towards working institutions. Only thus can they escape debasement into sets on the one hand, and shams on the other. If parties are split up into intriguing factions, they are solvents; if they become merely the masks of disregarded principles, they grow lifeless and hypocritical. They are at once “humbug and humdrum.” In his fine speech of February, 1850, on Agricultural Distress (a distress greatly due to the unrestricted competition of English land with foreign acres,[67] and only to be met by what he then proposed and long afterwards carried--the relief of its peculiar burdens), Disraeli dwelt on the sad fact that the labourers of the land made no appeal to Parliament. “Why, what is that,” he urged, “but a want of confidence in the institutions of the country?” Cobden, who definitely and avowedly sought the predominance of one portion alone, of middle-class individual interest, gave an ironical cheer. Carlyle had already published his philippic against Parliament. But Disraeli--and with justice--continued-- “... The honourable gentleman cheers as if I sanctioned such doctrines: I have never sanctioned the expression of such feelings; I never used language elsewhere which I have not been ready to repeat in this House. I never said one thing in one place, and another in another. I have confidence in the justice and wisdom of the House of Commons, although I sit with the minority; I have expressed that confidence in other places.... I have expressed the conviction that I earnestly entertain, that this House, instead of being an assembly with a deaf ear and a callous heart to the sufferings of the agricultural body, would, on the contrary, be found to be an assembly prompt to express sympathy, prompt to repair, if it might be, even the injury, necessary in the main as they might think it, which they had entailed on the agricultural classes of the country.... I have that confidence in the good sense of the English people that ... they will deem we are only doing our duty, we are only consulting their interests in taking every opportunity to alleviate their burdens, in trying to devise remedies for their burdens; and, if we cannot accomplish immediately any great financial result, at least achieving this great political purpose--that we may teach them not to despair of the institutions of their country.”