An interesting quote describing political parties

Thomas Babington Macaulay was a nineteenth-century English politician and historian, whose Essays contain an interesting characterization of a political party.  It seems to me not without relevance to the Pacific Green Party, torn as we now are in the Portland area by internal dissension.

A political party, like a camp, has its sutlers and camp-followers, as well as its soldiers.  In its progress it collects round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who relax its discipline and dishonor its flag by their irregularities, and who, after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut the throats and rifle the baggage of their companions.  -- Essays and Poems, vol. I, p. 351.

Since these camp-followers are no more avoidable to a political party, it would seem, than to a military campaign, the rest of the Portland Greens will be obliged to carry on the struggle, despite the imperfections and worse of their erstwhile companions in the fight.