Thus it was that perhaps no public man in England ever rose so high and
acquired power so great, so little of whose work has survived him. Not
one of the great measures which he once insisted on did he carry or
attempt to carry. The great industrial problems are still left to be
solved by the workmen in their own unions. Ireland is still in the
throes of disintegration. If the colonies have refused to be cast loose
from us their continued allegiance is not due to any effort of his.
From Berlin he brought back peace with honour, but if peace remains the
honour was soon clouded. The concessions which he prided himself on
having extorted are evaded or ignored, and the imperial spirit which he
imagined that he had awakened sleeps in indifference. The voices which
then shouted so loudly for him shout now for another, and of all those
great achievements there remain only to the nation the Suez Canal shares
and the possession of Cyprus, and to his Queen the gaudy title of
Empress of India. What is there besides? Yet there is a relative
greatness as well as an absolute greatness, and Lemuel Gulliver was a
giant among the Lilliputians. Disraeli said of Peel that he was the
greatest member of Parliament that there had ever been. He was himself
the _strongest_ member of Parliament in his own day, and it was
Parliament which took him as its foremost man and made him what he was.
No one fought more stoutly when there was fighting to be done; no one
knew better when to yield, or how to encourage his followers. He was a
master of debate. He had perfect command of his temper, and while he ran
an adversary through the body he charmed even his enemies by the skill
with which he did it. He made no lofty pretensions, and his aims were
always perhaps something higher than he professed. If to raise himself
to the summit of the eminence was what he most cared for, he had a
genuine anxiety to serve his party, and in serving his party to serve
his country; and possibly if among his other gifts he had inherited an
English character he might have devoted himself more completely to great
national questions; he might have even inscribed his name in the great
roll of English worthies. But he was English only by adoption, and he
never completely identified himself with the country which he ruled. At
heart he was a Hebrew to the end, and of all his triumphs perhaps the
most satisfying was the sense that a member of that despised race had
made himself the master of the fleets and armies of the proudest of
Christian nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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