PREFACE THESE four essays were delivered as lectures before the University of Pennsylvania. Except that I have in part rewritten the lecture dealing with Disraeli, I have purposely kept them them as they were delivered. It is reasonable to hope that good feeling between England and the United States may increase continually. It has no enemy more deadly than mutual misunderstanding, and the works of Lord Bryce and President Lowell - not to mention others-have played a great part in promoting friendship. There is room too for less ambitious attempts, on the part of men who take some one feature of the national life of this country or of that, and elucidate it with sympathetic treatment. On former visits to the United States I have had forced upon me the desire of Americans to understand our party system. The average American thinks that he understands the aims and views of the Radical party. They are the aims and the views of all sensible enlightened men! The Tory party, on the contrary, not one in ten takes the trouble to investigate. It is the party of privilege, of rapacious mediævalism, of opposition to enlightened reform! "We have no Tories in America," he will say; 66 we don't stand for that type of person over here." Radical historians have taken care that both the Tory of the eighteenth century and the Tory of the twentieth shall not stand on his merits in the land of liberty. It became then a welcome task to an Englishman to attempt a rather different account of Toryism in a country which in all the great things of life is essentially conservative. More than this, as I sat down to think out the real meaning of Toryism and the best way to present it to an audience of strangers, I became aware of advantages in this course of action which I had not perceived before. Recent events have concentrated the attention of the man in the street upon the negative rather than the constructive side of Toryism. Resistance to predatory attacks upon property, and the like, will always form important items in the Tory programme. But Tory doctrine loses all that is ennobling in its appeal, if it confines itself to these; if it fails, that is, to get down to the principles which lie beneath all such resistance. The great Tory leaders of the past challenge us to something more, and by their challenge show us the secret of their own irresistible example. The captains of Toryism in the past can be made the instructors of Toryism in the present and the Tory tradition is the Tory hope. An example will make this clearer. Any discussion of a political nature must resolve itself finally into a discussion of the question as to whether the legislator is in the presence of any absolute rights; as to whether he need be guided by any other considerations than the will of the majority. In dealing with the large class of legislation affecting all kinds of property this consideration becomes vitally important. The argument that a man has a right to the fruit of his own industry L |