management, a shrewd financier, and held a deep conviction that
it was the part of statesmanship to embody in law what he
conceived to be the proper demands of the nation. His opponent
for a generation was Benjamin Disraeli, the young Jewish
novelist, who had first won a following in the House of Commons
by voicing the venom of the old-line protectionist Tories against
the recreant Peel. Versatile, shifty, brilliant, this adventurous
politician made himself indispensable to the Conservatives, and
overcame by political moves which were little short of genius,
the leadership of the opposition. Indeed, he may be said to have
transformed Conservatism, giving it a new rallying cry, and
inscribing great achievements upon its banner.


LIBERAL REFORMS


"Whenever that man gets my place we shall have strange doings,"
Palmerston had said toward the end of his life, alluding to the
open-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Gladstone, and had
he remained on earth for another generation, he would indeed have
seen much done by his erstwhile followers under Gladstone's
direction which he would have accounted passing strange.
Admitting the democratic principle that the state owed it to
itself to provide every man's child with an education, Gladstone
inaugurated (1870) a beneficent system of free public schools. An
old popular grievance, the viva voce method of voting at
parliamentary elections, was done away and the secret ballot
substituted (1872), a change which struck a heavy blow at the
prevalent bribery and intimidation. He corrected one of the worst