Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/47

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
PETER ALFRED TAYLOR.
33

In his capacity of redresser-general of unheeded wrongs and oppressions, Mr. Taylor has quite a business to attend to; and in this character have some of his greatest senatorial successes been achieved.

He is the terror of the "great unpaid," whose cruel antics throughout rural England he has done much to curb. Every day "justices' justice" is more of a byword and a reproach. He has striven hard to remove the inequalities of Sunday legislation; and the poor of London in particular owe him a debt of gratitude for taking the sting out of the great harasser of then lives, that too "busy bee," Bee Wright. It is but the other day that Mr. Taylor, at a cost of more than ten thousand dollars, presented the workingmen of Brighton with a People's Club, which will secure to them on Sundays something like the advantages of a local Carlton or Reform.

In the attempt to bring General Eyre to justice, he was hardly less active than Mr. Mill.

The "cat," he has satisfied all humane minds, is twice accursed,—cursing him that administers, and him to whom it is administered.

The game-laws he has had the courage to expose in all then naked infamy to a country still held tight in the vice of feudalism.

He has been one of three in resisting the spoliation of the exchequer by royal princes and princesses; and the most important perhaps of all future parliamentary reforms—the payment of members—he has made peculiarly his own. His speech on the latter subject is one of the most convincing ever delivered by him or any other living member of the House.

As president of the "People's International League,"