history; to pry into the beginnings of some social anomalies which, they found, were not so ancient as they had been led to believe, and which had their origin in causes very different from what they had been educated to credit; and insensibly it created and prepared a popular intelligence to which one can appeal, no longer hopelessly, in an attempt to dispel the mysteries with which for nearly three centuries it has been the labour of party writers to involve a national history, and without the dispersion of which no political position can be understood and no social evil remedied.” This latter was an especial province of Disraeli. Carlyle also, as a social regenerator appealing to higher sanctions than the “useful,” was able to address the newly awakened “popular intelligence.” Here again Disraeli is in curious accord with Carlyle, the difference between them being that Disraeli, a doer as well as a seer, discerned in the traditional “orders” or “estates” of the realm real curatives of a sick body politic. Both protested against a state based on statistics and a progress that was arithmetical. Both were quick to discriminate, under the surface of parties, between the influences which made for cementing and those which made for dissolving the nation. Both saw in the conservatism and liberalism of the ’thirties, on the one side a pretence of protecting the forms they enfeebled, on the other a pretext and a sop for the universal suffrage which their professions logically implied. Disraeli perceived that such a French democracy was alien to England, and meant eventually some sort of unenlightened despotism, and the aggravation of a government by favouritism and through interference. He therefore resolved to reinspire the three “estates”--and if possible the Crown--with reality; and thus, in extending franchise, to extend it as the privilege of an order, earned by thrift, education, and intelligence, while he sought to found it on a basis so stable that leadership might never sink into being the sport of a fluid and fickle ignorance. Like Carlyle, he rejoiced that “opinion is now supreme, and opinion speaks in print; the representation of the Press is far more complete than the representation of Parliament;” he hailed the spread of knowledge among the mass so early as in the _Revolutionary Epick_. But, unlike Carlyle, he did not deem this increasing power fatal to parliamentary institutions; indeed, he regarded Parliament as a body privileged to lead and leaven “opinion,” and one that should never abandon its proper functions of initiative. Both Parliament and the Press in his eyes were vents for that free discussion inseparable from political health, but the one ought to form a school for statesmen, the other an arena for critics. And Disraeli also held and enforced that parties should never be particularist, but should rest on some national principle instead of on incoherent prejudices. Parties should represent broad attitudes