As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is not likely to be hooked on by any party.
I shall tell everybody that you are going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner: going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to distribute them.
The greater part of my officers were Whigs. It was well for their venerable brotherhood that the new Surveyor was not a politician, and though a faithful Democrat in principle, neither received nor held his office with any reference to political services.
It appears to me -- who have been a calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat -- that this fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them, and because the practice of many years has made it the law of political warfare, which unless a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice to murmur at.
"And you, by your long face, should be a Whig?"[13]
[13] Whig or Whigamore was the cant name for those who were loyal to King George.
He threw himself into the struggle of party, first as a
Whig, then as a Tory; but as a friend said of him later, "He was neither
Whig nor Tory, neither Jacobite nor Republican.
Then we loafed along past the Nickersons, and of course they asked if that was the new stranger yonder, and where'd he come from, and what was his name, and which communion was he, Babtis' or Methodis', and which politics,
Whig or Democrat, and how long is he staying, and all them other questions that humans always asks when a stranger comes, and animals does, too.
But while Charles was outwardly, for political reasons, a member of the Church of England (at heart he was a Catholic), the Duke of York was a professed and devoted Catholic, and the powerful
Whig party, strongly Protestant, was violently opposed to him.
He had ambitions that were vaguely political, he described himself as a
Whig, and he was put up for a club which was of Liberal but gentlemanly flavour.
You have made a
Whig of the girl; and how should her father, or anybody else, expect any obedience from her?"--"Brother," answered Mrs Western, with an air of great disdain, "I cannot express the contempt I have for your politics of all kinds; but I will appeal likewise to the young lady herself, whether I have ever taught her any principles of disobedience.
It is needless to say that Sir Pitt was brought to change his views after the death of the great
Whig statesman.