ABSTRACT
Lord George Bentinck once spoke of Lord Shaftesbury as a possible leader for the Conservative party, and Thomas Carlyle named him in “Past and Present” as a valiant Abdiel, who, if he could not save his order, would at least postpone the wreck. Shaftesbury always looked on himself afterwards as a man who had relinquished his career for a cause, and though he never regretted his choice, the reflection made him sometimes bitter and exacting. For Shaftesbury regarded with equal horror the stroke by which Disraeli dished the Whigs and the Imperialism into which he guided emotions and enthusiasms that he had once dreamt of educating for the service of social reconstruction. The real answer to Shaftesbury’s attack on the Reform Bill of 1867 was that the Governments elected on the middle class franchise had had their chance and had missed it.
