No truer friend of the great masses of the people ever lived in England. To all that made for their well-being he gave an earnest sympathy and unwearied effort, and he gave both without the alloy or imputation of a selfish sentiment or object. No man could have had a stronger distaste for the tactics of partisan warfare or for the excitement of parliamentary life, and nothing but a deep and honest sense of the political rights of the unenfranchised people could have constrained him to offer himself as a candidate for a seat in the House of Commons. Although he was defeated at the polls by small majorities, the moral influence of the principles and sentiments he put forth in his addresses and speeches was worth more to the great cause of the people than half-a-dozen seats in Parliament filled by the lukewarm doctrinaires of political expediency.
No class of the wronged or needy so took hold of his large and feeling heart as the little vagrant, ignorant children—some of them worse than fatherless—who seemed to be set on the steepest and slipperiest declivities of temptation, to slide into the depths of vicious life and misery. I was with him when he visited the Rauhe Haus, near Hamburgh, and witnessed the deep interest with which he studied the character and working of that admirable institution for the rescue and education of juvenile vagrants. Immediately on
