DISRAELI did not exercise effective power in England until he had reached the age of seventy years . When he became Prime Minister in 1874, he found the country recovered from a financial crisis which had reached its height in 1866, but threatened already with a new crisis . The Franco-Prussian War had just been fought and Germany hat arrived at the position of a great Empire . She was adopting a gold, standard . Norway, Sweden, and Denmark had also (1872) adopted gold . In 1873 Holland had suspended the free coinage of silver . And meanwhile the stream of new gold from California and elsewhere was drying up . There was, therefore, a world-wide lack of gold, and consequently a tendency everywhere for prices to fall, seeing that money was held bound to gold with "hoops of steel."
"The fall of values," says R.G. Hawtrey (Sauerbeck's index number measuring prices in England fell from 111 in 1873 to 102 in 1874), "combined with the sudden subsidence of the stream of capital which had flowed from Europe to America, led to a violent crisis (in America) in September and October 1873."
The fall of prices was of world-wide extent, and consequently nobody could sell to anybody . The state of mind produced by such a calamity is the same everywhere and at all times . Producers turn from the god gold, which has betrayed and deserted them, and busy themselves with devising methods of escape from their distresses which, in fact, represent approaches to the old order of service . The masters of Money have not, as a rule, been greatly alarmed, for experience has shown them that they have only to open their purses in order to recall the worshippers . But Disraeli saw his opportunity . Just before he took office he delivered a speech in which the keynote of his policy was sounded :
"No minister in this country," he declared, "will do his duty who neglects any opportunity of reconstructing as much as possible our colonial empire and of responding to those distant sympathies which may become the source of incalculable strength and happiness to this island."
After he had been in office for two years he bought the Suez Canal shares owned by the Khedive of Egypt, and secured to England control of the way to India . There followed the greatest act of statesmanship of the Nineteenth Century . Disraeli, almost alone of his countrymen, knew the virtue and value of the Throne . He knew that, under God, it is the Sovereign who makes the nation and that without Kingship nationhood is delivered over to Money . He conceived the idea not only of bringing India into the British Empire—that had already been accomplished—but of establishing for her a direct relationship with the Queen of England, so that the peoples of India might become a nation within the spiritual body of the British Empire . A Bill was introduced into Parliament by which the title Empress of India was conferred upon Queen Victoria . Perhaps the only person who fully appreciated the service thus rendered to Britain and to India was the Queen herself . Then the Prime Minister set himself to discharge his duty to the workers of England . He had urged before taking office that one of the planks of his platform must be :
"SANITAS SANITORUM OMNIA SANITAS. . . . Liberals call this a 'policy of sewage.' It is a policy of life and death. . . . It involves the state of the dwellings of the people, the moral consequences of which are not less considerable than the physical . It involves the enjoyment of some of the chief elements of Nature—air, light, and water . It involves the regulation of their industry, the inspection of their toil . It involves the purity of their provisions, and it touches upon all the means by which you may wean them from the habits of excess and of brutality."
The magnificent work which was performed in the realms of public health, of factory life, and of peasant life by Disraeli laid the foundations of a better world . For the rest, Disraeli's term of office was spent chiefly in upholding the greatness of England in the face of Europe . This he considered to be a duty of the very highest importance . For, like Louis XIV and Napoleon, he understood that Nationhood and its emotion, patriotism, constitute a value in human affairs the importance of which is surpassed only by religion.
"Nationality," he said early in his career, "is the miracle of political independence . Race is the principle of physical analogy."
That distinction between the nation and the tribe comes with all the greater force from the lips of one of the most illustrious members of the Jewish race . It is fundamental to an understanding of the history of Europe . In his last days the old man, in his retreat at Hughenden, restated his principles and emphasized again the mystical relationship existing between God, King, and Nation . He seems to have felt that, just as Monarchy must be progressive and evolutionary, so must religion be, since man's knowledge of God cannot stand still.
"To have secured," he said in 1872, "a national profession of faith with the unlimited enjoyment of private judgment in matters spiritual is the solution of the most difficult problem and one of the triumphs of civilization."
Disraeli had no opportunity to carry farther his plans for a return to the God-system, and, indeed, knew that much time must pass before the system of gain was wholly discredited . But there was anxiety in the courts of Money . It was during his premiership that the Bank of England assumed control—still against the will of some of its Directors—of the entire gold reserve of the country, and so finally established an iron discipline over the banks with which the leaders of agriculture and industry had their dealings.