Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/97

 without difficulty; his great services to India, and his persistent opposition to all encroachments on Epping Forest and the New Forest, weighing heavily in his favor in the electoral balance.

In Parliament Mr. Fawcett's career has been one of no ordinary success. The blind Postmaster-General is recognized by all parties in the House as a speaker of decided mark, and his vote is always to be weighed as well as counted. He entered the legislature with a body of well-defined principles, and he has stuck to them manfully through evil and through good report. His political conceptions are, in a great measure, those of his friend, the late Mr. John Stuart Mill. Unlike Goethe, for example, it was the special function of that great and generous thinker to fertilize, not sterilize, the minds of other men.

Mr. Fawcett's ideas may be described as ultra-individualist in their tendency. He is an "administrative Nihilist," who believes that government is at best a necessary evil, and that the less the people have of it, and the more they are left to seek their own happiness in their own way, the better for them. In a country like Germany, with its autocracy on the one hand and its socialism on the other, he would be between the upper and the nether millstone, and would assuredly,