According...to our Individualist and Free Trade friends, Prince Bismarck ought to have come to the conclusion that German industries were from "natur… - F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead

...votes are to swords exactly what bank notes are to gold—the one is effective only because the other is believed to be behind it.

Disraeli, in his youth, laid down the principles on which the England of his time ought to have been based, and his comparative failure to convince his contemporaries or to overbear his philosophic opponents left his country the richer by a supreme instance of political genius and the poorer by its slums, its wasted physique, and its industrial unrest and class hatred. If a Providence could have made Disraeli a dictator in the early 'thirties, there would have been no social problem to-day. That great man desired to build up the new industrial State on the principles and practice which had animated the older rural and urban dispensations—on the community of interest between master and man, between capitalist and employee, between guild and guild, between agricultural labourer and town workman. What was best in the feudal conception of the past was to be applied to the new progressive forces of the nineteenth century, and the aristocracy of industry was to follow in the tradition of the aristocracy of feudalism and make itself the guardian, and not the exploiter, of its new retainers.

I entertain no doubt that Tariff Reform would considerably alleviate these evils, but I have never believed that it will end them. Which party in the State stands to lose most by their continuance? Is it not evident that the party, to whom stability and content are vital, is far more deeply concerned to restore happier conditions than the party which lives upon discontent and the promulgation of class hatred? A contented proletariat should be one of the first objects of enlightened Conservative policy.