His own race he cleared from prejudice, and proudly displayed as a potent, if sometimes hidden, force throughout the world. His praise and illustration of its endowments, its strength by virtue of its purity of strain, its tenacity and power of organisation, its veiled ramifications among the mainsprings that move Governments and alter systems, no longer raise a smile; and if they did, they would certainly cease to do so when placed on the lips of Macaulay, who thus treated them-- “He knows,” said Macaulay, speaking in 1833 of the member for the University of Oxford--“he knows that in the infancy of civilisation, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.... Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, or heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.” CHAPTER V MONARCHY “To change back the oligarchy into a generous aristocracy round a _real throne_,” Disraeli ranks, with his ideal mission towards the Church, as “the trainer of the nation;” towards Labour, to “the moral and physical condition of the people;” towards Ireland, by governing it “according to the policy of Charles I., and not of Oliver Cromwell;” to Reform, by emancipating “the political constituency of 1832 from its sectarian bondage and contracted sympathies.” “Sovereignty,” he says, in the peroration to _Sybil_, “has been the title of something that has had no dominion, while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves the servants of the people. In the selfish strife of factions, two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England--_the Monarch and the Multitude_; as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared....” Such was Disraeli’s summary in 1870 of what inspired “Young England” in 1840. The more real is representation, the greater the chances of royalty. De Tocqueville, too, has shown that it was just the decay of mediæval, municipal institutions that loosened the hold of the French Crown on the French nation.