The early part of Lord Beaconsfield's Parliamentary life will have to be compressed into a very brief space. Where would be the good of re-opening in any detail the closed story of those stale politics, all as dead as Queen Anne herself; or where the use of treating Mr. Disraeli's doings as very seriously forming part of those politics? He simply availed himself of his opportunities. For all practical purposes I might nearly skip--strange as that at first sight seems--to his second term of office in the post of Premier. It is only during a comparatively very few of these later years that Lord Beaconsfield has been of real importance in our politics. Of course, he had always much significance for his party, but it is of the nation I am speaking here. These individual tactics have only any general interest now through their making him successively Conservative leader, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Prime Minister. Nothing in this world, I should say, would be more tedious than tracing, for example, how Mr. Disraeli trimmed and tacked between Protection, Reciprocity, Revision of Taxation in the interests of the farmers, and a recognition of Free Trade. It all resulted in nothing; at least, the one single result it has brought forth has been--Lord Beaconsfield. But if a detailed retrospect of his lordship's earlier career would now have this dreary aspect, it was at the time lively enough, from moment to moment, not only on account of his debating smartness, but owing to a certain drollery which it for a long time wore. A Minister, plainly, must get both his glory and his power from either domestic measures or from foreign policy. Very curiously, considering all the facts of Lord Beaconsfield's history down to the beginning of this last term of office, it was only to home matters that he should have looked for any distinction. An impression seems oddly to have popularized itself that he has a special genius for foreign affairs, and an enormous acquaintance with diplomacy. I can only say, that five years ago nobody knew it. The real truth is, that he had never any opportunities before of meddling with events abroad, and that we have been represented in these recent foreign complications by a Minister who, to that very moment, had had less to do with diplomacy than any English Premier for fully three-quarters of a century.