184 ENGLISH SAGA

plutocrats. The House of Commons by itself could never preserve
liberty. Without counter-availing forces securing popular rights
it might easily itself become a weapon of despotism and one
against which there would be no appeal.1

For the people by themselves could never be strong. Votes
alone could not secure their rights if the use of the power en-
trusted by those votes to the ruling few was not kept in check by
the existence of institutions strong enough to resist the abuse of
executive power. "None are so interested," Disraeli wrote to a
working-man's club, "in maintaining the institutions of the
country as the working-classes. The rich and the powerful will
not find much difficulty under any circumstances in maintaining
their rights but the privileges, of the people can only be defended
and secured by popular institutions."2 It was this which caused
Disraeli to defend, for all its manifest absurdities and deficiencies,
the House of Lords—"an intermediate body between the popular
branch of the legislature and absolute legislation . . . supported
by property, by tradition and by experience, ready to act with the
critical faculty which is necessary when precipitate legislation is
threatened and at least to obtain time, so that upon all questions
of paramount importance the ultimate decision should be
founded on the mature opinion of an enlightened nation. "8
Such an institution, as recent European experience showed, could
not be created artificially: it had to grow gradually out of
national needs and realities before it could rest firmly on
instinctive popular support.

All this was true of a yet more venerable institution. Since the
long insanity of George IE., the English monarchy had been in
jeopardy. The dignity and good sense of Queen Victoria had done
something to redeem it from the odium into which it had fallen
through the scandalous lives of her royal uncles. But in the
'sixties it was far from being a popular institution. The inter-
minable and teutonically exaggerated retirement into which the
royal widow had fallen after the death of the Prince Consort
caused widespread criticism. The tone of radical youth increas-
ingly tended towards a republic. To many thoughtful minds it

Hn. one of his earliest electoral addresses, Disraeli expressed such a fear. "I will
allow for the freedom of the Press; I will allow for the spirit of the age; I will allow
for the march of intellect; hut I cannot force' from my mind the conviction that a
House of ^Commons, concentrating in itself the whole power of the State, might . . .
establish in this .country a despotism of the most formidable and dangerous character."
Mmyferny & Suckle t /, 276".

& Buckle, II, ayj. *Monypenny & Łuckte> //, #,