Disraeli was always staunch to the land. After the Corn Law repeal, he strove pertinaciously till he succeeded in removing those especial burdens which unfairly hampered their free competition, and which were originally the price of peculiar privileges then removed. But though he always desired a preponderance of the various landed interests, he never wished for their predominance. And to the last he refused to allow any spurious cry for especial measures on their behalf to be raised when a temporary depression due to the seasons arose, which he always distinguished from permanent causes connected with social revolutions.[55] To develop our ancient institutions was his lifelong specific. From his earliest pronouncements, those in the _Letter to Lord Lyndhurst_, those in _What is he?_ and in _Gallomania_, those in the _Spirit of Whiggism_, those in his first election speeches, extending over a period of five years before he was returned, in his three first political novels, to his latest orations on Conservatism as a “national” cause, he laid the greatest stress on the function and origin of the three co-ordinate Estates of the Realm--“popular classes established into political orders”[56]--which under monarchy form our Constitution. And, while to the end he praised that mighty force of public opinion which has in the person of the Press almost divested Parliament of its ancestral office as “the grand inquest” of national grievances, he still held the “organisation of opinion” to remain the essence of the party system; while he increasingly desired the presence in Parliament of elements at once various and choice,[57] and the absence from its councils of any preponderant sects or sections. Like Burke, he believed that Parliament should be under every changing phase of national development “the express image of the feelings of the nation;” like Bolingbroke, he deemed that it should be also the collective assemblage of its wisdom. He regarded these “estates” as the embodiment of great national interests organised on the principle of distinct duties conditioning privilege; and he desired that, however modified, they should never be altered so as to impair the great national institutions as whose buttresses they were built to serve.