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MR. FAWCETT.

T must now be nearly twenty years since

IT

attendants at the Social Science Congress, which had just been started as a counter-attraction to the British Assocation, were wont to crowd into any particular 'section' in which it was known that 'the blind man' was speaking. The blind man who was able to discourse so fluently, not

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to say so oracularly, on education, on political economy, and on a great variety of minor topics, was, it need hardly be said, Mr. Henry Fawcett, now the Radical Member for Hackney.

Mr. Fawcett at that time

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was very young, and he commended himself to the sympathetic audiences of the Social Science Congress more by the courage and cheerfulness with which he bore a most depressing and terrible calamity, than by the graces of his eloquence. If the truth must be told, he was somewhat of a bore. he was very able, that he had wonderful clearness in statement, and that he possessed some, at least, of the attributes of the orator, such as a powerful resonant voice and a commanding appearance, was admitted by everybody. But even these qualities failed to make his lengthy harangues attractive, and they might have failed to draw the attention of the public, if it had not been for that physical infirmity which added so greatly to the interest, as it did to the difficulties of the young man's brave struggle against fate. Yet, although Mr. Fawcett was not a speaker who was likely to win

the applause of shallow or careless hearers, he was a man who clearly intended to make his way, and who had in himself most of the qualifications for success. Clear and vigorous as he was in speaking, he was still clearer and more vigorous in thinking: and though it could not be said that he had shown any signs of originality in the views he held and the doctrines he propounded, he was distinguished even in those days by the quickness and felicity with which he applied the teachings of the most advanced masters of political economy to the practical questions of the day. People were not surprised, therefore, when the young frequenter of the Social Science Congress began to come before the world as a candidate for Parliamentary honours. Slowly but surely he was. rising in the good opinion, not merely of the public at large, but of men of mark and eminence in the political world; and though

his first attempts to gain admission to the House of Commons were unsuccessful, he was still a young man when, in 1865, he was returned as Member for Brighton.

And here I must say something of the remarkable achievement of Mr. Fawcett, in thus getting into Parliament without the aid of money, or political or social interest, and in spite of the serious drawback of blindness. The son of a respectable farmer near Salisbury, from whom he inherits his intense devotion to Liberal principles, Mr. Fawcett is essentially a man of the middle class. His father was fortunately able to give him a thoroughly good education at King's College, London, and Trinity Hall, Cambridge; but here it is probable that his ability to assist him in the battle of life practically ceased. Having even in those days a strong leaning towards politics, Mr. Fawcett resolved that he would choose a

profession the pursuit of which would advance rather than retard his political career. Accordingly, in 1856 he entered himself as a student at Lincoln's Inn, and for some time pursued his legal studies with industry and success. Within two years, howeverin September 1858-the accident by which he lost his eyesight befell him. He was out shooting with a party of friends; the gun of one of the number was accidentally discharged; by a strange coincidence, a shot entered each of Mr. Fawcett's eyes, and his sight was in an instant gone for ever. It was a terrible, and to a man of less nerve and determination, it would have been a crushing calamity. Without wealth. or influence, engaged in a profession for the pursuit of which the possession of all the senses was absolutely necessary, such an accident as this might well have been. regarded by the sufferer as completely

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