DISRAELI.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10769, 15 May 1913, Page 2

DISRAELI.

Disraeli remains, and will remain, by far 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 Bolinbroke, says Maurice Woods, in the "Fortnightly Review." This is due partly to his esential greatness, and partly to the fact that his whole existence was, in a sense, a paradox. He was, by race, an alien, who cared more deeply than many of his English contemporaries for English history and England's greatness. He was pre-eminently a man of ideals 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 jf supreme intelligence—are not many of us living on his ideas to-day?—who yet could condescend to the tawdry. But he had genius, and when one has said that one has said everything. His mind, in an age given over to the worship of false political ideas, was neither bent nor broken by the opposition of the vast mass of his contemporaries. He planned in his youth the foundation on which the new industrial State ought to have teen built, but was not built, with so sure a hand that he would probably have builded far wiser than he knew. Of what he wrote and spoko on industrial and social policy every word remains true to-day. And this was because his instinctive feeling for the facts of British life, and for the mental qualities of the Brif.isli people, was truer than that of the men of formulae and theories who got their way in spite of him. It. is for this | reason, then, that his memory remains j a living and a moving force. j

If one thinks of Napoleon, the picture is of Lodi or of the eve of Aiisterlitz, 0)- of the great tomb in tho Invalided. To think of Bismarck, Disraeli's only contemporary rival in the lipid of tho nineteenth century Conservative statesmanship, one must come back to the entry of the returning army through the Brandenburg Gate in ISR(S, or to the Terrace at Versailles where tho German Empire was consummated. But tho mental picture of Disraeli irill always be the statue in the square in the dusk of a November evening, with the dark hulk of the Houses of Parliament, and all they embody, looming behind.