The above is a highly condensed, but strictly accurate summary of Lord Beaconsfield's version of our national history. Any reader by the slightest rummaging in his own mind will know how far his own impressions agree with it. But this is only his Lordship's instruction of us as to facts: I must proceed to state the principles of action he founds upon them. Here, however, I find myself brought up a little. If the whole truth is to be spoken, this further task is more easily announced than performed. Mr. Disraeli, in those early days, assuredly made a great appearance of stating his political opinions; but it almost seems as if a novel, after all, is not the best means of expounding political doctrine. The more you attempt to lay hold of these principles the more they somehow show a lack of exactness. But let me try. He again and again affirms that he is for our having a "real throne," which he asserts should be surrounded by "a generous aristocracy;" and he wishes, moreover, for a people who shall be "loyal and reverentially religious." All this certainly sounds as if it meant something very satisfactory. It is only when you try to penetrate into it that your over-curiosity leads to perplexity. Neither Mr. Disraeli nor Lord Beaconsfield has ever definitely explained, for example, how far a throne being "real" means that he or she sitting upon it shall have a personal veto. All that you can quite clearly make out as to securing "generousness" in the aristocracy is that they shall not be Whigs; you may suppose that they ought to be, and, in fact, no doubt would be, Tories. Pushed strictly home, it would seem to be implied that every peer who holds property which once belonged to the Church should be stripped of it, and it might be construed to mean that they should become commoners. Then, as to the people at large, how are they to be made loyal and religious, since it seems that they are neither of these now? From not the least important parts of Lord Beaconsfield's teaching, the first step logically to be taken with this view would be to ask the vote back from all of them who now have it. His own Household Franchise Bill will have given more work to do in this way. But the passing of that mysterious measure has been explained,--it was, at the moment, a necessary piece of party tactics. Strictly regarded, the explanation points to the conclusion that, if it could be done safely, the Act ought to be revoked to-morrow. But, certainly, it was no such measure as that he relied upon for elevating the condition of the people. What he did depend upon for doing it he has specified, and it is this,--the revival of Church Convocation on a particular basis, of which he knows the exact measurement. Possibly the reader, if he is not a political partisan, is growing puzzled. "Was nothing else," he may ask, "proposed in the Disraelian system for the cure of popular evils?" This, certainly, was not the whole of what it included some mention of.