“I beg your pardon, sir, but I can’t afford that.  When I give a vote I must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects on my till and ledger, speaking respectfully.  Prices, I’ll admit, are what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after you’ve bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep—­ I’ve never; myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke to human pride.  But as to one family, there’s debtor and creditor, I hope; they’re not going to reform that away; else I should vote for things staying as they are.  Few men have less need to cry for change than I have, personally speaking—­that is, for self and family.  I am not one of those who have nothing to lose:  I mean as to respectability both in parish and private business, and noways in respect of your honorable self and custom, which you was good enough to say you would not withdraw from me, vote or no vote, while the article sent in was satisfactory.”

After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife that he had been rather too many for Brooke of Tipton, and that he didn’t mind so much now about going to the poll.

Mr. Brooke on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics to Ladislaw, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that he had no concern with any canvassing except the purely argumentative sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.  Mr. Brooke, necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature of the Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance on the side of the Bill—­which were remarkably similar to the means of enlisting it on the side against the Bill.  Will stopped his ears.  Occasionally Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our eating and apparel, could hardly go on if our imaginations were too active about processes.  There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr. Brooke through would be quite innocent.

But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.  He had written out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to perceive that Mr. Brooke’s mind, if it had the burthen of remembering any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and not easily come back again.  To collect documents is one mode of serving your country, and to remember the contents of a document is another.  No! the only way in which Mr. Brooke could be coerced into thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied with them till they took up all the room in his brain.  But here there was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in beforehand.  Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in his way when he was speaking.