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No Crooked Atoms. The result, contained in a series of brilliant pamphlets, was to make coherent policy out of the deep distrust which Tories felt for the new Socialism. Rab replanted the sturdy old roots of Toryism in modern soil. The guiding principles of his philosophy were 1) a belief in the divine origin of the human personality, and 2) a faith in Christian ethics. Rab denied the cynical Marxist view of British history as the selfish struggle of classes; he saw it as a long odyssey of the individual toward the fullest expression of himself, in which each tradition and each institution was cherished as a milestone on that odyssey. In the 19th century, Toryism stood sturdily against the laissez-faire doctrine of Liberalism with its conception of labor as a commodity. The great Tory reformer Disraeli, a biographer once wrote, "could not believe that men. men of flesh with mobile faces . . . were condemned to combine like so many crooked atoms to produce the cheapest possible calico in the richest possible world." In that day, said Rab, "Conservatism did not hesitate to invoke the collective power of society to redress the social wrongs caused by economic development. Now Socialism unduly exalts the state, and Conservatives must emphasize the importance of the individual."
The new Toryism accepted the social services as giving individuals fuller expression, and even claimed credit for helping create them. But Rab also transformed the terms in which the Tories saw them selves. Instead of capitalists itching to grind the faces of the poor, he saw them as exponents of freedom resisting an autocratic state. He wanted, said Butler, "a creative society, not a series of state almshouses."
To many a Tory, this was revolutionary. Rab was accused of "me tooism," of "trying to amalgamate the Tory Party with the Y.M.C.A." Even Tories who had no quarrel with Rab's principles felt a distaste for putting Utopian plans on paper. But in local meetings and party conferences, the rank & file enthusiastically adopted Rab's policy papers. Tory Party membership nearly doubled in the space of a year. In 1951 the Tories came back to office. Their margin was narrow —in fact, Labor polled more votes while the Conservatives won a handful more seats. If they had failed to win a full vote of confidence from the country, the Tories had nonetheless won a rare opportunity to prove themselves.