The directors may think it safest to go on selling the old flavour to a diminishing number of customers, or they may gradually substitute another flavour, taking the risk that the number of housewives who say, 'This is not the real Parramatta Tea,' may be balanced by the number of those who say, 'Parramatta Tea has improved.' If people will not buy the old flavour at all, and prefer to buy the new flavour under a new name, the Parramatta Tea Company must be content to disappear, like a religion which has made an unsuccessful attempt to put new wine into old bottles.
All these conditions are as familiar to the party politician as they are to the advertiser.

The party candidate is, at his first appearance, to most of his constituents merely a packet with the name of Liberal or Conservative upon it.

That name has associations of colour and music, of traditional habit and affection, which, when once formed, exist independently of the party policy.

Unless he bears the party label--unless he is, as the Americans say, a 'regular' candidate--not only will those habits and affections be cut off from him, but he will find it extraordinarily difficult to present himself as a tangible entity to the electors at all.

A proportion of the electors, varying greatly at different times and at different places, will vote for the 'regular' nominee of their party without reference to his programme, though to the rest of them, and always to the nominating committee, he must also present a programme which can be identified with the party policy.