In _Vivian Grey_, Disraeli mocks at the attitude of the early political economists towards Labour in the person of “Mr. Toad,” who defined it as “that exertion of mind or body which is not the involuntary effect of the influence of natural sensations.” In the second of his long series of election addresses, he promised to “withhold his support from every ministry which will not originate some great measure to ameliorate the condition of the lower orders, ... to liberate our shackled industry....” The subject is closely allied to much already surveyed. Here, however, I shall for the most part leave politics alone, and confine myself mainly to the social aspects of the question, for from this standpoint he himself approached it. On Mr. Villiers’ resolutions in 1852, he distinctly stated that he and his friends had opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws on the main ground that it would “prove injurious to the interests of Labour;” on the subsidiary ground that it would injure “considerable interests in the country.” He had, two years before, urged that it “was a question of labour, or it was nothing.” Even in the _Revolutionary Epick_, fifteen years earlier, he had sung, “The many labour, and the few enjoy.” The extracts given in the preceding chapter from Disraeli’s speech on Mr. Hume’s motion in 1848, illustrate the central ideas which he enforced with singular pertinacity in all his published works and public utterances. They are mainly these. It was an age of emancipation, and Peel liberated commerce. In so doing he disjointed Labour. His two great reforms--that of the Tariff and that of the Corn Laws--designed as inter-remedial, were certainly calculated to disturb and dislocate Labour, the one by unloosing the full forces of straining competition; the other by revolutionising the centres of industry, by transferring population from the country to the city, by impairing the landed interests, both high and low, by shifting the distribution of toil. At the very moment before his relaxation of the Corn Laws, Peel, conscious that he would disorganise Labour,[75] had been unconsciously converted to the “right to physical happiness” system of Manchester--the dryest embodiment of the theory of the French “physical” equalitarians, on which I touched in my last chapter. His economics of “cheapness,” the results of which he feared in relation to the distribution of employment, thus became associated with a principle that, as I have shown, demands “unlimited employment of labour.” He freed Commerce, but he unsettled Labour, already rebelling against the harsh workings of the new Poor Laws. Disraeli asked himself if reduced tariffs would augment purchasing power, if dethroned land would be succeeded by any novel power for alleviating the Labour thus unhinged. And, further, he asked whether the middle class of 1846 would not reap the benefit without bearing the burden, just as it had done in the Reform of 1832. What would be the effect of discontent on