'So much is of course.I give credit to my opponents in Parliament for that desire quite as readily as I do to my colleagues or to myself.The idea that political virtue is all on one side is both mischievous and absurd.We allow ourselves to talk in that way because indignation, scorn, and sometimes, Ifear, vituperation, are the fuel with which the necessary heat of debate is maintained.'
'There are some men who are very fond of poking the fire,' said Phineas.
'Well; I won't name anyone at present,' said the Duke, 'but Ihave seen gentlemen of your country very handy with the pokers.'
Phineas laughed, knowing that he had been considered by some to have been a little violent when defending the Duke.'But we put all that aside when we really think, and can give the Conservative credit for patriotism as readily as the Liberal.
The Conservative who has had any idea of the meaning of the name which he carries, wishes, I suppose, to maintain the differences and the distances which separate the highly placed from their lower brethren.He thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and that he may best do his duty by ****** the inferior many happy and contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds is his by God's ordinance.'
'And it is so.'
'Hardly in the sense that I mean.But that is the great Conservative lesson.That lesson seems to me to be hardly compatible with continual improvement in the condition of the lower man.But with the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of the maintenance of those distances.I as a Duke am to be kept as far apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars,--and that is to go on for ever.There is much to be said for such a scheme.Let the lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect, and noble instincts, and it is possible that they should use their powers so beneficently as to spread happiness over the earth.It is one of the millenniums which the mind of man can conceive, and seems to be that which the Conservative mind does conceive.'
'But the other men who are not lords don't want that kind of happiness.'
'If such happiness were attainable it might well be to constrain men to accept it.But the lords of this world are fallible men;and though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek to govern.We know that power does corrupt, and that we cannot trust kings to have loving hearts, and clear intellects, and noble instincts.Men as they come to think about it and to look forward, and to look back, will not believe in such a millennium as that.'
'Do they believe in any millennium?'
'I think they do after a fashion, and I think that I do myself.
That is my idea of Conservatism.The doctrine of Liberalism is, of course, the reverse.The Liberal, if he have any fixed idea at all, must, I think, have conceived the idea of lessening distances,--of bringing the coachman and the duke nearer together,--nearer and nearer, till a millennium shall be reached by--'
'By equality?' asked Phineas, eagerly interrupting the Prime Minister, and showing his dissent by the tone of his voice.
'I did not use the word, which is open to many objections.In the first place the millennium, which I have perhaps rashly named, is so distant that we need not even think of it as possible.Men's intellects are at present so various that we cannot even realize the idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch of a pen or the chisel of a stone.We have been injured in that, because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men.Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it.
How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think otherwise? How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of the poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of the country, and say that it is all that it ought to be? You are a Liberal because you know that it is all not as it ought to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so godlike,--nay, so absolutely divine,--that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable.Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea of equality stinks in men's nostrils.'
The Duke in his enthusiasm had thrown off his hat, and was sitting on a wooden seat which they had reached, looking up among the clouds.His left hand was clenched, and from time to time with his right he rubbed the thin hairs on his brow.He had begun in a low voice, with a somewhat slipshod enunciation of his words, but had gradually become clear, resonant, and even eloquent.Phineas knew that there were stories told of certain bursts of words which had come from him in former days in the House of Commons.These had occasionally surprised men and induced them to declare that Planty Pall,--as he was then often called,--was a dark horse.But they had been few and far between, and Phineas had never heard them.Now he gazed at his companion in silence, wondering whether the speaker would go on with his speech.But the face changed on a sudden, and the Duke with an awkward motion snatched up his hat.'I hope you ain't cold?' he said.
'Not at all,' said Phineas.