of the generation that is vanishing.... It will be a product hostile to the oligarchical system. The future principle of English politics will not be a levelling principle; not a principle adverse to privileges, but favourable to their extension. _It will seek to ensure equality, not by levelling the few, but by elevating the many._” And again, the great manufacturer, “Millbank,” in _Coningsby_, is made to remark (after giving distinction as the basis of aristocracy), “that ‘natural aristocracy’ ought to be found ... among those men whom a nation recognises as the most eminent for virtue, talents, and property, and, if you please, birth and standing in the land. They guide opinion, and therefore they govern. I am no leveller. I look upon an artificial equality as equally pernicious with a factitious aristocracy; both depressing and checking the enterprise of a nation. I like man to be free--really free; free in his industry as well as his body....” As Carlyle puts it: “... I say you did not make the land of England; and by the possession of it you are bound to furnish guidance and government to England....”--“A high class without duties to do is like a tree planted on precipices.”[51] It should not be forgotten, and I shall afterwards illustrate, that in these and many other respects Carlyle’s teaching chimes with Disraeli’s. “... That speciosities which are not realities can no longer be.... What is an aristocracy? A corporation of the best, of the bravest.... Whatsoever aristocracy does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes of that, is not safe; neither is the land it rules in safe.... We must find a real aristocracy....” And so with priesthood. In “Angela Pisani”--a dazzling dream-picture of three generations in France--by Disraeli’s early intimate, Lord Strangford, occurs a striking outburst against natural equality, that solecism in ideas, that remainder biscuit of the French Revolution. “... Go and preach equality to the deep seas, ... that the oyster is equal to the whale or the starfish to the shark; you will succeed there sooner than you will be able to alter the relative grades of the five races of humanity. It is a _law_ which man must unmake himself, ere he can change, that the Caucasian will aspire as the highest, and the negro will grovel as the basest.” Disraeli’s attitude was the same in _Contarini Fleming_:--