_the secret views of a party whose scheme is infinitely more adverse to their own than the existing system, whose genius I believe they entirely misapprehend_.” And after commenting on the “preponderance of a small class” under the new arrangement, the dangerous tendency towards centralisation and the perils of the reformed municipal corporations, he thus concludes: “If there be a slight probability of ever establishing in this country a more democratic government than the English Constitution, it will be as well, I conceive, for those who love their rights, to maintain that constitution, and if the more recent measures of the Whigs, however plausible their first aspect, have in fact been a _departure from the democratic character of that constitution_, it will be as well for the English nation to oppose ... the spirit of Whiggism.” No student of the Croker Papers can deny that some of the leading Whigs did in the period immediately succeeding the Reform Bill plot for a Republican purpose. No historian will deny that the Reform Bill, by the exclusion of “Labour” from the franchise, and its deprival at the same time of the ancient rights which industry had possessed, left open a rankling sore. In this tract of 1836 Disraeli exposes the machination and probes the wound. Even thus early he feared the predominance of a plutocracy, “the supreme triumph of cash” at an era when, in Carlyle’s phrase also, “Cash Payment” is fast becoming “the universal sole nexus of man to man;” while he determined, if ever he had the power, to redress the balance by including the labouring classes. In 1848 he had spoken in Parliament on these questions to the same effect as he had spoken on the hustings in 1833, even favouring, as he had then advocated, triennial parliaments, except that under the later circumstances it might be an unnecessary change; and denouncing, as he had then denounced, “universal suffrage,” and on the same grounds. In this remarkable speech he forecasted that signal settlement which nearly twenty years later he was to secure. I shall shortly connect many utterances of his, ranging over more than thirty years; but there are three passages from this declaration, made at a time before the re-modelling of the reforms of 1832 had been agreed upon as an open problem, which I ask leave to excerpt as a prelude, for they strike the very keynotes of his domestic policy. Disraeli pointed out that the Radical Hume was taking _property_ as the basis of suffrage fully as much as the Whigs had done in 1832, and that the same _bourgeois_ predominance would ensue.