And those drilled in party
discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is nothing
there is Satan.
For a long time past in our politics there has not only been no real
battle, but no real bargain. No two men have bargained as Gladstone and
Parnell bargained--each knowing the other to be a power. But in real
revolutions men discover that no one man can really agree with another man
until he has disagreed with him.
LIBERALISM: A SAMPLE
There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much
as Tom Pinch felt towards Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had found him
out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all democrats,
about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen plutocracy of
to-day. And one of the things that it was fashionable to say of Dickens
in drawing-rooms was that he had no subtlety, and could not describe a
complex frame of mind. Like most other things that are said in
drawing-rooms, it was a lie. Dickens was a very unequal writer, and his
successes alternate with his failures; but his successes are subtle quite
as often as they are simple. Thus, to take "Martin Chuzzlewit" alone, I
should call the joke about the Lord No-zoo a simple joke: but I should
call the joke about Mrs. Todgers's vision of a wooden leg a subtle joke.
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