A Pre-Election Post

Courtesy of Mr. Gregsbury, a wonderfully awful politician in Chapter 16 of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. The scene is one where Gregsbury is answering to the complaints of his constituents, who accuse him of various episodes of flip-flopping for pecuniary advantage and other sorts of craven behavior that has betrayed the interests of the people. Gregsbury's reply to these charges, and the narrator's comment on it:

"My conduct has been, and ever will be, regulated by a sincere regard for the true and real interests of this great and happy country. Whether I look at home or abroad, whether I behold the peaceful industrious communities of our island home, her rivers covered with steamboats, her roads with locomotives, her streets with cabs, her skies with balloons of a power and magnitude hitherto unknown in the history of aeronautics in this city or any other nation--I say, whether I look merely at home, or, stretching my eyes farther, contemplate the boundless prospect of conquest and possession--achieved by British perseverance and British valour--which is outspread before me, I clasp my hands, and turning my eyes to the broad expanse above my head, exclaim, "Thank Heaven I am a Briton.""

The time had been when this burst of enthusiasm would have been cheered to the very echo; but now the deputation received it with chilling coldness. The general impression seemed to be, that as an explanation of Mr. Gregsbury's political conduct, it did not enter quite enough into detail, and one gentleman in the rear did not scruple to remark aloud, that for his purpose it savoured rather too much of a "gammon" tendency.