teness, should have achieved those
results which had so long and utterly eluded the desires of the richest
and most powerful community in the world?

It is the fashion of the present age to underrate the influence of
individual character. For myself, I have ever rejected this consolation
of mediocrity. I believe that everything that is great has been
accomplished by great men. It is not what witnessed at Munich, or know
of its sovereign, that should make me doubt the truth of my conviction.
Munich is the creation of its king, and Louis of Bavaria is not only a
king but a poet. A poet on a throne has realised his dreams.

THE SPIRIT OF WHIGGISM

_[In the following pages Lord Beaconsfield expounds that theory of the
English Constitution which he had previously set forth in his pamphlet
'A Vindication of the English Constitution in a Letter to a Noble and
Learned Lord.' The same theory is expounded in another way in the three
great novels, 'Coningsby,' 'Sybil,' and 'Tancred.' His contemporaries
never seem to have understood it, while his assailants of a later date
appear to have written and spoken concerning him in absolute ignorance
of his real political creed. The concluding paragraph of the tract
ought, in the minds of all candid men, to disperse at once and forever
the innumerable calumnies levelled at Lord Beaconsfield during and since
the Reform struggle of 1859-1867.]_

CHAPTER I.

_Object of the Whigs_

ENGLAND has become great by her institutions. Her hereditary Crown has
in a great degree insured us from the distracting evils of a contested
succession; her Peerage, interested, from the vast property and the
national honours of its members, in the good government of the country,
has offered a compact bulwark against the temporary violence of popular
passion; her House of Commons, representing the conflicting sentiments
of an estate of the realm not less privileged than that of the Peers,
though far more numerous, has enlisted the great mass of the lesser
proprietors of the country in favour of a political system which offers
them a constitutional means of defence and a legitimate method of
redress; her Ecclesiastical Establishment, preserved by its munificent
endowment from the fatal necessity of pandering to the erratic fancies
of its communicants, has maintained the sacred cause of learning and
religion, and preserved orthodoxy while it secured toleration; her law
of primogeniture has sup