into ridicule; Cobbett said he made a jest of the groans' of the poor; Lamb called him 'the zany of debate.' When he is jocular,' wrote Sydney Smith, he is strong; when he is serious he is like Samson in a wig!' Byron said, ' though bred a statesman, he was born a wit.' In those days many thought the functions incompatible. Was he serious at all? He had abandoned Fox, but, curiously enough, he had not abandoned liberal ideas. Was he a Whig or a Tory? It was hard to say, for he seemed to fit into no party category, indeed into no known category. Was he not merely a trifler or an adventurer, playing with ideas or policies for pleasure or for interest? There were many who openly attacked his character, as the intriguer, the new man, the tactician. Ward (afterwards to be one of his greatest admirers) had said that Castlereagh and Canning showed the difference between character and talents. Lord John Russell suggested that Canning had to bury himself in India' in order to redeem his character; or, as Mr Creevey gaily put it, his fate was banishment to India for want of honesty.' On his taking office, the Times called him ' a hired advocate,' and Leigh Hunt said he had neither faith nor principles.' Even his cousin, Stratford Canning, only contended that he was in the main an honest man.'

It was unfortunate that a man, suspected of incurable levity, and worse, should succeed one dowered with portentous gravity. Castlereagh had led the Commons though almost the worst speaker in it; Canning was now to lead them though indisputably the best. Castlereagh, though an Irishman, had typical British qualities. As powerful and as unassuming as Marlborough, obviously an aristocrat and a gentleman, mild and calm, he was the ideal of the ponderous fox-hunters of the Back-benchers, of the stately peers, and of the timid citizens who feared revolution. He never joked with intention, and his very failures as a speaker awakened in them a sympathetic chord. His alienation from the despots of the Continent was not wholly understood; most Tories thought that, in such matters, one must go slow, and anyhow that one could trust Lord Castlereagh. By the Whigs and by the mass of the people he was certainly detested, but such detestation was the measure of his greatness to many of the Tories. The peculiarly middle position held by Canning suggested to Tories

that he would abandon, and to Whigs that he would maintain, the principles of his predecessor. For he was so unlike himhe was egoistic where Castlereagh was modest, volatile where he was solid, communicative where he was restrained, irritable where he was calm, dominating where he was persuasive.

Enough has been said to show the baffling character of the new leader. Contemporaries admitted great qualities in Castlereagh, but denied him genius. Few denied it to Canning, most indeed thought it the chief source of his defects. Now we have got rid of these confounded men of genius' chuckled one old Tory lord on Canning's fall in 1809. To John Bull genius is always strange and often alarming. The fear and hatred which pursued Disraeli pursued his equally mysterious forerunner. Yet the real Canning differed as much from the legendary Canning, as he differed from his predecessor.

Castlereagh had many personal friends and moved in the highest society, charming all with his bland and gentle manners. But in the last resort Castlereagh was not an open, perhaps not a warm-hearted, man; he was repressed, reserved, and impenetrable. Canning, with even more affectionate friends, had once been a diner-out of the highest lustre,' a man whose social brilliance equalled that of George Selwyn or Tickell. But he had long ago forsaken high society. His absence from fashionable levées was noticed at once both by diplomats and by society, who contrasted him with the sociable Castle-i reagh. To those whom he met he was frank, open, and communicative, but he did not meet many. But the attitude was characteristic of the man. It was not merely that he was almost an invalid with the gout, and that he preferred his own circle and his own hearth to state dinners and to society dances. He did not think he would learn what England thought from the King, from great lords, from great ladies, from great diplomats, or from great dinners. When he wanted to learn that he dropped into the lobby of the Commons to hear the chatter of Back-benchers, he received deputations from merchants, he read the papers, he talked with men who walked the streets,' or took the even bolder step of making public speeches outside Parliament.

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2. CANNING AS THE PHILOSOPHIC TORY

Canning had a political creed of his own, and one which has strangely perplexed many students of it. But as it is the key to his foreign policy it must be examined. At first sight it is a bundle of inconsistencies. He resisted the Repeal of the Test Acts for Dissenters in England, he championed Catholic Emancipation for Ireland. He opposed Parliamentary Reform and supported the suspension of Habeas Corpus; he advocated Freedom of Trade and the eventual Abolition of Slavery. 'His Whiggism is for Peers and his Toryism for peasants," wrote Lytton; "with the same zeal he advocates the Catholic question and the Manchester Massacre." If we can explain these paradoxes we shall have no difficulty in understanding why the Anti-Jacobin and the enemy of Napoleon was to destroy the Neo-Holy Alliance in Europe, and to recognise republics in South America. In truth the creed was, in many respects, not very different from that of Castlereagh, whom none ever charged with lack of sincerity. Castlereagh opposed Parliamentary Reform, but he also wanted the repeal of the Navigation Acts, Catholic Emancipation, and, towards the end of his life, a relaxation of the duties on corn. In 1822 the two men showed some difference of opinion in two friendly little contests. Canning introduced a Bill for giving full privileges to Roman Catholic Peers; Castlereagh, though in favour of the general principle, opposed the particular measure as premature. Castlereagh was defeated and Canning carried his Bill by a majority of twelve. On the Corn Importation Bill Canning proposed an amendment, which Castlereagh opposed. Canning divided the House, only to find himself in a great minority. Such differences were not great, but they are enough to show a shade of distinction between the ideas of the two men.

'Burke,' wrote Canning in 1823, is still the manual of my politics,' and Burke's influence enables us to understand them. That great man had taught Canning that history was the key to politics, that society was a vital organism, a compact between the dead and the living. It was the greatest institution for promoting human liberty that had ever existed, a living mystic tree' rooted in the past and stretching arms

towards the future. You might lop, or prune, or graft, but you must never assail the trunk. Canning hoped never to see the day when England became a "democracy inlaid (for ornament's sake) with an aristocracy and topped (for sufferance) with a crown." The King, the Lords, the Commons, and the masses each had their powers and their rights but also their limits. None should be too powerful or too supreme. The Crown, and not the Commons, should have the right of patronage; the Peers should have the right of rejecting Bills; the Commons should have the right of resisting popular pressure if that seemed necessary or desirable. A Member of Parliament must resist his constituents if his conscience so dictated. While he sat for Liverpool, Canning sometimes voted in Parliament in accordance with the expressed wish of his constituents. Sometimes he laid their petitions on the table and said that he did not agree with them. Similarly

he thought Parliament ought sometimes to lead, and sometimes to oppose, popular opinion. Check and balance, adjustment and compromise, were the essence of the British Constitution.

It is strange that a mind so keen-sighted as that of Canning should have held to so rigid a doctrine as regards fundamentals, a doctrine that must ultimately have turned the Constitution into a museum and Englishmen into Chinamen. For he sustained the paradox that the England of 1820, which was predominantly industrial, should be content with the electoral system of 1688, which was based on the divine right of the [agricultural] freeholders.' The system had even then been full of anomaly and evil; it was now fuller of both by the accretions of a long century of parliamentary corruption. But Canning had started public life in the midst of the French Revolution, which had set out by destroying all privileges and precedents in the name of a perfect and simple system. In his eyes all simple governments are bad,' whether simple monarchy, simple aristocracy, or simple democracy. For such things were struck out at a heat,' and offered no barrier, no resistance to sudden change, no homage to time nor to

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1 E.g. Hans. Deb., xl. 909-10. Canning presented a petition from Liverpool against the Foreign Enlistment Bill, and spoke and voted for it (June 3/19). This is in the true tradition of Burke.

history. He had seen a French king lose his throne 'by too obsequious subservience to temporary popularity'; he had seen an English one retain his by resisting parliamentary reform, by gagging the Press, and by imprisoning the agitators. As he saw it, the great danger in 1822, as in 1792, was from irresponsible agitators driving on a blind majority to abolish old institutions, in obedience to reckless passions and in deference to abstract principles.

A people, said Canning, was no longer a people when they became a mob; a people was no longer free when it could no longer be restrained. Even the very word 'people' did not mean to him what it means to most of us to-day. What was the meaning of the word 'people'? he asked on 22nd December 1819. "The people as synonymous to (sic) a nation, meant a great community, congregated under a head, united in the same system of civil polity for mutual aid and mutual protection, respecting and maintaining various orders and ranks, and not only allowing the fair and just gradations of society, but absolutely built upon them. That was a 'people.' But in a mass of persons, first stript of the government, then stript of the aristocracy, then stript of the clergy, then stript of the magistracy, then stript of its landed proprietors, then stript of its lawyers, then stript of its learning, then stript of everything which ornamented and dignified human naturein such a mass he could no more recognise the people than he could recognise in the tub1 [bird?] of Diogenes the man of Plato. A mere populace, deprived of everything essential to what by common consent was called a nation, could not, without the grossest perversion of terms, be called a nation. But when the term 'people' was applied to a portion of the community arrayed against the interests of the nation; not only distinct from, but hostile to the nation; when the term was applied to such as these, it tended directly to encourage insurrection and rebellion." 2

Thus he held the doctrine that a nation really had a ' general will' not always represented in the majority but always represented in institutions, interests, and classes.

1 This is in Hansard, but it is obvious that bird' is meant, for that was the whimsical term by which Diogenes described man.

2 Dec. 22/19. Hans. Deb., xli. 1500.