tionist, 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 parlour.
“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 maintaining tradesmen of the right colour.’ Those very words have been spoken to me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting. I don’t mean by your honourable self, Mr Brooke.”
“No, no, no—that’s narrow, you know. Until my butler complains to me of your goods, Mr Mawmsey,” said Mr Brooke, soothingly, “until I hear that you send bad sugars, spices—that sort of thing—I shall never order him to go elsewhere.”
“Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged,” said Mr Mawmsey, feeling that politics were clearing up a little. “There would be some pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honourable manner.”
