Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/245



HERE is not in England's vast metropolis, or peradventure in all England, a Radical who, during the last thirty years, has more consistently acted on this principle than Mr. James Beal, the noted Regent-street auctioneer and land-agent.

He is the typical Radical citizen of London,—a bourgeois untainted by any of the political failings of the English middle class. These consist of indifference to the claims of intellectual superiority on the one hand, and to the demands of suffering humanity on the other. The British shopkeeper is not without his virtues; but he is neither the friend of thinkers nor of the proletariate. In both these respects Mr. Beal has been conspicuously above the class to which he belongs. For more than a quarter of a century this busy, bustling auctioneer has contrived to devote some portion of his day—often the best portion of it—to the furtherance of this scheme or that of municipal or national reform. Without fee or reward, in evil and in good report, he has gone steadily forward, studying, writing, 231