In the domain of politics Disraeli, as I shall show at length, divined in the national institutions the chief engine for the revival of unity and for social regeneration. When he denounced the Conservatism of the early ’forties as an “organised hypocrisy,” he did so just because, as it seemed to his eyes, the hopes once centred on Peel as the restorer of a truly “national” party were being shattered by his failure, under ordeal, to govern, to develop the institutions which he was called on to preserve, by his erection of “registration” into a party idol, by his policy of polls, by his cold indifference and suspicion of the youthful regenerators, who confronted the middle classes with the middle ages. “Whenever,” indignantly urged Disraeli in 1845, “whenever the young men of England allude to any great principle of political or parliamentary conduct, are they to be recommended to go to a railway committee?” And he found in his once chief’s temperament of discouraging formality and timorous desire for “fixity of tenure,” for _staying_ power, a reason for the stultification of the House of Lords: “... It is not Radicalism; it is not the revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century which has consigned ‘another place’ to illustrious insignificance; it is ‘Conservatism’ and a Conservative dictator.” Disraeli was one born with aristocratic perceptions, yet with a bent “popular” rather than “democratic” in the strict sense of those terms. “Democracy” in the concrete he considered as the unsettlement of compact nationality through the undue preponderance of a single class; democracy in the abstract he considered as a lever for ambitious tribunes. But the welfare of the people was ever his chief concern, and he knew full well that it is constantly foiled by the side-aims of those vociferous on its behalf. When he first appeared on the political horizon, neither of the great historical parties owned popular sympathies. The Tories dreaded “Radicalism” because they were blind to the possibilities of its adoption into the order of the State. Of the Whigs, democratic enthusiasms were at once the tools and the abhorrence. Disraeli determined to infuse them into those free yet settled institutions of which the Tories were the natural but forgetful guardians. His main purpose from the outset was to implant the new ideas of freedom on the ancient soil of order; to engraft them productively without uprooting the native undergrowth; to harmonise the modern democratic idea with those English traditions which had always harboured its older forms. His work was to accommodate federal to feudal principles; to render democracy in England national and natural; to popularise leadership; to make democracy aristocratic in the truest sense of the term; to undo the closed aristocracy of caste and to revive the open aristocracy of excellence wherever displayed. My next two chapters investigate this idea; and it will be found afterwards,