continent and in the East, he found himself in London, as the "Life," by Mr. Monypenny, states, " politically isolated." This was in the year after the passage of the great Reform Bill. If he had no political connections, Disraeli had at least his literary reputation. He had already written "Vivian Grey" and "Contarini Fleming." Mrs. Norton, Lady Dufferin's sister, invited him to her parties: he "found admission to a Society which, if not the highest, stood in close relationship to the highest -a curious blend of literature, fashion, politics and bohemianism." Perhaps high society would have taken to him more readily if he had looked less fantastic. Lady Dufferin's description of him at this time is well-known: he appeared with " a black velvet coat lined with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace ruffles, falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black ringlets rippling down upon his shoulders." In 1837 he entered the House of Commons "at last." The connection between politics and society was very close at that time: an entry in his "Journal " in 1837 shows this :

Returned to London on the first of May; entered much into Society invited by Lord Francis Egerton personally to a magnificent entertainment which I attended-Sir J. Tyrrell, Q. Dick, Lord Walpole, Exmouth, Fector, Grimston. Distinguished myself very much in the election of Burdett for Westminster; the success mainly attributable to myself: proposed and organized the youth of the Carlton, including all the nobility, fashion and influence of our party, to canvas-Lord Forester and his brother, Codrington, H. Baring, Pigot, Sir H. Campbell, etc., etc.

Disraeli aspired to be something more than a mere member of Parliament, received into high political and social circles. His vaulting ambition, although for years it seemed fantastic, met with the approval of several of the Tory chiefs outside the following of Sir Robert Peel. Lord George Bentinck, indeed, marked him out as the future leader of the Conservative party :

Lord Henry Bentinck told a friend in later years that his brother George used to complain that he had found for the Tory party a marvellous man as leader, whom they would not accept just because he was not a country gentleman. So the three brothers, Lord Titchfield, Lord George and Lord Henry, determined to make him one ; and the Bentinck family found the money to buy Hughenden.

*"Life of Disraeli," chap. VI, p. 150.

Thus Disraeli, already member of Parliament, with a good town-house in Grosvenor Gate, acquired through his marriage with Mrs. Wyndham Lewis, now became lord of a manor among the beech-clad slopes of the Chilterns, and could regard himself at last as an integral part of high society. He could be a social leader without being a peer; and in any case he could not, without sacrificing his political ambitions, enter the House of Lords. But his wife might be made a peeress in her own right. So in 1868 he made a request through General Grey, the Queen's Private Secretary, that this might be done. General Grey thought the proposal ridiculous, but the Queen consented; so Mrs. Disraeli became Viscountess Beaconsfield. Her significance in Disraeli's career is well touched off in Mr. D. L. Murray's brightly written "Life."

"In England" (wrote Disraeli in " Vivian Grey ")," personal distinction is the only passport to the society of the great. Whether this distinction arise from fortune, family, or talent is immaterial; but certain it is, to enter into high society a man must either have blood, a million, or a genius." Perhaps the word “genius "is too strong talent without genius would take a man into high society. From his boyhood, Disraeli had, in a perhaps rather desultory fashion, devoted himself to " a branch of study certainly the most delightful in the world; but, for a boy, as certainly the most perilous, the study of politics"; and from the first he connected it with high social life.

If

Yet not with high social life only, but with all social life. "Vivian Grey" and, still more," Coningsby " are filled with dukes and marquises, with spacious halls and drawing-rooms, banquets and footmen in plush, "Sybil " goes to the realities of life. Its full title is "Sybil, or the Two Nations," and if it deals with noble castles and town-mansions, it also deals, as fully and as lovingly, with cottages and factories; indeed, it might almost be said that Sybil " discovered to the reading public as a whole the existence and the misery of "slums." Disraeli's idea of Society was not that of a rich and heartless class, wrapped up in their own pleasures and saying," after us the deluge "; it was of a class with duties to perform and a real community of interest with all the rest. All privileges must be absorbed in the privileges of the people for the multitudes

had long ceased to distinguish between the two parties who then and now contend for power. And they were right. Between the noble

lord who goes out, and the right honourable gentleman who comes in, where is the distinctive principle? A shadowy difference may be simulated in opposition, to serve a cry and stimulate the hustings; but the mask is not worn, even in Downing Street; and the conscientious Conservative seeks, in the pigeon-holes of a Whig bureau, for the measures against which for ten years he has been sanctioning, by the speaking silence of an approving nod, a general wail of frenzied alarm.*

The natural leader of Society was and is the monarch. Disraeli looked to the Crown to restore the harmony of the people :

In the selfish strife of factions, two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England, the Monarch and the multitude; as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared, till at length the sceptre has become a pageant, and its subject has degenerated again into a serf. . . . That we may live to see England once more possess a free Monarchy, and a privileged and prosperous People, is my prayer; that these great consequences can only be brought about by the energy and devotion of our Youth is my persuasion. We live in an age when to be young and indifferent can no longer be synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity."†

The letters of Queen Victoria show how the sovereignexperienced, hard-working, calm-could and did exercise much influence. The queen was of opinion that the people who compose high society must learn to work hard, too: "The upper classes and aristocracy" (she notes in her " Journal,” on July 24, 1867) "must buckle to,' or they will deservedly suffer. The lower classes are becoming so well educated that they will push on." This was written shortly before the great extension of the franchise brought about by the second Reform Bill, and before the Education Act of 1870. When Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1874, with an ample and secure Conservative majority in the House of Commons, an opportunity at last came for the principles and ideas of" Sybil " to be put into practice. The Crown and Society worked harmoniously with the magnetic Prime Minister in a programme of vigorous social reform.

With the passage of the second Reform Bill, whatever borough influence had been left to members of society by the first Reform Act was lost. In his interesting Romanes lecture on "The TwoParty System in English Political History," Mr. G. M. Trevelyan

asks how had parties, especially the Tory party, been kept together during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? It was probably the borough-interest of the great families which was the cement of parties. Mr. Trevelyan tells a story to show the continuity of party tradition, attached to the name of a great family, in a borough of the Home Counties:

In the reign of William III the future Lord Chancellor Cowper was the Whig member for Hertford, and he had a brother named Spencer Cowper, a young barrister, and, like the rest of his family, an active Whig. Now, this Spencer Cowper was, in 1699, accused of having murdered a Quaker girl of that town. She had really committed suicide-and through no fault of his. He was tried for his life-you will find the proceedings in "State Trials," and an apt comment on them in the first volume of Stephen's "History of Criminal Law.” He was acquitted, but his danger had been great, for party feeling ran high at Hertford, and the Tories had joined with the Quaker community in taking up the cry against Cowper. In these rough old times, within twenty years of the Popish Plot and the Meal Tub Plot, neither Whigs nor Tories were much in the habit of probing evidence available against a political opponent. But, thanks to a jury whose sense of responsibility raised them above party feeling, Spencer Cowper escaped with life and honour intact; long afterwards, in the reign of George I, he became a distinguished judge, ever deeply considerate of the trembling prisoner at the bar. Generation after generation of the Whigs and Tories of Hertford town passed away, but still in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in the days of Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli, whenever a member of the Cowper family stood for Hertford in the Whig interest, as one of them generally did, the Tories used to interrupt his speeches with cries of "Who killed the Quaker?" The thing had long been little more than a good-humoured joke or ancient custom, and even the sex of the alleged victim had been forgotten-at least, so my father's informant in the matter, his friend Henry Cowper, told him. But my point to-day is that after nearly two hundred years the Cowpers were still leading the local Whig party, and for nearly two hundred years there had been an unbroken apostolic succession of Hertford Toryism handing down by continuous oral tradition, doubtless amid much other curious lore now irrecoverably lost, a confused memory of that old-world tale from which the tragic and serious element had long been extracted. Old England, with its rural market-towns, was a land of long memories and unchanging habits.

There were many other country towns besides Hertford where the influence of great families had maintained continuously down to the second Reform Bill the distinctive alignment of the two historic parties. But the influence of high society was much

greater, much more pervasive, much more subtle, than would be implied simply by this. Its power depended upon three things: firstly, its influence over elections in small boroughs or even in the counties; secondly, the fact that the Ministers of State themselves always belonged to high society, and tended to think as it did; and thirdly, the fact that, owing to the respect paid to it by the whole community, and owing to its education, its talents and its hospitality, Society was constantly forming or helping potently to form public opinion.

The first source of power is gone. Members of high society no longer have any very marked advantage in a constituency over other candidates. The second source of power, however, remains, for many Ministers of State are always likely to belong to society, since any man who rises to such eminence naturally moves in high social circles if he cares to do so. If the Liberal (or Whig) party is to disappear, and if the Conservative and the Labour connections are to be the great historic parties of the future, it is to be hoped that some people who are, or who hereafter may become, members of Society will adopt and maintain traditions of attachment to the Labour interest. For hitherto the lines of division between the great parties have been vertical, not horizontal. The Conservative and Liberal parties were composed of people in every class of the community. It would be a bad thing for British political life if in the future Society came to be identified with one party only. But if Society continues to be divided, not necessarily equally, between the two great parties of the State, then some of its members at any rate are almost sure to be always among the Ministers of State.

The third source of Society's power, its capacity to influence public opinion, will always remain if it remembers Queen Victoria's words and makes up its mind to "buckle to." For there will always be respect shown by the community to people who possess one or more of Disraeli's desiderates-birth, wealth or talent. If the fortunate members of the community who rise or have risen in the social scale through the possession of these things, show zeal for the common good, and unselfish ardour in the public service, they will never lack influence on public opinion. In a speech during the coal dispute, Mr. Clynes drew attention to the extravagance and the absorbing pursuit of pleasure which are features of the life of many members of high society even during