These were his theoretic convictions, while outwardly he amused himself in the high circles which his Parliamentary notoriety had opened to him. His letters are full of dukes and princes and beautiful women, and balls and dinners. He ventured liberties, even in the presence of the great Premier, and escaped unpunished. In the spring of 1839 he notes a dinner in Whitehall Gardens. 'I came late,' he says, 'having mistaken the hour. I found some twenty-five gentlemen grubbing in solemn silence. I threw a shot over the table and set them going, and in time they became noisy. Peel, I think, was pleased that I broke the awful stillness, as he talked to me a good deal, though we were far removed.' But though he enjoyed these honours and magnificences perhaps more than he need have done, he kept an independence of his own. It was supposed that he was looking for office, and that Peel's neglect of him in 1841 was the cause of his subsequent revolt. Peel did make some advances to him through a third person, and said afterwards in the House that Disraeli had been ready to serve under him; but if office was really his object, never did any man take a worse way of recommending himself. In the summer of the same year (1839) the monster Chartist petition was brought down to the House of Commons in the name of the working people of England, and the general disposition was to treat it as an absurdity and an insult. Disraeli, when his turn came to speak, was not ashamed to say that, though he disapproved of the Charter, he sympathised with the Chartists. They were right, he thought, in desiring a fairer share in the profits of their labour, and that fairer share they were unlikely to obtain from the commercial constituences whom the Reform Bill had enfranchised. Great duties could alone confer great station, and the new class which had been invested with political station had not been bound up with the mass of the people by the exercise of corresponding obligations. Those who possessed power without discharging its conditions and duties, were naturally anxious to put themselves to the least possible expense and trouble. Having gained their own object, they wished to keep it without appeal to their pockets, or cost of their time. The true friends of the people ought to be the aristocracy, and in very significant words he added that 'the English nation would concede any degree of political power to a class making simultaneous advances in the exercise of great social duties.'