PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. vii detestation. That Mr. Gladstone and his immediate colleagues should emulate Mr. Bradlaugh in resentment of Lord Beaconsfield's genius and in begrudging his elevation, is less intelligible. Least admirable of all is, however, the treatment he has received from his own party. His worst foes have been they of his own household. The great body of the Conservative party -that party which he re-created, reconstructed, lifted out of the mire of failure and defeat, educated and placed on the pinnacle of power-have never known how to appreciate him. They have dared even to school and to lecture the chief whose genius compelled them to follow him; and more than once, in time of storm and stress, when fidelity amongst his colleagues was an element of success for the party, he has been deserted by those who were most bound to support him. It has been said of Mr. Pitt, that, "constructing his policy on wise and liberal principles, he incorporated with a worn-out creed a new and vital element of strength, and imparted to a powerless and unimaginative party the force and refinement of genius." No words could better describe the career of Lord Beaconsfield. He entered public life when Catholic Emancipation had just been carried and when Reform was the question of the hour. He found the great national party in-to quote his own words —“a state of ignorant stupefaction," and the Whigs, who had caught that party "napping," at the commencement of a period of domination which, begun by force and continued by fraud, lasted for well-nigh a dozen years. He began at once the work. of reconstructing his party. Whilst still young in years and in public life, he was called to its leadership, and from that day forward he led it with unconquerable courage through difficulties all but overwhelming, to eventual triumph. He has completed his work. He has re-established the patriotic principles for which, during well-nigh half a century, he contended with tongue and pen, and during all this long and weary struggle he has been alone-alone in spite of his great qualities. His tact, his courage, his readiness, his adoitness, his wit, his marvellous command of temper, his reticence, his patience and his cheerfulness in adversity, have passed all but unrecognised. In the midst of all this detraction, calumny and misapprecia tion, however, there have been some who held their faith in the leader of the Tories; some who recognised his genius; some who were fascinated alike by his public and personal qualities. His want of success did not frighten them. They remembered how the Great Commoner himself had been more often out of office than in, and how on many subjects he had been hopelessly at variance with both his sovereign and the people. They remembered also the reason for Lord Beaconsfield's long exile from office, and that had he been more subservient he might from one point of view have been more successful. He had, they remembered, proudly refused to be a "Minister on sufferance," though by so accepting the situation he might have remained in place for an indefinite period. A Sir Charles Wood might alter his Budget four times in a Session and still remain Chancellor of the Exchequer with the full consent of the great united Liberal party. But when Mr. Disraeli presented to the House of Commons a well-considered financial scheme-at once the boldest and most statesmanlike Budget since the days of Peel-and found the House unwilling to accept it, he took a different course. He was told in so many words to take back his Budget and to reduce it to proportions intelligible to Whig financiers. He was assured that there would be nothing humiliating in the operation, but he refused -he "could not submit to the degradation of other Chancellors." Like Pitt "he knew how to retire." That in retiring he best consulted his own honour cannot be denied, but the consequences to the country were deplorable. For the bold, large and far-seeing scheme of finance which the Whigs had confessed to be too much for them, was substituted the timid and petty monetary policy of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and for the cautious and conciliatory yet decided foreign policy of the late Lord Derby, the mingled bullying and cringing of Lord Palmerston. England had a heavy price to pay for both. The one involved the country in the Crimean War; the other speedily gave her a doubled Income Tax. High-mindedness such as this is, however, an indubitable title to esteem. Unprejudiced and candid men admire with equal sincerity Macaulay accepting defeat at Edinburgh rather PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. He ix than belie his conscience on some one or other of those interminable theologico-political questions in which the Scottish mind delights; Mr. Forster at Bradford asserting his independence in the face of the serried hosts of political dissent, and Mr. Disraeli as leader of the forlorn hope of Toryism resigning place and power, rather than mutilate his well-considered programme. High-mindedness is not, however, the only claim of Lord Beaconsfield to the admiration of his followers. possesses every quality which can fascinate the rising generation of public men. He was the apostle of Young Englandthe leader of that generous, helpful, hopeful, kindly and sympathetic party whose very existence was a protest against what Mr. Carlyle was wont to call "Whig laissez-faire, and Benthamee utility." And he was something more. He was not one of those dilletante philanthropists who content themselves with amiable platitudes and sweet sounding sentiments, nor was his name at any time conspicuous on lists of charitable committees or amongst those who find their greatest gratification in showing themselves at public meetings. But for all that, he was the active and practical friend of the poor, the warm and tender sympathiser with the wrongs and sufferings of the labouring class. When demagogues were shouting upon platforms and Whig Ministers were crowding the gaols with political martyrs, Lord Beaconsfield was doing brave and masculine work for the suffering and the oppressed. At a time when to show sympathy with Chartists was equivalent to incurring all the penalties of social ostracism, he pleaded their cause both in and out of the House, and chose for the heroine of the most touching and powerful of his novels a daughter of the people. Altogether apart from its dominant humanity, "Sybil" would be immortal-its grace, its tenderness, and its truth would place it very high in the ranks of English fiction—but "Sybil" is something more than a novel It is an appeal to the great sentiment of human brotherhood, a vindication of the rights of the poor, and as such it has a double title to the reverence of posterity. The claims of Lord Beaconsfield to the admiration of his fellows on literary grounds alone, are unimpeachable. A poet of no mean order, a wit whose delicate small-sword is more than a match for the heavy cutlasses and bludgeons of his opponents, a novelist of no ordinary powers, he turns from the work of statesmanship to give to the world a "Henrietta Temple,"most exquisite of love stories; and he adorns the dry discussion of political details with all the graces of antithesis and epigram. Lady Blessington plagues him for a copy of verses for one of those Annuals' which she manufactures, and he gives her lines which would make the fortune of a poetaster, but which, with that lofty indifference to the public verdict which has always been characteristic of him, he leaves unnoticed in their original obscurity. There is, however, one quality of Lord Beaconsfield, concerning which too little is heard, even amongst his professed admirers, and that is his remarkable and undeviating consistency. During the three years which preceded his entrance into public life, he thought out the principles which were to guide him in the future, and to those principles he has adhered with unswerving fidelity. Those who adopt the partizan and prejudiced view, will probably scoff at this idea. In the eyes of his rivals and opponents he is, we all know, a man wholly devoid of political principle, and anxious only for his own personal advantage and personal aggrandisement. Beside his time-serving, the spotless consistency of his great rival stands out in bold and striking relief. It is true that at the outset of his political career, Mr. Gladstone was the "rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories;" that he turned Peelite; that he joined the Coalition; that he became an ultra-Liberal, and is now suspected of hankering after something even yet more advanced; that being, in theory, a High Churchman and a State Churchman of the most marked type, he has for political ends destroyed the Church of Ireland; and finally, that for the sake of a little cheap applause from the illiterate, he does not hesitate to fraternize with the lowest forms of Dissent and even to quote from the manuals of Atheism. These things are but spots on the sun of Liberal perfection-we have even been told that they are evidences of that "higher consistency which dares to be inconsistent." But it is simply intolerable that Lord PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. xi Beaconsfield's followers should claim for him the merit of consistency. Did not the Edinburgh Review brand him as a charlatan and a renegade? and who shall gainsay the blue and yellow organ of Whiggery? For those who do not pin their faith to this Quarterly oracle there is, however, something eminently agreeable in the fact that when eight and forty years ago, 'Disraeli the Younger' first presented himself to the electors of High Wycombe, he appeared as a Tory and as a Tory was defeated. To the principles of Toryism he has ever since adhered, through evil and through good report alike. It is true that in his youth he dreamed of the formation of a party which should be neither Tory nor Whig and that in the evening of his days he sees some part of his ideal realized. Mr. Cowen's support of his Eastern policy, and Mr. Roebuck's elevation to the Privy Council, are significant facts. Nor is it to be denied that on one occasion, at the very outset of his career, he sought the aid of two Radical leaders in his campaign against the domination of the Whig oligarchy. But however mistaken the step may have been-and that it was a mistake from the tactical point of view probably Lord Beaconsfield would himself be the first to admit--no one was deceived by it at any time. Armed with the letters of Hume and O'Connell, he contested High Wycombe as a Tory. As a Tory he was reviled in the local newspaper, and as a Tory he was ultimately defeated. Had he been aught but a Tory, the scurrilous organ of Aylesbury Liberalism would possibly have found something good to say of him. As he was an open and avowed enemy of Whiggism, that miserable print, which is even now accepted in some quarters as an authority, persistently reviled him Finally, it is not less true, that, at one period of his life, Lord Beaconsfield thought it might be desirable to revert to the ancient constitutional custom of triennial Parliaments, and that, in view of the corruption and pressure consistently exercised upon voters in those Whig nomination boroughs, which the Reform Bill had spared, he for a while leaned to the Ballot. He even dared to support the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, though as the Liberal party voted for that measure, he was obviously poaching on their manor in doing so. Yet when |