Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/44

 is said in infancy to have been smuggled to England in a pannier by his Huguenot guardians at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Not only was George Courtauld a zealous Unitarian, but his political sympathies appear also to have been republican. Writing from America to a relative in England, he shrewdly remarks, "I cannot but think with Mr. Paine that you have no constitution. You have, indeed, a form of government; but how you came by that it is very difficult to say,—certainly it was not that form which, after mature deliberation, the people of England chose for themselves."

Within the last few years Lord Beaconsfield has demonstrated to all whom it may concern that Mr. Taylor's grandfather and Mr. Paine were not far wrong in divining that the English people have "no constitution," only "a form of government," which, in the hands of a despotic Minister, may be twisted into the most dangerous imperialistic shape. "Our glorious constitution "is a political imposture and superstition which the member for Leicester, the descendant of such a clear-sighted race of iconoclasts, can hardly be expected to swallow without protest.

Mr. P. A. Taylor, M.P., was born in London in 1819. He is the eldest son of Peter Alfred Taylor, of the old and highly respected firm of Courtauld, Taylor, & Courtauld, silk-manufacturers. Booking, Braintree, Halstead. He was educated in the first instance at the Unitarian school at Brighton, then taught by the Rev. J. P. Malleson. At fourteen years of age he was removed to London, and for a short time he attended University College.

Of the Unitarians, as a sect, it has been wittily said.