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Updated: June 7, 2025
These were significant episodes; but a still more serious manifestation of Victoria's temper occurred in the following year, during the crowning crisis of Beaconsfield's life.
It is enough to recall what the last German Ambassador Count Münster told me, and what, in a curtailed form, has been so often quoted. Prince Bismarck said, "I think nothing of their Lord Salisbury. He is only a lath painted to look like iron. But that old Jew means business." This is merely a parenthesis. I am at present concerned only with Lord Beaconsfield's personal traits.
Gladstone repudiated Lord Beaconsfield's dark allusion to the repeal of the union and the abandonment of the colonies, characterizing them as base insinuations, the real purpose of which was to hide from view the policy pursued by the Ministry, and its effect upon the condition of the country; and said that public distress had been aggravated by continual shocks from neglected legislation at home, "while abroad they had strained the prerogative by gross misuse, had weakened the Empire by needless wars, and dishonored it in the eyes of Europe by their clandestine acquisition of the Island of Cyprus."
He was the steward of Polish balls, and the vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave dinners to Louis Blanc." Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than in the foregoing passage. Divested of its intentional and humorous exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait.
"I think the chief enjoyed himself," said the host, "and I know he liked his claret." "Claret!" exclaimed the hostess; "why, he drank brandy-and-water all dinner-time." I said in an earlier paragraph that Lord Beaconsfield's flattery was sometimes misplaced. An instance recurs to my recollection.
There is probably no race of people about which John Bull has been so much mistaken as he has been about the Jews. Lord Beaconsfield's description of Mr. Historically, Lord Derby and those who applauded his scheme had a great deal to say for themselves. The remote history of Judaism is a history of war. The Old Testament is full of "the battle of the warrior" and of "garments rolled in blood."
This may not have been absolutely correct, but it was certainly not very far from the truth. On every side we witnessed, during this year 1879, the revival of Liberal feeling, and the rapid growth of a strong hostility to Lord Beaconsfield's adventures in the domain of foreign affairs. The current had turned with a vengeance, and the flowing tide was indeed with us.
An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the present hour impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which, even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's judgment quoted above that "he was a poet, and a true poet."
If Englishmen understood such things they would see that the Congress was a comedy; anyone who will satisfy himself as to what Russia was really anxious to obtain, and then look at the Salisbury-Schouvaloff treaty, will see that, thanks to Beaconsfield's imbecility, Schouvaloff obtained one of the most signal diplomatic triumphs that was ever won.
The short-lived treaty, for which the sanguine Mr Stanhope claimed that it had gained for England 'a friendly, an independent, and a strong Afghanistan, may now be chiefly remembered because of the circumstance that it gave effect for the moment to Lord Beaconsfield's 'scientific frontier.
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