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Journal Entry 3 by  Nu-Knees from Knaresborough, North Yorkshire United Kingdom on Monday, December 08, 2008
 Thank you very much, bluenoser, for a lovely surprise parcel of books this morning. Yes, I'd very much like this one, thank you!
With your permission, once I've read it, I'll put it into my Permanent Collection of Classics I can't bear to part with, please. Thank you! Of course, as this is the fifth of the Palliser Novels and I've still to read the sixth of the Barsetshire Chronicles before I even begin on this other series, then it'll be some time (maybe even some years?) before I get to it :-)
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Journal Entry 4 by Nu-Knees at Knaresborough, North Yorkshire United Kingdom on Monday, July 19, 2010
Although I've not yet read the sixth, I can confidently state that so far this is the best of the Palliser novels by far! What a delicious collection of characters - not just the usual suspects that I know and love from earlier books in the series, but some strong and very memorable new ones, including the wonderfully dastardly baddie, Ferdinard Lopez! As expected, the plot is delightful and beautifully told.
Thank you again, bluenoser, for a much appreciated addition to my Permanent Collection :-) It'll be safer there than taking its chances in the Big Wide World. It's looking a little yellow around the edges, unfortunately! The inside cover shows that it was given as a school prize in 1974. I wonder where it's been since then and how it got to France from Croft House School, Shillingstone in Dorset!
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Journal Entry 5 by Nu-Knees at Knaresborough, North Yorkshire United Kingdom on Monday, July 19, 2010
I've been very struck while reading these novels about the political situation and burning issues of the 19th century at how contemporary they still seem in the 21st! For example, there are discussions on decimalising the coinage in all the books, something which was only introduced 100 years later in the 1970s, and the House of Lords is still much as it ever was!
The following extract is taken from pages 581-2. The first speaker is The Prime Minister, Liberal head of a coalition Liberal/Conservative Government in the 1870s. (Sound familiar?) He's in conversation with one of his ministers and friend, Phineas Finn.
'.....[We] can give the Conservatives credit for philanthropy and patriotism as readily as the Liberal. The Conservative who has had any idea of the meaning of the name which he carries, wishes, I suppose, to maintain the differences and the distances which separate the highly placed from their lower brethren. He thinks that God has divided the world as he finds it divided, and that he may best do his duty by making the inferior man happy and contented in his position, teaching him that the place which he holds is his by God's ordinance.'
'And it is so.'
'Hardly in the sense that I mean. But that is the great Conservative lesson. That lesson seems to me to be hardly compatible with continual improvement in the condition of the lower man. But with the Conservative all such improvement is to be based on the idea of the maintenance of those distances. I as a Duke am to be kept as far apart from the man who drives my horses as was my ancestor from the man who drove his, or who rode after him to the wars - and that is to go on for ever. There is much to be said for such a scheme. Let the lords be, all of them, men with loving hearts, and clear intellect, and noble instincts, and it is possible that they should use their powers so beneficently as to spread happiness over the earth. It is one of the millenniums which the mind of man can conceive, and seems to be that which the Conservative mind does conceive.'
'But the other men who are not lords don't want that kind of happiness.'
'If such happiness were attainable it might be well to constrain men to accept it. But the lords of this world are fallible men; and though as units they ought to be and perhaps are better than those others who have fewer advantages, they are much more likely as units to go astray in opinion than the bodies of men whom they would seek to govern. We know that power does corrupt, and that we cannot trust kings to have loving hearts, and clear intellects, and noble instincts. Men as they come to think about it and look forward, and to look back, will not believe in such a millennium as that.'
'Do they believe in any millennium?'
'I think they do after a fashion, and I think that I do myself. That is my idea of Conservatism. The doctrine of Liberalism is, of course, the reverse. The Liberal, if he have any fixed idea at all, must I think have conceived the idea of lessening distances, - of bringing the coachman and the Duke nearer together, - nearer and nearer, till a millennium shall be reached by -'
'By equality?' asked Phineas, eagerly interrupting the Prime Minister, and showing his dissent by the tone of his voice.
'I did not use the word, which is open to many objections. In the first place, the millennium, which I have perhaps rashly named, is so distant that we we need not even think of it as possible. Men's intellects are at present so various that we cannot even realise the idea of equality, and here in England we have been taught to hate the word by the evil effects of those absurd attempts which have been made elsewhere to proclaim it as a fact accomplished by the scratch of a pen or by a chisel on a stone. We have been injured in that, because a good word signifying a grand idea has been driven out of the vocabulary of good men. Equality would be a heaven, if we could attain it. How can we to whom so much has been given dare to think otherwise? How can you look at the bowed back and bent legs and abject face of that poor ploughman, who winter and summer has to drag his rheumatic limbs to his work, while you go a-hunting or sit in pride of place among the foremost few of your country, and say that it all is as it ought to be? You are a Liberal because you know that it is not all as it ought to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so godlike, - nay so absolutely divine, - that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable. Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea of equality stinks in men's nostrils.'
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The Prime Minister
