his own words, "no society, but only aggregation:" or, again to quote him, "the moral condition of the people was entirely lost sight of." Much of this, he believed, was due to the Church having failed in its obligations. "The Church," he makes one of the characters in his story say to another in it, "has deserted the people, and from that moment the Church has been in danger, and the people degraded." At this point I may very rightly interpolate a remark which has not a little explanatory value. Just in proportion to the importance given in Lord Beaconsfield's system to the Church was his natural disappointment at the failure, regarded from one side, of the awakening going on within its borders at the time of the "Young England" movement. A great part of his hopes rested on that stir. He was expecting from those most prominent in it a grand resuscitation of the Anglican Church, but in place of that he says Dr. (now Cardinal) Newman and the other seceders "sought refuge in mediæval superstitions, which are generally only the embodiment of pagan ceremonies and creeds." Bearing this in mind, there ought not to be much difficulty in understanding either Lord Beaconsfield's position towards the Ritualists, or the course he took as to the Public Worship Regulation Act. What was the remedy for this state of society into which England had fallen? The cure which seemed natural to Mr. Disraeli was to revert to the principles of our history. Practically, the first thing to be done was to break up the political monopoly of the Whigs, and it was this very task that he set himself to do. I have already extracted a passage denouncing that party in the first election address he issued. But here, too, he had no new course to strike out. He affirmed that both Lord Shelburne and Mr. Pitt had attempted the same work long before. Shelburne, he said, saw in the growing middle-class a bulwark for the throne against the Revolution families; and Pitt, still more determined to curb the power of the patrician party, created a plebeian aristocracy, when they baffled his first endeavours, blending it with the old oligarchy. It has not unlikely begun to dawn upon the reader that Mr. Disraeli, holding these views, was himself a Reformer, of a much more comprehensive kind even than the Radicals. True, Reform as it actually had come about in 1832, most craftily manipulated as it then was by the Whigs to their own advantage, skilfully snatching profit out of what ought to have been a danger to them, was not his notion. For part of what happened then he, indeed, with his usual courage, blamed the Duke of Wellington and his colleagues. His own party have had from no quarter criticism so severe as that he has given them. If Lord Beaconsfield is in favour of an aristocracy, it is because he is for making it actually "lead." He affirms that the Tories, by their conduct in office, precipitated a revolution which might have been delayed for half a century, and which need never have