This position was held by Disraeli through each of Derby’s three administrations; and on the resignation of that nobleman in February of 1868 the Chancellor of the Exchequer was raised to the post of Prime-Minister. This, however, he was obliged to resign before the end of the year; but in 1873, when Mr. Gladstone’s Government was defeated on the Irish Education Bill, the position was again tendered him. The circumstances of the situation, however, did not encourage him to accept. The Liberal ministry had been defeated not by the Conservatives alone, but by a combination with the Home Rulers, a group of some sixty Irish members who were likely to vote with the Liberals on all other questions. The offer, therefore, was declined; but when in the following year Mr. Gladstone decided to test the relative strength of the parties by a dissolution and an appeal to the country, the Conservatives were returned in triumphant majority, and Mr. Disraeli, in February, 1874, was called a second time to the head of the government. This position he continued to hold till the election of 1880, when, under the rigorous assaults of Gladstone and his followers, the Conservative policy was rejected by the country. Meanwhile, in August of 1876, Disraeli had been raised to the peerage with the title of Earl of Beaconsfield, and in July of 1878 had been invested with the Order of the Garter. With the downfall of his ministry in 1880, Lord Beaconsfield’s political career came to an end, though he continued to inspire the Opposition to the policy of his opponents till the time of his death in 1881. Throughout Disraeli’s political career, or at least ever after the very first years of it, he was a staunch advocate of the old Tory principles advocated by Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Shelburne. In “Coningsby” and cropping out here and there in his speeches we find constant evidences of his belief that the welfare of the common people depends upon the union of the upper and the lower classes under the guidance of the Conservative party. He held that the triumph of the Whigs was the triumph of the middle class in opposition to the interests of the lower, and that the inevitable results of a triumph of Whig principles must be the creation of irreconcilable differences between classes that ought to be cordially united. These views were elaborated in his “Life of Lord George Bentinck,” in his “Defence of the English Constitution,” and to some extent in his speeches on the Reform Bill of 1867.