He Might Have Been, So Far As Dress Went, A Clerk In A
Counting-House, Or An Undertaker.
But the face was no
ordinary one.
The wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke
type, the compressed lips and strong chin, were suggestive of
intellect and of suppressed emotion. There was no applause,
for nothing was known to the crowd, even of his opinions,
beyond the fact that he was the Liberal candidate for
Westminster. He spoke with perfect ease to himself, never
faltering for the right word, which seemed to be always at
his command. If interrupted by questions, as he constantly
was, his answers could not have been amended had he written
them. His voice was not strong, and there were frequent
calls from the far end to 'speak up, speak up; we can't hear
you.' He did not raise his pitch a note. They might as well
have tried to bully an automaton. He was doing his best, and
he could do no more. Then, when, instead of the usual
adulations, instead of declamatory appeals to the passions of
a large and a mixed assembly, he gave them to understand, in
very plain language, that even socialists are not infallible,
- that extreme and violent opinions, begotten of ignorance,
do not constitute the highest political wisdom; then there
were murmurs of dissent and disapproval. But if the ignorant
and the violent could have stoned him, his calm manner would
still have said, 'Strike, but hear me.'
Mr. Robert Grosvenor - the present Lord Ebury - then the
other Liberal member for Westminster, wrote to ask me to take
the chair at Mill's first introduction to the Pimlico
electors.
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