Essayists From England

"If you are not very clever, you should be conciliatory."

"There is no gambling like politics."

"As for that," said Waldenshare, "sensible men are all of the same religion." "Pray, what is that?" inquired the Prince. "Sensible men never tell."

"Real politics are the possession and distribution of power."

"The world is a wheel, and it will all come round right."

"As for our majority... one is enough."

"Without tact you can learn nothing."

"There is no education like adversity."

"The Athanasian Creed is the most splendid ecclesiastical lyric ever poured forth by the genius of man."

"An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen."

"As a general rule the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."

"I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will that will stake even existence for its fulfilment."

"The more you are talked about the less powerful you are."

"The "landed interest" and its possibilities always fired the imagination of Disraeli... In Disraeli the agricultural landlords had the most eloquent champion of their class and cause that England or any other country has ever seen. Disraeli believed in them more than some of them believed in him, and was not ashamed to say so. "Good-bye, my dear lord," said he at the end of a visit to one of the stately homes of England, "you have shown me the finest spectacle these islands can afford—a great nobleman living at home among his own people." What could be better?"

"Sybil can be read now as the production of a future Conservative Prime Minister, and hence in the narrow sense as a political novel. The elements of political pleading are indeed evident in any reading of it. Their curiosity, their partisanship and their opportunism are matched only by their brilliance of address. The novel would be fascinating if it were only political. The stucco elegance of Disraeli’s writing has a consonance with one kind of political argument. What is intolerable in his descriptions of persons and feelings becomes in his political flights a rather likeable panache. The descriptions of industrial squalor are very like those of Dickens on Coketown: brilliant romantic generalizations—the view from the train, from the hustings, from the printed page—yet often moving, like all far-seeing rhetoric. There are similar accounts of the conditions of the agricultural poor which need to be kept in mind against the misleading contrasts of North and South. Again, in a quite different manner, there is in Sybil the most spirited description of the iniquities of the tommy-shop, and of the practical consequences of the system of truck, to be found anywhere. Disraeli's anger—the generalized anger of an outsider making his way—carries him often beyond his formal text. The hostile descriptions of London political and social life are again generalization, but they have, doubtless, the same rhetorical significance as those of the forays among the poor. Anyone who is prepared to give credit to Disraeli's unsupported authority on any matter of social fact has of course mistaken his man, as he would similarly mistake Dickens. But Disraeli, like Dickens, is a very fine generalizing analyst of cant, and almost as fine a generalizing rhetorician of human suffering. Both functions, it must be emphasized, are reputable."

"He looked to national consensus in the 1830s and again in the 1870s; it does not follow that the intermediate decades were consistent. In the 1840s, Young England was more about social cohesion than national identity... It was only in the 1870s that the two themes of social cohesion and national identity were finally integrated... Many Conservative parties elsewhere failed to make the crucial move from élite parties to mass parties, partly because they did not have a brand image, or not one that could be put across in popular terms. It is to Disraeli's mental footwork as much as anything that the Conservatives owe their survival."

"Disraeli was a racial thinker. He thought race "the key of history". "All is race", he wrote; "All is race; there is no other truth", said Sidonia. Race, for him, transcended everything: it explained religion; it explained politics. Disraeli was far more of a racial thinker than a social or religious thinker... Disraeli's racial doctrine went the whole hog. Not only was race the key to history, but some races were far superior to others. There were master races, and there were the rest. Their superiority was a biological matter rather than just a cultural one, and depended on purity of blood. Interbreeding caused racial degeneration. If such doctrines ring oddly today, let us recall that they were advanced for the best of reasons: to raise a downtrodden people, the Jews, in the esteem of mankind, and to raise them, moreover, not to equality, but to a position of hardly deserved superiority among the nations. Disraeli was unusual not because he used the common coin of pseudo-scientific racial thought, but because he used it for Jewish (and therefore, in the circumstances, virtuous) ends. Disraeli said little about the lower races; his object was to praise, not to disparage. There was an absence of malign intent. Still, Disraeli believed that to think racially was to be modern and scientific."

"My idea of an agreeable person," said Hugo Bohun, "is a person who agrees with me."

""But they deserve their wealth," he added, "nobody grudges it to them. I declare when I was eating that truffle, I felt a glow about my heart that, if it were not indigestion, I think must have been gratitude; though that is an article I had not believed in."

"His Christianity was muscular."

"Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius."

"Nothing is going on, but everybody is afraid of something."

"I don't wish to go down to posterity talking bad grammar."

"It is a very difficult country to move, Mr. Hyndman, a very difficult country indeed, and one in which there is more disappointment to be looked for than success."

"My Lords, the key of India is not Merv, or Herat, or Candahar. The key of India is London. The majesty of sovereignty, the spirit and vigour of your Parliaments, the inexhaustible resources of a free, an ingenious, and a determined people—these are the keys of India."

"Now I must tell that nothing will induce me to support the 3 F's—three fiddlesticks. During a long parliamentary life, and long before I was in Parliament, I have been profoundly convinced, that the greatness and character of this country depended on our landed tenure. All the rest, I look upon, and have ever looked upon, as "leather and prunella". I fear the pass is sold ... I have formally, and even solemnly, warned the house in wh[ich] I now sit, that the landed system of this country would be attacked and invaded by the revolutionary party."

"I receive letters every day asking me to write a manifesto and make a speech; that I am the only man who could do so with effect; and all that. Why should I? I warned the country about Ireland before the General Election and told them to be vigilant, or there would be something happen there, "worse even than famine or pestilence". It has happened. And there have been elections since the Irish Revolution in England, Wales and Scotland, and they have supported the policy of imbecility and treason that has brought about all this disaster."

"The present state of affairs makes me tremble. Old England seems to be tumbling to pieces. I believe that if Constantinople were occupied by a foreign Power to-morrow, we should not stir a foot. Could we? With Ireland in revolution, S. Africa in rebellion, and the Radicals and Jacobins in England so intent on the destruction of the landed interest which is the backbone of the State, that no one will spare any energies to external dangers and disgraces. I never thought that in my time it could come to this!"

"Here everything is dark. A series of storms has destroyed all our hopes which were full of promise. A plentiful hay harvest drowned and the finest wheat the farmers have had for years all laid. It is a scene of ravage, of havoc like a conquered country. It is the last drop in the bitter cup which the landed interest will have to swallow... As for politics, Gladstone will be as fatal to the aristocracy as the weather; and if he were younger the Crown would not be safe."

"Bradlaugh makes the most noise, but the Irish Evictions Bill is much the most serious thing... If the Eviction Act passes, there will not be many more seasons. It is a revolutionary age and the chances are, that even you and I may live to see the final extinction of the great London Season, which was the wonder and admiration of our youth."

"Her Majesty's present Ministers have hitherto been enabled to secure that peace, so necessary to the welfare of all the civilized countries, and so peculiarly the interest of our own. But this ineffable blessing cannot be obtained by the passive principle of non-interference. Peace rests on the presence, not to say the ascendancy, of England in the Councils of Europe... May [the election] return to Westminster a Parliament not unworthy of the power of England and resolved to maintain it!"

"[T]here are some who challenge the expediency of the Imperial character of this realm. Having attempted, and failed, to enfeeble our colonies by their policy of decomposition, they may, perhaps, now recognize in the disintegration of the United Kingdom a mode which will not only accomplish, but precipitate their purpose. The immediate dissolution of Parliament will afford an opportunity to the nation to decide upon a course which will materially influence its fortunes and shape its destiny. Rarely in this century has there been an occasion more critical. The power of England and the peace of Europe will largely depend on the verdict of the country."

"[A] danger, in its ultimate results scarcely less disastrous than pestilence and famine...distracts that country [Ireland]. A portion of its population is attempting to sever the constitutional tie which unites it to Great Britain in that bond which has favoured the power and prosperity of both. It is to be hoped that all men of light and leading will resist this destructive doctrine. The strength of this nation depends on the unity of feeling which should pervade the United Kingdom and its widespread dependencies."

"Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action."

"Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress."

"I remember—the interruption of the hon. Gentleman reminds me of the words of a great writer, who said that "Grace was beauty in action." Sir, I say that justice is truth in action. Truth should animate an opposition, and I hope it does animate this opposition.;"

"Why, I say, that to tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection; it is plunder, and I entirely disclaim it; but I ask you to protect the rights and interests of labour generally in the first place, by allowing no free imports from countries which meet you with countervailing duties; and, in the second place, with respect to agricultural produce, to compensate the soil for the burdens from which other classes are free by an equivalent duty. This is my view of what is called "protection.""

"Considering that all our institutions spring from the land—considering that the Throne, that the estates of the realm, that the great scheme of our judicial institutions, the inheritance of the poor, the sacred spires, as it were, of our ecclesiastical establishment, all have their origin in the same source; considering that, in fact, we have a territorial constitution, they always have been of opinion that it was the first duty of a British statesman to sustain the industry, the property, and the influence of our territorial population. It is for this reason they have ever been of opinion—an opinion strictly constitutional—that we should, in all our legislation which refers to or regulates the distribution of power, consult the preponderance of the landed interest. They thought so because they considered that preponderance the best security for order and liberty, and, in addition, the best security for that political stability which is a still rarer quality in the history of nations than order and freedom. These are opinions which I know are considered somewhat old-fashioned in the House of Commons, but which, I believe, have not yet forfeited their hold on the great majority of the people; and I humbly venture to share in and adhere to them."

"Our morals differ in different counties, in different towns, in different streets, even in different Acts of Parliament. What is moral in London is immoral in Montacute; what is crime among the multitude is only vice among the few."

"We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets."

"London is a modern Babylon."

"We moralise among ruins."

"Everything comes if a man will only wait."

"When little is done, little is said; silence is the mother of truth."

"He was fresh and full of faith that "something would turn up.""

"The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven."

"That fatal drollery called a representative government."

"There is no index of character so sure as the voice."

"A majority is always the best repartee."

"Duty cannot exist without faith."