the institutions of the country? The two great problems during the whole decade of 1830-40, when there had occurred a real renaissance, an awakening, had been Democracy and the Church. Was Democracy to be detached from the order and orders of the State? was it to be an anti-national solvent? And was the Church to realise its mission as a society of believers instead of being perverted into a library of assent? So far Chartism and Apostasy had been the answers. Were Sir Robert Peel’s arithmetical measures, excellent as they were in theory, any practical power for regeneration? Chartism’s inner causes had been both the want of employment and the despair of the employed. In 1840, he proclaimed, to his leader’s dismay, his deep sympathy, not with Chartism, “but with the Chartists,” preyed on by ambitious leaders, and victimised by official indifference. Throughout he regarded the whole “condition of England” question from its moral and social standpoints--to which economics should be subordinate--as touching Labour at one end and Leadership at the other. The claims of Labour, he says, are paramount as those of property. Property and Labour should be allies, and not foes; nay, Labour is itself the property of the poor, out of which the property of the rich is accumulated. The gentlemen of England should form the advanced guard of Labour; and, moreover, the master-workmen themselves compose “a powerful aristocracy.” So long as property was allied both to land and manufacture, a feeling of public spirit and public duty in the main characterised the large employers. But a financial oligarchy was bound to arise, and has arisen, linked by no visible ties to the workers, and generous more by gifts of “ransom” than by personal participation; a system of commerce, too, without leaders, which now works in groups and merely on “cheapest market” principles, has sprung into being. And, moreover, the vast multiplication of machines tended all along, and tends more and more with the huge increase of intercommunication, to exalt mechanism into life and to degrade the labourer into a machine, himself devoid alike of powers and of duties. Over and over again Disraeli championed, not only the employment of the people, but variety in their employments. He is never wearied of scathing any system which might enhance the grinding monotony of mechanical toil. And all this, while the clamour for material enjoyment rises higher hour by hour; and the labourer is driven, in his hard quest after squalid enjoyments, more into the dark corners of organisations for coercing a State expected to pauperise him, than to philanthropists eager to raise his condition by preaching over his head, before the roof that covers it is decent.