e
intercourse, by stating their own sense to each of them as the sense of
the other; and thus they reciprocally master both sides. It is first
buzzed about the ears of leaders, "that their friends without doors are
very eager for some measure, or very warm about some opinion,--that you
must not be too rigid with them. They are useful persons, and zealous in
the cause. They may be a little wrong, but the spirit of liberty must
not be damped; and by the influence you obtain from some degree of
concurrence with them at present, you may be enabled to set them right
hereafter."

Thus the leaders are at first drawn to a connivance with sentiments and
proceedings often totally different from their serious and deliberate
notions. But their acquiescence answers every purpose.

With no better than such powers, the go-betweens assume a new
representative character. What at best was but an acquiescence is
magnified into an authority, and thence into a desire on the part of the
leaders; and it is carried down as such to the subordinate members of
parties. By this artifice they in their turn are led into measures which
at first, perhaps, few of them wished at all, or at least did not desire
vehemently or systematically.

There is in all parties, between the principal leaders in Parliament and
the lowest followers out of doors, a middle sort of men, a sort of
equestrian order, who, by the spirit of that middle situation, are the
fittest for preventing things from running to excess. But indecision,
though a vice of a totally different character, is the natural
accomplice of violence. The irresolution and timidity of those who
compose this middle order often prevents the effect of their
controlling situation. The fear of differing with the authority of
leaders on the one hand, and of contradicting the desires of the
multitude on the other, induces them to give a careless and passive
assent to measures in which they never were consulted; and thus things
proceed, by a sort of activity of inertness, until whole bodies,
leaders, middle-men, and followers, are all hurried, with every
appearance and with many of the effects of unanimity, into schemes of
politics, in the substance of which no two of them were ever fully
agreed, and the origin and authors of which, in this circular mode of
communication, none of them find it possible to trace. In my experience,
I have seen much of this in affairs which, though trifling in comparison
to the