134 MEMORIAL SKETCH. 



by giving him a power of concentrating his energies so as to 

 overcome the obstacles his blindness created. I shall always 

 have a pleasant recollection of him for the kindly way in which 

 he moved a vote of thanks to me as President of the British 

 Association at the closing meeting at Brighton, for which he 

 was then M.P. He said that he was quite unable to judge for 

 himself what I had done for science, but that all he had heard 

 of me led him to recognize the love of truth as the guiding 

 motive of my scientific career.* 



The next week will, I suppose, show whether the Opposi 

 tion are going to be wise in time, or to evoke the hostility of 

 the mass of the people, of which they have had the fullest 

 warning. If they adopt the suggestions of Gladstone and Lord 

 Hartington, and put forth their own programme of a redistribu 

 tion scheme, which the Government will most gladly take into 

 consideration, so as to make (as Gladstone said) the Bill the 

 work of the House, they will have a much better case on which 

 to go before the country at the next election, than if they per 

 sist in opposing the passage of the Franchise Bill. And I 

 cannot but hope that the attitude of Mr. Gorst may have a 

 sufficient number of imitators among the Peers to make Lord 

 Salisbury doubtful of his majority. If they force the country to 

 question the right of fifty country gentlemen responsible to 

 nobody to resist its will, I think there is no doubt what the 

 ultimate result will be. It is rather curious that Lord Salis 

 bury, who is so anxious to preserve the minority vote for the 

 Commons, should oppose any change in the mode of electing 

 the Scotch and Irish Peers, which makes the majority the sole 

 electors, and gives no representation whatever to the minority, 

 which (as in the election of aldermen by the first Bristol Town 

 Council) may be numerically less by only a single vote. I have 

 the fullest confidence that a great result will be gained in the 

 end, in whatsoever way it is worked out But it will be a great 



* Mr. Fawcett said that lon^ before he had the honour of Dr. Carpenter s 

 personal acquaintance, he had always heard him spoken of by scientific men, 

 whose authority he valued and whose opinion he could trust, as one of the 

 most conscientious, laborious, and single-minded workers in the great world of 

 science. No one, he had always been told, had ever worked with a purer 

 desire to promote scientific truth, with less idea of personal distinction, than 

 Dr. Carpenter. Brighton Daily Acivs, August 22, 1872. 



