The Sun.
London, England, 1867-05-27 00:00:00

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SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE " SPECTATOR" ON DISRAELI-WORSHIP.—
Mr. Bernal Osborne said with his usual cleverness
yesterday week, that " the Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer had lugged that great omnibus full of
stupid heavy country gentlemen" up the hill of
Reform with a spirit for which all true Radicals
would return him their heartiest thanks. That was
well said, and would make a capital illustration for
Fun; but if Mr. Tenuiel would again work out for
us one of those higher imaginative conceptions
which impress on some of his cartoons in Punch a
character of ideal power, ensuring them a life long
beyond the momentary situation that suggeststhem:
let him reverse the image, and draw Mr. Disraeli
as the inscrutable Sphynx of Mr. Poynter's great
picture, tugged along to be installed as one of the
idols of the hour by the same stupid, heavy, country
gentlemen, with many a drop of sweat and many a
fierce gesticulation, while the wives and daughters
of the enslaved squirearchy dance reluctantly before
his triumphal path. Mr. Bernal Osborne himself,
as one of the Radical leaders, might be stooping
from the car curling his long lash at the reluctant
team ; and Mr. Lowe might appear as the scowling
and gasping Israelite. who had fallen out of his place,
and was evidently launching deep curses at the
head both of his taskmasters and their temporary
god. For though no doubt in one sense Mr. Dis-
raeli has hoisted up the country gentlemen to their
present position, in another and more important
sense, they have convoyed him, the inscrutable and
enigmatic idol of the moment, to the altar on which
he at present stands. The House of Commons, in
spite of its thorough distrust of him, which is in-
deed the usual attitude of idolaters towards the
divinities they celebrate and strive to conciliate,
is lost in wonder at his great feats. The spirit of
criticism is almost paralysed by his miraculous
success. Every taunt flies back like a boomerang
at the head of him who launched it. The sword
of every one of his opponents enters into his
own breast, and the bow of the rash archer who aims
at him snaps and lies broken in his hands. People
go about on every side crying, " It is a god, it is a
god •
!" Private warnings are given that it is no use
attacking Disraeli ; he will only cry tush ! and suck
thereout no small advantage. If you give him what
would poison any one else, he thrives upon it. It is
a sort of enchantment. Unless any one can get
hold of the talisman that will break the spell, the
stars in their courses will fight against his foes. Is
not the marvel visible to the dullest eyes—Radicals
and high Tories competing together to serve him,
while both alike murmur ejaculations of distrust
between their teeth ? Such is the general talk, and
whatever the charms by which Mr. Disraeli has
worked hitherto, it is really true that he is now be-
ginning to get that influence over the nerves and ima-
gination of all parties which, while it is very far
indeed from winning their hearts—indeed probably
turning their hearts more and more away from the
detestable worship in which they are engaged—still
paralyses their will and renders opposition hopeless
and impotent. Mr. Disraeli is for the time more
than an adversary ; he is inscrutable, invulnerable
—a powerful, passionless political Sphynx. When
he puts on his idiotic mask he is most dangerous of
all. Then he is laying up in his high mind some
slight to his divinity, and calculating the rate of
compound interest at which he will repay it ; or he
is maturing some spell which shall make his adver-
saries mistake friends for foes, and fall hotly upon
each other, instead of upon him ; or he is meditat-
ing some fresh and potent charm, which shall pro-
long the servitude of such slaves of the lamp as
Lord Stanley, Mr. Gathorne Hardy, and Sir Staf-
ford Northcote, and make them see their former
political thoughts as ghosts gibbering unmeaning re-
proaches, and hear their former words as dreamers
hear the words of those around them. The old
Greek Sphynx used to ask rather difficult riddles,
but this modern political Sphynx answers them in.

fallibly, even though they be of the highest degree
of complexity. How to coax the Tory into Radi-
calism by giving him a number of false hopes and
taking them away one by one ;—how to utilise the
accident of the irrepre-sible compounder so as to
make the Tories think him a final and irresistible
obstacle to household suffrage, until at last they are
even more sick of the compounder than of house-
hold suffrage itself, and see the last wave of the
wand which consigns him finally to the receptacle,
for obsolete machinery with a sigh of some-
thing like relief ; bow to rtsist and defeat the
Liberals with a stern face and even ardent
defiance, though the whole battle is to the
mind of the leader purely formal—fought only
for the sake of showing the power to beat, and
though he means after all to resign the ground for
which he fights so hotly ;—these are the sort of
riddles, hopeless because they would never even
present themselves to ordinary politicians, which
Mr. Disraeli has been solving syllable by syllable
with consummate art, and with the enigmatic reti-
cence of an oracle who loves both to bewilder and
bewitch his devotees. We do not wonder at this
reluctant Disraeli - worship, though we doubt
whether a baser form of Parliamentary idolatry
has ever been invented. No doubt there are quali-
ties in the idol which are not, in themselves, igno-
ble,--a coolness and courage equal to any emer-
gency, a self-confidence that is almost above the
possibility of irritable despondency, an impassive-
ness that never fails under attack, and a fertility of
invention worthy of a demon or a god. But all
these qualities, rare as they are, and, apart from
the purposes to which they are turned, intellectually
admirable as they are,are by no means qualities
which it is at all desirable to be always contem-
plating with wonder and awe. For the most part
they are dexterities, even the abstract respect for
which cannot be cultivated without a constant les-
sening of respect for great and liberal aims, since
admiration for the studied manners and wonderful
address of a good manager must inevitably slide
into admiration for those happy strokes of mere
skill in which the object and purpose of the
manoeuvre is entirely lost sight of. But when
these qualities are worshipped by no means in the
abstract, but in the very concrete case of Mr.
Disraeli himself, who combines with them a perfect
unscrupulousness as to political principle, a readiness
to ring the changes on Radicalism and Toryism, on
Free Trade and Protection, on " the Semitic prin-
ciple" and the man-of-the-world practice, precisely
as is most conducive to his own fortunes as a states-
man, the Disraeli-Fetishism which is dominating the
imagination of the House of Commons will be seen
to foster one of the most degrading of political ido-
latries. The enigmatic and inscrutable calm of the
idol's face, the half-wiited expression with trhielthe
foils the curiosity of the loilse when he is pressed
for an answer which he wants time to meditate, the
practised hesitation with which he announces what
he had long determined on, the adroitness with
which he prepares for a concession by giving notice
of what looks like an aggression but which
turns out, to the great disappointment of his
enemies, to be only the bold face which a con-
cession should put on—all these are [personal
accomplishments which it is but too easy,
and exceedingly humiliating, to imitate, but in
which imitators are absolutely certain not to suc-
ceed. But in one thing the votaries of the new
Disraeli-worship will undoubtedly succeed. Tbey
will be able—it is already obvious indeed how able
they are—to rid themselves as completely as their
divinity of the superstitions of old convictions and
long-life faiths. Nothing could be more striking
than the Disraelite self-control with which his Tory
devotees only on Monday night refrained from be-
traying their not yet extinct sympathy with Mr.
Lowe's Conservatism, which, expressed as it was in
language of wonderful force and dignity, would, if
delivered last session, have been cheered to the
echo. No doubt there was a visible flutter about
their heart-strings, a twitching of their nerves, a
yearling of the still unmastered instincts of the
past, to burst into a generous cheer as he sat
down ; but there sat the pallid enigma of the new
idolatry, with cold, impassive face, silently
teaching the lesson of self-mastery to his fascinated
followers, and the natural instinct was subdued in
a moment, and died away with the last accent of
this last appeal. Disraeli- worship will not give
tact and subtlety, and crafty and counsel to the
" brute votes" of the House of Commons, but it
will work that revolution of nature which is said to
be due only to grace—or its opposite. It will make
it easy to throw off the ties of conviction, amusing
to desert the faith of a life-time, pleasant to outwit
opponents by fairly outbidding them ; it will make
political dishonesty seem a department of aesthetics,
and political thimble-rig a polite study ;it will
elevate the invention of political machinery for
breaking the fall of consciences into a fine
art, and make the successful use of such
machinery a service of honour. It is time that
our Parliament be reformed, if only the new for-
mation could be a regeneration. It has steadily
fallen in its ideal of statesmsnship from its birth to
its death. Lord John Russell,—no great political
idol of ours,—was its first and best hero. Narrow,
self-important, and in many respects ungenerous,
he had still the profoundest love of liberty, and the
highest earnestness of which Whig politics were
ever capable. To him succeeded Sir Robert Peel,
rather a great minister than a great statesman,
pompous and ostentatious in manner, limited and
shortsighted in his views, but acute in discerning',
the immediate signs of the times, and capable of
great personal sacrifices to achieve what he felt the
good of the country
imperiously demanded. To
him, again, succeeded Lord Palmerston, with less
of moral principles than either of his predecessors,
flippant, careless of the higher aims of politics, yet
very tenacious of the few views he was pleased to
regard as principle, always ready to do battle
against what he thought un-English, and without a
trace of anything sinister in his character. And
now at last, in itsdays of decrepitude and decay, Mr.
Disraeli is the object of Parliamentary worship, a
statesman with ambiguity for his chief attribute and
artifice for the method of his government —with
political principles which no one knows, unless it
be the principle of artfully propping aristocratic in-
stitutions ou the suffrages of the most ignorant of
the mob,—with wonderful proficiency in theatrical
counterfeits and also in amphitheatrical feats, such
as riding with one foot on the back of each party,
—with, no doubt, splendid coolness and courage,
which no one can imitate,—and for the rest made
up of superficial and tricky cleverness, which every
one can imitate quite sufficiently to humiliate him-
self. And such is the idol which Parliament is
every day adoring with a deeper awe, and for which
it deserts Mr. Gladstone, the highest-minded states-
man of this generation, if not of any generation
since the Restoration.

(From the Times.)

The defeat of a mare which had been backed at i to 4 for
the Oaks is an appropriate sequel to the victory of a horse
against which the odds were 100 to lin the Derby. Fa-
vourites,
however, are apt to come in second, as Achieve- •
ment contrived to do; whereas the success of Hermit, a
mere outsider, and reported to have broken a blood-vessel
in training, is a portent without parallel. The sensation
produced by such an event, coupled with the fact that large
fortunes are known to have changed hands upon it, will
have compensated for bad weather, and may probably ren-
der the Epsom meeting of this year famous, or infamous,
in the annals of racing. Tho days are long past in which
the patrons-of the Turf professed a patriotic desire to im-
prove the breed of horses, whose relative performances
wore the subject of keen interest for their own sake. It is
not for love, but for money, that racehorses are now for the
most part bred and reared, and while the simple-minded
sightseer has no thought beyond the visible trial of speed
on the course, the attention of the initiated is engrocsed
by the fluctuations in the odds. Betting, in short, has be-
come the life and soul of racing, and the passion for des-
perate pecuniary ventures, which finds a vent on the Paris
thegaming-tables of Germany, has in England
exclusive possession of this national pastime.
Boursetaken
almost
It is no secret that larger and larger sums are staked every
year upon races, and the scandals which occasionally be-
come public are but ono symptom of that deterioration in
the morality of the Turf which follows almost inevitably
from the increased scale of profits to be made by good luck,
or good management, as it is now called. Lot moralists
explain it as they will, there are men who would bo abso-
lutely proof against the temptation of £l,OOO, yet who
would sell their Fouls for £lOO,OOO. When, therefore,
we hear of many hundred thousand pounds, not to say
millions, having been lost and won on the Derby and
Oaks, we cannot shut oureyest a the meaning of these figures.
They not only involve the ruin of many an unfortunate
dupe, and some would-be harpies who richly deserve it.,
but will certainly give a mischievous impulse to fraudu-
, lent transactions on the turf.
To moralise on the growth of such a tendency as this
may well appear a piece of Quixotism. It would be
so, indeed, if society had no more power over the
extravagances of betting than over the indulgence
of any other vice. Happily, the reverse is the case, and
the salutary influence of social opinion which put an end to
duelling might do much to check, or at least to circum-
scribe, the evil to which we refer. Tho man who makes
a profession of betting jis, of course, beyond the reach of
any but legal restraints. He haows that he must trust for

through illicit channels, or to give out tha,, a horse is
broken down which is in the finest possible condition. It
has been well said that a racehorse once quoted in the
betting is, for some purposes, the property of the
public, and all such tricks as false trials and other
attempts to depreciate his reputation for the sake
of getting longer odds against him are nothing but
swindling. It is no excuse whatever for them that they
are practised in self-defence or in revenge, for no man need
put himself in a position to be fleeced by a blackleg. If the
present state of things on the Turf is such that a gentle-
man cannot avoid being overreached without overreaching
others, that is surely the best possible reason why gentle-
men should keep off the Turf. At all events, if they think
proper to compete with rogues on their own ground, it is
the duty of honourable men to shun their company.
It would be superfluous as well as invidious to enlarge
further on 'this aspect of the question so far as it affects
private character. It is high time, however, that public
attention should be invited to it so far as it affects interests
hitherto recognised as public. If a man who has made a
fortune on the Stock-Exchange prefers to squander it on
by pur-
ethheastiu:,ainsesteataidnofpadrelmiaomrae
"Zilent, it is constituencyto the
nation at large. It is otherwise when the inheritor of a
princely fortune gambles away not only the wealth earned
damnurn"
by the genius or valour of his ancestors, but the position
which not even wealth can recover. How often, again, do
we see an eldest son, with nothing that he can call his own,
plunging into speculations upon which the possible gains
are to go into his own pocket, but the probable losses must
be paid by mortgages on the family estates, or out of
savings destined for the portions of his younger brothers ?
It is not easy to speak too severely of the heartless selfish-
ness which thus plays at haphazard with property in which
many others have an interest, and of which the life tenant
in possession should consider himself but a trustee. It
would be well if parents would resolutely decline any
liability for "debts of honour" thus contracted, and
,Dave the winners to their remedy at law. *When a
tradesman supplies costly articles to ,an undergraduate
without inquiring as to his means ot communi-
cating with his father, the latter is perfectly jus-
tified in meeting a demand for payment with a plea of in-
fancy, and when a "friend" bets with a young man, whe-
ther under or over age, who has no security to give but
his own word, the claim should be steadily repudiated by
his relations. Whatever may be the verdict of the
Jockey Club, or the personal disgrace incurred by the de-
faulter, itis intolerable that the resources of a noble family
should be crippled for generations, or that fine domains
should pass into the hands of strangers, because ono race-
horse has failed to get his head in advance of another at
the winning post. There is a point beyond which such
reckless folly as this cannot be carried without still more
serious consequences. Some people have ventured to
maintain ironically that occasional collapses of young
nobles on the turf are, in the long run, conducive to the
benefit of the country, inasmuch as they contribute to
throw ill-managed estates into the market, whore they are
purchased by thriving capitalists. But it must not be for-
gotten that titles cannot be conveyed with property, and
that what our aristocracy loses is too often gained by the
most disreputable class in the whole community. More-
over, so long as we maintain au hereditary peerage, and
invest it with the functions of a Second Chamber, the
character and habitsof its members cannot be a matter of
indifference to the public. This is not a time at which it
is safe to neglect the safeguards or responsibilities of a
privileged position, and nothing would more effectually
shako the territorial power which our nobility still retain
than a few conspicuous examples of great houses impo-
verished and degraded by gambling.