he said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his
outlook by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or
rather stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note,
then, that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and
for Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals,
those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify
themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit,
for which they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for
they have no vital principle.

Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work
of the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady
swing, from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock,
which is the clock's life, remember that. The Liberals are the
professors of the practicable in politics.

'A suitable image for time-servers!' Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
exasperates men of a principle. 'Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,
an army of bastards, mercenaries professing the practicable for pay.
They know us the motive force, the Tories the resisting power, and they
feign to aid us in battering our enemy, that they may stop the shock.
We fight, they profit. What are they? Stranded Whigs, crotchetty
manufacturers; dissentient religionists; the half-minded, the
hare-hearted; the I would and I would-not--shifty creatures, with
youth's enthusiasm decaying in them, and a purse beginning to jingle;
fearing lest we do too much for safety, our enemy not enough for safety.
They a party? Let them take action and see! We stand a thousand defeats;
they not one! Compromise begat them. Once let them leave sucking the
teats of compromise, yea, once put on the air of men who fight and die
for a cause, they fly to pieces. And whither the fragments? Chiefly, my
friend, into the Tory ranks. Seriously so I say. You between future and
past are for the present--but with the hunted look behind of all godless
livers in the present. You Liberals are Tories with foresight,
Radicals without faith. You start, in fear of Toryism, on an errand of
Radicalism, and in fear of Radicalism to Toryism you draw back. There is
your pendulum-swing!'

Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the
day, for his privat