Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical SketchesMcCarthy, Justin
History
Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches
McCarthy, Justin
Biography
one can easily form some conception of what the average Tory must be.
Every one likes Lord Derby, and I fully believe it to be the fact that
those who know him best like him best. I cannot imagine Lord Derby doing
a mean thing; I cannot imagine him haughty to a poor man, or
patronizingly offensive to a timid visitor of humble birth. Look at Lord
Derby through the wrong end of the intellectual telescope and you have
the average British Tory. The Tory's knowledge is confined to classics
and field sports--when he knows anything. Even Lord Derby has been
guilty of the most flagrant mistakes in geography and modern history.
People are never tired of alluding to a famous blunder of his about
Tambov in Russia. It is also told of him that he once spoke in
Parliament of Demerara as an island; and when one of his colleagues
afterward remonstrated with him on the mistake, he asked with
ingenuousness and _naïvete_ "How on earth was I to know that Demerara
was not an island?" He once, at a public meeting, spoke of himself very
frankly as having been born "in the pre-scientific period"--the period
but too recently closed, when English Universities and high class
schools troubled themselves only about Greek and Latin, and thought it
beneath their dignity to show much interest in such vulgar, practical
studies as chemistry and natural history, to say nothing of that
ungentlemanly and ungenerous study, the science of political economy.
The average British Tory is a Lord Derby without eloquence, brains,
official habits and political experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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