has transformed us into dreamers, 
 extremists, or fanatics. After it, as before, 
 England will probably remain the land of 
 common sense, compromise, and practical pro- 
 gress. And if it does, it will never cease to 
 honour the Whigs who, in liberty's evil days, 
 fought against repression, defended free speech, 
 abolished slavery, and finally gave the country
 
 FOX AND GREY 147 
 
 Reform without revolution. And among them, 
 after the beloved name of Fox, it will remember 
 no one with more gratitude than that distinguished 
 aristocrat who laid the legal foundations of 
 democracy, Charles Lord Grey of the Reform 
 Bill.
 
 VIII 
 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL* 
 
 WITH a single exception, Lord Randolph 
 Churchill's rise to the first place in the House of 
 Commons is the most dazzling personal triumph 
 in English Parliamentary history. No parallel can 
 be found to it except that which goes far beyond 
 a parallel, the amazing victory which, exactly a 
 hundred years before, the genius and courage of 
 a boy of twenty-four won over the united forces 
 of all the veterans of the House of Commons. 
 That achievement stands alone ; and its equal 
 is not likely to be found, even though the House 
 of Commons should live another 500 years. 
 But such parallel as there is anywhere is to be 
 seen in the career of Lord Randolph Churchill, f 
 In January, 1781, Pitt was only a proud boy, 
 who had inherited the greatest of all political 
 names. Three years later he was Prime Minister. 
 In 1 88 1 Lord Randolph Churchill was the leader 
 of a party of four, and he and his party were the 
 established political joke of the day. In 1886 he 
 was the leader of the House of Commons, with 
 every eye fixed on him as the man of the future. 
 But there, except for the brevity of the two lives, 
 the parallel ends altogether. The swiftness of 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, January 5, 1906. 
 t " Lord Randolph Churchill," by Winston Spencer 
 Churchill, M.P. Two volumes. (Macmillan. 36*. net.) 
 148
 
 PITT AND LORD RANDOLPH 149 
 
 Pitt's rise to power was scarcely more remarkable 
 than the tenacity with which he retained it. 
 Lord Randolph's fall was even swifter than his 
 rise. And it was final. When Pitt died in 
 1806, of the forty-six years of his life nearly 
 twenty had been passed as Prime Minister. 
 Lord Randolph was also on the point of being 
 forty-six when he died ; but he had known only 
 a year of office and only six months of power. 
 Perhaps the story that Mr. Winston Churchill 
 tells in this book loses nothing from the sense of 
 the impending catastrophe which must be in the 
 mind of every one who reads it. There is, 
 indeed, in Lord Randolph's career a comedy, a 
 history, and a tragedy ; a comedy of irresponsible 
 youth Blenheim Harriers, and rehearsals at 
 hunt dinners of the Jack the Giant Killer 
 impudences which were afterwards to stagger 
 more important assemblies ; next, from 1883-86, 
 a history in which, with Napoleonic vigour, 
 speed, and ruthlessness, he transforms his party, 
 leads it to victory, and becomes himself the most 
 powerful man in England ; and then, from 1887 
 to 1895, a tragedy in which those ancient forces, 
 fate and a too free will, both play their parts, 
 till the curtain falls on the last sad months in 
 which the indomitable courage of the victim 
 only increases the pain of those who watch him 
 die. Never was there a case in which we so 
 inevitably think the thoughts which an obscurer 
 political tragedy drew from Burke : " What 
 shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue ! " 
 It is a pleasure to be able to say that a life so 
 
 L
 
 150 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 well worth writing has been admirably written. 
 Sons have not always proved the most judicious 
 of biographers, and Mr. Winston Churchill's 
 warmest admirers would not ask us to think him 
 the most judicious of men. But here is a book 
 which is certainly among the two or three most 
 exciting political biographies in the language, 
 and yet the young Achilles has done due honour 
 to Patroclus without sacrificing any slaughtered 
 Trojans on the funeral pyre. The book is a son's 
 book, of course, written from a particular point 
 of view ; and there are, of course, things which 
 might be said against Lord Randolph Churchill 
 but are not said here. That is inevitable ; but 
 the worst kind of biographer is not he who has 
 a point of view, but he who has not and certainly 
 Mr. Winston Churchill has not unduly obtruded 
 his. One hears the son's voice in a good many 
 places, and hears it willingly ; the voice of the 
 politician one hardly ever hears. Good taste 
 has not generally been considered the strong 
 point either of the biographer or of his father ; 
 nor has either of them been conspicuous for 
 self-restraint. But the severest critic will find 
 very few lapses of taste in this book ; and for 
 those few it is not the writer's pen, but his 
 subject's tongue, that is responsible. And as 
 for self-restraint, who could have believed that 
 Mr. Winston Churchill could write a book that 
 is full of Mr. Chamberlain, and not altogether 
 empty of Mr. Balfour, and yet write it like an 
 historian, and not at all like a man on a party 
 platform ? But he has. Even the temptation
 
 THE INTEREST OF THIS LIFE 151 
 
 of the fair trade controversy, and Lord Randolph's 
 conversion to economic orthodoxy, has not made 
 him swerve from the path of virtue. Once, and 
 once only, so far as we have noticed, does he 
 indulge himself in the luxury of using the past 
 to point the moral of the present. And then the 
 allusion is as innocent as it is isolated. It occurs 
 in the account of his father's resignation. " It 
 is no doubt true that he rated his own power . . . 
 too high. Like many a successful man before 
 him and some since he thought the forces he 
 had directed in the past were resident in himself, 
 whereas they were to some extent outside him- 
 self and independent." The italics are not in the 
 original ; and, even with their assistance, this 
 single shaft shot at our existing political actualities 
 can hardly be said to look very venomous. 
 
 But let there be no mistake. Virtue does not 
 necessarily imply dullness. The book is, on the 
 whole, a serious and fair-minded record of 
 Lord Randolph's career. But its interest never 
 flags for a moment. No one who cares for 
 politics will willingly put it down when it is 
 once in his hands. People who do not care for 
 politics had better not touch it. There are 
 other lives of politicians which may suit them, 
 but not this. Mr. Gladstone, for instance, 
 might have been an Archbishop, if fate had so 
 willed it, or a college don ; so thaj: Mr. Morley 
 was certain beforehand of a large circle of academic 
 and ecclesiastical readers. But no one can 
 imagine Lord Randolph anything but a politician. 
 And whatever else he was is not the concern of
 
 152 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 this book. It is written for politicians ; and 
 by them it will be read eagerly, excitedly, and 
 often enthusiastically, from the first page to the 
 last. There is every dish in it that can whet 
 their palates ; all the things that every one wants 
 to know and only a very few can find out ; the 
 real views that lie behind the plausibilities of 
 the platform, the private relations that lie behind 
 public politeness, all the secret springs of which 
 the world sees only the resulting acts. And yet 
 it is no book of the backstairs. The revelations 
 are of things of real interest, and are given in 
 letters from the actors themselves published 
 with their consent. Sir Michael Hicks Beach, 
 who was more closely associated with Lord 
 Randolph in his two great years than any one 
 else, has " thoroughly revised the whole book." 
 A large number of letters to and from Lord 
 Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain, and some to 
 and from the Duke of Devonshire, give the 
 changing picture of his relations with each. It is 
 characteristic of his hot-headedness that with 
 each there is a sharp quarrel. And yet, for all 
 these exciting personalities, there are no windows 
 broken ; unless, indeed, it be those of the 
 Cabinet. How far will that august and so 
 edifying fiction, the unity of the Cabinet, survive 
 the successive attacks of Mr. Morley, Lord 
 Edmond Fitzmaurice, and Mr. Churchill ? 
 Perhaps no one ever believed it in the inner 
 chamber of his mind ; but no one goes into 
 those inner chambers very often ; and for 
 daylight and the street and the platform, it
 
 THE CABINET 153 
 
 passed very well as one of the solemn plausi- 
 bilities of our political system. But will that be 
 possible any longer after the man in the street 
 has seen Lord Randolph " alone in the Cabinet " 
 of which the world supposed him to be the most 
 powerful member, Lord Salisbury wishing there 
 were " no such thing as Local Government " 
 after an eirenicon which he had proposed had been 
 abruptly rejected by his colleagues, and, most 
 startling of all, Mr. Gladstone rejoicing over 
 " only three resignations " at a Cabinet meeting ? 
 However, nothing would have disturbed Lord 
 Randolph less than that he, or his Life, should 
 be the means of exploding any number of 
 venerable fictions. And for the rest of us, it is 
 a satisfaction to observe that, if the corporate 
 Cabinet suffers, the individuals that compose it 
 come out, for the most part, unscathed. The 
 wisdom and patience and self-abnegation of 
 Lord Salisbury, to whose great qualities Mr. 
 Churchill pays more than one generous tribute, 
 the " grave, calm, slow-moving " mind of the 
 Duke of Devonshire, the sacrifices of office and 
 power and political prospects actually made by 
 the Duke and Lord James and Mr. Chamberlain, 
 on the Liberal Unionist side, and met, on the 
 Conservative side, by the most evidently sincere 
 offers of the same self-abnegation on the part of 
 Lord Salisbury and Lord Randolph Churchill 
 these things all come to give us a feeling that, 
 after all has been said, English public life is still 
 a thing we have a right to be proud of, a great 
 life, greatly and honourably lived.
 
 154 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 However, one may hope that there is nothing 
 new or surprising about this ; though there are 
 people who will say that a Life of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill is not exactly the place where they 
 would have expected to discover such consola- 
 tion. But that is part of the interest of the book ; 
 it contains a good many things that one would 
 not expect to find in it. Who, for instance, 
 except the very few who have been behind the 
 most secret political curtains, will not be surprised 
 to learn that the first meeting between Lord 
 Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain occurred at the 
 Turf Club, of all places in the world ? Napoleon 
 and Alexander met to divide the world on the 
 neutral ground of a boat moored in the middle 
 of the Niemen ; and if, for these meetings of 
 great potentates, a place has to be found where 
 neither will feel himself too much at home, 
 Lord Randolph, who arranged this meeting, may 
 be congratulated on the abundant fitness of the 
 ground he chose. Certainly he meant to succeed. 
 This book brings out how eagerly from the first 
 he pressed a coalition on Lord Salisbury. In 
 November, 1885, directly Mr. Gladstone was 
 known to be committed to Home Rule, he 
 wrote : 
 
 I think you ought to negotiate with the other side, 
 giving Harrington India, Goschen Home Office, 
 and Rosebery Scotch Office. You will never get 
 Whig support so long as I am in the Government, 
 and Whig support you must have. 
 
 To which Lord Salisbury drily replied, " They
 
 LORD RANDOLPH'S BUDGET 155 
 
 hate me as much as they hate you " : an,d, some 
 months later : 
 
 I observe that Hartington, whenever he has the 
 chance, dwells with so much conviction upon my 
 " rashness,'* etc., that I suspect I am more the 
 difficulty than you. I believe the G.O.M., if he 
 were driven to so frightful a dilemma, would rather 
 work with me than with you ; but that with Harting- 
 ton it is the reverse. 
 
 The whole of the story of the years 1885-87 
 and the gradual passage of the Liberal Unionists 
 from correspondence with Mr. Gladstone to 
 co-operation with Lord Salisbury is told here 
 with an authoritative fullness which is at once 
 new and final. Mr. Morley had told it from 
 the other side ; he could not tell it from this. 
 Among other new things in the book the most 
 startling is probably the fact that Lord Randolph 
 resigned the India Office in August, 1885, 
 because Lord Salisbury had sent Lord Dufferin 
 a letter from the Queen about an appointment 
 for the Duke of Connaught without making any 
 communication with him ; and the most im- 
 portant is the elaborate Budget scheme he had 
 submitted to the Cabinet before his final resigna- 
 tion. Of that it is enough to say here that even 
 its author never produced anything bolder, and 
 that no Budget since* not even the famous 
 one of Sir William Harcourt has made anything 
 like such a courageous attempt to cover the whole 
 ground. Budgets have always proved slippery 
 * Written, of course, in January, 1906.
 
 156 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 things, and probably even Lord Randolph's 
 tenacious fingers would not have managed to 
 hold this intact to the end. Its main lines were 
 sweeping reductions of the income-tax and the 
 tea and tobacco duties met by a complete recon- 
 struction of the death and house duties on a 
 graduated scale, and by several new taxes. But 
 more exciting than either the Budget or the first 
 resignation, and almost equally new as far as 
 the details are concerned, are the accounts of 
 the defeat of Lord Salisbury and capture of the 
 National Union in 1884, of the formation of the 
 two Ministries of 1885 and 1886, and of the 
 final resignation at the end of the latter year. 
 There are many people who find some of them 
 half against the grain that Westminster and 
 Pall Mall are, for them, the most interesting 
 places in all the world, and the game of politics 
 its only really exciting game ; and by all of them 
 these chapters will be devoured with breathless 
 eagerness. They will at least have the pleasure 
 of seeing their favourite game splendidly and 
 audaciously played. Lord Randolph knew what 
 he wanted from the first and meant to have it. 
 He had unbounded confidence in himself, and 
 might have said in the early eighties, almost in 
 the first Pitt's words, " I know that I can save 
 this party and I know that no one else can." He 
 was not a man to lose time in the " beatific state 
 of chronic deliberation " which he found so 
 common in the Cabinet when he got there. The 
 Tory party appeared to him to be going to sleep, 
 and he did not care whose bones were broken
 
 THE SOLDIER OF POLITICS 157 
 
 in the process of waking it up. He chose his 
 ground well, and when he had taken his stand 
 on it he never once retreated. All through these 
 controversies he showed a great soldier's instinct 
 in taking up a strong position, luring the enemy 
 into a weak one, and then smiting him in full 
 strength and without a moment's delay. And, 
 so far as politics are a mere game to be played, 
 or a mere battle to be won, he never made a 
 serious mistake till the final one, the commonest 
 of all, which no one had more excuse for making 
 than he. But the excuse was of no avail. The 
 world is never fond of people who fancy it cannot 
 do without them ; and the letter from Windsor 
 Castle, like similar documents before and since, 
 found no more agreeable answer than that 
 ancient but chilling maxim, " il n'y a pas 
 d'homme necessaire." There is always a 
 Goschen somehow on these occasions, and it 
 does not do to forget him. 
 
 But a biography is, after all, more as well as 
 less than a history ; its business is not merely to 
 relate events but to paint a portrait what sort 
 of portrait of Lord Randolph is it that this book 
 ultimately leaves on the memory ? In some 
 respects, that of a more complex personality than 
 has generally been believed. Who would have 
 suspected, for instance, that Lord Randolph, in 
 his speeches the rudest man, perhaps, who ever 
 sat on the front bench, had in private " an old- 
 world courtesy of manner " that astonished the 
 Treasury and made Mr. Gladstone call him 
 " the most courtly man I ever met " ? Or,
 
 158 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 again, what could surprise most people more 
 than to find Lord Randolph writing to Miss 
 Jerome shortly before their marriage : 
 
 I strongly recommend you to read some great 
 works and histories ; . . . novels, or even travels, are 
 rather unsatisfactory and do one no good, because 
 they create an unhealthy excitement which is bad 
 for any one. 
 
 and, in the same letter 
 
 I have two old favourites. When I feel very 
 cross and angry I read Gibbon whose profound 
 philosophy and easy though majestic writing soon 
 quiets me down, and in an hour I feel at peace with 
 all the world. When I feel very low and desponding 
 I read Horace, whose thorough epicureanism, quiet 
 maxims, and beautiful verse are most tranquillising. 
 Of late I have had frequent recourse to my two 
 friends, and they have never failed me. 
 
 It may be noted, too, that he quoted Non ebur 
 neque aureum in the House of Commons in 1884 
 at the expense of Mr. W. H. Smith, whose 
 " brilliant, ingenious, and fertile mind " had 
 invented the argument that Irishmen who lived 
 in mud cabins were not fit to vote. His son 
 tells us that in his early days he knew three books 
 almost by heart the Bible, Gibbon, and 
 " Jorrocks." The " resignation " chapter in 
 this book is headed by a passage from Dryden 
 which Mr. Churchill found copied out in his 
 father's hand ; those fine lines which end, " But 
 what has been has been, and I have had my 
 hour." So that Lord Randolph, too, was not
 
 "DE L'AUDACE" 159 
 
 altogether without the love of letters traditional 
 among English statesmen. But these and other 
 indications of the conventional English gentle- 
 man of culture are only the details of the portrait. 
 The broad impression is still that of the astonish- 
 ing young man of whom no one could say 
 whether his impudence was greater than his 
 ability, or his ability greater than his impudence. 
 " De 1'audace et toujours de 1'audace " was 
 always his motto ; and his life is a series of 
 defiances beginning with schoolmasters at Eton, 
 police magistrates at Oxford, and masters of 
 hounds in the hunting field, and proceeding 
 quite naturally to the magnates of his party and 
 the House. Even in his marriage he was as 
 rapid and audacious as in everything else. He 
 proposed to Miss Jerome on the third night of 
 their acquaintance, and when his father delayed 
 the marriage by " unnecessary rigmarole and 
 verbosity," was only prevented by a timely 
 surrender from a jnost vigorous scheme of 
 reprisals to be carried out through the medium 
 of the borough of Woodstock. Everywhere and 
 in everything he is a person who makes things 
 livelier by his entrance into a room. Public life 
 does not contain too many people who enliven 
 the course of official routine as he did, by such 
 questions as the " Was I a bimetallist when I was 
 at the India Office ? " with which he startled 
 Sir Arthur Godley ; or that other, " Are the 
 consumers represented upon this deputation ? " 
 which he put with crushing gravity to a deputation 
 of sugar refiners.
 
 160 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 That was the man. The statesman is, perhaps, 
 less easy to be sure about. Two things, however, 
 are brought out pretty clearly in this book, his 
 essential consistency and his loyalty to his party. 
 Towards his friends and colleagues, indeed, he 
 seems to have been deficient in the kind of 
 loyalty which alone makes political co-operation 
 possible. Sir John Gorst and Mr. Jennings, 
 after the closest political alliance with him, 
 conceived themselves so badly treated by him 
 that they broke off all correspondence and never 
 resumed it. Mr. Chamberlain felt so injured 
 by his conduct at one time that he wrote to him 
 in the third person. Lord Salisbury, after a 
 brief intimacy during which he wrote Lord Ran- 
 dolph no letters in seven months, accepted his 
 resignation without reluctance and never desired 
 his return. The truth is that Lord Randolph 
 was too wilful, too arbitrary, too masterful, to 
 act for long with men who would not be his 
 puppets. That would not so much have mattered 
 if he had had it in him to follow the wise advice 
 Mr. Labouchere gave him at the time of his 
 resignation " Sacrifice everything to becoming 
 a fetish ; then, and only then, you can do as you 
 like." But patience, the first necessity of an 
 English statesman, was a quality of which he 
 knew nothing ; and his imperious impatience 
 was his ruin. Still, this incapacity for getting 
 on with men involved no disloyalty to principle. 
 Few, indeed, are the prominent statesmen who 
 have so few inconsistencies in their record. The 
 best service Mr. Churchill has done his father's
 
 HIS FALSE POSITION 161 
 
 memory is the conclusive proof he gives that his 
 extremely generous views about Ireland, so 
 often supposed to have been taken up with an 
 eye to Parnell's support, date from his first 
 residence in Ireland during his father's Vice- 
 royalty. And the Liberal opinions which he 
 found to be so distasteful to the " rampant and 
 irrepressible Toryism " of Lord Salisbury's 
 Cabinet were profoundly sincere. But the 
 question, which, perhaps, he never sufficiently 
 asked himself, is whether a man who believed in 
 local option and one man one vote, who " re- 
 garded Liberal measures as things good and 
 desirable in themselves," and who could say 
 even in joke that he cared more for the Eight 
 Hours Bill than for Monarchy, Church, or 
 House of Lords, had any business in the Conser- 
 vative party at all ? He was loyal in action, as 
 his conduct from 1887 to his death, with its 
 many resistances to temptation and its few 
 surrenders, shows ; but could he possibly be 
 loyal in thought ? 
 
 That was perhaps the unhealthiest side of his 
 influence on politics that, and the vulgar 
 licence of personal abuse he always practised, 
 which did more than has been done by any one 
 else to lower the dignity and amenity of English 
 public life. A statesman of the highest order 
 he certainly was not. In political faith and 
 courage, the spring of all great achievement, he 
 almost equalled Gladstone and Disraeli, and he 
 surpassed Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour ; 
 but he had nothing of Lord Salisbury's large
 
 162 LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL 
 
 wisdom, and nothing of Mr. Balfour's intellectual 
 fertility. Most of all, perhaps, he was wanting 
 in the higher qualities of the imagination. He 
 lived entirely on the earth, in the street, one might 
 say, with his eyes on the polling booth, and his 
 hopes on the next general election. He could 
 never touch the national imagination on the 
 moral side as Gladstone could, making voters 
 and politicians feel the issue of the moment as 
 part of the eternal duel between the spirit of 
 evil and the spirit of good ; nor on the historical 
 side as, at his best, Disraeli could, making a 
 public meeting a place in which the very air 
 seemed full of august memories. Such things 
 were not in him to do. But what he could do 
 he did. And the man who in four years com- 
 pletely transformed a great party, and prepared 
 it for twenty years of power, will not be forgotten 
 so long as English parties exist and English 
 political history is read.
 
 IX 
 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST* 
 
 WHAT is an optimist ? We know what a pes- 
 simist is. At least we know that entertaining 
 definition which has truth as well as wit in it : 
 " What is a pessimist ? Why, a man who lives 
 with an optimist." It is a sort of new reading 
 of the ancient optimi corruptio pessima. And 
 probably its reverse is also true ; an optimist is 
 a man who lives with a pessimist. But in both 
 cases the truth involved is the smaller part of the 
 whole ; we are not so unhappily made that the 
 main influence of our friends and neighbours 
 is that of provoking a reaction. All of us, in so 
 far as we are really human, feel a desire of agree- 
 ment with those about us ; a large part of our 
 happiness consists in moral and intellectual 
 harmony. We learn from each other, every 
 hour get knowledge, opinions, sympathies, 
 admirations from each other. Everybody has 
 watched the process of a whole group of people 
 being infected with some enthusiasm which 
 before existed only in some one of its members. 
 And of course we catch other things from our 
 friends ; things less good than knowledge or 
 enthusiasm. In any case, it is clear, on the whole. 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, March i, 1917. 
 163
 
 164 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 that the epigram about the pessimist has the 
 amount of truth required in epigrams but not 
 much more. If we ourselves are perverse 
 people, or if our friends are, we act on each other 
 as irritants. But in ordinary circumstances 
 and in the case of men and women of ordinary 
 human sympathies, the temper and opinions of 
 those with whom we live are forces not of 
 repulsion but of attraction. 
 
 Nor, of course, could a mere definition by 
 opposites carry us very far. Yet the question 
 is, especially at the present time, interesting 
 and even important. Since August, 1914, the 
 nation has been almost divided into optimists 
 and pessimists. It is often said that the opti- 
 mists have always been wrong. One reads in 
 certain sections of the Press at each successive 
 crisis of the war such sentences as, " Our 
 optimists are behaving as fatuously as usual." 
 No doubt they have often been mistaken. In 
 the autumn of 1914 the optimist of the streets 
 believed the war would be over by Christmas. 
 And let us be just to the much-abused Mr. de la 
 Rue, as somebody christened him. The man 
 in the street was no more wrong than some, at 
 any rate, of the men in the Cabinet and of the 
 commanders in the field. All the optimists, 
 well and ill informed, under-estimated German 
 strength and over-estimated Russian. They 
 under-estimated German obstinacy and German 
 indifference to the laws of God and man ; they 
 also under-estimated the capacity of the Allies 
 to make gigantic and very costly mistakes in
 
 MISTAKES ON BOTH SIDES 165 
 
 diplomacy and in military operations. The 
 ordinary optimist, at any rate, had no conception 
 of the difficulties of working a Grand Alliance, 
 and could not foresee the possibility of such 
 muddles as those which lost an army in Gallipoli, 
 gave Bulgaria to the enemy and Serbia to destruc- 
 tion. In all these ways the whole clan of 
 optimists, obscure and distinguished, were lured 
 into that path of pleasant delusions which leads 
 straight to the pit of disappointment. They are 
 even at this minute perhaps no one can be sure 
 beforehand under-estimating the amount of 
 suffering which the rulers of Germany will see 
 their soldiers and people endure before they will 
 consent to lower the flag of their arrogance and 
 publicly confess themselves to be in the most 
 humiliating of all positions, that of the beaten 
 bully. 
 
 All this is true. But what is equally true and 
 much more rarely said is that the pessimists have 
 certainly not been any more infallible than the 
 optimists. Who does not remember the first 
 days of September, 1914, when every pessimist 
 ridiculed those who still had hopes of saving 
 Paris ? A little later they were quite sure that 
 Ypres would go, and indeed Calais and the 
 Channel coast; in 1915 they were certain that 
 not only Riga but Petrograd would be occupied, 
 and that, in fact, Russia was " finished " ; when 
 Italy came in they expected to see the Germans 
 in Milan and Venice within three weeks, and 
 last year they again asserted that these cata- 
 strophes were plainly on the eve of taking place ; 
 
 M
 
 i66 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 they were sure of the fall of Verdun ; sure that 
 we could never deal with the Zeppelins (one of 
 the more prominent printed a prophecy in 1915 
 that during the next six weeks we must expect 
 Zeppelins to come every day, doing increasing 
 damage a period during which, as it happened, 
 not one reached these shores) ; sure that we 
 could never make an offensive on the West, sure 
 that the submarines would prove invincible or 
 so serious as to force on us an unsatisfactory 
 peace. These are mistakes at least as serious as 
 those of the optimists, so far, at any rate, as time 
 has been able to pronounce upon them. Nor 
 did their military misjudgments stand alone. 
 If optimists of high financial authority can be 
 quoted as having declared that the Germans 
 would not be able to last out financially more 
 than six months, expert pessimists can equally 
 be quoted who were not deterred by the experi- 
 ence of two years from declaring last summer 
 that the rate of exchange could not be maintained 
 more than a few weeks and that a financial 
 collapse in the autumn was inevitable. Let us 
 hope that their patriotism is pure enough to 
 rejoice, without any alloy of irritation at their 
 own exposure, in the position as we see it to-day, 
 with a steady exchange and the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer announcing a War Loan of over 
 ^1,000,000,000 ! 
 
 These are all, both optimist and pessimist, 
 miscalculations of the intellect. But they illus- 
 trate what the philosophy of the eighteenth 
 century tried to ignore and the newest philosophy
 
 EMOTIONS AND INTELLECT 167 
 
 of our own day may tend to exaggerate the 
 interdependence of the intellect and the emotions. 
 There is very rarely such a thing as a pure act 
 of the mind. We see partly what we are looking 
 for and believe partly what we desire. In one 
 way, of course, this leads to constant deceptions. 
 If a farmer chooses to put off harvesting in 
 August because he is constitutionally incapable 
 of believing in anything but a fine September, he 
 is exposed to rude surprises. But then so he is 
 if he cuts his corn before it is really ripe because 
 he is constitutionally incapable of believing in 
 any but a wet September. These are simply 
 intrusions of the temperament in the sphere of 
 the intellect, and have to be paid for. Even 
 here the optimist has a real advantage. Both 
 are wrong : each feels, when September comes, 
 that he has lost a good crop which he might 
 have had ; but the one gets an August of happi- 
 ness, which means more life in himself and more 
 friendliness to others, out of his mistake ; the 
 other gets one of depression and consequent 
 ill-temper. Still every one would admit that in 
 this sphere the thing to aim at is to get the 
 emotions to stand aside and let the intellect work 
 so accurately that we form correct judgments 
 are, in fact, in touch with the truth. 
 
 But there are many things, and some of the 
 most important, in which it is a gain and not a 
 loss that the emotions, if they are of the right 
 sort, should influence the judgment. Our hopeful- 
 ness cannot affect the weather. But it can and 
 every day does affect the actions of those about
 
 1 68 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 us. The power of faith posstmt quia posse 
 videntur is not only for those who have it, but 
 for those who see it in their friends or their 
 leaders. It creates what it desires. If we 
 believe every man we have to do with to be a 
 cheat, a great many will become what we take 
 them for. If we suspect our servants they will 
 tend to deserve our suspicions. But if we 
 believe in goodness we not only find it, we 
 make it. Every soldier can tell us of the difference 
 between the officer who believes in his men's 
 courage and devotion and the officer who thinks 
 they will do nothing which they are not made to 
 do. Out of the same material the one will 
 create a regiment of heroes, the other one of 
 malingerers and grumblers. 
 
 It is in all these greatest things, and notably 
 in the great worlds of art and religion, that the 
 judgments of the intellect are most necessarily 
 and rightly affected by the non-intellectual parts 
 of the spirit of man. The mere intellect, alone 
 and by itself, is totally incapable of seeing the 
 whole of even the apparently plainest things in 
 these spheres. What it sees by itself is a very 
 small part, and the least essential, of the true 
 whole, say, of a Rembrandt etching or of a 
 collect in the Prayer-book. And so in the matter 
 of human character. What the external judg- 
 ment sees in men is that part alone which depends 
 on the calculating intellect, the part which issues 
 in external and measurable actions. It does not 
 see the secret, struggling, half-conscious or sub- 
 conscious emotions, the inner rebellions against
 
 THE OPTIMISM OF THE SPIRIT 169 
 
 acquired habit and the pressure of environment ; 
 it is blind to the immortal spirit, which is always 
 dying and being born again, always seeing 
 visions and failing fully to grasp them, always 
 moulding matter and yet wearying of the struggle 
 with its resistance, always proving itself the 
 power behind the visible sphere of things, yet 
 never itself seen by any eyes except those which 
 perceive the invisible. 
 
 And this is the real difference between the 
 deeper sorts of optimism and pessimism. It is 
 a difference of the spirit. Of course, in this 
 sphere, too, there are matters in which the 
 intellect by itself has a right to play an important 
 part. When other people were expecting a war 
 of three or four months it was right that Lord 
 Kitchener should expect one of three years. 
 Probably, though not certainly, it would have 
 been better for the country if Mr. Asquith had 
 expected the same. But there is another side 
 even to that. It has been said that many men 
 would not consent to live a day longer if they 
 could foresee the misfortunes which would occur 
 to them within a year. It is not certain though 
 we may have our private faith on the subject 
 that the nation would have faced the future as 
 it did in the black autumn of 1914 if it had known 
 how long the blackness was to last without 
 showing a streak of dawn. Part of the function 
 of Ministers was to keep high the courage and 
 confidence of the nation ; and it was difficult 
 to do that unless they shared it themselves, even 
 perhaps to a degree beyond what the cold
 
 170 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 intellect allowed. No doubt the nation has 
 paid a heavy price for the too easy hopefulness 
 of Ministers. But it is fair to remember that 
 there is, at any rate, a set-off against the loss. 
 The serene cheerfulness of Mr. Asquith, the 
 resolute refusal of Viscount Grey to consider the 
 possibility of any end but that of a triumphant 
 vindication of public right, were no small 
 elements in the stock of national determination 
 which has carried us through these three years 
 of supreme trial. The nation could not have 
 been successfully led by Ministers who were 
 pessimists. In this great world of politics as in 
 the small world of private life cheerfulness makes 
 for vitality, while the tendency to dwell on and 
 anticipate misfortunes makes for depression and 
 weakness. Which is the better member of a 
 family, one who thinks and talks only of what 
 has gone well with family affairs in the past and 
 by temperament expects things also to go well 
 in the future, or one who dwells only on gloom, 
 foresees it and gloats over it ? The answer is 
 plain. Both may be equally far from including 
 the whole truth, but the one has the half which 
 makes for life and the other the half which, by 
 itself, makes for death. By the one the family 
 life is cheered and strengthened ; by the other 
 its energy is sapped and its courage destroyed. 
 
 But the difference is much profounder than 
 this. The reason why the pessimist is a curse 
 to his country is not because he is often wrong 
 in his calculations ; it is not even because he 
 depresses our spirits and lowers our power to
 
 PESSIMISM IS LACK OF FAITH 171 
 
 face out task ; it is because he believes neither 
 in God nor in man. That may seem a hard 
 saying. But, so far as he is a pessimist, it is true. 
 It may not be necessary for everybody who 
 believes in God to believe with Browning's Pippa 
 that because " God's in His Heaven " therefore 
 here and now " all's right with the world." 
 But it is certain that such a man will believe 
 that all is at least in process and possibility of 
 being put right ; and that that process has 
 begun now and is constantly at work. A man 
 may believe that in another world all will be 
 made right. But that is really believing only in 
 a future God. He may live a sincerely good 
 life of obedience to this future God ; but that 
 seems to be believing only in a God who will 
 ultimately judge, not in One who is now trans- 
 forming and converting the world. And no 
 isolated texts in the New Testament will prevent 
 the faith of mankind, and especially of Christen- 
 dom, from believing more and more that God is 
 leading His world slowly but steadily upwards, 
 and that each generation or each century, gaining 
 on one side, losing on another, does on the whole 
 make a slowly mounting balance of progress 
 towards the life that God meant man to live. 
 That this faith is justified seems certain. In 
 matters of art, indeed, and of the pure intellect 
 progress is doubtful or invisible, unless ten 
 mediocrities are to be held the equivalent of one 
 creative genius. But in the sphere of morals, 
 generally though quite wrongly supposed to be 
 the sole interest of the Divine Will, who can
 
 172 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 doubt the progress of the world ? To take a 
 single small field of morals, who can doubt, in 
 spite of the constant tirades against luxury and 
 selfishness which have been equally loud in every 
 preceding age, especially those now exalted for 
 their supposed simplicity of life, that there were 
 in England in 1913 at least a hundred times as 
 many people freely giving of their leisure, wealth, 
 and education for the service of others as there 
 were a century earlier ? Of course there is 
 much culpable selfishness to-day, but the more 
 important point is that there is less selfishness 
 and more public service than ever before. So, 
 too, about the war itself. It is not merely the 
 advance of science ; it is the increased strength 
 of the humane will that makes the lot of the 
 wounded to-day so immeasurably less painful 
 than it was in the wars of Marlborough or 
 Wellington. The conduct of Germany in 
 Belgium and elsewhere, abominable as it seems 
 to us, and indeed is, is only abominable in 
 comparison with the practice of the civilised 
 world for the last few centuries. The lot of the 
 Belgians compared with that of the victims of 
 Attila or Timur to say nothing of more ancient 
 conquerors is almost a fortunate one. The 
 crime of the Germans lies precisely there. They 
 have sinned against the light ; they have tried 
 to set back the progress of centuries. The 
 surprise and indignation which they have aroused 
 is the measure of the world's progress, and may 
 be strong enough to prove in future its safeguard. 
 Not to believe in this progress, as a moral
 
 THE PESSIMIST'S LIE 173 
 
 certainty, an a priori act of faith, is the pes- 
 simist's lie in the soul. It is what makes him 
 always so fatal a presence, each in his own circle. 
 It is worst, and unfortunately commonest, when 
 it arises from a lack of any faith in spirit at all. 
 Many people must have noticed that at the 
 beginning of the war all the people who believed 
 in men were optimists, and most of those who 
 believed in machines were pessimists. All the 
 materialists, all the people who regard mechanical 
 inventions as important landmarks in human 
 history, all who think that the progress of 
 humanity may be measured in the scales that 
 deal with rapidity of movement, command over 
 sea and air, or similar matters, either were or 
 tended to be pessimists. They were obsessed 
 by the amazingly victorious march of German 
 materialism since 1870, and, knowing nothing 
 of the spirit of man, they believed that nothing 
 could resist a force so visible, tangible, entirely 
 undeniable. On the other hand, those who 
 believed, as especially in Russia, in man's soul, 
 or, as especially in France, in his mind, or, as 
 especially in England, in his character, stood 
 firm and undaunted in the worst days in face of 
 all the victories of Krupp. They had a faith 
 that there was something greater and more 
 invincible in man than was dreamt of in Krupp 's 
 philosophy. They were the real optimists ; not 
 those who built on a doubtful calculation of the 
 chances of battle, but those who built on the 
 moral nature of man. It is quite true that in 
 history they have not always proved right. The
 
 174 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 death-dealing passage of Timur over some of 
 the fairest parts of the human heritage, the fatal 
 victories of the barbarous Ottoman over Greek, 
 Roman, Arab, and Christian civilisation, were 
 set-backs to progress and obstacles to faith in it 
 as great as, or greater than, a victory of the new 
 barbarians would be. But between the struggle 
 against old scourges of humanity and that against 
 the enemy of to-day there is a difference as well 
 as a similarity. The victory of the new would 
 be like the victory of the old in being one of 
 robbers and barbarians over a higher civilisation. 
 The course of the war has proved to all the world, 
 what acute observers had always known, that the 
 Prussian, in spite of his organised and somewhat 
 mechanical learning, still exhibits the plainest 
 traces of the unfortunate fact that he has never 
 experienced either of the two great disciplines 
 which are the sources of European civilisation. 
 No Roman rulers ever taught him the laws, the 
 manners, or the wisdom of the ancient world ; 
 and of Rome's later lesson, that of Christianity, 
 he knew nothing till it had lost much of its 
 original vitality and become what with him it 
 remains a matter of politics rather than of 
 religion. His victory, then, would be as fatal 
 to Western Europe as the victory of the Turk 
 was to Eastern. But there are differences too ; 
 and the important one is that the barbarian who 
 to-day desires to overrun the world has not 
 found, and will not find, what his predecessors 
 found a succession of victims divided and 
 scattered, without organisation or alliance, and,
 
 SPIRIT AND MATTER 175 
 
 what is far more important, without virility, 
 spirit, or faith. The defenders of the ancient 
 polity of Europe have proved themselves in no 
 way the inferiors of its enemy, except in the 
 matter of preparation against a crime in which 
 they could not bring themselves to believe. In 
 all the higher human qualities in courage and 
 self-sacrifice, in quickness of intellect and in 
 wisdom and exaltation of spirit, in an unshaken 
 union which has resisted all disasters and all 
 temptations, and in unquenchable faith in the 
 certainty of ultimate victory they have been, 
 in spite of far greater difficulties, not only equal 
 to the Germans, but in most cases far above 
 them, on an altogether higher plane. Nothing 
 could be less like the nations which proved such 
 easy prey for Tartars and Ottomans than this 
 Allied Europe of to-day. In this lies a reasoned 
 justification for the optimist. 
 
 But it is not his highest justification. That 
 lies elsewhere. Faith and freedom may not 
 organise thamselves for war so easily as bureau- 
 cratic materialism, but they have in them a 
 vitality of which it knows nothing. It would be 
 false to say that they cannot be defeated. They 
 have been defeated before and may be again, in 
 ways and for reasons inscrutable to us who live 
 in a universe, material and moral, of which we 
 see only the tiniest fraction. But what we do 
 see, what faith sees for herself beyond experience, 
 what freedom finds in her own heart, is that they, 
 and such as they, are powers of life because they 
 are powers of the spirit ; and that tyranny and
 
 176 OPTIMIST AND PESSIMIST 
 
 materialism have in them something " akin," as 
 Wordsworth said of riches, 
 
 To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death. 
 
 To deny that is to deny the spirit itself; and 
 that is the unforgivable sin of the pessimist. To 
 believe it is the joy of the optimist and his best 
 service to his country.
 
 X 
 
 THEN AND NOW* 
 
 THERE are striking differences between the war 
 we are now waging and that of a hundred years 
 ago. This is much more of a war of the whole 
 world than that was, for one thing ; it can 
 scarcely fail to be very much shorter, for another. 
 And of course there are many other points of 
 contrast. But the more one goes behind surface 
 characteristics, the more one looks into the essential 
 meaning of the two, the more one is struck not 
 with contrasts but with resemblances. The 
 true war aims for which we continued that war 
 for twenty years are exactly the same as those 
 for which we shall, if need be, continue this for 
 as many. We fought then and we fight now 
 primarily for the " security " of Pitt's famous 
 speech and the " liberty " of Wordsworth's 
 great sonnets. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc is the 
 hardiest of all fallacies, and there are still ignorant 
 people who, because the war ended in the return 
 of Louis XVIII., say and write that we fought it 
 to restore the Bourbons. Of course the truth 
 is that, as is well known, Pitt refused to interfere 
 with the Revolution so long as it did not inter- 
 fere with us ; and throughout the war, in spite 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, January 10, 1918. 
 177
 
 178 THEN AND NOW 
 
 of Burke, nobody but a few sentimentalists cared 
 a farthing about restoring the Bourbons, whom 
 we had no reason to love or even respect. 
 Louis XVIII. was restored because to the 
 French themselves, as well as to the allied 
 Sovereigns who had to find a government for 
 France, he seemed the least objectionable of the 
 few possible solutions of a very difficult problem. 
 And to those most self-contradictory of men, 
 the champions of freedom who worship at the 
 shrine of Napoleon and complain of the Restora- 
 tion, one answer is sufficient and crushing : 
 France enjoyed fifty times as much of political 
 and personal liberty between 1815 and 1825 as 
 she enjoyed between 1800 and 1815. 
 
 The truth, then, plainly is that in that struggle, 
 as in this, our predominant motives were the 
 security of ourselves and of Europe against the 
 establishment of a universal military despotism, 
 and the defence of that political and national 
 liberty of which England had been the first to 
 set the example on a large scale. No doubt the 
 parallel is closer in the first point than in the 
 second. In that, indeed, the wars of Elizabeth 
 with Philip II., of William III. and Anne with 
 Louis XIV., of the English aristocracy of a 
 hundred years ago with Napoleon, of the English 
 demoeracy of to-day with the German Emperor, 
 are simply successive phases of the same struggle. 
 Much nonsense has been talked during the last 
 three years about the " balance of power " which 
 appears to be a sort of political red rag to certain 
 people, especially those who understand very
 
 THE BALANCE OF POWER 179 
 
 little about it. But if every country in Europe 
 became a pure democracy to-morrow, nay, if the 
 Society of Nations were established, as all that 
 is best among the Allies hopes it will be, neither 
 of these things would undo the truth of the 
 doctrine of the balance of power. The essential 
 part of that doctrine is that the whole of Europe 
 is unsafe if a single Power is strong and aggressive 
 enough to contemplate establishing ascendancy 
 over all the rest. That is equally true whether 
 the Power is Spain, or France, or Germany. 
 And it would be just as true, or even truer, in a 
 Europe joined together in a Society of Nations 
 as it is in one of absolutely distinct States. A 
 Society of Nations of which Louis XIV. or 
 Napoleon was a member would obviously be a 
 mere scrap of paper. And so still more would 
 one be of which an undefeated and unregenerate 
 Germany was a member. The balance of power 
 does not mean that every single member of the 
 family of Europe is to weigh exactly the same 
 number of ounces in some nicely adjusted 
 political scales. There is no reason why it 
 should mean, as it has sometimes been made to 
 mean, that what any Power loses in one place is 
 to be made up to it in another. The essential 
 part of it has nothing to do with the family 
 solicitor, mutual compensation, exchange of 
 properties point of view which played too large 
 a part at the Congress of Vienna. The vital 
 thing in it is quite distinct from all that. It is 
 that Europe is a family whose members are of 
 unequal age, size, and importance, but have one
 
 i8o THEN AND NOW 
 
 interest in common, which is that no one of 
 them shall have either the will or the power to 
 erect for himself a tyranny over the rest. That 
 is what France twice tried to do, and what 
 Germany has been trying to do ever since 1870 : 
 what we prevented France from doing and must 
 prevent Germany from doing if the world is to 
 be made ready for a Society of Nations. 
 
 The truth is that a healthy balance of power 
 is the first condition for the establishment of 
 such a society. And such a balance is at this 
 moment threatened by Germany, and by 
 Germany alone. The war has brought great 
 inconveniences and even sufferings to the small 
 neutral nations, and the immediate cause of 
 some of this suffering is the blockade policy of 
 the Allies. But neither before the war began 
 nor since has any intelligent person in Scandinavia 
 or Holland, or Belgium, or Switzerland had the 
 smallest fear of any interference with the inde- 
 pendence of his country on the part of France or 
 England. Exactly the opposite, and with very 
 good reason, was the case with reference to 
 Germany. In Belgium and Holland, in Denmark 
 and Sweden and Norway, in Switzerland, in the 
 Balkans, many intelligent persons had their 
 fears of the Central Empires. They knew that 
 the two Emperors were masters of by far the 
 strongest military force in Europe, and that 
 many of the most popular and influential voices 
 in Germany had proclaimed designs for the 
 future which quite undisguisedly involved the 
 destruction of the independence of all the
 
 RUSSIA 181 
 
 smaller nations, and even threatened to reduce 
 France and England to a position of impotence. 
 No one could then or now quote any influential 
 voice in France or England which advocated 
 interference with any nation's independence. 
 It is true that in Sweden and the Balkans some 
 fears of Russia were mingled with those of 
 Germany. Dislike of the old Russia is easy 
 enough to explain ; fear less easy. For in a 
 succession of wars, with France and England 
 in 1855, w i tn Turkey twenty years later, and 
 more lately still with Japan, she had shown that, 
 while too immense for real defeat, she is too 
 clumsy, too backward, too stupid for successful 
 aggression. How long did it take her to defeat 
 so weak a Power as Turkey ? How could any 
 Swede suppose that she could successfully 
 interfere in Scandinavia, any attack on which 
 was certain to bring in Germany to the support 
 of the victim, while it was almost certain that 
 the aggressor would not have the support of 
 France ? Even in such a case the wise Scandina- 
 vian had more fear of the German protector than 
 of the Russian enemy, if such there should be. 
 But in any case fear of Russia is now a thing of 
 the past. The madmen who have made them- 
 selves her masters have chosen to expunge their 
 country from the list of the Powers of Europe, 
 and even if sane men should soon succeed them 
 it will take them long to restore her to her place. 
 They will be only too fully occupied with the 
 disastrous legacy of almost insoluble problems 
 bequeathed to them by the tyranny, corruption, 
 
 N
 
 182 THEN AND NOW 
 
 and incompetence of the old Russia and the 
 lawless insanity of the new. Russia then being 
 written off, and America with her disinterested 
 idealism having come in, it is plain that no sane 
 citizen of any neutral country can have any fears 
 of any danger whatever from the decisive victory 
 of the Allies, while he must view with appre- 
 hension and misgiving anything short of a real 
 defeat of Germany. 
 
 For these reasons we may say with confidence 
 that now, as a hundred years ago, we are fighting 
 for the security not only of ourselves but of 
 Europe. And if, now as then, we are fighting for 
 security, so now, even more than then, we are 
 fighting for liberty. It is still a parallel, not a 
 contrast. Then as now our cause was, as Words- 
 worth knew, the cause of freedom. And that was 
 essentially true from the first, in spite of the 
 genuine enthusiasm for the cause of liberty of the 
 young French Revolution. We did not fight the 
 Revolution, in spite of many and very grave 
 provocations, till, after occupying Belgium, France 
 threatened Holland directly and ourselves in- 
 directly by setting aside the very recent treaty 
 about the Scheldt. We had entirely refused to 
 support the German invasion of France in the 
 supposed interest of Louis XVI., or to interfere in 
 any way in the internal affairs of France. But then 
 as now the independence of the Low Countries 
 was a subject of legitimate British interest. Even 
 so, it was the French and not we who made 
 the actual declaration of war. But no doubt 
 the firm language of Pitt in the dispatch of
 
 PITT AND MR. ASQUITH 183 
 
 December 31, 1792 (language which might have 
 been used by Mr. Asquith with hardly an 
 alteration in August, 1914, to Germany), made 
 war almost inevitable with a Power which was not 
 only intoxicated with victory, but openly aspiring 
 to impose on the whole world a kind of despotism 
 of freedom in the interest and under the tutelage 
 of France. These are some of Pitt's words : 
 
 England will never consent that France shall 
 arrogate the power of annulling at her pleasure and 
 under the pretence of a pretended natural right of 
 which she makes herself the sole judge, the political 
 system of Europe established by solemn treaties. . . . 
 If France is really desirous of maintaining peace 
 and friendship with England she must show herself 
 disposed to renounce her views of aggression and 
 aggrandizement and confine herself within her 
 own territory without insulting other Governments, 
 without disturbing their tranquillity, and without 
 violating their rights. 
 
 This was the language of good sense and right ; 
 and, more than that, then as now, it stated the 
 only principles on which the freedom of Europe, 
 and especially of the smaller States, could be 
 safe. But though this is true, and though a war 
 based on these principles was in fact a war for 
 freedom as well as for right, yet this did not 
 become clear at once. During some years of 
 the struggle everything that was most liberal in 
 Europe was French in sympathy, while we had, 
 as our damaging Allies, the old dynasties 
 bolstered up by all the forces of reaction and
 
 184 THEN AND NOW 
 
 stupidity. It was not, as " The Convention of 
 Cintra " shows with immortal wisdom and 
 eloquence, till we threw ourselves whole- 
 heartedly into the support of Spain and Portugal 
 in their struggle for freedom and nationality 
 against a foreign tyrant that we began to make 
 clear either to ourselves or to others what had 
 really been true all along, that we were righting 
 the cause of the freedom of the peoples of Europe 
 against the threat of a universal military despotism 
 which cared nothing whatever either for nation- 
 ality or for freedom. 
 
 We did not gain more than a part of that high 
 object. Partly by our own fault, and still more 
 by that of our Allies, our victory did not result 
 in more than a very partial satisfaction of the 
 double ideal of nationality and freedom. It was 
 natural and right that we should care more 
 about security than about either ; for without 
 the " security " which Waterloo sealed for 
 forty years neither nationality nor freedom 
 would have had a chance. But if our statesmen 
 had cared more, and if those of the Continent 
 had cared at all, for nationality and freedom, 
 more could have been done for both. As it was, 
 the first was partially secured, and a few founda- 
 tions laid for the second. The great gain was 
 that the universal tyranny and brigandage of 
 Napoleon was swept away. Bad as the Govern- 
 ments of Austria, Prussia, Spain might be, they 
 were at least Austrian, Prussian, and Spanish, 
 and men so greatly prefer national government to 
 foreign that they have generally been more
 
 NATIONALITY AND FREEDOM 185 
 
 content to be misgoverned by a native King than 
 well governed by any alien authority. All that 
 was pure gain even if the motive of it was 
 mainly dynastic interest and only to a small 
 extent national feeling ; and neither Italy nor 
 Belgium nor Poland could alter the fact that the 
 political map of Europe in 1816 represented the 
 feelings of its peoples much better than it had 
 done five years before. Little was done directly 
 for freedom outside France, where a Parliamentary 
 system under a well-meaning Sovereign replaced 
 the naked despotism of the sword of Napoleon. 
 But the France of 1789 and even Napoleon him- 
 self in his earlier phase had unloosed a spirit of 
 liberty which neither their own armies nor 
 Metternich's spies and gaolers could destroy. 
 And the victory of the Allies, which gave so very 
 little directly to that spirit, gave it everything 
 indirectly by giving it the two things indispensable 
 for its further development, the two things it 
 could never hope for while Napoleon reigned 
 the recognition of a sense of nationality and 
 security from external attack. 
 
 To-day we have to go farther, much farther, 
 than the men of 1815 either could go or had any 
 desire to go. But first of all we have to win the 
 victory they won without which they could have 
 done nothing. We have to go through the 
 difficulties and disappointments which they had 
 gone through. Once more, though in a different 
 way 
 
 the firm Russian's purpose brave 
 Is bartered by a timorous slave.
 
 186 THEN AND NOW 
 
 Russia seems to be failing us to-day as she 
 failed us for a time a hundred years ago. But 
 as despots disappear or change their minds, so 
 the present rulers of Russia may give place to 
 others, or may possibly even discover the truth 
 that the Western Powers are the natural and 
 sincere friends of free Russia and Imperial 
 Germany her natural enemy. Perhaps they 
 may also learn that democracy cannot be estab- 
 lished by throwing away the two things which, 
 as we have just been seeing, 1815 won for it and 
 without which it could never have come into 
 being. The people of Russia, it is certain, will 
 neither win freedom for themselves nor assist 
 in winning freedom for others by exposing 
 Russia to the easy invasion of a foreign Emperor's 
 army nor by substituting an empty and barren 
 internationalism for the true spirit of national 
 life, growth, and freedom. Nor are general 
 pillage and the repudiation of all engagements, 
 domestic and foreign, likely to prove a foundation 
 on which anything very lasting can be built. 
 
 But the failure of Russia leaves us with other 
 Allies, both sane and free, who will not fail ; a 
 happy contrast to the position of a hundred 
 years ago, when we were left for some while 
 alone ; as Wordsworth said, 
 
 The last that dare to struggle with the foe. 
 
 Those Allies are all of one mind with us, set on 
 one high purpose, joined together in a unity of 
 spirit of an order such as never existed in the 
 alliances against Napoleon. Our spirit is higher
 
 SELF-DETERMINATION 187 
 
 because our purpose is greater. We have not 
 merely inherited their partially conceived goal 
 of national integrity and independence. We 
 have carried it much farther. We ask for a 
 reorganization of Europe based upon the true 
 principles of freedom and nationality. It seems 
 to be supposed in some quarters that the principle 
 of self-determination of the peoples was invented 
 by the Russian Revolution. On the contrary, 
 it has been implied from the beginning in the 
 whole policy of the Allies, though not, it must 
 be admitted, always maintained with absolute 
 consistency. It is just a year ago, and therefore 
 long before the Russian Revolution, that the 
 Allies in their reply to President Wilson defined 
 their object as 
 
 the reorganisation of Europe guaranteed by a stable 
 regime and based at once on respect for nationalities 
 and on the right to full security and liberty of economic 
 development possessed by all peoples, small and 
 great. 
 
 This, especially coupled with the illustrations 
 which immediately follow, implies the whole 
 doctrine of nationality and self-determination. 
 But there seems to be no reason why we should 
 not now cut away all possibility of misunder- 
 standing between ourselves and the honest 
 idealism of Russia by declaring that we accept 
 the principle of self-determination absolutely and 
 immediately as to Europe (in proof of which we 
 may cite our action at this moment in Ireland), 
 and that we recognise it, as our public actions in
 
 1 88 THEN AND NOW 
 
 recent years show, as the goal which we aim at 
 attaining in Asia and even in the Mahomedan 
 and more advanced parts of Africa. Of course 
 this could only be done in agreement with our 
 Allies ; but if they consented the joint declaration 
 would be at once a challenge to which the despotic 
 Empires could give no reply and the charter of a 
 new world to be constituted after our victory. 
 
 That victory is not yet achieved. We have 
 to render William II. as harmless as Napoleon ; 
 we have to convince Germany as we convinced 
 France that Europe is not one despotism, but 
 many free States. The condition of that is 
 nothing less than victory. Now as then, victory 
 is the only pledge of freedom or of nationality 
 or of peace. Professor Firth, in his admirable 
 Creighton Lecture (" Then and Now " ; Mac- 
 millan, is.) t reinforces with his great authority 
 much of what has been said here. In particular 
 his last words insist on this need of enduring till 
 the goal of victory has been attained. The men 
 of a hundred years ago, he says 
 
 were tried by fiercer extremes of good and evil 
 fortune than we have known, the burdens and 
 perils we have borne for three years they endured 
 for seven times as many, and did not lay down their 
 arms till they had attained the ends they fought 
 for. Here it will be enough for us to equal them. 
 
 Will the democracy fail to fight its own battle 
 as perseveringly as the aristocracy fought what 
 was partly the same battle a hundred years ago ? 
 If it does so fail the cause of European freedom
 
 THE CROAKERS 189 
 
 will probably be lost for several generations, for 
 without England, now as then, it cannot be saved. 
 And for that failure the English democracy will 
 have no excuse. Its sufferings to-day, the 
 sufferings of those who remain at home, are as 
 nothing compared with those of the men of 1810, 
 who were tortured at once by unemployment, 
 high taxation, and something like famine. To- 
 day, as the Prime Minister has said, there is less 
 starvation in England than there was before the 
 war, there is an unprecedented abundance of very 
 highly paid employment, and nearly the whole 
 of the war taxation is borne by the well-to-do 
 classes. But for better reasons than these, for 
 Wordsworth's reasons, we will not believe that 
 the people of England will faint or fail. 
 
 " All the croakers are in England," wrote a 
 soldier in the Peninsula to his mother in 1812. 
 That is true still But it is not true that all in 
 England are croakers. Still, there are too many 
 of them, and they are the danger of the moment. 
 Curiously enough, Mr. Firth quotes Sydney 
 Smith, a Canon of St. Paul's, as one of the worst. 
 He was quite sure in 1807 that success in the war 
 was impossible ; that our blockade was useless, 
 and invasion both likely to come and sure to be 
 successful. And he felt no shame in publish- 
 ing these opinions. Another wiseacre, Francis 
 Horner, who also has his successors to-day, 
 thought that an army at home such as the 
 Government desired to raise " would only be a 
 less evil than conquest by a foreign invader ! " 
 Moreover, there were then traitors in high
 
 190 THEN AND NOW 
 
 places, very different from our petty and obscure 
 practisers in treason, men who actually and 
 openly desired the success of the enemy, even so 
 late as 1813, as the Granville memoirs show. 
 The spirit of England was besieged, as Mr. Firth 
 says, by " armies of Doubters, Doubters of every 
 breed." But the fortress was not taken then, and it 
 will not be taken now. But if it is to be safe it 
 must resolutely refuse all parleying with the enemy 
 which involves any lowering of its flag. No 
 good came of the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and 
 no good will come now of any peace which 
 leaves Germany undefeated, unrepentant, and 
 still in the hands of those whose policy of insolence 
 and violence stands confessed to the whole 
 world. Happily v/3/oc usually refuses the most 
 tempting opportunities of escaping its doom. 
 But we must not rely upon the Germans being 
 as arrogantly blind to their own interests as 
 Napoleon showed himself in the winter of 
 1813-14 during the foolish negotiations of 
 Frankfort and Chatillon. We must go through 
 to the end and insist even more firmly on our 
 higher and larger principles than the men of 
 1814 did on their primary needs of security and 
 independence. So, and so only, acting definitely 
 on principle, declining any huckstering, insisting 
 on a peace of right, no more and no less, shall we 
 rise to the height of the ultimate call made 
 upon us. 
 
 It is true that even while we use such words, 
 even while we pledge ourselves to respond to 
 the full call, every thinking man among us is
 
 FAITH 191 
 
 conscious of the tremendous difficulties which 
 lie ahead difficulties which appear impossi- 
 bilities in the eyes of many who are certainly not 
 fools and have not commonly been thought of as 
 cowards : he is conscious, too, that he is using 
 words too high for him, words which, like all the 
 best used by religion, like the language put into 
 our mouths by the Prayer-book, are altogether 
 above his habitual self and to which he will 
 certainly not be always able to keep faithful. 
 But, here as elsewhere, it is best not to be afraid 
 of thoughts that are too great for us. Above all, 
 in matters of the will the conquering words are 
 such as possunt quia posse videntur, credo quia 
 impossibile. Faith may fail, as Peter's did, but 
 none the less, Peter was the better, not the 
 worse, for having made his great profession. 
 And so, even if we shrink back, as he did, 
 and as each of us only too probably will, before 
 some sacrifice that seems too hard to bear, we 
 shall still be the better for having seen the vision 
 and embraced it, and shall be the more likely 
 to recover from the fall.
 
 XI 
 POLITICAL PROPHECIES* 
 
 ARISTOTLE said that the life of contemplation was 
 higher and more desirable than the life of action. 
 But he has had few English disciples. Give an 
 English student the chance of becoming a Civil 
 servant, the chairman of a company, or even the 
 chairman of a committee, and, as Mark Pattison 
 said in another connexion, he eagerly " issues at 
 dawn from his chamber and his books." And if 
 you give him the chance of becoming a Cabinet 
 Minister he naturally issues from them at cock- 
 crow. Mr. Fisher was a historian. He gave us 
 several admirable volumes and at least one that 
 was brilliant and delightful. He never gave us 
 the great work which readers of history were 
 hoping to get from him. But he was compara- 
 tively young, and if time was going on, so, no 
 doubt, were his accumulations and preparations. 
 And then the whirlpool caught him and sucked 
 him in. First the administration of a young 
 university, a more complicated and exacting 
 occupation than the chairmanship of a great 
 railway ; and then a great Office of State, the 
 House of Commons, and all that they involve of 
 serious and absorbing work and, alas ! also of 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 1919. 
 192
 
 LOST HISTORIANS 193 
 
 idle functions and the hearing and making of 
 unnecessary speeches. Clearly there is no more 
 historical hope now of Mr. Fisher than there 
 was of Stubbs and Creighton after they became 
 Bishops ; and Clio has to weep over another lost 
 disciple. But perhaps his case is not quite so 
 bad as theirs. For the Church never surrenders 
 its prey except to death or dotage ; while Sir 
 George Trevelyan is one of several examples 
 which show that the State is not always so 
 tenacious or perhaps so faithful. 
 
 Meanwhile this little pamphlet,* a mere lecture, 
 shows us something of what we have lost. It is 
 typically English : a house of many windows 
 looking in all directions and commanding pleasant 
 prospects. There is no pedantry, no sign of 
 specialism, no confinement to a period. It 
 covers a wide country ; touches on Greek, 
 Latin, French, American history as easily as on 
 English, and exhibits the English characteristic 
 of an obvious interest in ethics and practice. 
 The influence of Oxford may be seen in the fact 
 that the learning is always harnessed to the 
 service of ideas, and perhaps the influence of 
 Paris, whither Mr. Fisher proceeded after 
 Oxford, in the lucidity with which both learning 
 and ideas are presented. 
 
 What does it all come to ? Mr. George 
 Trevelyan, in his " Clio," says, broadly, " History 
 
 * " Political Prophecies : An Address to the Edinburgh 
 Philosophical Society delivered November 5, 1918, by 
 the Right Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, MJ?." (Clarendon 
 Press. 15. net.)
 
 194 POLITICAL PROPHECIES 
 
 cannot prophesy the future." What it can do, 
 he adds, is a thing at once less and greater than 
 this. " It can mould the mind itself into the 
 capability of understanding great affairs and 
 sympathising with other men." This widening 
 of sympathy, of course, makes a man a better, a 
 somewhat less fallible, judge of the affairs of his 
 own day, many of which must be to every man, 
 alien, dark and difficult, till he has made one of 
 those journeys outside himself which are among 
 the best results of intelligent reading. Even so 
 the benefit is not direct, not a thing which can 
 be measured and defined. What is gained from 
 reading history is not a science or even an art 
 that can be applied to practice as you may use 
 arithmetic to make up your accounts, or play the 
 piano as soon as you have been taught. Indeed, 
 Mr. Trevelyan goes so far as to say that history 
 " has no practical utility." But what he probably 
 means is that its use, like that of art, poetry and 
 religion, is one that cannot be separated from 
 its experience. It is not like the discovery of 
 the electric light or the telephone, which, once 
 worked out by a man of science, can be used by 
 anybody. History, like poetry, possesses a man 
 rather than is possessed by him ; what he gains 
 by it is not a handy key to contemporary politics, 
 nor any pocket possession of any kind, but an 
 enlarged mind and a quickened imagination. 
 The change that follows from it is a change not 
 in what he has got, but in what he is. 
 
 Perhaps this is the reason why so very few of 
 the host of successful and unsuccessful prophets
 
 THE RISKS OF PROPHECY 195 
 
 brought before us by Mr. Fisher's omniscience 
 are historians. Never prophesy unless you know, 
 was a cynic's warning. But it may be that an 
 historian would complete it by " and if you know 
 you'll never wish to." That is, when once you 
 have realised how infinitely complicated human 
 affairs are, how entirely dependent upon the 
 most varied and incalculable of all forces, human 
 nature, you will know that prophecy is too risky 
 a business to enter upon. Mr. Fisher, who is 
 an optimist, is inclined to encourage the prophets 
 as well as other people. He says that the 
 machinery which they work with has been vastly 
 improved since the French Revolution. He 
 notes with just complacency the improvement of 
 our statistics, our increased knowledge of birth 
 rates, trade figures and the like ; and our 
 capacity to estimate with tolerable accuracy the 
 probable duration of the mines which play such 
 an important part in the life of modern states. 
 Whether, as he adds, " the influence of the 
 public press and democratic institutions have 
 given us a more perfected and better schooled 
 habit of political calculation " is less certain. 
 And in any case how far do these new factors 
 carry the political prophet ? After all, the last 
 word is always with man himself, not with coal 
 mines or harbours or fertile soils. Why is 
 Glasgow, why still more are Liverpool and 
 Bristol great ports while Cork and Limerick are 
 very small ones ? Because of some calculable 
 causes no doubt, but most of all because of the 
 incalculable differences between the races which
 
 196 POLITICAL PROPHECIES 
 
 inhabit the two islands. Why is Spain a poor 
 country ? Not because it lacks minerals or 
 other natural advantages, but because the 
 Spaniards are the Spaniards. Why has Asia 
 Minor, once the flowering home of all the 
 famour cities sung by Catullus and visited by 
 St. Paul, been for many centuries a desert of 
 poverty ? Because the Turks are neither rich 
 in themselves nor the cause of riches in other 
 men. But till you knew the Turk you could not 
 prophesy the misery of his dominions ; and 
 though it is probably safe to bet against the 
 Turk's improvement, it would even now be rash 
 to make sure that the Spaniard and the Irishman 
 are incapable of achieving political intelligence 
 or economic success. So dark and difficult are 
 the paths of the prophet. 
 
 Yet they might be primrose paths to judge by 
 the number of those whom Mr. Fisher shows 
 us walking in them. They are a distinguished 
 company, the unsuccessful as well as the success- 
 ful. First of all there are those who failed to 
 prophesy when they seem to us to have had every 
 opportunity. Aristotle, who lived with Alexander 
 and yet never divined the coming of the Nation 
 State ; Franklin, Frederick the Great, and 
 Madame Roland, who had so much interest in 
 foreseeing the French Revolution and such 
 opportunities for doing so and yet foresaw 
 nothing ; the German General Staff, and indeed, 
 all the soldiers of all nations, who left it to a 
 Polish banker to divine that the great war when 
 it came would be a war of trenches. Then there
 
 PROPHETS GOOD AND BAD 197 
 
 are those who did prophesy and whose shades 
 must wish they had not ; Rousseau, Joseph II., 
 Catherine II. and Frederick the Great, who all 
 declared that England's day of greatness was 
 passed for ever ; Lord Morley, who, happily 
 being without a shade as yet, must do his own 
 business of regretting his declaration that 
 Australians would never be reconciled to paying 
 for a war undertaken for the defence of Belgian 
 neutrality ; two Prime Ministers and an editor 
 of The Times Palmerston, Disraeli and Delane 
 who were all quite sure the French would 
 beat the Germans ; and a third, Lord Salisbury, 
 who in 1860 was quite certain that Germany 
 would never be united. Then there are the 
 successful prophets. It may be noted that all 
 are men of letters, only one a politician, while 
 only two are professed historians and their 
 prophecies are the least remarkable of all. They 
 are Polybius, who prophesied that luxury and 
 success would ultimately destroy the Roman 
 Empire, and Hume, who told Gibbon that the 
 English language would soon provide a larger 
 public than the French. Then there is Heine, 
 who warned the French that the old heathen 
 gods of Germany would one day rise from their 
 graves to the discomfort of Christianity and 
 civilisation. A higher level is reached, perhaps, 
 by Renan, who foresaw that England would 
 soon be France's ally against Germany ; certainly 
 by Montesquieu, who prophesied the revolt of 
 the American colonies, and still more by Words- 
 worth, who saw from the first the doom of 
 
 o
 
 198 POLITICAL PROPHECIES 
 
 French Imperialism in the national uprising oi 
 Spain. The highest level of all is of course 
 reached by Burke, who saw that the French 
 Revolution was an armed doctrine and could 
 not be confined to France, but unless defeated 
 must spread all over Europe ; who foresaw the 
 effect of the civil constitution of the clergy 
 and prophesied the military despotism of 
 Napoleon. 
 
 We are again living in an hour which sees the 
 floodgates laid open. And naturally the prophets 
 have not been able to resist temptation. When 
 the Bolshevists made their revolution, good 
 judges gave them a few days, some a few weeks, 
 some a few months. They have already lasted 
 over a year and a quarter. Last November, a 
 few days before the German Revolution, there 
 appeared in one of our best reviews an article 
 by a high authority declaring that the German 
 sovereigns were perfectly safe on their thrones. 
 On the other hand, it has been freely predicted 
 for the last two years that the General Elections 
 of all countries when they came would result in 
 sweeping victories for the Extremists of the Left. 
 Elections have now been held in Spain, Norway, 
 the United States, England and Germany ; and 
 the one common feature which they exhibit is 
 the defeat of extreme socialist or revolutionary 
 candidates. So we have the Dean of St. Paul's, 
 not content to confine himself to wise warnings 
 about the importance of quality in additions to 
 the birth rate, but rashly hurrying on, undeterred 
 by the fate of Malthus, to declare that every baby
 
 HISTORY DOES NOT RECUR 199 
 
 born can only make a place for itself by extin- 
 guishing another, and to assume that the world's 
 supplies of food and other commodities have 
 reached their final level ; as if the increased rate 
 of production during the last hundred years had 
 not again and again shown itself capable of 
 utterly outdistancing population and reducing 
 Malthus and the Malthusians to confusion. For 
 such revivals of refuted prophecy there seems 
 no excuse. More easily excused is the prophecy, 
 so commonly made to-day, that Germany is 
 now having her Kerensky and will presently 
 have her Lenin and Trotsky. But this seems 
 to be the sort of mistake which always comes of 
 fancying that history repeats itself. In England 
 there was a Parliamentary revolution, a military 
 despotism, a Restoration, an abdication, and a 
 re-settlement of the Monarchy in a younger 
 branch of the Royal family on a liberal and 
 constitutional basis. So in France there were 
 the Estates General and the various Parlia- 
 mentary forms of Government that filled the 
 first years of the Revolution ; then Napoleon ; 
 then the Bourbons again, and then their abdica- 
 tion. And when Louis Philippe appeared on 
 the throne, as the Citizen King, rash people said, 
 " It is English history over again ; the problem 
 is solved ; and the House of Orleans will last as 
 long as the House of Hanover." But it lasted 
 eighteen years. So Germany is not Russia, 
 and Herr Ebert has already shown that he is not 
 M. Kerensky ; and it would be foolish to suppose 
 that what happened in the one case must happen
 
 200 POLITICAL PROPHECIES 
 
 in the other. It may. In favour of its doing so 
 is the apparent law that the downward course of 
 revolution is seldom arrested till it reaches the 
 bottom, finds it very hard, and rebounds ; in 
 favour of its not doing so is the truth that the 
 Germans, unlike the Russians, are an extremely 
 industrial and materialistic people, and that, 
 whatever the Russians might imagine when they 
 acquiesced in Bolshevism, the Germans at any 
 rate know from the Russian example that it 
 spells universal ruin. 
 
 Anyhow, if prophecies are to be made they 
 must be made not on superficial parallels such as 
 that between Louis XVIII., followed by Louis 
 Philippe, and Charles II. followed by William III., 
 or that, if there be one, between Kerensky and 
 Ebert ; but, as Burke made his, on a considera- 
 tion of the profounder causes of political changes. 
 And as we cannot but speculate on the future, 
 which is of such great interest and vast importance 
 to us, prophets there will always be. Even those 
 who are most conscious that they are not Burkes 
 cannot help looking round at this smoking 
 cauldron of the world and asking what feast of 
 the future it is cooking for us. And from that 
 it is an easy step to making guesses at the answer. 
 An anonymous prophet at any rate prophesies 
 on a pleasant system of limited liability ; for 
 though time may prove his guesses wrong, it 
 cannot get at him to cover him with the ridicule 
 which he may deserve. Such a prophet may 
 venture where a statesman and historian like 
 Mr. Fisher must keep silence. Even he perhaps
 
 THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA 201 
 
 will be wise to cast his prophecies into the form 
 of queries which people may put to themselves 
 when they are speculating on what may happen 
 in the immediate or more remote future. He 
 may ask, for instance, whether it is not so prob- 
 able as to be almost certain that an extremely 
 illiterate, almost entirely agricultural, half- 
 Oriental people, like the Russians, into every 
 fibre of whose inherited being are interwoven 
 the threads not only of religion, mysticism, 
 superstition, call it what you will, but of a 
 personal monarchy, will return to both in 
 one form or another, before very long. The 
 Monarchy and the Church of the future may 
 be, almost certainly will be, very different 
 from those of the past : but the Russian people 
 will not always lie dead : they can only come 
 to life again by something that moves their 
 imagination : and that can only be something 
 large and simple and picturesque, something 
 for which the history and instincts of a primitive 
 people are a preparation and a call : and, if so, 
 what is there but some kind of Monarchy and 
 some kind of Church, a vision real or unreal of 
 loyalty, love and faith directed towards some holy 
 and distant God in Heaven and some personal 
 and visible substitute for Him on earth ? 
 
 So, again, with the great question of the future 
 of democracy. Everybody is hoping to-day that 
 the era of irresponsible and arbitrary govern- 
 ments is over. The world is to be made safe 
 for democracy. And so much we may hope with 
 confident assurance. Both the faith and hope
 
 202 POLITICAL PROPHECIES 
 
 of the whole world at this moment, and its 
 material power, are overwhelmingly on the side 
 of democracy. It is certain of being given a 
 fair chance, and the probabilities seem in favour 
 of its successful survival. Things look as if it 
 might at last succeed in showing that peoples 
 can continue for more than a moment to govern 
 themselves as efficiently and as justly as one or 
 more men arbitrarily chosen for them by the 
 accident of birth. But our anonymous questioner, 
 who on the whole believes in this prophecy, may 
 ask whether there is enough realisation in the 
 minds of democratic leaders of the conditions 
 on which success depends. Do they remember 
 how short and troubled the life of democracy has 
 commonly been compared with that of monarchy 
 and aristocracy ; how very rapidly, as a rule, it 
 has rushed through extravagance and excess to 
 suicide ? Are they remembering how very few 
 people care seriously, ever have cared or ever 
 will, about political forms, and how many care 
 about a quiet life and being able to carry on 
 their own daily business without interference ? 
 Are they forgetting, especially the Socialists 
 among them, that man does not live by trade 
 alone, and still less by municipal government, 
 main drainage and perpetual bureaucratic in- 
 spection ? Are they vainly imagining, like that 
 remarkable man the late Sergeant-Major Keeling, 
 that in the days to come a history of main drainage 
 will be found more interesting than the story of 
 Crecy ? If so, they are driving their ship 
 straight on to the rocks, for men are not so dull
 
 IMAGINATION AND CUSTOM 203 
 
 as that. Probably, Mr. Keeling, who learnt so 
 many things during his years in the army (learnt, 
 for instance, so much of the wastefulness of 
 State management that it very considerably 
 modified his Socialism), discovered before his 
 death in the field that the ideal life is not so drab 
 a thing as the Fabian Society imagines, and 
 that wife and child, yes and country also, have a 
 power of stirring human emotions which will 
 not be reached by district councils, trade unions 
 or limited companies, till they have won it by a 
 thousand years of generous and passionate appeal 
 to higher interests than those of health or housing, 
 wages or wealth. And if democratic leaders do 
 not make the same discovery, if they imagine 
 that for an Englishman any International can 
 ever replace England, any State supersede the 
 family, or any philosophy supersede religion it is 
 safe to prophesy that they will not lead very 
 long or very far. And this is no more true of 
 England than of any other country. Abstract 
 argument, however powerful, can never do 
 more than educate and gradually transform 
 custom ; it can never dethrone her. She sits 
 at the centre of political life, unconscious of her 
 slow but never-ceasing transformations, the 
 perpetual guardian of its unity, continuity and 
 strength. 
 
 But an anonymous prophet must remember 
 that it is characteristic of prophets to take 
 themselves over-seriously, and must not rely so 
 much on his anonymity as to venture on usurping 
 the functions of the preacher.
 
 XII 
 
 NATIONAL AND INTER- 
 NATIONAL* 
 
 WE live in an age of Internationalism, not 
 realised to any great extent but at least discussed, 
 desired and attempted. It is true that the 
 greatest of all Internationals issues weakened 
 and discredited from the war. The Vatican in 
 1914, not for the first time, preferred politics to 
 ethics, and expediency, or what ignorance thought 
 to be expedient, to right, and is beginning the 
 payment of a penalty which will not be discharged 
 in our time or that of our sons. It was easy, 
 convenient, and profitable to sell indulgences in 
 the Middle Ages, but the penalty for doing so 
 was the loss of all Northern Europe and the end 
 of a United European Church. That penalty 
 is still being paid to-day, and there is no likeli- 
 hood of its being remitted. So it was convenient 
 to lean on the support of Austria and Germany in 
 peace and to refuse to condemn them either for 
 turning peace into war or for turning war into 
 hell, and that at the immediate expense of an 
 admittedly innocent and most Catholic people. 
 But the penalty is the scorn of men of the world, 
 the sorrow of the good, and the wide recognition 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1919. 
 204
 
 CUSTOM AND ORGANISATION 205 
 
 that the Church lost in 1914 the greatest chance 
 which ever came to her of recovering the moral 
 authority she enjoyed in the early Middle Age. 
 The hope which some cherished of living to see 
 a revival of the most august of Internationals 
 must be abandoned. The Roman claim to a 
 world-wide spiritual authority was judged and 
 found wanting when Belgium appealed in vain to 
 Rome to pronounce judgment on her oppressors. 
 But the Church has two immense advantages 
 over the younger Internationals. Indeed, she 
 has a third which this is not the place to discuss. 
 So long as she produces Saints, as she certainly 
 does, so long, that is, as the love of Christ is seen 
 visibly working in her, she is indestructible and 
 eternal. But putting this supreme advantage 
 aside she has two others of overwhelming 
 importance. She is the oldest political institu- 
 tion in the world, and one of the best organised. 
 Now, the two greatest forces in politics are first, 
 history that is, custom the prestige of estab- 
 lished order and long descent ; and, secondly, 
 organisation, that is, a " cadre " to work in a 
 machine to work by. The spirit of man, and 
 the ideas which set it on fire, are no doubt a 
 much higher force than either, and are irresistible 
 in their hour of energy. But such hours are 
 rare : and history shows custom and organisation 
 again and again defeating, without any kind of 
 compromise or concession, the insurgent assaults 
 of young ideas : while ideas have seldom or 
 never triumphed over custom and order without 
 submitting to be fitted, more or less, into the
 
 206 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 
 established scheme of things. In politics at 
 least, new wine is seldom palatable unless it 
 comes from old bottles. The most successful 
 of popular Governments, that of England, still 
 works through monarchical and aristocratic 
 forms : the most august of all monarchies, the 
 imperial sovereignty of the Caesars, preserved 
 for centuries many of the forms of the Roman 
 Republic, and retained to the last the use of the 
 almost mystic letters S.P.Q.R. 
 
 These forces of history and of a working 
 machine the universal international Church has, 
 and her young rivals have not. What have they 
 in their favour ? What is bringing them to 
 birth ? First of all the very force which has 
 greatly weakened the Church ; the fact that the 
 war took place at all and the horrors which have 
 marked it. The Church loses by its identifica- 
 tion with the old system of things ; by its share 
 in the general failure of that system to prevent 
 the war and by its own special failure in its own 
 province, its refusal of its own office as the 
 champion of right against wrong. The League 
 of Nations and the attempts at an international 
 organisation of Labour are a revolt against the 
 war and the system which allowed it to come 
 about. It is true that both existed in some sort 
 before the war, and both deeply disappointed 
 the hopes which had been founded on them. 
 The Hague Conference and all that gathered 
 round it had done admirable work in creating a 
 spirit of willingness to submit quarrels to arbitra- 
 tion, and had probably saved the world from
 
 THE FAILURE OF THE HAGUE 207 
 
 more than one war. It would no doubt have 
 prevented the Great War if Serbia's offer to refer 
 the original dispute to it had been accepted. 
 And it had obtained the general acquiescence in 
 rules for making war less barbarous if it should 
 occur. But against Berlin's will to war, and will 
 to wage it without limit or scruple of any kind, it 
 proved absolutely powerless. It could neither 
 protect Europe from war nor war from barbarism. 
 Its regulations and recommendations proved a 
 dead letter. Not only was there no realisation 
 of the more humane conditions which The 
 Hague had sought to establish ; there was a 
 positive set-back. The Germans of 1914 proved 
 worse, not better, than the Prussians of 1814 ; 
 they revived practices many of which had been 
 extinct since the Thirty Years' War, and some 
 which had been extinct since the days of the 
 Assyrian and Babylonian monarchies ; and they 
 invented horrors and abominations previously 
 unknown. Plainly The Hague as an international 
 force to prevent and control war had failed. 
 
 The failure of the International Socialist or 
 Labour organisation was even more complete. 
 This had no important previous achievements 
 to its credit, such as The Hague had ; and its 
 failure to fulfil its province of preventing war was 
 absolute. Nearly all the German Socialists at 
 once ranged themselves at the word of command 
 behind the Emperor and the generals. Many, 
 no doubt, were simply deceived by the Govern- 
 ment as to the cause of the war ; and their 
 deception is innocence itself compared with that
 
 208 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 
 of the professors and historians who, with 
 infinitely greater means of ascertaining the 
 truth, were even more easily and universally 
 induced to countersign the lies of the German 
 Sovereigns and statesmen. But whatever the 
 degree of guilt there is the fact. When the day 
 of trial came the German International Socialists 
 proved to be nine parts German and at most one 
 International and Socialist. Only a very few 
 of them gave any consideration at all either to 
 the claims of Labour or Socialism, or to the 
 claims of truth, justice or right. The voice of 
 Germany, not merely Deutschland but Deutsch- 
 turn, the narrow and arrogant war-cry even 
 more than the loved name of the ancient home, 
 instantly drowned all others. Humiliating as it 
 is not only for all Germans but for all men to 
 remember it, the greatest of all national crimes 
 was committed in a blind unanimity of enthu- 
 siasm, with scarcely a voice to protest against it. 
 Yet these are warnings, not prohibitions. The 
 fact that The Hague Conference proved too 
 weak to prevent the Great War, though it had 
 prevented some smaller ones, should not forbid 
 our entertaining hopes that a stronger inter- 
 national organisation may succeed where The 
 Hague failed ; especially if care be taken that 
 in the new world in which it is to work no such 
 danger-spot as Berlin was before 1914 be suffered 
 to remain in existence. The fact that the old 
 International of Labour or Socialism achieved 
 nothing of any value does not forbid us to hope 
 that International Labour legislation, to which
 
 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 200, 
 
 the partners are whole nations, not a mere class 
 or party in each nation, may in the early future 
 carry the world a great step forward on the road 
 of social and industrial progress. International 
 hopes are at present too high to be lightly 
 abandoned. The revolt against the rivalry of 
 nations which was, to a small extent, the cause 
 of the misery of the last four years, is too wide- 
 spread and intense to allow us to give up without 
 a most determined struggle the effort to substi- 
 tute, in some degree, co-operation for jealous 
 hostility as the normal relation between the 
 great States of Europe and the world. It seems 
 almost certain that that effort will be made in 
 the form of a League of Nations, and that it 
 will be at least partially and temporarily success- 
 ful. How much more it will be depends on 
 the success of its friends in defeating the two 
 chief dangers which beset it. The first danger, 
 of course, is that which comes from its open 
 enemies. They exist in all countries ; Chau- 
 vinists in France, Jingoes in England, filibustering 
 Senators in America ; men who prefer force to 
 reason, as the Junkers of Germany did, and who 
 have learnt nothing from the fall of the Junkers. 
 Such men hate the notion of a League of Nations 
 as a thing meant to check the violence and un- 
 reason of the natural man in which they in fact 
 delight. And they are reinforced by a whole 
 crowd of men who, without loving violence or 
 hating reason, cannot rise to belief in a League 
 of Nations because they are men of little faith, 
 frost-bound in the acceptance of things as they
 
 2io NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 
 are, unable to open their eyes to the possibility 
 of a changed world of better men, women and 
 nations. But probably not even these, and 
 certainly not the men of violence, are so great a 
 danger to the prospects of a strong League as 
 its extreme admirers, who write and speak as if 
 nothing were needed but to draw up and agree 
 to its constitution on paper, giving it extra- 
 ordinary powers, after which all would be well, 
 and neither arms nor diplomacy would be any 
 longer required in a world of peace. 
 
 Talk of this sort, commonest among French 
 Socialists, has had the result of making France the 
 centre of the strongest hostility to the League. 
 And so it will be everywhere. Men of sense are 
 disgusted by such flimsy and superficial senti- 
 mentality, ignorant alike of history and of 
 human nature. They know that political history 
 shows that men can only be ruled by one of 
 two things, or more commonly by a mixture of 
 both custom and force. Of all human actions 
 being done in the world to-day probably ninety- 
 nine hundredths are mainly decided by custom. 
 In a few cases, as in Bolshevist Russia, custom is 
 entirely superseded by naked force. But such 
 episodes never last very long. In any case to 
 suppose that a League of Nations which had 
 neither force nor custom to support it could 
 survive a single crisis of difficulty is to show a 
 total incapacity of political judgment. Confi- 
 dence is a plant of slow growth in political 
 bosoms. If the League of Nations is to succeed 
 it must win general confidence, and it can only
 
 CHILDHOOD OF THE LEAGUE 211 
 
 do that very gradually. It must grow out of the 
 old order, not violently break with it. It must 
 do smaller things successfully in order that 
 greater things may be entrusted to it. It must 
 use what is to prepare what is to be. Happily 
 the madmen who wanted to begin by making it 
 a Super-State have been put back into their 
 strait waistcoats. Happily the world-statesmen 
 showed at once that they had no intention of 
 asking nations which had, some of them, been 
 States for over a thousand years to submit their 
 future destinies to the discretion of something 
 which was not yet born and might not survive 
 the first ailments of childhood. Indeed it is 
 clear that, like other infants, the League will 
 need guardians during its minority. And the 
 minorities of great institutions are often long. 
 Those guardians can only be the United States 
 of America, who have, perhaps, furnished the 
 chief driving power for getting the League 
 accepted ; the British Empire, which has pro- 
 vided not only the existing model for its working 
 but nearly all the thought which has turned an 
 idea into a constitutional scheme ; and France, 
 who will soon realise that no one has so much to 
 gain by its successful establishment as she. But 
 the guardians, like the other members, will 
 remain separate nations, each with its separate 
 history, habits, moral and material powers. To 
 defy the separate consciousness of the nation- 
 state would be to break the new International 
 feeling against a force too strong for it. For 
 the nation-state has been growing in strength
 
 212 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 
 ever since the break up of the Roman Empire ; 
 and the only International which has a chance 
 of surviving is one which works, not against it 
 but through it and with its acceptance, towards 
 the ultimate goal, when each may come to 
 realise that it can have a larger life as a member 
 of an incorporated society than as a separate and 
 isolated unit or individual. 
 
 That goal will not be reached for a long while 
 yet. There is still no real sign of any reversal 
 of the process of increased national self- 
 consciousness which has been going on for a 
 thousand years. In the Middle Ages scholars 
 and ecclesiastics, soldiers and statesmen, passed 
 freely from the service of one country to that of 
 another and in doing so neither felt nor excited 
 surprise. During the Renascence such a man as 
 Erasmus was equally at home everywhere, and 
 talked the same language, Latin, wherever he went. 
 He was a scholar and a European, and seems to 
 have had no feeling of nationality at all. That 
 feeling grew in the next two centuries, but was 
 still so weak that one Italian could govern 
 France and another Spain, that the greatest of 
 French soldiers could fight with Spain against 
 his own country, and that an English army * 
 commanded by a Frenchman could fight a 
 
 * When this article first appeared several correspondents 
 found this assertion incredible. There is, however, at 
 least one, and perhaps more than one, occasion, on which 
 the situation was as described. At the battle of Almanza 
 in 1707 the first Lord Gal way, who was a Frenchman 
 (Marquis de Ruvigny), commanded the English army, 
 while the French army was commanded by the Duke of 
 Berwick, the son of James II. and Arabella Churchill.
 
 ENGLISH AND FRENCH 213 
 
 French army commanded by an Englishman 
 all inconceivable defiances of national spirit as it 
 exists to-day. 
 
 That spirit must be turned and used. It 
 cannot be met and defeated. There is no 
 reason to suppose that it is greatly weakened 
 by the events of the last four years. It used 
 to be believed that international trade would 
 produce international affection. It ought, of 
 course, to have been obvious that there was 
 no more reason to expect that than that we 
 should all love our grocers and butchers. Any- 
 how, the promises of Cobden and the Great 
 Exhibition proved a delusion. It would be an 
 insult to compare the companionship of the 
 soldiers of freedom with that of commercial 
 travellers and their customers. But is it certain 
 that even the glorious partnership in heroism 
 and suffering of Belgians and Englishmen, 
 English and French, French and Italians, has 
 always been fruitful of increased affection ? 
 Men of different races differ in temper and 
 habits ; and close contact, even in the mightiest 
 of causes, is not always found to smooth over or 
 explain away these differences. The Frenchman 
 who had an enthusiastic affection for the English 
 Army from a distance is not always proof against 
 disappointment when close acquaintance brings 
 him up against insularity of mind and roughness 
 of manners. Nor is English sympathy and 
 admiration always tolerant of French meanness 
 in money matters, private and public. 
 
 These things are so, and cannot simply be 
 
 p
 
 2i 4 NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 
 
 ignored. But of the three great efforts at inter- 
 national action now before the world two make 
 the absurd attempt to leave national feeling 
 altogether out of account. The Bolshevist move- 
 ment rapidly shed any ideal quality with which 
 it began, till it is now a mere narrow tyranny 
 based on violence and corruption. But that is 
 not all. It was doomed from the first by its 
 determination to ignore the national feeling 
 which is nowhere stronger than in Russia : by 
 its attempt to appeal to an internationalism 
 which, in fact, does not exist : and by its naked 
 materialism, violence and class selfishness, which 
 were merely the worst side of the Tsardom over 
 again, only with a partial reversal of the roles of 
 tyrant and victim. But if the Tsardom with 
 all history behind it could not stand, it is certain 
 that the new tyranny, with nothing at all behind 
 it and everything distinctively Russian against 
 it, will stand even less. It will, in fact, almost 
 certainly end in a revival of Russian nationality, 
 which, in the reaction from the hated memory 
 of Bolshevism, will be more strongly felt than 
 ever. So, again, International Socialism tries to 
 ignore nations and see only classes. Worse still 
 for its chances, it has become, since Marx, more 
 and more purely materialist. Such a creed has 
 no chance against national feeling, with its 
 centuries of high memories and generous 
 achievements behind it. 
 
 If I should die, think only this of me : 
 That there's some corner of a foreign field 
 That is for ever England.
 
 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 215 
 
 Any one who imagines that for " England " here 
 you will ever get men to substitute the Fabian 
 Society or the House of Lords or the Amalga- 
 mated Society of Engineers is cherishing the 
 vainest of delusions. 
 
 There remains the League of Nations. That 
 is to be a league of something greater than 
 classes ; and it is to be a league, not even a 
 society, still less a single unit. It is to take the 
 facts of to-day and build to-morrow out of them. 
 After it as before it, France will still be France 
 and England England ; the United States will 
 still be in America, not in Europe. Each will 
 be a free nation, with a history and a temper of 
 its own, with its own variety of classes and 
 conditions, yet itself something more than all 
 and above them all, a body in which its many 
 members find their unity and their life. So 
 each, if it be true to the spirit in which its best 
 representatives are accepting the League, will 
 bring to the service and building of the world 
 of the future a combination of wisdom and 
 strength which no mere class could hope to 
 bring. And the League, as a whole, will be 
 founded on an ideal which is universal not 
 sectional, spiritual not material. If it succeeds 
 it will not have destroyed the old world, it will 
 have given it new birth : birth into a new life, 
 more just, more generous, and more nearly 
 universal.
 
 XIII 
 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR* 
 
 HOPE is the second of the great trinity of 
 Christian virtues. And Wordsworth, like St. 
 Paul, puts it second in his similar group of the 
 three virtues by which, as he asserts, we live. 
 Probably he was not thinking of the famous 
 passage in the Epistle to the Corinthians, and 
 indeed only two of his virtues are verbally 
 identical with St. Paul's. But admiration, 
 though a much weaker thing than faith, is after 
 all at the root of it. We cannot have the Pauline 
 sort of faith, which means an emotion which 
 issues in action, except for a person or an idea 
 which first surprises and then wins us, which 
 fills us first with wonder and then with love. 
 And, though we have somehow made admiration 
 a so much weaker word than either, that is just 
 what it really consists of wonder and love. 
 But this wonder and love, though the foundation 
 of faith, are not by themselves faith. For that 
 hope must be added to them. And so perhaps 
 Wordsworth is more exact in this three than 
 St. Paul, for admiration does not include hope, 
 and therefore in this trinity hope must be expressly 
 added to admiration and love. But love and 
 
 * Times Literary Supplement, April 29, 1920. 
 216
 
 THE DUTY OF HOPE 217 
 
 faith make the mention of hope almost un- 
 necessary. For faith implies hope, and is mean- 
 ingless without it. In either case the importance 
 of hope is plain. Whether implied in faith or 
 superadded to admiration, it is a spring of 
 action, almost as important as or perhaps even 
 more important than love itself. For love, as 
 we so often see, if deprived altogether of hope, 
 has seldom the heart to act, and sinks into the 
 helplessness of mere sympathy. 
 
 All this, if true at all, is as true in public life 
 as in private, in politics as in ethics. Those 
 who insisted all through the war, as Words- 
 worth insisted throughout the struggle with 
 Napoleon, on the duty of hope as the first and 
 paramount duty of all, are to-day sometimes 
 strangely invited by those who were pessimists 
 then and are pessimists now to go back on their 
 creed of hopefulness and admit their mistake. 
 They are asked now at any rate to adopt the 
 temper and the doctrines of those who, having 
 been proved wrong in their expectation of our 
 defeat in war, are revenging themselves by a 
 confident assurance of our failure in peace. It 
 is difficult to see the logic which justifies this 
 invitation. One would rather have supposed 
 that it was for those who proved wrong to 
 learn of those who proved right. No doubt the 
 pessimists can point out that the optimists were 
 often false prophets. And so of course they 
 were. But that is not the important thing. 
 Both were abundantly wrong about details : the 
 optimists who expected that every offensive was
 
 218 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 going to end the war, and the pessimists who 
 were certain that everybody was a fool who did 
 not see that Paris was going, or the Channel 
 ports, or the Suez Canal, or our command of the 
 sea. Here there is little to choose. But in 
 the main issue, and it cannot be too often re- 
 peated that it was a moral issue as well as an 
 intellectual, the optimists were wholly right 
 and the pessimists wholly wrong. Hope was 
 once more justified of her children. As in 1812 
 and 1813, so in 1917 and 1918 those who knew 
 they had a duty to do to the very end, and never 
 doubted that in the end they would get it done, 
 proved to have the true moral and political 
 instinct ; and both those who a hundred years 
 ago at Holland House thought that " the man 
 was invincible," and those who three years ago 
 at Lansdowne House and elsewhere were sure that 
 we never could defeat the German Army, showed 
 moral weakness as well as political blindness. 
 Indeed, in each case the political blindness was 
 partly due to the moral weakness. Their faith, 
 for lack of hope, had no life in it : their love 
 degenerated into sympathy : their admiration 
 made of wonder and love which they should 
 have felt for their own country was changed into a 
 basor thing made of wonder and fear with which 
 they allowed the armies of the enemy to over- 
 whelm them. 
 
 Is there not the same contrast, and largely 
 between the same people, in the temper with 
 which the problems of peace are being faced ? 
 Now, as three years ago, the pessimists have
 
 MILTON AND MR. KEYNES 219 
 
 plenty of obvious justification for their pessimism. 
 The picture of Europe is a very different one 
 from what it was then. But from some points 
 of view it is even darker and sadder. The 
 Allies won the war. But, too plainly, they have 
 not yet won the peace. The actual document 
 which is called the Peace Treaty is open to 
 very serious criticism. Scarcely anybody defends 
 the provision in it which penalised the recovery 
 of German industry by exposing Germany to 
 uncertain financial demands only to be limited 
 by her power to meet them. Mr. Keynes, 
 starting from this strong ground, has violently 
 attacked the whole work of those who made the 
 Treaty in a book which exhibits every kind of 
 ability except the political kind, and shows its 
 writer a man of almost all the virtues if we 
 could forget that modesty and a sense of honour 
 have hitherto been counted among them. But 
 the agent who casts himself for the part of 
 principal is a well-established figure in political 
 comedy. Mr. Keynes knows everything except 
 the elements of politics, which is the science of 
 discovering, and the art of accomplishing, the 
 practicable in public affairs. What was the title 
 of the pamphlet Milton issued a few weeks before 
 Charles II. entered London in triumph ? Was 
 it not something like " a short and easy way to 
 establish a Free Commonwealth " ? Mr. Keynes 
 is not Milton, and 250 years of political experience 
 which Milton could not possess have not taught 
 him the things which in that infancy of English 
 politics Milton could scarcely be expected to
 
 220 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 know. He is still in the elementary school of 
 politics, and believes that exhibiting on paper 
 the desirability of a particular course of action is 
 solving the problem of statesmanship. A single 
 year of office in any Cabinet in Europe would 
 have taught him his mistake. Men are not 
 fixed mathematical abstractions. They are very 
 inconstant living things, made up of passions 
 and prejudices and habits, absurd loyalties and 
 unreasonable antipathies ; and whether the 
 peace of Europe, or the settlement of Ireland, or, 
 to take the greatest of all, the establishment of a 
 League of Nations be the matter in hand, the 
 real difficulty is, as a rule, not nearly so much 
 the discovery of what is best to be done as of 
 what is the nearest approximation to it which, 
 men and things being what they are, has any 
 chance, first, of getting accepted, and, secondly, 
 of proving workable and lasting. 
 
 By that second test the Treaty of Peace has 
 yet to be tried, and it will assuredly prove 
 sufficiently severe. There is no need to try 
 it by unpolitical and fanciful comparisons with 
 what it might have been if the French and the 
 Poles had been suddenly healed, in some night 
 of miracle, of their memories both of a distant 
 past in which they see nothing but their own 
 greatness as self-love shapes it and of a more 
 recent past in which they see only German 
 barbarism and brutality blackened by the hatred 
 of the injured. Wise men, and men who make 
 allowance for the weaknesses of human nature, 
 will have enough to do without that. Their
 
 DISAPPOINTMENTS OF PEACE 221 
 
 task is to take things as they are and so to use 
 them as gradually step by step to bring them a 
 little nearer to what they might be. In what 
 spirit are they to approach it ? Surely in the 
 same spirit as they faced the war, the spirit of a 
 modest but unconquerable hope. 
 
 There is no reason for hope to be ashamed 
 of herself in peace any more than during the 
 war. It is quite true that the optimists of 
 peace have made as many mistakes as the 
 optimists of war. The making of peace has 
 proved a harder and much longer business than 
 they supposed. The return to normal ways, to 
 say nothing of normal prices, has been much 
 slower. The healing of the temporary insanity 
 of Russia has been delayed longer than the 
 optimists expected, and the old family doctor 
 on whom they relied has had to give up the case. 
 It is now seen that the strait-waistcoat which he 
 recommended was not the right treatment. The 
 case is seen to be one in which the patient must 
 be allowed to indulge the cerebral excitement 
 which is his disease, so far as is compatible with 
 the safety of other people, until fatigue of body 
 and mind have led him back to sanity through 
 exhaustion. All these disappointments of the 
 optimist, and others besides, are plain enough. 
 But as in the war, the mistakes of the pessimist 
 have been even more conspicuous. He told us 
 that Bolshevism would spread all over Europe 
 directly the war was over. It has not yet spread 
 outside Russia, and those who know Germany 
 best are most confident that both the virtues
 
 222 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 and the vices of Germany will protect her 
 against a system which would only be workable 
 in a country where no one had acquired any 
 habits, no one had any feeling of race, and no 
 one cared anything for his own material interests. 
 He told us that the extremists who had every- 
 where been so noisy in the guise of pacifists 
 during the war would sweep every country as 
 soon as elections were held. In the last year of 
 the war, and in the year and a half which has 
 elapsed since, elections have been held nearly 
 everywhere ; and in all countries, with the 
 possible exception of Italy, their most con- 
 spicuous feature has been the rout of the 
 Revolutionary or Bolshevist Left. 
 
 As for the relations between Labour and 
 Capital, grave and anxious as the situation un- 
 doubtedly still is, whether we look to England, 
 France, or America, it is certainly better, not 
 worse, than the prophets of evil would have had 
 us expect. The wheels of the industrial machine 
 still do a good deal of creaking, and even stop at 
 times ; but we are perhaps in danger of allowing 
 the creaking and the stoppages which force 
 themselves so unpleasantly on our attention to 
 make us forget that they occupy only a very 
 small portion of the whole contemporary life of 
 the machine, much the largest part of which 
 passes in smooth and unnoticed obscurity. It 
 is true that some of the methods employed to set 
 the wheels going again after a stoppage seem to 
 call up uncomfortable memories of Ethelred 
 the Unready. Either what is demanded at a
 
 STRIKES 223 
 
 strike is reasonable, in which case it ought to 
 be given without waiting for a strike, or it is 
 unreasonable, in which case it ought not to be 
 given at all, and most particularly not after a 
 strike. But it is easier, as Mr. Keynes does not 
 know, to construct these intellectual dilemmas 
 than to show statesmen a way of never falling 
 into them. We live in a time of excitement, 
 with the sea of our politics and society still 
 restless with the waves of the most tremendous 
 of all storms, waves which must be expected 
 to take longer than any others ever took to 
 subside. And if, as may well be, there is nothing 
 so important as to give them time to perform 
 that natural process of subsiding, it may be that 
 the best way of meeting demands which cannot 
 perhaps be justified either by facts or by argu- 
 ments (but are not on that account any the less 
 strongly and honestly put forward) is by making 
 concessions which could not get the approval of 
 any strict Court either of politics or of political 
 economy. 
 
 Thirty-two years ago Matthew Arnold noted 
 down as one of his daily mottoes for meditation 
 some words of a French optimist : " Rien ne 
 s'arrangera plus dans ce monde que par la 
 raison et requite, la patience, le savoir, le devoue- 
 ment et la modestie." When one reads such 
 words and looks back on what happened in 1914 
 and the years which followed it, optimism at 
 first seems the veriest vanity of vanities. And 
 yet, so obstinate is optimism, so hardy a growth 
 is hope in men who mean to live, that some
 
 224 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 believers in human nature will still reply that 
 the felon stroke of 1914 was the work of one 
 nation or at most of two ; and that history may 
 perhaps ultimately judge that the really significant 
 fact about 1914 is not that war broke out, but 
 that such active, large, generous, sincere, and 
 widespread efforts were made to prevent it. 
 The old wars broke out easily enough, almost 
 as a matter of course. This war perhaps opens 
 the new era by the horror which the very thought 
 of it inspired beforehand everywhere except 
 among the handful of criminals who were bent 
 upon bringing it about ; and by the passionate 
 and all but successful efforts of good men to 
 compel them to listen to that reason and equity 
 and patience in which the French writer sees 
 the new rulers of the world. After all, was not 
 George Sand right, in the slow way of being 
 right which is all that any wise man will expect 
 in politics ? Is it not the simple truth that 
 everywhere to-day many things which fifty 
 years ago would have been decided simply by 
 bare law, by the result of mere remorseless 
 competition, or on the naked system of " might 
 is right," are being settled by conferences and 
 mutual concessions between the parties affected ? 
 Of course the settlements, whether the disputes 
 are between nations or between bodies of 
 workmen and employers, are often greatly 
 influenced by the forces which either party could 
 bring into play if no settlement were effected. 
 But is the hope and plan of a League of Nations 
 and the wide force of reasonableness and good-
 
 EQUITY REPLACING FORCE 225 
 
 will which have gone to its formation to count 
 for nothing ? Surely the mere creation even of 
 the forms of such a League proves something, 
 is evidence of a new spirit in the world which 
 did not exist a generation ago. It has difficulties 
 enough before it, and it may fail ; but the 
 optimist is surely entitled to point to its mere 
 establishment on paper as proof of a new desire 
 to take a step forward towards substituting the 
 rule of equity for the rule of force. 
 
 So in domestic affairs ; is it unreasonable of 
 him to claim that the mere setting up of such 
 bodies as Whitley Councils, the mere increase 
 of the practice of employers and employed 
 meeting together and discussing difficulties and 
 differences, is once more proof of a new temper 
 and a new method which at first may seem to 
 produce at least as much friction as the old, but 
 has a new promise in it which the old could not 
 have ? The new method, no doubt, leads to 
 unreasonable claims claims which are some- 
 times quite incompatible with the continuance 
 of an industry, and may yet have to be met by 
 firmer and harder methods than concession. Or 
 rather it does not lead to them. They were 
 there before ; only they were suppressed or 
 inaudible under the old system of " Do what I 
 tell you, take what I offer you, or go." The 
 new way is with all its difficulties at least a move 
 towards the recognition of reason and equity as 
 the ultimate court of appeal in industrial affairs. 
 Yes ; and as George Sand adds, also of patience, 
 knowledge, good will, and modesty as their
 
 226 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 assessors and amicce curies. Where could one 
 find a better list of the qualities which such a 
 court needs ? They are not yet any more 
 conspicuous, no doubt, in the average employer 
 or workman than they are in the average man. 
 But the point, on which the optimist may fairly 
 insist, is that the new system does all that a 
 system can do to call them into existence and 
 stimulate their growth. Meeting together is a 
 proof of goodwill, a school of patience and 
 modesty, an almost certain road to increased 
 knowledge on both sides. And perhaps that 
 increased knowledge is the most urgent need 
 of both. The employer has to learn the work- 
 man's point of view and his determination no 
 longer to play the part of a mere tool in industry. 
 That is often very new to him. He has got to 
 learn it, think about it, and make up his mind 
 to satisfy it, not by some independent plan of 
 his own but by some plan worked out in con- 
 junction with his men. So he has also to learn 
 the workman's view of the risk of periods of 
 unemployment, and find some way of facing a 
 difficulty of which he has generally thought 
 little, but which is a constant nightmare to 
 many workmen. Again, the men have to learn 
 that the accumulation of capital is at all times, 
 and especially after a great war, a first necessity 
 for the life of the whole people, and certainly 
 not least of those who earn weekly wages. For 
 their two principal needs are regular employment 
 and abundant supplies of all kinds, and every 
 million added to the capital of the country
 
 THE ENGLISH CHARACTER 227 
 
 inevitably tends to increase both. They have 
 also to learn that this accumulation cannot take 
 place as may be seen in all the savage and 
 backward countries of the world unless capital 
 be assured of a reasonable return. For men 
 will no more save without the promise of income 
 than they will work without the promise of 
 wages. At least they will only take the chance 
 of no return in case of failure, a chance which 
 happens oftener than workmen realise, if they 
 are also allowed the other chance of a very 
 high return in case of success. These and a 
 hundred other things, seen now only on one 
 side of the tables of conference, may be fairly 
 expected to be seen by both as patience, good- 
 will, and modesty help and are helped by 
 knowledge, and all gradually more and more 
 place themselves at the service of reason and 
 equity. 
 
 So hope insists on fixing her eyes on the 
 sunnier side of a largely overclouded landscape, 
 and believes that in peace as in war her method 
 will prove its own justification by helping to 
 furnish the strength needed to turn her vision 
 into reality. Moreover, Englishmen may be 
 forgiven for thinking that hope can nowhere 
 have a better foundation to build on than the 
 history and chaiacter of the English people. 
 Have we net now for seven centuries been always 
 developing the method of free discussion, and 
 always more and more using that, and not force, 
 as the right way of adjusting our differences and 
 disputes ? What did our greatest political
 
 228 OPTIMISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 thinker put his trust in ? Was it not " the 
 inbred integrity, good sense, and good humour 
 of the English people " ? May not hope follow 
 modestly in the steps of Burke and believe that 
 these qualities, which have never failed us in 
 the great crises of the past, will no more fail us 
 now ? For if the crises and the problems of 
 to-day are partly new, the men who are to solve 
 them are not new, even if, perhaps, they think 
 they are. They are of the old stock, and not to 
 credit them with the old genius for rinding a way 
 out of difficulties would be to deny our faith in 
 the English race.
 
 XIV 
 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE* 
 
 AT this New Year the whole world seems to 
 have reached a great moment of transition. It 
 seems to have got near the top of the narrow 
 pass which will look over into a new era. Some 
 climb with high hope confident that the unseen 
 country on the other side of the mountains will 
 prove to be a land flowing with milk and honey. 
 Others, accustomed to the sights and sounds of 
 the valley in which they have always lived, and 
 to its familiar way of life, shrink from the 
 crossing over and believe that the mountain 
 barrier which has shut them in has protected 
 them from a barbarous climate and, perhaps, 
 from barbarous men. The latter are probably 
 the more numerous ; the former certainly the 
 more active and energetic spirits. Both deceive 
 themselves. It is only by a synthesis of the two 
 temperaments that a right attitude towards the 
 new is to be found. Everywhere, in politics, in 
 literature, in religion, the problem is the same ; 
 it is that of finding continuity in progress. That 
 is just what life is : something which is always 
 changing yet never ceasing to be the same, and 
 what Nature does for the individual life is what 
 * Times Literary Supplement, January 6, 19*1. 
 229 Q
 
 230 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 we have to try to do for all forms of the life of 
 society. And, like all moral and social as 
 opposed to mathematical problems, this one 
 does not admit of being answered in any exact 
 formula plainly defining the right course of 
 action in every contingency. No one can 
 promise to say what either the utilitarian ethical 
 imperative or the law of loving our neighbours as 
 ourselves would prescribe as the right course in 
 every particular occasion. Such laws are ideals, 
 things of the spirit, never to be completely 
 expressed in the letter of any rules which can be 
 set down in speech or on paper. Their meaning 
 can only be learnt through its practical applica- 
 tion, step by step. Like all spiritual things they 
 can only be experienced from inside. It is 
 impossible to state in a phrase the aesthetic 
 experience produced by a great work of art. It 
 is only by entering into it for himself that a man 
 ever has it at all ; only by having it again and 
 again that he can hope to enter into possession 
 of anything like its full greatness. 
 
 So also in politics. What does the law of 
 continuity in change mean ? No one can say 
 precisely. No one can invent a formula by 
 which any particular proposal can be instantly 
 and infallibly tested, and pronounced to be 
 either in accordance with or contrary to this 
 supreme political law. Yet that is as far as 
 possible from proving the law useless. It at 
 least lays down definitely that two things two 
 things which some people would think contra- 
 dictory are needful for political health. It at
 
 CHANGE, DECAY, AND BEAUTY 231 
 
 least draws attention to the fact that countries in 
 which constitutional change is avoided with 
 especial care, such as China or Sparta or Venice, 
 seem always to sink into the decay of apathy. 
 On the other hand states which make sudden 
 and frequent changes, like Athens and Florence 
 and the France of the nineteenth century, 
 rapidly exhaust themselves. Insistence on con- 
 tinuity is the first necessity for the life of the 
 state. All the long-lived states have, like Venice, 
 been exceedingly tenacious of established laws 
 and customs. But such states are apt to purchase 
 longevity at the price of activity, beauty, and 
 originality. " Better fifty years of Europe than 
 a cycle of Cathay " was the saying of one of 
 the poets who have best understood politics 
 and was anything but a revolutionary. And 
 many would argue that two stormy centuries 
 of Florence much more than out-value for 
 humanity all the thousand ordered years of the 
 Venetian Republic, and that the century or 
 century and a half of Athens which carries us 
 from /Eschylus to Demosthenes is worth a 
 hundred whole histories of Sparta, in which 
 there is little besides Leonidas (with the help, 
 too, of one of the noblest of the poets whom 
 Athens inspired and sheltered) who can very 
 greatly move us. Yet, perhaps, it is chiefly the 
 business of the other arts to adorn the life of 
 the state but of the political art to preserve it. 
 And while the ultra-conservative states of China 
 and Venice, the moderately conservative Rome 
 and England have lived to a very great age,
 
 232 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 Athens and Florence had brief and troubled 
 lives. Athens and Florence, and, one may add, 
 the Paris of the last century were all more than 
 once entered by a foreign conqueror. Peking, 
 Sparta, Rome, Venice, and London all passed 
 through many centuries without seeing an 
 invader. Stability is probably the most im- 
 portant of all elements of political strength. 
 The political restlessness of Athens and Florence 
 and Paris was in each case followed by, and was 
 probably the cause of, the loss at once of freedom 
 at home and power abroad. The French 
 Revolution led at once, and inevitably, to 
 Napoleon, as Burke had foreseen ; and his 
 restless military genius combined with the 
 revolutionary restlessness of the French people 
 to exhaust France to such an extent that she has 
 never since 1815 been the power in Europe 
 which she was in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries. We can all now see, though it was 
 not always plain at the time, that since Waterloo 
 she has never possessed the resources which 
 enabled her under Louis XIV. to play a decisive 
 part in the most disastrous war ever waged by 
 England, and under Napoleon to overrun all 
 Europe ; and though many who should have 
 known better feared her under Napoleon III., 
 all such fears received their final answer at 
 Sedan. During the fifty-five years which 
 separated Waterloo from Sedan she had re- 
 covered strength certainly, but never enough 
 to place her in the same position relatively to 
 the rest of the world as she occupied ten, twenty,
 
 FRANCE SINCE WATERLOO 233 
 
 and two hundred years before Waterloo. Her 
 rivals had grown more rapidly than she ; the 
 wealth and population of England, the military 
 power of Germany, the new unity of Italy, had 
 made such dreams as those of Louis XIV. and 
 Napoleon no longer merely impracticable but 
 absurd. Such a price has France permanently 
 paid for twenty-five years of feverish change and 
 exaltation, the madness of freedom and the 
 madness of slavery. Not till, perhaps, the last 
 twenty years has any Government of hers been 
 able to feel assured of ten years' continuance. 
 At last the Third Republic, having escaped the 
 Boulanger and Dreyfus dangers, was able to 
 face with a united front the supreme ordeal of 
 the war and to emerge from it, bleeding indeed 
 profusely, but triumphant ; and when five more 
 years have passed it will be possible to say that 
 for more than half the period since Waterloo 
 the political system of France has remained 
 unchanged, and that the spirit of continuity has 
 begun to reassert itself against the eternal round 
 of change. 
 
 But with all the world of to-day in an orgy 
 of change how shall that spirit find strength to 
 do its work in France or elsewhere ? The war 
 has left us face to face not only with political 
 and national changes on the widest scale but 
 with something much more difficult to deal 
 with a whole atmosphere of dissatisfaction 
 with the old and aspiration after the new : all 
 that is vaguely called political, social and 
 economic unrest. The Peace Treaty of 1919
 
 234 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 has recast the map of Europe. This has been 
 done, broadly speaking, on the basis of the 
 principle of nationality, and of the choice of the 
 people concerned in the changes. The Treaty 
 is the first in the history of Europe which has 
 been founded on a higher ideal than that of 
 " possession is nine-tenths of the law " and 
 " J'y suis j'y reste," or even that of legal inheri- 
 tance and the family property of Royal person- 
 ages, one or other of which was the inspiration 
 of most or all of the old treaties. And that, of 
 course, is just what produces the present political 
 difficulty. Ideals are always destructive things ; 
 part of their business is the destruction of some- 
 thing which needs to be replaced by something 
 else. The Gospel, in St. Paul's view, did 
 destroy the Law ; and even He who declared 
 that He came not to destroy it but to fulfil it 
 gave the other side of that saying, as He did with 
 so many of His sayings, when He poured forth 
 those striking contrasts between what was 
 " said by them of old time " and what " I say 
 unto you." And the destructiveness of ideals 
 is all the greater, perhaps, because of their 
 necessary and essential indefinableness. No- 
 body can say exactly what Mr. Wilson's famous 
 Fourteen Points command or forbid. Some 
 people assert that the Treaty of Versailles is in 
 flagrant contradiction with them ; others, in- 
 cluding Mr. Wilson, declare that it is founded 
 upon them. This dispute is far from proving 
 that they or the other idealisms which became 
 so prominent in the last year of the war were
 
 THE NEW EUROPE 235 
 
 empty and useless. Far from it. No sane 
 criticism of the Treaty can deny that those 
 idealisms wrote their mark all over it, even though 
 they did not obliterate all others. 
 
 And now the problem is how to preserve the 
 idealist gains achieved on paper and partly 
 realized. Austria and Turkey are gone the old 
 Austria and the old Turkey, at any rate. Even 
 Germany has lost much of her old self. In their 
 place is a motley of new States a new Serbia or 
 Jugo-Slavia, a new Poland, a new Bohemia, a 
 new Greece, a new Esthonia, an enlarged France 
 and Italy and Denmark. The changes are 
 plainly on a scale which has never been attempted 
 before. They exhibit the far-reaching, what 
 some would call the dangerous, action of general 
 principles in political matters. Those who have 
 brought them about have evidently carried to 
 the extreme edge of safety, if not beyond it, the 
 intrusion of abstract doctrines and their logical 
 application into politics. How can so enormous 
 a dose of change be assimilated by the digestion 
 of Europe ? Obviously only by a very careful 
 diet after swallowing it. There can be no 
 chance of the present arrangements proving 
 permanent unless the new States are extremely 
 abstemious in the matter of ambitions and 
 novelties for a long time to come. Action and 
 reaction are always at work in human nature, 
 and not least in politics. The thing is to expect 
 reaction, make it your own, and guide it. If you 
 do not, it overwhelms you. Poland, Jugo-Slavia, 
 and even Italy itself, have in the last six years
 
 236 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 had enough nationalist advance and excitement 
 about external politics to last them at least for a 
 generation. Their own peoples will inevitably 
 feel a satiety of it, while their neighbours are 
 thoroughly tired of being worried and disturbed. 
 Their hope lies in quietness, in consolidation of 
 their gains, and, most important of all, in making 
 the changes which have occurred as little obvious, 
 ostentatious and troublesome as possible. They 
 have to remember that one of the strangest but 
 most certain facts of human nature is that 
 people more easily bear great evils to which they 
 are accustomed than smaller evils which are new. 
 Men who have escaped from the despotism of a 
 tyrant are more actively critical of small failings 
 in the new, benevolent government than they 
 were of the horrors to which they had been 
 born. All these new States should therefore 
 incorporate all that is in any way tolerable of 
 the ways and habits of the old. There is no sure 
 way of averting the danger of the mood which 
 leads to reactions and counter revolutions but 
 by going to meet it with a policy of continuity. 
 The success of the old France in Alsace was due 
 to her altering as little as possible in the laws and 
 habits of the country she incorporated. There 
 are few appetites for change so hungry that a 
 transfer of allegiance does not satisfy them. The 
 other changes should be as few and as unobtrusive 
 as possible. So continuity will avert the reaction 
 which might otherwise undo the blessings of 
 change. 
 The same law is at work in the still more
 
 INDUSTRY AND CAPITALISM 237 
 
 difficult field of economics and industry. The 
 democratic principles put forward by the Allies 
 in the war have combined with the Revolution 
 of Russia to excite the wage-earning classes to a 
 mood of great but vague expectations all over 
 the world. They had, even before the war, 
 become utterly impatient of the industrial 
 system which beginning in England had in a 
 hundred years spread all over Europe. They 
 attributed its evils to what they called Capitalism, 
 which they imagined to be a new and mischievous 
 thing, whereas it is an old and beneficent thing 
 without which production can never be carried 
 beyond the stage of infancy. This belief, with 
 others equally crude, led to the second Russian 
 Revolution, which in the attempt to destroy 
 Capitalism has almost totally destroyed Russia. 
 No country in the history of the world has ever 
 gone back so fast as Russia has during the last 
 few years. It will take many years, and they 
 must be years of capitalism, before she can again 
 approach the stage of prosperity which she had 
 reached before the war. This does not mean 
 that we must acquiesce in the admitted evils of 
 the old industrial system. We shall not acquiesce 
 in them ; we are not doing so. The interests of 
 Labour find a place in the Peace Treaty which 
 they never found in any before it. It recognises 
 the claim of workmen to have some voice in 
 deciding the conditions of their labour and its 
 remuneration. Already in England wages and 
 conditions have greatly improved, perhaps be- 
 yond what it will be possible to maintain unless
 
 238 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 labour becomes more productive. These matters 
 are now almost always settled, not by naked 
 competition, but by agreement between repre- 
 sentatives of employers and employed. This 
 would by itself be a great advance. But a far 
 greater is the recognition, in the systems proposed 
 for the future management of the mines and 
 railways, of the claim of the workmen to some 
 share in the control of the business in which 
 they are employed.* All these things are, as 
 they should be, tentative and experimental. We 
 are on the whole following the traditional English 
 method of feeling our way. The English 
 working man of advanced views has paid some 
 lip worship to the Russian break with all the 
 industrial past, but he is too practical, as a rule, 
 to desire its application here. He knows that it 
 is one thing and a thing, as the proof shows, 
 ruinous enough to introduce it into a country 
 whose manufactures occupied a tiny fraction of 
 its population, and quite another, a thousand 
 times more fatal, to do so in one the bulk 
 of whose population is manufacturing and 
 
 * These proposals appear at present (July, 1921) to have 
 been abandoned or found impracticable. But it is likely 
 enough that further efforts may be made before very long 
 to work out more satisfactory schemes with the same 
 object. Meanwhile the scheme of something like Profit 
 Sharing arranged between coalowners and miners has 
 received a striking tribute from the miners' leader, Mr. 
 Hodges, who described it as " the most far-reaching 
 proposal that has been made in modern industry." It 
 certainly carries that most hopeful of all solutions of 
 industrial disputes and distrust far further than it has ever 
 been carried before.
 
 THE NEW INDUSTRIAL ORDER 239 
 
 industrial. He feels, therefore, and as the headi- 
 ness induced by the war diminishes will more 
 and more feel, that the right thing is to repair, 
 alter and adapt an old industrial house, not to 
 pull it down because it was in some parts in- 
 convenient or unhealthy. He clearly feels that 
 change is necessary, and means to insist upon it ; 
 but he also feels, dimly perhaps, but with a kind 
 of conviction that he could not express and is 
 hardly aware of, that something which is 
 continuity (though he would not use that word) 
 is necessary too. He will gradually find his way 
 to a new and better order of industry in which 
 he will no longer be a mere " hand," but a co- 
 operating and understanding partner under one 
 system or another, the best of which will not be 
 discovered, and certainly not perfected, for a long 
 time to come. 
 
 Part of the continuity will certainly be capital, 
 both his own and other people's. Here, too, 
 change will no doubt occur. The capitalist of 
 the future will in some ways be in a different 
 position from the capitalist of the past. But 
 capital and the reward of capital there will 
 certainly be : for without it industrial progress is 
 absolutely impossible. In a primitive prairie 
 where two men are bringing patches into cultiva- 
 tion and one eats and drinks all the product of 
 his crops, while the other saves part of it, sells it, 
 and buys the means by which he himself or 
 another man can bring another patch into 
 cultivation, it is solely by the last that production 
 is increased, and solely because he uses part of
 
 240 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 his product as capital on which he necessarily 
 expects a return. So he grows rich while the 
 other remains poor. Their relative positions 
 are important only to themselves. What is 
 important from the public point of view is that 
 the man who grows rich has benefited his 
 country, and could not help doing so if he were 
 a devil of malice, while the man who remains 
 poor is for whatever reason the man of the 
 parable who keeps his talent in a napkin and is 
 an unprofitable servant to his country. All 
 capital has its origin in saving, which is postponing 
 a small, present and certain enjoyment to a 
 larger, future but problematic one. The more 
 the workman is admitted into the councils of 
 business the more he will see this. No new 
 railway can be built, no new manufacture begun, 
 without capital which some one must have 
 saved and must be prepared to risk. And as new 
 enterprises often fail, the more risky they are the 
 larger must be the possible profit in the event of 
 success. The workman is apt to fancy that all 
 capital secures a high return. A slight acquaint- 
 ance with the history of limited companies or 
 with Stock Exchange quotations would at once 
 correct this delusion. Perhaps it is most easily 
 corrected by the history of two companies, of one 
 or other of which he is almost sure to have heard. 
 The District Railway Company of London has 
 paid wages to labour and given a service of 
 trains to the public for over half a century ; and 
 the Manchester Ship Canal has done the same 
 for a shorter period. But since 1882 the Railway
 
 THE RISKS AND USES OF CAPITAL 241 
 
 has not paid a penny of interest, nor did the 
 Canal begin to do so till five years ago, to those 
 who found the capital which made possible the 
 paying of those wages and the rendering of those 
 services. They need not be pitied. They took 
 their risk and lost. But neither would they 
 have deserved to incur obloquy if they had won 
 instead and secured a return of twenty, thirty, or 
 forty per cent. It is to be remembered that if 
 an enterprise does badly it may still provide 
 enough, as these have done, for the workmen's 
 wages ; indeed, of course, it would at once 
 cease altogether if it did not. But if that stage 
 of failure is reached and the workmen lose their 
 employment, they may, and generally do, find 
 other employment, however seriously they suffer, 
 and they often do suffer very seriously, in the 
 meanwhile. The capitalist, on the other hand, 
 has lost his capital altogether ; it has simply 
 ceased to exist ; it is not there any longer to be 
 transferred to a new enterprise. All this is 
 elementary enough ; but to-day it has ceased to 
 be superfluous to point out that without continu- 
 ally accumulated capital there can be no increase 
 in public production, and that without a prospect 
 of a fair return there will be no accumulation of 
 capital. So much continuity there must be. 
 But it is compatible with many changes, the best 
 of which would be for the workmen themselves 
 to become more and more the providers of 
 capital for their own trades. 
 
 History warns us of another financial rock on 
 which democracy must not run if it is to be
 
 242 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 saved. That is the rock of over-taxation. 
 Over-taxation of the poor played a large part 
 in bringing about the French Revolution ; 
 over- taxation of everybody, and especially the 
 rich, was one of the most certain causes of the 
 fall of the Roman Empire. The barbarism and 
 poverty of Asia are due to the fact that from time 
 immemorial, and especially since the conquest 
 of the Turks in Western Asia, any one who was 
 visibly rich was instantly despoiled by the 
 agents of the Government. The consequence 
 is that the temptation to save, on the results of 
 which all economic development depends, has 
 been much weaker in Asia than in Europe ; 
 capital has not been accumulated because of 
 the probability of its being confiscated ; and 
 consequently the trading and manufacturing 
 operations by which not merely the traders but 
 their whole countries are enriched have, for 
 lack of security, not come into existence. The 
 present comparative prosperity of India is due 
 to the fact that under the British rule a man has 
 known that if he made a fortune it would remain 
 his, which is just what he did not know under 
 the old rulers of India. Some theorists of the 
 West imagine that the plan of seizing through 
 the tax-gatherer half or three-quarters of the 
 wealth of the rich is a new and brilliant discovery 
 of their own. It is, on the contrary, the oldest 
 of all systems of taxation ; and its results are 
 written in the history of all parts of Asia, where 
 commonly not even the tax-gatherer has been 
 able to find any wealth to seize. The making of 
 wealth is usually a business involving labour and
 
 NEW USES FOR TAXES 243 
 
 self-denial ; and men will not incur either until 
 they are fairly secure of the reward. The 
 consequence is that countries in which the 
 reward is denied remain in a condition of general 
 poverty and backwardness. There is no escape 
 from this, and if Western democracies imitate 
 the policy of Oriental rajahs they will produce 
 the same result and pay the same penalty. 
 
 So much for continuity in economics, and 
 fiscal policy. Yet there is even here another 
 side. The modern democracy, though exactly 
 as subject to economic law as the rajah, is not 
 in other respects exactly like him. It does not 
 spend the proceeds of the taxes mainly on 
 silks or wines or jewels or women. In theory 
 and aim, at any rate, it spends them on promoting 
 the public good. Health and education, the 
 judicial administration, police, roads, and other 
 such matters are among its heaviest expenses. 
 Almost the heaviest of all in England is, in its 
 various forms, the relief of the poor, than which 
 none is capable of being more beneficial, and none 
 of being more pernicious, to the life of the State. 
 What we see in all this is the universally accepted 
 policy of the democracies, which is that of 
 applying the public funds, at any rate after the 
 protection of the State from external dangers 
 and sometimes to the neglect of that primary 
 duty, to the enlargement and betterment of the 
 life of the whole people. There is the element 
 of change, which is good and indeed final. The 
 Magistrates in Quarter Sessions governed the 
 English counties far more economically than the 
 present County and District Councils, with even
 
 244 CONTINUITY IN CHANGE 
 
 less suspicion of jobbery, and, within their 
 limits, quite as efficiently. But that is just the 
 point. Their limits were too narrow. Nobody 
 dreams of desiring to return to them. Long 
 before the war the nation had begun to demand 
 a larger conception of their functions from all 
 its officials, municipal as well as national. The 
 demand has grown since the war. It means 
 that the action of the State, which used to be 
 mainly negative, almost an affair of regulation 
 and police, should in many spheres become 
 positive, an affair of instruction, inspiration and 
 example. Every one now desires this. But 
 every one with a sense of realities knows that it 
 must be done with caution. Bureaucracies, 
 which consist of men with fixed salaries spending 
 other people's money, are almost invariably 
 wasteful and unp regressive. They tend to 
 become a ceremonial priesthood, doing the 
 things which they have always been accustomed 
 to do, and identifying the interest of their own 
 order with the good of the State. 
 
 Will the new democracies and the oldest 
 to-day have a new spirit be able to keep 
 enough of the old woild to save the new ? Will 
 they be able to unite their policy of ideas and 
 sympathy, alike in foreign and home affairs, 
 with enough caution, with enough sense of the 
 facts which limit and condition human progress, 
 with enough instinct for that continuity without 
 which progress is a thing in the air having no 
 foundations in a word, with enough history, to 
 give its philosophy a chance of being engrafted 
 into the political tree of life ? That is the
 
 THE SALVATION OF DEMOCRACY 245 
 
 problem, of such absorbing interest, of such 
 immeasurable gravity, of which the next genera- 
 tion will give the solution. Landor in one of 
 his Conversations makes Machiavelli say that 
 " democracies have enemies in most of the rich, 
 in more of the timorous, and nearly in all the 
 wise." This always has been true, and still is : 
 must it always remain so ? Monarchies and 
 aristocracies have commonly died of the worship 
 of an inequality false to nature ; and of forgetting 
 that change is of the essence of life. Democracies 
 have died, even more surely and much more 
 quickly, of the opposite things, of the worship 
 of an equality as false as the inequality of the 
 others, and of forgetting that the present is 
 rooted in the past and dies if it be plucked away 
 from its roots. The only democracy which has 
 ever continued to flourish on a great and ever 
 greater scale for nearly a century and a half has 
 all throughout its life allowed its caprices to be 
 controlled, indeed to be repressed, by an almost 
 unchangeable Constitution, which it owes, first, 
 to the peculiar circumstances of its birth, 
 secondly to the rare wisdom and patriotism of 
 its founders, and thirdly to their happy mis- 
 reading of the English political system which 
 they desired to imitate. Such a combination of 
 felicities will not easily occur again. If the 
 democracies of Europe are to be saved and to 
 build the new world, they must work out their 
 salvation as much by their political justice, 
 temperance and teachableness as by their tender- 
 ness to the weak, their faith in humanity, and 
 their hopefor a better and more generous order. 
 
 R
 
 INDEX 
 
 ABERDEEN, Lord, 28, 31 
 
 ^Egean Sea, 114 
 
 Albert, H.R.H. Prince, character- 
 istics, 1 8 ; death, 19 ; policy, 
 3, 32, 33 
 
 Almanza, battle of, 212 note 
 
 Al thorp, Lord, 49 
 
 American Constitution, the, 25 
 
 Amiens, Peace of, 190 
 
 Anson, Sir William, book on the 
 Constitution, 26, 34 
 
 Aristotle, 192, 196 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, daily motto, 
 223 
 
 Asia, poverty, 196, 242 
 
 Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. N., in ; 
 optimism, 169 
 
 Athens, changes in constitution, 
 231 
 
 Austria, Memorandum on the 
 Eastern question, 115; col- 
 lapse, 235 
 
 I Bohemia, changes in, 235 
 
 ; Bolshevists, 221 ; revolutic 
 
 198 ; characteristics. 214 
 ! Bradford, Lady, relations wit 
 Disraeli, 96, 105 ; co 
 spondence with him, 102 
 Bradford, Lord, 106 
 Bridgeman, Commander, 102 
 Bright, John, 82, 90, 137 
 ! Bristol, port of, 195 
 British Constitution, the, 24 
 Buckle, George Earle, " The 1 
 of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of 
 Beaconsfield," 65-68, 79, 94 ; 
 criticisms on, 67 ; editor of 
 The Times, 94 ; style of writing, 
 98-100 
 
 ' Bulgaria, 114 
 
 I Burke, Edmund, motives for 
 entering public life, 52 ; 
 political views, 60 ; saying 
 of, 149 ; prophecy, 198, 200 
 
 BALANCE of power, doctrine, 178; 
 meaning of the term, 179 
 
 Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 41 ; 
 Committee of Imperial De- 
 fence, in ; intellectual fer- 
 tility, 162 
 
 Balkan Peninsula, 114 
 
 Bateson, W., " Common Sense 
 in Racial Problems," 5 
 
 Beach, Sir Michael Hicks, 152 
 
 Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, 
 Earl of, Political Life of, 45, 
 65, 79 1 94 ; see Disraeli 
 
 Beaconsfield, Lady ; see Disraeli, 
 Mrs. 
 
 Bedford, Duke of, 123 
 
 Bentinck, Lord George, death,69 
 
 Berlin, Treaty of, 107, 112 
 
 Berwick, Duke of, in command 
 of the French army, 212 note 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, opinion of 
 Disraeli, 112 
 
 CABINET, unity of the, 152 
 Calvin, J., 138 
 Canada, Dominion of, 87 
 Canning, Rt. Hon. George, 
 
 Prime Minister, 133 
 ! Capital, value of, 239-241 
 j Capital and Labour, relations 
 
 between, 222, 225-227 
 I Capitalist, position in the future, 
 
 239 
 
 j Carlyle, Thomas, 4 
 I Caroline, Queen, 7 
 Catherine II., Empress, 197 
 Catholic Emancipation, 33 
 Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. J., 71 ; re- 
 lations with Lord R. Churchill, 
 152, 160 ; first meeting with 
 Lord Salisbury, 1 54 
 Change, continuity in, 229-246 
 Charles I., King, 7 ^ 
 Charles II., King, 7 ; entry into 
 London, 219
 
 INDEX 
 
 247 
 
 Chatham, William Pitt, First 
 Earl of, 128 ; oratory, 45 
 
 Chesterfield, Lady, correspon- 
 dence with Disraeli, 102 ; 
 relations with him, 105 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, 9 
 
 China, constitutional continuity, 
 231 
 
 Church, the, failure of, 204, 206 ; 
 advantages, 205 
 
 Chui chill, Lord Randolph, 148 ; 
 Leader of the House of Com- 
 mons, 148 ; career, 149 ; 
 quarrels, 152, 160 ; plan of a 
 coalition, 154 ; resigns the 
 India Office, 155 ; Budget 
 scheme, 155 ; confidence in 
 himself, 156 ; complex per- 
 sonality, 157 ; favourite books, 
 158 ; audacity, 159 ; charac- 
 teristics, 160 ; political views, 
 161 
 
 Churchill, Winston Spencer, 
 " Lord Randolph Churchill," 
 148 ; criticism on, 150-152 
 
 Cicero, speeches, 46, 79 
 
 Cintra, Convention of, 184 
 
 Clarence, Duke of, death, 23 
 
 Cobden, Richard, 60, 76 
 
 Colenso, Bishop, 83 
 
 Conroy, Sir John, 14 
 
 Conservative Party, legislative 
 measures, 108 ; principles, 109 
 
 Constantinople Conference, 115 
 
 Continuity in change, 229-246 
 
 Cork, port of, 195 
 
 Corn Laws, Repeal of the, 51 
 
 County and District Councils, 
 
 244 
 
 Cranmer, Archbishop, 138 
 
 Creevey, Mr., 10 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 138 
 
 Cumberland, Duke of, 23 ; re- 
 lations with Henry Fox, 123 ; 
 advice to him, 125 
 
 DARWIN, Charles, 83 
 Delane, J. T., 197 
 
 Democracy, future of, 201 ; 
 modern, 243-246 
 
 Denmark, 86, 87 ; changes in, 
 235 
 
 Derby, Lord, 29 ; characteristics, 
 69 ; attitude on the question of 
 Protection, 70, 72 ; result of 
 his refusal of office, 72, 107 ; 
 policy, 82, 112 
 
 Devonshire, Duke of, 49, 123 ; 
 relations with Lord R. Church- 
 ill, 152 ; characteristics, 153 
 (123 is not the same Duke) 
 
 Disraeli, Mrs., 53, 93, 96 
 
 Disraeli, Rt. Hon. Benjamin, 2, 
 4, 41 ; characteristics, 19, 57, 
 73, 103, 162 ; on absolute 
 government, 32 ; attacks on 
 Peel, 45-47, 70 ; character, 
 47-49 ; charge against, 48-5 1 ; 
 motives for entering public 
 life, 52 ; relations with Peel, 
 53 ; with Stanley, 54 ; mar- 
 riage, 55 ; letters, 57, 102 ; 
 Oriental taste, 58 ; relations 
 with Louis Philippe, 58 ; 
 political views, 60-64, 7S> 84 ; 
 " Sybil," 61, 97 ; founds The 
 Press, 67 ; Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, 69 ; views on 
 Protection, 70-72 ; " Tan- 
 cred," 74, 79, 82 ; " Life of 
 Lord Ge 
 
 eorge Bentinck," 74, 
 7; policy in India 
 political prophecies, 
 
 76, 80, 97 ; policy in India, 75, 
 5, 76, 
 
 197 ; private life, 77, 92 ; 
 " playing for safety," 81 ; 
 attends meetings, 81 ; speech 
 in the Sheldonian Theatre, 83 ; 
 tribute to, 84 ; foreign policy, 
 85-87, 107, 112-116 ; attitude 
 to Queen Victoria, 87, 101 ; 
 Reform Act of 1867.. 90-92, 
 1 20 ; contrasted with Glad- 
 stone, 95-97 ; " Coningsby," 
 97 ; Church appointments, 
 99 ; relations with Lady 
 Bradford and Lady Chester-
 
 2 4 8 
 
 INDEX 
 
 field, 105 ; " Endymion," 105 ; ! 
 Prime Minister, 107, 146 ; ; 
 legislative measures, 108 ; edu- 
 cation of the Conservative 
 Party, 109 ; zeal for the great- 
 ness of England, no ; definite- 
 ness of purpose, 112-114 ; 
 policy in the Russo-Turkish 
 crisis, 113 ; oratory, 117 ; 
 element of mystery, 1 1 8 
 District Railway Company, 240 
 
 EASTERN question, 114 
 
 Ebert, Herr, 199, 200 
 
 Eight Hours Bill, 161 
 
 Elections, General, prediction, 
 198 
 
 Eliot, George, 4 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 36 ; popula- 
 rity, 38 
 
 Employers and employed, new 
 method, 225-227 
 
 England, position, 86, 1 10 ; 
 policy, 1 80 ; history, 199 ; 
 government, 206 ; guardian 
 for the League of Nations, 
 2ii ; strength, 233 
 
 Erasmus, 212 
 
 Esher, Lord, 10 
 
 Esthonia, changes in, 235 
 
 Europe, security, 182 ; political 
 map, 185, 234 ; reorganization, 
 187 
 
 FAITH, power of, 168 
 
 Firth, Prof., " Then and Now," 
 1 88 
 
 Fisher, Rt. Hon. H. A. L., 
 " Political Prophecies," 192 ; 
 optimism, 195 
 
 Fitzgerald, Edward, 9 
 
 Florence, changes in constitu- 
 tion, 231 
 
 Fox, Rt. Hon. Charles, 15 ; at- 
 tack on Lord North, 46 ; popu- 
 larity, 128 ; character, 132 
 
 Fox, Rt. Hon. Henry, 119 ; Pay- 
 master, 121, 131 ; private and 
 public relations, 122-124 ; pro- 
 
 scription of 1762.. i 23 ; cha- 
 racteristics, 124, 130 ; fortune, 
 124, 129-131 ; corruption, 
 124, 130 ; disloyalty to Pitt, 
 125-127 ; political views, 128 ; 
 death, 129 ; unpopularity, 
 130, 132 ; see Holland 
 
 Fox, Stephen, 129 
 
 France, result of the Restoration, 
 178 ; policy, 180, 182 ; sense 
 of nationality, 185 ; history, 
 199 ; hostility to the League 
 of Nations, 210 ; guardian for 
 it, 21 1 ; result of political rest- 
 lessness, 232 ; changes in, 235 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 196 
 
 Frederick, Empress, 22 
 
 Frederick the Great, 196, 197 ; 
 saying of, 126 
 
 Free Trade measures of 1842, 53 
 
 French Revolution, 142, 144, 
 198 ; result, 232 
 
 " Friends of the People," 
 founded, 145 
 
 GALWAY, First Lord in com- 
 mand of the English army, 
 212 note ; see Ruvigny 
 
 Garibaldi, 85, 137 
 
 George II., King, 21, 125; 
 opinion of H. Fox, 130 
 
 George III., King, 8, 25, 121, 
 123, 125 
 
 George IV., King, 33 
 
 Georgian era, 6 
 
 Germans, crimes, 172, 207, 220 ; 
 characteristics, 200 
 
 Germany, Memorandum on the 
 Eastern question, 115 ; policy, 
 1 80 ; need for conquering, 
 188, 190 ; revolution, 198 ; 
 prophecy on, 199 ; war-cry, 
 208 ; protection against Bol- 
 shevism, 222 ; military power, 
 233 
 
 Gladstone, Mrs., 96 
 
 Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 2, 4. 
 41, 51 ; policy, 33 ; motives
 
 INDEX 
 
 249 
 
 for entering public life, 52 ; 
 political views, 60 ; Home 
 Rule policy, 71, 154 ; Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer, 82 ; 
 contrasted with Disraeli, 95- 
 97 ; characteristics, 97, 104, 
 162 ; principles, 99, 103 ; 
 financial measures, 135 ; opin- 
 ion of Lord R. Churchill, 157 
 
 Glasgow, port of, 195 
 
 Goderich, Viscount, Prime Min- 
 ister, 133 
 
 Godley, Sir Arthur, 159 
 
 Gorst, Sir John, relations with 
 Lord R. Churchill, 160 
 
 Greece, 114 ; changes in, 235 
 
 Greville, the diarist, 10 
 
 Grey, Charles, Second Earl, 133 ; 
 Prime Minister, 133 ; charac- 
 teristics, 133 ; Reform Bill of 
 1832.. 133-136 ; policy, 144 ; 
 founds the " Friends of the 
 People," 145 
 
 Grey, Viscount, 1 1 1 ; optimism, 
 170 
 
 HAGUE Conference, 206 ; failure 
 to prevent war, 207, 208 
 
 Halifax, Lord, 142 
 
 Harcourt, Sir William, 117, 155 
 
 Hatfield, 103 
 
 Heine, H., prophecy, 197 
 
 Henry VIII., King, 7 
 
 Henry, Prince, death, 22 
 
 Herbert, Sidney, 70 
 
 History, use of, 194 
 
 Hodges, Frank, tribute to the 
 profit-sharing scheme, 23 8 note 
 
 Holland, Henry Fox, First Lord, 
 119 ; see Fox 
 
 " Holy Alliance," 115 
 
 Horner, Francis, 189 
 
 Houghton, Lord, 54 
 
 Hughenden, 77, 107 
 
 Hume, David, prophecy, 197 
 
 Huxley, Prof., 83 
 
 ILCHESTER, Earl of, " Henry Fox, 
 
 First Lord Holland, His 
 
 Family and Relations," 119, 122 
 Imperial Defence, Committee of, 
 
 ill 
 India, Government of, 31 ; 
 
 policy, 75, 88 ; cause of the 
 
 prosperity, 242 
 
 Inge, Dean, prophecies, 5, 198 
 Intellect, judgments of the, 167- 
 
 169 
 International and National, 204- 
 
 215 
 Italy, 85, 87 ; Liberation of, 139 ; 
 
 unity, 233 ; changes in, 235 
 
 JAMES I., King, 7 
 
 Jennings, Mr., 160 
 
 Jerome, Miss, 158 
 
 Johnson, Dr., criticism of his 
 
 poetry, 18 
 Joseph II., 197 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 83 
 Jugo-Slavia, 235 
 
 KEELING, Sergeant-Major, 202 
 Kerensky, M., 199, 200 
 Keynes, Mr., 219, 223 
 King, position of an hereditary, 
 
 7, 26 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, 4 
 Kitchener, Lord, on the length 
 
 of the war, 169 
 
 LABOUCHERE, Henry, 28 ; advice 
 to Lord R. Churchill, 160 
 
 Labour, International organiza- 
 tion of, 206 ; failure, 207, 208; 
 interests, 237 
 
 Labour and Capital, relations 
 between, 222, 225-227 
 
 Landor, W. S., on democracies, 
 
 245 
 Lansdowne, Lord, foreign policy, 
 
 in 
 League of Nations, 206, 209, 
 
 224; guardians, 211 ; ideal, 
 
 215 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, 10
 
 250 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lehzen, Baroness, 13, 1 6 
 
 Leopold, King, 85 
 
 Lewis, Mrs. Wyndham, mar- | 
 
 riage, 55 
 
 Liberal Unionists, the, 155 
 Liddon, Canon, 4 
 Limerick, port of, 195 
 Liverpool, port of, 195 
 Lords, House of, 63 
 Louis XIV., King of France, 2, 
 
 41, in, 232 
 
 Louis XVI., King of France, 182 
 Louis XVIII., King of France, 
 
 restoration, 177 
 Louis Philippe, King of the 
 
 French, 30, 55, 144, 199; 
 
 relations with Disraeli, 58 ; 
 
 dislike of Palmers ton, 59 
 Lowe, Robert, attacks on Reform, 
 
 46 
 
 Luther, Martin, 138 
 Lyttelton, Sarah, Lady, 10 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, history of 
 England, 136 
 
 Machlavelli, on democracies, 245 
 
 Mallock, W. H., "The New 
 Republic," 103 
 
 Manchester Ship Canal, 240 
 
 Maurice, Rev. F. D., 4 
 
 Melbourne, Lord, instructions to 
 Queen Victoria, 13, 16, 25 ; 
 opinion of her, 15 ; relations 
 with her, 16-^18 ; character of 
 his conversation, 17 ; criticism 
 of Johnson's poetry, 18 ; cha- 
 racteristics, 19 ; death, 14 
 
 Milton, John, pamphlet, 219 
 
 Ministers, optimism, 169 
 
 Montesquieu, C., prophecy, 197 
 
 Monypenny, William Flavelle, 
 " The Life of Benjamin Dis- 
 raeli, Earl of Beaconsfield," 45, 
 65 ; introductory dissertations, ' 
 59 ; death, 65 ; on the element \ 
 of mystery in Disraeli, 118 
 
 Morley, Lord, 61, 68 ; Life of 
 Gladstone, 98 ; prophecy, 197 
 
 NAPOLEON, Emperor, in ; des- 
 potism, 184 ; victories, 232 
 
 Napoleon III., Emperor, 232 
 
 National and International, 204- 
 215 
 
 Nationality, doctrine of, 187, 
 234 J growth, 212 
 
 Nations, Society of, 179 
 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 28, 123, 
 125 ; refuses a pension, 132 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, 4 
 
 Norfolk, Duke of, 15 
 
 North, Lord, 46 
 
 OPTIMISM after the War, 2 16-228 
 Optimist, definition of, 163 ; mis- 
 calculations, 164, 217 221 ; 
 belief in men, 173 ; justifica- 
 tion of faith, 175 
 Over-taxation, result, 242 
 
 PALMERSTON, Lord, 2, 28,30,41, 
 73 J 97 ; character as Prime 
 Minister, 82 ; death, 90 
 
 Panmure, Lord, 28 
 
 Peace, Treaty of, 233 ; criticism 
 on, 219 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 4, 15, 41 ; 
 attacks of Disraeli, 45-47, 70 ; 
 character, 47 ; repeal of the 
 Corn Laws, 51 ; motives for 
 entering public life, 52 ; rela- 
 tions with Disraeli, 53 ; Free 
 Trade measures, 53, 135 ; 
 political views, 60 ; Prime 
 Minister, 146 
 
 Peelites, the, characteristics, 70 
 
 Pelham, Henry, 121, 131 ; rela- 
 tions with H. Fox, 123 
 
 Perceval, Spencer, Prime Minis- 
 ter, 133 
 
 Pessimist, definition of, 163 ; 
 miscalculations, 165, 217, 221; 
 unbelief, 171 ; belief in ma- 
 chines, 173 
 
 Philip II., King of Spain, in 
 
 Pitt, Rt. Hon. William, Pay-
 
 INDEX 
 
 251 
 
 master, 121, 124 ; probity and 
 honour, 124, 131 ; character- 
 istics, 126, 140 ; measures of 
 repression, 141, 143-145 ; 
 prosecutions for sedition, 142 ; 
 Prime Minister, 148 ; death, 
 149 ; policy in the French 
 Revolution, 177 ; despatch of 
 1792. .183 
 
 Pitt, William, 127 ; see Chatham 
 
 Poland, changes in, 235 
 
 Political prophecies, 192-203 ; 
 unsuccessful, 196 ; successful, 
 197 
 
 Politics, two forces in, 205 ; law 
 of continuity in change, 230 
 
 Polybius, prophecy, 197 
 
 Pope, Alexander, character of his 
 letters, 9 
 
 Poor, relief of the, 243 
 
 Portland, Duke of , Prime Minis- 
 ter, 133 
 
 Portugal, struggle for freedom, 
 184 
 
 Press, The, 67 
 
 Profit-sharing scheme, 238 note 
 
 Prophecies, political, 192-203 
 
 Prophet, an anonymous, 200, 203 
 
 Protection, question of, 70-72 
 
 Prussia, 85 
 
 Prussians, characteristics, 174 
 
 Public Worship Regulations Act, 
 36, 108 
 
 Pusey, Rev. E. B., 4 
 
 QUEENSBERRY, Duke of, 15 
 PvEDESDALE, Lord, IO2 
 
 Reform Bill of, 1832.. 25, 133- 
 136; of 1 867.. 89-92, 120 
 
 Renan, E., prophecy, 197 
 
 Robespierre, 144 
 
 Roland, Mdme., 196 
 
 Roman Empire, 42 
 
 Rosebery, Lord, 41, 144 ; "Pitt," 
 66 ; Prime Minister, 133 
 
 Rousseau, J. J., 197 
 
 Rumania, 114 
 
 Ruskin, John, 4 
 
 I Russell, George, opinion of 
 
 Disraeli, 117 
 Russell, Lord John, 2, 28, 30, 41; 
 
 ! despatch on the Trent affair,3 1 
 
 ; Russia, Memorandum on the 
 Eastern question, 115 ; weak- 
 ness, 181 ; defeat of Turkey, 
 181 ; failure, 186 ; revolution, 
 187 ; Bolshevist movement, 
 214, 221 ; condition, 221 ; 
 result of the revolutions, 237 
 Russians, characteristics, 201 
 
 I Russo-Turkish war, 112 
 Ruvigny, Marquis de, in com- 
 mand of the English army, 
 212 note 
 
 | SALISBURY, Lord, 41, 63, 161, 
 197 ; motives for entering 
 public life, 52 ; on appoint- 
 ments of High Church deans, 
 100 ; tribute to Disraeli, no ; 
 foreign policy, in ; relations 
 with Disraeli, 112 ; at the Con- 
 stantinople Conference, 115 ; 
 Prime Minister, 146 ; relations 
 with Lord R. Churchill, 152, 
 1 60 ; tribute to, 153 ; first 
 meeting with J. Chamberlain, 
 154 ; co-operation of the 
 Liberal Unionists, 155 
 
 San Stefano, Treaty of, 107 
 i Sand, George, 224, 225 
 
 Schleswig question, 76, 87 
 ; Sedan, battle of, 232 
 i Serbia, 114, 235 ; see Jugo-Slavia 
 
 Shelburne, Earl of, 123 
 i Sheldonian Theatre, 83 
 
 Smith, Rev. Sydney, 189 
 
 Smith, Rt. Hon. W. H., 158 
 
 Smythe, George, 54 
 
 Socialism, international creed, 
 214 
 
 Sophia, Electress, 7 
 
 Spain, struggle for freedom, 184 
 poverty, 196 
 
 Sparta, constitutional continuity, 
 231
 
 252 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Spencer, Lord, 142 
 
 Spurgeon, Charles, 4 
 
 Stanley, Lord, 28 ; relations 
 
 with Disraeli, 54 ; see also 
 
 Derby, Lord 
 Strachey, Lytton, Life of Queen 
 
 Victoria, 10-13, 32,, 33, 41 ; 
 
 book on French poetry, n ; 
 
 " Eminent Victorians," n 
 Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, 30 
 
 TENNYSON, Lord, 4 
 
 " Then and Now," 177-191 
 
 Times, The, editorship, 94 
 
 Tory Party, 121, 156 
 
 Trent affair, 31 
 
 Trevelyan, Sir George, Life of 
 Lord Macaulay, 136 
 
 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 
 " Lord Grey of the Reform 
 Bill," 135, 130-144 ; creed, 
 137 ; political views, 140 ; 
 " Clio, extract from, 193 
 
 Turf Club, 154 
 
 Turkey, defeat of, 18 1 ; collapse, 
 235 
 
 UNITED States, difficulty with, 
 1 862 87 ; guardian for the 
 League of Nations, 211 
 
 Universal suffrage democracy, 6 
 
 VENICE, constitutional con- 
 tinuity, 231 
 
 Versailles, Treaty of, 234 
 Victoria, Queen, i ; character of 
 her reign, 2-5 ; characteristics, 
 6, 8, 12-14, 20-23, 27, 33, 38, 
 42, 101 ; letters and journals, 
 9-11, 27 ; works on, 10-13 '> 
 accession, 14, 1 6 ; indomitable 
 will, 14, 26 ; education, 16 ; 
 impressions of Lord Mel- 
 bourne, 17 ; husband and 
 children, 19 ; narrowness, 20 ; 
 relations with her children, 20, 
 22 ; courage, 21 ; relations 
 
 with her people, 22 ; exercise 
 of her functions as Sovereign, 
 24-40 ; tenacious of her rights, 
 27 38 ; treatment of her 
 Ministers, 27-29, 33 ; policy, 
 28, 30, 36 r services to her 
 country, 29-31 ; limitations 
 of her power, 32-34, 36 ; daily 
 work, 35, 40 ; Public Worship 
 Regulation Act, 36, 108 ; 
 neglect of her public position, 
 37 ; system of granting hon- 
 ours, 38 ; veneration of her 
 name, 40-44. ; distinguished 
 contemporaries, 41 ; symbol 
 of the British Empire, 42 ; 
 Empress of India, 75, 89 ; 
 letters from Disraeli, 87, 101 
 Vienna, Congress of, 179 
 Vitzthum, tribute to Disraeli, 84 
 
 WALPOLE, Sir Robert, 124 
 War, European, 224 ; result, 
 
 1 80, 233 ; optimism after the, 
 
 216-228 
 
 Waterloo, battle of, 184, 232 
 Wellington, Duke of, 143 ; 
 
 Prime Minister, 133 
 West, Sir Algernon, 142 
 Whig Party, 120 ; creed, 138 ; 
 
 policy, 146 
 
 Whitley Councils, 225 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, 92 
 William II., German Emperor, 
 
 1 88 ; birth, 86 
 William IV., King, 33 
 Williams, Mrs. Brydges, friend- 
 ship with Disraeli, 77 
 Wilson, President, reply of the 
 
 Allies to, 187 ; Fourteen 
 
 Points, 234 
 
 Wolff, Sir H. Drummond, 115 
 j Words worth, William, lines from, 
 
 176, 1 86 ; prophecy, 197 ; on 
 
 the three virtues, 216 
 Wycliffe, John, 137 
 
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