Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/51

 with better assurance be hailed as the rising hope of Radicalism,—of all that is sincere, capable, and of good repute in English politics. The odds are heavily in his favor. He has youth, health, wealth, birth, strength, talent, industry, firmness of character, special training, and moral courage of a very high order on his side. Such a combination of advantages seldom fails. If he is spared to his country for the next twenty years, he will almost certainly be able to say with regard to her fortunes, whatever these may be, Magna pars fui. "Never prophesy," said the wise Quaker, "unless thou knowest!" Nevertheless, I venture to predict, that, sooner or later, Charles Wentworth Dilke will be called upon by the people of England to take a very high place,—it may be the highest,—and he will succeed, too, by the right of the fittest. Like his friend Gambetta, he has been tried in the fiery furnace of political calumny and social hate, and has not been found wanting. "Society" undertook to put him down, and he has put down society. Of the two he has proved himself the stronger, and a better proof of capacity to serve the nation it would be impossible to adduce.

"That which is bred in the bone," says the proverb, "will come out in the flesh." The anti-monarchical sympathies of the Dilkes, like those of the Taylors, are at least as much inherited as acquired. No fewer than three of the Dilke ancestry were among the judges of Charles I.; viz., the resolute Bradshaw, who presided over the High Court of Justice, Sir Peter Wentworth, and Cawley. All were stem foes of "one-man government," whether that one man were the "divine right" Charles Stuart, or the Puritan Bonaparte, Oliver Crom-