Disraeli, therefore, saw the rock ahead, but how did he endeavour to steer the ship clear of the rock?  It is in dealing with this aspect of the case that the view of the statesman dwindles away and is supplanted by that of the self-seeking party manager.  His fundamental idea was that “we had altogether outgrown, not the spirit, but the organisation of our institutions.”  The manner in which he proposed to reorganise our institutions was practically to render the middle classes politically powerless.  His scheme, constituting the germ which, at a later period, blossomed into the Tory democracy, was developed as early as 1840 in a letter addressed to Mr. Charles Attwood, who was at that time a popular leader.  “I entirely agree with you,” he said, “that an union between the Conservative Party and the Radical masses offers the only means by which we can preserve the Empire.  Their interests are identical; united they form the nation; and their division has only permitted a miserable minority, under the specious name of the People, to assail all right of property and person.”

Mr. Monypenny, if I understand rightly, is generally in sympathy with Disraeli’s project, and appears to think that it might have been practicable to carry it into effect.  He condemns Peel’s counter-idea of substituting a middle-class Toryism for that which then existed as “almost a contradiction in terms.”  I am unable to concur in this view.  I see no contradiction, either real or apparent, in Peel’s counter-project, and I hold that events have proved that the premises on which Disraeli based his conclusion were entirely false, for his political descendants, while still pursuing his main aim, viz. to ensure a closer association of the Conservative Party and the masses, have been forced by circumstances into an endeavour to effect that union by means not merely different from but antagonistic to those which Disraeli himself contemplated.

It all depends on what Disraeli meant when he spoke of “Conservatism,” and on what Mr. Monypenny meant when he spoke of “Toryism.”  It may readily be conceded that a “middle-class Toryism,” in the sense in which Disraeli would have understood the expression, was “a contradiction in terms,” for the bed-rock on which his Toryism was based was that it should find its main strength in the possessors of land.  The creation of such a Toryism is a conceivable political programme.  In France it was created by the division of property consequent on the Revolution.  Thiers said truly enough that in the cottage of every French peasant owning an acre of land would be found a musket ready to be used in the defence of property.  In fact, the five million peasant proprietors now existing in France represent an eminently conservative class.  But, so far as I know, there is not a trace to be found in any of Disraeli’s utterances that he wished to widen the basis of agricultural conservatism by creating a peasant proprietary class.  He wished, above all things, to maintain the territorial magnates in the full possession of their properties.  When he spoke of a “union between the Conservative Party and the Radical masses” he meant a union between the “patricians” and the working men, and the answer to this somewhat fantastic project is that given by Juvenal 1800 years ago: