BOOKS.

DISRAELI: THIRD VOLUME.* THE late Mr. W. F. Monypenny wrote two volumes of Benjamin Disraeli's Life, and now Mr. G. E. Buckle has taken over the task. The narrative goes smoothly forward, and is not too long for the interest of the materials. It comprises the years 1846 to 1855. As Mr. Buckle truly says, the most important correspondence in the volume is that between Disraeli and his chief, the fourteenth Lord Derby.

The narrative opens with the period when Disraeli was in that close political relation with Lord George Bentinck which caused him to be nicknamed " Bentinck's Prime Minister." Lord John Manners and Lady Londonderry were already his intimate friends, to whom he made political and literary • The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, By William Playe'? Monypenny and George Earle Buckle. Vol. III., 1846-1255. With Portraits and Illustrations. London : John Murray. [12s. net.]

confessions. The former was his constant support, and the latter his admiration. His compliments to Lady Londonderry were of the characteristic flowery Disraelian form ; one feels that it would have been appropriate to write them on scented paper —he has no information " worthy of her delicate ear," she ought to be " Queen of Ireland," and so forth. In January, 1847, he took his place for the first time on the Front Bench in the House of Commons, a position he was to occupy, in or out of office, for thirty years. He admitted at this time in an election address that the Free Trade principle which Sir Robert Peel had brought into force must be given a fair trial. He remained, however, the lieutenant of Lord George Bentinck and the Protectionists.

His position was truly equivocal, for in his private correspond- ence he often used words which seem to us to show that be was much more of a Free Trader than a Protectionist. Mr.

Buckle condones Disraeli's excessive finesse, to call it by no harsher name, with an explanation which we shall mention later, and which seems to us unsatisfactory. The revelations as to the comparative dislike which Disraeli entertained for Protection, -while he continually did it lip service ; as to the disappointment of Derby at Disraeli's attitude ; and as to the consequent instability of the Protectionist Party make up the most valuable political information in the book. Protec- tion is a heavy load for any party to bear. This volume shows that it was more troublesome to Disraeli and Derby than any one had previously supposed. In 1847, then, it was Disraeli's business to be a Protectionist, while making the reservation (as indeed Lord George Bentinck himself did) that, since Peel had passed Free Trade with the weight of a Parliamentary majority, Constitutional custom required that the system should be tried before it was discarded. To the electors of Aylesbury he said

"Yon are in the position of a man who has made an improvi- dent marriage. You have become united to Free Trade, and nothing can divorce you except you can prove the charmer to be false. Wait., then, till that period has arrived ; when you find that you have been betrayed, then will be the time to seek a divorce from that pernicious union. You have become united to the false duenna, and you must take the consequences; and the con- sequence, I venture to predict, will be that the House of Commons, after a fair, full and ample trial of this great measure, will be driven to repeal it from absolute necessity, though at the ter- mination of much national suffering ; but that that suffering will be compensated for by the bitterness and the profundity of national penitence."

In these days he also suggested that fiscal expedients might serve an Imperial purpose. Thus to the people of Newport Pagnell he said

"They had heard much of the Customs Union of Germany, but when they looked to the numerous colonies over which the Queen of this country ruled, they saw Great Britain possessing a greater area than any other European Power except Russia, and they were tempted to ask why should not England have her Imperial Union, the produce of every clime coming in free which acknow- ledged her authority, and paying no tax to the public Exchequer."

But the influence of Lord George Bentinck had been removed for little more than three years when Disraeli (in 1852) wrote to Malmesbury : " These wretched colonies will all be inde- pendent, too, in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks."

We must leave the fiscal question for the moment, and observe that the opening of the third volume marks a distinct stage in Disraeli's career, quite apart from his political advancement. His mind was much occupied with the importance of race as a determining influence in human affairs. "All is race," as be used to say. And what more natural than that a man of Jewish birth, with all the abilities and qualities of his race, should use his own increasing political importance to issue a challenge on behalf of Israel An extraordinarily ingenious and arresting challenge it was.

He had left behind him the abortive enthusiasm for " Young England," and used his new strength and position to champion his own people, whose religion, indeed, he did not profess, but with whom he was otherwise united in thought and feeling. He saw himself, if we may put it so, as a high priest of the Great Asian Mystery, which had been mentioned

incidentally in the " Young England" novel Coningsby- every reader will remember Sidonia's eloquent harangue on Judaism—to which Tancred was wholly devoted, and which appeared again in a famous chapter in the Life of Lord George Bentinck. In a letter to Lady Londonderry Disraeli says that his hero Tancred has turned out a very troublesome character

—a confession which, remembering the theatrical artificiality of some of the culminating episodes of that remarkable story, we have no difficulty in believing. In 1847 Disraeli carried his championship into the House of Commons in a singular but brilliant speech which was too exotic for the taste of any part of the House. The occasion was, of course, the debate on the very proper proposal that Jewish disabilities should be removed. The burden of the speech was that Christianity was only completed Judaism ; that Christ was a Jew, that the Disciples were Jews, that the mould and cast of Christian literature were Jewish, and that conse- quently there could be no possible antagonism between Judaism and Christianity. At worst Judaism was only an undeveloped vision of Christianity. Historically this view was, of course, accurate in many respects, but the contention that there was no substantial difference between the morality of the Old and New Testaments was beyond the patience of his hearers—a rather intolerant and prejudiced audience, we must admit. Mr. Buckle insists on the courage which was required in Disraeli to take this unpopular course at a time when he had everything to lose in his career. But, without denying the courage, we may suggest that another motive, very natural if lower, may have been at work. In his close connexion with the Country Party Disraeli had, of course, become aware of the prejudice against him because of his birth—a preposterous and deplorable prejudice, but none the less real and none the less galling for that. What an oppor- tunity for a proud and smarting intellect to hit back and instruct these purblind and hidebound squires in the majesty of the Great Asian Mystery which they were too obtuse to understand!

The last days of Lord George Bentinck were most un- deservedly darkened by the opposition be met with in his generous support of the Jews. After his disappearance the difficulty was to find a successor to him in the leadership. Disraeli was available, but the mass of the Protectionist Party could hardly be persuaded to think of him as their chief. What should have been a powerful Opposition, indeed, had been rent asunder, and had shed some of its chief ornaments, owing to the inopportune insistence on Protection, just as more than fifty years later a powerful party was wrecked by the adoption of Tariff Reform. The best that could be accom- plished for Disraeli by his friends was that he should be appointed one of a triumvirate of leaders, the other two being Lord Granby and J. C. Berries. The inevitable result of this arrangement quickly followed; Disraeli devoured his partners and became supreme by might of ability, The letter in which Derby, then Lord Stanley, communicated to Disraeli, while the choice of a leader was still to make, the fact that he would not be acceptable to the majority of the party, seems to us to he filled with good sense and courtesy. Mr. Buckle, however, agrees with Greville (who apparently bad seen or heard of the contents of the letter) that it was "a `flummery' letter." The- objection that Disraeli would not have the support of the whole party was surely an imperative objection, and Disraeli in his answer himself admitted it to be so.

We must now return to the question of Free Trade and Protection, since Disraeli was at last in a position to lead opinion. In 1849 Stanley complained that Disraeli was dis- couraging Protectionists. Disraeli's response was a speech in which, in Mr. Buckle's words, he declared his continued adherence "in principle to the general policy of Protection to agriculture." But the next year we find him saying to a friend who had remarked that Protection was dead, "Protection is not only dead but damned." In 1852 Disraeli became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Cabinet of Lord Derby. He at once pleased the Free Traders by renewing the Income Tax. In August, 1852, be wrote to Malmesbury : " We ought now to be for as complete Free Trade as we can obtain, and let the English farmer, and the English landlord

too, buy the best and the cheapest silks for their wives and daughters." Mr. Buckle admits that it was "certainly Disraeli's intention" to hoist what Lord John Russell called the "broad banner of Free Trade." Yet the agricultural interest which supported Disraeli unquestionably believed that he had promised it Protection and meant to redeem that promise. At length Disraeli's equivocal conduct gave bin opponents a fair opportunity to taunt him in the House with his inconsistency. Mr. Buckle's comment is :—

" What justification was there for these taunts, what truth in these charges P Was Disraeli a Free Trader at heart who pre- tended for awhile to be a Protectionist for his own selfish ends; er, on another theory, a Protectionist throughout who only sandered lip-service to Free Trade at the last to gain, or retain, aloe; or—a third discreditable alternative—an absolutely indif- ferent person who adopted either cause as his self-interest dictated ? Was his conduct in 1853 comparable to that of Peel in 1845-46, and equally, or indeed much more culpable? Did he betray either his principles or his party ? In the light shed by Di:smelt's private papers en his public actions, no fair-minded person can adopt any of the crude theories for which party animus and Free Trade bigotry gained at one time widespread acceptance. It is evident that such ambiguities as appear in Disraeli's conduct flaring the six years between 1846 and 1852 are due to the struggle within the party between him and the high Protectionists, some- thing of which was suspected but little definitely known before now. Disraeli took throughout his political life a middle course en the commercial question, and was never a fanatic for either Protection or Free Trade ; but he definitely considered moderate Protection the better course for England, especially with a view be *securing to the land what he regarded as its duo influence in the Constitution. That opinion he never altered, though he did not think that the return to any form of Protection was prac- ticable during his lifetime. . . . Can anyone familiar with what is practicable in polities maintain that it was Disraeli's duty in opposition to proclaim upon the housetops in 1849 that Protection must be abandoned—not on principle, but because it could not be ebtained—when the result must have been a further split in the party which he was so laboriously bringing together?"

Our own conclusion Is that Disraeli believed that the whole pendency of the country was in the contrary direction to Protection ("Protection is not only dead but damned"), but that be was unequal to what might be called the noble humiliation of eating his former words. For another thing renunciation would have meant an expensive split with the powerful Derby, who was convinced that the country was tired of Free Trade and disappointed with it.

Finally, we may mention some stray points. One thing that stands out rather clearly is what seems to be the inaccuracy of Disraeli. For instance, in a memorandum Britten in the "sixties" he says of his later relations with Peel :—

"He sat almost next to me during the last years of his Par- Hamentary life. . . . I had recourse to many little arts to spare Isis feelings, and to get fellows to sit between us and all that: but he never assisted me in these endeavours; quite the reverse, and I have since more than once suspected, that he meant to make our respective positions in the House a means of gradually bringing about a reconciliation. In one of my great • Protectionist' motions, as they were called, though I carefully avoided advo- cating Protection in them, which he was obliged to oppose, he book elaborate pains to assure the House, looking at me the whole time, that he bore no enmity to any member on account of former struggles and differences of opinion. His language was so cordial and his manner so marked, that it was much cheered by his own friends and all the men of sense of [our] own party : as indicating *ultimate fusion on honourable terms. There were other traits and circumstances I could mention, and, as Gladstone said, he died cheering me."

As Mr. Buckle points out, no corroboration of this statement .tan be found. In 1897 Mr. Gladstone wrote of the Don Pacifico debate that Peel tried not only to avoid speaking on the same night as Disraeli, but even to avoid being anywhere in his neighbourhood. Another curious statement which is opposed to all other evidence is contained in a letter from Disraeli to Lady Londonderry in 1854. He says that he had received from " the highest quarter" (the Queen, of course) an intimation that he was to be the head of the next Tory Government. Mr. Buckle finds it "almost incredible" that there should have been any thought of superseding Derby. Indeed, when the next Tory Government was being formed the Queen displayed no anxiety to have Disraeli in charge of it. Of course the Queen's feeling about Disraeli entirely changed later, but we are talking now of 1855. Some benevolent readers may perceive or invent explanations favourable to Disraeli, but we confess that for ourselves we cannot forget the fact that he twice publicly denied that be had ever asked Peel for office, though Mr. Monypenny published the abject letter in which Disraeli begged Peel to save him from humiliation by including him in the Government. If Disraeli was inaccurate in that large matter, he was no doubt inaccurate in many others of- less account, and no feats of explaining away are necessary, or indeed possible. Another curious event treated in this volume is the plagiarism of Thiera in Disraeli's funeral oration on Wellington. An appendix gives the text of a suggestion which Bulwer Lytton offered to Disraeli for getting himself out of the scrape—a suggestion, which leaves one with a deeper impression of Bulwer Lytton's insincerity than of his generous anxiety to help a friend. If Disraeli's own explanation of the plagiarism was not very good, it was much better than Bulwer Lytton's.

We must not end, however, without expressly admitting that Disraeli's inaccuracy was an incident in a wonderful sweep of vision which indeed made him a whale among minnows. No wonder that he swallowed Berries and Granby. His keen eye ranged from horizon to horizon, while other men saw little beyond their noses: A very good example of his prophetic insight was the promptness with which he swooped on to the ultimate meaning of Prussia's Danish policy. He predicted that it meant a challenge to British naval power, and that was more than sixty years ago.