The first Lord Ripon, who was born in 1782 and died in 1859, entered public life as soon as he had done with Cambridge, filled pretty nearly every office of honour and profit under the Crown (including, for four troubled months, the Premiership), and served impartially under moderate Whigs and crusted Tories, finding, perhaps, no very material difference between their respective creeds.  The experiences of the hen that hatches the duckling are proverbially pathetic; and great must have been the perplexity of this indeterminate statesman when he discovered that his only son was a young man of the most robust convictions, and that those convictions were frankly democratic.  To men possessed by birth of rank and wealth, one has sometimes heard the question addressed, in the sheer simplicity of snobbery, “Why are you a Liberal?” and to such a question Lord Goderich (for so the second Lord Ripon was called till he succeeded to his father’s title) would probably have replied, “Because I can’t help it.”  He was an only child, educated at home, and therefore free to form his own opinions at an age when most boys are subject to the stereotyping forces of a Public School and a University.  Almost before his arrival at man’s estate, he had clearly marked out his line of political action, and to that line he adhered with undeviating consistency.

He was supremely fortunate in an early and ideally happy marriage.  Tennyson might well have drawn the heroine of The Talking Oak from Henrietta, Lady Ripon: 

 “Yet, since I first could cast a shade,
      Did never creature pass,
  So slightly, musically made,
      So light upon the grass.”

Her mental constitution corresponded to her physical frame; she was the brightest of companions and the most sympathetic of friends.  She shared to the full her husband’s zeal for the popular cause, and stimulated his efforts for social as well as political reform.

From the earliest days of their married life, Lord and Lady Goderich made their home a centre and a rallying-point for all the scattered forces which, within the Liberal party or beyond its pale, were labouring to promote the betterment of human life.  There the “Christian Socialists,” recovering from the shocks and disasters of ’48, re-gathered their shattered hosts, and reminded a mocking world that the People’s Cause was not yet lost.  There was Maurice with his mystical eloquence, and Kingsley with his fiery zeal, and Hughes and Vansittart and Ludlow with their economic knowledge and powerful pens.  They were reinforced by William Edward Forster, a young Radical M.P., whose zeal for social service had already marked him out from the ruck of mechanical politicians; and from time to time Carlyle himself would vouchsafe a growl of leonine approval to enterprises which, whether wise or foolish, were at least not shams.  In 1852 the Amalgamated Society of Engineers conducted in London and Lancashire a strike which had begun in some engineering