CHAPTER XXXVIII.

'ON THE TRUE FAITH OF A CHRISTIAN.'

WHEN Mr. Disraeli became once more leader of the House of Commons, he must have felt that he had almost as difficult a path to tread as that of him described in 'Henry the Fourth,' who has to 'o'erwalk a current roaring loud on the unsteadfast footing of a spear.' The ministry of Lord Derby, whereof Mr. Disraeli was undoubtedly the sense-carrier, was not supported by a parliamentary majority, nor could it pretend to great intellectual and administrative ability. It had in its ranks two or three men of something like statesman capacity, and a number of respectable persons possessing abilities about equal to those of any intelligent business man or county magistrate. Mr. Disraeli of course became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Stanley undertook the Colonies; Mr. Walpole made a painstaking and conscientious Home Secretary, as long as he continued to hold the office. Lord Malmesbury muddled on with Foreign Affairs somehow; Lord Ellenborough's brilliant eccentric light perplexed for a brief space the Indian Department. General Peel was Secretary for War, and Mr. Henley President of the Board of Trade. Lord Naas, afterwards Lord Mayo, became

Chief Secretary for Ireland, and was then supposed to be nothing more than a kindly, sweet-tempered man, of whom his most admiring friends would never have ventured to foreshadow such a destiny as that he should succeed to the place of a Canning and an Elgin, and govern the new India to which so many anxious eyes were turned. Sir John Pakington was made First Lord of the Admiralty, because a place of some kind had to be found for him, and he was as likely to do well at the head of the navy as anywhere else. A ridiculous story, probably altogether untrue, used to be told of President Lincoln in some of the difficult days of the American Civil War. He wanted a commander-in-chief, and he happened to be in conversation with a friend on the subject of the war. Suddenly addressing the friend, he asked him if he had ever commanded an army. 'No, Mr. President,' was the reply. 'Do you think you could command an army?' 'I presume so, Mr. President; I know nothing to the contrary.' He was appointed Commander-in-Chief at once. One might without great stretch of imagination conceive of a conversation of the same kind taking place between Sir John Pakington and Lord Derby. Sir John Pakington had no reason to know that he might not prove equal to the administration of the navy, and he became First Lord of the Admiralty accordingly. No Conservative Government could be supposed to get on without Lord John Manners, and luckily there was the Department of Public Works for him.

Lord Stanley was regarded as a statesman of great

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and peculiar promise. The party to which he belonged were inclined to make him an object of especial pride because he seemed to have in a very remarkable degree the very qualities which most of their leading members were generally accused of wanting. The epithet which Mr. Mill at a later period applied to the Tories, that of the stupid party, was the expression of a feeling very common in the political world, and under which many of the Conservatives themselves winced. The more intelligent a Conservative was the more was he inclined to chafe at the ignorance and dulness of many of the party. It was therefore with particular satisfaction that intelligent Tories saw among themselves a young statesman, who appeared to have all those qualities of intellect and those educational endowments which the bulk of the party did not possess, and what was worse did not even miss. Lord Stanley had a calm meditative intellect. He studied politics as one may study a science. He understood political economy, that new-fangled science which had so bewildered his party, and of which the Peelites and the Manchester men made so much account. He had travelled much; not merely making the old-fashioned grand tour, which most of the Tory country gentlemen had themselves made, but visiting the United States and Canada and the Indies, East and West. He was understood to know all about geography and cotton and sugar; and he had come up into politics in a happy age when the question of Free Trade was understood to be settled. The Tories were proud of him, as a democratic mob is proud of

an aristocratic leader, or as a working men's convention is proud of the co-operation of some distinguished scholar. Lord Stanley was strangely unlike his father in intellect and temperament. The one man was indeed almost the very opposite of the other. Lord Derby was all instinct and passion; Lord Stanley was all method and calculation. Lord Derby amused himself in the intervals of political work by translating classic epics and odes; Lord Stanley beguiled an interval of leisure by the reading of Blue-books. Lord Derby's eloquence when at its worst became fiery nonsense; Lord Stanley's sank occasionally to be nothing better than platitude. The extreme of the one was rhapsody, and of the other commonplace. Lord Derby was too hot and impulsive to be always a sound statesman; Lord Stanley was too coldly methodical to be the statesman of a crisis. Both men were to a certain sense superficial and deceptive. Lord Derby's eloquence had no great depth in it; and Lord Stanley's wisdom often proved somewhat thin. The career of Lord Stanley did not afterwards bear out the expectations that were originally formed of him. He proved to be methodical, sensible, conscientious, slow. He belonged perhaps to that class of men about whom Goethe said, that if they could only once commit some extravagance we should have greater hopes of their future wisdom. He did not commit any extravagance; he remained careful, prudent, and slow. But at the time when he accepted the Indian Secretaryship it was still hoped that he would, to use a homely expression, warm to his work,

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and on both sides of the political contest people looked to him as a new and a great figure in Conservative politics. He was not an orator; he had nothing whatever of the orator in language or in temperament. His manner was ineffective; his delivery was decidedly bad. But his words carried weight with them, and even his commonplaces were received by some of his party as the utterances of an oracle. There were men among the Conservatives of the back benches who secretly hoped that in this wise young man was the upcoming statesman who was to deliver the party from the thraldom of eccentric genius, and of an eloquence which, however brilliantly it fought their battles, seemed to them hardly a respectable sort of gift to be employed in the service of gentlemanlike Tory principles.

Lord Stanley had been in office before. During his father's first administration he had acted as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. On the death of Sir William Molesworth, Lord Palmerston had offered the Colonial Secretaryship to Lord Stanley; but the latter, although his Toryism was of the most moderate and liberal kind, did not see his way to take a seat in a Liberal administration. His appearance

therefore as a Cabinet Minister in the Government formed by his father was an event looked to with great interest all over the country. The Liberals were not without a hope that he might some day find himself driven by his conscientiousness and his clear unprejudiced intelligence into the ranks of avowed Liberalism. It was confidently predicted of him in a