For sheer insight into the march of ideas and reach of vision there is no comparison between the two. Even in the ’forties Disraeli perceived that the coming choice lay between absolute democracy and a monarchical democracy. Afterwards--in the early ’fifties, while monarchy in England was still far from popular--he laid his plans--as is apparent from his contributions to his organ, _The Press_, in 1853--to popularise monarchy and educate democracy before enfranchising it; and, not till that was accomplished, to re-imperialise Great Britain. “He has not,” he wrote in 1853 of Lord John Russell, “comprehended that for the last twenty years the choice is between the maintenance of those institutions and habits of thought which preserve monarchy, and that gradual change into absolute democracy to which Tocqueville somewhere rashly considered all the tendencies of our age impel the destinies of Europe.... The Whigs should have been conservative of the reformed constitution, and have developed it....”[34] While Gladstone was refining a rather tortuous conscience into making the forlorn Peelites alternate between the Conservatives and the Whigs, Disraeli was reconstructing and developing a national party. While Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, in righteous indignation at Peel’s memory, were enraged at the delinquency of not struggling for absolute protection when the Derby Ministry assumed office, Disraeli showed that the _principle_ of his struggle (continued as regarded the sugar repeal) had been land and labour. He must now benefit these by alleviations, rather than, as a responsible Minister, attempt an upheaval of what the nation had finally endorsed, and set private opinion as to particular measures at variance with the possibility of government at all. Had he done so he would have been doing what Fox himself had not attempted with regard to Catholic emancipation, what Lord John Russell had not thought of in 1847, what no responsible Minister could have compassed, and what, Lord John Russell added, the Whigs could not do in 1835. And yet, out of sheer honest hatred, he was vilified by those “high and stubborn spirits who, with the severity peculiar to those censors who cannot aspire to be consuls, refuse to acknowledge that there could be any virtue of necessity, ... and could not enlarge their comprehension of the requisites of a statesman beyond quotations from ‘Hansard.’ There were surely some juster thinkers in the House of Commons who must have trembled at the doctrine that men in office are rigidly to carry out the opinions they proposed in opposition.”[35] That, he points out, is the function of opposition, and the duty of supporting opinions which a nation has cancelled never arises unless those opinions have sent you to office. As he puts it, “Themis is the goddess of opposition, but Nemesis sits in Downing Street.” In the overthrow of Peel lay a very different moral, and by that overthrow he wished to lay bare the choice