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soil on which to try his fortune. The magniloquent letters, however, which he addressed to her daily as Leader of the House appear rather to have amazed than pleased her. 'Mr Disraeli (alias Dizzy) writes very curious reports to me of the House of Commons' proceedings-much in the style of his books,' is her comment. It needed some rare event to make a nature so imaginative as his acceptable to one so matter-of-fact as hers; and, but for Prince Albert's death, the thing might never have come about. Disraeli's oriental extravagance of language helped him then as it could have helped him at no other time. The Queen was not reserved in her grief, nor he in his appreciation; and the poetry of the Eastern dreamer read like sober prose to the desolate widow. The Prince,' he wrote to her, 'is the only person whom Mr Disraeli has ever known who realised the ideal. The only character in English History that would, in some respects, draw near to him is Sir Philip Sidney.' 'Mr Disraeli,' she told her suite more than once, 'is the only person who appreciated the Prince.' Thenceforward she bestowed on him rare distinctions; and he, a subject, seized a unique opportunity, as all the world knows, to confer upon a reigning sovereign an imperial crown.

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There is one other of his friendships, of which some record appears in these volumes, that may not be passed by without a mention-the friendship with Metternich. In the chapter on the Jews, which has already been alluded to, Disraeli calls that famous reactionary 'the most enlightened of modern statesmen,' chiefly, it appears, on the ground that he selected Friedrich Gentz, a Jew, as the Secretary of the Congress of Vienna, and suggests in addition that Metternich was the most intellectual of men.' He wrote under the glamour of an intimacy which had sprung up during Metternich's exile in England after the revolution of '48. The two had, as the Austrian observed, one great principle in common-la conservation.' They had, too, the rare industry to seek a philosophical basis for their opinions. But of such matters, needing as they do rather an education than an argument, this is no place to speak. The two men had another point in common-an insight into foreign politics of which, if Mr Buckle had written his first volume after

July 1914, instead of before it, he would have spoken more respectfully. They both viewed with scepticism the plea of nationality in international affairs. 'Dreamy and dangerous nonsense,' said Disraeli of German aspirations in 1848. And more explicitly, 'It is to gain the harbours of the Baltic and to secure the mouths of the Elbe that the plea of German nationality is put forth. . . . Peace cannot be maintained if the policy of Prussia be permitted to pass unnoticed and uncensured.' It is almost unkind to recall Mr Buckle's comment, for he warns us that it is a serious blot on Disraeli's reputation for prescience that he entirely failed to foresee what the principle of nationality was to effect for Germany and Italy. The truth is that Disraeli's vision was extraordinarily subtle, and that he had distinguished the principle of race from that of nationality, the one, in fact, the true principle of pacific penetration, the other too often a false pretext of aggressive conquest. But a Congress may yet be required to expose to the full the meretricious glamour of a catchword.

This, however, is to suggest a return to the grim realities of common day; and Mr Buckle's genial pages have carried us into a world, which, for all its anxieties and alarms, was, beside our own, full of sweetness and light. Disraeli's days may be called for a generation to come, without a shadow of exaggeration, 'the good old times.' Surely it was good to be alive when one could write, as Disraeli did to Mrs Willyams, that 'the trenches are so near the enemy, that we lose forty per diem by casualties!' And surely it was still the pastoral stage of human history when the leader of the Opposition could be rebuked, as Disraeli was, by the clergyman of the parish for travelling by train upon a Sunday, and informed that he had committed a breach of that commandment which, though not so rigidly enforced as on that people from whom with a natural pride you record your descent, is still not less binding on a Christian.' Or, if such a supposition should tax too severely the imagination of the reader, surely he will without effort fancy himself back in an England not, indeed, medieval, yet far remote from modern, when he reads that the energy of papal aggression was so great that it could be gravely compared with that of the

female sex, and Disraeli could think it worth while to profess that he feared a pair of blue stockings more than a pair of red ones. Surely it was a merry England where a distinguished diplomatist could put on a coat than which no other of more variegated hues had been seen since Joseph's jacket, and where a Prime Minister of the age of eighty could consume nine dishes of meat for his dinner, and a sentimental Home Secretary could burst into tears because the mob pulled down the railings in the Park.

At least we may affirm that it was an agreeable and entertaining world, in spite of all its slings and arrows, in which Disraeli passed his days. If sometimes, as we turn over the pages of his biography, we seem to lose sight of it, the reason is not hard to determine. Mr Buckle has no eye for decoration. That world is so little a stage for him and was so much one for Disraeli that their perceptions of it never harmonise; and, when we pass from Disraeli's descriptions to Mr Buckle's narrative, it is a little as if one were called upon to pass to and fro between one production of Shakespeare by the lavish hand of Sir Herbert Tree and another of the same piece under the austere management of Mr Granville Barker. This opposition of outlook-for it hardly amounts to less-has more than the obvious disadvantage. It results in Disraeli's being treated by his biographer with all that sedate respect which we habitually accord in this country to political personages. Others with a keener perception of the dramatic element in life were often in a difficulty to know in what light the game he played so skilfully really appeared to him. In the course of his last Administration two ladies of his acquaintance visited him on the day of a division in the House of Lords to which he looked forward, quite needlessly as it turned out, with much alarm. He depicted with every circumstance of gravity the features of an alarming political situation-factious peers, an imperilled majority, a Government drifting towards dissolution, a country threatened with disaster. 'And, dear lady,' he concluded, throwing out his hands with a gesture of despair, 'believe me, to meet the situation we have nothing, nothing but one Garter and the Bishopric of Durham.'

Was he serious? Was he fooling? Had he developed the faculty of 'make-believe' further than the rest of his countrymen, and in this one point become more English than the English themselves? Probably to such questions he could have given no answer that most of us could understand. Having nothing of the Greek about him either in temperament or training, he never learned to know himself; and, being the subject of vision and humour and political capacity, and having these three gifts most strangely blended, he was to himself as well as to others not the least remarkable of Asiatic mysteries. All we can be sure of is that long after the Conservatism of the 19th century, which he moulded to his likeness, has passed into oblivion, long after the Federal Empire, which he dreamed of, has become a coherent reality, long after the Berlin Congress has been superseded by Congresses of greater weight and greater achievement, men will from time to time discuss that versatile and enigmatic figure which, as it passed through the several phases of human life, gave to each a brilliant and appropriate expression-was in turn the marvellous adventurer, the skilful sophist, and the sardonic sage-and, as they talk, will find reason to thank the two able men who have collected with so much diligence and so much fidelity all that is material to the knowledge of a character as fascinating and as problematic as any that history shows.

ALGERNON CECIL.

Art. 12.-ENGLISH AND GERMAN BANKING IN RELATION TO TRADE AND INDUSTRY.

Two full years of war have opened the eyes of business men to much that use, habit and prosperity had overgrown. Introspection and self-criticism hold the field; congresses call for action, and deputations to Ministers refuse any longer to be put off with official platitudes. In the general welter, banks have not escaped; and many years of careful management, instead of being commended, are now characterised as showing want of adventure and disregard for the real interests of industry. The cry was first raised publicly at the annual gathering of the Associated Chambers of Commerce in February last. The attack had little force behind it and, though well engineered and advertised with some skill, quickly broke down under the weight of contrary experience. Those present knew better. It was the old story of German perfection and English dilatoriness. The success of German pre-war banking was taken for granted, and therefore English bankers were exhorted to go and do likewise. The real question at issue the soundness of German finance in generalwas begged from beginning to end. Modern banking methods wait so closely on the needs of commerce and industry that the general financial condition of both countries must be considered, if a true parallel is to be drawn between the English and German systems.

Properly to consider the present position in England, it must first be realised that our modern joint-stock system is the growth of little more than a generation. Old-time country banking was essentially local, private partnerships and small district companies easily supplying all the accommodation required. Partners and Directors, being of the countryside, knew their customers intimately, and ordered their business accordingly. In the main, this local system, though not without elements of capital weakness, served its purpose; but, as trade expanded and industrial capital accumulated, it undoubtedly lagged behind the growing needs of the times. The introduction of the principle of limited liability into business concerns extended indefinitely the number of

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