ogical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a
revolutionist, and then Middlemarch would not elect you, I fancy. As
for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."

Mr. Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still appeared
to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval
the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn
into using them with much hopefulness. At this stage of affairs he was
in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of
money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been,
tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing
other orators, or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he
came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it
was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing. He was a
little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey, a chief
representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail
trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the
borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas
and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree
impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this
necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even
if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand,
there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing
respectable people whose names were on his books. He was accustomed to
receive large orders from Mr. Brooke of Tipton; but then, there were
many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a great weight of
grocery on their side. Mr. Mawmsey thinking that Mr. Brooke, as not
too "clever in his intellects," was the more likely to forgive a grocer
who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his
back parlor.

"As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the
small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably. "Will it support Mrs.
Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more? I
put the question _fictiously_, knowing what must be the answer. Very
well, sir. I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when
gentlemen come to me and say, 'Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote
against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere: when I sugar my liquor
I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintainin