The death on Sunday of Mr. Peter Taylor, for a
long time M.P. for Leicester, marks the decay of a school of Radicals who were in many respects manlier and more stoical than the modern race. For one thing, Mr. Peter Taylor steadily refused, while he represented Leicester, to subscribe to any of the great local charities of the place, lest his constituents should vote for him for selfish and not for public reasons,—a political ideal which has, we fear, nearly died out of modern Radicals. In the next place, though he voted against com- pulsory vaccination,—indeed, against compulsion of most sorts,—he had no sympathy for those who were not content with their fair share of popular influence over the counsels of the nation at large, and wanted to break it up into subor- dinate nationalities, and that, too, in spite of the existence of a wheel within the wheel, a fragment of the nation which preferred the rule of the greater society to the rule of the less ; for Mr. Peter Taylor, though he had retired from Parlia- ment before the Home-rule crisis arose, was a firm Unionist. Compared with Mr. Labouchere's or Mr. Cunninghame Graham's Radicalism, Mr. Peter Taylor's was of a manly and healthy type.
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