om
Bismarck, who, comparing him with other eminent figures at the
Congress, is reported to have said, bluntly but heartily, "Der alte
Jude, das ist der Mann."[11] But to know what the condition of
South-Eastern Europe really was, and understand how best to settle its
troubles, was a far more difficult task, and Disraeli possessed
neither the knowledge nor the insight required. In the Europe of
to-day, peoples count for more than the wills of individual rulers:
one must comprehend the passions and sympathies of peoples if one is
to forecast the future. This he seldom cared to do. He did not realise
the part and the power of moral forces. Down to the outbreak of the
American Civil War he maintained that the question between the North
and the South was mainly a fiscal question between the Protectionist
interests of the one and the Free Trade interests of the other. He
always treated with contempt the national movement in Italy. He made
no secret in the days before 1859 of his good-will to Austria and of
his liking for Louis Napoleon--a man inferior to him in ability and in
courage, but to whose character his own had some affinities. In that
elaborate study of Sir Robert Peel's character,[12] which is one of
Disraeli's best literary performances, he observes that Peel "was
destitute of imagination, and wanting imagination he wanted
prescience." True it is that imagination is necessary for prescience,
but imagination is not enough to give prescience. It may even be a
snare.

Disraeli's imagination, his fondness for theories, and disposition
rather to cling to them than to study and interpret facts, made him
the victim of his own preconceived ideas, as his indolence deterred
him from following the march of change and noting how different things
were in the 'seventies from what they had been in the 'thirties. Mr.
Gladstone said to me in 1876, "Disraeli's two leading ideas in foreign
policy have always been the maintenance of the temporal power of the
Pope, and the maintenance of the power of the Sultan." Unable to save
the one, he clung to the hope of saving the other. He was possessed by
the notion, seductive to a dreamy mind, that all the disturbances of
Europe arose from the action of secret societies; and when the Eastern
Question was in 1875 re-opened by the insurrection in Herzegovina,
followed by the war of Servia against the Turks, he explained the
event in a famous speech by saying, "The secret societies of Europe
h