placed from their lower brethren.
He thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and
that he may best do his duty by making the inferior man happy and
contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds
is his by God's ordinance."

"And it is so."

"Hardly in the sense that I mean. But that is the great Conservative
lesson. That lesson seems to me to be hardly compatible with
continual improvement in the condition of the lower man. But with
the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of
the maintenance of those distances. I as a Duke am to be kept as far
apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the
man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars,--and that is to
go on for ever. There is much to be said for such a scheme. Let the
lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect,
and noble instincts, and it is possible that they should use their
powers so beneficently as to spread happiness over the earth. It is
one of the millenniums which the mind of man can conceive, and seems
to be that which the Conservative mind does conceive."

"But the other men who are not lords don't want that kind of
happiness."

"If such happiness were attainable it might be well to constrain
men to accept it. But the lords of this world are fallible men; and
though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those
others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units
to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek
to govern. We know that power does corrupt, and that we cannot
trust kings to have loving hearts, and clear intellects, and noble
instincts. Men as they come to think about it and to look forward,
and to look back, will not believe in such a millennium as that."

"Do they believe in any millennium?"

"I think they do after a fashion, and I think that I do myself. That
is my idea of Conservatism. The doctrine of Liberalism is, of course,
the reverse. The Liberal, if he have any fixed idea at all, must, I
think, have conceived the idea of lessening distances,--of bringing
the coachman and the duke nearer together,--nearer and nearer, till a
millennium shall be reached by--"

"By equality?" asked Phineas, eagerly interrupting the Prime
Minister, and showing his dissent by the tone of his voice.

"I did not use the word, which is open to many objections. In the
first place the mil