Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/324

 dramatic and ruthless force to destroy Peel, his former leader, who had abandoned it, he himself stealthily abandoned as soon as the work of destruction was accomplished, thus exactly duplicating the "treachery" with which he had charged the man whom he displaced, and proving that a practical politician is one who repeats the sins of his predecessor. In the course of his assault, he seems, as his biographer admits, to have lied deliberately and solemnly, to the House full of the "gentlemen of England," in denying that he had sought office under Peel. In 1865 he solemnly warned the House against sanctioning any "step that has a tendency to democracy"; for Lord Russell was pressing for an extension of the suffrage. But two years later, he himself strode toward democracy—or, as Carlyle screamed in septuagenarian panic, "leaped Niagara"—by putting through the Reform of 1867, which emancipated the lower as the legislation of 1832 had emancipated the middle class. Such things occur when a born revolutionary in a Tory mantle advances on power with perfect inflexibility of purpose and perfect mobility of principle.

Guizot said to Disraeli on his accession to acknowledged leadership: "I think your being the leader of the Tory party is the greatest triumph that Liberalism has ever achieved." Guizot was clairvoyant in perceiving the joke on the country gentry involved in their accepting the guidance of this radical mind; but he perhaps overstated the "triumph" of Liberalism in the ambiguous position