THE DUKES OF BEACONSFIELD AND LEEDS.
THE Berlin correspondent of the Standard telegraphs on Wednesday a story of the Congress which is worth more than a passing note. On the arrival of Lord Beacons- field at the " Kaiserhof," he was presented, on behalf of the Crown Princess, with a bouquet of flowers, in the centre of which was a strawberry-plant crowned with a single large strawberry. German Courts do not pay honours of this kind without consideration, the Crown Princess is but just returned from London, and if the story is true, it can have but one signification,—that Lord Beaconsfield, if he re- turns successful from the Congress, having made a peace and secured some kind of scenic triumph, is to be made a Duke. The statement, which has been whispered about for some time, is not improbable in itself, for the Court has shown a disposition to honour the Premier ; the public, whether favourable or hostile to his policy, will not care what title he takes, thinking justly that the man who made an Empress may well make a Duke ; and he himself has of late years displayed a thirst for social precedence and distinctions. The Privy Seal gave him for a time ducal precedence, and he will enjoy the supersession of the class which, of all others, he scorns with the deepest contempt, the English aristocracy,— the barbarians "who did not conquer the land, and do not defend it," who " know but one language, and never open a book." There will be a certain loneliness in the position, too. In the history of England since the Revolution the Duke of Beaconsfield will be, with one exception, the only man who has ever risen by Parliamentary talents alone from the position of a Commoner to the highest rank of the Peerage. Charles Montagu, perhaps the greatest of Par- liamentary figures before Pitt, only died an Earl, though his descendants are Dukes of Manchester. The English Dukes, as a body, are either the descendants of great feudal nobles, like the Dukes of Norfolk and Northumberland ; or of Kings' mistresses, like the Dukes of St. Albans, Richmond, and Grafton ; or of great soldiers, like the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington. The Duke of Portland, who seems to be an exception, descends from the favourite of a King, though a most worthy one, rather than from an English statesman. The other man is Sir Thomas Osborne, the Tory Yorkshire squire who, possessing scarcely any special ability save that of Mr. Disraeli, the ability for managing Parliaments, rose under Charles IL, James II., and William to be Earl of Danby he skipped, like Lord Beaconsfield, two steps of the ladder—Marquis of Caermarthen, and Duke of Leeds. It is of him that Macaulay wrote, nearly forty years ago, the brilliant sentences in which he described the modern road to the highest places in the State :- "From the time of Charles IL down to our own days a different species of talent, Parliamentary talent, has been the most valuable of all the qualifications of an English states- man. It has stood in the place of all other acquirements. It has covered ignorance, weakness, rashness, the most fatal maladministration. A great negotiator is nothing when com- pared with a great debater ; and a Minister who can make a successful speech need trouble himself little about an unsuc- cessful expedition. This is the talent which has made judges without law, and diplomatists without French, which has sent to the Admiralty men who did not know the stern of a ship from her bowsprit, and to the India Board men who did not know the difference between a rupee and a pagoda, which made a foreign secretary of Mr. Pitt, who as George H. said, had never opened Vattel, and which was very near making a Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division. This was the sort of talent which raised Clifford from obscurity to the head of affairs. To this talent Osborne, by birth a simple country gentleman, owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom." The White Staff is in commission, but Lord Beaconsfield has more ascendancy in his Ministry than any Lord Treasurer• over had, and occupies quite as high a place in the English bier. archy of politics, while no man has ever risen so exclusively by Parliamentary management. Although his birth is unduly depreciated, for he has made of it a weapon with which to disarm opponents, he was less well-born than Osborne ; he had not at first, as Osborne had, the favour of a Sovereign, and he was not supported as Osborne was by the steady alle- giance of his party. The Tories who now deify him as the heaven-born Minister, for years treated him as the mere agent of Lord Derby, and once passed him over in the most discreditable manner in favour of Lord George Bentinek,—a man who, but for his birth, would have been known only as a racing noble, of little education, though of fine original parts. It was through his value to his party in managing Members that Lord Beaconsfield, like Lord Danby, really rose ; and the first lesson of the visible, as of the for- gotten career, is that all is open to the man who can master the House of Commons. No matter what the origin, or the career, or the policy, the man who can do that may in this country die a Duke.
The resemblance between the characters of the two men, though not close, is closer than at first sight appears. Denby was corrupt, and sought for money by unfair means, as well as by means that his age approved, and no one has ever attributed corruption, or indeed any care about pecuniary position, to Lord Beaconsfield, while he himself has never restrained his scorn for " men acred up to their lips, consolled up to their chins." Both, however, hungered for honours and station, both con- sidered scruples evidences of weakness as well as of virtue, and both understood well the desire of Englishmen for a great position among the nations. Both, too, sought and found success through a popular foreign policy, and both relied greatly on the personal favour they obtained from the occupants of the Throne. And both have shown, though in very different ways, that they possessed one key to the art of popular govern- ment, the perception where lay power which could be used. Macaulay says of Danby :—" He saw that the true policy of the Crown was to ally itself, not with the feeble, the hated, the down-trodden Catholics, but with the powerful, the wealthy, the popular, the dominant Church of England ; to trust for aid, not to a foreign Prince whose name was hate- ful to the British nation, and whose succours could be obtained only on terms of vassalage, but to the old Cavalier party, to the landed gentry, the clergy, and the Universities. By rallying round the Throne the whole strength of the Royalists and High-Churchmen, and by using without stint all the re- sources of corruption, he flattered himself that he could manage the Parliament." Had Danby lived in our day, he would have seen with Mr. Disraeli that if he could but please " the monarch and the multitude," and attract the gentry, the Universities, and the clergy, he might reign in defiance of the intelligent, and with- out regard to the distrust of thegreat middle-class. Both men, too, enjoyed the incurable aversion of the Whigs, and felt to- wards them the almost personal hatred which that great party has always had the demerit of inspiring in men at once capable and ambitions of honour. It is not probable that the careers of the two men will have a similar termination. The Duke of Leeds retired a broken man, convicted of taking bribes and crushed by public obloquy, but he founded a family still among the greatest in the Three Kingdoms. The Duke of Beaconsfield will probably retire amid popular applause, and certainly without any accusation of bribery, to pass away, leaving nothing but a name in the land, and a name which will hereafter, if we judge'his policy aright, chiefly attract the student who is curious to know and to comprehend unaccountable careers.
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