“... What, then, is the duty of an English minister? _To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would do by force...._ It is quite evident that, to effect this, we must have an Executive in Ireland which shall bear _a much nearer relation to the leading classes and characters_ of the country than it does at present. There must be a much more _comprehensive_ Executive, and then, having produced order, the rest is a question of time. There is no possible way by which the physical condition of the people can be improved by Act of Parliament.”[139] So I read this pregnant deliverance. So, I believe, will read it any one who scans it closely in relation to its time and setting. In 1868, when there was capital to be made out of it, Mr. Gladstone did not so read it. Mr. Gladstone contended--and he had full right to contend--that, with regard to the Church, at any rate, it spelled out “Destruction.” Disraeli contented himself with retorting: “... There are many remarks which, if I wanted to vindicate ... myself, I might legitimately make.... But I do not care to say it, and I do not wish to say it, because in my conscience the _sentiment of that speech was right_....” My view is that it spelled out “Reconstruction.” It would have settled Ireland and the Irish question by the principles of 1636 and on the lines of 1792, and not either by the Orange lodges of 1795, which answered Pitt’s abortive schemes of improvement, or by the undemanded spoliation of 1868, which trebled the discontent it designed to allay. All Pitt’s proposed measures were against _exclusion_. He tried to grant Ireland that free outlet for her manufactures to England which had proved her main source of discontent throughout the eighteenth century. He tried to include the Protestant Dissenters as well as the Roman Catholics in the avenues to political power. He was foiled by the selfishness and corruption of an Irish caste, and by the spread of the French Revolution to the Irish multitude. But in each case _inclusion_ was his principle; development, not destruction. Disraeli followed him. It was his hatred of exclusiveness that prompted his aversion alike to the Whiggism of the Grenvilles and the Toryism of Eldon. It was his devotion to wide and popular as opposed to democratic and class principles that drew him to the Toryism of Bolingbroke and Wyndham, and enabled him to reconstruct the Tory party on its first but forgotten foundations.