Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/48

 Mr. Taylor in his younger days was untiring in his endeavors to liberate Poland, Hungary, and Italy from the oppressor's grasp. By voice, pen, and purse, he did his best for the popular cause.

The only conspicuous blunder of his life was his advocacy^ of the Crimean war in opposition to Cobden and Bright. The wrongs of Poland rankled in his breast and blinded his judgment, as it fatally darkened the understanding of so many other true friends of freedom. In the American civil war, needless to say, his sympathies were entirely with the North and the policy of abolition, of which he had long been a -strenuous advocate.

In America the name of P. A. Taylor is perhaps as well known as in England, and it will be better known to posterity than to his contemporaries. Nor is this to be wondered at; for in this royalty and aristocracy ridden land the member for Leicester is a "rare" figure, and precious as he is rare. He is, in a sense, a "survival" from the great era of the Commonwealth,—a mind of the type of Vane, Ludlow, Hutchinson, Scott, and Hazelrig,—an idealist in politics, but withal a practical idealist. He is more human than English, his principles being more or less applicable to all times and to all places. Having embraced a principle, he holds to it with the tenacity of a bull-dog, fearlessly pushing it to its remotest consequences.

This was the distinguishing mental characteristic of all the great republicans of the seventeenth century. Since then an extraordinary blight has fallen on the political intelligence of Englishmen. They waste their best intellect in the defence of palpable anomalies and pernicious compromises. Even Gladstone and Bright