was less of a doctrinaire. He considered questions on their merits, not in the light of a priori ideas. Politics, as he said, speaking on the question of hostile tariffs, were no exact science (speech at Dumfries, 21 Oct. 1884). He was all in favour of promising experiments, provided they were undertaken with caution. His mind was, indeed, of the broad English pattern ; he enjoyed the poetry of Pope ; he possessed an English contempt for the impracticable. The unfailing resolve to keep within the limits of the actual and the possible was, it has been said, at the root of the most familiar of his characteristics his so-called cynicism if cynicism be 'the parching-up of a subject by the application to it of a wit so dry as to be bitter' (Lord Roseberry, speech at the Oxford Union, 14 Nov. 1904). But also his cynicism was a continual protest against sentiment, for he dreaded more than all things the
least touch of cant.
It is of a piece with this that the note of passion is wanting in his eloquence, for his emotion, instinctively repressed, seldom stirs the polished surface of his language. No great passage of oratory, no vivid imaginative phrase, keeps green the memory of his speeches. It is something of a satire upon this master of satire, that he is best remembered by certain casual and caustic comments, which criticism denominated 'blazing indiscretions.' His diplomatic caution and his extreme courtesy seemed to slacken in his public speeches, and he occasionally expressed himself before popular audiences with a humour as reckless as it was shrewd ; not that he was, as was sometimes alleged, a blue-blooded aristocrat of the traditional type, but that he cordially detested all the plausible manoeuvres by which party-managers set themselves to catch the vote of an electorate. He regarded democracy as inimical to individual freedom. A belief in letting men alone to develop their own thoughts and characters was native to his nature and at the heart of his creed. His relations with his colleagues, like Ms relations with his children, were characterised by this intense dislike of interfering with others. His conservatism itself rested upon the old conviction that by means of well-contrived checks and balances our ancestors had provided for the utmost possible freedom of the subject compatible with the maintenance of society. He desired to see the state just and not generous. And though his mind was too tenacious of experience, too intensely practical to allow of his making any very original contribution to conservative theory, his presentment of that theory was singularly penetrating. Whilst he saw 'the test-point of conservatism' in the maintenance of an hereditary second chamber (Quarterly Rev. July 1860, p. 281) he found 'the central doctrine of conser- vatism ' in the belief' that it is better to endure almost any political evil than to risk a breach of the historic continuity of government' (ib. Oct. 1873, p. 544). In regulating the franchise, he maintained that only a material and not any spiritual nor philosophic conception of the state was in point, and he vindicated the analogy between the state and a joint-stock company with singular ingenuity by an appeal to 'natural rights.' 'The best test of natural right is the right which mankind, left to themselves to regulate their own concerns, naturally admit' (ib. April 1864, p. 266). He was thus the inveterate enemy of the alliance of 'philosophy and poverty 'against' property.' He believed that the remedy for existing discontents so far as they were susceptible of remedy at all lay in the encouragement of forces diametrically opposed to free thought and legislative confiscation that is in dogmatic religion and in production stimulated by security. He was a merciless querist of the radical idea of progress (ib. 'Disintegration,' Oct. 1883, p. 575). After the more definite conservatism of his youth had become a lost cause, he urged the need of restoring 'not laws or arrangements that have passed away, but the earlier spirit of our institutions, which modern theory and crotchet have driven out. . . . The object of our party is not and ought not to be simply to keep things as they are. In the first place the enterprise is impossible. In the next place there is much in our present mode of thought and action which it is highly undesirable to conserve. What we require in the administration of public affairs, whether in the executive or legislative department, is that spirit of the old constitution which held the nation together as a whole, and levelled its united force at objects of national import instead of splitting it into a bundle of unfriendly and distrustful fragments.'
Above all things, then, he was a patriot. His conservatism, trenchant and thorough as it was, merged in a larger devotion to his country. The bitterest moment of his career (1867), when public life seemed to be slipping from his grasp, evoked the loftiest of his utterances : 'It is the duty
