"
Thus the leaders are at first drawn to a connivance with sentiments and
proceedings often totally different from their serious and deliberate
notions. But their acquiescence answers every purpose.
With no better than such powers, the go-betweens assume a new
representative character. What at best was but an acquiescence is
magnified into an authority, and thence into a desire on the part of the
leaders; and it is carried down as such to the subordinate members of
parties. By this artifice they in their turn are led into measures which
at first, perhaps, few of them wished at all, or at least did not desire
vehemently or systematically.
There is in all parties, between the principal leaders in Parliament and
the lowest followers out of doors, a middle sort of men, a sort of
equestrian order, who, by the spirit of that middle situation, are the
fittest for preventing things from running to excess. But indecision,
though a vice of a totally different character, is the natural
accomplice of violence. The irresolution and timidity of those who
compose this middle order often prevents the effect of their
controlling situation.
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