Walpole's Way To Win Them
Sir Robert Walpole, in one of his letters, thus describes the relations
of a skilful Minister with an accommodating Parliament--the description,
it may be said, having, by lapse of time, acquired the merit of general
inapplicability to the present state of things:--"My dear friend, there
is scarcely a member whose purse I do not know to a sixpence, and whose
very soul almost I could not purchase at the offer. The reason former
considered the temper of the people they had to deal with. I have known
with a lucrative employment. I pursue methods as opposite as the poles,
effect." "Patriots," elsewhere says Walpole, "spring up like mushrooms.
I could raise fifty of them within four-and-twenty hours. I have raised
many of them in one night. It is but refusing to gratify an unreasonable