Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/89

 VII.

HENRY FAWCETT.

OR twenty-one years the brightness of noonday has been to Henry Fawcett, "member for Hackney and Hindostan," as the blackness of midnight. As is well known, he has been stone blind during the whole period of his public life. The fact is a most painful one, which I allude to thus early, not for the purpose of exciting sympathy, but because it is impossible to estimate aright the magnitude of Mr. Faweett's achievements if the heaviness of the odds against which he has had to contend is not duly taken into account. There are always clever people ready to demonstrate that untoward calamities, which do not happen to themselves, are somehow blessings in disguise. Are you lamed for life? So much the better for you. Is there not thus effected an immense saving of shoe-leather? For the future you are independent of shoemakers. Are you deprived of sight? Good for you again; for is it not a fact that the blind have a marvellous gift of groping their way in the dark? Do not, for example, the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii testify that in their last agony the doomed inhabitants sought the aid of sightless guides to direct 75