and even Bentinck owes it mainly to Disraeli that his memory has survived. Herries and Bankes were the only men in the whole company who had enjoyed the experience of office. For the rest, the Protectionists depended upon Thomas Baring, Henley, Inglis and the brothers Manners. Since the fall of Bolingbroke the Tory party had never, probably, been so destitute. It needed both philosophy and leadership-to know itself and to marshal its forces. The hour was pregnant with opportunity-one of those rare occasions, such as promises to occur at the close of the present war-when parties are ripe for reshaping, and insight and imagination reap a reward too often denied them. So far, at least, Disraeli had everything to his advantage. But, if there was a fair field, there was far from being no favour. The gentlemen of England-and Disraeli made it plain that the leadership of gentlemen was at the core of his political system *—neither thought him a gentleman nor desired him for a leader. In the months which succeeded the resignation of Bentinck he was evidently a great embarrassment. Stanley (as Derby still was then) felt it to be equally impossible to offer him the leadership in the Commons or to offer it to another; and an attempt to induce him to serve under a figure-head met with a firm refusal. He knew his market value and was resolved to get the proper price. A veil was eventually thrown over the unpalatable fact. The leadership in the Commons was put in commission, and Disraeli, Granby, and Herries were formed into a triumvirate; but, as Aberdeen justly observed, there was no doubt who would play the part of First Consul. And, indeed, in about as many weeks as Napoleon took years Disraeli had shaken off his colleagues.

Thenceforward there were only three characters that counted for anything in the Tory combination-the two Stanleys, father and son, and Disraeli himself; and his relations with the two men form not the least interesting nor the least important part of Mr Buckle's story. Towards the elder Stanley-that same Stanley whom reverential politicians styled 'the Rupert of Debate' and irreverent ones the Jockey,' and whose behaviour in the

*The proper leaders of the people are the gentlemen of England.'

senate-house and on the racecourse gave him as good a title to the one appellation as to the other-he displayed an unswerving fidelity, the more admirable that it was more than once severely tried. Towards the younger, a son whose opinions were as much more liberal as his character was less resolute than his father's, he played the part both of philosopher and friend. All the inner history of his rise to power lies behind that long effort of consummate tact. The friendship of the Stanleys was vital to his fortunes, while he lived down the long distrust of the Court, of the Party, and of the Public. And those who would understand the prolongation of the cabinet-crisis of 1878, when the Cranborne of 1867 took the place at the Foreign Office of the Edward Stanley of 1847, will need to bear in mind all the elements of affection, antipathy, and old association involved.

In Disraeli's immediate task of party reconstruction it was Stanley who was the drag upon, Edward Stanley who was the support of, his endeavours. The younger men in the combination were naturally the quicker to realise what was practicable and what was out of date in the traditions of the party. It was just over three years after the fall of Peel that Disraeli decided, as one of his critics phrased it, to abandon the narrow defile of Protection and give battle on the open plain of Reciprocity. A Protectionist agitation was then on foot; and Disraeli met it with frank opposition.

'In this county,' he wrote to the leader of the movement, 'which has always been foremost in its zeal for the old opinions, five men could not be got together by a vague talk of recurrence to abrogated laws; and no farmer will stir, unless you hold out to him some practical object of probable attainment.'

Stanley's remonstrance did not tarry:

Our doctrine has been, and my doctrine continues to be, that the change in our financial system has been productive of a great portion of the ruin which we see, and will be productive of more, if persevered in; and that, in order to restore prosperity, we must retrace our steps and recur to a sounder position of finance' (iii, 224).

*The text (iii, 222) has 'country'-almost certainly a misprint.

Such were the opinions deeply ingrained and stubbornly insisted upon, which Disraeli, aided by the hard logic of events, ultimately contrived to modify. It says much for his discretion, that so early as 1852 Derby, as by that time he had become, should have assured the Queen, who had little affection at that stage of his career for one of her favourite Prime Ministers, that Mr Disraeli has acted very straightforwardly to him as long as they had had anything to do with each other.' An unmistakable symptom, however, of the delicacy and difficulty which Disraeli at this time experienced in his relations with his chief is no doubt to be detected, as Mr Buckle acutely points out, in the obvious insufficiency of the description of and allusion to Derby in the 'Life of Lord George Bentinck,' which was published at the end of December 1851.

There is no space to tell at length how Disraeli, having brought his party through the mountain passes of Protection to the plains of Reciprocity, led them on to the shore, and launched the Tory ship at last on the waters of Free Trade. But no one who follows the detail of his career at this period can doubt his possession of that which Pitt reckoned the greatest of all possessions in a statesman—an inexhaustible, untiring patience. Again and again Derby's hesitation let slip the prizes that Disraeli's skill had brought within their grasp. It was so in 1851, when a repudiation of Protection would have recalled the Peelites and made a Conservative Administration a practical possibility. It was so in the election of 1852, when Derby's acceptance of Free Trade, delayed overlong, sent the party to the polls with divided counsels and returned them to office without sufficient numbers. It was so, once again, when in the crisis of the Crimean War, Derby, making through want of courage the great refusal, declined to form an administration-a task which Palmerston, despite Disraeli's sententious observation of four years earlier that 'there was a Palmerston,' triumphantly achieved, to the virtual destruction of Conservative prospects, as Mr Buckle points out, for something like a decade. Nothing can excuse this last mistake; but, as regards the two others, Derby's insistence on taking the verdict of the electorate before the Party finally laid aside the practice, though not, as

he and Disraeli were careful to emphasise, the theory of Protection, must be recognised as a perfect application of the principle which Disraeli had laboured in reference to Peel. Nemesis, as usual, had shown herself to be no slumbering laggard, but had struck home with speed and accuracy.

In the latter days of the Crimean War, Disraeli had the courage to champion, in the journal he had started under the title of 'The Press,' that most difficult of all causes to advocate at the right hour and in the proper spirit--the cause of peace. The words he wrote, or at least inspired, sound so strangely to-day that we may pause a moment to read and reflect:

'The difference between the policy which "The Press" has advocated, and that proclaimed by some speakers and writers professing to represent Conservative sentiments, amounts to this-that we believe a solid and satisfactory peace may now be effected by treaty with Russia, while they believe it can only be effected by the annihilation of her power. . . . They have no faith in those principles of policy and those mutual guarantees and engagements upon which the division of European power and the integrity of the boundary lines of States depend. A treaty is with them but a bit of paper, a seal but a morsel of wax. We believe, on the contrary, that it is those principles and guarantees which preserve the peace of the world . . . that the progress of civilisation is towards a more solemn recognition and sacred maintenance of treaties; and that, as they extend wider, . . . there is less probability that they will be invaded, and stronger assurance that the State which attempts to violate them will be promptly restrained.'

Alas! for human foresight and human optimism! Alas! for those who would have annihilated Russia, for those who had faith in the maintenance of the Black Sea Clauses, and for those, too, like Disraeli, who dreamed that aggressive states could be promptly restrained. For men of all shades of opinion, for the bellicose as well as for the peaceable, the passage gives food for thought.

At the elections of 1852 Disraeli achieved the object of his long endeavours. Derby surrendered to the inevitable; the millstone was unslung; and the Conservatives raced free of the burden of Protection. Yet

still Fortune mocked him. Palmerston, that 'gay old Tory' in Liberal guise, had stepped upon the bridge and, as the ship of state glided over the last placid waters of a constitution which Russell thirty years before had deemed to be finality itself, and which Lecky in the last years of his life still considered the soundest we ever had, it was, by a provoking irony, a progressive hand that held the wheel and a progressive crew that manned the vessel. There was only one course left open to ambition, and Disraeli took it with his customary courage and his customary absence of scruple. Beyond all doubt it was the elections of 1857, which installed Palmerston in power with a substantial majority as the typical embodiment of stable mid-Victorian England, that first turned Disraeli's thoughts in the direction of electoral reformin the direction of Niagara and the rapids. There was not present in his mind any question of better men or better measures. It was not that Palmerston's personality or Palmerston's opinions excited distrust. Derby and Disraeli had sought him as a colleague in 1852 and 1855, and would have been only too glad to have got him. It was simply that Disraeli was taking the shortest way to get back into power. His letter to Derby scarcely veils the truth behind the perfunctory patriotism which it includes:

'Consider,' he writes to Derby, whether a reform, in such a spirit, would not be extremely beneficial to the Conservative party. . . . Our party is now a corpse. A bold and decided course might not only put us on our legs, but greatly help the country and serve the State' (iv, 79).

Derby's answer is the answer of an honest patriota frank recognition that Palmerston's opinions sufficiently represented those of the Conservative party and that Palmerston's policy was therefore deserving of their support. Mr Buckle, however, characteristically dismisses Derby's conduct with faint praise. He cannot, he tells us, deny that there was good sense in Derby's reasoning, yet he is half indignant at the blow administered to the adventurer.

'Derby,' he remarks, thus damped down, as on so many previous and so many subsequent occasions, his lieutenant's