Just as I have shown with regard to the Church, his predisposition lay towards pure Theocracy, but his practical bent discerned in a national Church its aptest and most congenial embodiment; so with regard to kingship his predisposition lay towards pure monarchy--royal leadership--which he knew, and indeed hoped, could in England never prove absolute, still less arbitrary. But a British king retains the great advantage of being outside the prejudices of every order in the State of which he is the social chieftain. The tendency, mused “Sidonia,” of “advanced civilisation was to ‘pure monarchy;’” “Monarchy is indeed a government which requires a high degree of civilisation for its fulfilment.” Public opinion, absorbing so many functions of control, training, and discussion, should find in the king a disinterested exponent. “In an enlightened age, the monarch on the throne, free from the vulgar prejudices and the corrupt interests of the subject, again becomes divine.” But this was said with regard to France, and in answer to “Coningsby’s” hazard that the republic of that country might absorb its kingdom, and Paris[109] the provinces. It was a dream. None felt more deeply than Disraeli that English tradition was the temper of England. None, more than he, deprecated centralisation. The very value of her “glorious institutions” is, as he often insists, that they foster, in a form above the passions of momentary outburst or fickle reactions, those great elements of loyalty, religion, industry, liberty, and order which have conjoined to make and keep her great. Representing classes, they humanise virtues. The problem since the Revolution has always been how to bring the varying force of public opinion, the power of Parliament, and the cabinet system, which has gradually crystallised, into line with the ancient and beneficial personality of the Crown; in later times, how to reconcile the King both to Downing and also to Fleet Street; how to harmonise the dependence of his just limits with the independence of his just influence; how to render him no mere _roi fainéant_, or marionette to be danced on the wires of patricians or tribunes, but a real representative individuality; how he may rule as well as reign; and all this, in this country and in this century, without assuming any kind of either fatherly or of stepfatherly meddlesomeness; for the “Patriot King” must never take even a tinge of the Patriarch. He must be one, whatever else he may be, who “thinks more of the community and less of the government.” He must, in a word, bear himself as a chief, and not as a master. As Byron sang, bearing Bolingbroke in mind-- “A despot thou, and yet thy people free, And by the _heart_, not hand, enslaving us.”