However, a more rational use of my space will be to ask at what stage of his career Mr. Disraeli developed the leading political principles which came to be recognized as characteristically his? That is the only mode in which it is worth while to discuss a man's consistency. Lord Beaconsfield has himself done it all in the preface to "Lothair," but I may recall a few details. In the very first election address he ever issued, he styled the Whigs "a rapacious, tyrannical, and incapable faction." That may be taken, one would suppose, as pretty clearly marking his point of political departure. At his second candidature for Wycombe, he quoted Bolingbroke and Windham as his models; and it was as far back as 1835, in his "Vindication of the English Constitution," that he first applied the term "Venetian" to our Constitution, as the Whigs had transformed it. The very peculiarities of theoretical opinion which are most individually his, can be traced back into what in respect of a living man's career might almost be termed antiquity--it is something like two-thirds of half a century ago since he first spoke of the "Asian Mystery." Nobody's sayings live as Mr. Disraeli's have done. The truth is, that so far from his political system having been hatched piecemeal in a way of after-thought to serve exigencies of personal ambition, he started with it ready made. His critics themselves unknowingly admit this in one part of their clumsy strictures, since they can find events so very recent as his naming of the Queen Empress of India, and his appropriation of Cyprus, sketched in his early novels. But let me take the very latest arraignment to which he has been summoned to plead guilty--that of having invented "Imperialism" just to bolster himself in office. As far back as 1849, which now is exactly thirty years ago, in one of his greatest speeches after having fairly settled down as the leader of his party, he used these words:--"I would sooner my tongue should palsy than counsel the people of England to lower their tone. I would sooner leave this House for ever than I would say to the nation that it has overrated its position.... I believe in the people of England and in their destiny." In his last Premiership he has simply put those thirty-year-old utterances into practice. If he had not done all he has done, he would have been false to the heroic spirit of that far-back hour. On the hustings at Maidstone Mr. Disraeli said, "If there is one thing on which I pique myself, it is my consistency." Lord Beaconsfield in advancing age may repeat the statement without varying it a syllable, though more than forty years have elapsed between the times.