“The Monarchy of the Tories,” Disraeli exclaimed in his youth,[54] “is more democratic than the Republic of the Whigs.” “The House of Commons,” he exclaimed many years later, “is a more aristocratic body than the House of Lords.” In each House, through all its pronouncements, he recognised that the democratic element is aristocratic, the aristocratic element democratic. That the representative assembly of the Commons, which is elected, should include all that is best from each class which by its qualities has earned the boon of the franchise; that the representative assembly, which is not elected, should include more and more not only those whose aggrandisement stands for the interests of property, but those too whose intellect and attainments entitle them to distinction. Nor, of course, can the fact be ignored that through hereditary honours the Estate of the Commons, which constantly reinforces the Estate of the Peers, is, in its turn, as constantly refreshed from the Estate of the Peers. And from first to last, in theory, as well as in action, he upheld the land as the deepest foundation of England’s greatness of character. I could quote passage after passage, both from books and speeches, and regarding subjects the most various, in which he presses home the substantial importance of a territorial constitution, and the fact that the landed interest is in truth not only a safeguard for freedom in peace and vigour in war, but also an industrial interest of the highest order; and doubly so, because by sentiment, by tradition, by its contribution to local government, to stability, to the social scale of duties conditioning the tenure of property, to physique, its influence is essential and exceptional. I shall content myself with a citation from a speech of 1860, and it may be remembered that the acute De Tocqueville singles out the self-seclusion of the official bourgeoisie from the land as a chief contributory to the French Revolution-- “... I look round upon Europe at the present moment, and I see no country of any importance in which political liberty can be said to exist. I attribute the creation and maintenance of our liberties to the influence of the land, and to our tenure of land. In England there are large properties round which men can rally, _and that in my mind forms the only security in an old European country against that centralised form of government which has prevailed, and must prevail, in every European country where there is no such counterpoise_. It is our tenure of land to which we are indebted for our public liberties, because it is the tenure of land which makes local government a fact in England, and which allows the great body of Englishmen to be ruled by traditionary influence and by habit, instead of being governed, as in other countries, by mere police.”