Disraeli’s European prominence is evidenced through the space occupied by the polyglot literature relating to him in the book catalogue alone of the British Museum. It extends to eleven of those huge pages. His importance at home before he became pre-eminent is shown by a shower of virulent abuse. Science assures us that the difference between life and death is that the former holds the powers of growth and reproduction, while inanimateness is incapable of either. A great man is surely one who possesses and imparts these qualities of life. Disraeli, without question, powerfully affected the thought of his generation and the destinies of the future. CHAPTER II DEMOCRACY AND REPRESENTATION I wish to head this chapter by a most striking passage hitherto unquoted. It occurs in the fourth of Disraeli’s Letters to the Whigs, published in the first numbers of _The Press_--an organ founded by him in 1853 for the exposition of his views.[50] It unites the brilliance of his youth to the ripeness of his prime. It is a wonderful forecast of the future, and it embodies his ideas at a time when the “Coalition” alliance of Peelites, Whigs, and Manchester Radicals--one of “suspended opinions”--was entering on the career which closed so disastrously. In 1833, the “aristocratic” principle had been crippled. The problem now was how to bring the new democracy into line with an old monarchy-- “... I see before me a numerous and powerful party, animated by chiefs whose opinions in favour of all that can advance the cause of pure democracy have been openly proclaimed. Amongst that party no doubt there are some more moderate than others, some who march blindfold towards the goal which those of bolder vision see clear through the mists of faction. But all unite in the march of the caravan towards the heart of the desert; and if there be those who then discover that the fountain which allures them on is but the mirage, it will be too late to return, and it will be destruction to pause.... If England is to retain that empire which she owes to no natural resources, but to the various influences of a most complicated and artificial, but most admirable and effective social system, _she must gather into one united phalanx all who hold the doctrine that England, to be safe, must be great_. To continue free, _she must rest upon the intermediate institutions that fence round monarchy, as the symbol of executive force, from that suffrage of unalloyed democracy_ which represents the invading agencies of legislative change. Our system of policy must be opposed to all those who by rules of arithmetic would reduce the empire on which the sun never sets to the isle of the Anglo-Saxon, and leave our shores without defence against a yet craftier Norman. Our measures of reform must be so framed as to gain all the purposes of good government, yet to admit under the name of reform no agency that tends by its own inevitable laws to the explosion of the machinery whose