John Morrison Davidson

“ They waste their best intellect in the defence of palpable anomalies and pernicious compromises. Even Gladstone and Bright have not escaped the contagion of compromise. They go to court, and are caught in the net of "society," which sticks to them like a Nessus shirt. Peter Alfred Taylor has never been caught. ”

“ Taylor is generally considered an eccentric member; but his eccentricity is wholly on the surface. Once understand his principles, or rather solitary principle of action,—viz., that liberty, liberty, liberty, is the best of all things in all things political, religious, social, or commercial,—and the course which the senior member for Leicester will pursue on any given question may be predicted almost with mathematical certainty. ”

“ 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 ”

“ He is, in a sense, a "survival" from the great era of the Commonwealth,—a mind of the type of Vane, Ludlow, Hutchinson, Scott, and Hazelrig,—an idealist in politics, but withal a practical idealist. He is more human than English, his principles being more or less applicable to all times and to all places. Having embraced a principle, he holds to it with the tenacity of a bull-dog, fearlessly pushing it to its remotest consequences.
This was the distinguishing mental characteristic of all the great republicans of the seventeenth century. ”

“ Self-interest, it is held, induces them instinctively to throw in their lot with the privileged classes; but the history of some of the most respectable and well-to-do families in England proves the very opposite. The instinct in favor of progress may fail for a generation; but it soon reappears.
Mr. Taylor's genealogy is in itself a standing refutation of ordinarily accepted theories. The name is distinctly of plebeian origin; but, as early as the reign of Edward III., Mr. Taylor's progenitors possessed large estates in Huntingdonshire. They "bore arms" of course ”

“ It may appear somewhat strange to attribute ancestral pride to an out-and-out democrat like Mr. Taylor; but it is impossible fully to understand his character without taking the markedly liberal tendencies of his forefathers, both in politics and religion, into account. Mr. Taylor may be described as a hereditary Radical of two and a half centuries standing. ”

“ Mental, like physical characteristics, are shown to persist and recur from generation to generation, contrary to all our preconceived notions of the determining causes of the opinions of individuals and the way in which they are formed. The acquisition of riches is vulgarly supposed to make the best of Radicals Conservatives. ”

“ Albeit a churchman, he was in all respects the prototype of the honorable member for Leicester,—Radical in politics as in religion, with a caustic vein of drollery, of which the following extract from a circular to the clergy, found among his papers, may serve as a specimen. It reminds one forcibly of Mr. Taylor's own very clever contribution to the "Pen and Pencil Club," styled "Realities." ”