It is not a little remarkable that this farewell re-echoes the sentence quoted in my first chapter from his tract _What is he?_ as well as that later Runnymede Letter which, forty years earlier, he addressed to Sir Robert Peel.[134] “... Spread it then, And let it circulate through every vein Of all your empire; that where Britain’s power Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too.” CHAPTER VII AMERICA--IRELAND I have associated these two heads of discussion because they have long been coupled in home politics, at times disastrously, but now, it may be hoped, under favouring auspices. On the lighter side of American society and its first invasions of England he also touched. I shall touch these in the next chapter, reserving this for the political aspects of the question. My first chapter has already mentioned the paragraph in his earliest pamphlet, dedicated to Canning. Disraeli was always intensely interested in America, and watched her development with vigilance. He predicted her imperial future. He deprecated jealousy of her power, and, while England was incensed at her conduct in 1871, he alone maintained that it was due to the prejudices of a class and the objects of a party, not to the national sentiment. He descried in America’s essential democracy, which adheres even to her republican forms, one wholly peculiar to herself--a democracy of the soil, of which the base and root is land, underlying the gigantic commerce and colossal finance which are merely the froth of her wealth; and in such a democracy he perceived an element of stability lacking to every other known democratic country. Before her crucial conflict was determined, he prophesied, too, among the difficulties that must confront her, that of a vast number of emancipated negroes. When the great struggle arose between the energy of the North and the traditions of the South, Disraeli also, alone among the leaders of his party, discerned both the probabilities of the winning side and its aptitude for moderation and self-control. For this sagacity he received Mr. Bright’s approbation in 1865. When the civil war was in process, the gentry of England, naturally and generously sympathetic with the Southerners, had suspected that Canada might be threatened, and had wished something “to be done;” Disraeli restrained and allayed them. Mr. Bright said: “With a thoughtfulness and statesmanship which you do not all acknowledge, he did not say a word from that bench likely to create a difficulty with the United States. I think his chief and his followers might learn something from his example.” I quote this meed from an opponent, because Mr. Bryce, in his recent monograph, implies the contrary; but then, Mr. Bryce sometimes trips, and has made the trifling mistake of naming “Lucian” as Disraeli’s pet classic, whereas surely it was “Tacitus.”