He was now to show whether he was or was not a really great man. In his early career he had not concealed that his chief motive was ambition. He had started as a soldier of fortune, and he had taken service with the party among whom, perhaps, he felt that he would have the best chance of rising to eminence. Young men of talent were chiefly in the other camp--among the Conservatives he might expect fewer rivals. But the side which he had chosen undoubtedly best suited the character of his own mind; under no circumstances could Disraeli have been a popular apostle of progress, or have taught with a grave face the doctrines of visionary freedom. He regarded all that as nonsense, even as insincere nonsense, not believed in even by its advocates. On all occasions he had spoken his mind freely, careless what prejudice he might offend. Even on the abolition of slavery, on which English self-applause was innocently sensitive, he alone of public men had dared to speak without enthusiasm. The emancipation of the negroes, he said in a debate upon the sugar trade, 'was virtuous but was not wise.' Politics was his profession, and as a young barrister aspires to be Lord Chancellor Disraeli aspired to rise in the State. He had done the Conservatives' work, and the Conservatives had made him Prime Minister; but he had committed himself to few definite opinions, and, unlike most other great men who had attained the same position, he was left with a comparatively free hand. Lord Burghley was called to the helm to do a definite thing; to steer his country through the rocks and shoals of the Reformation. His course was marked out for him, and the alternatives were success or the scaffold. Disraeli had the whole ocean open, to take such course as might seem prudent or attractive. There was no special measure which he had received a mandate to carry through, no detailed policy which he had advocated which the country was enabling him to execute. He was sincerely and loyally anxious to serve the interests of the British Empire and restore its diminished influence, but in deciding what was to be done it was natural that he would continue to be guided by an ambition to make his Ministry memorable, and by the cosmopolitan and oriental temperament of his own mind.