IRONHORSE 97

maintenance of private property and on the sense of individual
responsibility which its possession could alone engender. Though
he did not want a capitalist's England—"a sort of spinning-
jenny machine kind of nation"—he did not want a bureaucrat's.
Therefore he used all his powers of speech and pen—and it is
his country's tragedy that, great as they were, they were limited
by his circumstances^—to impress on a forgetful generation the
twin truths that privilege and property must never be exclusive
and that rights must always be accompanied by duties. The
greater the privileges, the greater the obligations.

Against the radical and levelling tendencies of his^age,
Disraeli reacted not because he was opposed to popular rights
and social amelioration" which he desired to extend, but because
he wished to base both on something more stable than the
despotic will of an all-powerful popular assembly and an attend-
ant bureaucracy. At the time when almost every social activity
of government, national and local, was dormant, he foresaw
that the very abuses of irresponsible capital which he exposed
would ultimately provoke a central despotism capable of stifling
all liberty. Knowing how many nations centralisation had
enslaved and devitalised in the name of efficient administration,
he wished to insure against it by strengthening local self-
government and restoring national institutions.1

At the back of Disraeli's mind lay always certain ancient
English ideals—the one Tudor and the other medieval—of a
united nation and of a continuing community composed of men
and women possessing inalienable privileges and rights secured
by a stronger tenure than that of their own lives. His conception
of society was essentially religious and humane—an ordered
hierarchy based on a universal recognition of human needs and
rights. He wished to restore .dignity, romance and personal
influence to the throne, responsibility to the nobility and gentry,
moral authority to the Church, above all, status, pride of craft
and security to the peasant and worker. In his home in the
Wycombe woods he loved to speak of the Buckinghamshire

l<eln the great struggle between popular principles and liberal opinions, which is
characteristic of our age, I hope ever to be found on the side of the people, and of the
Institutipns of EnglaneL It is our Institutions that have made us free, and can alone keep
us so; by the bulwark which they offer to the insidi9us encroachments of a convenient,
yet enverating system of centralisation, which, if left unchecked, will prove fatal to the
national character. Therefore I have ever endeavoured to cherish our happy habit of
self-governmei^i, as sustained by a prudent distribution of local authority." Monyfetwy