THE RUSSO-TURKISH WAR
Of the tens of thousands who gathered in Hyde Park to shout for war how many had considered what a war with Russia might involve? Bismarck could not understand Disraeli’s attitude. ‘Why cannot you be friends with Russia and settle your differences peacefully?’ he said tohim at the beginning of the dispute. ‘Why not put an end once for all to this miserable Turkish business, which threatens Europe every year or two with war?’ Why not, indeed? Russian interests and English interests divide the continent of Asia. These two Powers between them are engaged in the same purpose of bringing the Eastern nations under the influence of Western civilisation. It would be a misfortune to humanity if either they or we should cease our efforts. The world smiles when we complain of Russian aggression. The Asiatic subjects of the Queen of England are two hundred millions. The Asiatic subjects of Russia are forty millions. The right on both sides is the right of conquest.
They have annexed territories and we have annexed territories. Annexations are the necessary results of the contact of order with anarchy. If we work together the regeneration of Asia may proceed peacefully and beneficently. If we quarrel in earnest, as things now stand, the whole enormous continent will be split into factions, nation against nation, tribe against tribe, family against family. From the Bosphorus to the Wall of China, and perhaps inside it, there will be an enormous faction-fight, with an amount of misery to mankind of which no recorded war has produced the like. It will be a war, too, which can lead to no atoning results. England staggers already under the vastness of her responsibilities, and even if she conquers can undertake no more. That we might not conquer is an eventuality which our pride may refuse to entertain; yet such a thing might happen, and if we are defeated we are a lost nation. Russia might recover, but we could not; a disaster on the Dardanelles or the Afghan frontier would cost us our Indian Empire.
RUSSIA AND ENGLAND
In such a war we stand to lose all and to gain nothing, while in itself it would be nothing less than a crime against mankind. We are told that a cordial co-operation with Russia is impossible. It will not be made more possible by a quarrel over Turkey. Yet to a peaceful arrangement we must come at last if the quarrel is not to be pursued till one or other of us is destroyed. These are the broad facts of the situation, to which the fate of the Principalities or of the Bosphorus itself are as feathers in the balance. Disraeli, in whose hands for the moment the tremendous decision rested, chose to overlook them. He persevered in the policy of upholding the Turkish Empire. It was the traditional policy of England, and, as he professed to consider, the most consistent with English interests. It may be that he remembered also that the Turks had befriended his own race when the Russians had been their bitterest enemies. It may be that something of his early vanity still lingered in him, and that he was tempted by the proud position of being the arbiter of Europe. But fact was against him. Turkish rule in Europe is an anachronism, and neither force nor diplomacy can prevent the final emancipation of Christian nations from Mahometan dominion. He chose a course which gave him for a moment an ephemeral glory, but it was at the cost of undoing the effects of his whole political life, wrecking again the party which he had reorganised and giving a fresh lease of power to the revolutionary tendencies which threatened the dismemberment of the Empire.
The Eastern question was beginning to simmer when Disraeli came into power, but the symptoms had not yet become acute and he had leisure for internal politics. He desired to strengthen Conservative institutions. Of these the Church of England ought to have been the strongest,but it was distracted by internal disorders. The Romanising party was the counterpart of Radicalism. The original Tractarians had imagined themselves to be champions of old Tory principles, but revolutionary movements draw instinctively together. Romanisers and Radicals had the common belief that they were wiser than their fathers, that they must have something ‘deeper and truer than satisfied the last century.’ The reformers of the State wished to remodel the Constitution, the Ritualists to restore Church principles and bring back the Mass. The Radical chief sympathised with both of them. They returned his regard; and vast numbers of the clergy fell off from their old allegiance.
Disraeli, keenly as he observed the outer features of the situation, was not entirely at home in such subjects. He did not see that the lay members of the Church, who had once been earnest Protestants, had now grown indifferent about it. If the clergy liked to amuse themselves with altars and vestments and elaborate services the clergy might have their way for all that the laity cared about the matter. Old Tory families still hated Puritans and Puritanism, and had not realised the change of front which made Protestants Conservatives and Radicals into allies of the Papacy. Disraeli believed that an Act of Parliament could check a tendency which ran in a current where legislation could not reach. He passed a Public Worship Act to put down ritualism,[11]and it has been scarcely more effective than Lord John Russell’s demonstration against Papal aggression. This disease has not been checked; acrimonious lawsuits promoted by a few antediluvian Protestant parishioners have failed, and will continue to fail, because public opinion refuses to support the promoters. Suffering priests and bishops pose as martyrs, and there is unwillingness to punish them. By the Constitution the Church of England rests on an Act of Parliament, but sooner than effectively use its controlling power Parliament will consent to disestablishment. The Public Worship Act exasperated the enthusiastic clergy and their friends. It secretly offended not a few of Disraeli’s aristocratic followers. For the purpose for which it was passed it was as ineffectual as, to use President Lincoln’s simile, ‘a Pope’s Bull against a comet,’ and demonstrations which are not followed by action do not add to a statesman’s influence.
THE BERLIN CONFERENCE
This, however, and all other internal subjects lost their interest when Servia rose against the Turks, when the Servian defeat brought the Russians across the Danube, and the passions, the alarms, the panics of the Crimean episode revived in all their frenzy. Circumstances had altered. England had no longer France for an ally. Turkey had then been saved, and allowed a fresh lease of life on condition of mending her administration and behaving better to her Christian subjects. Turkey had amended nothing, and could amend nothing. So far as Turkey was concerned, the only result had been a Turkish loan, and on this the interest had ceased to be paid. Nevertheless the familiar cries rose again. Our old ally was in danger. The Dardanelles were the keys of India. We were threatened on the Indus, we were threatened in the Mediterranean. Quiet voices could get no hearing, and eloquence could be only met by eloquence. Mr. Gladstone, if by his Irish action he had let loose the winds at home, did a service then which must be remembered to his honour. He forced the country to observe what the rule of Turkey meant. He insisted, not entirely in vain, on the indignity, the shame, the dishonourwhich we should bring on ourselves by taking the side of the Bulgarian assassins. He succeeded in making Disraeli pause at a critical time and preventing measures which might have led to an immediate conflict, and the Turkish successes at Plevna and in Armenia seemed for a time to dispense with the necessity of armed interference. The Turk, it was hoped, would be able to defend his provinces with his own hand. But, as Disraeli said truly, the English are the most enthusiastic people in the world. They have an especial love for courage, and the bravery of the Turks in the field made them forget or disbelieve in the ‘atrocities.’ When Kars fell and Plevna fell, when the Russian armies forced the Balkans in the dead of winter, and the Ottoman resistance collapsed, the storm rose again into a hurricane. Mr. Gladstone and the ‘Daily News’ stood their ground. Disraeli waved aside the horrible story of Turkish cruelties, as, if not false, yet as enormously exaggerated. Such as it was the ferocity had not after all cut deep into Bulgarian memories. If the dead have any knowledge of what is passing upon earth he must laugh in his grave when the Bulgarian survivors of these horrors are now inviting the Turks into an alliance with them against their Russian deliverers. Deeds of violence have been too common in some countries to make a deep impression. The fugitive Macdonalds from Glencoe were lost in astonishment at the interest which political passion had created in the murder of their kinsmen. Public opinion, so far as it expressed itself in words, continued strongly in Disraeli’s favour. He said amidst general applause that he would not allow Turkey to be crushed. He did not desire war, but he was prepared for war if the Russians entered Constantinople, and on two occasions peace hung upon a thread. A plan of campaign wasformed, not for local resistance but for war on an universal scale. The British fleet went up within sight of the Golden Horn to cover the Turkish capital. Gallipoli was to be occupied. Turkestan was to be set on fire through the Afghan country; and, I believe, so ambitious was the scheme, another force was to have advanced from the Persian Gulf into Armenia. Not all the Cabinet were prepared for these adventures. Lord Carnarvon and Lord Derby resigned, and caused some passing hesitation, and as the Russians left Constantinople unentered that particular crisis passed away. But the Russian conquerors had dictated their own terms of peace, and when Disraeli insisted that the terms should not stand till they had been revised at a European Conference England again applauded and admired. He determined to attend the Conference in person, and the remarkable impression which he produced there was the culminating point of his singular career. On Prince Bismarck, who respects firmness more than eloquence, it was an impression eminently favourable. French is the language generally used at the meetings of European plenipotentiaries. Disraeli spoke French tolerably, and had prepared a French address. It was represented to him, however, that his peculiar power of creating an effect would be impaired by his accent, and he spoke actually in English. There were two points, I believe, on which the peace of Europe hung in the balance, one referring to Batoum, which was not to be fortified; the other to the division of the two Bulgarias, which the treaty of San Stefano had joined. Heavy guns are now mounted at Batoum, and we are none the worse for it. The large Bulgaria, so much dreaded, has become a fact again, with the warm approbation of the anti-Russian Powers. Yet on threads so slight as these the lives or deaths, perhaps, ofmillions of men at that moment depended. After a stormy debate on the Balkan question Disraeli broke up the Conference and announced that he should return home and take other measures. Russia, at Bismarck’s entreaty, yielded a point which had no substantial significance. Disraeli had the glory of extorting a concession by a menace. We imagine that the days are past when nations can go to war for a point of honour, but we are no wiser than our fathers after all.
PEACE WITH HONOUR
War, however, was avoided, and Disraeli had won his diplomatic victory. He returned to London in a blaze of glory, bringing peace with honour, and all the world sang the praises of the patriot Minister. He thought himself that he had secured the ascendency of the Conservatives for a quarter of a century at least. In 1876 he had passed from the leadership of the House of Commons to the House of Lords, reviving in an earldom the title which he had given to his wife, and which had died with her. He now received the Garter, the most coveted of all English decorations, because bestowed usually of free grace and not for merit, but for him the reward of his unequalled services. Yet it was all hollow. The public welfare, the public security of the Empire had not been advanced a step. Before the shouts had died away we were astonished by a secret treaty with Turkey, by which we had bound ourselves to the future defence of her Asiatic dominions, an obligation which we shall fulfil as much and as little as we fulfilled a similar obligation to Denmark. We had bound ourselves to secure a better administration of the Turkish provinces, an undertaking which we cannot fulfil; and we had acquired an addition to our Empire in Cyprus, a possession of which we can make no use. The country was surprised, and notparticularly pleased, but on the whole it was still proud and gratified, and if Disraeli had dissolved Parliament when he returned from Berlin there is little doubt what its verdict would then have been. But he waited, believing himself secure in his achievements, and Fortune, which had stood his friend so long, now turned upon him. The spirit of a great nation called into energy on a grand occasion is the noblest of human phenomena. The pseudo-national spirit of jingoism is the meanest and the most dangerous. A war had been lighted in Afghanistan as part of the Eastern policy. It was easier to kindle than to extinguish. Sir Bartle Frere in South Africa imagined that he too could have an Imperial policy. He went to war with the Kaffirs. He went to war with the Zulus, whom, if he had been wise, he would have helped and favoured as a check upon the ambition of the Boers. A British regiment was cut to pieces. The Zulus in expiation were shot down in thousands and their nationality extinguished. Frere’s policy was his own; Lord Beaconsfield was not responsible for it, and did not approve of it. Yet the war went on.
The Transvaal had been annexed against the will of the people. Disraeli had fallen before that measure had borne its fruits, but he lived to hear of Majuba Hill and the ignominious capitulation in which, in that part of the world also, jingoism came to its miserable end.
The grand chance had been given to English Conservatism, and had been lost in a too ambitious dream. Like drunkards recovering from a debauch and revolting at their own orgies, the constituencies once more recalled the Radicals to power with a fresh impulse to the revolutionary movement, and Disraeli may have reflected too late on the uselessness of embarking on ‘spirited policies,’ which thenext swing of the democratic pendulum may reduce to impotence.
DISRAELI AND CARLYLE
His administration was not useless. Unambitious home measures were passed for the comfort or benefit of the people, which may be remembered gratefully when the Berlin Conference is forgotten. His patronage, and especially his literary and art patronage, was generously and admirably exercised. John Leech had for twenty years made him ridiculous in the cartoons in ‘Punch.’ Leech had a pension which would have died with him. Disraeli continued it to his widow and his children. Most notable was his recognition of the duty of the country to bestow some public honour on Thomas Carlyle. For half a century Carlyle had worked his way in disregarded poverty. The wise throughout Europe had long acknowledged in him the most remarkable writer of his age. He had been admired for his genius and reverenced for his stern integrity; the German Empire had bestowed upon him its most distinguished decoration; but in England it is held that the position which an eminent man of letters makes for himself can receive no added lustre from the notice of the Government; and Carlyle had been left severely alone in his modest home at Chelsea under all the changes of Administration, while peerages and titles were scattered among the brewers and the City millionaires. Disraeli, who was a man of intellect as well as a politician, perceived the disgrace which would attach to all parties if such a man as this was allowed to pass away as one of the common herd. Carlyle, indeed, had never spoken of him except with contempt, but it was Disraeli’s special credit that while he never forgot a friend he never remembered a personal affront. He saw at once that no common pension or decoration at so late an hour could atone for the longneglect. In a letter as modest as it was dignified he implied that he did not offer Carlyle a peerage because a hereditary honour would be a mockery to a childless old man; but he did offer in the Queen’s name, and pressed him to accept, the Grand Cross of the Bath, a distinction never before conferred upon any English author, with a life income corresponding to such a rank. Carlyle in his poorest days would never have accepted a pension. Stars and ribands had no attraction for him at any time, and less than none when he had one foot in the grave. He declined, but he was sensible of the compliment, and was touched at the quarter from which it came.
‘Very proper of the Queen to offer it,’ said the conductor of a Chelsea omnibus to me, ‘and more proper of he to say that he would have nothing to do with it. ’Tisn’t they who can do honour to the likes of he.’ But Disraeli saved his country from the reproach of coming centuries, when Carlyle will stand among his contemporaries as Socrates stands among the Athenians, the one pre-eminently wise man to whom all the rest are as nothing.
Retirement from office—Dignity in retreat—Hughenden—Lord Beaconsfield as a landlord—Fondness for country life—‘Endymion’—Illness and death—Attempted estimate of Lord Beaconsfield—A great man? or not a great man?—Those only great who can forget themselves—Never completely an Englishman—Relatively great, not absolutely—Gulliver among Lilliputians—Signs in ‘Sybil’ of a higher purpose, but a purpose incapable of realisation—Simplicity and blamelessness in private life—Indifference to fortune—Integrity as a statesman and administrator.
‘Was man in der Jugend wünscht, davon hat man im Alter die Fülle’ (What one desires in one’s youth one has enough of in one’s age).
Disraeli had won it all, all that to his young ambition had seemed the only object for which it was worth while to live. Yet he had gained the slippery height only, perhaps, to form a truer estimate of the value of a personal triumph. It was his to hold but for a moment, and then he fell, too late in life to retrieve another defeat. When the shadows lengthen and the sun is going down, earthly greatness fades to tinsel, and nothing is any longer beautiful to look back upon but the disinterested actions, many or few, which are scattered over the chequered career. Disraeli, like many other distinguished men, had to pay the penalty of his character. A fool may have his vanity satisfied with garters and peerages; Disraeli must have been conscious of their emptiness.
FATE OF THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENT
When the result of the elections of 1880 was known he again accepted his fate, as Mr. Gladstone had done six years before, without waiting for the meeting of Parliament. He submitted with dignity, though with the fatal consciousness that at his age he could not hope to witness a reversal of the judgment upon him. He did not talk petulantly of retiring from politics. He took his place again as leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, and showed no signs of weakened power. But he had always been impatient of the details of business, and his chief pleasure was now to retire to Hughenden, with or without companions, most frequently alone. For a fortnight together he would remain there in solitude, wandering through the park or through the Bradenham woods, which in his youth had been the scene of so many ambitions or moody meditations. His trees, his peacocks, his swans, his lake and chalk stream were sadly associated with the memories of his married life. He was so fond of his trees that he directed in his will that none of them should be cut down. He was on pleasant terms with his tenants and labourers; he visited them in their cottages, and was specially kind to old people and to little children. The ‘policy of sewage,’ with which he had been taunted as a Minister, was his practice as a landlord. No dust-heaps, or cesspools, or choked drains, or damp floors were to be seen among the Hughenden tenements. To such things he looked with his own eyes, and he said he never was so happy as when left to himself in these occupations.
Of his reflections at this period some may be found hereafter in the papers which he bequeathed to Lord Rowton. No particular traces appear in the last literary work which in his final leisure he contrived to accomplish. He had left ‘Endymion’ half finished when he took office in 1874; hewent on with it when office had left him, perhaps because he had thought himself obliged to buy a house in London on retiring from Downing Street and wanted money.
There is nothing remarkable in ‘Endymion’ except the intellectual vivacity, which shows no abatement. It is in the style of his earlier novels, and has little of the serious thought which is so striking in ‘Sybil’ and ‘Lothair.’ There are the same pictures of London fashionable life and fashionable people, in the midst of them a struggling youth pushing his way in the great world, and lifted out of his difficulties, as he himself had been, by a marriage with a wealthy widow. As before many of the figures are portraits. Myra, the heroine, impatient, restless, ambitious, resolute to raise herself and her brother above the injuries of fortune, is perhaps a likeness of himself in a woman’s dress. But the calm mastery of modern life, the survey, wide as the world, of the forces working in English society, the mellow and impartial wisdom which raises ‘Lothair’ from an ephemeral novel into a work of enduring value, all this is absent. It is as if disappointment had again clouded his superior qualities and had brought back something of his original deficiencies. The most interesting feature in ‘Endymion’ is the exact photograph of the old manor house at Bradenham, and the description of the feelings with which a fallen and neglected statesman of once brilliant promise retired there into unwelcome poverty. Except for this the book might have been unwritten and nothing would have been lost of Disraeli’s fame. It throws no fresh light upon his own character. He wanted money and it brought him ten thousand pounds.
ILLNESS AND DEATH
The sand ran rapidly out. Lord Beaconsfield was in his place at the opening of the session of 1881. The effects ofthe return of the Liberal party were already visible in all parts of the Empire. He spoke with something of his old force on the state of things which was to be expected in Ireland. He spoke on India and foreign politics. He could not foresee the bombardment of the Alexandrian forts, the conquest of Egypt, to be followed by the disgrace of Khartoum. He escaped the mortification of the surrender to Russia on the Afghan frontier. But he lived to hear of the conclusion of the annexation of the Transvaal. He saw the enemies of England again at their work across St. George’s Channel, and a Government again in power whose rule was to purchase peace by concession. His own part was played out. He had not succeeded, and it was time for him to be gone. In the middle of March he had an attack of gout, which was aggravated by a cold. At first no danger was anticipated, but he grew worse day after day, and on the 19th of April Benjamin Disraeli had taken his last leave of a scene in which he had so long been so brilliant an actor. When an English statesman dies, complimentary funeral orations are spoken over him in Parliament as part of the ordinary course; but Disraeli had been so uncommon a man that the displays on this occasion had more in them than they often have of genuine sincerity. He had been so long among us that his name had become a household word. The whole nation, of all shades of politics, felt that a man was gone whose place could not be filled, who in a long and chequered career had not only won his honours fairly but deserved affectionate remembrance.
He was infinitely clever. In public or private he had never done a dishonourable action; he had disarmed hatred and never lost a personal friend. The greatest of his antagonists admitted that when he struck hardest he had not struck inmalice. A still higher praise belongs to himself alone that he never struck a small man.
The Abbey was offered, and a public funeral; and if honour there be in such interments he had an ample right to it. By his own desire he was buried at Hughenden, by the side of his wife and the romantic friend who had conceived so singular an attachment to him. There those three rest side by side, Disraeli and his faithful companion disguised as Earl and Viscountess, but thought of only by the present generation under their own familiar name, and the eccentric and passionate widow who had devoted her fortune to him. In life there had been a peculiar bond between these three. Disraeli had innumerable admirers, but there were not many to whom he trusted his inmost confidence. Gratitude was stronger in him even than ambition, and as to his wife and to Mrs. Willyams he owed the most, to them, perhaps, he was most completely attached. It was a strange union, but they had strange natures, and they lie fitly and well together—far away from the world, for which neither of them cared, in a quiet parish church in Buckinghamshire.
CONDITIONS OF HUMAN GREATNESS
A biography, however brief, must close with a general estimate. What estimate is to be formed of Disraeli? We have a standard by which to measure the bodily stature of a man; we have none by which to measure his character; neither need we at any time ask how great any man is, or whether great at all, but rather what he is. Those whom the world agrees to call great are those who have done or produced something of permanent value to humanity. We call Hipparchus great, or Newton, or Kepler, because we owe to them our knowledge of the motion of the earth and the stars. Poets and artists have been great men; philosophers have been great men. The mind of Socrates governs our minds at the present day. Founders of religion have been great men; reformers have been great men: we measure their worth by the work which they achieved. So in society and politics we call those great who have devoted their energies to some noble cause, or have influenced the course of things in some extraordinary way. But in every instance, whether in art, science, religion, or public life, there is an universal condition, that a man shall have forgotten himself in his work. If any fraction of his attention is given to the honours or rewards which success will bring him there will be a taint of weakness in what he does. He cannot produce a great poem, he cannot paint a great picture, he cannot discover secrets of science, because these achievements require a whole mind and not a divided mind. The prophet will be a prophet of half-truths, because the whole truth will not be popular. The statesman who has not purified himself of personal motives will never purify a disordered Constitution. Even kings and conquerors who are credited with nothing but ambition—the Alexanders and the Cæsars, the Cromwells and Napoleons—have been a cause in themselves, have been the representatives of some principle or idea. Their force, when they have succeeded, has been an impulse from within. They have aimed at power to impress their own personality outside them, but their operations are like the operations of the forces of nature, working from within outwards rather than towards an end of which they have been conscious. A man whose object is to gain something for himself often attains it, but when his personal life is over his work and his reputation perish along with him.
In this high sense of the word Lord Beaconsfieldcannot be called great, either as a man of letters or as a statesman. ‘Vivian Grey’ is nothing but a loud demand on his contemporaries to recognise how clever a man has appeared among them. In every one of his writings there is the same defect, except in ‘Sybil’ and in ‘Lothair.’ It is absent in ‘Sybil’ because he had been deeply and sincerely affected by what he had witnessed in the great towns in the North of England; it is absent in ‘Lothair’ because when he wrote that book his personal ambition had for the time been satisfied, and he could look round him with thesiccum lumenof his intellect. He had then reached the highest point of his political aspiration, and money he did not care for unless required for pressing necessities. It is clear from ‘Sybil’ that there had been a time when he could have taken up as a statesman, with all his heart, the cause of labour. He had suffered himself in the suffering and demoralisation which he had witnessed, and if the ‘young generation’ to whom he appealed would have gone along with him he might have led a nobler crusade than Cœur de Lion. But it was not in him to tread a thorny road with insufficient companionship. He had wished, but had not wished sufficiently, to undertake a doubtful enterprise. He was contented to leave things as he found them, instead of reconstructing society to make himself Prime Minister.
PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS
Thus it was that perhaps no public man in England ever rose so high and acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him. Not one of the great measures which he once insisted on did he carry or attempt to carry. The great industrial problems are still left to be solved by the workmen in their own unions. Ireland is still in the throes of disintegration. If the colonies have refused to be cast loose from us their continued allegiance is not due to any effort of his. From Berlin he brought back peace with honour, but if peace remains the honour was soon clouded. The concessions which he prided himself on having extorted are evaded or ignored, and the imperial spirit which he imagined that he had awakened sleeps in indifference. The voices which then shouted so loudly for him shout now for another, and of all those great achievements there remain only to the nation the Suez Canal shares and the possession of Cyprus, and to his Queen the gaudy title of Empress of India. What is there besides? Yet there is a relative greatness as well as an absolute greatness, and Lemuel Gulliver was a giant among the Lilliputians. Disraeli said of Peel that he was the greatest member of Parliament that there had ever been. He was himself thestrongestmember of Parliament in his own day, and it was Parliament which took him as its foremost man and made him what he was. No one fought more stoutly when there was fighting to be done; no one knew better when to yield, or how to encourage his followers. He was a master of debate. He had perfect command of his temper, and while he ran an adversary through the body he charmed even his enemies by the skill with which he did it. He made no lofty pretensions, and his aims were always perhaps something higher than he professed. If to raise himself to the summit of the eminence was what he most cared for, he had a genuine anxiety to serve his party, and in serving his party to serve his country; and possibly if among his other gifts he had inherited an English character he might have devoted himself more completely to great national questions; he might have even inscribed his name in the great roll of English worthies. But he was English only by adoption, and he never completely identified himself with the country which he ruled. At heart he was a Hebrew to the end, and of all his triumphs perhaps the most satisfying was the sense that a member of that despised race had made himself the master of the fleets and armies of the proudest of Christian nations.
But though Lord Beaconsfield was not all which he might have been he will be honourably and affectionately remembered. If he was ambitious his ambition was a noble one. It was for fame and not for fortune. To money he was always indifferent. He was even ostentatious in his neglect of his own interests. Though he left no debts behind him, in his life he was always embarrassed. He had no vices, and his habits were simple; but he was generous and careless, and his mind was occupied with other things. He had opportunities of enriching himself if he had been unprincipled enough to use them. There were times when he could set all the stock exchanges of Europe vibrating like electric wires in a thunderstorm. A secret word from him would have enabled speculating capitalists to realise millions, with no trace left how those millions were acquired or how disposed of. It is said that something of the kind was once hinted to him—once, but never again. Disraeli’s worst enemy never suspected him of avarice or dishonour. As a statesman there was none like him before, and will be none hereafter. His career was the result of a combination of a peculiar character with peculiar circumstances, which is not likely to recur. The aim with which he started in life was to distinguish himself above all his contemporaries, and wild as such an ambition must have appeared, he at least won the stake for which he played so bravely.