Note 122 — Chapter VI · COLONIES—EMPIRE—FOREIGN POLICY

A most interesting collection might be made of Disraeli’s ready and fluent illustration by precedents. For of precedent his memory was quite as retentive as Gladstone’s. In his famous Address to the Crown of 1864, he was sharply blamed for referring to “the just influence of England being lowered” in the extraordinary tangle of alternate brag and whimper that attended the Government’s action in the Danish embroilment. This language was solemnly declared “unprecedented since the great days of the Norths and the Foxes.” But Disraeli instantly proved that Fox himself had used language in his own Address far more violent and censorious of the Ministry in 1846. So, again, on at least two occasions when the phrases “political morality” and “political infamy” were bandied for partisan purposes, he effectively hurled back the taunts in the teeth of their inventors, and refuted present profession by past conduct. When Palmerston again twitted him, in 1846, he received a reminder which brought home the jaunty service of seven successive Administrations, and all this, though he never attacked small game, and never any “unless he had been first assailed.” In the earlier numbers of The Press are many most interesting historical instances of how “principles” may be confused with “measures,” when the latter have to be relinquished in office from the practical duty of carrying on the Government, while at the same time the former can be developed in other directions when the national condemnation of the particular measure is deliberate. So Fox had acted towards Catholic emancipation, Russell towards the Appropriation Bill, the Whigs in the ’forties towards the Income Tax, and Disraeli in 1852 towards “Protection.” So, he argued in many previous utterances, the principle must now be followed by relieving the land, now placed under unfair conditions of competition, of its burdens.