But for this purpose the national imagination must be reckoned with. “... When that faculty is astir in a nation,” he has insisted, “it will sacrifice even physical comfort to follow its impulses.” The struggle will always continue for national unity, but it takes generations to perceive that colonial federation, for example, is as requisite a means to this idea as native institutions representing real elements. “... A political institution is a machine; the motive power is the national character,” says “Sidonia;” “Society in this country is perplexed, almost paralysed. How are the elements of the nation to be again blended together? In what spirit is that reorganisation to take place?...” And again, so late as 1870, in the preface to _Lothair_, summarising his works, Disraeli observes: “... National institutions were the ramparts of the multitude against large estates exercising political power derived from a limited class. The Church was in theory--and once it had been in practice--the spiritual and intellectual trainer of the people. The privileges of the multitude and the prerogatives of the sovereign had grown up together, and together they had waned. Under the plea of Liberalism, all the institutions which were the bulwarks of the multitude had been sapped and weakened, and nothing had been substituted for them. The people were without education, and, relatively to the advance of science and the comfort of the superior classes, their condition had deteriorated, and their physical quality as a race was threatened....” On the other hand, the incongruity of modern political machinery was never far from Disraeli’s thoughts. “... Whatever may have been the faults of the ancient governments,” he muses in _Contarini Fleming_, “they were in closer relation to the times, the countries, and to the governed, than ours. The ancients invented their governments according to their wants. The moderns have adopted foreign policies, and then modelled their conduct upon this borrowed regulation. This circumstance has occasioned our manners and our customs to be so confused and absurd and unphilosophical.... He who profoundly meditates upon the situation of modern Europe, will also discover how productive of misery has been the senseless adoption of Oriental customs by Northern peoples....” And Disraeli also distinguished between the direct democracy of multitude and that of “popular” institutions. Nothing is less truly “popular” than “the people” as a “democracy,” for the despotism of many is as odious as the arbitrary will of one, and even more fatal than the government by groups of the few. This is the distinction on which he expatiated in a famous speech of 1847 at Aylesbury, where he contrasted “popular principles” with “Liberal opinions”--