9& ENGLISHSAGA

peasant's right to his triple estate of the porch, the oven and the
tank. His policy, utterly misunderstood by his contemporaries
and 'almost as much by his successors, was defined by himself
as being:

"To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristo-
. cracy round a real throne; to infuse life and vigour into
the Church as the trainer of the nation, , . . to establish a
commercial code on the principles successfully negotiated
by Lord Bolingbroke at Utrecht, and which, though baffled
at the time by a Whig" Parliament, were subsequently, and
triumphantly vindicated by his'political pupil and heir,
Mr. Pitt; to govern Ireland according to the policy of
Charles I, and not of Oliver Cromwell; to emancipate the
political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage
and contracted sympathies; to elevate the physical as well
as the moral condition of the people, by 'establishing that
labour required regulation as much as property, and all
this rather by the use of ancient forms and the restoration
of the past than by political revolutions founded on abstract
ideas."1

An England, obsessed by material wealth and the economic
formulas of Manchester, naturally did not understand what he
was talking about.

His contemporaries took the strength, assurance and vital
character of England for granted, Disraeli, a half-foreigner
viewing the land of his adoption with detachment, knew that
the virtues which made her people great and prosperous were
nourished by institutions and principles whose relinquishment
must bring about a gradual national decay and ultimate
defeat and ruin. He could not*share the easy optimism of re-
formers who supposed that they had only to rationalise to
improve. He distrusted human reason, knew it to be fallible
and its conclusions subject to ceaseless and unpredictable change*
Like Burke he preferred the instinctive wisdom and prejudice of
the older England. An intellectual himself, he fell back on instinct
and precedent: on the accumulated reason of generations tested
by experience. * A precedent," he once said, "embalms a principle."

It was a rational opinion, widely held by economists, that

lUonypenny Sf Buckle^ /, 569-70.