George Jacob Holyoake

Excerpt from George Jacob Holyoake
To compress the life of George Jacob Holyoake into a little more than a hundred pages is no light task. He was born in 1817, when the Holy Alliance completed its deadly grip on the throat of European progress, and he died in 1906, when social idealism stood again erect and radiant beside the dark old powers. Between those two dates stretches the noblest struggle on which the sun has ever shone, and Holyoake bore a lance in almost every single field. He fought war, ignorance, superstition, tyranny, injustice, folly, and cruelty all his life. We look back over that historic battle-ground, and we coldly study the "movements," as we call them, which brave men and women formed, and fed with their blood, while the millions enjoyed themselves. Holyoake is prominent in most of these liberating movements, is in the van of very many of them, and is the standard-bearer of not a few. In the early annals of nearly every triumphant reform of our time we find the name of the slender, refined working man who set out from a Birmingham foundry eighty years ago to slay dragons.
Fourteen years ago, after his death, I was invited to write a biography of him. Six large trunks of letters and other documents were placed before me. They would have made an intimate and vivid biography of the nineteenth century.
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