Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/316

 In the year of the great Reform Bill, 1832, Disraeli, still sympathetic with reform, refused to inscribe himself a member of the Conservative Club and declined being returned for a Tory borough. In 1834, it was a Liberal minister, Melbourne, offering to assist him and asking him where his ambition lay—it was a Liberal minister whom he astounded by declaring that he wished to be prime minister. Yet in 1837, when at last he entered Parliament, he entered as a member of the Conservative party. Why, after his initial appearance as a Radical and a Reformer, did he finally throw his "supernatural energies" into the "Feudal" cause?

The reasons are not one but many. First and foremost, his desire to "rule the House of Commons" quite transcended his interest in either of the parties. Secondly, after repeated failures to break into Parliament as an independent, he discovered that he should never get in without party support. Thirdly, toward the end of 1834 he formed a strong personal attachment to Lord Lyndhurst, which led to the establishment of Conservative connections. Fourthly, the Whig Government, which at the passing of the Reform Bill had expected to last "forever," began in 1834 to break up, and the Tory prospects to brighten. Fifthly, the Philosophic Radicals of the Bentham and Mill type were as antipathetic to him as they were to Carlyle: they were too dryly rational, they dwelt too much in the thin air of abstract rights, they were "logic-chopping doctrinaires." "The Utilitarians in politics," he