Lord Salisbury is equipped with many of the qualifications that are necessary or held to be desirable in a party leader. He is a member of the higher aristocracy. He can boast of ancestors who played a distinguished part in the politics of Europe three centuries ago. This circumstance appeals to the imagination and confers a legitimate advantage. He served an apprenticeship in the House of Commons. On succeeding to the peerage he did not lose a moment in making his influence felt in the Upper House. In one of his earliest speeches he startled the peers by telling them that if they did not choose to assert their constitutional rights they would consult their dignity by ceasing to be a House at all. He has had much experience in State affairs. What he did at the India Office and as Foreign Secretary is too well known to the world. Lord Salisbury's oratorical gifts are undeniable. He is one of a select half-dozen taken from either House who stand first in the power of moving a popular assembly. Lord Beaconsfield said that he "wanted finish." The remark was more spiteful than true. Lord Salisbury could not rival his chief in the neatness and polish of an epigram, but just as little could Lord Beaconsfield rival him in the unstudied graces of oratory. His speeches have a freedom and a rhythmical flow which captivate the hearer. Though he gives full play to his imagination and recklessly faces the risks to which an impetuous speaker is exposed, he is seldom stilted, and rarely breaks the neck of a sentence. Here, perhaps, the favourable side of the catalogue should end. His speeches have the great blemish of insolence. They are wanting in geniality, and apparently wanting in reflectiveness. They contain too little thought and more than enough of gall. Perhaps their cleverness is too obtrusive. His hearers are pleased, but they suspect a trick, and levy a discount on his argument. The faults of his speeches are his faults as a politician. He is headstrong and impulsive. He borrows his ideas from his passions, and fancies he is sagacious when he is but following the bent of his uppermost desire. He has but little sympathy with modern life and but a narrow comprehension of its facts. He is under the spell of long-descended traditions, and would prefer, if he could have it so, the England of the Tudors to the England of Victoria. Of the people and of the spirit which animates them he knows nothing. How should he? Save the rustics of Hatfield, he has never seen them, except from a platform. His occasional references to such a subject as English Nonconformity shows the depth of his benightedness; and his ignorance, the voluntary and superb ignorance of the aristocrat and the High Churchman, is the source of many of his blunders. Knowing nothing of the ground in front, he forces a leap and comes down in the ditch, and his friends with him.