DISRAELI.

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15298, 10 May 1913, Page 5 (Supplement)

DISRAELI.

Disraeli remains, and will remain, by ftp the most interesting political figure of his century; perhaps, indeed, the most interesting figure of the last 200 years, with the exception of Chatham and broke. This is due partly to his essential greatness, and partly to the fact that his whole existence was, in a sense, a paradox. He was, by race, an alien, who cared moie deeply .than many of his British contemporaries for English history and England s greatness. He was pre-eminently a man of ideas and a man of literature, who yet exhibited in practical life a capacity and an endurance which baffled and defeated the so-called men of the world and of affairs. He outwitted the financiers over Suez, and he beat Mr. Gladstone over Parliamentary tactics on . the Franchise Bill. He was a man of supreme intelligenceare not many of us living on his ideas to-day?— yet could condescend to the tawdry. But he 'had genius, and when one lias i said that one has said everything. , His mind, in an age given over to the worship of false political ideas, was neitherbent nor broken by the opposition of the vast mass of his contemporaries.' He planned in his youth the foundation 1 on which the new industrial State ought to have been built, but was not built, with so sure of a hand that he would probably have builded far wiser than lie knew. Of what he wrote and spoke on industrial and. social policy every word remains true today. And this was because hie instinctive feeling for the facts of British life, and for the mental' qualities of the British people, was truer than that of the men of formulte and . theories who got their way in spite of him. It is for this reason, then, that his memory remains a living and a moving force.' ' If one thinks of Napoleon, the picture is of Lodi or of the eve of 'Austerlitz, or of the great tomb in the Invalided. To think of Bismarck, Disraeli's only contemporary rival in the field of 19th-century Conservative statesmanship, one must come back to the entry of the returning army through the Brandenburg Gate in 1866, or to the Terrace at Versailles where the German Empire was consummated. But the mental picture of ■ Disraeli will always be the statue in the square in . the dusk of a November evening, with the dark bulk of the Houses of Parliament, and all they embody, looming behind.—Jlauricp i Woods, ;in the Fortnightly Review,