Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/40

 captain of forlorn hopes, the champion of forgotten rights, the redresser of unheeded wrongs. He is the Incorruptible of the House. In evil and in good report he has striven to subject every issue that has presented itself to the test of general principles of human well-being.

I am not now considering whether he has been uniformly right in particular deductions from these principles: he may, or he may not. All I say is, that he has been uniformly true to his principles from his youth up. They alone have been his leaders. Of "doctrines fashioned to the varying hour," he has known nothing, and, from the constitution of his mind, will never know.

Mr. Taylor is generally considered an eccentric member; but his eccentricity is wholly on the surface. Once understand his principles, or rather solitary principle of action,—viz., that liberty, liberty, liberty, is the best of all things in all things political, religious, social, or commercial,—and the course which the senior member for Leicester will pursue on any given question may be predicted almost with mathematical certainty.

I always remember a curiously instructive telegraphic summary of a speech delivered by Mr. Taylor to his constituents about the time of the republican agitation in 1870. It was a model of compression; but it illustrates admirably what I have been saying. It appeared among other items of "election news," and ran thus: "Mr. P. A. Taylor, the member for Leicester, addressed his constituents last night. He declared for the republic and against the Permissive Bill." I don't know whether the intelligent reporter saw any irony in the juxtaposition into which the republic and the Per-