The man, on the other hand, of overwhelming personality, aspires honourably to power, the very condition of which in his eyes is to guide and elevate the country which entrusts him with it. The responsibility of privilege, great position on the tenure of great duties, ambition not as a right but as the sole means of enforcing his ideals--these are his characteristics. He never covets place without power, and never power without influence; whereas some kind of covetousness is essential to the egotist. “He who has great honours,” Disraeli has urged, “must have great burdens.” And again: “... My conception,” he said, in a signal speech during 1846, “of a great statesman is of one who represents a great idea; an idea which he may and can impress on the mind and conscience of a nation.... That is a grand, that is indeed an heroic position. But I care not what may be the position of a man who never originates an idea--a watcher of the atmosphere, a man who ... takes his observations, and when he finds the wind in a certain quarter trims to suit it. Such a person may be a powerful Minister, but he is no more a great statesman than the man who gets up behind a carriage is a great whip. Both are disciples of progress; both perhaps may get a good place. But how far the original momentum is indebted to their powers, and how far their guiding prudence regulates the lash or the rein, it is not necessary for me to notice.” Disraeli never stooped to trim; he always aspired to steer. When he started as a brilliant author, electric with ideas derided but since accepted--as an imaginative originator, “full of deep passions and deep thoughts”--it would have been easy for him to have followed the triumphal car of the Whigs who invited him.[6] It would have been easy for him to have suited himself to Sir Robert Peel’s vicissitudes of private, and desertion of public opinion, embodied in a great party which had raised him to power. In obeying again the central ideas which quickened him from the first, Disraeli broke up the “Young England” party, which looked up to and cheered him, whose main objects he inspired, and eventually realised. And in 1867, as we shall see, so far from “dishing” the Liberals with their own measure of Reform, he carried, in the teeth of his own supporters, one on lines peculiar to his own perpetual view of the subject, and at length achieved what he had urged in the ’thirties, the ’forties, and the ’fifties.