e subject. I had long been aware that there was something rotten in
the core of our social system. I had seen that while immense fortunes
were accumulating, while wealth was increasing to a superabundance, and
while Great Britain was cited throughout Europe as the most prosperous
nation in the world, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were
steeped in the most abject poverty and gradually sinking into the
deepest degradation." The generation of 1912 cannot dub as a charlatan
the man who could speak thus in 1844. For in truth, more especially
during the last five years, we have been suffering from a failure to
recognise betimes the truth of this foreseeing statesman's admonition.
Having for years neglected social reform, we have recently tried to make
up for lost time by the hurried adoption of a number of measures, often
faulty in principle and ill-considered in detail, which seek to obtain
by frenzied haste those advantages which can only be secured by the
strenuous and persistent application of sound principles embodied in
deliberate and well-conceived legislative enactments.

Disraeli, therefore, saw the rock ahead, but how did he endeavour to
steer the ship clear of the rock? It is in dealing with this aspect of
the case that the view of the statesman dwindles away and is supplanted
by that of the self-seeking party manager. His fundamental idea was that
"we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organisation of our
institutions." The manner in which he proposed to reorganise our
institutions was practically to render the middle classes politically
powerless. His scheme, constituting the germ which, at a later period,
blossomed into the Tory democracy, was developed as early as 1840 in a
letter addressed to Mr. Charles Attwood, who was at that time a popular
leader. "I entirely agree with you," he said, "that an union between the
Conservative Party and the Radical masses offers the only means by which
we can preserve the Empire. Their interests are identical; united they
form the nation; and their division has only permitted a miserable
minority, under the specious name of the People, to assail all right of
property and person."

Mr. Monypenny, if I understand rightly, is generally in sympathy with
Disraeli's project, and appears to think that it might have been
practicable to carry it into effect. He condemns Peel's counter-idea of
substituting a middle-class Toryism for that which then existed a