Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/41

 Bill were thus brought; but sure I am that Mr. Taylor would have recognized none. According to his views, the one was in favor of, the other in opposition to, liberty. Hence his support and his antagonism. Both flowed naturally from the same source,—a source at once of strong personal conviction and ancestral pride.

It may appear somewhat strange to attribute ancestral pride to an out-and-out democrat like Mr. Taylor; but it is impossible fully to understand his character without taking the markedly liberal tendencies of his forefathers, both in politics and religion, into account. Mr. Taylor may be described as a hereditary Radical of two and a half centuries standing.

The pseudo-science of heraldry is coming to have an unexpected value as an aid to the study of the laws of heredity. Mental, like physical characteristics, are shown to persist and recur from generation to generation, contrary to all our preconceived notions of the determining causes of the opinions of individuals and the way in which they are formed. The acquisition of riches is vulgarly supposed to make the best of Radicals Conservatives. Self-interest, it is held, induces them instinctively to throw in their lot with the privileged classes; but the history of some of the most respectable and well-to-do families in England proves the very opposite. The instinct in favor of progress may fail for a generation; but it soon reappears.

Mr. Taylor's genealogy is in itself a standing refutation of ordinarily accepted theories. The name is distinctly of plebeian origin; but, as early as the reign of Edward III., Mr. Taylor's progenitors possessed