leaders and influential citizens—carried with them from the mother country strong working-class or middle-class opinions and prejudices. What could be more alien to such people than much of the political philosophy of Disraeli's novels? Yet it is a fatal mistake for the ordinary English Liberal or Radical to assert that we democratic colonists were simply fascinated and deluded by Lord Beaconsfield's "showy foreign policy," and what they used to term his "sham Imperialism." It is doubtless the want of all Imperial sentiment, which has marked the English Liberals under the long papacy of Mr. Gladstone, that in the first instance alienated the colonists from a leader whose genius works most smoothly on the broad but perilous path of political disintegration.[1] Nothing
- ↑ A much-esteemed friend deprecates this harsh criticism of Mr. Gladstone, and quotes the Rev. Dr. West, "the revered Vicar of St. Mary Magdalene, Paddington," to the effect that the Liberal Premier bestowed his Church patronage wisely; my correspondent adding, "like a loyal Churchman and true Statesman," whereas "Mr. Disraeli's appointments were purely on political or personal grounds. "I am, however, not dealing with Mr. Gladstone as an English Churchman, but as an English Statesman. Even in the former capacity I do not see that he has exhibited a distressing loyalty to his religious ideals; nor will his name be linked with any measure of ecclesiastical policy except the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. This may have been a necessary, but it was an iconoclastic act.
