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 he made straight the British highway into the Orient. He presided over the White Man, taking up his burden in South Africa and Afghanistan. He presented to his royal mistress as the most substantial of his magnificent compliments the title of Empress of India. And when that pious and patriotic lady, whose conceptions of the royal prerogative he had incessantly fostered and flattered—when that excitable lady repeatedly cracked the whip over him and his recalcitrantly pacific cabinet and threatened to resign her "crown of thorns" if he did not act, Disraeli at last girded up his old loins; sent a confidential threat of war to St. Petersburg; marched to Berlin; forced Russia to withdraw from Constantinople, to restore the outraged Christians to the Turk, and her Slavic friends to Austrian auspices; and so by a right John-Bullish settlement of a European problem laid a firm foundation for the war of 1914.

There are, of course, sacrifices to be made and embarrassments to be undergone by a Jewish radical but one generation removed from the merchant class, who becomes champion of the "gentlemen of England." It did very well for Disraeli to insist in his fashion that the new Toryism was to be unselfish, comprehensive, national. But it became his duty, as a practical politician bent upon overthrowing the "Whig oligarchy," to turn a disdainful back to his