176	ENGLISHSAGA
a continuing society in which the full value of each individual
life could only be attained and measured by its contribution to the
common weal. Privilege, though it involved inequality was
desirable, even necessary, if it evoked from selfish man a greater
measure of service and sacrifice to the community. For through
the imagination it had the power to appeal to self-respect and civic
conscience. What mattered was not that all men should be equal,
as Radicals desired, but that all men should have an equal oppor-
tunity to the kind of privilege that made them readier to serve
their country.
In this Disraeli based his argument on a profounder knowledge
of human nature than that possessed by the middle-class utili-
tarians who were massed against him. He was an artist with an
artist's insight into human motive: he was a member of the
oldest civilised race in the world. Unlike the sanguine and
innocent radicals he never believed in the perfectibility of human
nature: he merely believed in the divine instinct in man that,
given the right background, had power to raise him from the
brute to the citizen, the martyr and the saint. It was his perpetual
study as a statesman to make the institutions of the State afford
that background.
In this Disraeli had the support of English history which he
had studied far more closely than most Englishmen. Thirty
years before while still a young man he had written:
aThe basis of English society is Equality. But here let us
distinguish: there are two kinds of equality; there is the
equality that levels and destroys, and the equality that
elevates and creates. It is this last, this sublime, this celestial
equality, that animates the laws of England. The principle
of the first equality, base, terrestrial, Gallic and grovelling, is
that no one should be privileged: the principle of English
equality is that every one should be privileged."1
In his maturer age he had improved on this* u Unlike the levelling
equality of modern days the ancient equality of England elevates
and creates. Learned in human nature the English constitution
holds out privilege to every subject as the inducement to do his
duty." Instead of wishing like the Radicals to level every ancient
institution and human right that offended against the notion of
mathematical uniformity, Disraeli sought consistently to main-
1 Vindication of the English Constitution (i%), Ch. XXXIV.