number of customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, ’This is not the real Parramatta Tea,’ may be balanced by the number of those who say, ‘Parramatta Tea has improved.’  If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.

All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser.  The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it.  That name has associations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy.  Unless he bears the party label—­unless he is, as the Americans say, a ‘regular’ candidate—­not only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible entity to the electors at all.  A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the ‘regular’ nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy.  But, in any case, as long as he is a party candidate, he must remember that it is in that character that he speaks and acts.  The party prepossessions and party expectations of his constituents alone make it possible for them to think and feel with him.  When he speaks there is between him and his audience the party mask, larger and less mobile than his own face, like the mask which enabled actors to be seen and heard in the vast open-air theatres of Greece.  If he can no longer act the part with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the mask of another party.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions.  This does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere.  As individuals they can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant readiness to lose it.  Sometimes they must even risk the existence of their party itself.  When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in 1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four years before.  In either case Peel was doing something other and more serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of the moment.  And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.