Above all things Disraeli was a personality. Personality is independent of training, except in the rare cases where education accords with predisposition. It is the will. And in authorship, when expression chimes with intention, it is the style. Personality is the clue to history, for events proceed from character, more than character from events. Commenting on the adoption of the “Charter” by non-chartists groaning under the injustice of industrial slavery, Disraeli observes most truly: “... But all this had been brought about, as most of the great events of history, by the unexpected and unobserved influence of individual character.” Personality is the salt of politics; it is the spirit of our party system; and woe betide every era in England when figure-heads replace head-figures. It is an atmosphere enchanting the landscape. “... It is the personal that interests mankind, that fires their imagination and wins their hearts. A cause is a great abstraction, and fit only for students: embodied in a party, it stirs men to action; but place at the head of that party a leader who can inspire enthusiasm, he commands the world....” Association, groups, co-operative principles, these are the mechanisms invented by the brain, and guided by the hand of individuality, the fuel that individuality gathers and enkindles. Without it they remain dead lumber, and can never of themselves prove originative forces. What men crave is, once more in Disraeli’s parlance, “... A primordial and creative mind; one that will say to his fellows, ‘Behold, God has given me thought, I have discovered truth, and you _shall_ believe.’” Personality is the contradiction of the mechanical and of the dead level; it is the soul of influence. How depressing is the reverse side of the medal!--“Duncan Macmorrogh” (the utilitarian in _The Young Duke_), “cut up the Creation and got a name. His attack upon mountains was most violent, and proved, by its personality that he had come from the lowlands. He demonstrated the inability of all elevation, and declared that the Andes were the aristocracy of the globe. Rivers he rather patronised, but flowers he quite pulled to pieces, and proved them to be the most useless of existences.... He informed us that we were quite wrong in supposing ourselves to be the miracle of the Creation. On the contrary, he avowed that already there were various pieces of machinery of far more importance than man; and he had no doubt in time that a superior race would arise, got by a steam-engine on a spinning-jenny....”