Art. XII.-THE MARQUIS OF SALISBURY.

1. The Life and Speeches of the Marquis of Salisbury, K.G. By F. S. Pulling. London: Sampson Low, 1885.

2. The Marquis of Salisbury. By H. D. Traill. London: Sampson Low, 1891.

3. The Life and Times of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, K.G. By S. H. Jeyes. London: Virtue, 1896. 4. British and Foreign State Papers. Vols. LXXVII-XCI. London, 1876-1902.

5. Schulthess' Europäischer Geschichtskalender. Von Hans Delbruck und Gustav Roloff. Munich: Beck, 1876-1902. WITH the retirement of Lord Salisbury from the field of active politics, a career of prodigious activity and success, marked by singular dignity of conduct and loftiness of character, has come to an end. To essay a judicial appreciation of such a life is not easy, especially at the present moment. It is a commonplace of the biographic art that no absolutely trustworthy history is possible in the generation to which it belongs, partly because its judgments must inevitably be coloured by party feeling and personal prepossessions, and partly because the material with which it has to deal must necessarily be incomplete. In the case of modern statesmen there is a further difficulty to which public opinion a century ago was a stranger. While, on the one hand, many indispensable clues to motive must still remain hidden in secret state papers and personal confidences, the accessible materials relating to action are more abundant than ever they were; and this abundance is rendered more difficult of digestion by the increased complexity of political problems.

In the case of Lord Salisbury the task of synthesis is made more perplexing by the fact that, in an age given over to reform, he became a living and successful force without sacrificing principles of a pre-reform origin. It is interesting to note how this paradox has been treated by the newspaper critics. On the Tory side it has been for the most part ignored, all attention being concentrated on his work as Foreign Secretary, which is undoubtedly his main title to fame. Among the Opposition and the great bulk of the unthinking public, however, the paradox Vol. 196.-No. 392.

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is explained by a convenient theory of survivals. The final word is held to have been uttered when the late Premier is patronisingly dismissed as 'the Last of the Barons,' or 'a lingering remnant of unbending Toryism.' Popular intuitions suffer from their tendency to express themselves in generalisations which are at once too wide and too rigid, but they are not on that account devoid of a certain penetrating shrewdness. So far as the 'Last-ofthe-Barons' label recognises in Lord Salisbury the spirit of early nineteenth-century Toryism, it is not inaccurate; but it is totally misleading when it assumes that the popular interpretation of that spirit, born of the ascendency of Liberal ideas between 1835 and 1885, is Lord Salisbury's; and the consequent deduction that he represents an obsolete school of political thought is erroneous. The truth is that Lord Salisbury has stood, not for a moribund survival, but for an effective revival of the Toryism of Pitt, Castlereagh, and Canning, as he understands it. He has been more essentially the link which, in the history of Conservatism, binds the Disraelian epoch with that of Pitt and his disciples than was Disraeli himself. The Duke of Wellington was no more a creative force in Toryism than was Lord Goderich. Sir Robert Peel, Lord Derby, and Lord Beaconsfield were less essentially party-leaders than the artificers of the great transition which gave us a new common ground for party struggles in the shape of Free Trade and Household Suffrage. Lord Salisbury, taking no part in this work of transition, brought back to reformed England the old Tory principles; and it is his merit that he has shown that, in the new conditions of political life, these principles respond to a deep-seated national sentiment, and are just as effective for popular well-being as the more drastic recipes of the Radicals.

How far this service has expressed itself in constructive legislation due to his own personal initiative cannot be known until the Cabinet secrets of the last fifteen years are divulged. The question, however, is immaterial. In the domain of domestic legislation his constructive record may or may not be scanty; but in the region of political thought his services to Toryism-the principle rather than the party-have been far more considerable than is generally recognised. When once these services are clearly understood it will be seen that, whatever may be his

personal responsibility for the democratic legislation of the Unionists, it involved no derogation from his fidelity to Tory principles. It is a long cry from Pitt and Castlereagh to the Duke of Devonshire and Mr Chamberlain ; but it is none the less a fact that, throughout his life, Pitt, in domestic politics, and Castlereagh, in foreign affairs, have been Lord Salisbury's chief exemplars. From neither of these men, however, did he slavishly borrow maxims which found all their force in a vanished condition of things. So far as they stood for the historic continuity of British institutions and the rights of property he was with them. For the rest, he learnt from Castlereagh his patient and unemotional diplomacy, and from Pitt the popular value of a character for stainless purity and lofty forgetfulness of self, and the political value of an untheoretic mind in which abstract doctrines, watchwords, and shibboleths had no place. It is this untheoretic mind which perplexes the students of Lord Salisbury. Fixing their gaze on the pre-reform Tories, they imagine that all the axioms of that period must be vital to Tory principles, and hence they figure to themselves a statesman who sought refuge in the Foreign Office from democratic legislation which struck at the root of his dearest prejudices, but which he was powerless to hinder.

That this idea is wholly unfounded may be shown by a long array of speeches and other expositions of his political opinions reaching from 1853 to 1900. The dominant note of all these utterances is that in Toryism, as in everything else, change is the inexorable law of life. As an irresponsible politician of the unbending Tory school we find him, in 1861, preaching this doctrine with a zeal rivalling the destructive energy of the Manchester Radicals. On the eve of his first Premiership in 1884, with a great Tory revival before his eyes, he again urged the lesson on his party, but in an even more revolutionary form. The two passages are worth recalling. Here is what he wrote in 1861 :

'The historical continuity of parties has a political as well as a sentimental value; but it is an absolute delusion if it is applied to measure the tendencies of a statesman in one age by the tendencies of another statesman in another age. It will only mislead if it is used to give a character of permanence to that which is in its nature fleeting. The axioms of

the last age are the fallacies of the present; the principles which save one generation may be the ruin of the next. There is nothing abiding in political science but the necessity of truth, purity, and justice. The evils by which the body politic is threatened are in a state of constant change, and with them the remedies by which those evils must be cured.'

The repetition of this idea is found in his speech in the House of Lords on the Housing of the Poor twenty-three years later:

'After all, even my noble friend [Lord Wemyss] may press as earnestly as he will upon us the necessity of leaving every Englishman to work out his own destiny and not attempt to aid him at the expense of the State; but, on the other side, he must always bear in mind that there are no absolute truths or principles in politics.... I hope Parliament will never transgress the laws of public honesty, but I equally hope that Parliament will not be deterred by fear of being tempted to transgress those laws, or, still more, by the fear of being accused of intending to transgress those laws, from fearlessly facing, and examining, and attempting to fathom these appalling problems which involve the deepest moral, material, and spiritual interests of our fellow-countrymen.'

Against this elasticity of party doctrine, of course, will be set his intransigeant attitude towards the Reform Bills of 1866 and 1867. It is, however, a mistake to imagine that he opposed those measures because they violated Tory principles. His action was in reality governed by the ingrained caution which has been at once his strength and his weakness through life. A few months ago a discontented Tory twitted him with being a man who took no risks.' This reproach touches the very essence of his character. It has been as marked a feature of his domestic as of his foreign policy, and it was the mainspring of his action in 1866-67. The extension of the suffrage was to him 'a leap in the dark.' The leap in itself was not necessarily a revolution; but the danger of revolution probably lurked in the abyss below. He distrusted the democracy, not, as he explained, because their nature was different from that of other classes, but because the franchise would expose them to temptations out of all proportion to their material resources.

The flexibility of his 'unbending Toryism' in practice

is strikingly illustrated by the sequel. The Reform Bill of 1867 was the turning-point in his career. The fears with which that measure had inspired him were, as we know, not realised. He had argued from the normal weaknesses of human nature without taking account of the differentiations of national sentiment. The innate conservatism of the English people revealed itself in the elections of 1874; and Lord Salisbury was neither slow nor grudging in recognising his error or in explaining it to himself. Lord Beaconsfield dimly perceived the moral force that was at work, but he was content to perceive it and to embody it in a phrase. Lord Salisbury, on the other hand, not only perceived it but laboriously analysed it, and sought to justify it by a wider interpretation of Tory doctrine. He saw that the era of great measures of structural reform was at an end. The repeal of the Corn Laws, the removal of Religious Disabilities, the extension of the franchise, the Ballot Act and the Elementary Education Act had extinguished all the urgent grievances of the great bulk of the people. Their normal political instincts were now free, and their conservative bias had been strengthened by the widely distributed prosperity resulting from cheapened raw materials, railways, and scientific discoveries. The elections of 1874 were, as Lord Salisbury told the Middlesex Conservative Association in the following year, 'a declaration that the English nation will never endure destructive legislation.' The discovery of this conservatism explains all his subsequent concessions to the democracy. Social amelioration as distinct from organic change had always been his ideal. The safety of the constitutional principle and the interests of the Tory party now required the active promotion of legislation in this direction.

'It is the duty of every Englishman and of every English party,' he wrote at the bitterest moment of his disappointment in 1867, 'to accept a political defeat cordially, and to lend their best endeavours to secure the success or to neutralise the evil of the principles to which they have been forced to succumb.'

To this work he now set himself. He was under no illusions. If he was convinced that there was no danger of internal revolution from the new democracy, he did