English and French Constitutions Compared

         "They {French revolutionists}measured their land, and divided it into equal geometrical departments, without the slightest regard to difference of soil or population, variety of manners, or diversity of temperament;  and in this Laputan state that great country still remains. . . .If for its associations, could not these Utilitarian legislators understand that, in destroying the associations that clung to the name of Brittany and Burgundy, they were destroying so many wholesome elements of vigorous and enduring government?  Their sentiment required that they should still dwell in Paris, beautiful and famous Paris.  Were they so blind as not to see that the outraged sympathy, which would have recoiled from styling the capital "the city of the Seine," was equally offended when the old dweller in Toraine found that he was suddenly transformed into an inhabitant of the department of the Loire? . . .In France, thanks to Equality and its crabbed fruits, there were no prejudices to shock;  but when we read of the sudden transplantation {by Louis XVIII} of institutions gradually established in the course of centuries by the phlegmatic experience of a Saxon people {i.e. England} into the most southern soils of Europe, the glittering and barbaric Sicilies, and a country which is the link between Europe and Africa, and which in the fertility of its soil, the temperature of its climate, and the character of its inhabitants, resembles Morocco more than England, we seem to be perusing the mad pages of a political novel poured forth by the wild and mystic genius of some inmate of a German University. . . .Are we never to learn that a Constitution, a real Constitution, is the creation of ages, not of a day, and that when we destroy such a Constitution we in fact destroy a nation? . . .The Constitution founded on the Sovereignty of the People has run even a shorter career than the Constitution founded on the Equality of Man:  one of the most gifted and civilised nations that ever existed is enthralled by an iron despotism;  the liberty of the press is utterly destroyed;  trial by jury virtually abrogated;  arbitrary imprisonment in daily practice;  the country covered with Bastiles, and the Bastiles crowded with State victims. . . .English equality calls upon the subject to aspire;  French equality summons him to abase himself.  In England the subject is invited to become an object of admiration or respect;  in France he is warned lest he become an object of envy or of ridicule.  The law of England has invested the subject with equality in order that, if entitled to eminence, he should rise superior to the mass.  The law of France has invested the subject with equality, on condition that he prevent the elevation of his fellow.  English equality blends every man's ambition with the perpetuity of the State;  French equality, which has reduced the subject into a mere individual, has degraded the State into a mere society.  English equality governs the subject by the united and mingled influences of reason and imagination and aspiring to reason, has, in reality, only resolved itself into a barren fantasy.  The Constitution of England is founded not only on a profound knowledge of human nature, but of human nature in England;  the political scheme of France originates not only in a profound ignorance of human nature in general, but of French human nature in particular;  thus in England, however vast and violent may be our revolutions, the Constitution ever becomes more firm and vigorous, while in France a riot oversets the government, and after half a century of political experiments one of the most intellectual of human races has succeeded in losing every attribute of a nation, and has sought refuge from anarchy in a despotism without lustre, which contradicts all its theories and violated all the principles for which it has ever affected to struggle."  Benjamin Disraeli, Vindication of the English Constitution (1835) 

Tory Manifestos, Part Three

       "But the republican model of the House of Russell was Venice;  of their plebian allies, Geneva.  The Peers, to reduce the power of the Crown, now supported by the great majority of the nation, called in the aid of the Puritans, and to obtain the aid of the Puritans attacked the Church:  the Puritans, to insure the destruction of the religious establishment, allied themselves with the Peers in their assault upon the King, whose office, apart from the ecclesiastical polity, they were inclined to respect, and even to reverence. . . .Their cry was, "Civil and Religious Freedom"--that is, a Doge and no Bishops:  advocating the liberty of the subject, the Peers would have established an oligarchy;  upholding toleration, the Puritans aimed at supremacy. . . .Instead of "swamping" the Tory House of Commons by a Septennial Act, they have moulded it to their use and fancy by a reconstruction which has secured a prepondering influence to their sectarian allies:  instead of restricting the royal prerogative in the creation of Peers, they have counselled its prodigal exercise;  but before they had only to confirm their power in the House of Lords, now they have to create their power. . . .The House of Commons remodelled, the House of Lords menaced, the King unconstitutionally controlled, the Church is next attacked, then the Corporations, and they do not conceal that the Magistracy is to be the next victim:  and the nation is thus mangled and torn to pieces, its most sacred feelings outraged, its most important interests destroyed, by a miserable minority arrogating to themselves the bewildering title of "the People," and achieving all this misery and misfortune, all this havoc and degradation, in the sacred name of liberty, and under the impudent pretence of advancing the great cause of popular amelioration, and securing the common good and general happiness."
                                           Benjamin Disraeli ,Vindication of the English Constitution                                                                             (1835)

Tory Manifestos, Part Two

       "The vast majority of the people is unrepresented and must ever be represented.  No Government of any form or frame can last without the existence of some irresponsible power in its structure, and if the House of Lords were rendered elective to-morrow, what is to check, what is to guard the people of England against the irresponsibility of the constituency and the Representatives of that constituency styled the House of Commons?. . . .But the Commons of England have exercised despotic power before this, and compared with their infamous tyranny {ed.--the Long/Rump Parliaments}the recollection of the rule of the stoutest tyrant that ever waved in this island a solitary sceptre is a dream of bliss.  Let us not, in God's name, try them again;  but if we are mad enough the Republic of jobbers will not last long.  Some brawny arm will soon be extended to 'take away this bauble.' . . .Never let us forget that the House of Commons, when they had got rid of the House of Lords, voted 'trial by Jury' a breach of privilege;  that they doubled the taxes of the country, and loaded it at the same time with enormous debts;  that they divided the public money openly among themselves;  bored men's tongues with red-hot irons who refused to answer their questions;  and sequestered the property and imprisoned the persons of all whom they styled, or chose to consider, malignants."  Benjamin Disraeli, Peers and People (1835)

Political Idealism from Lord Monmouth

       "I have for a long time looked upon the Conservative party as a body who have betrayed their trust;  more from ignorance, I admit, than from design;  yet clearly a body of individuals totally unequal to the exigencies of the epoch, and indeed unconscious of its real character. . . .Power has left our order, this is not an age for factitious aristocracy. . . .Let me see property acknowledging, as in the old days of {Catholic} faith, that labour is his twin brother, and that the essence of all tenure is the performance of duty."  Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, Chapter Three

Political Idealism

     "But I cannot find that it is part of my duty to maintain the order of things, for I will not call it system, which at present prevails in our country.  It seems to me that it cannot last, as nothing can endure, or ought to endure, that is not founded upon principle;  and its principle I have not discovered. . . .Every session of that Parliament in which you wish to introduce me, the method by which power is distributed is called in question, altered, patched up, and again impugned. . . .Our morals differ in different counties, in different towns, in different streets, even in different Acts of Parliament.  What is moral in London is immoral in Montacute;  what is crime among the multitude is only vice among the few. . . .I see nothing in this fresh development of material industry, but fresh causes of moral deterioration.  You have announced to the millions that their welfare is to be tested by the amount of their wages.  Money is to be the cupel of their worth, as it is of all other classes.  You propose for their conduct the least ennobling of all impulses.  If you have seen an aristocracy invariably become degraded under such influence;  if all the vices of a middle class may be traced to such an absorbing motive;  why are we to believe that the people should be more pure, or that they should escape the catastrophe of the policy that confounds the happiness with the wealth of nations?"- Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred, Chapter Seven 

Whig Church

"Tadpole was wont to say in confidence, that for his part he wished Sir Robert had left alone religion and commerce, and confined himself to finance, which was his forte as long as he had a majority to carry the projects which he found in the pigeon-holes of the Treasury, and which are always at the service of every minister."

Tory Manifestos

       "The Aristocracy of England have had for three centuries the exercise of power;  for the last century and a half that exercise has been uncontrolled;  they form at this moment the most prosperous class that the history of the world can furnish:  as rich as the Roman senators, with sources of convenience and enjoyment which modern science could alone supply.  All this is not denied.  Your order stands before Europe the most gorgeous of existing spectacles;  though you have of late years dexterously thrown some of the odium of your polity upon that middle class which you despise, and who are despicable only because they imitate you, your tenure of power is not in reality impaired.  You govern us still with absolute authority--and you govern the most miserable people on the face of the globe.  Disraeli, Sybil ,p.195
       "Here too was brought forth that monstrous conception which even patrician Rome in its most ruthless period never equalled--the mortgaging of the industry of the country to enrich and to protect property;  and act which is bringing its retributive consequences in a degraded and alienated population.  Here too have the innocent been impeached and hunted to death;  and a virtuous and able monarch martyred, because, among other benefits projected for his people, he was of opinion that it was more for their advantage that the economic service of the State should be supplied by direct taxation levied by an individual known to all, than by indirect taxation, raised by an irresponsible and fluctuating assembly.  But, thanks to parliamentary patriotism, the people of England were saved from ship-money, which money the wealthy paid, and only got in its stead the customs and excise, which the poor mainly supply.  Rightly was King Charles {I.} surnamed the Martyr;  for he was the holocaust of direct taxation.  Never yet did man lay down his heroic life for so great a cause:  the cause of the Church and the cause of the Poor."  Disraeli, Sybil, p.198
       "But we forget, Sir Robert Peel is not the leader of the Tory party;  the party that resisted the ruinous mystification that metamorphosed direct taxation by the Crown into indirect taxation by the Commons;  that denounced the system that mortgaged industry to protect property;  the party that ruled Ireland by a scheme which reconciled both Churches, and by a series of Parliaments which counted among them Lords and Commons of both religions;  that has maintained at all times the territorial constitution of England as the only basis and security for local government, and which nevertheless once laid on the table of the House of Commons a commercial tariff negotiated at Utrecht, which is the most rational that was ever devised by statesmen;  a party that has prevented the Church from being the salaried agent of the State, and has supported through many struggles the parochial polity of the country which secures to every labourer a home.
       In a parliamentary sense, that great party has ceased to exist;  but I will believe that it still lives in the thought and sentiment and consecrated memory of the English nation.  It has its origin in great principles and in noble instincts;  it sympathizes with the lowly, it looks up to the Most High;  it can count its heroes and its martyrs;  they have met in its behalf plunder, proscription, and death.  Nor, when it finally yielded to the iron progress of oligarchical supremacy, was its catastrophe inglorious.  Its genius was vindicated in golden sentences and with fervent arguments of impassioned logic by St. John;  and breathed in the intrepid eloquence and patriot soul of William Wyndham.  Even now it is not dead, but sleepeth;  and, in an age of political materialism, of confused purposes and perplexed intelligence, that aspires only to wealth because it has faith in no other accomplishment, as men rifle over which Bolingbroke shed his last tear, to bring back strength to the Crown, liberty to the subject, and to announce that power has only one duty--to secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE." Disraeli, Sybil ,pgs. 233-34.
       "The great object of the Whig leaders in England from the first movement under Hampden to the last most successful one in 1688, was to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of the Venetian, then the study and admiration of all speculative politicians.  Read Harrington;  turn over Algernon Sydney;  then you will see how the minds of the English leaders in the seventeenth century were saturated with the Venetian type. .  . .George I. was a Doge;  George II. was a Doge;  they were what William III., a great man, would not be.  George III. tried not to be a Doge, but it was impossible materially to resist the deeply-laid combination.  And a Venetian constitution did govern England from the Accession of the House of Hanover until 1832."  Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby , Book V, Chapter Two 

Lord Shelburne, Part Three

       "That age of economical statesmanship which Lord Shelburne had predicted in 1787, when he demolished, in the House of Lords, Bishop Watson and the Balance of Trade, which Mr. Pitt had comprehended;  and for which he was preparing the nation when the French Revolution diverted the public mind into a stronger and more turbulent current, was again impending, while the intervening history of the country had been prolific in events which had aggrevated the necessity of investigating the sources of the wealth of nations.

       It was to be an age of abtruse disquisition, that required a compact and sinewy intellect, nurtured in a class of learning not yet honoured in colleges, and which might arrive at conclusions conflicting with predominant prejudices."  Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby Book II, Chapter One

Lord Shelburne, Part Two

       "Such was the man selected by George the Third as his champion against the Venetian party, after the termination of the American War.  The prosecution of that war they had violently opposed, though it had originated in their own policy.  First minister in the House of Lords, Shelburne entrusted the lead in the House of Commons to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, the youthful Pitt.  The administration was brief, but it was not inglorious.  It obtained peace, and, for the first time since the Revolution, introduced into modern debate the legitimate principles on which commerce should be conducted.  It fell before the famous Coalition with which 'the Great Revolution families' commenced their fiercest and their last contention for the patrician government of royal England.
       In the heat of that great strife, the king, in the second hazardous exercise of his prerogative, entrusted the perilous command to Pitt.  Why Lord Shelburne on that occasion was set aside, will perhaps always remain a mysterious passage of our political history, nor have we space on the present occasion to attempt to penetrate its motives.  Perhaps the monarch, with a sense of the rising sympathies of his people, was prescient of the magic power of youth in touching the heart of a nation. Yet it would not be an unprofitable speculation, if for a moment we paused to consider what might have been the consequences to our country if Mr. Pitt had been content for a season again to lead the Commons under Lord Shelburne, and to have secured for England the unrivalled knowledge and dexterity of that statesman in the conduct of our affairs during the confounding fortunes of the French Revolution.  Lord Shelburne was the only English minister competent to the task;  he was the only public man who had the previous knowledge requisite to form accurate conclusions on such a conjuncture;  his remaining speeches on the subject attest the amplitude of his knowledge and the accuracy of his views;  and in the rout of Jena, or the agony of Austerlitz, one cannot refrain from picturing the shade of Shelburne haunting the Cabinet of Pitt, as the ghost of Canning is said occasionally to linger about the Speaker's chair, and smile sarcastically on the conscientious mediocrities who pilfered his hard-earned honours."  Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil,p.16-17 (Wordsworth ed.)

Lord Shelburne, Part One

      " It could no longer be concealed that, by virtue of a plausible phrase, power had been transferred from the Crown to a Parliament, the members of which were appointed by an extremely limited and exclusive class, who owned no responsibility to the country, who debated and voted in secret, and who were regularly paid by the small knot of great families that by this machinery had secured the permanent possession of the king's treasury.  Whiggism was putrescent in the nostrils of the nation;  we were probably on the eve of a bloodless yet important revolution;  when Rockingham, a virtuous magnifico, alarmed and disgusted, resolved to revive something of the pristine purity and high-toned energy of the old Whig connection, appealed to his 'new generation' from a degenerate age, arrayed under his banner the generous youth of the Whig families, and was fortunate to enlist in the service the supreme genius of Edmund Burke.

       No sooner had a young and dissolute noble{C.J. Fox}, who, with some of the aspirations of a Caesar, oftener realised the conduct of a Catiline, appeared on the stage, and after some inglorious tergiversation adopted their colours, than they transferred to him the command which had been won by wisdom and genius, vindicated by unrivalled knowledge and adorned by accomplished eloquence.  When the hour arrived for the triumph which he had prepared, he was not even admitted into the Cabinet, virtually presided over by his graceless pupil, and who, in the profuse suggestions of his teeming converse, had found the principles and the information which were among the chief claims to public confidence of Mr. Fox.

       To understand Mr. Pitt, one must understand one of the suppressed characters of English history, and that is Lord Shelburne.  When the fine genius of the injured Bolingbroke, the only peer of his period who was educated, and proscribed by the oligarchy because they were afraid of his eloquence, 'the glory of his order and the shame,' shut out from Parliament, found vent in those writings which recalled to the English people the inherent blessings of their old free monarchy, and painted in immortal hues his picture of a patriot king, the spirit that he raised at length touched the heart of Carteret, born a Whig, yet sceptical of the advantages of that patrician constitution which made the Duke of Newcastle, the most incompetent of men, but the chosen leader of the Venetian party, virtually sovereign of England.  Lord Carteret had many brilliant qualities:  he was undaunted, enterprising, eloquent;  had considerable knowledge of continental politics, was a great linguist, a master of public law;  and though he failed in his premature effort to terminate the dogeship of George the Second, he succeeded in maintaining a considerable though secondary position in public life.  The young Shelburne married his daughter.  Of him it is singular we know less than of his father-in-law, yet from the scattered traits some idea may be formed of the ablest and most accomplished minister of the eighteenth century.  Lord Shelburne, influenced probably by the example and the traditionary precepts of his eminent father-in-law, appears early to have held himself aloof from the patrician connection, and entered public life as the follower of Bute in the first great effort of George the Third to rescue the sovereignty from what Lord Chatham called 'the Great Revolution families.'  He became in time a member of Lord Chatham's last administration;  one of the strangest and most unsuccessful efforts to aid the grandson of George the Second in his struggle for political emancipation.  Lord Shelburne adopted from the first the Bolingbroke system;  a real royalty, in lieu of the chief magistracy;  a permanent alliance with France, instead of the Whig scheme of viewing in that power the natural enemy of England;  and, above all, a plan of commercial freedom, the germ of which may be found in the long-maligned negotiations of Utrecht, but which, in the instance of Lord Shelburne, were soon in time matured by all the economical science of Europe, in which he was a proficient.  Lord Shelburne seems to have been of a reserved and somewhat astute disposition:  deep and adroit, he was however brave and firm.  His knowledge was extensive and even profound.  He was a great linguist;  he pursued both literary and scientific investigations;  his house was frequented by men of letters, especially those distinguished by their political abilities or economical attainments.  He maintained the most extensive private correspondence of any public man of his time.  The earliest and most authentic information reached him from all Courts and quarters of Europe;  and it was a common phrase, that the minister of the day sent to him often for the important information which the Cabinet could not itself command.  Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who comprehended the rising importance of the middle class, and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against 'the Great Revolution families.'  Of his qualities in council we have no record;  there is reason to believe that his administrative ability was conspicuous;  his speeches prove that, if not supreme, he was eminent, in the art of parliamentary disputation, while they show on all the questions discussed a richness and variety of information, with which the speeches of no statesman of that age except Mr. Burke can compare." Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, Pgs. 13, 14,15-16. (Wordsworth ed.)

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"Speech is for fools, but is for genius to observe." Benjamin Disraeli