Leader of the Conservative party for seventeen years & prime minister for fourteen the third Marquis of Salisbury was one of the most successful political practitioners of modern times as well as a major international statesman Yet he was also a prolific & pungent writer on politics The large body of journalism which he produced during the first thirty years of his career enables us to examine in detail the views on politics & society which underlay his practical action While his brand of Conservatism was conventional in its conclusions it was distinguished by the highly sceptical & utilitarian mode of reasoning through which it sought to reach them & by its insistence on a crudely conceived class struggle as the driving force of history & politics Its central theme was hostility to 'democracy'; & when after 1867 'democracy' seemed to have arrived it questioned how far the system of parliamentary government could work tolerably under the new dispensation