Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his
elders, I derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs
and their traditional policy. I gathered that, with their tongues
in their cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not
themselves believe, should they think that by so doing they would
be able to enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in
office: that, in order to extricate themselves from some present
difficulty, they were always prepared to mortgage the future
recklessly, quite regardless of the ultimate consequences: that
whilst professing the most liberal principles, they were absurdly
exclusive in their private lives, not consorting with all and
sundry as we poor Tories did: that convictions mattered less than
office: that in fact nothing much mattered, provided that the
government of the country remained permanently in the hands of a
little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit
under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some
member of those favoured families. In proof of the latter
statement, I learnt that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as
Prime Minister, had been to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-
at-Arms of the House of Commons, and to offer to another of his
brothers, the Rev.
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