measures--strong and large measures--which Mr.
Gladstone's Government brought forward.

Before long the tide turned. The Dissenters resented the Education Act
of 1870. A reaction in favour of Conservatism set in, which grew so
fast that, in 1874, the general election gave, for the first time
since 1846, a decided Conservative majority. Mr. Disraeli became again
Prime Minister, and now a Prime Minister no longer on sufferance, but
with the absolute command of a dominant party, rising so much above
the rest of the Cabinet as to appear the sole author of its policy. In
1876, feeling the weight of age, he transferred himself to the House
of Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield. The policy he followed (from 1876
till 1880) in the troubles which arose in the Turkish East out of the
insurrection in Herzegovina and the massacres in Bulgaria, as well as
that subsequently pursued in Afghanistan and in South Africa, while it
received the enthusiastic approval of the soldiers, the stockbrokers,
and the richer classes generally, raised no less vehement opposition
in other sections of the nation, and especially in those two which,
when heartily united and excited, have usually been masters of
England--the Protestant Nonconformists and the upper part of the
working class. An election fought with unusual heat left him in so
decided a minority that he resigned office in April 1880, without
waiting for an adverse vote in Parliament. When the result had become
clear he observed, "They," meaning his friends, "will come in again,
but I shall not." A year later he died.

Here is a wonderful career, not less wonderful to those who live in
the midst of English politics and society than it appears to observers
in other countries. A man with few external advantages, not even that
of education at a university, where useful friendships are formed,
with grave positive disadvantages in his Jewish extraction and the
vagaries of his first years of public life, presses forward, step by
step, through slights and disappointments which retard but never
dishearten him, assumes as of right the leadership of a party--the
aristocratic party, the party in those days peculiarly suspicious of
new men and poor men,--wins a reputation for sagacity which makes his
early errors forgotten, becomes in old age the favourite of a court,
the master of a great country, one of the three or four arbiters of
Europe. There is here more than one problem to solve, or, at least, a
pr