These ideas, in happier times and altered circumstances, passed to Disraeli. In 1859, repeating in part what he had affirmed of “Bolingbroke” in the Letter to Lord Lyndhurst, indited nearly twenty-five years earlier, he said of the Conservative party: “... In attempting, however humbly, to regulate its fortunes, I have always striven to distinguish that which was eternal from that which was but accidental in its opinions. I have always striven to assist in building it upon a _broad and national_ basis, because I believed it to be a party peculiarly and essentially _national_--a party which adhered to the institutions of the country as embodying the national necessities and forming the best security for the liberty, the power, and the prosperity of England.” In his Runnymede Letter to Peel of 1836, he calls on him to head this “national party.” In his Crystal Palace oration of 1872, he showed that the ideal of a “Conservative” party seeking to preserve, adapt, and expand traditional institutions is to be national. In this striking speech, after deprecating that, in the days of Eldon, “... instead of the principles professed by Mr. Pitt and Lord Grenville, and which those great men inherited ‘from predecessors’ not less illustrious, the Tory system had degenerated into a policy which formed an adequate basis on the principles of exclusiveness and restriction,” he urged, as he had always urged: “... The Tory party, unless it is a national party, is nothing. It is not a confederacy of nobles, it is not a democratic multitude; it is a party formed from all the numerous classes in the realm--classes alike and equal before the law, but whose different conditions and different aims give vigour and variety to our national life.” For the essence of these ideas, the forms which have since appeared or vanished--the development of the ministerial system, the organisation of public opinion--are immaterial. Of course Bolingbroke could not foresee the _routine_ of the far future; it was its _spirit_ which he foresaw, and to which, through Disraeli, he contributed. In his own language about another, he “... _had the wisdom to discern, not only the actual alteration which was already made, but the growing alteration which would every day increase_.” And this, too, may be affirmed of Disraeli. I think that, in the denial of Bolingbroke’s real objects, achieved by Disraeli, some misconception has arisen from the constant use towards the close of the eighteenth century of “to govern by party connections.”