MB. FAWCETT.
NIB. FAWCETT has now reached, and has shown by his admirable exposition of the conditions of the Tele- graphic and Post Office Services delivered this week, that he has not reached by accident, a high position amongst English statesmen, and one quite unique when you consider the path by which he has attained it, and the very unusual diffi- culties which he has had to surmount in order that he might attain it. The late Professor Clifford, it is re- lated, once climbed the vane of a church steeple, and hung on to the cross-bar by his toes. If Mr. Fawcett, without sight to help him, had done the same, we doubt whether he would have achieved anything more intrinsically surprising than what he has actually achieved, in reaching nearly the highest office below the Cabinet, without the help of wealth or anything approaching to wealth,—without the help of genius, unless the power of giving close attention to a subject be rightly described as genius,—without the help of any remarkable gift of eloquence or persuasion,—and with the enormous and, to ordinary men, almost inconceivable impedi- ment of blindness in his way. It might, indeed, be said that to certain temperaments blindness would aid instead of hindering the gymnast's steadiness of head in dizzy situa- tions. But no one could maintain that in dealing with the world of political and literary controversy, by which Mr. Fawcett has won his arduous way to eminence, blindness can ever be regarded as anything but one of the most daunting and most weighty of all the disqualifications for success. It makes a man dependent on others at the moments when he most needs the sense of independence ; it creates the constant discouragement which every one feels who is aware that he is acting on inadequate data, while his rivals or opponents have other data to which he has no access ; and it multiplies many fold the physical difficulties in the way of acquiring accurate knowledge. The only set-off against all these immense deductions from ordinary men's ordinary ad- vantages for a public career, is due not to any external circumstance, but to the use Mr. Fawcett has himself made of his own peculiar position. No doubt, a man who has once accustomed himself habitually to overcome such a dis- couragement as his, will be indefinitely less susceptible to discouragements of all sorts than other men. As Demosthenes is said to have attained a distinct articulation by accustoming himself to talk clearly with stones in his mouth, so a man who can treat the loss of eyesight as if it were simply a new difficulty to be got over, and to be got over without allowing it to turn him aside for one moment from the path which he would have trodden if he had been as other men, will get as accustomed to move freely in a resisting medium as others are to moving in one which offers no resistance. When a man has a great power of overcoming resistance, anything which gives him the occasion to exert it hourly, strengthens him for the whole work of life. In this way, no doubt, Mr. Fawcett, by the power of his own spirit, has transmuted a great privation into a great oppor- tunity ; but then that was the alchemy of his own resolve, not a gift from without.
Mr. Fawcett's great political characteristic has been what we m ly call a firm, nay, almost obstinate rationality, which would never turn aside from its path for any one, leader or follower, clique or party, country or constituency. He is a very thoughtful, but not in any sense an imaginative politician. Some people have said that Mr. Fawcett could never have shown the physical courage he habitually shows,—in his bold riding and skating, for instance, in spite of his inability to see,—but for a want of im- agination. That may be either true or false ; probably it is due to Mr. Fawcott's wonderful power of fixing his attention exclu- sively on what is pertinent to the object he has in view, and not allowing it to wander to possibilities which would only take courage out of him, without giving him any fresh chance in life. But however this may be, no doubt his power as a poli- tician is greatly due to an obstinate rationality which dis- regards all imaginative considerations,—sometimes even very im- portant considerations which influence greatly and justly more imaginative men. Thus he quoted with approval, in his recent speech to the deputation on Telegraphs, Bentharu's rather absurd assertion that among the services which could be rendered by a Government to a country, there was probably no service so great as that of facilitating the means of internal communica- tion. As the value of every communication depends on the kind of thing communicated, it is obvious, we should think, that any act of a Government which tended to raise the standard of public justice or public mercy or public character,—and there are many which have this effect,—is of infinitely greater service than one which merely enables men to communicate more freely to each other whatever good or evil may happen to be in them. But obviously it is natural, and by no means regrettable, that a great economist, who has made economy his study through life, and whose politics have, as it were, grown naturally out of his economy, should in his own mind exaggerate the importance of improvements in method which he fully understands and knows to be always attainable, even though in doing so he loses sight of aspects of human life which lend themselves much less easily to the manipulation of administrative tact. Mr. Fawcett's obstinate rationality has been shown again and again in poli- tics ; first, in resisting hero-worship,—at one time, from about 1870 to 1873, there was nothing he loved better than taking up a high moral position of superiority to Mr. Gladstone ; again, in resisting the prejudices of Liberals,—there is nothing he has fought for more courageously than the representation of minorities, and the payment of election expenses by consti- tuencies out of the rates; also in rapping the knuckles of Liberals who seemed to be taking up his own principles too radically, and as he thought, in a manner to make them less palatable to the Rouse,—only last year he snubbed Mr. Dillwyn most redun- dantly for putting the House on its guard against conceding too unlimited an influence to the prerogative of the Crown ; and lastly, in depreciating the value attached to national religious sentiment in Irish affairs,—he was al one time the prop of the party which resisted all proposals for a Catholic Univer- sity in Ireland, and supported the claims of Trinity College, Dublin, to be the great University of the Irish people. In a word, Mr. Fawcett is the legatee, we may say, of Mr. J. S. Mill's economical and political conceptions, though he has never shown any of that disposition to throw himself ardently into anomalous positions,—for instance, into the monumental senti- ments left behind after the rational ground of those sentiments had been undermined—which makes Mr. J. S. Mill's autobio- graphy so singular and fascinating a study. Mr. Fawcett, like Mr. Mill, has been one of the most vigorous of the advocates for women's sufferage, but he has never shown anything of that exceptional sympathy with women, that disposition to regard women as having in them, far more than men, something of the nature of the seer, which lent a certain poetical fervour to Mr. Mill's pleas for the equality of women. Wherever Mr. Fawcett follows Mr. Mill,—and he has followed him pretty closely in the main lines of politics,—he follows him with a certain abatement of the glow, and a certain enchancement of the methodical sobriety of judgment, which were so curiously blended in the opinions of that distinguished man. For the intellectual passion of Mr. J. S. Mill, Mr. Fawcett has substi- tuted a perfectly unimpassioned but extremely vigorous and tenacious rationality.
Mr. Fawcett is certainly a remarkable example of the success which may be achieved by living on a principle. He told his audience in one of his addresses to the blind, that soon after he lost his sight he determined that he would, as far as pos- sible, ignore his loss, and live in every respect as nearly as might be the life he had intended to live if no such calamity had befallen him. And that is the real key to his political success. For not only in relation to his personal position, but in political and social matters also, he has had the nerve as far as possible to ignore difficulties,—that is, to keep his mind steadily fixed on the best mode of overcoming them, and not to discourage himself by dwelling on the chances that it may be impossible to overcome them at all. He has had a dauntless confidence in himself, and in the force of lucid method. As far as we know, he has never in his life expressed a hesitating opinion, and never an indefinite one. He has made it his principle to get his own mind clear, and more than clear, confident, before speaking it, and then he has never flinched. He has ridden his opinion, as he rides his horse, without seeing where it would take him, but with an absolute determination to stick to it, wherever it might go. And this complete—this some- times almost unamiable—independence of party, of colleagues, of anything in the world but his own definitely-formed convictions, has been, perhaps, even a better friend to him than it would otherwise have been, on account of his peculiar position in the world. The public have been justly struck with wonder and admiration to see a man, apparently doomed by circumstances to be more than usually dependent on others, more than usually independent of them. And as his indiffer- ence to authority, though expressed with a certain dogmatic and even didactic sang-fivid, has never been satirical and malicious,—as even when evidently enjoying the function of taking those who " seemed to be pillars " to task, he has never attempted to wound them, his insouciance has been for- gotten and forgiven, in the respect felt for the singular spectacle of so great an intellectual victory as he has achieved,—without any magic but power of will,—over obstacles which would have struck panic into any other man, but which he has steadily, and entirely, and successfully ignored.
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