THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 COLLEGE OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mrs. J. R. Sackrider 
 
 1 1
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 SECOND SERIES ]
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 MEMORIES 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE W. SMALLEY, M.A. 
 
 "I have found among my possessions none that I so much prize 
 and esteem as a knowledge of the actions of great men." 
 
 Machiavelli. — The Prince. 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 C;bc IRnlchcrbocl^er press 
 1912
 
 Printedin England by Williavi Brendan and Son, Ltd., Plymouth
 
 460 
 
 UNIVRKSITY OF CALITORNIA 
 aAmA BARBARA COLLKGE LIBRABT 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TN the sentence from Machiavelli quoted on the 
 title-page the phrase " great men " is used loosely, 
 and most people use it loosely. Nature is not so lavish 
 as all that. If she gives us one or two great men in a 
 century let us be thankful for the one or two and, as 
 to the rest, discriminate. To be a great orator or a 
 great politician is not necessarily to be a great man. 
 But the quality of greatness is there and we need not 
 demand that it shall be so complete as to envelop the 
 man. I have written about the men who interest me in 
 the hope that what I say of them may interest others. 
 
 All these papers are the work of the last year or two. 
 They are, like the first series, strictly what I have called 
 them. Memories. I have never kept a journal and 
 seldom taken a note. If it should occur to anybody 
 that other personages might have been included in the 
 first series, or in the second, I may say that in earlier 
 books of mine, and in magazines, and still more in The 
 New Tork Tribune, for which most of these Memories 
 were originally written, many other names will be 
 found ; and there may be more hereafter. 
 
 The study of Mr. Whitelaw Reid was not sent to 
 that paper, since, although on accepting the London 
 Embassy he ceased to be its Editor, he remained chief 
 proprietor. The chapters now republished have been 
 revised and some have been re-written or enlarged. For 
 my opinions and indiscretions I only am responsible. 
 
 G. W. S. 
 
 London, /iz?nm;7, 191 2.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Mr. Chamberlain i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Eighth Duke of Devonshire . . .22 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 The Late Duchess of Devonshire . . . '37 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Mr. Balfour 45 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Sir William Harcourt — Domestic and Political 
 
 Recollections 61 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Lord Roseberv — A Personal View of an English 
 
 Statesman 68 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley . . . -79 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Mr. Winston Churchill — The Boy and the Man . 87 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Sir Edward Grey — A Personal and Diplomatic 
 
 Impression 102
 
 viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 Viscount Haldane — War Minister, Metaphysician, pagb 
 Lawyer, and Socialistic Radical . . .112 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 Four Speakers of the House of Commons . .119 
 
 CHAPTER Xn 
 The Fifth Earl Spencer 134 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 The Late Viscount Goschen — A Very Individual 
 
 Anglo-German Englishman 149 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 Mr. Goldwin Smith — Scholar, Apostle, Historian, 
 
 Writer of English 156 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 Prince Francis of Teck .163 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 Lord Pauncefote as Anglo-American ambassador . 170 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 The Present American Ambassador, Mr. Whitelaw 
 
 Reid i88 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 Two Methods of Diplomacy — American and European 198 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 The American Speaker, Mr. Thomas B. Reed . . 208 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 Mr. Junius S. Morgan 215
 
 CONTENTS ix 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 Mr. Pierpont Morgan 221 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 Mr, Andrew Carnegie 241 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 Mr. William Waldorf Astor and His Experiences 
 
 IN England 261 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 Mr. James McNeill Whistler — Anecdotes, Estimates, 
 
 Friendships 276 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 Sir William Schwenck Gilbert 289 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 Mlle. Aim^e Desclee— Her Art, Her Letters, Her 
 
 Life ......... 296 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 Sir Henry Irving 308 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 Mme. Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Henry Irving . 327 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 Mr. Theodore Roosevelt 339 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 Count Witte and What He Did at Portsmouth . 383
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 MEMORIES 
 
 SECOND SERIES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 TANDING on Dover pier at four o'clock in the 
 "^ morning, after a turbulent voyage from Calais, 
 I met Mr. John Morley and walked with him along 
 the still more turbulent railway platform to his 
 compartment. He told me Mr. Chamberlain was 
 with him and asked me to come in. When I said 
 I did not know Mr. Chamberlain, he answered it 
 was time I did, and introduced me. This was more 
 than thirty years ago, and so began my acquaintance 
 with the man who then was reckoned the foremost 
 Radical in England. We talked from Dover to Lon- 
 don, while Mr. Morley slept. During those two hours 
 his Radicalism was aflame, and he seemed ready 
 enough to declare his opinions with more freedom 
 than most Englishmen use to a new-comer. Needless 
 to say he talked with picturesque energy ; whether 
 about persons or politics ; and ever in an uncom- 
 promising tone. He discoursed among other things 
 
 B
 
 2 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 on Mr. Forster's Education Act of 1870, which 
 later he described as one of the greatest measures, 
 or perhaps the greatest, Parliament had ever passed. 
 But that morning he was in no mood for eulogy. He 
 was in his finest Nonconformist temper and nowise 
 disposed to make light of Mr. Forster's compromises 
 which to him seemed, taken together, a surrender to 
 the Church of England. I was so much struck with 
 his implacable tone that I asked : 
 
 *' Shall you never forgive Mr. Forster ? " 
 
 " Never." 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain did not then foresee that he 
 was himself to undergo changes of opinion compared 
 to which Mr. Forster's concessions were of little 
 moment. All the more precious is this first memory 
 of him in his original state ; which I imagine he 
 himself might call unregenerate. There was the 
 real Chamberlain in all the fervour of convictions 
 that admitted then of no doubt, that to him formed 
 part of the law of the Universe. The Chamberlains 
 who have succeeded to this one have been just as 
 real, just as sincere, and each one, I suppose, just as 
 sure of the permanence of the beliefs of each. 
 
 Often taunted with versatility, his old speeches 
 often quoted against him, he has answered with 
 unshaken composure that mere consistency is no 
 part of a Minister's outfit. Opinions change because 
 circumstances change. An open mind, an essential 
 sincerity of character, a clear view of what at the 
 moment the public good requires of a public servant — 
 those are the qualities a useful Minister must possess. 
 
 Even his enemies, perhaps even the Irish Home 
 Rulers whom he overcame, do not deny to him these 
 traits. As I think of the attacks on him, surpassing 
 in bitterness those on any other man of his time,
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 3 
 
 I think also of what an American said of President 
 Cleveland : 
 
 " I love him for the enemies he has made." 
 
 And so, in the heat of conflict, and by influences 
 stronger than individual opinions, and ever in stress 
 and storm, was slowly fashioned the Chamberlain 
 whom all men at last recognized as one of the great 
 forces of English Conservatism and English life. 
 
 Perhaps the rarest of all political products in 
 these British Isles is the man of ideas. Rarer still 
 is the man who, having ideas, has also the gift of 
 political leadership, which includes political courage. 
 Mr. Chamberlain is that man, and that is why, 
 five years after illness had driven him from public 
 life, England celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday 
 with as much heartiness as if he were still, where 
 for thirty years he had ever been, in the forefront 
 of battle. There he will never be again. His mind 
 has still much of its old vigour, but paralysis, or 
 something like it, bereft him of his physical strength, 
 and left him, though not speechless, wholly incapable 
 of addressing either the House of Commons or a 
 public meeting. He writes now and then a letter 
 to a Unionist candidate for Parliament or a brief 
 epistle on some pressing topic ; lucid, effective, 
 because they are his, but never quite in the old tone. 
 So far as fresh effort is concerned, he is a spent force, 
 but the influence of his name and of his life-work 
 will never be spent. 
 
 Napoleon was wont to call men who mixed theory 
 with practice ideologues. He hated them ; and he 
 also despised them, since, in his view, their habit 
 of speculation impaired their power of will and of 
 work. He might have hated Mr. Chamberlain. 
 He would never have despised him. Seldom, if
 
 4 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 ever, has there been an EngUshman whose power 
 of will and of work was greater than his. If you look 
 at Lawrence's portrait of the younger Pitt, you will 
 see the features of Mr. Chamberlain, and you may 
 well suppose that this statesman of the nineteenth 
 century could have carried on Pitt's twenty years' 
 struggle with Napoleon, and freed Europe. Pitt 
 died an old man at forty-six, worn out. Mr. Chamber- 
 lain lasted till seventy. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone excepted, I have known no English- 
 man who gave you such an impression of concentrated 
 energy as Mr. Chamberlain. Whether he talked to 
 you, whether he talked to a crowded House of Com- 
 mons, whether he talked to six thousand people in 
 Birmingham Town Hall, whether he sat silent, the 
 impression was the same. Into that slender, sinewy 
 frame of no great height his Maker had packed the 
 essential energies of a great race. I have met him 
 in all sorts of circumstances ; never once when his 
 was not the dominant personality of the scene. 
 I can think of nobody in recent times to compare 
 him with except the late Prime Minister of France, 
 M. Clcmenceau. They had this in common, that 
 each married an American wife, and among all the 
 gifts the gods have bestowed on the Englishman, 
 his American wife is one of the most precious. But 
 the great Frenchman is so little known to Americans 
 that the comparison would be futile. Nor is any 
 comparison of much use except as an illustration of 
 particular traits. Nor will any description of Mr. 
 Chamberlain avail unless you have seen and heard 
 the man himself, and then it is superfluous. 
 
 But look at him on the platform at Birmingham, 
 among his own people, in the arena where some of 
 his most splendid triumphs have been won. As he
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 5 
 
 comes forward a roar of welcome greets him. You 
 see that he and his fellow-townsmen are on affectionate 
 terms. They know what they owe him. They re- 
 member that long before he served England he served 
 Birmingham ; was thrice Mayor of that great city, 
 and made it an example to every municipality in 
 Great Britain. A business man, first of all ; an ad- 
 ministrator, an organizer. He begins his speech in a 
 business tone. His attack is instantaneous. Almost 
 with his first sentence he is in the heart of his subject. 
 No generalities, no rhetoric, not a word of appeal to 
 his audience ; no preface, no exordium. As if by 
 instinct, he goes straight to the matter in hand. His 
 voice rings clear and there is in it the unmistakable 
 accent of sincerity. He knows Birmingham like an 
 old glove, and the men of Birmingham as old friends. 
 In the phrasing of his sentences there is a touch of 
 intimacy almost conversational. Try to converse 
 with six thousand people, and see if you find it 
 easy. 
 
 In point of fact, this air of artlessness is calculated. 
 He knows all that can be known about the art of 
 public speaking. He knows what sentences will 
 carry, to use the stage term, and what will not. 
 Profoundly in earnest, still he is an actor ; and a 
 most accomplished actor. You cannot be a great 
 actor unless you have the dramatic gift. Mr. Glad- 
 stone had it, but in him it was almost too visible. Mr. 
 Bright had it, but his art was reduced to its final 
 expression of complete simplicity, and no one who 
 listened to him suspected the art. He spoke as the 
 messenger of the Almighty. To those heights Mr. 
 Chamberlain did not often reach, nor did he 
 make, as Mr. Bright did, a supremely imaginative 
 use of his material. Mr. Bright had tones in his
 
 6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 voice which were the tones of an organ. Mr. 
 Chamberlain had not. He was far too wise and 
 far too individual to attempt to rival, still less to 
 imitate, Mr. Bright or anybody else. Mr. Bright 
 was emotional ; Mr. Chamberlain never. One thing 
 they had in common : a profound sympathy with the 
 people ; as Lincoln had ; and a command of the words 
 by which sympathy of that kind declared itself ; 
 in each of the three differently, and in Mr. Chamber- 
 lain without your perceiving that the view he pre- 
 sented to you was anything but intellectual. 
 
 So close was the tie between him and his Birming- 
 ham audience, that you felt as if you were intruding 
 on a family party. It was a great political occasion, 
 but it was domestic ; a Round Table about which 
 all the Six Thousand were sitting. It was a Con- 
 ference. You wondered how it was possible for that 
 keen-faced figure on the platform to get into these 
 obviously confidential relations with all these gun- 
 makers and ironmongers of this Midland city which 
 turns out hardware for all the world, the United 
 States excepted. But he himself is of steel ; elastic, 
 polished, tempered as a sword is tempered, with an 
 edge not less trenchant. He wields a shining blade 
 which no armour can turn, as his enemies have found 
 out. He delivers his thrust quietly enough, imper- 
 turbably, without malice and without mercy. In 
 his face there is no sign of the fierce delight you see 
 in the faces of those for whose pleasure he impales 
 their common enemy. His attitude is scientific. 
 These processes of vivisection are not primarily to 
 give pain, but to increase knowledge. 
 
 In portraits and caricatures you see him always 
 with an eyeglass and an orchid. The straw which 
 Punch put into Palmerston's mouth, and the legs
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 7 
 
 of Lord John Russell on the Front Bench, too short 
 to reach the floor, were alike efforts o£ the imagination. 
 Mr. Chamberlain's single eyeglass and orchid are real. 
 You never see him without both, and you never notice 
 either. What you see is a man. He does not strike 
 you as big, nor yet as little. He is just a man : and 
 a man tremendously alive. The measurement you 
 take of him is not an outward measurement. What 
 you would like to measure, and cannot, is the man's 
 soul. Your unconscious effort is to give to yourself 
 an account of the nature of this extraordinary being, 
 and of the contents of the skull, which is of no ex- 
 traordinary size. When Gambetta died they weighed 
 his brain, and found the weight of it under the average, 
 not much more than forty-two ounces. The doctors 
 were astonished. They had expected the weight of 
 the brain to answer to the weight of character, and 
 to the capacity of a mind which had at that time in 
 France no second. Then they reflected that it was 
 just as easy to explain his superiority by quality as 
 by quantity, and were content. I imagine it is so 
 with Mr. Chamberlain. The osseous structure is 
 not ample enough for an unusual mass of brain ; 
 but the thinking power is there, and the will power ; 
 or, if not there, hidden away somewhere in the man, 
 and the two together have been enough to enable 
 him to work fifteen hours a day, full steam ahead. 
 If he had not also smoked fifteen cigars a day, I might 
 not have to use the past tense now in writing of his 
 place in the life of England. 
 
 As his speech proceeds you become aware that the 
 power of it proceeds also ; grows more and not less 
 with this prodigious expenditure of mental and 
 physical force. It is a crescendo throughout. You 
 cannot afford to relax your attention for an instant.
 
 8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 There is no marking time. If he thinks on his legs, 
 as he certainly does, the thinking never hinders the 
 expression. The stream flows on like Matthew 
 Arnold's Oxus ; brimming, and bright, and large. To 
 say that as he proceeds he does not lose his hold on 
 his hearers is nothing. He rivets their attention ; 
 moment by moment his grip tightens ; the logic is 
 pitiless ; the invective more pitiless still ; you bend 
 to his passion ; you are the captive to an unrelenting, 
 argumentative sequence. 
 
 It is the Chamberlain I first saw and first heard in 
 Birmingham that I am trying not to describe, but to 
 outline ; with a touch of colour if I could manage it. 
 I heard him later in St. James's Hall in London, 
 and elsewhere ; a fairer test because his London 
 audience was under no such spell as that of Birmingham 
 and stood to him in no purely personal relation. But 
 the effect, or my memory of it, is much the same. 
 A test more searching still was the House of Commons, 
 where he measured himself against the giants of those 
 days. 
 
 The business of the House of Commons is, or once 
 was, debate ; it was in the days of Mr. Disraeli and 
 of Mr. Gladstone a deliberative assembly. Neither 
 of those great leaders feared discussion or resorted 
 to the systematic use of gag and guillotine to carry 
 their Bills. They had other resources ; nor had 
 either adopted the theory of Grenville, the author of 
 the Stamp Act, or of Mr. Asquith, the author of the 
 Parliament Act, that to Parliament the whole power 
 of the people had been delegated. Neither cared, as 
 Grenville cared and Mr. Asquith now cares, to see 
 Parliament despotic over the nation. Macaulay 
 states the case against Grenville. For the case against 
 Mr. Asquith you have but to read his own speeches.
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 9 
 
 Not in Disraeli and not in Gladstone will you find a 
 trace of either. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain had therefore in those days a 
 free course to run and he glorified. To-day he would 
 be closured. He could be silenced if he could not be 
 answered. But I was fortunate enough sometimes to 
 hear him in a great debate, when the great men stood 
 up to each other in fair combat. Perhaps as a debater 
 no one of them was Mr. Chamberlain's superior. In 
 other things they may have surpassed him. Mr. 
 Gladstone certainly did in his amazing power of 
 creating his own atmosphere in the House of Commons; 
 of lifting debate to a level it never otherwise reached. 
 But debate is a thing by itself and has rules of its 
 own ; as a contest with the sword has, which you 
 neglect at your peril. In such a contest I do not 
 know that either of the two was more than a match 
 for Mr. Chamberlain. 
 
 II 
 
 It seems odd, considering all that has happened, to 
 say so, but Mr. Chamberlain's decisive appearance in 
 public life was due to his political alliance with the 
 late Sir Charles Dilke. I give the facts as they were 
 known to me at the time, from Dilke and a little 
 from his friend ; for the relations between the two 
 were not political only ; they were personal. I will 
 say here once for all, in order to avoid re-entering 
 upon a subject none too savoury — I mean Dilke's own 
 subsequent history — that Mr. Chamberlain stood by 
 Dilke when disaster came upon him ; refused to 
 believe — or to admit — what others knew to be true ; 
 refused to join in the attacks on him ; defended him
 
 lo ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 d tort et a travers. Whether he really thought Dilke 
 innocent I, of course, do not know. He acted, at any 
 rate, upon the maxim in the two Hares' Guesses at 
 Truth, a book once current and still not wholly for- 
 gotten : " Friendship closes its eye rather than see 
 the moon eclipst." I don't say it critically. I say it 
 to Mr. Chamberlain's honour. His steadfastness to 
 his friend was part of the steadfastness of his character. 
 
 When Dilke became M.P. for Chelsea, in 1868, the 
 alliance between him and Mr. Chamberlain had already 
 been formed; a singularly close alliance. By 1880, 
 when Mr. Disraeli's six years' reign ended, and Mr. 
 Gladstone, mainly by help of the ever memorable 
 Midlothian campaigns of 1879-80, had driven his 
 great rival from power, these two young men felt 
 themselves strong enough to demand office. Dilke 
 was then thirty-seven and Chamberlain forty-four — 
 mere boys as age is commonly reckoned in English 
 public life. They were the representatives of the 
 New Radicalism inside the Liberal Party ; a force 
 destined to portentous growth, as anybody may see 
 to-day ; so portentous, so pregnant with disaster long 
 before to-day, that Mr. Chamberlain had forsaken it 
 even earlier than that gloomy winter of 1885-86 when 
 Mr. Gladstone took his fatal plunge into the dark 
 waters of Home Rule. Even while he was yet the un- 
 challenged leader of a united, or comparatively united, 
 Liberal Party, Mr. Gladstone did not like Radicalism 
 or Radicals. But it was his business as party chief to 
 weigh the forces he had to deal with, and he recog- 
 nized the claim these two men made on him, and sent 
 for Sir Charles Dilke to offer him a post in the Ministry 
 he was forming, though not in the Cabinet. 
 
 The story is told in different ways and the accounts, 
 even those which may be called authoritative, cannot
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN ii 
 
 be easily reconciled. Lord Morley tells it, in his 
 monumental Life of Gladstone, as usual, with great 
 reserve ; a Life of which frankness is not the pre- 
 vailing note. The version I am going to give you is 
 Dilke's version. I was at that time on friendly, and 
 even intimate, terms with him ; and saw him that 
 afternoon at his house in Sloane Street. Mr. Cham- 
 berlain was present. Dilke had just come from Mr. 
 Gladstone, and the offer of that subordinate place in 
 the Government which the great leader thought 
 adequate to Dilke's party claims had just been made. 
 Without either accepting or declining it, he told 
 Mr. Gladstone that he and Mr. Chamberlain were 
 acting together ; that both of them expected office ; 
 and that for one of them a place must be found in 
 the Cabinet. 
 
 I give the substance and intent of Dilke's statement 
 to Mr. Gladstone ; very much as he himself gave it 
 to me ; not at all, I imagine, as he phrased it when in 
 presence of the great Liberal whom the Queen had 
 asked, sorely against her will, to form a Ministry. 
 Dilke's brevity of speech had, at times, a certain 
 brutality, but it cannot be that he allowed himself 
 this curt freedom of statement to Mr. Gladstone 
 himself. Even upon Dilke, who respected few things, 
 the authority of this wonderful old man must have 
 made itself felt. Few were they who did not acknow- 
 ledge and yield to it. But whatever the words in 
 which Dilke delivered his ultimatum, Mr. Gladstone 
 listened with his usual grave courtesy, and this was his 
 answer : 
 
 " Sir Charles, you are as yet inexperienced in public 
 life, and I think it a duty to explain to you that when 
 a Prime Minister is forming a Government it is usual 
 for him to distribute offices in accordance with his
 
 12 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 own conception of public duty. Never before have I 
 known a case — never before have I heard of one — 
 where a young man who has never held office has 
 thought himself entitled to dictate to a Prime Minister 
 or to tell him he will accept, not the post tendered to 
 him, but another post more to his taste. Still less 
 has any candidate been known to impose conditions 
 upon his acceptance, or to insist that two offices and 
 not one shall be reserved for him and for a friend in 
 whose behalf he speaks. You cannot be aware how far 
 your attitude violates all tradition and political usage. 
 You may realize this in part when you know by ex- 
 perience something about official life. And some day, 
 when you shall find yourself engaged in the task which 
 now occupies me, you will know how unprecedented 
 and indefensible is your present attitude." 
 
 This rebuke was, in effect, addressed to Mr. Cham- 
 berlain as well as to Dilke, and was meant to be handed 
 on by Dilke to his partner ; and in substance was. I 
 am not sure that it impressed either of the two very 
 deeply. Mr. Chamberlain's seven years' seniority to 
 his friend had cooled none of his fire. They knew very 
 well, both of them, what they were doing ; and I 
 don't doubt that Mr. Chamberlain, who in knowledge 
 of affairs and sagacity was superior to Dilke, had fore- 
 seen what kind of answer to their demand Mr. Glad- 
 stone was likely to make. 
 
 But they were playing for great stakes and risks 
 had to be taken. Nor, in these high matters, do per- 
 sonal sympathies or antipathies count for so much as in 
 private life. No Minister has ever been able to in- 
 dulge his partialities to the full, or to surround him- 
 self with colleagues all of whom were his personal 
 friends. Mr. Gladstone, more than most men, was 
 able to free himself from influences of this kind and
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 13 
 
 to hold the scales even. His personal attachments 
 were not strong. And he knew — none better — the 
 inroads which even then, four years before Democracy 
 captured the electorate and became the ruling force 
 and absolute majority, Radicalism had made upon that 
 historical Liberalism of which Mr. Gladstone was the 
 greatest, and also the most conservative, leader. 
 
 For these and other sufficient reasons Mr. Glad- 
 stone did ultimately accede to the audacious proposal 
 which he rightly described in the terms I have quoted 
 above. He made Mr. Chamberlain, who had never 
 held Parliamentary office. President of the Board of 
 Trade, and Sir Charles Dilke Under-Secretary for 
 Foreign Affairs. The very audacity of the coup had 
 won. It was not from Dilke, and of course not from 
 Mr. Chamberlain, that I heard in full what Mr. 
 Gladstone had said ; but long after, from one who 
 knew equally well what had passed at this interview. 
 From Dilke I heard, that afternoon and later, many 
 things which I do not repeat. I desire to give only 
 the essential facts, and only those which concern Mr. 
 Chamberlain, in order that it may be seen by what 
 methods — by what violence indeed — these twin heirs 
 of Danton forced open a door which the most power- 
 ful, and certainly the most autocratic. Minister of his 
 time had closed. 
 
 As I recall the scene of that afternoon in Dilke's 
 study, Mr. Chamberlain's reserve was even more 
 remarkable than Dilke's effusiveness. He was clearly 
 surprised by the freedom of Dilke's revelations to a 
 man whom he, Chamberlain, knew only or mainly 
 as a journalist. He had not perhaps at that time 
 understood that a journalist may be, and often is, 
 the most discreet of mankind. He knew little or 
 nothing of The Tribune or of its high traditions, or
 
 14 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 what it expected of a representative to whom it had 
 enstrusted a responsible post. He thought Dilke rash, 
 and he certainly had no part in his friend's indiscre- 
 tions, if indiscretions they were. 
 
 There he sat ; silent, a little puzzled, a good deal 
 amused, perhaps a little alarmed. He looked a Sphinx ; 
 though he had not her composure. He smoked im- 
 patiently ; the puffs from his cigar expressing well 
 enough the perturbations of his mind, the uneasi- 
 ness of the position in which he found himself. 
 True, he was aware that Dilke and I were friends, 
 but he may well enough have thought that it was 
 not wise to choose a journalist as friend, and to pour 
 out to him the secrets of a political crisis ; for such it 
 was to him and to Dilke. 
 
 It was a crisis in their fortunes and, as events 
 proved, in the fortunes of the State. It was the real 
 beginning of a great career. Mr. Chamberlain, no 
 doubt, would have come to the front later, even if 
 he had failed then ; but time was then of the essence. 
 What he wanted was a place in that Ministry ; not 
 a place in some Ministry of the future. Mr. Glad- 
 stone was expected to do great things, as he did, 
 though not precisely the things on which he and his 
 friends and Mr. Chamberlain himself then counted. 
 It would have been far more difficult to force his 
 way into the Government later, had this attempt 
 been foiled. Above all, the history of 1885 and 1886 
 could not have been the same ; nor could Mr. Cham- 
 berlain's authority have sufficed to wreck the first 
 Home Rule Bill. It was therefore the turning- 
 point for him. He stood upon the threshold, and 
 no wonder he was disturbed at finding a journalist 
 sharing these momentous confidences. No wonder 
 he sat silent. I only wonder he did not try to silence
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 15 
 
 Dilke. But he did not. I hope, as time went on, 
 he Vv^as reassured. But even now I cannot help being 
 more than interested as I see the twisted muscles 
 of his face, as one anxiety after another distorted 
 that austere visage. He certainly did not mean to 
 let it be seen that he distrusted me, and I suppose he 
 was not aware how little the expressions that swept 
 over his face were under his control. 
 
 The truth is, Dilke at that time had not outgrown 
 his boyishness. Whether Mr. Chamberlain was ever 
 a boy I am not sure. He had, at any rate, lived 
 through municipal experiences which, in one sense, 
 aged him prematurely. Municipal politics, even 
 when handled by a man of genius — a quality which 
 none would now deny to Mr. Chamberlain — do not 
 tend to liberalize a man's mind. They sharpen it, 
 and perhaps harden it, and certainly sometimes 
 narrow it. In Mr. Chamberlain they never did ; or, 
 if they did, he grew broad again, and large, and all 
 the rest of his life took ever larger and larger views, 
 till he became the consummate Imperialist statesman 
 of whom there is still so much to be said. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Thus far I have written of Mr. Chamberlain 
 chiefly as orator and debater ; a master of words. 
 If he had been only that, and nothing more, his 
 name would not have meant to England what it 
 still means after five years of eclipse. What he has 
 said has often been admirable, but it is what he has 
 done that has given him his unique place with the 
 English people. I will try to sum up in sentences
 
 1 6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 some of his achievements, and I begin with one which 
 may commend him to people who set a high value 
 on what they call practical politics. 
 
 He is the best electioneering agent ever known 
 in England. I don't refer now to those speeches 
 on the platform by which he converted to his own 
 views great multitudes of voters. I mean that he 
 had no equal in devising and handling election 
 machinery. He founded, I believe — at any rate he 
 developed — the National Liberal Federation, a 
 superior kind of caucus and a vast improvement on 
 the American caucus which was supposed to have 
 served, but did not, as its model. He established 
 a permanent control over Birmingham. He extended 
 that control through the Midlands, rescued great 
 constituencies from his opponents, kept what he 
 recovered, and the Midlands are still his. First 
 Liberal and then Unionist victories throughout 
 England were due in the first instance to him and his 
 power of organizing political forces. 
 
 He defeated Home Rule in 1886 and again in 
 1893. In both cases he had powerful allies, but in 
 neither is it probable that without him either of 
 Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bills could have been 
 beaten. The best testimony I ever heard to Mr. 
 Chamberlain's firmness came from Lord Randolph 
 Churchill. Lord Randolph said : 
 
 " Mr. Gladstone offered such concessions to Mr. 
 Chamberlain that I never understood how he could 
 reject them. I should have given in. And I should 
 have wrecked the great cause which Joe saved." 
 
 " Joe " is the name given him by both friends 
 and enemies ; a name of affection ; and of hatred 
 that tried to be contemptuous and failed. 
 
 He was the first Englishman to conceive, adopt,
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 17 
 
 and carry through that wise colonial policy which 
 has made the great Colonies at the same time inde- 
 pendent and loyal. As Secretary of State for the 
 Colonies from 1895 to 1903 he gave effect to the 
 Imperial idea which underlay all his dealings with the 
 Colonies. In proportion as their control over their 
 own affairs became complete, their relations to the 
 Mother Country became closer. They became, 
 in a new sense, integral parts of the British Empire. 
 They ceased to be Colonies and became Common- 
 wealths or Dominions. A momentous change. It 
 was Mr. Chamberlain's work. He planted and he 
 watered, and the ripening harvest of to-day when 
 these great States meet in Imperial Conference 
 in London, the Prime Minister of Great Britain 
 presiding, and debate great questions of Imperial 
 concern on even terms, is " Joe's " harvest. Ask 
 Canada, in the pride of her Dominion, what she 
 thinks of Mr. Chamberlain. Ask Australia, now a 
 Commonwealth. Ask whom you will. I take it no 
 name stands higher, no Englishman is recognized as 
 a greater benefactor. 
 
 I can think of but one man who has done a work 
 comparable to Mr. Chamberlain's, and that is Cecil 
 Rhodes ; not in South Africa only, for the example 
 and inspiration of Cecil Rhodes were far-reaching. 
 The two men wrought together ; equal partners 
 in the great enterprise of Empire-building. It has 
 been the fashion to say that Chamberlain brought 
 on the South African War. I have denied that 
 more than once, on the authority of the late Duke of 
 Devonshire : 
 
 " It was no more Joe's war than it was my war. 
 We were all of one mind. It was the Ministry's 
 
 war."
 
 1 8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 And it had to be fought if the Empire was not to 
 go to pieces. Kruger and the Kaiser between them 
 would have turned all South and Central Africa into 
 a German principality. 
 
 He was the first Englishman thoroughly to free his 
 mind from the worn-out fetish of Free Trade ; to 
 adopt for himself, and, after years of struggle, to 
 force upon the Unionist party, a policy of Tariff 
 Reform. Of all his acts this was probably the boldest. 
 You must have lived long in England before you can 
 feel, even imperfectly, the hold which the super- 
 stitions of Free Trade still have upon the English 
 mind ; or measure the effort still needed to emancipate 
 not merely the multitude but the leaders of the 
 multitude from their slavery to the economic fallacies 
 which Cobden taught. The struggle is not over ; 
 victory hangs in the balance ; issues even greater 
 have delayed its coming ; the leader of this movement 
 for free thought about Free Trade is stricken by the 
 wayside ; but he has never doubted that Tariff Reform 
 will triumph. In that world-wide war of Tariffs, 
 which is the greatest of modern wars, England is 
 not for ever to stand, alone of all great powers, 
 defenceless. When she arms herself with the weapons 
 by which only a great economic battle can be fought, 
 she will owe them to Mr. Chamberlain. Alone 
 among great Englishmen, or for a long time alone, 
 he looked across the Atlantic, learned the lesson of 
 Protection, and Prosperity the child of Protection 
 in America, and taught it to his countrymen. He 
 converted his own party, and, if he did not convert, 
 coerced the leader of his party. When that party 
 recovers its majority in the country and in Parliament, 
 it will be a majority for Protection. 
 
 On a question more vital still, Mr. Chamberlain's
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 19 
 
 five years of retirement have meant disaster to England. 
 Think what the history of these recent years might 
 have been had he been in the full vigour of his powers. 
 His leadership, his voice on the platform, his con- 
 summate skill in elections, have carried the kingdom 
 with him before now, and might have carried it 
 again. The Budget of 1909, the Parliament Bill of 
 191 1 — is it certain that either could have become 
 law had Chamberlain been in the House to fight the 
 good fight against both ? 
 
 Mr. Balfour — yes, Mr. Balfour is a man with a 
 high order of political genius. Like Lord Rosebery, 
 he is a diplomatist, skilled in every art of evading 
 or compromising great issues ; a great debater and 
 much else. But he is not a man whom men follow 
 instinctively, inevitably, because they must. There 
 is no must. He asks you to choose. He appeals to 
 reason ; he philosophizes ; he thinks men are led by 
 the subtleties of a metaphysical argument. What 
 they are led by is a trumpet note, such as you used 
 to hear from Mr. Chamberlain, and before him from 
 Lord Palmerston, and before Palmerston — but I 
 will come to that presently. Mr. Balfour under- 
 stands logic, Mr. Chamberlain understands men. The 
 unhappy peers who are asked to choose between 
 the executioner and suicide are, after all, men. They 
 are loyal to ideas centuries old. Huxley said : 
 
 " I am a plebeian, and I stand by my order." 
 
 May not even a duke say : 
 
 " I am an aristocrat, and I stand by my order " ? 
 
 Plebeian or aristocrat, the cry comes from the 
 heart of a man, and that is what Mr. Chamberlain 
 would have seen. Byron's line is on the lips of many 
 an Englishman : 
 
 Oh, for one hour of blind old Dandolo !
 
 20 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 The longing of the country for Mr. Chamberlain, 
 as the one man who could deal with the crisis of to- 
 day, is perhaps the best tribute ever offered him. 
 
 " Think imperially." That is one of Mr. Chamber- 
 lain's phrases, perhaps the finest of all in its simplicity 
 and in its breadth. There was no counsel of which 
 England stood in greater need ; none which condensed 
 into two words a purpose more vital. He has always 
 had that art. He could always put into a phrase, 
 sometimes into a word, a policy meant to encircle 
 the globe. If you think it an easy thing to do, try it. 
 But you must first have the policy. In politics, 
 as elsewhere, the influence of an idea, of a policy 
 based on an idea and not on expedience, is, in Emer- 
 son's phrase, mathematically measurable by its depth 
 of thought. 
 
 |[^In great moments his has been the voice of England. 
 I will ask you to recall the hour when, alone among 
 public men of the first rank, he took up the German 
 challenge, which long had echoed through Europe 
 as well as England. He spoke as no other man had 
 spoken, of German arrogance, of German hostility 
 to England — a considered hostility with a clear 
 purpose, in the Press, in the Reichstag, and in the 
 Imperial Court — of the constant German menace 
 to the peace of Europe ; of the peril that lay half hid 
 in Imperial purposes. Prince Biilow, then Chancellor 
 of the Empire, undertook to answer him, to rebuke 
 him, to denounce him as a mischief-maker between 
 two friendly peoples. Mr. Chamberlain, then a 
 Minister of the Crown, replied to Prince Biilow from 
 his place in Parliament thus : 
 
 " What I have said, I have said. I have nothing 
 to retract, nothing to defend, nothing to explain. 
 I have no wish to read a lesson to the Chancellor of
 
 MR. CHAMBERLAIN 21 
 
 the German Empire, nor will I accept any at his 
 hands. What I thought it my duty to say may well 
 have been unpleasing to him and to his master, and 
 perhaps to the German people. But as I read English 
 history I know of no English Minister who has served 
 his Sovereign and his country loyally and at the same 
 time found means to be popular abroad." 
 
 Since Chatham, who has uttered sentences like 
 those ? Who has spoken in that spirit ? Who has 
 put diplomacy behind him, and told sixty millions 
 of a more or less hostile people the plain truth in 
 plain words ? It was the day of bitter party strife 
 and of deep divisions between not only parties but 
 classes : and Mr. Chamberlain was the Minister most 
 hated by his political opponents. But to this retort 
 to the Imperial Chancellor all England said Amen. 
 Nor did Prince Biilow carry the contest further. 
 He had no answer but silence. Mr. Chamberlain's 
 assertion of the dignity of England and of the inde- 
 pendence of a Minister of the Crown lives in the 
 memory of the English people, and will long live. 
 
 It is a thing said once for all and for all time ; the 
 final word in a great dispute ; the final denial of an 
 arrogant German claim. The great Minister who 
 said it established once for all, as I believe the world 
 thinks, his claim to the gratitude and affection of 
 the people in whose name it was said.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 
 
 T ONDON has one more statue, not much better 
 "^ or worse than most of those which present 
 themselves to the beholder as illustrations of that 
 genius for sculpture which at present resides and for 
 some time past has resided in the British breast. The 
 art merit of these productions matters the less since 
 both artist and beholder seem content with them. 
 But let us not look at it like the Philistines most of us 
 are with respect to art. Let us rather say that what 
 really matters is that there should be a memorial of 
 some sort, good or bad, to the great men of the nation 
 or to the men who have done high service to the 
 State. 
 
 This latest testimony of public gratitude is to the 
 eighth Duke of Devonshire, who died in 1908 after 
 a life of devotion to the highest interests of the king- 
 dom and of the British people ; a devotion than which 
 none in our time has been nobler. It is thought a 
 sufficient eulogy to record on that surface of the plinth 
 which looks to the Horse Guards his name and the 
 dates of his birth and death. It is sufficient. From 
 1833, or rather from early manhood to 1908, he 
 was, I think, absolutely the most disinterested and one 
 of the most useful public servants who lived during 
 any part of those seventy-five years. 
 
 22
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 23 
 
 It cannot be denied that he was a Duke. If, as 
 sundry Radicals now profess to think, the inherited 
 possession of that title and of a great fortune out- 
 weighs and neutralizes all personal merits, there is 
 no more to be said. But that has not yet come to be 
 a general opinion. And even if it had, during the 
 larger part of his life the late Duke was no Duke, 
 but bore the courtesy title, Marquis of Hartington ; 
 or in common speech, Lord Hartington ; and, per- 
 haps still more often, just Hartington. Let that 
 serve in mitigation of his later misfortune when 
 upon the death of his father, in 1891, the dukedom 
 descended upon him. 
 
 No doubt he would be classed during the whole of 
 his life by Mr. Lloyd George among the idle rich. 
 But it was a kind of idleness which, to men who have 
 less time to spare for invective than the present 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer has, would seem arduous. 
 I was with him once when he was out of office, sitting 
 at his writing-table, strewn with papers — masses of 
 papers — and I said : 
 
 " You seem to find something to do, though you 
 are no longer Minister of War." 
 
 " Yes, there's always something. The business of 
 the estate and my other private affairs would alone 
 keep me at my desk from ten in the morning to four 
 in the afternoon, every day in the year." 
 
 The heads of the biggest houses in the City don't 
 much exceed that ; England being, as we all know, 
 a country where business is transacted with delibera- 
 tion, and the meaning of the word hustle is unknown. 
 
 Yet there was no man who liked better to amuse 
 himself. He liked the Turf, on which he was singu- 
 larly unsuccessful ; liked sport of many kinds, in none 
 of which was he extraordinarily expert ; liked cards.
 
 24 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 which he played with skill and, above all, with judg- 
 ment ; and liked certain forms of society and social 
 life. He was supposed, as every man in public life is 
 supposed, to be ambitious. But if ambition came to 
 him it came late ; nor did it, in the vulgar sense, 
 ever come. Is a man ambitious who twice, from 
 purely public motives, refuses an offered Prime 
 Ministership ? It was not his habit to talk about 
 himself, but he sometimes let fall a sentence which 
 was illuminative. We had been dining at the same 
 house, and after dinner drove together in a hansom — 
 in those happy days, consule Planco, when the hansom 
 was still what Disraeli called it, the gondola of London 
 — to the Gaiety Theatre. I said I thought he was to 
 have spoken that evening in Lancashire. 
 
 " No, it has been put off till next week." 
 
 " You will have a great meeting." 
 
 " I dare say. But if you knew how it all bores me." 
 
 There came a time when it bored him much less, 
 or not at all, whether in the House of Commons or 
 on the platform, but at all times he made his speech 
 with the same fidelity. He did as well as he could. 
 Few men ever served a longer apprenticeship to 
 oratory, yet never, in the larger sense of the word, 
 did he become an orator. I heard him from time 
 to time, at all periods of his career. He had no 
 natural gift of fluent discourse, nor perhaps ever 
 understood what rhetoric meant. But he had some- 
 thing to say and a resolute purpose to say it as well 
 as he knew how. In time, and with untiring practice, 
 his sentences grew clear and strong, and became the 
 adequate expression of the man's thought and will. 
 If it was not oratory it was perhaps something better ; 
 a speech of absolute sincerity. No man ever suspected 
 him of saying what he did not think and believe and
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 25 
 
 intend. He v. is, umil ven- laie, a be::ir ..:ir-i::ii5- 
 trator than orator, and better in the Cabinet or in 
 private council than as either Minister or Head of a 
 Department. 
 
 I wiU say this. I have never known a man in whom 
 the sense of justice was stronger than in Lord Hart- 
 ington. It put him, as it were, under compulsion to 
 do justice, the most complete justice, to the men or 
 the man whom he disliked. I will give one instance 
 out of many. Goldwin Smith, in his Reminiscences — 
 a disappointing yet entrancing book — puts the crown 
 to his long diatribe against Mr. Chamberlain by say- 
 ing that Mr. Chamberlain brought on the Boer War. 
 Mr. Goldwin Smith, it is quite true, only expresses, 
 or echoes, what was at the time a general belief or 
 impression. That it was also Mr. Goldwin Smith's 
 private conviction I don't doubt. He was incapable, 
 even in his not infrequent hours of bitterness, of 
 sa)-ing what he did not believe. But, like Mr. Glad- 
 stone, he could con'S'ince himself of anything ; as Mr. 
 Forster told his late leader to his face in the House 
 of Commons. At the time when this rumour was 
 rife, and the Radicals were tn-in? to make Mr. Cham- 
 berlain a scapegoat, I met Lord Harrington one 
 evening at a club and we dined together. He was 
 then Lord President of the Council in Mr. Balfour's 
 Cabinet, Mr. Chamberlain being Secretary of State 
 for the Colonies. After a while he began talking 
 about the Boer War, with what I thought an unusual 
 unreser^-e. He said : 
 
 " In a sense it is not our war at aU, It was forced 
 upon us. I don't know what you think about it, but 
 we are in truth fighting in South Africa for the 
 Empire. If we lose South Africa, who can say what 
 we shall keep ? "
 
 ii 
 ii 
 
 26 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " Yes, I think people are beginning to see that, 
 and that is one reason why your disasters stir English 
 feeling so deeply. But you used the phrase ' our 
 war.' Many men call it ' Chamberlain's war.' " 
 
 " It is no more Chamberlain's war than it is mine. 
 When I say ' our war,' I mean it of the whole Cabinet. 
 We were all agreed at the beginning. We are all 
 agreed now. It is ' our war.' " 
 May I repeat that ? " 
 
 You may repeat what I said first, that it is no more 
 Chamberlain's war than it is mine. But, of course, 
 I must not commit or compromise my colleagues. It 
 will be known later, when the war is over, that the 
 Cabinet were of one mind. But I am quite ready 
 to take my share of the responsibility." 
 
 As it did become known, and as the war ended in 
 victories which consolidated not only South Africa, 
 but the other great Dominions, and the Empire itself, 
 I think I may now give the whole of Lord Harting- 
 ton's testimony. I need only point out that at the 
 time when he thus put himself by Mr. Chamberlain's 
 side the war was unpopular because ill-understood and 
 because success seemed doubtful. The Imperial pur- 
 pose of it was obscured. It was not clearly seen to 
 be a defensive war, as it was, and sentimental clamours 
 rang through the land, and the apostles of peace and 
 of a Little England were loud-mouthed. It needed a 
 man to face all that. 
 
 Lord Hartington, it is true, belonged not only to 
 the governing class, but to one of the great governing 
 families of England. I doubt whether popular 
 clamours, sentimental or otherwise, disturbed him. 
 He knew very well that he had fallen upon times when 
 the centre of political power had shifted, and that a 
 majority of the electorate was democratic. But he
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 27 
 
 knew that the inevitable had happened, and that the 
 game had to be played, if at all, under these new con- 
 ditions. He accepted them, but his courage in the 
 presence of overwhelming hostile majorities was never 
 shaken. When the Khaki election and a new lease of 
 power to the Unionists came, it came as a vindication 
 of his judgment. Testimony to his courage he needed 
 none. 
 
 The office of Lord President of the Council, which 
 the Duke then held, is supposed to be, and sometimes 
 is, chiefly ornamental. It is coveted for the sake of 
 the dignity and for the sake of the social precedence 
 it gives. It had, in the Duke of Devonshire's case, a 
 very different significance ; as it has had in some other 
 cases. It is a convenient position for a man who no 
 longer cares to be burdened with Departmental duties. 
 It is equally convenient for the Prime Minister to 
 have a post at his disposal splendid enough to tempt 
 a man whose presence in the Cabinet is desirable for 
 personal reasons. The Duke lent to Mr. Balfour's 
 Ministry a great name. He had had immense ex- 
 perience. He had a mature, sagacious judgment. He 
 had, in a degree possessed by nobody else after Lord 
 Salisbury's death, the confidence of the country. That 
 it was which made his declaration about Mr. Chamber- 
 lain, and his readiness to share the responsibility for 
 the Boer War, invaluable. 
 
 Character — what else is there ? Lord Hartington 
 sometimes made a bold use of the authority which 
 character gave him. In that strange dispute which 
 lay at the bottom of the quarrel between the Prince 
 of Wales (Edward VII) and Lord Randolph Churchill, 
 Lord Hartington was asked to intervene. Into the 
 details I had rather not go, known though they are 
 to many persons in London. But the happiness and
 
 28 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 reputation of two great families were involved, and 
 there were compromising letters which one party to 
 the quarrel threatened to divulge. When Lord 
 Hartington was appealed to he said he could do 
 nothing unless he saw the letters. They were brought 
 and put into his hands. He read them. Then : 
 
 " Are there any more ? " 
 
 " No." . 
 
 " I have your authority to make such use of these 
 letters as I think best ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Whereupon Lord Hartington walked to the fire, 
 put the letters into the blazing grate, saw them burn 
 to ashes, and said : 
 
 " I do not think it will be necessary to carry this 
 matter further." 
 
 And to a protest he replied : 
 
 " You are at liberty to say what you like and do 
 what you like. I have acted in what I consider to be 
 the interests of both sides." 
 
 Naturally, there are more versions than one of this 
 incident, but the one I give I believe to be the true 
 one. Said one of those present : 
 
 " Hartington is the only man I know who could 
 have done it without question. But that is because 
 he is Hartington." 
 
 II 
 
 The last time I saw the late Duke of Devonshire, 
 or rather the last time I had a talk with him of any 
 length, was in the summer of 1907, at Devonshire 
 House. I had met him just before at Ascot and he
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 29 
 
 had begun discussing an international matter of im- 
 portance. After a few sentences he stopped, saying 
 with a laugh : 
 
 " This is hardly the place for a talk on such a ques- 
 tion. Look in some morning next week and then we 
 can go over the whole business." 
 
 When I looked in he was in his room at the north- 
 west angle of Devonshire House, commanding the 
 gardens and grounds, which are perhaps the finest in 
 London, and all the finer because the grounds about 
 Lansdowne House seem to be part of them ; which 
 they are not. The room is one of the largest, if not 
 the largest, in Devonshire House ; a palace which its 
 architect chose to subdivide in a way that diminishes 
 the sense of spaciousness you expect in a house of this 
 kind. His writing-table faced the north windows. 
 Some of the best pictures are here. There are books ; 
 there is, all over the room, the air of being lived in. 
 To the right of the large desk was a table covered 
 with cigar and cigarette cases, perhaps thirty in all ; 
 mostly gifts, I should guess, arranged with a precision 
 of which only a servant would be capable, and pre- 
 sumably not in daily use. 
 
 The clear north light — for even in London the air 
 is sometimes clear — fell on his face. The Cavendishes 
 are of a type which is their own. The present Duke, 
 a son of the late Duke's brother. Lord Edward Caven- 
 dish, is the lesser image of his uncle as he was earlier in 
 life. At seventy-three or seventy-four, after half a 
 century of responsibilities and labours, the late Duke 
 had a look of power, and those lines of patient thought 
 which belonged to his age. But the features were 
 not much changed. The rather high, cliff-like fore- 
 head, the blue eyes, tired from over-use, the straight 
 nose largely moulded, the mouth with the Bourbon
 
 30 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 under-lip, the square angle of the chin, were very- 
 much what they had been. With all its regularities 
 of feature and proportion, the face was not beautiful. 
 It was something much better. It had strength and 
 faith and the stamp of that genuineness which pene- 
 trated and saturated his whole nature. It mirrored 
 his mind. When struggling with a thought he could 
 not express as he wished, the lips from which the 
 words ought to have flowed grew twisted and rigid. 
 He looked at you as if to give him the missing word, 
 but he would not have it unless it fitted exactly. He 
 had never been fluent, but his lack of fluency never 
 embarrassed him, as the too familiar story of his 
 yawning in the middle of one of his own speeches 
 attests. 
 
 He had always been in the habit of reading in bed 
 at all hours of the night, whether from sleeplessness 
 or caprice. When his doctor told him it would injure 
 the eyes, he said : " Yes, but I can't lie awake and do 
 nothing." And when asked if the eyes did not pain 
 him he again said : " Yes, but it is a choice of evils." 
 His was, in truth, a stubborn nature, self-willed, im- 
 patient of advice, even when it came from his doctor. 
 His hair and full, close-cut beard, light brown to 
 begin with, had turned grey of late years, and the hair 
 tumbled about his forehead. It always seemed to 
 those about him that as the end drew near he faced 
 death with a tranquil, almost defiant courage ; with 
 a fortitude that never failed. He had lived his life, 
 the whole of it, and on all sides. That morning he 
 uttered one sentence, and one only, which sounded 
 like an allusion to the near future. We were speaking 
 of what was likely to be the end of a certain contro- 
 versy. " Yes," he said, " but I shall not see it." Nor 
 did he.
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 31 
 
 Concerning the subject we discussed, he said : 
 
 " I think it will be convenient if you will state 
 your whole case from your American point of view. 
 As you know, it has never come before me officially." 
 
 As the subject was important, he put his mind to 
 it. He asked questions as I went on. Sometimes I 
 had to repeat a statement. Sometimes he made a 
 comment : brief, weighty, penetrating. No question 
 of high policy could be wholly strange to him after 
 forty years of experience in statecraft. Now, as before, 
 it struck me that he never, like Boswell's Johnson, 
 talked for victory ; he wanted to get at the truth and 
 to convince himself what was best for his own country. 
 He had been brought up in a school certain to hold 
 a view adverse to our American view on this topic. 
 That to him was only a reason for taking the more 
 pains to understand the unfamiliar view, and to make 
 out, if he could, how the two hostile views were to 
 be reconciled, or whether there was a basis for com- 
 promise. Never contentious, he had immovable con- 
 victions ; a safeguard against contention. 
 
 Mr. Lowe or somebody else said of Lord Hartington 
 that what he liked about him was his " you-be-damned- 
 ness." The phrase is expressive, but conveys a wrong 
 impression. All Mr. Lowe meant was that Lord 
 Hartington had an uncompromising independence of 
 nature and a mind of such fibre that it yielded no 
 assent — still less obedience — to mere authority. His 
 attitude to other men or other opinions was not an 
 attitude of contempt. Contempt comes cheap, and 
 is worth no more than it costs. What he really had 
 was patience of mind. He listened with patience to 
 opinions he could not possibly share. He had not 
 only the politeness which goes with long descent and 
 great place, but a real desire to find out what were
 
 32 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 the reasons which induced a man to hold such opinions. 
 If it were an unfamiliar set of facts, he was in a similar 
 mood. He would not give judgment until he had 
 mastered the facts and knew both sides. 
 
 All this and much more came out as we sat there 
 for some two hours of that pleasant July morning, the 
 sunshine playing with the shadows on the lawn. You 
 saw that here was a man with his mind long since 
 made up, yet willing to reopen it if cause were shown. 
 I thought of 1886 and of those interviews between 
 Mr. Gladstone and Lord Hartington, when Mr. 
 Gladstone strove to convert his colleague to Home 
 Rule. Unlike Lord Spencer — " If you had ever been 
 half an hour alone in a room with Mr. Gladstone you 
 would know why I gave in " — Lord Hartington was 
 under no spell. He knew very well that no matter 
 what arguments his leader used, he should never arrive 
 at his conclusions, nor ever be party to a scheme for 
 breaking the United Kingdom of Great Britain and 
 Ireland into fragments. He listened, but never for a 
 moment was his conviction shaken. Against that rock 
 the floods of Mr. Gladstone's eloquence beat in vain. 
 
 In the subjects we considered at Devonshire House 
 I was a good deal interested, but while this talk lasted 
 I was at least as much interested in the man with 
 whom I talked. His sincerity of character I knew — 
 everybody knew ; but what he showed now was above 
 all things a sincerity of mind. He had an intellectual 
 honesty comparable to his honesty of nature. The 
 arts of debate he put aside. There was nothing Parlia- 
 mentary in his method. The arts of the advocate he 
 disdained. There was nothing either in his method 
 or in the man himself which you could call forensic. 
 He opened his mind to you with perfect frankness. 
 The tricks of the Socratic dialogue were not his.
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 33 
 
 He had not, perhaps, the subtlety which that process 
 requires, but he certainly had a preference for sim- 
 plicity and loyalty which made it impossible to him to 
 lay traps for an opponent or to contrive an ambush 
 for an enemy. He met you, if at all, in the open field, 
 on even terms. 
 
 That is what he had done all his life ; a life crowded 
 with public and private interests ; temptations of one 
 kind or another lying in wait for him at every step. 
 Not once had he yielded. Not once had he swerved 
 from the straight, hard line of truth and honour and 
 honourable conduct. The bronze statue of him in 
 Whitehall is not more erect, unbending, self-poised 
 than was he. You would know it afar off if only from 
 the up-springing carriage of the head ; unconscious 
 in Hartington himself, but patrician. 
 
 He was no more afraid to defend his own interests 
 than those of the State ; when the two happened to 
 coincide. He resisted Harcourt's Death Duties in 
 1894 on both grounds. He gave Chatsworth as an 
 illustration. The Dukes of Devonshire had kept up 
 that place partly for the public, partly for the tenants 
 and neighbours, as well as for themselves. They had 
 put a great share of their revenue back into the land. 
 They had given yearly great sums. Said Lord Harting- 
 ton then, in substance : 
 
 " You cannot have it both ways. If you exact from 
 us by law what we have given of our free will we shall 
 obey the law, but we shall no longer have the means to 
 bestow in charity what we have bestowed heretofore ; 
 or what the law now takes from us." 
 
 He was much criticized. The Radicals raged, after 
 their manner. But who does not now see that he was 
 right ? The people who own no land and wish to 
 make land bear all its own burdens and theirs besides. 
 
 D
 
 34 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 do not see, and will not see. The Dukes of Devonshire 
 own a considerable Irish property, Lismore. Said the 
 late Duke — I do not know whether he himself ever 
 said it publicly : 
 
 " I have had the figures examined. Within a recent 
 period we have spent on Lismore for the benefit of 
 the tenants ^34,000 ($170,000) more than we have 
 received from it in rent." 
 
 Even with that, I suppose the single taxers and other 
 Socialists would not be content. They want the whole. 
 No man knows what the end will be. 
 
 It was, I believe, when these Lismore figures were 
 quoted in the House of Commons that a Nationalist 
 Member asked : 
 
 " How long is it since the Duke of Devonshire has 
 been in Ireland ? " 
 
 And from across the floor came the answer : 
 
 " Not since his brother was murdered in Phoenix 
 Park." 
 
 Who said it I do not know. I wish I did. It is 
 worthy to rank with Colonel Saunderson's answer to a 
 demand for his reasons against Home Rule. 
 
 " There are in this House sixty-nine good and 
 sufficient reasons against Home Rule, and there they 
 sit I " 
 
 Our talk did not then turn on these matters, but my 
 memories of other talks and of Lord Hartington as a 
 steadfast advocate of the rights of all classes are many, 
 and I choose out of them such as seem to me best to 
 paint the man. 
 
 The American tourist who has seen Chatsworth 
 has probably brought away with him the impression 
 that it is all state apartments. Only that wing of the 
 house is shown. They are of a great and impressing 
 splendour, but those parts of the house in which the
 
 EIGHTH DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE 2S 
 
 family live, though still splendid, are delightful and 
 homelike. The library contains treasures known the 
 world over. The morning -room is panelled with 
 Titians, and I was going to say Van Dycks, but I have 
 forgotten. The bedrooms are, or were, equally 
 magnificent and primitive. There were no bells, but 
 a servant in livery waited outside the door to take 
 your orders. The dining-room is of great size and 
 beauty. The most beautiful thing I ever saw in it 
 was the light on the face of the late Duke's father as 
 we sat at lunch, and Lord Hartington arrived unex- 
 pectedly, having ridden over from Hardwick Hall 
 where he then lived. Never between father and son 
 was there a more perfect relation than between these 
 two. Lord Hartington once broke through his reserve 
 to say to me : 
 
 " I owe everything to my father ; everything." 
 From a man whose emotions easily found their 
 way out, that might not have meant much. From 
 him it meant precisely what he said ; and he said it 
 as if the obligation were one he was bound to acknow- 
 ledge. The burden of gratitude to his father would 
 not be borne for ever in silence. 
 
 If, as Mr. Price Collier says, Americans do not like 
 Englishmen, they surely would not have liked Lord 
 Hartington. He had in the highest degree those 
 English traits which Americans, some Americans, 
 think un-American : the not wearing his heart on 
 his sleeve, the absence of effusiveness, of self-assertion, 
 of swagger in any kind. I have used some superlatives 
 in sketching him, but I dismiss all I have said as in- 
 adequate ; perhaps because of the superlatives. They 
 always betray you. They will not do the work they 
 are meant to. To Lord Hartington himself they 
 would not have been agreeable. He used none.
 
 36 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Delete them, then, if you will, and think of Lord 
 Hartington as what he was, an Englishman without 
 brilliancy, without pretence, without great original 
 genius, without much literature or art ; not a great 
 administrator in the official sense, but a man who, 
 never seeking it, won the confidence of his country- 
 men, deserved it, did high service to the State, to 
 which his devotion was wholly unselfish. A man who 
 was, and will remain, an example of truth, judgment, 
 wise conduct in great affairs, and integrity never 
 questioned. He seemed a part of the British Con- 
 stitution. Were he still alive, the powerful Ministry 
 now* seeking to overthrow the Constitution would 
 have had to overthrow him also ; which would have 
 added something to the difficulty of their endeavour. 
 
 * Written early in 1 9 1 1 . They have since succeeded ; temporarily.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 THE LATE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE 
 
 /^NCE or twice in a generation appears a woman 
 ^^^ who takes command of the social world in 
 which she lives. Lady Jersey was such a woman. 
 Lady Palmerston was another. They are historical 
 instances. The late Duchess of Devonshire was a 
 third ; and not the least remarkable of the three. 
 To round out a career like any one of these there 
 must be something more than character or exceptional 
 gifts. There must be opportunity, and circumstances 
 must combine with fortune. They did in the late 
 Duchess's case, but rather late in life ; yet I cannot 
 remember a time when she was not a great power in 
 London. 
 
 Whether her foreign birth was against her I know 
 not. London has a great power of assimilation. It 
 has adopted many a woman not of English blood into 
 that charmed and sometimes charming circle known 
 as Society. With German Kings and Queens to rule 
 over them and an army of their kin encamped in May- 
 fair, why should there be any hesitation about the 
 social naturalization of the alien ? There is none, 
 in one sense. There is only a process of selection. 
 Of the American women who have married English 
 husbands, some have been taken and others left, but, 
 on the whole, the American record is a good one. We 
 perhaps think it a tribute to the charm of the American 
 
 37
 
 38 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 woman, as it is, though churHsh patriots at home take 
 a view different from that. But we do not always stop 
 to think how many wives of Enghsh husbands are 
 neither English nor American. 
 
 The great lady who died on the 15th of this month* 
 was the daughter of Charles Francis Victor, Count 
 von Alten, a Hanoverian nobleman. From her girl- 
 hood she had a renown for beauty. She was an orna- 
 ment of the Court of King George V of Hanover : 
 who never saw her, poor blind King that he was. 
 Born, they say, in 1832, but that has always been dis- 
 puted. There has always been a question how old 
 she was ; partly because she was so long young. 
 What is certain is that in 1852 she married Lord 
 Mandeville, son and heir to the sixth Duke of Man- 
 chester. It was not supposed to be a pre-eminently 
 fortunate alliance. There was an ancestor, an Earl 
 of Manchester, who was one of Cromwell's generals, 
 and a good one, as he proved at the battle of Marston 
 Moor and elsewhere. But when Mile, von Alten 
 married Lord Mandeville the possessions of the family 
 were not precisely splendid, and the scope for Lady 
 Mandeville's ambitions was not so wide as she desired. 
 
 But in 1855 he succeeded to the dukedom, and in 
 1858 the Duchess was made Mistress of the Robes : a 
 great post about the Court. This was in Lord Derby's 
 second administration. There was, therefore, no 
 question about her social position, nor could it have 
 been long before her personal qualities made them- 
 selves felt. If there was a difficulty it was finance ; 
 as everybody knew. It is a subject on which people 
 talk more freely here than in New York. Poverty is 
 no reproach ; it is only an inconvenience, and nothing 
 is more common than to hear a woman in high place 
 
 * July, 191 1.
 
 LATE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE 39 
 
 say bluntly she cannot " afford " what she wishes. I 
 suppose a lady of position in New York would perish 
 sooner than make such a confession ; many such 
 ladies, if not all ; and all delectable in all other re- 
 spects ; as they all are. 
 
 My English memories do not go back to so early a 
 date as this, so I will come down to a time of which 
 I know something personally. I stop only to set 
 down one fact which she would forgive no one for 
 omitting ; that she had three daughters who became, 
 the first, Duchess of Hamilton ; the second. Countess 
 of Gosford ; the third. Countess of Derby. In that 
 way was one of the supreme ambitions of an English 
 mother satisfied — she married her daughters well. Two 
 of the three were great alliances. One of them has 
 come to touch us ; since it was the eldest son of 
 Lady Gosford, Viscount Acheson, who last year 
 married Mildred, daughter of Mr. Ridgely Carter, 
 long Secretary of the American Embassy in London, 
 in succession to Mr. Henry White. Mr. Carter be- 
 came American Minister to Rumania : a post by no 
 means adequate to his abilities and experience. Miss 
 Carter was before her marriage one of the flowers of 
 the American Colony in London, and still is ; regard- 
 less of the fiction of law which makes the American 
 wife of an Englishman herself English. 
 
 It is a tradition that among the many who admired 
 the Duchess of Manchester was Mr. Disraeli ; a man 
 whose admirations were discriminating. The two 
 names were never that I heard of otherwise connected. 
 Disraeli was not a man to be permanently attracted 
 by beauty unless there was something more than 
 beauty. He required of a woman that she should be 
 able to interest him. Now the Duchess had a maxim 
 of intercourse which ran like this : " Listen to every-
 
 40 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 thing ; answer nothing." Not a maxim to be acted 
 on strictly. It is, however, true that for a woman of 
 gifts so transcendent as hers, she talked with reserve. 
 What she liked was to form her own estimate of char- 
 acter ; to weigh social forces ; to form conclusions 
 and to act on them. Disraeli's was a glance which 
 went deeper than the surface. He, too, had a gift of 
 silence. But two silences beget speech. The genius 
 of the man and the genius of the woman had much in 
 common : and though neither might care for mere 
 talk with an unsympathetic listener they knew each 
 other when they met ; they had an intellectual 
 kinship ; and they had each something to give in 
 exchange. 
 
 But the man about whom her life revolved was 
 neither Mr. Disraeli nor her first husband, the seventh 
 Duke of Manchester. It was Lord Hartington. 
 Theirs was a friendship which began long before the 
 Duke of Manchester died : and lasted to the end. It 
 was the deciding fact in the lives of both. The attach- 
 ment between them was of the strongest, and never 
 diminished. It was said that Lord Hartington would 
 never marry unless he could marry the Duchess of 
 Manchester. He never did. As soon as might be 
 after the death of the Duke of Manchester Lord 
 Hartington, being then Duke of Devonshire, took the 
 Duchess to wife : while people were still guessing. 
 
 But there had long been between them a tie wholly 
 independent of mere marriage. By nature Hartington 
 was indolent ; averse from politics and public affairs ; 
 without political ambition. The Duchess used all 
 her influence all the time to rouse him from this 
 lethargy, and to fill his mind with visions of a great 
 future of great service to his country. She succeeded, 
 and, having succeeded, never allowed him to relapse
 
 LATE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE 41 
 
 into a mood of indifference. England owes to her an 
 immense debt ; for the kind of usefulness there was in 
 Hartington belonged to him alone. Her ambition 
 was to see him Prime Minister. She ought to have 
 been, but I think was not, more than content when, 
 alone among all men like him, he had the oppor- 
 tunity twice to refuse, and did twice refuse, that 
 great office. But no guidance could have been more 
 delicate than hers ; whether in his relations with 
 great affairs or in other matters which required per- 
 haps an even liner touch. In all these she had and 
 used consummate skill. She never used bit or spur. 
 She rode with light hands and a loose rein. Of other 
 attachments she was never — or never showed herself — 
 jealous. London, always cynical in such matters, used 
 to say she encouraged them, and used them to con- 
 firm her own authority. It is for women to say 
 whether that could have been. 
 
 He rewarded her with a devotion which knew no 
 limit. She was a little older than he, but what did 
 that matter ? He was from the beginning quite care- 
 less how he showed his devotion or who knew it. 
 Throughout their lives it was the same and shown in 
 the same way. If you entered a drawing-room where 
 the Duchess was, you looked about for Lord Harting- 
 ton. If he was not near her you looked at the door, 
 and you would not look long before you saw him enter. 
 His greeting to his hostess accomplished, he hardly 
 noticed others. He was quite happy to stand in a 
 throng and gaze on the Duchess from a distance. 
 The heavy Cavendish face lighted up. With all his 
 immobility of feature you saw happiness in his eyes. 
 When he had found his way to her side, they might 
 or might not have much to say to each other. But 
 speech was not needed. Presence was enough.
 
 42 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Affinity is a worn-out word, but if ever there was 
 an affinity between a strong man and a woman with 
 both beauty and cleverness this was one. 
 
 If the Duchess was tolerant she was not always 
 tolerant. I knew of a case. A much younger and 
 therefore lovelier woman was their guest. It befell 
 that this young woman and the Duke wandered away 
 together one afternoon and returned after dusk. 
 Said the Duchess to the younger woman : 
 
 " My dear, I'm delighted you and Hartington 
 should be friends, but you will not again be out with 
 him so long or so late." 
 
 That is a good enough example of the tone she took 
 with all sorts of people when things were not going to 
 her mind. She was a law unto all her world. A guest 
 asked for Monday did not arrive till the Thursday : 
 having telegraphed to excuse herself. She was met 
 by the Duchess brandishing the telegram : 
 
 " This is your wire ; answer prepaid. Did you 
 think I was too poor to pay for my own message ? " 
 
 And for three days this temper continued. At the 
 end of the three days, the Duchess said : 
 
 " My dear, you deserved your punishment and you 
 have had it. I love to have you here, but when you 
 say you will come I expect you to come." 
 
 After which all smiles and sunshine. 
 
 Implacable she certainly was ; often unforgiving ; 
 sometimes vindictive. A lady whose position entitled 
 her, you would have thought, to be independent, 
 told me the story of a quarrel between the Duchess 
 and herself. The Duchess had been overbearing and 
 was in the wrong, but my friend had not the less 
 surrendered. I asked : 
 
 " Why did you give in ? " 
 
 " Do you suppose I was going to make an enemy
 
 LATE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE 43 
 
 of the most dangerous woman in London, and the 
 most powerful ? " 
 
 So the doctrine of worldly prudence prevailed. 
 
 When the Duchess gave her wonderful fancy ball 
 in 1897 in honour of the Great Queen's second Jubilee, 
 she asked eight hundred people and closed the list. 
 One of the unasked persuaded her Ambassador to 
 intercede with the Duchess. She refused. He re- 
 ported the refusal to his countrywoman ; who replied : 
 
 " You must go back to the Duchess. If I am not 
 asked to this ball my position in Paris, in St. Peters- 
 burg, in Vienna, will be ruined. My social future is 
 in your hands." 
 
 The Ambassador returned and renewed his entreaty. 
 
 " Why do you bother me ? You know I never ask 
 any one not on my original list." 
 
 " Duchess, I have left Mme. X. in convulsions on 
 the floor of the Embassy drawing-room. If you do 
 not send her a card I will not answer for the conse- 
 
 5) 
 
 quences. 
 
 " I will not send her a card." 
 
 Then a pause ; then : 
 
 " If she likes to come without a card she may come." 
 
 And she came. 
 
 This is not the Duchess's most amiable side, but 
 you must look at her on all sides. She was never a 
 woman to reign and not govern. But when she 
 chose to be charming she could be more charming 
 than anybody. When she talked, her German accent 
 was marked, but her mind was English. She had un- 
 expected felicities of diction ; in little matters and 
 great. After an absence in America of some years I 
 met her again at a friend's house in London. There 
 was a look on her face which I thought inquiring, and 
 I said :
 
 44 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " I am a ghost." 
 
 " Well, you look a prosperous ghost." 
 
 She loved the turf and cards, and loved to win at 
 all games. But for Hartington she might have thought 
 life only a game, but her love and ambition for him 
 gave her a great and serious purpose, which she put 
 above everything. After his death she clung to his 
 memory and lived in that. You might, after that 
 great disaster, have expected her to quote Landor : 
 
 I warmed both hands against the fire of life ; 
 It sinks and I am ready to depart. 
 
 But it may be doubted whether, even at seventy- 
 nine, she was ready to depart. She would rather have 
 said with Huxley : " Death, the everlasting extinction 
 of one's energies and faculties, is horrible and in- 
 credible." But that despairing protest has never yet 
 availed.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 MR. BALFOUR 
 
 /CONCERNING Mr. Balfour's resignation of the 
 ^■^^ Conservative leadership there are two or three 
 things to be said before even those personal memories 
 which are my real subject. This, first of all, that the 
 one great act of decision in his public life is an act of 
 suicide. Secondly, that he has led the Conservative 
 Party during all these recent crises with an excess of 
 prudence ; led it with less courage and foresight than 
 were desirable ; led it often into the by-paths of 
 politics when a broad, straight road lay plain before 
 him. Nevertheless, his retirement, if it be indeed a 
 withdrawal and not a fausse sortie, is a calamity the 
 disastrous consequences of which are immeasurable. 
 
 Irresolute as he has been, there is no one to replace 
 him. Mr. Bonar Law is an able man of business, with 
 a great knowledge of fiscal and economical questions, 
 but with little experience of Parliament and none at 
 all of leadership. He becomes leader at a moment 
 when all the resources of the most experienced 
 Parliamentarian will be needed to fight Home Rule 
 and other measures of Revolution, imminent in the 
 House of Commons ; and Mr. Law has none of them. 
 He may acquire them all, but not all at once. Mr. 
 Balfour has them all, and in the most critical hour of 
 his party's life resigns. He delivers over his party and 
 his cause, with the Union of the three kingdoms at 
 
 45
 
 46 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 issue. It is not, o£ course, a betrayal, but it is a 
 surrender. Still, any leader is better than none, and 
 for most Parliamentary purposes Mr. Balfour has no 
 superior and no equal. Mr. Asquith, in words which 
 do him honour and are but a just tribute to his only 
 rival and only superior, described him as the most 
 distinguished member of the greatest deliberative 
 body in the world. If it is no longer the greatest 
 deliberative body in the world it is because Mr. 
 Asquith has substituted the gag and the guillotine for 
 deliberation, and the closure stifles debate. Reason 
 the more, since the situation is more difficult, why 
 Mr. Balfour should have stood by his party. If ever 
 he had had in him the real spirit of leadership this is 
 the last moment he would have chosen to desert. 
 But he has in him all the gifts a leader ought to have 
 except the gift of leadership. 
 
 That he has had every provocation must be admitted, 
 but is he the first party chief whose followers have 
 been disloyal or mutinous ? His business was to 
 coerce them, to lead and not be led, to sacrifice every 
 personal feeling, no matter how just, to the party 
 and the cause. 
 
 Mr. Balfour himself put forward the excuse of 
 health. He told some of his friends some months 
 before he resigned that he was too ill to go on. I 
 should never dream of questioning any statement 
 Mr. Balfour made. Let it then be admitted that 
 health had something to do with his retirement. It 
 adds to the regret which all but his opponents feel, 
 and some even of them. But I suppose it may still 
 be said that if there had been no other reason, this 
 alone might not have sufficed. His ill-health has been 
 borne for years. Alone, it might have been borne for 
 years to come.
 
 MR. BALFOUR 47 
 
 But as I have begun on this uncongenial subject 
 I will go a little way into the inner history of it 
 and say what I believe to be the true, original, and 
 perhaps final cause of his decision. 
 
 A woman is the cause. Not in the usual sense, 
 but in the sense that a woman has led the attack 
 on him, and that, but for her, the cabal against 
 Mr. Balfour might never have grown strong enough 
 to drive him from his post. No opposition has been 
 more damaging to him than the opposition of The 
 Morning Post, and The Morning Post is Lady Bathurst. 
 I dislike to mention her name, but how otherwise 
 can the truth be told ? The Countess Bathurst is 
 the daughter of Lord Glenesk, who was Sir Algernon 
 Borthwick and a journalist of unexampled genius. 
 He made this paper the great power it is, and be- 
 queathed it to his daughter. Lady Bathurst does 
 not, of course, edit or manage it, but she controls 
 it, and is absolute master there when she chooses to 
 be. If any woman were equal to such a duty she 
 would be equal. A woman of rare qualities, with 
 a capacity for great things which all men who know 
 her acknowledge and admire, as they do her charm 
 of character. But she is a woman, with a woman's 
 impulses and emotions, and with the readiness of 
 a woman to be governed, and to govern other people, 
 by impulses and emotions ; and she intervened in 
 grave affairs, which are essentially the affairs of men 
 and not of women. 
 
 There were other causes than the one on which 
 I have dwelt. It is not necessary to distribute these 
 responsibilities mathematically. But it is safe to say 
 that the unrelenting antagonism of a journal so 
 powerful as the one which Lady Bathurst owns and 
 sometimes directs was enough to turn the scale.
 
 48 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Early in the agitation for Tariff Reform she be- 
 came a convinced Tariff Reformer ; and convinced 
 that Tariff Reform was the one paramount issue 
 of politics. Mr. Balfour's mind moved slowly on 
 that matter ; or slowly toward the conversion he 
 ultimately announced, and to his acceptance of this 
 proposal as an article of party faith. His mind is, 
 on most questions, subject to philosophic doubt. 
 He was born a Free Trader. It is thought doubtful 
 whether he ever went heartily and wholly over to 
 the other doctrine. Certain it is that he was long 
 in coming about ; he shivered in the bleak wind of 
 fierce controversy ; and if finally he swung round 
 on the other tack he laid his new course uncertainly. 
 Lady Bathurst was impatient ; — was there ever a 
 woman who was not ? When she wanted a thing, she 
 wanted it, and at once. The criticisms of The Morn- 
 ing Post on Mr. Balfour were incessant ; and they 
 took the form of reproaches, sometimes of invective, 
 and often of rebuke. It is a great party organ and 
 was attacking its own party leader. But for its in- 
 temperate zeal the Tariff Reform controversy need 
 not have become envenomed, as it did, and the division 
 in the Conservative ranks need not have yawned so 
 wide. 
 
 But consider the dates. It was in 1903, May 15, 
 that Mr. Chamberlain delivered in Birmingham the 
 great speech in which he summoned the Unionist 
 Party to declare for Tariff Reform. He was then in 
 a position of such authority that his challenge could 
 not be neglected or declined. At once the party, 
 the whole body of Conservatives, made answer in 
 one way or another. The majority accepted Mr. 
 Chamberlain as leader on that subject, and leader 
 on that subject he remained. When did Mr. Balfour
 
 MR. BALFOUR 49 
 
 announce his decision ? Is the date known ? The 
 dates o£ several speeches could be given in which he 
 recorded different stages of the long process which 
 is supposed to have ended in his complete acceptance 
 of Tariff Reform. If there be any one statement 
 which, taken by itself, was decisive, how many years 
 had passed before it was made ? In the interval, 
 down to 1906, the leadership of the party had become 
 in effect, though not in name, dual. Then, unhappily, 
 Mr. Chamberlain, from reasons of health which 
 admitted of no debate, withdrew from public life. 
 For five years Mr. Balfour remained at his post — ■ 
 urged on, during much of that time, by his followers 
 — in the plenitude of his Parliamentary powers. 
 
 Then came the Parliament Bill and the momentous 
 question whether the Conservative Peers should allow 
 it to pass, as it was certain to do in any case, or suffer 
 the Upper House to be swamped by Mr. Asquith's 
 creation of five hundred Radical Peers — " chimney- 
 sweeps," as Mr. Churchill hypothetically called them. 
 Lord Halsbury pronounced for the last ditch ; which 
 the wits called the first ditch. He and his supporters, 
 numbering more than one hundred votes, openly 
 rebelled against Mr. ^Balfour and Lord Lansdowne. 
 Lord Salisbury, Lord Selborne, Sir Edward Carson, 
 Mr. George Wyndham, all bound to him by political 
 and personal ties, openly defied him. He is supposed 
 to have said he did not mind. Is it conceivable that 
 he did not ? Is it not more probable that he deceived 
 himself than that he " did not mind " the defection 
 of these and other pillars of the party and his own 
 friends ? Whether he minded it then or not, the 
 mutiny spread, and he may well have resented it 
 later. The Halsbury Club marked another deepening 
 of the division in the party. That club, we are told, 
 
 E
 
 so ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 intended no disloyalty to Mr. Balfour. It was merely 
 meant to oppose his policy, to take the control out 
 of his hands, to reduce his leadership to a phrase. 
 He might remain leader provided they were not 
 expected to follow him. If Mr. Balfour meant to 
 resign, then was the moment, but he let it pass. Why 
 he has resigned now it may be hard to say, except that 
 there came at last the hour when he could endure no 
 longer. 
 
 Long before the Halsbury Club there had been 
 criticisms on Mr. Balfour's policy or want of policy ; 
 on his conduct of the Education Bill of 1902 ; on his 
 failure to pass a proper Trade Union Bill, spite 
 of advice ; on his failure to bring forward a scheme 
 of Redistribution ; on his neglect of the ever more 
 pressing question of the Reform of the House of 
 Lords ; on his disposition to " let things slide," or 
 to follow the line of least resistance. There was dis- 
 affection at the Carlton Club as well as in the Halsbury 
 Club. But to the Carlton Club, the head-quarters 
 of his party, Mr. Balfour never went. His most 
 intimate adviser, whose name everybody knows, is 
 supposed to have thought it his duty to keep from 
 the knowledge of his chief whatever might be dis- 
 agreeable to him. He was shepherded too much. 
 Something may be said for the Unionists who, having 
 chosen Mr. Balfour for their leader, had to look on 
 while so many of the functions of leadership slipped 
 out of his hands and into the hands of a man they 
 had not chosen. Mr. Jack Sanders's fidelity was not 
 disputed; it was his judgment which was impugned. 
 He made access to Mr. Balfour difficult, and free 
 communication between him and his party impossible. 
 
 In the great contest over the Parliament Bill Mr. 
 Balfour described himself as ever a House of Commons
 
 MR. BALFOUR 51 
 
 man. What he meant the House to understand 
 was that in opposing the Bill designed to convert 
 the House of Commons into a Single Chamber, 
 he was not acting as a partisan or champion of the 
 House of Lords, He put the Commons and their 
 rights first. As far as it went, that is a true account, 
 but it is very far indeed from being complete, nor 
 can you understand Mr. Balfour if you regard him 
 wholly, or even mainly, as a Parliamentarian. He 
 will go down in history as a great member of Parlia- 
 ment, as Prime Minister, and much else which is 
 purely political. But there is a Balfour behind all 
 that, of whom the public sees little and knows little ; 
 yet, for all that, the real Balfour. If you meet him 
 you will have glimpses of the real man, or of one or 
 more sides of him. A single sentence will show how 
 wide and deep is the gulf which divides him from 
 politics. I used once, in a group of men which in- 
 cluded Mr. Balfour, an impatient expression about 
 the Psychical Society and its so-called investigations 
 into the nature of psychical phenomena. He broke in 
 at once : 
 
 " I think your scepticism carries you too far. 
 There is nothing in political life as I know it which 
 can be compared to the interest, the profound interest 
 and significance, of psychical research." 
 
 Yet I am not aware that he has ever given in his 
 adhesion to the beliefs which that society was founded 
 to establish. It was simply that on all subjects, or on 
 most, he has an open mind ; and that to present to 
 him a problem of any kind is to challenge his attention. 
 And that of itself is almost enough to explain his de- 
 fects as leader of a great political party. He shares 
 with Pascal the distinction of being a devout believer, 
 yet possessed with an invincible longing to apply
 
 52 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 scientific methods of inquiry to matters of faith. 
 He is a saint in the skin of an agnostic. There is an 
 intellectual and spiritual kinship between him and 
 the great Frenchman. Of the Provincial Letters, 
 he might have written the first four. To the imagina- 
 tive height, the spiritual splendour of the rest, he could 
 never have attained. Nor has he that genius for con- 
 densing long periods of thought into the compactness 
 of an epigram which makes the Pensees not merely- 
 immortal, but the most fertilizing of all such col- 
 lections. 
 
 Yet, in a way and to a certain extent, he is a child 
 of Pascal all the same. If he has not Pascal's genius — 
 and who has ? — he has the Port Royalist's habit 
 of seeing both sides, and of stating both. It is a 
 useful habit in the realms of speculation. It is almost 
 fatal in party politics. On a party platform or in a 
 House of Commons debate, as in a legal trial, there 
 is always some one else to present the other side. 
 A Minister or a leader of the Opposition who states 
 both only perplexes and dispirits his followers. Let 
 him think what he likes of the other side of a question ; 
 he has no business to think aloud. But Mr. Balfour 
 was always thinking aloud on his legs. At times he 
 rivalled Mr. Gladstone himself in the art of applying 
 metaphysics to politics, and of qualifying his state- 
 ments, till they ceased to be statements, and became 
 hypothetical suggestions. 
 
 During the debate on the Parliament Bill Mr. 
 Asquith asked him across the table whether, if or 
 when the Conservatives came back into power, 
 they would repeal the Parliament Bill. Peel would 
 have said, " It is my purpose." Palmerston would 
 have answered in a word, " Yes." Disraeli would 
 have uttered a flashing sentence : " We exist only
 
 MR. BALFOUR 53 
 
 for that." Even Mr. Gladstone might have declared 
 that the logic of circumstances vi^ould impose on him 
 that high duty. But Mr. Balfour began to distinguish. 
 There w^ere clauses which would have to be modified. 
 Others, no doubt, must be expunged. If any part 
 of the Act remained on the statute book it would not 
 be the most mischievous part. And so on. His 
 followers sat aghast. The ground on which they 
 were fighting the Bill as a measure of revolution was 
 slipping from under them as Mr. Balfour went on 
 refining. If he had met the challenge with a " Yes, 
 certainly we will," he might have remained leader 
 of the party, and the blue sky that bends over England 
 would have been a good deal bluer than it is to- 
 day. 
 
 II 
 
 I hope it may still interest Americans to know that 
 Mr. Balfour has been a steadfast friend of this country 
 and people. He has been more than a steadfast friend. 
 He had, before he was Prime Minister, and while he 
 was Prime Minister, and has had ever since, a states- 
 man's appreciation of the usefulness of friendship 
 to both countries. It was while he governed the 
 British Empire that most of the most dangerous 
 disputes between Great Britain and the United 
 States came up for settlement, and were settled. 
 Venezuela had been disposed of by Lord Salisbury 
 and Mr. Olney, but there remained the Bering 
 fisheries, the Alaska boundary, and others, which, 
 if less important, were almost as menacing. I know 
 that Mr. Balfour was for the pacific adjustment of 
 all these, and used to that end all his authority as 
 Prime Minister. He said :
 
 54 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " The advantages o£ a victory in each one, or in 
 all these, controversies, would be as nothing in com- 
 parison to the advantages of a permanent good under- 
 standing with the United States." 
 
 What he did as Prime Minister is better evidence 
 even than what he said. But I will quote one other 
 testimony. A well-known Unionist M.P. went to 
 see him during one of these crises to beg him to 
 come to terms with the United States. Mr. Balfour 
 got out of his chair and said : 
 
 " I am as anxious for it as you are. It is the thing 
 I care most about." 
 
 He was in truth genuinely devoted to a good under- 
 standing with the United States. 
 
 He was for arbitration where arbitration was 
 possible ; that is, where the United States Senate 
 could be induced to agree to a treaty of arbitration. 
 If there had to be negotiation, he was for friendly 
 negotiation, and for reasonable concessions or com- 
 promise, as every reasonable man is, well knowing 
 that in few international disagreements is the right 
 all on one side. On this view he acted consistently 
 throughout. He even yielded to our proposal to 
 substitute for arbitration a commission of six for the 
 delimitation of the Alaska boundary ; nor did he object 
 when, by way of fulfilling our pledge to appoint im- 
 partial commissioners, we named Senator Lodge and 
 Mr. Turner. I dwell a little on this because I think 
 we have hardly done full justice to Mr. Balfour's 
 attitude in Anglo-American disputes ; nor to Mr. 
 Balfour himself for his consistent good -will to the 
 United States and his readiness to make sacrifices 
 for the sake of Anglo-American harmony. He in- 
 herited this tradition of friendship from Lord Salis- 
 bury : from the later Lord Salisbury, who was true
 
 MR. BALFOUR 55 
 
 to it during all his last Premiership. To that great 
 Prime Minister also we have yet to acknowledge 
 our obligations in respect of Venezuela and other 
 matters. 
 
 One other point, briefly. Mr. Balfour is the one 
 Chief Secretary of Ireland who governed that un- 
 governable island. Of him as the executive officer 
 in whose hands rested the cause of peace, of law, of 
 order, it is to be said that he did the work he was 
 appointed to do ; and that there, in the most trying 
 post which any man can anywhere hold, he showed 
 great administrative qualities and great courage as 
 well. To him also was due the new policy in respect 
 of land which transformed the agrarian conditions, 
 and gave prosperity to half, or more than half the 
 island. The two together make a record. Perhaps 
 that also may conciliate American, if not Irish- 
 American, good-will. 
 
 The Mr. Balfour of private life is not, I think, 
 very well known to his own people ; and naturally 
 still less well to us. They think of him as a being 
 somewhat remote from those personal and domestic 
 sympathies on which, in all their public servants, 
 from King and Queen through all social levels, 
 they set a high value. They know that Mr. Balfour 
 is not married. They do not know that his own family 
 have been and are to him in a singularly close and 
 beautiful relation. When he is at his place in Scot- 
 land, Whittingehame (pronounced Whittengcm), he 
 is surrounded by them. He has married brothers 
 and sisters, and they and their many children fill the 
 great house. They are almost as much at home 
 there as he is, and take up a great deal more room. 
 There is, to be sure, a study which is his and his 
 only, where he does alone his thinking and other
 
 56 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 kinds of work, and into which no one enters unless 
 summoned. I don't wish to linger on private matters, 
 but if you will ask anybody who knows the facts 
 you will easily learn how broad is his kindliness of 
 nature, how genuine are his affections, how far- 
 reaching is his charity, and how he is loved by his 
 family, his friends, his neighbours, and his associates 
 in public life. 
 
 You have heard, no doubt, of his charm of manner 
 and character. No one who meets him is insensible 
 to that, or fails to see that he has a true sweetness 
 of nature. But we seem to have got into a habit 
 of judging a man by trivialities, and when Mr. Balfour 
 is discussed he is discussed as a devotee of a particular 
 game on which all the world has gone mad. With 
 the man himself you may talk long and never hear 
 it mentioned. But you will hear of books and music 
 and pictures, and, if you are supposed to be interested 
 in such matters, of religious beliefs and of those 
 psychical mysteries to which I referred in a previous 
 letter, and of others. If you are a friend, he may talk 
 to you of friendships, but in social gossip he has 
 little interest, and of scandal an abhorrence. He has 
 never sought to make his house in Carlton Gardens 
 a social head-quarters : contenting himself with giving 
 two or three large dinners, mostly political, during 
 the season. That is equivalent to saying that he does 
 not care to use social influences for the purposes of 
 public life, as Lord Palmerston did, as his uncle. 
 Lord Salisbury, did, as Lord Rosebery always has, 
 and many another poHtical chief. It has been thought 
 that as leader, and in his own interest as leader, as 
 well as in the interest of his party, he might do more. 
 His London house is adequate to hospitalities on a 
 splendid scale. In his drawing-room hang the famous
 
 MR. BALFOUR 57 
 
 canvases by Burne-Jones, as good examples as exist, 
 or perhaps the best, of that artist's conception of 
 nude beauty as seen in the natural woman, and yet 
 imaginatively treated. But Burne-Jones and the 
 British Philistine have never quite understood each 
 other, and Mr. Balfour may not care to expose a 
 master whom he loves to the criticism of the man in 
 the street. 
 
 It may be said of Mr. Balfour that he has a mind 
 which moves automatically. An incessant activity 
 is its normal natural state. He is always ready. 
 He said once of himself that when he went down to 
 the House neither expecting nor prepared to take 
 part in a debate, he made his best speeches. Partly, 
 no doubt, because no subject is likely to come up in 
 Parliament which he has not long since studied ; 
 and partly because, whether in speaking or writing, 
 a man is apt to do his best under pressure. He must 
 speak, and he must not fall below his reputation, nor 
 below the occasion. If you want to know what kind 
 of stuff there is in a man, take him by surprise, said 
 Emerson. Whether taken by surprise or not, Mr. 
 Balfour alone among the men of to-day lifts debate 
 in the House to a higher level. Mr. Gladstone did 
 that, and so, while he was speaking, did Mr. Bright, 
 but both Mr. Gladstone and, in a less degree, Mr. 
 Balfour maintained this high level. The House 
 expects its members to conform, to take their note 
 from the general tone of the House. But Mr. Glad- 
 stone created the atmosphere in which he moved 
 and which the House breathed. You may still, 
 if you are there on a great night and Mr. Balfour is 
 up, see something of the same magical effect. 
 
 Perhaps he expects from others what he only 
 is capable of — the power of an instant response to
 
 58 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 a demand, of instant brain-work at full speed ahead. 
 I will venture on one illustration. It was after dinner 
 at Wynyard Park, the house filled with people, most 
 of them celebrities. I was standing with Mr. Balfour, 
 British fashion, on the hearthrug before a lighted 
 fire. He had heard I meant to write a book, a com- 
 parative study of English and American politics, and 
 other matters, and asked some questions. Presently 
 he said : 
 
 " Well, you have had great opportunities. You 
 ought to write such a book. Have you begun it ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Then go upstairs now and write the first chapter." 
 
 Alas ! it was a counsel of perfection. It was what 
 he himself would have done. But Lady Londonderry 
 presented herself at that moment and required us 
 to make up a bridge table, and I did not write my 
 first chapter that night ; nor have I written it since. 
 
 Whether from his philosophical studies or other- 
 wise, he has mastered and applied the doctrine which 
 Taine said was the result and root of all philosophy : 
 " Take things as they come." Many years ago there 
 was a story that he was ruined. Perhaps he used that 
 ominous word himself ; at any rate, he did say : 
 
 " They tell me I am ruined. It may be so, but 
 I do not find that it makes any difference in my 
 life. I still have all that I ever cared for ; all that 
 I need for the convenience and comfort of existence. 
 Nay, I still have my friends. How can I be ruined ? " 
 
 And in truth he was not ruined. It is not our 
 business, but I believe the story grew out of a large 
 purchase of land adjoining the Whittingehame estate, 
 just before the drop came in land values, and this 
 new property did not at once seem a good invest- 
 ment.
 
 MR. BALFOUR 59 
 
 For whatever reason, he was long known as Prince 
 Arthur. Mr. Lucy, now Sir Henry Lucy, perhaps 
 gave him that name ; at any rate, he used it weekly 
 in his sparkling " Essence of Parliament " in Punch. 
 It was supposed to give offence in certain quarters, 
 but there was, and is, in him and in his bearing, 
 and in his remoteness from all that is ordinary or 
 merely conventional, something that may as well 
 be called princely as anything else. 
 
 I do not try to draw a picture of Mr. Balfour. 
 His face, I presume, is familiar to Americans through 
 the photographs which now daily adorn the Press. 
 But I have never seen a photograph of him which 
 fully renders the benignity of his expression. Still 
 less can any photograph reproduce for us the luminous 
 beauty of his eyes. In repose the beauty of them is 
 almost feminine. When he is on his feet in the 
 House this softness or sweetness disappears ; the eyes 
 flash and burn ; the fire in them is deep, and in anger 
 or in a high mood their gentleness turns to strength, 
 sometimes to passion. The voice is melodious when 
 not strained, and has varied modulations. What 
 we in America humorously call the English accent 
 is not to be expected from a Scot, yet neither has he 
 the method of speech that prevails beyond the 
 Border. If the features are not commanding, the 
 whole figure of the man is instinct with dignity, 
 and on a platform he dominates when he does not 
 care to coax. Not much gesture. In caricatures 
 you mostly see him with his hands on the lapels of 
 his coat ; which is hardly a gesture, nor does he seem 
 to have studied the art of delivery as it is understood 
 on the stage. 
 
 What does all that matter ? He is an orator. 
 Perhaps he and Lord Rosebcry are the last of the
 
 6o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 orators, and both are debaters of resource. If we 
 put Lord Rosebery first as orator, Mr. Balfour is 
 unmatched in debate. He learnt in the best school, 
 indeed the only school in England, the House of 
 Commons, which Lord Rosebery, to his lasting regret, 
 never had an opportunity to enter. A parallel be- 
 tween these two might be drawn to cover many 
 other points of likeness and of unlikeness, but there 
 is no room, and no Plutarch to do it. Of Mr. Balfour 
 by himself there is still much to say, and this, at any 
 rate, must be said, that whatever the imperfections 
 of his leadership or the untimeliness of his resignation, 
 no man ever doubted the singleness or sincerity of 
 his devotion to public duty. It has carried him far 
 from the flower-strewn fields in which he would have 
 liked best to wander, and there is in his whole career 
 an unselfish sacrifice of his tastes and preferences to 
 the demands not of Parliament only, but of Empire.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT— DOMESTIC AND 
 POLITICAL RECOLLECTIONS 
 
 "lY^R. LEWIS HARCOURT'S long-delayed pro- 
 motion in Cabinet and political rank has come 
 at a critical moment.* But the first thing it recalls 
 is the memory of his father, Sir William Harcourt. 
 One cannot but think how Sir William would have 
 rejoiced in his son's success. Never, I should think, 
 had there been a more beautiful relation of father and 
 son than between these two. The affection of each 
 for the other was deep ; their devotion without stint 
 or limit. They were much more together than is 
 usual. The son was sent to Eton, but never to a 
 university. Upon his return from Eton he gave up 
 his life to his father ; became his private secretary ; 
 lived with him and for him. The father, in turn, 
 taught the boy politics, statesmanship, and the world. 
 There could have been no more competent master. 
 Said the father : 
 
 " I can never repay Lulu for what he has done. 
 He has done everything. He has sacrificed everything ; 
 at any rate, he has postponed his entrance into public 
 life till much later than he ought ; and adjourned 
 his chances for distinction. All this and much more 
 he has done that he might be of use to me." 
 
 This was said at Malwood in 1899. I had been 
 
 * December, 1910. 
 61
 
 62 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 asked to Malwood for a short visit. The day before I 
 was to have gone came a telegram putting me off 
 till the next week. When I arrived Sir William said : 
 
 " You have heard of Lulu's engagement, and you 
 can guess why we asked you to come later." 
 
 And after some other explanation came the sen- 
 tences above quoted. They show you the other side 
 of a man who has been thought in public a little 
 austere, peremptory, and masterful. The true Har- 
 court was kind-hearted and affectionate ; generous in 
 character, with a strong nature capable of being 
 strongly moved. 
 
 Five years before this he had been Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer in Mr. Gladstone's fourth and last 
 Ministry, and had brought in the Death Duties 
 Budget which had revolutionized English finance and 
 some other things. Mr. Lloyd George's Budget of 
 last year is but the logical and inevitable sequel of 
 Sir William Harcourt's in 1894. The day after this 
 exploit I met Sir William at lunch. He called to me 
 from the other end of the table : 
 
 " What do you think of my Budget ? " 
 
 " I think I had rather not tell you." 
 
 " Nonsense. Can't you say whether you think it 
 good or bad ? " 
 
 " Well, if you will have it, I think it a brigand's 
 Budget." 
 
 I suppose I ought not to have said it, but I thought 
 then, as I think now, that it was the dividing line 
 between the Old and the New. He had broken with 
 the traditions of the Treasury. He was taxing Capital 
 instead of Income. His new finance was political, and 
 something worse than political. He had adopted the 
 doctrine of ransom which Mr. Chamberlain had first 
 proclaimed and then renounced — that property must
 
 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 63 
 
 pay a ransom in return for the protection of the State. 
 He levied a fine upon the transmission of wealth from 
 father to son. He appealed to class jealousies and 
 hatreds. He invited the poor to transfer to the 
 shoulders of the rich a great burden of taxation. He 
 asked the working classes to understand that they in 
 future were to pay less than their share, and the rich 
 — whom Mr. Lloyd George now calls the idle rich — 
 to pay more than their share. At the bottom of it all 
 lay a motive of politics. He wanted the votes of 
 labour, skilled and unskilled, and believed they were 
 to be had in this way. And that is why I called it a 
 brigand's Budget. 
 
 The phrase seemed a little abrupt and there was a 
 slight pause. Then Sir William said : 
 
 " So that is what you think. Well, you may like 
 to know that both Sir Isaac Holden and Lord Roths- 
 child have been to see me this morning, and both 
 approve of my Budget." 
 
 As these were two of the richest men in England, 
 the retort told. What Sir Isaac Holden thought I 
 never knew, but I saw Lord Rothschild next day, and, 
 having Sir William's permission, told him what had 
 been said. He answered : 
 
 " Oh, no. Harcourt misunderstood me. I told him 
 there was one provision of his Budget, touching the 
 method of valuing and taxing certain properties after 
 death, which I approved. But I never said I approved 
 the Death Duties, for I do not." 
 
 Some years after that I was in Wiltshire, and this 
 question of Death Duties came up. Indeed, it is 
 always coming up. It never rests. It was said long 
 ago that revolutions never go backward. It happened 
 that three great properties lying close to each other 
 in Wiltshire had lately passed by death : Longleat,
 
 64 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 belonging to the Marquis of Bath ; Wilton, the Earl 
 of Pembroke's, and Longford, owned by the Earl of 
 Radnor. Lord Radnor had twenty-five thousand 
 acres, Lord Bath fifty-six thousand, and Lord Pem- 
 broke sixty thousand. They are all Conservatives. 
 I asked one of them what the effect of the Death 
 Duties had been. He gave a very deliberate answer : 
 
 " The effect has been to cripple the estate and its 
 present owner. I have had to dismiss a large number 
 of gardeners, gamekeepers, labourers, and others 
 employed in one way or another on the estate. I have 
 had to cut down my subscriptions to charities. I have 
 had to reduce the amount of my tradesmen's bills. I 
 have retrenched in every possible way to make two 
 ends meet, and they don't meet. If I hadn't property 
 elsewhere I could not keep this house open. 
 
 " If you will ask the men whom you meet as you 
 walk about, gardeners, hedgers, ditchers, all kinds of 
 agricultural hands, carpenters, blacksmiths, no matter 
 who, you will soon find what they think of the Death 
 Duties. They have all found out that though I pay 
 the duties in the first instance the cost and burden of 
 them fall in a measure on all those who are in any way 
 dependent on me. If you will put the same questions 
 on the other two estates about which you know, you 
 will be told the same thing." 
 
 In other words, Sir William Harcourt's expectation 
 that the Death Duties would bring in a political profit 
 to the party which levied them has been, in these 
 three capital instances, disappointed. The political 
 result is startling. Wiltshire, formerly divided, sent 
 to the present House of Commons an unbroken dele- 
 gation of Unionists and Conservatives ; or perhaps 
 broken by one. 
 
 It is the more remarkable because the Conservatives
 
 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 65 
 
 never took up the challenge Sir William threw down. 
 Mr. Balfour, then leader of the Opposition, speaking 
 the same night, guarded himself against the supposition 
 that he opposed Death Duties in principle. On him 
 as well as on his Liberal opponents lay the party obliga- 
 tion to appeal, in one way or another, to the majority 
 of the electorate. He has never proposed to repeal 
 them. It would not have been necessary to repeal 
 them, for the Budget is a yearly measure, and when the 
 Conservatives came into power, in 1895, they had only 
 to refrain from re-enacting these duties and they 
 were dead. But the Death Duties formed part of 
 every Conservative Budget while the Conservatives 
 were in power, as well as of every Liberal Budget 
 while the Liberals were in power. They have come 
 to stay. Neither party dares drop them. It is a rule 
 or tradition that a duty once imposed remains ; or 
 remains so long as there is need of the money it pro- 
 duces. The lesson of Wiltshire is lost upon Liberals 
 and Conservatives alike. 
 
 There were days — I mean from 1894 onward — 
 when the Liberal Party was torn with the dissensions 
 between Sir William and Lord Rosebery. I am not 
 going into that unhappy dispute except so far as to 
 say that Sir William thought himself entitled by 
 length of service and ability to be Prime Minister. 
 So he was, but not by the following he had attached 
 to himself. If the Queen had asked Sir William in 
 1 894 to be Prime Minister there is no reason to suppose 
 he could have formed a Government. Yet he was so 
 powerful in the House of Commons, which he led, 
 that it rested with him to give Lord Rosebery an 
 efficient support ; or to withhold it. Lord Rose- 
 bery's friends thought this efficient support inefficient ; 
 thought it grudgingly given ; and there grew up
 
 66 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 between the two men an estrangement of which the 
 consequences were injurious and even disastrous to the 
 party. It was visible in private as well as in public. 
 Years after, in 1899, I was at Dalmeny, and the day I 
 left one of the younger members of the household 
 asked me : 
 
 " Where are you going from here ? " 
 
 " To Malwood." 
 
 With the grave ironical humour characteristic of 
 the speaker came the answer : 
 
 " I call it indecent." 
 
 But Malwood was a very pleasant place to go to. 
 Not a great property. Sir William had bought ten 
 or twelve acres in the New Forest and had built 
 himself a good and interesting house, and there was 
 content to live. It was much later that he came un- 
 expectedly, by the death of the direct heir, into 
 Nuneham, a fine estate near Oxford. At Malwood 
 everything but the trees and the soil and the heavens 
 above was new. He was not often suspected of senti- 
 ment by those who knew him as a Parliamentary 
 gladiator ; matching himself from time to time 
 against Disraeli and against Gladstone, and coming out 
 of these encounters, whether victorious or beaten, 
 with honour. He was ever a fighter. But he had a 
 warm heart for his friends, and there was a Garden 
 of Friends near the house, in which each plant or 
 shrub had been given by a friend, and served as a 
 memento, an inscription on each. A pleasant notion, 
 with perhaps an Elizabethan air, and pleasantly 
 carried out. 
 
 There were giants in those days, and Sir William 
 Harcourt was one of them. A giant in stature and 
 physical bulk, the head powerful, and carried high, 
 perhaps haughtily ; the features carved with an
 
 SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT 67 
 
 heroic touch. He was a force ; not in Parliament 
 only, but in the world, in the service of the law, and 
 even in journalism. I believe his real ambition was 
 to be Lord High Chancellor. If there was any ques- 
 tion of his knowledge of the law, that would not have 
 stood in his way. He certainly knew as much law as 
 Lord Brougham, of whom Lord Lyndhurst said that 
 if he only knew a little law he would know a little of 
 everything. Sir William was, in truth, a jurist ; and 
 to be a jurist is more than to be a lawyer. He had a 
 mind saturated with the principles of jurisprudence. 
 
 He had been at the Parliamentary Bar and gave 
 up an income of ^12,000 a year to go into politics. 
 On the Woolsack he might, at a pinch, have done as 
 Disraeli sometimes did when he came late and un- 
 prepared into a debate which he had to close — pick 
 up the facts from the speeches. But Sir William would 
 soon have mastered anything to which he gave his 
 mind ; as he did finance when he became Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer. There was no more adroit debater ; 
 none more dangerous. And, on the whole, there was 
 no figure in the public life of his time, Disraeli and 
 Gladstone excepted, which more attracted the eyes 
 of men than his. They said, or perhaps he said, that 
 Plantagenet blood ran in his veins. I know not, but 
 there was in him beyond dispute the kingly spirit of 
 that great line of Kings.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 LORD ROSEBERY— A PERSONAL VIEW OF AN 
 ENGLISH STATESMAN 
 
 TN what I have written before now concerning 
 Lord Roseber)^ I have written with reserve ; nor 
 can I now depart from that reserve. But I suppose I 
 may say, in explanation of what I write and do not 
 write, that my obhgations to him are of longer standing 
 and are greater than to any other Englishman. I owed 
 to him my acquaintance with Mr. Gladstone and the 
 many days spent in the great Minister's company in 
 London, at the Durdans, at Mentmore, at Dalmeny 
 House, and elsewhere. I owe to him many other 
 relations with other men and a great deal else of what 
 has been most delightful in all the years I have spent 
 in England. These kindnesses cover a period of more 
 than thirty years. When at the Durdans some months 
 ago I looked in the visitors' book for the date of my 
 first visit. It was in 1880 and that was not the be- 
 ginning. 
 
 I forget whether I have ever said how I first came 
 to know Lord Rosebery. It does not much matter 
 Vv'hether I have told the story or not, for if I have for- 
 gotten, whom it most concerns, nobody else will 
 remember. It is, at any rate, an illustration of the 
 easy way in which such things are done here, and 
 would not be so easily or often done in New York. 
 
 It was Mr. Frank Lawley to whom I owe my intro- 
 duction to Lord Rosebery. Mr. Lawley had been 
 
 68
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 69 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's private secretary, had been much on 
 the Turf, of which he had a great knowledge, had a 
 good position by birth, and was a leader writer on 
 The Daily Telegraph. His acquaintance was a large 
 one and I imagine he had had Turf relations of some 
 sort with Lord Rosebery, about whom there was ever 
 a group of men who found means to be serviceable 
 to him. Frank Lawley, in any case, was a man of the 
 world, and knew the ways of this English world, 
 which, it is ever to be borne in mind, take a great 
 deal of knowing. He had a real kindness of nature and 
 was always ready to do a good turn to any one whom 
 he liked. We had only a casual acquaintance and 
 hardly an interest or idea in common, but he was 
 none the less ready to put his gifts of good nature at 
 my disposal. As we were talking one day, Lord Rose- 
 bery's name was mentioned and Lawley said : 
 
 " Of course you know Rosebery ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " But you don't take the pains about such matters 
 you should. Rosebery is becoming every day a greater 
 figure, and, in your position as journalist, more im- 
 portant to you. You ought to know him. I will see 
 what I can arrange." 
 
 The next day came a note from Lawley : 
 
 " I am commissioned by Lord Rosebery to say that 
 he hopes, if you have nothing better to do, you will 
 dine with him to-morrow night at 8.30. Mind you 
 do." 
 
 That was all — not a word from Lord Rosebery 
 himself, except this message through Lawley. What 
 Lawley had told him I never knew. Lord Rosebery 
 lived at that time — it was in 1878 — at No. 107 
 Piccadilly, the house which had formerly belonged 
 to Baron Meyer de Rothschild, and had descended
 
 70 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to his daughter Hannah, whom Lord Rosebery had 
 married in that year. It was afterwards sold to the 
 Savile Club, and by that unusual club is still occupied. 
 A house very like many others in that part of London, 
 with an outlook across Piccadilly upon Green Park ; 
 an enchanting piece of landscape in the heart of the 
 West End of London. Baron Meyer seems to have 
 found the house ample for his tastes. It was not till 
 he built Mentmore, in 1851, that his aptitude for 
 great splendour became evident, and for a great estate 
 in the country, in the loveliest part of Buckingham- 
 shire. 
 
 Mr. Lawley was to have been at this dinner, but 
 had been called away, and of the three persons pre- 
 sent there was not one I had ever seen before. Lord 
 Rosebery's greeting was that of a host ; cordial and 
 open and unceremonious, ceremony being a thing 
 which the English prefer to reserve for great occasions. 
 A host and his guest cannot be strangers, and a dinner 
 of four can hardly be ceremonious ; or would be very 
 stiff if it were. But a small dinner, where the talk 
 necessarily includes everybody, is either a great success 
 or a great failure. It was not the latter. Lord Rose- 
 bery's conversational gifts are, on the whole, unrivalled. 
 They were not then, perhaps, quite what they became 
 later, but they were of a kind rare in all countries and 
 in England unique. His talk had, as he himself had, 
 both charm and authority, which is not a usual com- 
 bination. His range was very wide, his tact unfailing, 
 his touch electric, with the result, naturally, that you 
 sometimes got a slight shock, just perceptible amid the 
 sparkle, which also is electric. I am suggesting, no 
 doubt, the impressions of many later conversations 
 as well as of this first. 
 
 For I have seen Lord Rosebery on many critical
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 71 
 
 occasions, public and private. The way in which a 
 man takes victory or defeat is in this country thought 
 a good test of character, and perhaps the ordeal is 
 as severe on the Turf as anywhere in this country. 
 Well, I have seen him win and lose races, and no man 
 could tell from his face whether he was winning 
 or losing. I have seen him on the platform with 
 somewhere from five to fifteen thousand people cheer- 
 ing themselves into apoplexies, and again in the streets 
 of Edinburgh, his carriage surrounded by a howling 
 mob of admirers. These are the occasions on which 
 he looks bored. He can, when he chooses, discharge 
 his face of all expression, and has sufficient control 
 over his muscles, and even over the eyes, to leave the 
 whole visage a blank. But he does not always choose. 
 
 In the critical year of his Premiership he was per- 
 haps tried higher than ever before. He was a Liberal 
 and his most dangerous enemy was the Liberal leader 
 of the House of Commons. His best friends were in 
 positions where they could give him little help in 
 the business of managing the party. He had to en- 
 dure secret hostility in matters of policy and to pro- 
 mote policies which he did not think the best. He 
 used to say that as Prime A^inister he had nothing to 
 do. That is always true in a departmental sense when 
 the Prime Minister is only First Lord of the Treasury, 
 or, as Lord Rosebery was. Lord President of the 
 Council. In his case it was true because he was not 
 master in his own party, nor even in his own Cabinet. 
 It was, in fact, not his own, but an inherited Cabinet. 
 Disappointed ambitions confronted him and under- 
 mined his position. The public misunderstood him. 
 
 I should think no Englishman in a great position 
 had been more often or more generally misunderstood. 
 He is a Scotchman — that may be one reason, but the
 
 72 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 chief reason is that his mind has something of the 
 subtle flexibility of the Italian, which to the English 
 is a puzzle. Most of the great Italians have been 
 diplomatists and Lord Rosebery's mind is essentially 
 the mind of the diplomatist. Those to whose wishes 
 he will not bend say he is infirm of purpose. That 
 he is not. Witness the grave crises in which he used 
 the British fleet as Palmerston would have used it. 
 Sometimes, it is true, he went on refining like Burke, 
 or like Goldsmith's Burke, not while the House 
 thought of dining, but while the country thought 
 only of giving a plain answer to a plain question, if 
 he would but put it plainly. He liked to weigh evi- 
 dence instead of yielding to an overmastering impulse, 
 which is in politics so often the wisest thing to do. 
 He has a respect for logic which the English people 
 do not share with him. Great movements of public 
 opinion or emotion sometimes pass him by. 
 
 A recent illustration is as good as any other. In 
 the suspended conflict between Lords and Commons 
 he came out one morning in The Times with an ap- 
 peal to Conservatives to drop Tariff Reform and fight 
 the coming election on the Constitutional question 
 only. He made no allowance for the fact that after 
 years of struggle the Tariff Reformers had captured 
 the Conservative organisation, imposed their will on 
 the Conservative Party, and left the Conservative 
 Free Traders a beaten and helpless minority. What he 
 asked, therefore, was that the triumphant majority 
 should surrender to this helpless minority. Was it 
 in human nature to do that ? His appeal passed un- 
 regarded. 
 
 Lord Rosebery's enemies — I mean political enemies 
 — call him an Opportunist, as Gambetta's enemies 
 called Gambetta, who forthwith accepted and adopted
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 73 
 
 the name, defined it for himself, and welcomed it as 
 a eulogy. But the true criticism on Lord Rosebery 
 is that he is not an Opportunist. The ideal policy or 
 the logical conclusion presents itself to him as inevit- 
 able. It is an intellectual idol, or perhaps image, 
 and he worships the image which is, like that of most 
 idolaters, of his own creation. Then he cannot 
 compromise. He goes to the stake for it. He re- 
 nounces power sooner than betray his own belief, 
 and he and his party fall together. It is a very noble 
 trait, but it is not exactly politics. 
 
 What would have happened if the Queen had 
 asked Mr. Gladstone, on his retirement in 1894, to 
 say whom he recommended as his successor, and if 
 Mr. Gladstone had named, as Lord Morley says he 
 would have named. Lord Spencer, and if Lord 
 Spencer had accepted ? It might well enough have 
 altered the course of English politics. It certainly 
 would have improved Lord Rosebery's position. That 
 Lord Rosebery did not then wish to be Prime Minister 
 is well known. It is known that he twice refused the 
 office, and in the end accepted it only upon the 
 Queen's urgency. It might be said that the Queen 
 made a personal matter of it. The Radicals may say 
 what they will, but the influence and even the au- 
 thority of the Queen were in those last years of her 
 life very great. 
 
 If Mr. Gladstone had been asked what he thought 
 about it, and how often, in matters in which he as 
 Prime Minister was concerned, the Queen's ascendancy 
 had been successfully asserted, his answer would have 
 covered a great deal of ground. And if Mr. Gladstone, 
 with all the accumulated authority of his unrivalled 
 experience, and all his force of character, and all his 
 popularity, could not always stand up against the
 
 74 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Queen, how could it be expected that a much younger 
 man could refuse to obey her ? The Queen had, in 
 fact, taken a strong step when she neglected to ask 
 Mr. Gladstone's advice as to his successor. Her 
 Majesty was within her right in not asking, but was 
 outside the accepted custom and usage. All the more, 
 having taken upon herself the responsibility which 
 she might have divided with her great Minister, was 
 she bound to carry out her scheme, and, if I may 
 say so, force upon Lord Rosebery the office he had 
 the best of reasons for wishing to decline. And she 
 did. 
 
 I take it one chief reason for the Queen's peremp- 
 tory choice of Lord Rosebery was her opinion of his 
 capacity as Foreign Minister. He had been Secretary 
 of State for Foreign Affairs under Mr. Gladstone in 
 1886, and again under Mr. Gladstone from 1892 to 
 1894, and held that post when Mr, Gladstone resigned 
 office. " Under Mr. Gladstone," but under him in 
 name only. For it is known that Lord Rosebery, 
 certainly in 1892 and perhaps also in 1886, had taken 
 office upon condition that he was to have a free hand. 
 Mr. Gladstone's conceptions and methods of foreign 
 policy were not Lord Rosebery's. They were not 
 those which had made England, from Cromwell's 
 time with brief intervals down to the present day, a 
 great Continental Power. They were not Chatham's. 
 They were not Pitt's. They were not Palmerston's. 
 They had, in fact, brought the prestige and authority 
 of England upon the Continent lower than they had 
 stood since Charles II. For conceptions and methods 
 which had had that result Lord Rosebery did not pro- 
 pose to make himself responsible. He was perfectly 
 loyal to Mr. Gladstone, but he made it clear to his 
 great chief that he believed — which his chief did not
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 75 
 
 — in the continuity of English foreign poUcy, and that 
 he did not intend to depart from the lines Lord Salis- 
 bury had laid down. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone held views upon Cabinet-making 
 which were not easily reconciled with these claims 
 of independence. On one memorable occasion he 
 had said to an eminent but much younger man whom 
 he desired as a colleague, but in a post to which the 
 eminent much younger man preferred another, that 
 he must be master in his own Cabinet. 
 
 But Mr. Gladstone in 1892 had hardly a choice. 
 By the voice of the Liberal Party and by public opinion 
 Lord Rosebery was designated Foreign Minister, and 
 there was no real competitor. Sir Edward Grey had 
 not then reached his present position. He was, more- 
 over. Lord Rosebery's friend and supporter. The 
 retirement of Lord Salisbury was a momentous occa- 
 sion. Since the death of Prince Bismarck Lord Salis- 
 bury had stood alone. There remained no European 
 statesman or diplomatist whose reputation and au- 
 thority abroad were comparable to Lord Salisbury's. 
 Among English Ministers Lord Rosebery stood next 
 to Lord Salisbury, and to pass him over or to put 
 him in leading strings, or to let it be known that 
 though he held the seals Mr. Gladstone was to mould 
 and direct the foreign policy of Great Britain, would 
 have been to notify all Europe that Great Britain had 
 again, as under Lord Granville, become a negligible 
 quantity in the affairs of the Continent. 
 
 I do not suggest that as an argument which would 
 have force, or did have any force, with Mr. Gladstone. 
 In foreign policy, as in all other policies, he believed 
 in himself. To the last, he thought himself right in 
 denouncing the Bulgarian massacres, in opposing the 
 Congress of Berlin, in preaching an Armenian crusade,
 
 76 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 in desiring to withdraw from Egypt, in surrendering 
 after Majuba Hill the territory claimed by Kriiger, in 
 opposing the purchase of the Suez Canal shares, and 
 so on. He took domestic views of foreign policy, and 
 continued to take them to the last. And it was because 
 he took domestic views that he reluctantly consented 
 to leave to Lord Rosebery, as Foreign Minister, the 
 conduct of foreign affairs. He found he could not 
 have Lord Rosebery on any other terms, and in 1892 a 
 Cabinet without Lord Rosebery as Foreign Minister 
 would have been, for purely domestic reasons, un- 
 thinkable. There was one view of foreign policy which 
 Mr. Gladstone well knew Lord Rosebery would never 
 take ; the emotional view ; and there was one view 
 which Mr. Gladstone himself, whether he knew it or 
 not, had never failed to take : the emotional view. 
 Anything like a compromise between two minds 
 thus constituted was obviously impossible. The one 
 or the other had to give way, and it was Mr. Glad- 
 stone who gave way. 
 
 It is among the little ironies of political life that a 
 man who had fought such a fight as this and won it, 
 and who made the fruits of victory his own and his 
 country's, should be supposed to be wanting in 
 resolution. During his tenure of the Foreign Office, 
 from 1892 to 1894, the voice of England was heard 
 with respect on the Continent ; the policy of England 
 was recognized as a consistent policy ; firm, courageous, 
 unwavering. 
 
 " On the whole," said Lord Salisbury, " among all 
 qualities essential to a diplomatist patience is most 
 likely to be of permanent use." 
 
 He said it in the summer of 1896, apropos of the 
 Venezuela business, then drawing to its close. He 
 himself had shown all through the negotiations, be-
 
 LORD ROSEBERY 77 
 
 ginning in July, 1895, and ending in the autumn of 
 1896, both patience and firmness. 
 
 Lord Rosebery's diplomatic equipment is, in truth, 
 very like that of Lord Salisbury. He, too, has patience ; 
 and he has the firmness needful to get the true value 
 out of patience. He has another gift in which Lord 
 Salisbury was pre-eminent — the power of work. I 
 was with Lord Rosebery one night at Mentmore. 
 He sat in his room upstairs, inside a rampart of Foreign 
 Office dispatch boxes, three sides of a quadrilateral 
 and as high as his writing-table. As I left, about one 
 o'clock in the morning, I asked : 
 
 " When are you going through those ? " 
 
 " Now." 
 
 " But that may mean half the rest of the night." 
 
 " I can't tell how long they may take till I have 
 looked at them, but, long or short, they must be done 
 to-night. The only way to deal with F. O. business is 
 to start with a clean slate every morning." 
 
 I remembered having heard from a Foreign Office 
 clerk that Lord Granville used to leave his boxes un- 
 opened for three weeks at a time. And I remembered 
 having met Lord Granville on a Sunday morning in 
 the country, when he learned from a Sunday news- 
 paper arriving about eleven o'clock a piece of diplo- 
 matic intelligence of high importance which must 
 have been known in the Foreign Office in London the 
 day before. Well, yes, and I remembered having been 
 told in Berlin that high officials of that highly and 
 deservedly praised German bureaucracy thought them- 
 selves lucky if they got papers back from the Emperor 
 three weeks after they had been sent. 
 
 " Penal servitude for fourteen hours a day," was 
 Lord Rosebery's own description of his work at the 
 Foreign Office. The working-man who thinks eight
 
 78 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 hours a day too much might be asked what he thought 
 of fourteen as a measure for one of the leisured class. 
 But Lord Rosebery, whose name figures often and 
 high on the Turf and in Court ceremonies, and as 
 host and guest in London and in the country and 
 abroad, has nevertheless always been a worker. He 
 is, for all practical purposes, the greatest living 
 English master of that political and diplomatic history 
 without which a politician or a diplomatist can be 
 only an amateur. If he had not that, and much else, 
 including a knowledge of the world and of men, 
 sometimes cynical but always kindly, he would not be 
 what the great Queen called him, " a heaven-born 
 Foreign Minister."
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WOLSELEY 
 
 ** I ""O what is said about Lord Haldane, Minister 
 of War, I might add some remarks on the 
 present state of the British army, were that not 
 travelling too far afield. It may answer the purpose 
 if I give you a memory or two of General Wolseley 
 — I mean Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley, but I 
 knew him and all the world knew him so long as 
 General that this title still comes most readily to 
 one's lips or pen. I don't enter upon military con- 
 troversies, but since Lord Haldane is hailed — by one 
 set of politico-military critics — as the regenerator of 
 the British army, I will quote what a great authority 
 said to me : 
 
 " The British army has of late been a good deal 
 pulled about, and has had several doctors all honestly 
 trying to improve its constitution. Lord Cardwell, 
 Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Arnold Forster, Mr. Brodrick 
 (now Lord Midleton), and finally Lord Haldane, 
 tried their hands, each in his own way. Their failures 
 differed in kind and in degree, but they were all 
 failures — or, if Lord Haldane's scheme is not yet 
 a failure, you will see that, with all its ingenuity and 
 scope, it will not stand the test of time." 
 
 Then he went on : 
 
 " The one man to whom the army owes almost 
 all the efficiency it now has is Wolseley. It was 
 
 79
 
 8o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Wolseley who introduced short service, and short 
 service is the foundation of military usefulness. 
 He did it in the face of tremendous opposition, 
 with the Duke of Cambridge, then Commander-in- 
 Chief, at the head of the opposition. But nobody 
 now denies that it was a reform without which the 
 army would have decayed." 
 
 Side by side with that I print another quotation ; 
 this one from Field-Marshal Wolseley himself. But 
 first I ask you to remember that this great soldier 
 had served all over the world, beginning with the 
 Burmese War, in 1 852-^53 ; then in the Crimea, where 
 he was pretty well shot to pieces, and won his cap- 
 taincy at twenty ; then in India, at Lucknow ; then 
 China ; then the Red River Expedition in Canada ; 
 then the Gold Coast, in command during the Ashantee 
 Campaign ; then Egypt, in 1882, crushing the Arabi 
 Rebellion ; then, two years later, at the head of the 
 Gordon Relief Expedition, which would have ended 
 in success instead of defeat had his advice been taken 
 before it started ; then Commander of the Forces 
 in Ireland, and so on. During all this time he rose 
 steadily in rank and in renown. He was thanked 
 by Parliament three times, was raised to the peerage, 
 and later made a viscount. Promotion followed 
 promotion ; he was Quartermaster-General of the 
 Forces as early as 1880, then Adjutant-General and 
 chief executive officer of the army, 1882-85 J ^^*^ 
 again 1885-90; finally Field-Marshal in 1894; and 
 Commander-in-Chief of the army, 1 895-1900. That 
 is a mere skeleton of his career, but it will serve as 
 the preface I want for my quotation. When the Boer 
 War broke out, the command was not offered to 
 Wolseley, nor was it till Lord Roberts entered the 
 field that the record of British defeats, cheered by
 
 FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WOLSELEY 8 1 
 
 the Irish Nationalists in ParHament, came to an end. 
 I met Lord Wolseley during one of those gloomy 
 periods, and to ray " How are you ? " he answered : 
 
 " Thanks. I am very well, and I spend my time 
 trying to forget that I have ever been a soldier." 
 
 Did you ever hear a more pathetic speech ? He 
 was then but sixty-five. He knew himself still capable 
 of command. He knew why he had been passed over. 
 He had to look on while the War Office at home 
 and the generals in the field vied with each other 
 in colossal blunders, and while, as Lord Rosebery 
 said, the fortunes of the whole British Empire hung 
 in the balance. He knew South Africa. He had 
 powers of organizing and powers of fighting which 
 had never failed him. But the War Office, which 
 had pigeon-holed General Sir William Butler's re- 
 ports warning his chiefs of what was coming ; which 
 sent Sir Redvers Buller to the front, on whom " disaster 
 followed fast and followed faster " ; which starved 
 the services and thought forty thousand men could 
 do the work for which a quarter of a million proved 
 to be none too many ; — the War Office, of which 
 first Lord Lansdowne, 1 898-1900, and then Mr. St. 
 John Brodrick, 1900-3, were the responsible Ministers, 
 had no use for such a soldier — a tried, victorious 
 soldier — as Wolseley. Their mistake cost England 
 dear ; and it cost her best captain what remained to 
 him of happiness in life. He was put on the shelf, 
 and left there. 
 
 It is now many years since I have seen Lord Wolseley. 
 The pleasant house in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, 
 is pleasant for other reasons, if it be pleasant. He 
 and Lady Wolseley are among the privileged inhabit- 
 ants of Hampton Court Palace. I hear he has aged ; 
 perhaps has never recovered from the shock and 
 
 G
 
 82 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 disappointment and the many sorrows, public and 
 personal, of the Boer War. The years — there are 
 seventy-eight of them — ^have dealt gently with him, 
 but there is nobody on whom they do not leave a 
 mark ; they and wounds and privation and fatigue 
 and great responsibilities greatly borne. But down to 
 a recent period the vigour of his mind had not been 
 impaired. 
 
 I write with a photograph before me which Lord 
 Wolseley gave me in 1895, signed and dated. The 
 signature, " Wolseley," is strong and firm ; each 
 letter clear-cut almost as if with a sword ; and it 
 is certainly the slash of a sabre which finishes off the 
 " 5." The great soldier is in a Field-Marshal's uniform. 
 He wears the ribbon and Grand Cross of the Bath, 
 the Grand Cross of St. Michael and St. George, 
 the Star of St. Patrick, nine military medals, each 
 a souvenir of great services in the field ; and more 
 clasps than I can count. The signature and date are 
 scored across the ribbon. 
 
 None of these decorations would you notice till 
 you had looked at the face, which is rather more 
 than three-quarters front. The strength of it is well 
 rendered in the photograph, and its one weakness — 
 a retreating chin — is altogether hidden. I don't 
 know whether this riddle was ever presented to the 
 physiognomists to read, nor how it happened that a 
 man whose whole life is a record of unshaken purpose 
 and invincible courage should have had the lower 
 part of his face so moulded as to denote irresolution. 
 But there it is. All the rest is as fine as you could wish, 
 every feature chiselled ; the forehead broad and full ; 
 the poise of the head such as comes from long leader- 
 ship of men. What the photograph cannot give is 
 the light in the eyes ; or in one of them, since the
 
 FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WOLSELEY 83 
 
 other — and it's not easy to tell which — is artificial. 
 But the one the bullets left him is filled with blue 
 fire ; which grows deeper as he talks. 
 
 Clear as are my remembrances of Lord Wolseley, 
 I despair of making clear to others the vividness of 
 his talk, still more any clear notion of the man him- 
 self. But I will quote a sentence or two from an 
 old letter : 
 
 " It is because he has something to say on so many 
 matters, and this perfect fearlessness in saying it, 
 that his conversation is successful. There is an alert 
 energy in his manner which seems fitting to a warrior 
 on the war-path ; his store of anecdote and reminis- 
 cence is vast, his convictions are free from any taint 
 of uncertainty, and he agrees with Lord Beaconsfield 
 in regarding invective as an ornament of debate." 
 
 But his invective was, after all, good-natured. 
 I never heard from him a vindictive word. He was 
 no more vindictive than a judge on the bench sen- 
 tencing a criminal is vindictive ; though the criminal 
 may think he is. But Wolseley was never the man to 
 suppress an opinion because it might not be the 
 opinion of others. He was outspoken in all companies, 
 and quite willing that others should be equally out- 
 spoken. There is a courage of the drawing-room 
 as of the battlefield, and that also Lord Wolseley had. 
 With it went a cheerfulness which was equally part 
 of his nature : and was the cause of cheerfulness in 
 others. His presence and his talk were alike inspiriting. 
 In that slight shattered body dwelt an invincible 
 force ; a happy temperament and a power of en- 
 durance no trial had ever shaken, nor any stress of 
 circumstance impaired. I once asked him what was 
 the worst climate he had ever known. He thought, 
 and answered :
 
 84 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " The only place I can recollect where I ever woke 
 in the morning not feeling perfectly fit was Suakim." 
 
 It was part of the heroism of his nature to accept 
 things as they came : bullets, fever, and the rest. 
 He was a soldier, and they were in the day's work. 
 He was a born leader of men, and men follow a man 
 who will lead them to their death and his ; and him 
 only do they follow. Into the rush of battle and of 
 life, in age and youth alike, pectoris fervor misit 
 jurentem. 
 
 Writing twenty years ago, when some people were 
 alive who are now dead, I said that Lord Wolseley 
 had been known to send a letter from the Nile to a 
 schoolgirl, in which the burden of just responsibility 
 for the delay in resolving on the Gordon Relief Ex- 
 pedition was laid squarely on the shoulders where it 
 belonged. Now I will add that the girl herself 
 showed me the letter. I said also that Lord Wolseley 
 had been known to repeat the same accusation on 
 his return home in a dozen different companies, 
 and to all comers, and with every circumstance of 
 publicity, as if he intended it to reach the ears of 
 him whom he thought guilty, as no doubt it did. 
 
 Yes, but this publicity was never of print. London 
 journalism was then, perhaps, more reticent, more 
 discreet, than it is to-day — at any rate. Lord Wolseley's 
 accusation never, so far as I know, found its way 
 into the papers. I myself was discreet because the 
 guilty person was then alive. But I have no need 
 to inquire of others, for I heard Lord Wolseley more 
 than once denounce the author of that dilatory 
 policy which in its result, though of course not in 
 its intention, left Gordon to be hacked in pieces 
 by Mahdist spears in betrayed Khartoum. It was 
 Mr. Gladstone, then Prime Minister and ever a
 
 FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WOLSELEY 85 
 
 lukewarm friend of Gordon, if not his enemy, who 
 held back the relief force during that summer of 
 1885, while the Nile was steadily falling and an over- 
 whelming savage force was besieging Khartoum. 
 
 " I tell you," said Lord Wolseley, " I put every 
 military argument before Mr. Gladstone. I pressed 
 upon him the urgent necessity of haste. I assured 
 him that though others had been discussed, there 
 was but one road to Khartoum, and that was the 
 Nile ; and that as the Nile fell the problem of trans- 
 porting troops and munitions and provisions by that 
 stream grew each day more difficult. I besought him 
 to act. He would not." 
 
 At another time the baffled General put his case 
 still more compactly. Mr. Gladstone, he said, 
 knew well that time was of the essence of the whole 
 matter. 
 
 " I was on my knees to Mr. Gladstone for months, 
 entreating him to let us go. He steadfastly refused." 
 
 And so Gordon's doom was sealed in Downing 
 Street. Lord Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, makes 
 a half-hearted attempt to put the blame, or some 
 of the blame, on Lord Hartington, then Minister 
 of War. He quotes a sentence from a letter of Mr. 
 Gladstone to Lord Granville, in 1888, saying : " I 
 don't think he [Hartington] ever came to any sharp 
 issue (like mine about Zobeir) ; rather that in the 
 main he got what he wanted." But that is the plea 
 of the accused in his own behalf. The answer is 
 simple. Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister and Lord 
 Hartington was not. Mr. Gladstone may have had 
 difficulties with his Cabinet as he did about Gordon's 
 request for Zobeir. But he was the most masterful 
 of First Ministers when he chose to be. The truth 
 is, Mr. Gladstone's heart was never in Egypt, and his
 
 86 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 sympathies with Gordon were ever sluggish. No 
 decision was taken till August 8, 1885. Later, Lord 
 Wolseley was appointed to command the expedition. 
 On September 9 he reached Cairo ; on October 5, 
 Wady Haifa. Not till then did the Nile Campaign 
 begin. Lord Wolseley's letter to Lord Hartington, 
 recommending immediate and active preparations 
 for an exclusively British expedition to Khartoum, 
 had been written and sent April 8. To that list of 
 facts and dates I do not care to add any comment. 
 
 On other great issues he spoke with the same free- 
 dom ; on Home Rule, for one. His conception of 
 his duty as a soldier did not lead him to silence when 
 he saw danger to his country. In a letter to the Duke 
 of Cambridge, written when Mr. Gladstone was 
 using his great powers for the break-up of the United 
 Kingdom, Lord Wolseley said : 
 
 " Home Rule will be the end of the English army." 
 The sentence is characteristic ; a deep meaning, 
 clear to him, expressed in a phrase likely to puzzle 
 those who had not looked at Home Rule with a 
 military eye. His belief was that English soldiers 
 would refuse to fire on Ulstermen whose crime was 
 loyalty to England. But, whatever their reason, an 
 army that mutinies is no longer an army. It is a 
 subject which an Irish soldier who has been Com- 
 mander of the Forces in Ireland may be supposed to 
 know something about.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL— THE BOY AND 
 
 THE MAN 
 
 TV/TOST people speak of him, or used to, as 
 Winston ; perhaps because he was, and still 
 is, being now in his thirty-eighth year, a youthful 
 prodigy. This ease of allusion may denote affection, 
 or may not. It was not from affection that the 
 English called Bonaparte " Boney." There were 
 mixed motives which underlay the re-christening 
 of the ex-President of the United States " Teddy," 
 to which European nations never accustomed them- 
 selves. Mr. Roosevelt, with his sure instinct for 
 popularity and what tends to promote it, seems to 
 have encouraged this familiarity. Mr. Gladstone 
 was spoken of, but never to, as " Mr. G." Nor was 
 " Dizzy " used to denote his great adversary except 
 in the third person. In the case of the First Lord 
 of the Admiralty, long before he attained to that 
 great dignity, it w^as partly a matter of convenience. 
 There were many Churchills and only one Winston, 
 unless you count the American novelist, whom you need 
 not count since he lives in a different hemisphere. 
 
 I knew this extraordinary man as a boy at the age 
 of ten. I was staying with Lord and Lady Randolph 
 at Great Forsters, a fine old Elizabethan mansion 
 near Egham, which they rented for two successive 
 summers. The boy Winston had, even at the age 
 
 87
 
 88 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 of ten, the same clear notion of what he wanted 
 and how to get it which has distinguished him ever 
 since. He wanted, one morning, to go boating on 
 the river. He invited his mother. Lady Randolph, 
 his younger brother Jack, and me to go with him. 
 He took command of the party, first on land and then 
 on the water. Nobody thought of disputing his 
 claim. I had lived enough in boats to see that Winston, 
 though with no great skill in watermanship, knew what 
 he was about, and though he ran some needless risks, 
 it was never necessary to interfere. The critical 
 moments were never dangerous, and we landed as 
 we had embarked, quite safely. I paid him the 
 compliment on his captaining that was his due, to 
 which he kindly answered, " But I see you know as 
 much as I do about rowing." 
 
 It was during this same visit that I gave Winston 
 a little present. It is the custom in England, and the 
 boy, with all his premature ambitions, was attractive. 
 For years after I never met him that he did not 
 renew his thanks. That is not the custom with the 
 English, whose genius is for repression and reserve. 
 It was perhaps the American half of him which ex- 
 pressed itself in this way. Nobody, I think, would 
 describe the American genius as one of repression 
 and reserve, nor did Miss Jerome when she married 
 an English husband cease to be an American with 
 more than the usual American exuberance of nature. 
 It was this clinging to her Americanism which was 
 one of the secrets of her popularity in England : and 
 among the best people in England. 
 
 Since those pleasant days at Great Forsters, in 
 1884 and 1885, I have met him in many companies 
 and circumstances, and it is only of what I have 
 seen — or almost only — that I shall have anything
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 89 
 
 to say. His career of military and quasi-military 
 service and adventure as soldier and correspondent 
 deserves a book to itself, and, indeed, he has written 
 more books than one, and very good books they are. 
 By the time he was twenty-six he had seen and shared 
 in some ten campaigns, in Cuba, in India, in Egypt, 
 and in South Africa. In all he was distinguished, 
 and he wears I know not how many military medals 
 and clasps. But I am not writing a biography, 
 and I refer to none of these adventures except his 
 escape from a Boer prison, and to that only in order 
 to say that having heard the statements on both sides, 
 including a full one from himself, I think his conduct 
 open to no reproach nor even criticism. Civil or 
 military, his life has been a battle, and most of his 
 battles have been victories. 
 
 When he came to America to lecture on the South 
 African War I met him at Government House, in 
 Ottawa. It was during Lord Minto's Governor- 
 Generalship, and Government House was then, 
 in much more than an official sense, the social centre 
 of the Dominion. Lady Minto carried all before her. 
 Winston's lecture tour had been organized by Major 
 Pond, then at the head of the lecture business in 
 America, a man with good qualities, but prone to 
 take a purely business view of matters which, after 
 all, depended on something besides good business 
 management for success. It was of common know- 
 ledge that between him and the lecturer there was 
 friction. Friends were called into council and the 
 strife was appeased, but there was one evening when 
 all Ottawa was crowding into the theatre, all unaware 
 of the doubt whether Mr. Churchill would appear. He 
 thought a point of honour involved, and that had to be 
 disposed of before he would consider anything else.
 
 90 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 In New York the Irish, whom in New York and 
 elsewhere we have always with us, were not disposed 
 to welcome Mr. Churchill as a lecturer, nor perhaps 
 even to allow him to be heard. They gathered in 
 some force in Carnegie Hall, not having Mr. Car- 
 negie's peace precepts in mind, bent on disturbance : 
 bent on silencing the Englishman who presumed to 
 take his country's side and tell his country's story 
 of a war which Mr. Patrick Ford disapproved. They 
 made no demonstration when Mr. Churchill appeared 
 on the platform. They kept quiet till he mentioned 
 the Boers, and at that name they broke into a storm 
 of applause. Mr. Churchill waited till it ended. 
 Then he said : 
 
 " Gentlemen, I am glad to hear those cheers. 
 You are quite right to cheer the Boers. They are 
 a brave people, and they deserve all the cheers you 
 can give them." 
 
 Then again the cheers broke forth, but this time 
 not for the Boers, but for Mr. Churchill. His tact, 
 his quickness in assuming that it was the courage of 
 the Boers, and not their politics, the Irish applauded, 
 won over the hostile minority, and the minority 
 merged in the majority. To the end there was no 
 further outbreak. Now that, I suppose, is the kind 
 of talent which serves a politician better than any 
 other. Mr. Churchill has shown it on a hundred 
 platforms since. In Carnegie Hall it was an inspiration, 
 but even an inspiration may improve by practice, 
 and there is now in England no politician who of late 
 years, and especially during the last two General 
 Elections, has spoken so often and always in every 
 speech with such fullness and freshness and effect 
 as Mr. Winston Churchill. He is supposed to be the 
 most unpopular Member of the Ministry or of the
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 91 
 
 Ministerial Party. Probably he is, but he is also the 
 most popular. Politics I eschew, but the man about 
 whom the leader of the Opposition and the Prime 
 Minister contend in the first great debate of a 
 serious Session of Parliament is not an ordinary 
 politician. Mr. Balfour pours ridicule on him for 
 his performances at the Sidney Street fight, where 
 " he was in the zone of fire — he and a photographer, 
 both risking valuable lives." To which Mr. Asquith, 
 who is understood to find now and then a difficulty 
 in reducing his colleague to order, replied : 
 
 " My right honourable friend, if he will forgive 
 me for saying so, suffers from the dangerous endow- 
 ment of an interesting personality." 
 
 Precisely, and that is why I write about him and 
 you, I hope, read about him. 
 
 With one other remark I will get clear away from 
 this zone of fire and from all proximity to immediate 
 controversies. I must presume that the Conservative 
 censures on him are heard beyond the Atlantic. 
 These censures are frequent and extremely bitter ; 
 even more bitter than those upon Mr. Lloyd George. 
 The reason for the extra bitterness is simple. Mr. 
 Lloyd George was from the beginning an unregenerate 
 Radical in whom all the natural and acquired vices of 
 Radicalism were fully developed at an early age. 
 Nothing, therefore, but Radicalism, in its most extreme 
 socialistic form, was ever expected of him. But Mr. 
 Churchill was born into the world a Conservative, 
 and a Conservative he remained till Mr. Balfour, 
 then Prime Minister, rejected his application for 
 Cabinet Office. Then he crossed the floor of the 
 House and has ever since acted with the Liberals, 
 who knew the value of their recruit and gave him 
 what Mr. Balfour had denied. That is what the
 
 92 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Conservatives tell you, and that is why their dislike 
 of Mr. Churchill is so extreme. It does not stop 
 short of something like social ostracism. Mr. 
 Churchill's social position is not unlike that of Lord 
 Spencer in 1886, when he followed Mr. Gladstone 
 into the Home Rule camp ; for Lord Spencer, though 
 he never passed from one party to the other, was 
 then regarded by the Unionists as having betrayed 
 the cause of the Union. None of these things do I 
 affirm or deny. I simply expound the English view 
 on one side and the other. 
 
 You will not understand Mr. Winston Churchill 
 unless you understand that the passion or the over- 
 mastering impulse and rule of his life is to be doing 
 something. His power of work is prodigious, almost 
 commensurate with his passion for it. Whether 
 he ever rests or ever sleeps I do not know. But I 
 have seen him pretty often in circumstances which 
 for most men would be a holiday, and for him were 
 none. Country-house life in England is supposed 
 to be a life of indolence, or of that energetic amuse- 
 ment by which the Englishman recruits his exhausted 
 energies. Not so with him. Dunrobin, where there 
 is sport of many kinds, may furnish an instance. 
 He was at that time writing that life of Lord Randolph 
 Churchill which, by common consent of the judicious 
 and of the general, is reckoned among the few great 
 biographies in English literature. He toiled at it 
 all the morning and part of the afternoon and, for 
 aught I know, at night also. His experience in journal- 
 ism had taught him to work at full speed at all times, 
 and in no matter what surroundings. Occasionally 
 he asked me to his bedroom to talk over some subject 
 I knew about. His bedroom had been turned into 
 a literary workshop, strewn with books and papers
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 93 
 
 and all the apparatus of the writer. He had brought 
 with him a tin box, some three feet square, divided 
 into closed compartments. This was his travelling 
 companion on journeys of pleasure. 
 
 Like his father, he wanted ample room for his 
 materials, and his hostess had provided him with 
 a large writing-table. This was covered with papers, 
 loose and in docketed bundles, but all in exact order 
 for ready reference. Now and then he gave me a 
 chapter to read. He did not want compliments, 
 but criticisms, or perhaps an opinion on a doubtful 
 point. Into this Life he was putting all that was 
 best in himself ; and in it shine forth qualities not 
 always conspicuous in his party speeches ; judgment, 
 broad viev^^s, patient accuracy, and a strict sense of 
 proportion ; which, perhaps, are not to be expected 
 in party speeches. If you queried a statement, he 
 always had a fact or a considered opinion to support 
 it. His task was the more delicate because Lord 
 Randolph and Winston had not always agreed on 
 matters which concerned them both ; nor did Winston 
 think his father's political course at the most critical 
 moment of his career judicious or even defensible, 
 as every reader of his book may see. But he was on 
 every point the most conscientious of biographers, 
 and, whatever view he may have taken of this or that 
 incident, his Life is a noble tribute to his father. 
 Lord Randolph's fame stands the higher for this book. 
 
 When we left Dunrobin we found that Winston 
 had reserved a compartment in the railway train 
 for himself and for his big tin case of papers. He 
 shut himself up there, and during that long journey 
 read and wrote and worked as if a Highland railway 
 train were the natural and convenient laboratory in 
 which literature of a high order was to be distilled.
 
 94 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 II 
 
 It might be said of Mr. Churchill, as the late Lord 
 Russell of Killowen said of Sir George Lewis, that 
 with all his gifts and capacities, the most remarkable 
 thing about him is his courage. It may be seen in 
 private and in public alike, in little things and in 
 great. He may not like the word, but he is a born 
 Nonconformist ; a label which, ecclesiastically and 
 socially, a Churchman may well decline to accept 
 as applicable to himself for any purpose. The 
 great body of Mr. Churchill's political supporters, 
 including the whole, or nearly the whole, of his 
 constituents in Dundee, are, if you consider the 
 Church of England only. Nonconformists. I assume 
 that their Member is not. I never heard that when 
 he changed his politics he changed also his religion 
 or his church, which many Englishmen would con- 
 sider the same thing. But, as I use the word neither 
 ecclesiastically nor socially, nor yet politically, it is 
 in fact descriptive of Mr. Churchill. 
 
 He is by nature and temperament a Dissenter. 
 His critical faculty is at least equal to his constructive 
 faculty. He likes standing alone, apostle of Democracy 
 though he be. He never forgets that his grandfather 
 was seventh Duke of Marlborough, and even when 
 he derides and abuses dukes in general, there is a 
 mental reservation in favour of the princely line of 
 Blenheim. On a platform his manner is one of 
 authority, and his appeal is not to the sympathies 
 but sometimes to the intelligence and very often to 
 the prejudices of his audience. He stands apart, 
 aloof, almost alone ; the blue blood flowing to his 
 finger-tips, or, if you like, to the tip of his sharp 
 tongue. He stirs impatience in friends and foes
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 95 
 
 alike. Often the most agreeable, he is sometimes 
 the most absorbed, abstracted, distrait of companions, 
 whether with women or men ; unwittingly disturbing 
 the sensibilities of the more delicate sex. You may- 
 hear a sentence now and then repeated which fell, 
 or is supposed to have fallen, from the lips of one 
 of the most gifted of beautiful beings ; a testimony 
 to his charm and a complaint of his carelessness in 
 matters which women think no man entitled to neglect. 
 
 More than once his political chief has rebuked 
 him for assuming functions or declaring policies 
 which only the Prime Minister has authority to 
 announce. It was supposed he meant to force Mr. 
 Asquith's hand. I rather imagine he had an irresistible 
 impulse to proclaim the gospel of the moment as it 
 presented itself to his own mind. Foreign Affairs, 
 Finance, the Rights of Labour, the policy of the 
 party — nothing comes amiss to Mr. Churchill. Critics 
 who thought his administration of the Home Office 
 irregular or fitful, or in violation of the fixed traditions 
 of that great department, have gone so far as to 
 suggest that his control over all that complicated 
 business would be more complete if he allowed his 
 colleagues to manage their own affairs. They insist 
 that, of all other things, he should suffer the Prime 
 Minister to be Prime Minister, and that Mr. Asquith, 
 under the friendly guidance of Mr. Redmond, should 
 direct the policy of the Government and the pro- 
 cedure of the House of Commons. 
 
 His courage might often be called audacity. Early 
 in life he took for his rule of life the tremendous 
 sentence of Danton. He did not need to have it 
 tattooed on his breast like a sailor, nor embroidered 
 on his under-vcst, as the Legionaries of Honour are 
 said to do in France when first this coveted yet too
 
 96 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 frequent distinction is given them. It was inwoven 
 with the fabric of his soul. His career sparkles with 
 audacities of many kinds. I have known him challenge 
 a dignitary of the Roman Church to a controversy 
 on ecclesiastical history, of which he knew little 
 and his adversary much. But Winston's expertness 
 in debate worsted and finally silenced the dignitary 
 of the Roman Church. 
 
 For other great personages he showed little of 
 that deference to which they were used. An amiable 
 familiarity of address suited him better than starched 
 civilities. " Excellency " or " Sir " in those days 
 seldom passed his lips ; an ambassador's surname, 
 or even an abridgment of it with " little " as a 
 prefix, served his purpose, even if it surprised 
 the Ambassador and the company. There is, I 
 suppose, nobody who sets greater store by the con- 
 secrated courtesies due to his great ofhce than a 
 diplomatist of high rank ; but if any offence was 
 taken it was not shown. In the presence of Royalty 
 itself Mr. Churchill's attitude was not always one of 
 restraint. 
 
 At Blenheim Mr. Winston Churchill has always 
 been at home, and always had a suite of rooms known 
 as his, and always reserved for him. His abandonment 
 of the Unionist Party did not, I believe, much affect 
 the friendship between himself and his cousin 
 the Duke of Marlborough, which had always been 
 close. The Duke is still a staunch Conservative, 
 and is likely to hold office in the next Conservative 
 Government, as he did in the last with much credit 
 to himself. He and his cousin were in Paris together 
 on a holiday not long before Mr. Churchill publicly 
 cast in his lot with the Radicals. A friend who met 
 the Duke alone one morning at the Ritz asked,
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 97 
 
 " Where is Winston ? " With a humorous demand 
 for the immediate damnation of his wayward cousin, 
 he answered, " Upstairs in his room, hard at work." 
 The splendours of Paris had no more power to draw him 
 from his desk than had the splendours of Dunrobin. 
 
 For a man who has fought his way to the top 
 so early in life, Mr. Churchill, as you see, has shown 
 little regard for conventions and little desire to 
 conciliate. In New York he met everybody, but he 
 would sit in the midst of the most delightful people, 
 absorbed in his own thoughts. He would not admire 
 the women he was expected to admire. They must 
 have not only beauty and intelligence, but the par- 
 ticular kind of beauty and intelligence which appealed 
 to him ; if otherwise, he knew how to be silent with- 
 out meaning to be rude. It is, of course, a consider- 
 able and a rather unusual social gift to be able to 
 disappoint the reasonable expectations of those about 
 you, yet offend nobody. It was useless to remonstrate 
 with him. He answered : " She is beautiful to you, but 
 not to me." Or sometimes in Mr. Sargent's familiar 
 retort when critics could not discover the likeness of 
 a noble yet unlovely portrait to the lovely original : 
 
 " I paint what I see. I cannot see her otherwise." 
 
 Mr. Churchill may or may not have the artist's 
 eye but he has his own ; and in that, and not in the 
 eyes of others, does he put his trust. It is the same in 
 matters of judgment. It is his own judgment that 
 he follows, and, right or wrong, that is the only 
 judgment that is worth anything to him. 
 
 Upon the social boycott (if there be one), of which 
 I wrote the other day, I will make one other remark. 
 Mr. Churchill married two or three years ago the 
 daughter of the late Colonel Sir Henry Hozier and 
 Lady Blanche Hozier, a girl whom London had 
 
 H
 
 98 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 greatly admired in her girlhood, and admired still 
 more in the fuller flowering of her beauty, her gifts 
 of mind, and her charm of character, after her mar- 
 riage. A society — any society — which thinks it de- 
 sirable for purely political reasons to deprive itself of 
 such an ornament is the chief loser by its intolerance. 
 
 There are times when the Cabinet Minister looks 
 the boy he was on the river issuing orders to his mother 
 and me. But he is, in fact, older than he was then. 
 Of the changes he has undergone one is more notice- 
 able than the rest ; or noticeable when you look for 
 differences. The skull has filled out under that 
 inward pressure from a brain which had to find 
 room somewhere. The arch of the forehead has a 
 more Roman shape ; more of the half circle and less 
 of the flatter breadth of earlier days. The blue eyes 
 have become the eyes of the thinker, and their depths 
 are such that the light in them seems to come from 
 far away. 
 
 Not long ago I sat opposite this new Winston 
 for some two hours at a small round table where 
 one other person completed the company. This 
 third person was an American of renown, with much 
 knowledge of the matter which just then happened 
 to interest us three and the rest of mankind, to use 
 once again a forgotten phrase of General-President 
 Zachary Taylor. The matter was Mr. Lloyd George's 
 Budget. Mr. Churchill and the American of renown 
 were both, in a sense, experts on this subject. They 
 had, at any rate, a knowledge of the facts and much 
 practice in the public and private discussion of them. 
 
 They discussed those amazing proposals of political 
 finance for two hours. As opponents they were well 
 matched, and neither of them made the least approach 
 toward converting or subverting the other. The sun
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 99 
 
 went down, or the electric light went out, on a drawn 
 battle. The methods of the two were as unlike as 
 their opinions. The American came into action 
 with all his forces and sent resounding volleys into 
 the enemy, who nevertheless was not swept off the 
 field. Much familiarity with the art of war had taught 
 Mr. Churchill the art of waiting, and when an opening 
 came his single bullet found its way home. 
 
 What interested me most, as I listened and looked 
 on at this combat, was Mr. Winston Churchill's 
 face and demeanour. The conflict did not excite 
 him. He might have been sitting in his library 
 with his six thousand volumes about him, and thinking 
 out a problem of statecraft or a party manoeuvre. 
 In the eyes was the glow, not of battle, but of re- 
 flection. He thought while his adversary talked, 
 and the processes of thought somehow expressed 
 themselves on the smooth expanse of brow. You 
 may stand sometimes on the upper engine deck of 
 a steamship, and watch through a sheet of plate glass 
 the pulsing of the machinery below. It was so here. 
 If you did not see you felt the working of a great 
 intellectual force. 
 
 The scene passed, indeed, as upon a stage. We 
 were dining at the Ritz, and the room was thronged 
 with well-known people. Mr. Balfour sat not far off, 
 a glance of inquiry coming our way at times ; possibly 
 wondering whether he might not better have given 
 his former follower the Cabinet offlce he wanted. 
 With a keener eye for the future and a surer guess at 
 the growth of this young man's capacity for politics, 
 who knows but the Unionist chief might have kept 
 the mutineer in his proper camp ? It was evident 
 enough to all these lookers-on that a duel was in 
 progress between Churchill and the American, known
 
 loo ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to many of them as Mr. Bourke Cockran, with a 
 great fame as a talker, in London not less than in 
 New York and in Washington and on Long Island. 
 There was no group in the room which so much at- 
 tracted men and women alike as this pair of athletes ; 
 themselves aware only of each other, and of the struggle 
 over the arid details of finance which they, like Mr. 
 Gladstone, knew how to make fascinating, even to 
 minds which cared not greatly for figures or fiscal 
 puzzles. Since then, night after night and twice or 
 three times a day during the last election, Mr. 
 Churchill has spoken on these dry matters to hard- 
 headed Lancashire audiences and captivated them all. 
 The Home Office was his reward, and in the Home 
 Office, as at the Board of Trade and throughout 
 his adventurous career, he kept the public guessing ; 
 and the question was for ever on all lips : " What will 
 he do next ? " 
 
 Presently the question answered itself. It was 
 thought advisable that Mr. McKenna should leave 
 the Admiralty, and so Mr. Churchill suddenly became 
 First Lord. Another surprise, or rather two sur- 
 prises ; the second being that the new First Lord, 
 though not known as a friend to an adequate Navy, 
 left his Radical or Little England prejudices behind 
 him at the door of the Admiralty, and within a few 
 weeks had reorganized, if not revolutionized, the 
 naval policy of the Government. He set himself to 
 restore the discipline and efficiency which under Mr. 
 McKenna had been impaired ; to restore the tone 
 of the Navy ; to create a War Staff ; and to put the 
 business of the Navy on a business basis. What he 
 will do on the other vital matter of building battle- 
 ships and cruisers and destroyers is not known as I 
 write ; nor does it depend wholly on him. But, if
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL loi 
 
 I understand Mr. Churchill, he is not the man to 
 put his hand to a great and patriotic work and with- 
 draw it before the work is done. 
 
 Moreover, there is reason to believe that his trans- 
 ference from the Home Office to the Admiralty was 
 less sudden than it seemed. Wise men in Whitehall 
 will tell you that for many months before he became 
 First Lord Mr. Churchill had been often a visitor 
 at the Admiralty, and that he had studied the or- 
 ganization and business of that great office. If he 
 did that, it certainly was not with a view to careless 
 administration when he took charge. His worst 
 enemies do not deny to him ambition, nor doubt 
 that to whatever station in public life he may be 
 called, he means in that station to achieve success. 
 To success sound administration is the only road, 
 and sound administration at the Admiralty means 
 a Navy equal to the work it has to do. 
 
 In Mr. George Peel's The Future of England, 
 lately published, a piece of concise thinking pic- 
 turesquely phrased, occurs a passage which Mr. 
 Churchill's Radical friends may read with profit. 
 Says Mr. Peel : 
 
 " In that danger zone where argument dies away 
 and only might flourishes, we have initiated the re- 
 organization of our armaments ; remembering that, 
 of all the gods and goddesses, only one never lays aside 
 her spear and shield and helmet. It is the goddess of 
 wisdom." 
 
 With that goddess the advocates of a stingy ship- 
 building policy have perhaps no very intimate ac- 
 quaintance. But since they have votes in the House 
 of Commons, it will be Mr. Churchill's first business, 
 when he introduces his naval estimates, to improve 
 the relations between them. 
 
 tmiVEKSITY (?K VAi.lFOKNlA j 
 
 1 
 
 ■ABTA BAJtiiAUA COLLEGE LIBRABI
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY— A PERSONAL AND DIPLOMATIC 
 
 IMPRESSION 
 
 'T^WICE last year it happened to Sir Edward Grey 
 to become, in a moment, and for a moment, and 
 in one instance apparently by accident, the most con- 
 spicuous figure in the British political world. He 
 was already, and had long been, a personage of dis- 
 tinction in public life, and also in private. But I 
 cannot remember that, until he made in the House of 
 Commons his speech on Arbitration, he had ever 
 concentrated public attention on himself as one of the 
 few men in the Ministry, or in public life, who are to 
 be reckoned with permanently. The impression he 
 then made was renewed and strengthened by his more 
 recent speech on the Moroccan question. The quiet 
 power with which he then vindicated the position and 
 diplomatic action of Great Britain showed him a 
 stronger man than his best friends had suspected him 
 to be. Before that there had been hints of indecision, 
 of over-caution, of a preference for tentative policies. 
 But now, without a note of passion or an incorrect 
 phrase, he put Germany in her place ; where she has 
 since stayed. Mr. Gladstone said of him long ago that 
 he might be anything he chose, but that he chose to 
 go fishing. He still goes fishing, and has written a 
 book on that gentle art, which is an authority, and is 
 still an example of one of the best types among the 
 
 1 02
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY 103 
 
 English ; the country gentleman. But he is much 
 else than that, Radical Northumberland being his 
 home. 
 
 Last summer some of the limelight which was 
 turned so freely on Mr. Roosevelt fell incidentally 
 on Sir Edward Grey, though it is not a thing he cares 
 for. There was something novel and unexpectedly 
 human in the Foreign Secretary's serving as guide to 
 the ex-President through the mazes of the New Forest 
 and introducing the naturalist-hunter of the United 
 States to the birds and flowers of Great Britain. It 
 was an agreeable episode in both those lives. The 
 stalwart Britons — and there were many of them — 
 who could not forgive Mr. Roosevelt for his lecture 
 at the Guildhall and his admonition to them to do 
 for Egypt what Mr. Roosevelt thought right, or get 
 out, took a kinder view of him when he made friends 
 with Nature on the intercession of Sir Edward Grey. 
 And the state of feeling here was for some time such 
 that Mr. Roosevelt's debt to his New Forest friend 
 was considerable. 
 
 I first met Sir Edward Grey at Tring Park, Lord 
 Rothschild's delightful place in Buckinghamshire, a 
 house with which many other similar memories con- 
 nect themselves. The date I cannot give you, but 
 what matters the date ? It was the event which 
 mattered ; it is always the event ; the meeting with 
 some new human being of interest ; the new ex- 
 perience ; the new view of life at an angle different 
 from any earlier view ; the revision of hearsay im- 
 pressions in the presence of the man himself. But it 
 must have been before I left England in 1895 ; and 
 between 1892 and 1895 when Sir Edward was Under- 
 Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the ministries of Mr. 
 Gladstone and of Lord Rosebery. Prior to that he
 
 I04 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 had held no office. When he entered the Foreign 
 Office Lord Rosebery was Foreign Minister and the 
 new Under-Secretary had the advantage of serving 
 his apprenticeship to diplomacy under Lord Rosebery, 
 the most accomplished of Foreign Ministers in recent 
 times, Lord Salisbury alone excepted ; with a reputa- 
 tion abroad second only to Lord Salisbury's, and held 
 upon the Continent to be a lineal diplomatic descen- 
 dant of Lord Palmerston, who is still, to most good 
 Britons, ultimus Romanorum. Lord Palmerston be- 
 queathed to Lord Rosebery his conception of the 
 British fleet as the chief European instrument of 
 peace. They both used it as such. 
 
 So, it is true, did Lord Salisbury, but he is remem- 
 bered most vividly of all as author of the saying that 
 the British fleet could not climb the mountains of 
 Armenia. It was one of those sentences uttered by 
 Lord Salisbury in his most epigrammatic mood, in- 
 tended and adapted to cool the hysterical enthusiasms 
 of the sentimental factions which were wont to de- 
 mand impossibilities both of the Minister and of the 
 fleet. It was a counsel of sense and prudence like so 
 many of those by which Prince Bismarck kept the 
 Prussian generals in order, after Koniggratz and after 
 Sedan. But a Minister who sets himself to stem the 
 tide of popular or military feeling in the moment of 
 victory must expect to be denounced as preferring 
 peace to honour. Denounced he was, and little he 
 cared for the denunciation. But history sometimes 
 sets a black mark against the name of such a Minister, 
 unfairly and untruly ; nor even for that need he 
 care. These are days when all historical judgments are 
 subject to revision. 
 
 But to go back to Tring. Sir Edward Grey could 
 not then have been much more than thirty. He
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY 105 
 
 looked even younger till you noted the thought- 
 fulness of the face, the lines of thought already visible ; 
 sketched if not incised. Tall, straight, erect, with the 
 bearing of a man on whom the stamp of the patrician 
 was plainly set. It was a face which the winds of 
 heaven had visited. There was, and is, something 
 Norman in the features ; they are high, clean cut, 
 finely modelled ; such as Duke William of Normandy 
 and his knights might have brought with them to 
 England and bequeathed. 
 
 There are men of whom you say when first seen 
 that they are both thinkers and men of action. You 
 would have said that of Sir Edward Grey, and you 
 would have been wrong. Man of action he has never 
 been, in the sense which made Palmerston and Bis- 
 marck men of action before and above all. It may 
 not be quite fair to try anybody by those high stan- 
 dards, but how otherwise are you to take a man's 
 measure ? Young as Sir Edward Grey then was, 
 and holding only a subordinate post in the Foreign 
 Office, you nevertheless felt that he was in his right 
 place. The first business of a diplomatist is not to 
 make war but to avoid war. To keep the peace is the 
 test of his capacity. He was obviously a man who 
 brooded over the problems presented to him. Deep 
 on his front engraven, deliberation sat. The group of 
 people in the smoking-room were talking, as is the 
 habit of groups in smoking-rooms. Sir Edward stood 
 on the hearth - rug listening, reflecting, weighing 
 opinions and characters. Now and then his eye 
 wandered to Mr. Waldo Story's marble bas-reliefs of 
 Greek goddesses which line the four walls. A winged 
 Victory looked down from the prow of the marble 
 ship above the chimney-piece. But I take it not 
 victory nor the means to victory, but the means
 
 io6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 whereby alike victory and defeat might be escaped, 
 
 were what filled his mind. 
 
 None of all this would he have told you. He was a 
 
 man who had ever the rare power of keeping his 
 
 thoughts to himself ; as if they matured better in 
 
 his own brain than by contact with the thoughts of 
 
 others. It seemed then, and it has seemed ever since, 
 
 that he had something of the Sphinx in him : 
 
 Who'll tell me my secret 
 The ages have kept ? 
 
 Sympathetic as he was, he stood aloof. He has stood 
 so ever since. 
 
 With her husband was Lady Grey ; since dead ; and 
 the memory of her is a pathetic memory. A stately 
 figure in black velvet ; beautiful, attaching ; like her 
 husband sympathetic, and like him remote yet sur- 
 rounded by admiration. That was the atmosphere in 
 which she lived. It was a true nobility of nature to 
 which this homage was paid. Upon him her influence, 
 if you may believe those who knew them best, was 
 constant and always for good. It was Sir Edward's 
 way to take detached views. Lady Grey came close 
 to the things of real life ; understood them, and 
 understood that no man ever gains his full stature 
 in seclusion. Hers was the kind of power worth a 
 hundred times the power a capable v/oman can wield 
 by help of a piece of printed paper called a ballot. 
 Character, not the vote, is what tells. 
 
 Lady Grey, if I understood her at all, had a wise 
 patience, rare in either man or woman. She was 
 content to use such means as came to her hand. In 
 herself, and through him in their closeness of intel- 
 lectual companionship, she had an authority which 
 suffragists will never get from the suffrage ; nor from 
 any other source. The loss of an influence so benefi-
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY 107 
 
 cent as hers is an irreparable loss. Nor did the part 
 she elected to play diminish her womanly charm, but 
 enhanced it. Never was it defiled by the dust of the 
 arena ; never debased by the tumult of the market- 
 place. 
 
 It was as a friend of Lord Rosebery that Sir 
 Edward Grey finally accepted the post of Foreign 
 Minister in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's ad- 
 ministration of 1905. He has been Foreign Minister 
 ever since. He was, in the first instance, one of Lord 
 Rosebery's " Ambassadors " to a Power, a Ministry 
 which to Lord Rosebery had become foreign. The 
 others were Mr. Asquith — ^how strange that name in 
 that connection now seems ! — Lord Haldane, and Sir 
 Henry Fowler, afterwards Lord Wolverhampton, de- 
 ceased only last year. Sir Edward then passed as a 
 Moderate ; a strong, dry, useful man. What else 
 than a Moderate could a friend and pupil of Lord 
 Rosebery be ? Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was 
 not a Moderate ; then nor ever ; it was not in him 
 to be ; and Sir Edward Grey's first refusal of the 
 Foreign Ofiice as colleague to that shrewd Scot was 
 understood to be on account of his Radicalism. It 
 was believed to be upon the late King's intervention 
 that he accepted. 
 
 I know not, but what we all know now is that the 
 effect of Sir Edward Grey's opinion on domestic 
 affairs has ceased to be a moderating effect. He has 
 become, since 1906, a Radical of the Radicals. His 
 public speeches on the Budget, on the Parliament 
 Bill, on Home Rule, and on Woman Suffrage, are 
 those of a man prepared to go all lengths. The con- 
 servatism which once was his in English politics he 
 now keeps for affairs abroad ; where no man with 
 knowledge and judgment can be anything but Con-
 
 io8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 servative. Yet even in Foreign Affairs Sir Edward 
 became at one critical moment an extremist. It was 
 he who announced to Europe when Austria annexed 
 Bosnia and Herzegovina that annexation required the 
 assent of the signatory Powers to the Treaty of Berhn, 
 and that the act which Austria had done of her own 
 motion could not be held valid till ratified by a Con- 
 ference of these Powers. Alas ! he had to look on 
 while European Powers gave their separate assent, 
 each for reasons sufficient to each, and till the assent 
 of England no longer mattered. Count Aerenthal, 
 and not Sir Edward Grey, was the victor in that 
 encounter. 
 
 Sir Henry Lucy, with his usual felicity of char- 
 acterization, once labelled Sir Edward " The Veiled 
 Prophet of the Treasury Bench." It was a picturesque 
 and accurate description if limited to the days before 
 he made his Radical speeches. Now the veil has been 
 torn oif and the prophecies are like other prophecies : 
 useful in debate because nobody can contradict them. 
 
 A Minister who has stood by the side of Mr. Lloyd 
 George in the Albert Hall, and spoken as Sir Edward 
 Grey spoke for the Woman's Revolution, has renounced 
 once and for all his Conservatism of other days. He 
 renounces, on that gravest of all issues, his allegiance 
 to the Prime Minister. He ranges himself with the 
 forces of disorder and destruction. He is the ally 
 of a man who is for a new policy of Thorough : more 
 menacing, as well-wishers of England think, than 
 Straiford's ; menacing not only to the liberties but to 
 the existence of this ancient Commonwealth. What- 
 ever exists, exists to be abolished, and anything is 
 good enough to rebuild with, provided it has never 
 been tried. The dragging of women into politics is a 
 cause for which American precedents are invoked.
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY 109 
 
 Well, it is true enough that five or six American States 
 have adopted Woman Suffrage ; California the most 
 recent of them. But they are all States on the Pacific 
 coast or the Pacific slope ; in all of which government, 
 so far as the States themselves are concerned, is in an 
 experimental and fluid state. They have embarked on 
 other political adventures in the same spirit of easy- 
 confidence. So loose is the organic structure of those 
 societies that one or another part of the fabric may 
 be disturbed without much impairing the cohesive 
 energy of the v^'hole. It is idle to argue from com- 
 munities still in the cradle to a country like England 
 of which the institutions are the deliberate growth of 
 centuries. But for an exposition of the fallacies under- 
 lying the citation of these American excursions into 
 uncharted seas I need only refer to Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward's impregnable letters to The Times. 
 
 It is pleasanter to pass from that and to come back 
 to Anglo-American matters. In those, if no more in 
 domestic matters, he is Conservative. His two Arbitra- 
 tion speeches and the settled purpose of which they 
 were the expression, endear him to Americans. It 
 may be true that Sir Edward chose that moment in 
 which to make a party move. Mr. Asquith, who 
 would otherwise have spoken in that debate instead 
 of his Foreign Minister, was in Switzerland, by his 
 daughter's bedside. A conflict was expected on the 
 naval estimates, not only between the Government 
 and the Opposition, but between the two wings of the 
 Ministerial forces, of which one is known as the 
 Little Navy wing. It was an awkward crisis. How is 
 a Minister to face his enemies in front when half the 
 army behind him is on the point of mutiny — has, in 
 fact, already mutinied ? 
 
 With a fine gift of strategy Sir Edward turned the
 
 no ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 attention of the House and of the pubHc away from 
 the question of Dreadnoughts to Arbitration : Arbi- 
 tration as a sudden, substantial, practical issue of 
 international politics. Months had passed since the 
 President had announced his desire for an agreement 
 " with some great nation " for an Arbitral Court to 
 adjudicate on every question which cannot be settled 
 by negotiation, including even territory and national 
 honour. It is not clear that England is prepared to 
 entrust her territory and national honour to the 
 Hague Tribunal or any other tribunal. It is quite 
 clear that the United States will not submit the 
 Monroe doctrine to arbitration. So perhaps we may 
 consider that part of President Taft's proposal as 
 not much more than a pious aspiration, or an " un- 
 wearied pursuit of unattainable perfection." Enough 
 is left for the practical policy of Arbitration. Mr. 
 Taft is no fanatic ; no visionary ; but a sober-minded 
 magistrate who knows that States are governed in 
 their relations with other States by a policy of en- 
 lightened self-interest ; and cannot be governed 
 otherwise. One of the interests of Great Britain and 
 the United States is, to his mind, a good and clear 
 understanding of what they have in common. His 
 appeal was an overture of friendship. The Foreign 
 Minister of England grasped that outstretched Presi- 
 dential hand. Then Mr. Balfour grasped it. Then all 
 England cried out to these two leaders, " Well done ! " 
 and then America said " Amen ! " Sir Edward Grey, 
 in the absence of the Prime Minister who might or 
 might not have seized this occasion, had pledged 
 Government and the governed alike to the President's 
 policy. 
 
 Seldom has any Minister achieved so great a triumph 
 by a single speech. But what I ask you to notice is
 
 SIR EDWARD GREY iii 
 
 that to no Minister would the confidence of the 
 country have been given in whom the country had 
 not confidence already. Here again it is character 
 which counts. Here again it is the governing class 
 which speaks through Sir Edward Grey. His pledge 
 is personal as well as governmental. He and the 
 President are of the same mould ; two men who 
 understand each other and come together on a great 
 Anglo-American issue, perhaps the greatest of all, 
 because they are built alike and because the soul of 
 each is a soul of truth and honour.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE, WAR MINISTER, META- 
 PHYSICIAN, LAWYER, AND SOCIALISTIC RADICAL 
 
 " T WHO know Kant by heart." 
 
 It is Lord Haldane who is speaking, and the 
 speech is a characteristic one, or characteristic of one 
 side of him. Somebody had undertaken to expound 
 to him the mysteries of German metaphysics, and this 
 was his answer — the beginning of his answer, at the 
 end of which the expounder departed unhappy. 
 Whether he does in truth know the whole of the 
 Critique of Pure Reason by heart or not, he has at any 
 rate an acquaintance with German philosophy more 
 full and minute and exact and comprehensive than 
 most Englishmen. Whether it fits him or unfits him 
 for his duties as War Minister may be a question. Of 
 the fact there is no question. Not one of his colleagues 
 is in this respect his rival. Not one of his opponents 
 on the Front Bench has a similar turn of mind, except 
 the author of the Defence of Philoso-phic Doubt. But 
 neither in Mr. Balfour's case nor in Lord Haldane's 
 is it thought that the meditations of the closet add 
 much to their efficiency as debaters or political leaders. 
 Indeed, a question might be asked more broadly 
 still ; the question whether on the whole and with all 
 due recognition of Germany's position in the world 
 of thought, it really is good for the English mind to 
 be Germanized. If there be an authority entitled to 
 respect in such matters it is Huxley's, whose range 
 
 112
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 113 
 
 was far wider than that o£ the mere specialist. Huxley 
 was asked whether Science did in fact owe as much 
 to Germany as the Germans tell you. He answered : 
 
 " In the accumulation of facts, yes. In the use 
 made of them, no. They are at the head of the world 
 in methods of investigation and in the completeness 
 of it. But in those constructive processes on which 
 everything most valuable in science depends, the 
 French are their superiors and the English are their 
 superiors. It is by these two peoples, the French and 
 the English, that the fabric of science has been built 
 up." 
 
 It is Schopenhauer and not Kant with whom Lord 
 Haldane is most closely identified. He translated and 
 published many years ago Schopenhauer's World as 
 Will and Idea, a kind of Handbook to Schopenhauer. 
 He made the great apostle of despair the delight of 
 English maidens and young matrons. I have met 
 many a one who talked Schopenhauer fluently, and 
 sometimes one or more who had mastered him and 
 knew w^hat his system really meant and what his in- 
 fluence on life and thought had been. I once said 
 so to Lord Haldane, who answered : " You have a 
 wide acquaintance." 
 
 That is No. i. The Lord Haldane whom the 
 British public knows is better indicated by anecdote 
 No. 2, as follows : 
 
 When the new Minister of War introduced in the 
 House of Commons his Bill for the reorganization of 
 the British army he made a speech five hours long ; a 
 speech crowded with facts, with figures, with com- 
 plicated expositions of the new scheme as a whole and 
 in detail ; the whole consecutive and luminous. In 
 answer to a question he said : 
 
 " Yes, I made it without a note. I had nothing in
 
 114 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 writing, not even a page of figures. But that is nothing. 
 In the days when I was busy at the Bar I have some- 
 times gone into court not knowing which one of half 
 a dozen causes would come on that day, but quite 
 ready to go on with any one of them, and not a note 
 in any one of the six." 
 
 They were causes of importance and difficulty, for 
 his practice lay in the Court of Appeals, the Privy 
 Council, and the House of Lords. The considered 
 decisions of these courts are sometimes published in 
 The Times, and fill six or eight columns, closely 
 printed in small type. I imagine that not many 
 barristers concerned in cases of that magnitude dealt 
 with them in the same way. But Lord Haldane was 
 one of the most distinguished and most successful 
 among them all. 
 
 He entered the Campbcll-Bannerman Cabinet an 
 Ambassador from Lord Rosebery, as did Mr. Asquith 
 himself and Sir Edward Grey. They remained as 
 hostages. They are to-day neither Ambassadors nor 
 hostages but component parts of the Radical force 
 which is dominant alike in Cabinet and party. They 
 took the stump for Mr. Lloyd George's Budget. 
 They joined in the campaign against the House of 
 Lords, the sole check in this country upon revolu- 
 tionary legislation. They acquiesced in Mr. Asquith's 
 surrender to Mr. Redmond and his declaration for 
 Home Rule. I offer no criticism on any of these 
 performances. I only chronicle them, and I only do 
 that because they explain, and nothing else can ex- 
 plain, the change in Haldane's political position. 
 
 With his soft manner and smooth voice and philo- 
 sophical turn of mind, he may not impress you as a 
 man designed by Providence to destroy an army and 
 then to create and govern another. But there have
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 115 
 
 been such men before now, and it is not a matter on 
 which a civiHan's opinion is o£ prime importance. 
 The soldiers say — or some o£ them say — ^he has handled 
 the technical part o£ the business in a very competent 
 way. Perhaps it is too soon to be quite sure. The 
 German staff are reported to be pleased with his 
 scheme, but their pleasure is an equivocal eulogy. 
 The German Emperor invited him to be present at 
 the great manoeuvres of last autumn and paid the 
 English War Minister compliments, the precise value 
 of which seems, for the same reason, doubtful. We 
 are assured that the Committee of Imperial Defence, 
 with its world-wide authority, is satisfied that the 
 Minister has done what is possible. But Lord Eslier, 
 himself a permanent member of the great Army 
 Council, has lately said that, to put the Territorials 
 into working order, sixty thousand recruits must come 
 in yearly, and that no such number can be had. 
 
 There is, however, one English soldier, not a member 
 of that committee, but excluded from it, whose 
 opinion would probably go further with the English 
 public than all others. I mean Lord Kitchener. But 
 Lord Kitchener does not take the public into his 
 confidence. 
 
 I met Lord Haldane at a party in London some 
 two years ago. You do not expect much serious dis- 
 cussion in a throng of that kind, but he made a remark 
 which led me to say I should like to ask him one 
 question. 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 " I should like to know how it is that an army is 
 to be made better by abolishing some of the best 
 battalions in it." 
 
 Just then a lady came toward us to whom he wished 
 to speak, and my question was left unanswered. " We
 
 ii6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 will discuss it some other time," said Lord Haldane. 
 But that other time has not yet arrived. I asked the 
 question because I had a friend or two in the battalions 
 marked for destruction. The 3rd Battalion of the 
 Scots Guards was one. It was admittedly one of the 
 finest in the service. A little later I dined at the mess 
 of the officers on guard duty at St. James's Palace. It 
 was a dinner of eight, including two civilians — the 
 other a man well known about the Court and formerly 
 private secretary to Lord Salisbury. From begin- 
 ning to end not one of the officers said a word 
 about their impending fate. Where else could this 
 reserve have been kept ? What made their silence 
 the more remarkable was the fact that they all knew, 
 though my civilian friend and I did not know, that the 
 battalion had received orders to report at Buckingham 
 Palace next morning, there to be mustered out by the 
 late King. It was, in fact, mustered out on that 
 Saturday morning. The late King undertook this 
 duty as the highest compliment he could pay the bat- 
 talion. When they surrendered their colours he received 
 them, saying they should be safely kept till they could 
 again be delivered into the care of a battalion which 
 had carried them always with distinction. Every 
 soldier was grateful to the King for those words. 
 His praise was understood to mean that he hoped 
 and expected the battalion would presently be called 
 into being once more. Whether Lord Haldane was 
 grateful I do not know. The criticism was obvious. 
 The King was Commander-in-Chief of the army, and 
 he clearly meant to signify his disapproval of the dis- 
 solution of the battalion. 
 
 In private life Lord Haldane used to be known not 
 only for agreeable and brilliant qualities, but for an 
 independence of opinion and life rare in this country.
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 117 
 
 The opinion of the multitude was not his. Even in 
 such matters as dress he showed himself careless of 
 custom. Whether this mutinous spirit had anything 
 to do with his project of army reconstruction must be 
 left for others to say. 
 
 I thought Lord Haldane entitled to be called a 
 Socialist Radical even before he declared for woman 
 suffrage. If it were questioned before it cannot be 
 questioned now. To this point has philosophy led 
 Lord Haldane as it has led Mr. Balfour ; or, if it has 
 not led them, it has not hindered them. There is not 
 in English history or in any other history any revolu- 
 tionary movement so revolutionary as this. Lord 
 Haldane, Mr. Balfour, Sir Edward Grey, and other 
 men who on many great questions are moderate and 
 sane, deal with this in a light-hearted way which it were 
 no slander to call flippant. The foundations of society 
 are to be broken up, experimentally. The balance of 
 political power is to be transferred from one class to 
 another. It has been done before where only classes 
 were concerned ; done with agony and the sweat of 
 blood and political convulsions. Now, when it is 
 made an issue between the sexes, and the family which 
 is the unit of English life is to cease to exist, the 
 matter is handled with levity. The Prime Minister 
 believes and says it will be disastrous, but flings the 
 reins on the neck of his Cabinet to drive where they 
 will. Lord Haldane may consider no issue of practical 
 politics comparable in importance to the subtleties of 
 metaphysics. Perhaps none is, but if that be so surely 
 the metaphysician might stick to his metaphysics, and 
 leave revolutions to be made or prevented by those 
 who think revolutions a serious business. It is not 
 the first in which he has been engaged. The Con- 
 stitution lies in ruins about him : he assenting to the
 
 ii8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 ruin and going himself to the House of Lords to make 
 sure that the ruin should be complete, and the 
 Parliament Bill, so called because it destroys the 
 Parliament, be enacted into law. That also, we are 
 to suppose, is a child of the philosophical detachment 
 of mind which is able to regard merely mundane things 
 as secondary, and only les choses de Vesfrit as vital to 
 national life. Smooth phrases and play of mind and 
 skill in dialectic are not, however, the gifts by which 
 great English Ministers have become great.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 FOUR SPEAKERS OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS 
 
 I 
 
 MR. HENRY BRAND, MR. ARTHUR PEEL, MR. GULLY 
 
 T HAVE known four Speakers, beginning with Mr 
 Henry Brand, who held this great office from 
 1872 to 1884, who was afterwards Sir Henry Brand, 
 G.C.B., then Viscount Hampden. He belonged to a 
 family of whom one was John Hampden ; a name 
 which, notwithstanding its connection with the Dacre 
 peerage, I suppose even Mr. Lloyd George would 
 recognize as illustrious. In the days when Mr. Brand 
 was Speaker I used to go now and then to the House 
 of Commons. The figure of this amiable gentleman 
 was a prepossessing one. All Speakers, I may say, in 
 their robes and wig and seated in the great chair, like 
 a Chair of State, have an air of that dignity which is 
 inseparable from this office. 
 
 Mr. Brand had it. He was not, I think, by nature, 
 a man of high authority. The habit of command or of 
 quick decision was not natural to him. Such as was 
 his he won by practice. The office educated him into 
 a competence for its duties. There was never any 
 doubt that he knew the rules of the House and how 
 and when to apply them. And finally there came a 
 moment, a memorable moment about nine o'clock one 
 February morning of 1880, when he rose to the height 
 
 119
 
 I20 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 of a great occasion and reasserted once for all not 
 only his own authority as Speaker, but the prestige 
 and power of the House over its own rebellious mem- 
 bers. 
 
 The veiled form of rebellion then called Obstruction 
 had been brought by the Irish Nationalists to a pitch 
 of perfection never before known. The pioneer in 
 this business of preventing business by an unscrupulous 
 use of the rules framed in order to carry on business, 
 was Mr. Biggar. The moral twist in Mr. Biggar's 
 nature had its outward counterpart in a curious 
 physical malformation and in a face which seemed in- 
 tended as an example of Darwin's theory of the Origin 
 of Species. He entered the House unknown but not 
 unobserved. Mr. Disraeli observed him, put his glass 
 into his eye, surveyed this new species for a moment 
 and turned to a colleague by his side with the ques- 
 tion : 
 
 " What is it ? " 
 
 Mr. Parnell was not above adopting Mr. Biggar's 
 tactics. He was like Mr. John Russell Young when 
 managing editor of The Tribune. I asked Young one 
 day where he got an idea he announced and desired 
 me to carry out. 
 
 " It doesn't matter where I got it. I would take 
 an idea from Benjamin if he had one." 
 
 Benjamin was the office boy. Mr. Parnell, with 
 Mr. Biggar and other eminent Irish Nationalists and 
 office boys to help him, deliberately set himself to 
 paralyse the legislative efficiency of the House and to 
 bring the House into contempt. It was a policy in 
 which he gloried. A friend — if he had a friend — once 
 asked : 
 
 " Mr. Parnell, how did you acquire your extra- 
 ordinary knowledge of the rules of the House ? "
 
 MR. HENRY BRAND 121 
 
 " By breaking them," answered the Irish leader. 
 
 He broke them all, one after the other, but his real 
 strength lay not in breaking them, but in using them. 
 On this occasion obstruction had gone on for three 
 days. The Speaker intervened, the House sustained 
 the Speaker, but the ingenuity and pertinacity of 
 Mr. Parnell and his colleagues were, during these 
 three days, more than a match for both Speaker and 
 House. It was said afterward that Mr. Brand might 
 have acted sooner than he did. Down to that time 
 he had been thought rather easy-going. Probably he 
 was no more easy-going than other Speakers whose lot 
 had fallen on easier times. Nor does it matter. When 
 he struck, he struck home. He rose in his chair on 
 that February morning and announced to a hushed 
 House that in his judgment the sense of the House 
 was that the question be now put. And he put it. 
 
 I did not see this great act. I wish I had. But nine 
 o'clock in the morning is not an hour when one is 
 likely to find oneself inside the Palace of Westminster, 
 nor was there any reason to suppose that anything 
 was going to happen. I was told afterward that Mr. 
 Brand had taken few members into his confidence. It 
 was a secret too tremendous to be trusted to many, 
 even of the party leaders ; all of whom, the Irish 
 excepted, were with him. He had, however, con- 
 sulted with the chief officials of the House. Unlike 
 most officials, they, or some of them, were capable of 
 taking an unofficial view. The Irish, of course, de- 
 nounced it as tyranny, a violation of their privileges, a 
 couf d'etat ; and I know not what else. But the 
 Speaker's view was a very simple one. He said later to 
 his friends : 
 
 " It cannot be that the rules of the House were 
 intended to make a small minority of the House rulers
 
 122 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 over the majority. The will of the majority is meant 
 to prevail. That is the object of the rules. That 
 was the evident sense and desire of the House as a 
 whole. It only remained to find some means of giving 
 effect both to the purpose and intent of the rules and 
 to the evident resolve of the majority. Only the 
 Speaker could do that. I thought I ought to take 
 that responsibility and I took it ; and there never 
 was any question that I rightly interpreted and exe- 
 cuted the will of the House. I wish no other defence 
 than that." 
 
 But it has gone further than that. The power which 
 the Speaker then usurped — if he usurped it — was soon 
 after conferred upon him by the Standing Orders 
 which govern the procedure of the House, and those 
 orders are still in force. 
 
 To an American familiar with the practice of the 
 House of Representatives in Washington all this may 
 seem no great matter. But the Speaker of the House 
 of Commons is never a " Czar," nor ever a " Joe " 
 Cannon, nor ever in any sense a party man or the 
 agent of a party's will. He does not appoint com- 
 mittees. There is no Committee on Rules, as in the 
 House of Representatives, for the purpose of con- 
 trolling legislation and of controlling it in the interest 
 of a party. It would not have been possible for Mr. 
 Brand to bring obstruction to an end if he had had 
 only one party behind him. It was only because he 
 had the House behind him that he could do it. More- 
 over, he went beyond all precedents and traditions in 
 order to do it ; and in this country precedents and 
 traditions have — they still have, but nobody knows 
 for how long — the force of law, and sometimes more 
 than the force of law. 
 
 Of the three other Speakers about whom I wish to
 
 MR. ARTHUR PEEL 123 
 
 say something I will take Mr. Arthur Peel, now Vis- 
 count Peel, first. He succeeded Sir Henry Brand, 
 and there is a curious story about the way in which 
 he came to succeed him. He was the son of the great 
 Sir Robert Peel, the idol and ideal of Mr. Gladstone's 
 political life. He had been twenty years in the House, 
 yet had won no particular distinction in debate or 
 otherwise. He seldom, if ever, spoke. But Mr. 
 Gladstone — for the choice of a candidate for Speaker 
 rests in the first instance with the Prime Minister of 
 the day — said to his colleagues that he should like to 
 make the proposal to Mr. Peel if only as a compliment 
 to his father. He was told that Mr. Peel would not 
 accept. 
 
 " Never mind. I wish he should have the chance 
 to accept." 
 
 So the proposal was made and, to the surprise of 
 Mr. Peel's friends, was accepted. The House is not 
 obliged to choose the candidate presented to it by 
 the Prime Minister, but Mr. Gladstone's authority 
 was still very great in 1884, and his nominee was 
 elected unanimously. Mr. Peel had then to address 
 the House. He spoke with an eloquence nobody ex- 
 pected ; with dignity, and in that House of Commons 
 tone which is supposed to be attainable only by long 
 practice. The House was delighted, and from the 
 day he took the chair, in 1884, down to 1895, when he 
 retired, he ruled wisely and well. 
 
 I often saw Mr. Peel. All Speakers, for the reason 
 I gave above, are impressive. It is not too much to 
 say of this one that his air was majestic. " Like a 
 King upon his throne," I once heard an experienced 
 observer say, but in truth the number of kings who 
 upon good testimony arc kingly in their demeanour is 
 not unlimited, and the number to whom you would
 
 124 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 apply the word majestic is more limited still. The 
 most striking scene I can remember was that in which 
 a tumult arose in Committee : insults were flung 
 across the floor of the House, the two sides roared at 
 each other, blows were exchanged, the Chairman was 
 powerless, and the Speaker was sent for. As he was 
 seen emerging from the space behind the Chair the 
 House grew still ; the passions which had rent the air 
 subsided ; order reigned before a word had fallen 
 from those grave lips. The mere presence of the 
 Speaker sufficed. It was a triumph of personality far 
 more than of official position. 
 
 A tall, erect, strong-featured and strong-natured 
 man. The first Sir Robert Peel was a cotton spinner, 
 from whom came the great fortune which the great 
 Sir Robert used greatly, now, by descent to a last 
 eldest son, pretty much squandered. The Speaker was 
 the youngest son of the Prime Minister. The doctrine 
 of heredity is no longer a favourite doctrine with the 
 men who have possession of the platform. It seems 
 useless, therefore, to ask whether the present Lord 
 Peel owes any debt to either of his ancestors, or to 
 which. He is quite capable of standing alone. 
 
 He is a great orator. It was not merely the one 
 speech on his election to the Speakership which proved 
 it. A frequent orator he is not, but whenever he has 
 spoken it has been in the grand manner. He belongs 
 to the school of which Mr. Gladstone was the most 
 illustrious example ; not the greatest school, but 
 one of the greatest. When Mr. Disraeli described Mr. 
 Gladstone as intoxicated with the exuberance of his 
 own verbosity there was too much truth in that 
 unfriendly sentence. But Lord Peel, who has the 
 sonorous eloquence of Mr. Gladstone, has never had 
 the fluent facility of speech and the unrestrained
 
 MR. GULLY 125 
 
 copiousness of diction which so often brought that 
 orator to disaster. If I were asked to choose among 
 all the speeches I have heard one which had every 
 great quality of oratory in the least compass, I should 
 choose Lord Peel's speech at the dinner of farewell 
 to M. Waddington, on his retirement from the 
 French Embassy to London which he had long honour- 
 ably filled. He said everything that needed to be said, 
 said it with finish, with distinction, with rhetorical 
 power, with a vibratory emotion which held a brilliant 
 company breathless, and his speech was just six minutes 
 long. 
 
 The present Speaker's predecessor was one of the 
 politest of men, yet firm enough to rule the House. 
 He was Mr. Gully, the third of the Speakers I am 
 writing about ; a barrister and Liberal politician ; 
 able in both capacities but not supremely able in 
 either. It was a surprise to the House when Mr. 
 Gladstone chose him as a candidate for the Speaker- 
 ship. The surprise was not quite the same as in Mr. 
 Peel's case ; or not for the same reason. Perhaps the 
 occult motives of Mr. Gladstone were never made 
 public. Mr. Gladstone had many occult motives ; 
 many which he did not care to expose to the light of 
 day. In this particular case they do not matter much. 
 Mr. Gully's genial personality may have been one of 
 them. 
 
 My acquaintance with him began at that highly 
 miscellaneous Anglo-German watering-place, Homburg 
 von der Hohe. It was a place where a man was more 
 likely to be seen in his shirt sleeves — moral shirt 
 sleeves — than anywhere else. Mr. Gully had few re- 
 serves. His appearance and manner were alike pre- 
 possessing. He had the diplomatic art of talking 
 freely and revealing nothing. He was popular and
 
 126 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 he had a popular wife. The Speaker's Chair he put 
 far behind him ; there was no room for it in the little 
 German town under the lee of Frankfort. The Prince 
 of Wales — the late King — who liked him, had set 
 everybody an example in such matters, and Mr. 
 Gully saw no reason why he should not follow it ; 
 nor was there one. 
 
 The circumstances in which he had come to the 
 Speakership might tend to promote modesty. There 
 had been a contest, which was unusual. Mr. Gully 
 had been elected by a narrow majority — and a party 
 majority at that ; which was more unusual still. 
 The Conservatives had publicly announced that if, 
 after the election known to be imminent, they came 
 back with a majority they would turn Mr. Gully 
 out ; or rather, since the Speaker's tenure of office 
 expires with the Parliament in which he has been 
 elected, they would not re-elect him. But he proved 
 to be an efficient Speaker, with a wide knowledge of 
 Parliamentary law and a mastery of the rules and 
 traditions of the House of Commons ; with quick- 
 ness, which is indispensable, and tact, which is de- 
 sirable, and force. When the dissolution came they 
 nevertheless attacked him in his constituency and tried 
 to defeat him and to prevent his re-election to the 
 House, which would, of course, have prevented his 
 re-election as Speaker. That effort failed, and 
 when the Conservatives came back with a majority, 
 their hostility to Mr. Gully died away, and Mr. Bal- 
 four, then as now leader of the Conservatives, proposed 
 Mr. Gully as Speaker and the House elected him 
 unanimously. He reigned ten years, 1895 to 1905, and 
 was a good officer, and left behind him a good name 
 when, in 1905, he took a better and became Viscount 
 Selby. The most inveterate republican may admit
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER 127 
 
 that it is better when he is told that Mr. Gully chose 
 his wife's name as that by which he was to be ennobled. 
 A rare, if not unique, instance. 
 
 II 
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER 
 
 Mr. Lowther, the present Speaker, in any account 
 you may take of living celebrities stands very near 
 the front. Not only because he is Speaker, but 
 because he is Mr. Lowther. To give him his full title, 
 he is the Right Hon. James William Lowther, p.c. 
 — magic initials which stand for Privy Councillor — 
 and Member of Parliament for the Penrith division 
 of Cumberland since 1886. A Conservative in his 
 private capacity ; of no politics whatever in his 
 capacity of Speaker ; no, nor was he in his capacity of 
 Chairman of Committee of Ways and Means and 
 Deputy Speaker ; a post second in importance only 
 to the Speakership itself. This he held from 1895 
 to 1905, when he was chosen Speaker. He had, there- 
 fore, ten years' training in the business of presiding 
 over the House of Commons. And it was because 
 he came brilliantly well out of this long trial that he 
 was made Speaker. Had he been a poor or even a 
 moderately good Chairman of Ways and Means he 
 would never have been put into this higher place. 
 
 You might, nevertheless, describe him as a country 
 gentleman ; born for sport and the care of an estate ; 
 one of the " idle rich " whom Ministers of the Crown 
 to-day denounce as so many cumberers of the ground ; 
 an " idle " man, in this case, with a habit of working 
 ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Look at that well-
 
 128 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 set-up, athletic figure, with the head on it of a man of 
 the world and a student ; and the eyes of a man who 
 can hold a gun straight ; brown-haired, blue-eyed, 
 brown-skinned and bearded ; a man every inch of him. 
 
 Beyond doubt he comes easily within the range of 
 Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse invective. He does 
 not work with his hands ; he is not in receipt of an 
 old age pension ; he owns a property in Cumberland ; 
 his associates are also of the idle rich. Worse than that, 
 he is the eldest son of the Hon. William Lowther, who 
 is uncle to the present Earl of Lonsdale, the actual 
 head of the Lowther family ; to whom the Speaker is 
 first cousin. A family of many and far-reaching dis- 
 tinctions ; none perhaps superior to that of the 
 Speaker, since the Speaker is First Commoner of 
 England, a title of true pride. Here also is heredity, 
 in which Lord Rosebery, speaking lately at Manchester, 
 declared himself a believer : " though I do not care 
 about hereditary legislators " ; meaning, no doubt, 
 that he did not care about an hereditary legislature, 
 having succeeded after many years in inducing the 
 House of Lords to abolish, so far as a vote of that 
 body could abolish, the hereditary principle as a 
 principle of legislative right. 
 
 The Speaker's father was long a diplomatist, then 
 an M.P. ; then in 1892 retired to private life. He 
 is at this momemt of writing eighty-nine years old ; 
 and still young. A mind of genuine force ; convic- 
 tions which he never tampered with ; a firmness of 
 nature as of a rock, and, over all, that saving grace of 
 humour which stands between its happy possessor 
 and tragic views of life. Now, as half a century ago, 
 it lights up his face ; his eyes glow with it, and the 
 softening, cheering, inspiriting influence of it descends 
 gently upon those about him, and the radiance of it
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER 129 
 
 fills the room. It is so with the son. Of all qualities 
 it is the most human and the most rare. 
 
 No American visitor can have gone westward 
 through Kensington without seeing Lowther Lodge ; 
 one of the few private residences in London which 
 stands in its own and ample grounds ; commonly 
 called a Queen Anne house ; of red brick, with gables 
 and steepled chimneys ; a picturesque piece of archi- 
 tecture which would look at home in a country land- 
 scape, and in London seems a little exotic. A dehghtf ul 
 house inside ; full of treasures ; renowned for its 
 hospitality. Until lately there presided over both 
 Lowther Lodge and Campsea Ash, the Lowthers' 
 place in Suffolk, a mistress who had rare qualities of 
 mind and character ; a hostess of both tact and 
 authority ; an accomplished, original, most amiable 
 and kindly woman, who is dead. 
 
 Of such descent and of such a parentage the 
 Speaker of to-day comes rightfully by the gifts which 
 have won him the respect, the liking, the affection of 
 the House. He is unlike all past and probably unlike 
 all future Speakers. In knowledge none ever excelled 
 him ; in his way of applying his knowledge to the 
 matter in hand he is absolutely unique. When Gam- 
 betta was President of the French Chamber of Deputies 
 you saw the use a man of genius could make of his 
 genius in a place which did not seem to call for genius. 
 I draw no comparison between Gambetta and Mr. 
 Lowther, and I don't know that genius is the word 
 which would be thought descriptive of Mr. Lowther. 
 All I mean is that each of the two men brought to 
 bear upon duties largely of a routine kind qualities 
 far removed from the region of routine. 
 
 That sense of humour which, as I said, Mr. Lowther 
 possesses is perhaps of not less use to him as Speaker 
 
 K
 
 I30 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 than those other traits which might seem more 
 germane to the office. There are various ways of 
 keeping 670 gentlemen — ^well, a majority are gentle- 
 men — in order besides the strict enforcement of the 
 Standing Orders. The power of taking detached 
 views — a power inseparable from humour — is one. Mr. 
 Lowther has not said a harsh thing since he has been 
 Speaker, but he has made many an honourable member, 
 including the Prime Minister and other Ministers, look 
 a little foolish. He does it by setting the honourable 
 member's conduct or statement in a new light. It is 
 done in a sentence ; in the fewest possible words ; 
 never arguing, never doubting ; inflexible but smiling ; 
 and members have grown shy about calling down on 
 themselves these flashing thunderbolts. The terse 
 sentence with which he sends an offender back to 
 his seat is like a sentence to the Clock Tower, except 
 that the offender whom the Speaker has once dealt 
 with seldom offends again. He is master of the un- 
 expected ; and the most convinced extremist or 
 enthusiast, as well as the most accomplished cynic, 
 suddenly becomes aware that there is another way of 
 seeing things than his. His manner is parental but 
 peremptory ; and appeal from his decision there is 
 none ; or none at the moment, and therefore prac- 
 tically none at all. 
 
 But it is easier to form a notion of Mr. Lowther 
 from a little acquaintance in private life than from 
 the Speaker's Chair ; easier to form and much more 
 difficult to express. But I will venture to take an 
 instance. I was visiting at Campsea Ash three years 
 ago when Mr. Lowther came down, after a late ad- 
 journment of the House. There was a crisis. There 
 have been many crises of late years, and I will not say 
 which. The Speaker had had to interpose. The
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER 131 
 
 whole situation was delicate and difficult. At dinner, 
 for which he arrived with the coffee, nothing was 
 said. Later in the evening there was a reference to 
 the incident of the day, and one of us asked how it 
 had ended. That question was easily answered, and 
 I think nobody would have put another. But having 
 answered it, the Speaker went on. He gave us such 
 an account of what had happened as nobody else 
 could have given, because nobody else had seen it 
 from the Chair. He did not hesitate to lay the blame 
 where it belonged. He told us what his rulings had 
 been, and why. He summed up the case as a judge 
 on the bench might sum it up ; a strong judge, 
 strong enough to impose his view or his will on the 
 jury while leaving them, to all appearance, free and 
 independent. The Speaker has, I am always saying, 
 as Speaker, no politics. In private and before his 
 constituents of Cumberland Mr. Lowther is still a 
 Conservative. I will not say whether he was Con- 
 servative or Liberal during this exposition ; but he 
 was, for the purposes of his statement, one or the 
 other. He had formed a strong opinion and expressed 
 it strongly. No bitterness, of course. Anything like 
 bitterness or rancour is alien to his nature, as it is to 
 the nature of most strong men. But when he had 
 ended his account he had carried us all with him. We 
 were like the jury who said it was no credit to a certain 
 great barrister to win so many causes, because he was 
 always on the right side. 
 
 During so much of the session as the weather per- 
 mits Mrs. Lowther receives her friends on the Terrace 
 of the Houses of Parliament and gives them tea. There 
 is usually a large company of guests ; women in the 
 majority, not unnaturally. If the state of business in 
 the House permits, the Speaker appears for half an
 
 132 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 hour or less. He is in full dress, minus wig and robes. 
 With them he has laid aside his authority o£ manner. 
 He is simple ; most Englishmen are ; and the sim- 
 plicity is apt to increase as the rank or position in- 
 creases. In the House he is vigilant, determined, 
 unrelaxing ; it does not answer to be otherwise. 
 Here on the Terrace all that is gone. He is simply 
 entertaining his wife's guests. If you care to see 
 whether he succeeds in this praiseworthy effort you 
 have only to look into the faces of the women to 
 whom he is talking. Mrs. Lowther as hostess has 
 the kindliness which underlies all social successes ; 
 the graciousness which a hostess of high place must 
 have ; the social knowledge and diplomacy incidental 
 to, and also indispensable in, the discharge of her 
 duties. Both have the art of putting people at their 
 ease. 
 
 The state and splendour of the Speakership are 
 kept up, no matter who is Speaker. The Speaker's 
 house is part of the Houses of Parliament. You 
 drive through Palace Yard and through an arch- 
 way facing the entrance, and the Speaker's House is 
 at the opposite end of the court. It was designed as a 
 house of hospitality. When you have climbed the 
 staircase to the first floor you may pass from room to 
 room, each opening into the other and all looking 
 upon the river, till you come to the great dining-room 
 hung with official portraits, with seats for some sixty 
 guests at table. Crowded as these rooms often are 
 with much that is most brilliant in the social life of 
 London, they are themselves brilliant. When the 
 Speaker gives his Parliamentary dinners everybody 
 comes in uniform or in court dress. At Mrs. Lowther's 
 evening parties there is often the same blaze of colour, 
 not always to the advantage of the more delicate
 
 MR. JAMES LOWTHER 133 
 
 beauty of the gowns worn by the women. The 
 Speaker's salary is j/^5000 a year, plus the house and 
 large allowances for keeping it up. It is still the pre- 
 dominant opinion in England that the dignity of great 
 offices of State should be adequately maintained. 
 
 And it is still the custom, the rule, even if a rule 
 with exceptions, to appoint to these great offices 
 men adequate to fill them. And when a great office 
 like the Speakership is greatly held, as it is by Mr. 
 Lowther, a new sense of its importance and its op- 
 portunities reinforces the old traditions.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 
 
 T70R nearly five years Lord Spencer has been 
 fighting a hopeless battle. Yesterday he died, 
 and a great figure passes into history. I imagine there 
 is no man who has known him who has not to-day a 
 sense of personal loss. There can be no Englishman 
 who does not feel that a great Englishman is gone. 
 I must have written about him in times past, but I 
 must write of him to-day out of many personal recol- 
 lections of earlier days. 
 
 I speak of him as a great Englishman. Americans 
 may think it a strong phrase, for, except during the 
 three years of his second Irish Viceroyalty, his fame 
 was not of a kind to fill the world. During that second 
 Viceroyalty, moreover, American opinions must have 
 been touched with some of the hatreds of the Irish 
 Nationalists of those sombre days. He became Viceroy 
 in 1882, and on his entrance upon his great office, 
 May 6, 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke 
 were murdered in Phoenix Park, not far from the 
 Viceregal Lodge and within view of its windows. 
 
 I have heard Lord Spencer tell the story. His entry 
 into Dublin had passed off with no unhappy incident. 
 He and his half-brother, Mr. Robert Spencer, since 
 Viscount Althorp and now successor to the earldom, 
 had ridden out from the Castle to the Lodge. From 
 the windows or from the grounds, I forget which, 
 they saw what they took to be a scuffle. Presently 
 
 134
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 135 
 
 word was brought to the Viceroy that the Chief 
 Secretary and the Permanent Under Secretary had 
 been assassinated. They meant to kill Mr. Burke. 
 They did not know who Lord Frederick Cavendish 
 was, but since he tried to help Mr. Burke they killed 
 him also. 
 
 It was an anxious moment, for it might well enough 
 be that the murderers would aim higher still. Lord 
 Spencer and Mr. Robert looked about them. There 
 was not a soldier or policeman within call. There were 
 no arms. Neither Lord Spencer nor his brother had 
 so much as a revolver. Lord Spencer sat watching to 
 see what might happen, and Mr. Robert explored the 
 Lodge, presently returning with a steel poker from 
 the library fireplace. There was nothing else. But 
 the Lodge was not attacked. Brady and his fellow- 
 assassins were content with what they had done, and 
 departed. It was rather late in the afternoon. The 
 news soon reached the barracks in Dublin, and a force 
 of cavalry was hurried off to the Lodge. But, for the 
 moment, the thirst for blood had been slaked. 
 
 " Statesman and sportsman," says one English paper 
 in its headlines, characteristically. In both capacities 
 he had to hunt down the murderers. I am afraid 
 there is no doubt that, though Mr. Parnell washed his 
 hands of this stain, the Parnellites generally through- 
 out Ireland were willing enough there should be a 
 smear of blood on their flag. There had been many 
 murders before ; agrarian, political, and others. The 
 adjective does not matter. They were murders. 
 But the deed done in Phoenix Park had made it once 
 more necessary to pass and enforce a Crimes Act. No 
 less a man than Sir William Harcourt, then Home 
 Secretary, introduced the Bill in the House of Com- 
 mons. Mr. ParncU's abhorrence of the Phoenix Park
 
 136 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 murders, which hindered his pohcy, did not prevent 
 him from opposing a Bill to prevent other murders ; 
 nor from withdrawing, with all his followers, as a 
 protest against its passage. But passed it was on 
 July 12, and Lord Spencer the next day proclaimed 
 seventeen counties. Other murders followed — the 
 Joyce family at Maamtrasna, husband, wife, son and 
 daughter, all shot dead ; Bourke and Wallace, shot 
 dead in Galway ; Blake, Lord Clanricarde's agent, and 
 Kan, his steward, shot dead near Loughrea ; detectives 
 in DubHn assaulted and Cox killed ; Field, a juryman 
 in the Joyce trial, stabbed. The intent to defeat the 
 administration of justice was evident, and Lord 
 Spencer put Dublin under martial law. Then Carey, 
 who looked on while Brady and the other three hacked 
 Lord Frederick Cavendish to pieces, turned Queen's 
 evidence ; Brady and Kelly and ColTey (who pleaded 
 guilty) and Curley and Fagan were tried, convicted, 
 and duly hanged. More than a year had passed since 
 the murders. Six or seven months later Carey, the 
 informer, was shot dead by O'Donnell on board the 
 Melrose Castle in South African waters. 
 
 Such were some of the circumstances amid which 
 Lord Spencer had to govern Ireland. But govern he 
 did, firmly, wisely, effectively. He had Sir George 
 Trevelyan as Chief Secretary, a very competent man, 
 very devoted, but not, like Lord Spencer, of the 
 governing type. Trevelyan was of the emotional 
 type. Spencer's nerves were of steel. He used 
 the powers which the Prevention of Crimes Act put 
 in his hands with such effect that the number of 
 of outrages was reduced by three-fourths. He was 
 therefore reviled as no Viceroy had ever been reviled, 
 nor has ever since been reviled, in Parliament and out. 
 He took it all as part of the day's work. He never
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 137 
 
 answered. He turned neither to the right nor to the 
 left. He did what he thought his duty as well as he 
 knew how to do it. Before or since Ireland has had 
 no such Viceroy nor ever been more steadily ruled. 
 Let us take the testimony of Lord Morley, con- 
 vinced Home Ruler and ex-Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
 who is believed to have turned the mind of Mr. 
 Gladstone to Home Rule. Lord Morley says in his 
 Life of Gladstone, Vol. Ill, p. 71 : — 
 
 " The new Viceroy attacked the formidable task 
 before him with resolution, minute assiduity, and an 
 inexhaustible store of that steady-eyed patience which 
 is the sovereign requisite of any man who, whether 
 with coercion or without, takes in hand the govern- 
 ment of Ireland." 
 
 And there is just before this passage a picture of 
 the condition of Ireland, " when the Invincibles still 
 roved with knives about the streets of Dublin," with 
 demoralization, moral cowardice, affecting even the 
 courts in their duty, and " the very foundations of the 
 social fabric rocking." 
 
 The worst and most desperate years in the modern 
 history of Ireland. Not many men, perhaps, have 
 lived for three years in hourly peril of assassination in 
 a spirit as tranquil as Lord Spencer's. It never dis- 
 turbed his work nor embittered his feeling toward the 
 Irish. Of bitterness he was incapable ; and of fear. 
 Now that these dangers are past men may make light 
 of them ; especially those whose interest it is to 
 relieve themselves of suspicion. But I will give you a 
 single sentence of Lady Spencer, who remained by 
 her husband's side and desired to share, and did share, 
 the perils that environed him. Said Lady Spencer : 
 
 " I don't think I ever quite realized what the
 
 138 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 condition of things was till in driving out I found that 
 the aide-de-camp on the seat opposite me had his 
 hand always on his revolver." 
 
 This, although there was always a mounted escort, 
 beside police and detectives in front and in rear of the 
 carriage. Such was the life they lived ; such were the 
 methods employed. The Irish, with their natural 
 quick wit and gallantry, had named the Viceroy's 
 wife Spencer's Faery Queen. But politics — it was 
 always called politics — made no allowance for poetry. 
 
 All this did not prevent Lord Spencer from follow- 
 ing Mr. Gladstone into the Home Rule camp in 1886. 
 It has been said that if Lord Spencer had held out 
 Mr. Gladstone would have been forced to abandon 
 or greatly modify his Home Rule Bill. However that 
 may be. Lord Spencer's decision was a great surprise 
 to the Unionists and a great blow, and they resented 
 it with no common bitterness. They denounced him 
 as a traitor. They resented it socially as well as 
 politically. I met Lord Spencer one night at a house 
 which, though of great importance and splendour, 
 was a house where a year or two before he and Lady 
 Spencer might or might not have been seen. A friend 
 said to me : 
 
 " Do you see the Spencers ? " 
 
 " Yes— why not ? " 
 
 " You know as well as I do that it is the first time 
 they have crossed this threshold." 
 
 " I know nothing of the kind, and if you ask Lord 
 Spencer he will tell you you are wrong." 
 
 He did not ask, nor did I, but after a while I said to 
 Lord Spencer : 
 
 " Well, it seems you do go out sometimes." 
 
 Half laughingly, but rather grimly, he answered : 
 
 " I go when I am asked."
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 139 
 
 And after a pause : 
 
 " You know very well how angry the Unionists 
 are ; but would you suppose that we don't receive 
 one invitation where we used to get twenty ? " 
 
 " That's a rhetorical way of putting it." 
 
 " It is literally true." 
 
 I did not say so to Lord Spencer but I thought it 
 almost as discreditable to the Unionists as I thought 
 the Irish attacks on Lord Spencer discreditable to 
 the Irish. I record one as I record the other, and in 
 that spirit of impartiality at which I always aim, 
 and to which I do not always attain. But this is a 
 fine example. 
 
 Between a cancelled dinner-card and a shot from 
 behind a hedge there is a certain difference ; but there 
 need not be much difference between the spirit which 
 inspires the one and the other. If there were in all 
 England two people who stood as near the summit 
 of things as subjects can stand, they were Lord and 
 Lady Spencer. Lady Spencer was a Seymour, great- 
 granddaughter to the seventh Marquess of Hertford. 
 The first Earl Spencer was grandson to the third Earl 
 of Sunderland, who married the daughter of the first 
 Duke of Marlborough, and comes down through a 
 line of ancestors distinguished in public and in private 
 life. He was grandson to that Lord Althorp who, 
 as Chancellor of the Exchequer, led the House of 
 Commons 1830-4, and the two were singularly 
 alike in those personal qualities which in this country 
 confer upon the possessor of them an authority 
 which mere talents never confer. The late Duke of 
 Devonshire was another example, and perhaps the 
 most illustrious of all. Side by side with him in 
 point of character, absolute integrity, unselfish devo- 
 tion to the State, and courage whether personal or
 
 140 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 political of the highest order, stands this fifth Earl 
 Spencer. Yet this was the man whom other men, 
 of position not less than his and of character hereto- 
 fore spotless, set themselves to persecute. 
 
 I will take the late Duke of Westminster, the first 
 Duke, as an illustration of the temper which at that 
 time pervaded the Unionist ranks. He had been 
 Marquis of Westminster till 1874, when Mr. Gladstone 
 made him a Duke. He was a Liberal, a Gladstonian 
 Liberal. In testimony of his respect and friendly 
 admiration for his creator he commissioned Sir John 
 Millais to paint Mr. Gladstone's portrait — the finest 
 of the four which came from Millais's brush. In 
 1886 or 1887 the Duke caused it to be known that he 
 no longer wished to keep the portrait, and he sold it, 
 at a large profit, to Sir Charles Tennant, in whose 
 house in Grosvenor Square it hung till Sir Charles 
 died, and is now, I think, to be seen in Sir Edward 
 Tennant's house in Queen Anne's Gate, with other 
 canvases of distinction. 
 
 The Duke's next act produced an excitement even 
 greater than the selling of Mr. Gladstone's picture. 
 In 1887 he had asked Mr. and Mrs. Robert Spencer 
 to dinner. Mr. Robert Spencer had lately married 
 the Hon. Margaret Baring, second daughter to Lord 
 and Lady Revelstoke. Then it came to the Duke's 
 knowledge that Mr. Robert Spencer had been present 
 at the dinner given by the Eighty Club to Mr. Parnell, 
 and he withdrew his invitation. He was not deterred 
 by the fact that the invitation to Mrs. Spencer had 
 also to be withdrawn. In the vehemence of his hatred 
 to Home Rulers, especially English Home Rulers, 
 he was ready to inflict, and did inflict, this grave 
 discourtesy upon a woman. There were other ways 
 in which he could have avoided or evaded receiving
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 141 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Spencer, but he choose none of them. 
 Even the Duke's friends, his political and personal 
 friends, thought him wrong ; and to explain his act 
 he wrote a letter to Mr. Spencer, which convinced 
 nobody of anything except that he had made one 
 more mistake. 
 
 I do not think that Lord Spencer was insensible 
 to these various evidences of hostility, but he showed 
 neither concern nor resentment. He was too proud 
 a man, and his pride was of a kind which made it 
 impossible for him to enter upon any justification 
 of himself. He needed none. But he would some- 
 times, when asked, let a sentence or two fall from his 
 lips which might give you a hint, though they never 
 seemed meant as explanations. Like so many others, 
 he felt the magic power of Mr. Gladstone, and in 
 answer to a remark about Mr. Gladstone's influence 
 he once said : 
 
 " If you have ever been alone in a room with Mr. 
 Gladstone for half an hour, you would not ask me 
 why I followed him." 
 
 In point of fact, I had not asked. 
 
 n 
 
 Next to his Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, Lord 
 Spencer's services as First Lord of the Admiralty, from 
 1892 to 1895, first under Mr. Gladstone and then 
 under Lord Rosebery, were of the highest value to the 
 country. He laid the foundation of the system under 
 which the British Navy has attained its present power. 
 He did it in spite of Mr. Gladstone, and in spite 
 of Mr. Gladstone's ablest lieutenant, Sir William 
 Harcourt, Mr. Gladstone, in truth, was not much
 
 142 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 better than a Little Englander. He was not willing, at 
 any rate, to spend the money on naval defence which 
 alone could ensure to England her control of the seas, 
 and therefore her Imperial position. He allowed Sir 
 William Harcourt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 and in that capacity, like other Finance Ministers, 
 parsimonious to the great spending departments, to 
 assure the House in 1893 that the Sea Lords of the 
 Admiralty were satisfied with things as they stood. 
 Lord Spencer told Sir William Harcourt that unless 
 that statement were corrected and adequate funds 
 provided for the strengthening of the Navy he should 
 resign. The Sea Lords reinforced that protest, 
 and the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer were confronted with the certainty that the 
 Lords of the Admiralty, Civil and Naval, would resign 
 in a body. They put country above party. Mr. 
 Gladstone had to give way, and the Estimates of the 
 following year were framed in accordance with the 
 Admiralty programme. But it was one of the causes 
 which led to Mr. Gladstone's resignation ; none too soon. 
 I dwell no further on Lord Spencer's political 
 career, except to say that he held many high offices ; 
 that his renown as a statesman grew steadily greater ; 
 that, though not an orator, he was one of the weightiest 
 speakers in the House of Lords, and that, with the 
 Sovereign and with the nation, he held a position of 
 high confidence. Mr. Gladstone, had he been asked 
 by the Queen to recommend a successor on his resigna- 
 tion in 1894, would have recommended Lord Spencer. 
 But Lord Morley dryly remarks, " As it happened, his 
 advice was not sought." The act of magnanimity, 
 of patriotic forgetfulness of all differences between 
 Lord Spencer and himself which Mr. Gladstone had 
 in mind could not be performed.
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 143 
 
 There came a note one day from Lord Spencer : 
 " If you will look in for lunch to-morrow there's 
 something I should like to ask you about." 
 
 At that time Lord and Lady Spencer were living 
 in Spencer House, St. James's Place. With the dis- 
 advantage of a confined entrance, and being, so far 
 as approach to it and getting away from it are con- 
 cerned, in a cul-de-sac, it is, nevertheless, one of the 
 best houses in London. The west front looks out on 
 Green Park and on Buckingham Palace in the near 
 distance. Many of the rooms are fine, and there are 
 fine pictures. The dining-room is on the first floor. 
 Lunch over, we went to Lord Spencer's room. All 
 the world knew that the great Althorp Library was to be 
 sold. Few people, I think, knew that Lord Spencer 
 had elected to sell it in order to reduce the rents 
 on the Althorp property, and so relieve the farmers, 
 hard hit by American competition and scarce able to 
 make both ends meet, let alone the question of profit. 
 Lord Dalhousie had done a similar thing on the 
 Brechin and Panmure estates in Scotland, but such 
 instances were rare and have not yet become frequent. 
 Said Lord Spencer : 
 
 " I suppose you will be sorry to hear that the 
 library is sold." 
 
 " But it was to be disposed of by auction." 
 " Yes ; but I had an offer from a private buyer 
 which I have accepted, and the books are now being 
 packed for removal. You were so much interested in 
 them that I thought you might like to know." 
 
 There was a moment's hesitation ; then he went on : 
 
 " For the present I am not at liberty to tell you the 
 
 name of the buyer nor the amount of the purchase 
 
 money. But there's a matter on which I should like 
 
 your opinion."
 
 144 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES- 
 
 Nor am I at liberty, nor shall I ever be, to repeat 
 what Lord Spencer then told me about the circum- 
 stances of the sale. It became known presently that 
 the buyer was Mrs. Rylands, of Manchester, on whom 
 no blame of any kind rests, and the sum paid is 
 believed to have been well over a quarter of a million 
 sterling, and not far from a million and a half in 
 dollars. Saying nothing about these matters. Lord 
 Spencer briefly and very quietly stated the facts, and 
 the reasons why he had not, in fact, received the whole 
 of the purchase money, and asked me what I thought 
 of the transaction as a whole. 
 
 " But you say the transaction is completed." 
 
 " Yes ; it is." 
 
 " Then what is the use of asking me to advise you 
 about it ? If you had applied to me earlier " 
 
 " Ah, I supposed you would disapprove, and that is 
 why I did not tell you at once. You probably think 
 I had legal rights which I might have enforced." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well, I thought it all over and made up my mind 
 I could not have a lawsuit about the library." 
 
 " Did you consult your solicitors ? " 
 
 " No. I was afraid they would advise me to contest 
 it, and you know one doesn't like to go to one's 
 solicitors and then not act on their opinion. I have 
 not told them, nor anybody but you. I thought I 
 should like to see how you would take it." 
 
 Lord Spencer had a sense of humour which he was 
 indulging at my expense. His eyes sparkled, as they 
 often did ; a gleam in them which could be only a 
 gleam of humour. There was no use in remonstrating. 
 The mischief was done. But I said what I thought, 
 and my wrath seemed to amuse Lord Spencer still 
 more. His conduct had been throughout that of a
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 145 
 
 grand seigneur. He was that all his life through and 
 in every circumstance of his life, but when it came to 
 business matters and to dealing with large sums, 
 it was to say the least, expensive. I said finally I 
 could understand his wishing to avoid a controversy, 
 but how could he submit to what he thought an 
 unjust exaction ? 
 
 " Don't you see, I had to choose ? It had to be one 
 or the other. I preferred to lose the money and endure 
 the injustice." 
 
 Finally I said that while I would not pretend to 
 give a legal opinion, I felt convinced an action could 
 still be brought, on grounds I indicated, for the recovery 
 of the money. But Lord Spencer shook his head. 
 
 " You are only proposing to me a lawsuit, and that 
 I am no more willing to bring now than before." 
 
 We talked a httle of other things, and before I said 
 good-bye I asked what he meant to do about the 
 empty bookcases at Althorp. An expression I can 
 only call pathetic came into his face. 
 
 " I believe Lady Spencer is already buying more 
 books. Will you help her ? " 
 
 I did look over these new purchases from time to time. 
 They served to fill vacant spaces but had no other interest. 
 
 Some time after that I heard of a sequel to the 
 story. Also from Lord Spencer himself, and also 
 after it was all over. The sum involved was very much 
 less, but the impudence of the claim was even more 
 flagrant, and this time I think Lord Spencer had been 
 for a moment disposed to fight it. But he did not. 
 It could not have been done without bringing up the 
 whole matter, and bringing on the scandal he was 
 resolved to prevent. Not once did he use a hard 
 word about anybody concerned. It was not his way. 
 He lived in the upper air.
 
 146 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 I had seen Lord Spencer in many circumstances ; 
 perhaps never before when the line nature of the man 
 shone out more clearly. He was describing what to most 
 business men would have seemed a most unbusinesslike 
 proceeding. He himself was quite aware that it 
 would not stand the tests which men of the world 
 commonly apply to such transactions. But he told 
 his story with a simple dignity which was enchanting. 
 He had no apology to offer. He said as Luther said, 
 " I could not otherwise." Wise or foolish was not to 
 him the point. He had to do it because he was Lord 
 Spencer. On the strong, benignant face there was 
 no expression of regret or consciousness of fault. 
 There was no animosity against those who had wronged 
 him. He was of those who thought it nobler to 
 suffer an injury than to resent it. He made no pro- 
 fessions, quoted no text, had no air of righteousness. 
 He was a man of the world, and of the great world, 
 who had chosen to do what the world, had it known, 
 would have thought a foolish thing. He was content 
 that it should be so. 
 
 I had seen the great library at Althorp more than 
 once, intact. I am not going to describe it for 
 there is no room and descriptions of it are not want- 
 ing. But I saw it in such a way that I have always 
 felt as if I knew the collection better than I did. 
 The hours I spent there were hours of freedom. 
 On the morning after I arrived at Althorp Lord 
 Spencer said at breakfast : 
 
 " You shall have the keys and the place to yourself. 
 But you will have to find what you want. I am sorry 
 to say neither Lady Spencer nor I can be of any help. 
 We know nothing about the treasures which have 
 made the library famous." 
 
 The treasures were all in the one square corner
 
 THE FIFTH EARL SPENCER 147 
 
 room at the end of the south corridor. There were 
 other books everywhere. All the passages and halls 
 were lined with books, but they were for the most part 
 books which no gentleman's library should be without. 
 There are hundreds and thousands of such collections 
 all over England, standard works, Parliamentary 
 papers, histories, cyclopaedias long since out of date — 
 masses of volumes bought from a sense of duty and 
 never looked into. Thousands of excellent books, 
 none of distinction. 
 
 The books of distinction were in the square room. 
 The Valdarfer Boccaccio was there, the buying of 
 which at the Roxburghe sale, for a price then without 
 precedent, Emerson himself has sung in prose. The 
 Caxtons, the old Bibles, the Shakespeares, the rarities 
 of many kinds which entitled the Lord Spencer of 
 the time to think his the finest private library in the 
 world, as it probably was, were all in this one room, 
 in locked glass cases reaching to near the ceiling. In 
 fine condition, as a rule, though the Boccaccio in its 
 smart modern binding, with edges cut close, was a 
 disappointment. It is so great a library that not 
 even the greasy rhodomontade of Dibdin's six- 
 volume catalogue could degrade it. Toward lunch- 
 time Lord and Lady Spencer came in, asked how I 
 had been getting on, and looked at some of the books 
 I had taken out and was going over. Lord Spencer 
 took one into his hand, looked at it, opened it, shook 
 his head, and laid it down almost sadly, saying : 
 
 " I care for the library because it was my ancestors' 
 and is a part of Althorp, and a family possession. 
 But I never could have learned to value books as 
 books, even precious books like these." 
 
 There was a certain pathos in the words as there 
 was in his manner. But he spoke the exact truth,
 
 148 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 because it was the truth, and he never in his life 
 spoke anything else. In the afternoon we walked 
 across the fields to Brington Church, the burial- 
 place of Lawrence Washington and other Washingtons, 
 whose inscriptions and arms are to be seen in the 
 brasses and pavement stones of the little church. 
 
 " Your countrymen are always coming here," said 
 Lord Spencer. " It is an American shrine." 
 
 I said : " Yes, if we have a saint in the American 
 calendar, it is Washington." He considered a moment, 
 and added : 
 
 " Well, after all, he was an Englishman." 
 
 I told him I had more than once heard Sir William 
 Harcourt say that all the great Americans of that 
 great period were English. 
 
 " True, but they were Englishmen who chose to be 
 Americans." 
 
 An answer which would have pleased Harcourt 
 and silenced him. 
 
 Long as Earl Spencer had been out of the public 
 eye, the English evidently feel his loss, and feel that 
 one of the truest Englishmen of his time and of 
 all time is gone. The Irish themselves, the men, 
 or some of them, who heaped hateful epithets upon 
 him, and then, after he accepted Home Rule, heaped 
 eulogies on him more hateful still, now pay him a 
 homage which has nothing political in it. He passed 
 outside of politics upon his wife's death. That was 
 the end of everything for him. " I have lost all — 
 literally all." The firmness of his character was shaken 
 for the first time by that grief. With the strength 
 of his character there was always sweetness, always 
 beauty ; always a noble conception of life, and he so 
 lived his own life as to make his conception a noble 
 reality.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE LATE VISCOUNT GOSCHEN— A VERY INDI- 
 VIDUAL ANGLO-GERMAN ENGLISHMAN 
 
 '' A VIOLENT moderate man." 
 
 Such was the late Lord Goschen's description 
 of himself. But he was not, in truth, violent, and 
 not moderate. Otherwise the description is accurate. 
 
 Not violent, I should say, but contentious. Not 
 moderate, but an opportunist, when he was not too 
 stubborn. The epithets, one set or the other, have 
 no particular value. A man is not to be summed 
 up in an adjective ; least of all a man whose life was 
 public, who was everywhere to be met, who spoke 
 in Parliament and talked without stint in private ; 
 who was long a Minister of the Crown, a man of 
 business, of affairs, of very varied and substantial 
 gifts. Character and achievement are what you 
 judge by, in such a life as his. So judged, he stands 
 rather high, if not quite so high as his invincible 
 confidence in himself would put him. 
 
 To take the man of business first. I always thought 
 his best eulogy came from the City. That is where 
 the brains of finance are to be found. I have often 
 asked, and I have always had the same answer. The 
 great bankers and merchants of the City of London 
 thought Mr. Goschen, as he then was, a first-rate 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, and did not think Mr. 
 Gladstone first-rate. As for his conversion of Consols, 
 reducing the rate of interest first to 2^ per cent 
 
 149
 
 I50 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 and then to 2h, the manner of the operation was 
 reckoned masterly. Whether the result of it and the 
 effect on public credit can be deemed favourable is 
 another question. But it embedded his name in 
 financial history, since reduced Consols have ever 
 since been known as " Goschens." He went out 
 of business rather early, his fortune seeming to him 
 sufficient, and thenceforward devoted himself in 
 one way or another to politics. 
 
 My acquaintance with Mr. Goschen stretched 
 over a long period but was never in the least intimate. 
 I used to meet him at dinners or at houses in the 
 country. It happened sometimes after dinner, when 
 the ladies had gone, that I found myself next Mr. 
 Goschen, by no choice of his or mine. He was a 
 man to be respected and was respected ; and to be 
 liked if you were built that way. But his idea of 
 conversation was to plunge at once into argument. 
 With me he often chose an American topic ; thinking, 
 apparently, that on American topics I needed en- 
 lightenment, as perhaps I did, and that it was his 
 mission to enlighten me, which did not logically 
 follow. Still, I thought it very good of him to try. 
 His mental attitude was not unlike that of the late 
 Empress Frederick, when, as I have elsewhere re- 
 lated. Her Royal Highness — then Crown Princess — 
 was good enough to set forth at length her views 
 on things American for my benefit and instruction. 
 
 None the less, there was a certain pleasure in listen- 
 ing to Mr. Goschen. He knew as much of America 
 as most Englishmen of his time knew ; perhaps more. 
 But whether he knew much or little, listening to 
 him was an exercise of the mind. He understood 
 logic. Grant him his premise, and he led you step 
 by step irresistibly to his conclusion. I used sometimes
 
 THE LATE VISCOUNT GOSCHEN 151 
 
 to wonder where he got his premises. The office he 
 held brought him into no relation with the Govern- 
 ment of the United States. In the English newspapers, 
 at that time, the American news was meagre and 
 trivial. No doubt Mr. Goschen's firm in the City 
 had correspondents in New York, but information 
 from that source would relate chiefly to the money- 
 market. Mr. Goschen, nevertheless, ranged over 
 a wide American field. I must do him the justice 
 to say that though he dogmatized he liked to be 
 answered. He liked you, as the English generally 
 do, to stand up to him, if only for the pleasure of 
 bowling you over. Once I happened to say I agreed 
 with him. Instantly he retorted : 
 
 " No, that is not what I want. Even if you agree 
 with me you know the other side of the case, and 
 that is what I wish to hear." 
 
 Again it might be that he wanted a statement of 
 the other side in order to demolish it. No matter. 
 His was the attitude of a man who desired to get 
 at the truth, and, if he did not think the truth attain- 
 able otherwise, then controversially. His desire to 
 get it somehow was laudable. It remained laudable 
 even if by and by you came to see, or to believe, 
 that he thought the true home of truth not at the 
 bottom of a well but in his own head. A good many 
 people think the same of their heads. Said Mr. 
 Goschen once : 
 
 " Well, the truth must be somewhere, and truth 
 is not a matter of opinion but of fact." 
 
 " Mr. Ruskin said the same thing of art," I answered, 
 well knowing he did not regard Mr. Ruskin as an oracle, 
 and ehciting the retort I hoped for : 
 
 " Why do you quote Ruskin to me and what has 
 art to do with the question we are discussing ? "
 
 152 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 There you saw the man's habit of mind. He 
 fastened upon his subject. Nothing could divert 
 him from it. No illustration, no analogy, was to the 
 point. He kept as rigidly to the proposition he had 
 laid down as Euclid to his geometrical demonstrations. 
 Early in life he — I mean Mr. Goschen, not Euclid — 
 wrote a book on ^he Theory of the Foreign Exchanges. 
 Exchange, that is, in the financial sense of the word. 
 I have never read it, and am quite sure I should not 
 understand it if I did. But I have been told that 
 from beginning to end it is a chain of inseparable 
 links. He writes on this abstruse subject with mathe- 
 matical precision. I should be very much surprised 
 if he did not. 
 
 The one impossible subject was Free Trade and 
 Protection. He had in the highest degree the in- 
 tellectual arrogance of the confirmed Free Trader. 
 He knew perfectly well that the whole world, England 
 excepted, was Protectionist, yet he could not discuss 
 it unless in a tone which implied contempt for the 
 Protectionist. Yet he did his best to be polite, in the 
 beginning. 
 
 " I suppose you, like all intelligent Americans, 
 must deplore the Protectionist policy of your Govern- 
 
 ment." 
 
 " No, I am a Protectionist, and if you make belief 
 in Free Trade — your kind of Free Trade — a test 
 of intelligence in the United States, there are not 
 more than half a dozen intelligent Americans, and 
 they are college professors." 
 
 He was a man to attract attention anywhere. 
 Tall, strongly built, the shoulders powerful, a little 
 rounded and with a just perceptible stoop, his head 
 bent, as often happens to men who have a weight 
 of brains to carry. The features were largely moulded,
 
 THE LATE VISCOUNT GOSCHEN 153 
 
 and he had such a look of the Jew in him that he 
 thought it desirable to deny that he was of Jewish 
 descent. Hebraic he was not, but Teutonic. His 
 abrupt manner showed that. Plainly a personage ; 
 but more impressive than sympathetic. His short- 
 sightedness took from his appearance and put him 
 at a disadvantage. The steadfast gaze was lacking. 
 He peered out upon the world. But he bore this 
 misfortune, as he bore other things, with a philosophy 
 which strove to master an impatient temper, and 
 sometimes succeeded. In a country house known as 
 South Hill Park, where I sometimes met him, was 
 an oak staircase, the oak steps polished and uncarpeted ; 
 treacherous even to good eyes. Goschen clung to 
 the hand-rail as we went down, and at the bottom 
 said : 
 
 " Every time I descend these stairs safely it 
 strengthens my firm belief in an overruling and 
 beneficent Providence." 
 
 Not without reason was he grateful, but a spice 
 of danger was welcome in a house of peaceful beauty, 
 where attractions of many kinds abounded ; Lord 
 and Lady Haversham being two. 
 
 As a speaker Lord Goschen had two physical 
 defects. He was extremely near-sighted and his 
 voice was harsh. An orator — which he never was, 
 though a good debater — needs to be able to watch 
 the faces of those to whom he is talking. If he 
 cannot do that, he cannot judge of the effect he is 
 producing ; the expression of the features being far 
 more significant than applause or audible dissent. 
 As he could not see these expressions, he could not 
 vary his speech to suit the mood of his audience, 
 as all great orators do, since oratory is an appeal, 
 and by no means a spoken essay. His voice was so
 
 154 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 thin and raucous that you had to forget it in order 
 to open your mind to what he was saying ; nor was 
 his bearing good, or his manner. He seemed never 
 to care to persuade, but only to convince ; which 
 is fine from the moral point of view but ineffective 
 on the platform or even in the House of Commons. 
 In neither place do you get a fair hearing for your 
 arguments unless you first win the sympathies of 
 your hearers. 
 
 The same defects impaired the effect of his con- 
 versation, though perhaps in a less degree. As he 
 talked, the eyes narrowed in the attempt to see 
 clearly ; the brows knitted ; the features were dis- 
 torted, and the voice was rasping. Charm of manner 
 he had none, though I believe when you knew him 
 well his character had the charm which springs from 
 sincerity and from unusual mental powers ; if indeed 
 that be charm. All the same, you felt you were in 
 the presence of a masterful personality with abilities 
 equal to any post ; with a record of great and various 
 services equalled by few men of his time. He had 
 been First Lord of the Admiralty as well as Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer, and special Ambassador to Con- 
 stantinople in a formidable crisis. He had declined 
 the Speakership — where he would have been out of 
 place — and the Viceroyalty of India. The flowing 
 tide of Democracy was not strong enough to carry 
 Goschen with it. He stood on the bank and watched 
 the surging of the torrent seaward, bearing, as he 
 thought, destruction with it. Because he adhered 
 to the convictions which Mr. Gladstone had abandoned 
 he was not asked to join Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet in 
 1880. All honour to him. Mr. EUiot, whose rather 
 mechanical and almost impersonal Life of Goschen 
 has lately appeared, quotes from a talk between
 
 THE LATE VISCOUNT GOSCHEN 155 
 
 Palmerston and Goschen a sentence of fire. Palmer- 
 ston had told his young colleague he need not trouble 
 his head at present about domestic reforms. The 
 book was closed — for Palmerston. 
 
 " But you will soon have Gladstone and then you 
 will see strange things." 
 
 He did see them. We all saw them, and it was 
 Mr. Goschen's high task to lead the Liberal revolt 
 against Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule policy of 1886; 
 while Mr. Chamberlain was still weighing chances 
 and considering compromises, and while Lord Harting- 
 ton was making up his mind ; always with him a slow 
 process. 
 
 And when Mr. Goschen, because Lord Randolph 
 Churchill forgot him, became Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer in Lord Salisbury's Government, he had 
 already founded the Unionist Party, and had become, 
 as Mr. Garvin well describes him, " a sort of living 
 link between the Conservatives and their new allies, 
 and an inspiring agent in giving moral unity to the 
 coalition." If Lord Randolph " forgot Goschen," it 
 is certain that Mr. Gladstone never forgave Goschen ; 
 no, nor any of the other great, true Liberals who 
 forsook their leader rather than forsake their principles. 
 In the Grand Old Man — how that phrase, once in 
 all mouths, has passed out of use ! — was also a vin- 
 dictive old man. You opposed him at your peril. 
 But not for one moment did Goschen hesitate. 
 If all else be forgotten, that act of wise courage will 
 preserve his memory.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MR. GOLDWIN SMITH, SCHOLAR, APOSTLE, 
 HISTORIAN, WRITER OF ENGLISH 
 
 TN his original form Mr. Goldwin Smith was a 
 survival of the Renaissance. He was born out of 
 due time. By nature he was a scholar, which is a 
 contradiction in terms but true. He was in truth 
 a scholar of many accomplishments — the Humanities, 
 History, Political and Economical Science, and much 
 else. You could imagine him living his life in an 
 Oxford quadrangle, quite happy and quite useful 
 in a way ; in the way of the quadrangle. But there 
 was another Goldwin Smith, a kind of apostle, with 
 a message from on High to preach the Gospel. That 
 is the Goldwin Smith the world knew for near sixty 
 years. 
 
 Yet the Gospel he preached was his own, and 
 not always the same. Moreover, from time to time 
 the original Goldwin Smith reappeared, as it did 
 at Cornell. That was after he had endured a period 
 of disappointment. 
 
 But the impression he left after many years of 
 acquaintance was the same. We met, not fre- 
 quently, but always on exactly the same terms. 
 He wrote to me, not frequently, yet in the course of 
 years a large number of letters ; all exactly alike. 
 We were friends, but never said anything about it. 
 His letters began, " My dear Smalley," and plunged 
 at once into the discussion of the topic at that moment 
 
 156
 
 MR. GOLDWIN SMITH 157 
 
 uppermost in his mind ; or of the matter in which he 
 thought I might, as a journalist, be useful to him 
 or to his scheme. They ended not less abruptly. 
 Within four pages he would have stated his case 
 with the force and clearness he used in print ; then 
 without a word of transition, " Very truly yours, 
 Goldwin Smith." At one time he wrote much about 
 Canada and her relations to the United States, and 
 the inevitability of her annexation by the United 
 States, for commercial if not political reasons. He 
 was surprised that I, as an American, did not share 
 his views, but he never tired of stating and restating 
 them, until finally he either abandoned them him- 
 self or became convinced that neither in Canada nor 
 in the United States was there any important party 
 of his mind. 
 
 I kept these letters, and if I could get leave from 
 his executors would print them, or some of them. 
 But I am under no temptation at present to do it with- 
 out leave, for they are all locked up with a great many 
 more not less valuable, in a safe deposit vault in New 
 York. And I have not the courage to disturb them. 
 
 When we met, much the same thing happened 
 as when we wrote. A word or two, perhaps, of greet- 
 ing, and then to business. I used to think it a pity 
 his interests were so many. As he could not deal 
 with them all exhaustively he dealt with most of them 
 fragmentarily. He became a journalist. He wrote 
 no matter where, and on whatever subject had him 
 at the time in its grip. The Bystander, which he 
 founded and supported, never, I think, had a large 
 circulation, nor ever much influence except of a 
 secondary kind ; often the most important of all. 
 I mean that he reached the minds of other writers 
 and editors, and of many who were neither but read
 
 158 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 this queer sheet in order to know what Goldwin 
 Smith was thinking about. No medium of com- 
 munication with the pubhc was too insignificant. 
 When he used it it ceased to be insignificant. 
 
 He did much for Oxford. He did much for Cornell. 
 His multifarious activities were likely to be pro- 
 ductive whether they seemed to be right or seemed 
 to succeed or not. For his was a fertilizing mind, 
 and stony indeed must be the ground where what 
 he sowed would not take root. But if I am to single 
 out one service he did I should take The United States : 
 An Outline of Political History, 1492-1871. He meant 
 it chiefly for England. But it happens to be the 
 best history of its kind there is, whether for Americans 
 or English, and it was the first history in which the 
 anti-English prejudice which disfigures most histories 
 by American writers had been omitted. The good 
 example has since been followed, but it was Goldwin 
 Smith who set the example. It is, moreover, a master- 
 piece of narrative. The author was for so many years 
 accused by Canadians of being too American that to 
 Americans he cannot but be known as a friend. 
 Yet let me quote a sentence from the Preface to this 
 History : 
 
 " If it comes into the hands of an American, 
 his liberality will make allowance for the position 
 of an Englishman who regards the American Common- 
 wealth as the great achievement of his race, and looks 
 forward to the voluntary reunion of the American 
 branches of the race within its pale, yet desires 
 to do justice to the mother country, and to render 
 to her the meed of gratitude which will always be her 
 due." 
 
 That was dated in 1893, five years before England's 
 refusal to join the European coalition in favour of
 
 MR. GOLDWIN SMITH 159 
 
 Spain and against the United States taught us that 
 England was our friend. 
 
 One thing more. Goldwin Smith never lost 
 his distinction as a writer because of his continuous 
 immersions in journaHsm. He is a lesson to us all. 
 The lesson is there but the learners are never too 
 many. Perhaps the coldness of his temperament 
 helped him. In none of his handwriting that ever 
 I saw was there a trace of hurry or of impetuous 
 feeling. The stream was full but did not overflow 
 its banks. For his style I go further back than the 
 Renaissance. He had something of the purity of 
 the Greeks ; the simplicity, the absence of emphasis, 
 the total neglect of the superlative and the intensive 
 adverb. I do not know whom of his contemporaries 
 to put above him as a writer, nor whom to put beside 
 him. In the measured and melodious flow of his 
 prose, in its restrained force, in the beauty of its 
 grave cadences, in its purely intellectual quality and, 
 as a rule, in its distinction, he stands by himself. 
 He could hit very hard, and often did, but there 
 was something judicial in his anger ; it was not passion, 
 but a process of the mind. 
 
 In his melancholy quarrel with Disraeli it was 
 Goldwin Smith who began. His criticisms upon the 
 great Tory were acrimonious because they took no 
 account of circumstances nor of differing points of 
 view. When Disraeli replied by calling his critic a 
 parasite, the reply was neither apt nor damaging. 
 But it angered Goldwin Smith, whose message from 
 beyond the Atlantic about " the stingless insults 
 of a coward " was no better than Disraeli's taunt. 
 The Tory leader could strike blows that hurt when 
 he cared to, but he often contented himself with 
 an expression of contempt, almost always a cheap
 
 i6o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 retort because not often sincere and still less often 
 energetic. That seems to have been all he meant 
 to suggest when he remarked : " I am told I am pur- 
 sued in the public press by an Oxford Professor named 
 Smith." 
 
 If the Oxford Professor had political ambitions, 
 as he had, a wrangle of this sort with Disraeli was 
 not the way to promote them. But there were 
 other reasons which stood in the way. Two things 
 darkened his life and changed its course. The first 
 was his failure to win the Oriel fellowship on which 
 his heart was set, and the success of his rival Dean 
 Burgon whom he called a buffoon, as perhaps he 
 was. It may seem no great matter, especially as he 
 did secure a University College fellowship, and as 
 his Oxford career was starred with scholarships and 
 prizes, and later he became Regius Professor of Modern 
 History at Oxford. But he was profoundly chagrined 
 and he did not conceal his chagrin. He carried it 
 with him across the Atlantic ; it was one of the causes 
 which drove him into exile. The second of the two 
 tragedies was the insanity of his father, a doctor in 
 Reading, Berks ; and the dread lest a similar fate 
 might be his ; happily a groundless dread. But it 
 is easy to understand that a man pursued by such 
 a phantom as that might shrink from the collisions 
 of public life. 
 
 During visits to Canada I used to hear Goldwin 
 Smith discussed in varying tones. The fact that 
 he took Cornell on his way did not predispose the 
 Canadians to like him. Were there not universities 
 in Canada, and was not an Englishman's first duty 
 to his own country and her outlying provinces ? 
 Then came his theory of Canadian absorption by 
 the United States, which Canada hated, and from
 
 MR. GOLDWIN SMITH i6i 
 
 hating the theory to hating the author of it was 
 no long step. By and by the theory was relinquished, 
 and the theorist became popular on quite other 
 grounds, and remained so. There grew up an affection 
 toward him. His choice of Canada for his home lent 
 distinction to the Dominion, and his life was filled 
 with proofs of devotion to the land in which he had 
 chosen to dwell. But now, since his death, comes 
 the gift of his fortune to Cornell, and this, naturally 
 enough, is resented. Why should an Englishman 
 endow an American college ? But the EngHshman 
 had spent a great part of his life in trying to aboHsh 
 some of the barriers between English and Americans, 
 between what he always regarded as two halves of the 
 one British race. He had other enthusiasms, some of 
 which he kept in cold storage and took out as they 
 were wanted. But they were enthusiasms still. 
 
 The Englishman to whom Goldwin Smith seems 
 nearest akin, intellectually and personally, is Lord 
 Morley. Yet instantly contrasts present themselves, 
 and the contrasts seem sharper than the likenesses. 
 Lord Morley long had in him, and still has, not less 
 of the ascetic than Goldwin Smith, yet this did not 
 prevent him from entering public life and making 
 himself a great place there, which he still keeps. 
 The asceticism was somehow consistent with a real 
 sweetness of nature and a real sympathetic concern 
 in the interests of others. He left journalism, as 
 Lord Milner did, for politics, high politics, and for 
 years he governed 290,000,000 of Oriental subjects of 
 the Crown. He had laid aside so much of his early 
 Radicalism as would have made his Secretaryship 
 of India a disaster. He did not apply to the govern- 
 ment of the great military dependency of India 
 the principles of Mr. Keir Hardie or of our great 
 
 M
 
 i62 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Mr. Bryan, who based his eight columns of criticism 
 upon EngHsh rule in India on the ignorant beHef that 
 India is a colony. Lord Morley, in short, is so con- 
 stituted that he is capable of compromise, and has 
 that practical side to his character which has made 
 him a very able, very useful, very sensible Cabinet 
 Minister. If I were to enter upon a parallel between 
 him and Goldwin Smith I should have to leave out 
 all that. The parallel between them lies in their 
 intellectual qualities, their capacity for scholarship, 
 their unswerving loyalty to ideals, and in each a touch 
 of something like fanaticism ; in Lord Morley his 
 " sombre acquiescence " in the ferocities of the French 
 Revolution, and in Goldwin Smith his long-cherished 
 but academic faith in the readiness of the Canadians 
 to cease to be Canadians.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 PRINCE FRANCIS OF TECK 
 
 *" 1 ""O the late King he was always " My dear Frank." 
 To the German Emperor he was " My dear 
 Frank." 
 
 To the present King and to the Queen, whose 
 brother he was, he could hardly be anything else. 
 
 But to his friends and to many who were hardly 
 more than acquaintances he was " Frank " and " My 
 dear Frank." Which is equivalent to saying that he 
 was a very popular man : as he was. He was not a 
 Royalty, but he stood upon the steps of the Throne. 
 It is a difficult position. His mother, the late Duchess 
 of Teck, was one of the best-liked women in England ; 
 also in a difficult position. His father, the Duke of 
 Teck, had a kindliness of manner, and therefore 
 presumably of nature, not always, though often, 
 found in Serenities. 
 
 The English people have had a long apprenticeship 
 in such matters, but these German titles never come 
 very trippingly off an English tongue ; nor are the 
 things they represent a natural outgrowth of English 
 life. Inextricably interlaced as they are with what is 
 purely insular, they are accepted but they are not 
 welcomed for their own sake. The welcome depends 
 on the character of those to whom their German 
 distinctions belong by birth. It adds to the per- 
 plexity of the average Englishman when he finds a 
 Prince, who on one side of him is English, inferior 
 
 163
 
 i64 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 in rank to a Duke. Prince Francis of Teck was a 
 second son. His elder brother is Duke of Teck. There 
 is a third son, Prince Alexander. Their mother was 
 sister to the late Duke of Cambridge and cousin to 
 the late King. 
 
 I must use the word popular, with reference to this 
 family, over and over again. The Duchess of Teck 
 had a popularity of a very remarkable kind. She 
 laughed her way through life. It was perhaps for her 
 the easiest way of getting on, for she was very stout 
 and did not like walking. A genial, cheerful, sympa- 
 thetic soul. Her daughter, the present Queen, was 
 popular as a girl. When the late Prince Eddy, the 
 late King's eldest son, asked her to be his wife and she 
 consented, all England applauded. It was not a 
 brilliant match. The Heir to the Throne of England 
 might be expected to mate with the best Royalty 
 there was on the Continent, but brilliancies of that 
 kind are not what the English people care most for. 
 They liked this girl. They liked her fresh face and 
 pretty manner and her friendliness. At a garden 
 party at Marlborough House she appeared on the 
 terrace after the gardens were filled, and stood there 
 a moment looking down on the scene. There was 
 something like a murmur of admiration ; the nearest 
 permissible approach to applause in the circumstances. 
 The Queen was present, sitting under a tree, and 
 noticed it and her sad face brightened. Mr. Gladstone 
 was there and took note of the incident for his own 
 purposes : his face wearing the look of instantaneous 
 concentration often seen in the House of Commons 
 when debate took an unexpected and personal turn. 
 When Prince Eddy died it was thought right that his 
 younger brother. Prince George, should succeed him 
 as suitor to Princess Mary of Teck as well as in his
 
 PRINCE FRANCIS OF TECK 165 
 
 heirship to the Crown. And so it happened that the 
 Princess, more often called Princess May, came to 
 be Queen of England ; and is loved as Queen by her 
 people, who loved her as Princess May. 
 
 If I were writing of a death which had occurred 
 a hundred or two hundred years ago, I might say : 
 
 A King and Queen stood by his bed ; visited him 
 during his last illness ; were with him when he died, 
 and mourn for him now that he is gone. They were the 
 King and Queen of England. 
 
 To many a loyal subject that would be something 
 more than a consolation in his last hours. To Prince 
 Francis it could only have meant that the Queen 
 was his sister. Family ties are strong in this Royal 
 Family. It is one of the reasons of the hold they 
 have upon the affections of the people of England. 
 
 There are critics who say that Prince Francis 
 might have been saved. He would not have been ill 
 had he not gone to Balmoral before he had really 
 recovered from the operation on the throat of three 
 weeks before. He was not well enough for the return 
 journey, but it was a choice between that and staying 
 on in a climate which, to him, had become deadly. 
 Once here, and in a nursing home in Welbeck Street, 
 pneumonia had mastered the patient. His was the 
 kind of constitution, robust and of abounding vitality, 
 in which that malady plays worst havoc. 
 
 Moreover, it begins to be said that in respect of 
 certain maladies Continental methods of cure are 
 more efficient than English. The late King's was a 
 different and more difficult case, but there were 
 plenty of doctors in Paris and Berlin who thought, 
 and said, that he ought not to have been allowed to 
 die. I have heard here in London the same remark 
 on Prince Francis of Teck. But that is a purely
 
 i66 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Continental view. The Prince had the best treatment 
 England could give him. 
 
 Prince Francis was a soldier and a good officer. 
 He had served in India, in Egypt with Lord Kit- 
 chener, and in South Africa ; ending as brevet-major 
 in the ist Dragoons with a D.S.O. and the Queen's 
 Medal with three clasps. I was talking last night 
 with an officer who had served in South Africa with 
 even greater distinction than Prince Francis. He 
 said : 
 
 " There was this about Francis Teck. He could 
 get men to do things that other officers could not. 
 He was careless about danger. He had a great power 
 of work and an organizing ability, and looked after his 
 men thoroughly. That is the kind of officer for whom 
 men will do their best." 
 
 He looked it. He was a soldier all over ; tall — 
 I should think six feet — well set up, powerfully built, 
 with an air of command which in private he tried to 
 suppress but could not quite. He was one of the big- 
 nosed men whom Carlyle respected ; but the rest of 
 the features were in proportion, and the impression 
 of energy was not restricted to any one feature, but 
 came from the whole presence of the man. 
 
 I met him oftenest at a certain club where many 
 kinds of persons are to be met, most of whom have 
 some title or other to distinction ; not all, because 
 every club has its mistakes. Wherever you met him 
 he was the same. A great suavity of manner and a 
 great energy of manner at the same time ; perhaps 
 an unusual combination. The more a man bored him 
 the politer he would be. Into whatever occupied him 
 for the moment he put his whole soul. He would 
 not talk to you about it unless you were interested 
 and asked ; then he would pour out details. He had
 
 PRINCE FRANCIS OF TECK 167 
 
 devoted himself to setting up an Automobile Club 
 on a great scale, and now the club building lifts its 
 fine facade in Pall Mall, a monument to the enthusiasm 
 and administrative capacity of the Prince. 
 
 It is a monument also to something else. I once 
 asked Prince Francis how he had managed to get his 
 club built so quickly, so much more quickly than 
 is usual with important structures in this country. 
 He said : 
 
 " I hoped you would ask me that. It has been 
 built in this short time because I sent to America 
 for American foremen and put them in charge. The 
 credit is due to them." 
 
 " Did they get on well with their English workmen 
 and the English workmen with them ? " 
 
 " I have never heard a complaint from either. 
 Moreover, the work has been done not only quickly 
 but well and solidly; no building more so." 
 
 It covers nearly the whole of the site of the old 
 War Office, and is, or soon will be, the last word, 
 at any rate on this side of the Atlantic, in luxury and 
 conveniences and variety in club life. Prince Francis 
 himself was in one thing American ; he had an open 
 mind and did not reject a novelty because it was 
 a novelty or had no precedent. What will happen 
 to the club now that he is gone is a question. It has, 
 I believe, five or six thousand members, and contains 
 two hundred bedrooms, and almost everything you 
 can think of except a race-track for motors. 
 
 He was chairman of the Middlesex Hospital ; 
 the same hospital to which Sir Henry Morris was 
 Consulting Surgeon. Of his work as chairman I 
 hear the account I should expect. He mastered the 
 whole business of hospital government, gave time 
 without stint to his duties and was a devoted, inde-
 
 i68 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 fatigable, intelligent executive. It is the chronic 
 condition of all London hospitals supported by- 
 voluntary contributions to be in debt. The Middlesex 
 owed ^20,000 which it had no means of paying. 
 Prince Francis set to work and in three months or so 
 raised the whole amount ; begged it from the public. 
 Then, instead of resting ©n his laurels, which is not 
 what laurels are meant for, he proposed to raise 
 another larger sum to put this great hospital on a self- 
 supporting basis. And then death came. 
 
 Prince Francis had a generous side to his energies, 
 even in little matters ; he liked doing kindnesses for 
 others. Little things or big, the spirit was the same. 
 When Mr. Bourke Cockran was in London last year 
 he brought his automobile with him. He was going 
 to the Continent ; and to take an automobile with 
 you from England to the Continent involves some 
 rather technical arrangements with the customs and 
 other authorities. Neither Mr. Cockran nor his 
 chauffeur knew exactly what to do. We went upstairs 
 — this was at the Ritz Hotel — to call on an English 
 lady, a brilliant being who lives in New York, and 
 there we found Prince Francis. When he heard of 
 the automobile difficulties, he said at once : 
 
 " Why, that's in my jurisdiction. That's what 
 the Royal Automobile Club exists for. Give me the 
 facts and I'll arrange it all for you." 
 
 Mr. Bourke Cockran was a stranger to him but that 
 made no difference. Turning to his hostess, he asked 
 if he might use her telephone, called up the secretary 
 of the Automobile Club, told him what was wanted, 
 asked him to see that the fermalities were attended to, 
 and ended with a characteristic sentence : 
 
 " Please understand, the details I have given you 
 are all you need. Do not trouble Mr. Cockran, but
 
 PRINCE FRANCIS OF TECK 169 
 
 arrange so that when he arrives at Dieppe he shall find 
 his motor waiting for him, ready to start for Paris, 
 and his papers all in order. The chauffeur will have 
 funds for all expenses. You quite understand ? 
 Thank you. Good-bye." 
 
 He dies at forty, but in his forty years he has lived 
 the full measure of ordinary lives. He departs amid 
 such expressions of grief and affection as attend a man 
 to his grave, not because of his position or relations, 
 but because he was a man.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE AS ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 
 AMBASSADOR 
 
 T HOPE nobody will misapprehend the meaning 
 o£ Anglo-American as applied to a man who was 
 British Ambassador first, last, and all the time. No 
 man ever stood more stoutly on all occasions for 
 his country's interests and rights. But what I mean 
 is that, in the long run. Lord Pauncefote's rectitude 
 and sense of fairness, of justice, of friendship as the 
 first policy of the two countries, inured to the benefit 
 of both. In that sense he was Anglo-American. 
 Of that his friends on both sides may be proud, 
 and for that we Americans have every reason to be 
 grateful to this Englishman. 
 
 Lord Pauncefote was a great Ambassador, and as 
 such my memories of him are abundant. So are they 
 of the man himself, and I hardly know which of the 
 two ought to have precedence. But the truth is they 
 cannot be separated, since he could not have accom- 
 plished what he did as Ambassador had he been any 
 other than the Sir Julian Pauncefote who first came 
 to Washington to represent his Sovereign and country 
 as Minister Plenipotentiary. Moreover, at the end of 
 his thirteen years' service it was hard to say whether 
 England or the United States was most in his debt. 
 
 170
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 171 
 
 That could be said of few diplomatists, and it is 
 perhaps because he was not primarily a diplomatist 
 that it can be said of him. 
 
 It sounds like irony to admit that when, in 1889, 
 Sir Julian Pauncefote was appointed to be Her 
 Majesty's Minister in Washington the appointment 
 was sharply criticized. But it was mainly because 
 Sir Julian was not in the direct line of diplomatic 
 promotion. His training and life work had been 
 largely that of a lawyer and judge ; then he had been 
 brought into the Foreign Office which had not been 
 treated until of late years as a stepping-stone to diplo- 
 matic preferment. The men who were pushed aside 
 to make room for him not unnaturally complained. 
 But of such complaints Lord Salisbury, then Prime 
 Minister, took little heed. He was in search of a 
 man who could do the work, at that time far more 
 anxious and difficult than now, which he wanted done. 
 Had there been such a man among the Ambassadors 
 or Ministers then available, that man would probably 
 have been sent ; but there was no one. I do not 
 think we have ever done full justice in America to 
 Lord Salisbury in his relations with the United States. 
 What he most cared for was to promote a good under- 
 standing between his country and ours. He thought 
 Sir Julian the man best fitted for that task, and 
 therefore made him Minister. Never was a happier 
 choice ; never one which more signally evinced Lord 
 Salisbury's judgment of men. 
 
 On the morrow of this nomination Lord Rosebery 
 said to me : 
 
 " Of course you know Pauncefote ? " 
 
 " No ; I have never met him." 
 
 " But you should know him ; now that he is going 
 to Washington you must know him. Come to lunch
 
 172 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to-morrow and I will ask Pauncefote, and you two 
 can have a talk." 
 
 That is one more of the many kindnesses I owe to 
 Lord Rosebery. He, who had been Foreign Secretary, 
 understood better than most men the value, or rather 
 the necessity, of personal acquaintance with diplo- 
 matists to whom a journalist has to stand in some sort 
 of relation. 
 
 " Besides, you will have to say something about 
 Pauncefote in ' the States,' where I suppose he is 
 little known, and it is desirable you should meet him 
 for that purpose." 
 
 The morrow came and with it Sir Julian Pauncefote, 
 at 38 Berkeley Square. He entered the reception- 
 room next to the lesser dining-room with an air I 
 thought uncertain ; perhaps only the air of deference 
 which a new Minister Plenipotentiary might naturally 
 assume to an ex-Foreign Secretary of renown. His 
 manner had about it a certain formality also ; it 
 came near being stiff. He knew he was to meet a 
 journalist, and I dare say that put him a little on his 
 guard. To the official mind an unknown journalist 
 is an object of suspicion. Besides, he was on trial ; 
 he was new to his new position, and previous experience 
 gave him no great confidence. 
 
 All the same, he was impressive. His fine, powerful 
 head rose well out of his broad shoulders, and the 
 whole figure had power if not authority. He was 
 already bald but that only served to show the full 
 outline of a well-balanced head. It was plain to see 
 that inside it was a brain which was used, and had all 
 his life been used, in serious work. There was a slight 
 stoop ; the shoulders not quite square ; as of one 
 long accustomed to bending over a desk. The blue 
 eyes had a student look in them ; the mouth lacked
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 173 
 
 decision. I thought him in that first moment less 
 a man o£ the world than of books and courts. He 
 looked at you, or down on you, as if from the bench 
 where he had sat so long ; and though a judge has in 
 this country, if not always with us, the authority of 
 a ruler in his own dominions, that authority does not 
 reach beyond the four walls within which he is 
 supreme. 
 
 You expect, first of all, from a diplomatist suavity, 
 temie, and a manner of conciliation. Sir Julian had 
 none of all that. He was rigid, self-contained ; 
 courteous, certainly, and even cordial, yet with the 
 remoteness of a man engaged at that moment rather 
 upon the solving of a legal problem than upon adjusting 
 a new social relation. The stamp of diplomacy most 
 marked was his reserve, yet even that was not really the 
 trait of a trained diplomatist. A trained diplomatist 
 is reserved while appearing open ; one who has the 
 air of telling you everything and yet tells you nothing ; 
 who seems to go with you all the way, yet advances 
 never an inch beyond the line he has drawn for himself. 
 I take it few men have this finish of deportment 
 save those who have spent their lives in acquiring 
 it by the daily and yearly practice of those arts which 
 are to be learned only in the actual exercise of diplo- 
 matic functions. A man exceptionally gifted may 
 attain to that distinction without experience, but such 
 men are rare, and Sir Julian certainly was not one of 
 them. 
 
 Nor can the lack of early training, or of the qualities 
 which sometimes are a gift of nature at birth, often 
 be supplied later in life. What Sir Julian was, or 
 what he seemed to me, on this first acquaintance, 
 he remained to the end. He was never a diplomatist 
 in the drawing-room. He never acquired the small
 
 174 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 graces and social dexterity of a man who begins as 
 attache and climbs through long years to the top of 
 his profession. 
 
 But he became the greatest Ambassador England 
 ever sent to the United States. He was so great that 
 it matters little whether he grafted upon the parent 
 stock of sterling character and qualities the flower 
 and foliage-bearing scions that ornament the trunk 
 in which flows the sap that vitalizes the tree. I will 
 give you later one brilliant example of his unfitness 
 to contend with colleagues who practised, upon him 
 or against him, the artifices by which a diplomatic 
 expert thinks it permissible to entrap an opponent. 
 
 So new was Sir Julian to his new post that during 
 all this lunch he felt his way. Every sentence had the 
 air of having been considered. Not one was allowed 
 to pass his lips except as a second thought. Lord 
 Rosebery noticed this and tried to give a freer course 
 to the talk, but could not. I do not think I was the 
 obstacle, for later, as we walked away together, Sir 
 Julian poured out his soul. His delight in the life now 
 opening before him flowed freely into words. His 
 talk became spontaneous and his mood confiding. 
 I was so much encouraged by this that presently 
 I told him I thought it might be for the interest of 
 his mission if, before he landed in New York, the 
 Americans were allowed to learn more about him 
 than they yet had. Without knowing it I had struck 
 the right note. It was the interest of his mission 
 and not his own which he cared for. He said : 
 
 " Yes, your people cannot know much about me ; 
 nor can even the President or your Secretary of State, 
 with whom I am to do business. If you think an ac- 
 count of my official life would help, I will give you 
 the material, to make such use of as you think^best."
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 175 
 
 I am quite certain no such idea as this had occurred 
 to him before, and he certainly had no conception 
 of what he might be called upon to face in the way 
 of publicity on his arrival in America. I can imagine 
 that journalism, as such, was not what most appealed 
 to him. But he saw quickly that it might have uses, 
 and was perhaps readier to avail himself of them than 
 if he had served a long apprenticeship to diplomacy 
 in European capitals. I warned him I should send 
 an appreciation as well as the facts. In short, I think 
 he saw that an introduction to the American people 
 through The New Tork Tribune would be as likely as 
 anything else to put him on good terms with them 
 and with the official world in Washington. He gave 
 me the material, I wrote the letter, and The Tribune 
 published it. 
 
 As I did not leave London till 1895, I saw little of 
 the new Minister before that date. But when I went 
 to New York for The Times I saw much, in the way of 
 duty and otherwise. He had then been six years 
 Minister and, after 1893, Ambassador. Yet his natural 
 simplicity and kindness of heart had survived this 
 experience, and when he heard I was going to Washing- 
 ton on a visit he asked me to stay at the Embassy. 
 I should have liked nothing better than to be his 
 guest, but I thought it would not do ; either for him 
 or for me. An Ambassador cannot afford to keep a 
 tame correspondent nor can a correspondent afford to 
 be tamed, or to be under any but inevitable obligations 
 to anybody. The inevitable are more than enough. 
 I explained to him that as his guest I should put myself 
 under an obligation, and that as The Times representa- 
 tive I must be, first of all, independent. 
 
 " I may have to criticize you and I cannot do that 
 from under your roof."
 
 176 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 He thought I was very stiff about it, but assented. 
 There grew up between us, none the less, a friendship 
 which lasted, unbroken and uncheckered, to the day 
 o£ his death; and lasts still. During the Venezuela 
 negotiations I came very near to offending him — 
 perhaps did offend him, since some of these negotia- 
 tions were unofficial, and were transacted outside of 
 the Embassy and, for a time, without the knowledge 
 of the Ambassador. But his was too large a nature 
 to quarrel or take umbrage on a point of etiquette. 
 He never made any other than an indirect allusion 
 to my relations with Mr. Olney, nor do I suppose 
 that he ever knew the whole truth. There was no 
 reason why he should, nor do I believe for a moment 
 it would have troubled the friendship between us if 
 he had. Whatever he knew, that friendship went on 
 strengthening. I was indebted to it and to him in 
 many ways. I cannot acknowledge that too freely. 
 Then there came an hour when, thanks to his confidence 
 and to my connection with The Ti7nes, I was able to 
 repay my debt in part, and to do him a service. Debt 
 and repayment are, at best, but conventional terms, 
 and not quite apt. We were friends, that is enough ; 
 that covers the obligations on both sides, and I shall 
 speak of them as acts of friendship ; as acts arising 
 partly from mutual regard, but, on Lord Paunce- 
 fote's side, first and always from public duty. 
 
 II 
 
 In these days when Arbitration, thanks to the President 
 first and then to Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Balfour, is 
 passing out of the hypothetical into the practical stage, 
 it becomes us to keep in mind what we owe to those 
 who led the way. The first treaty of general arbitration
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 177 
 
 between. England and the United States was the work 
 of Lord Pauncefote and Mr. Olney. They had legal 
 minds, learned and full, from which the spirit of con- 
 tention was absent. 
 
 They worked together in harmony. No two men 
 were more competent to frame such an agreement. 
 If it was not an agreement for unlimited arbitration, 
 it went as far as the public opinion of that day would 
 follow ; and further. No treaty can be made to-day 
 without reference to this. It was built on recognized 
 principles of international jurisprudence : a science 
 which both Lord Pauncefote and Mr. Olney had 
 mastered ; at different dates. The Senate wrecked it 
 — a body of legislators ever more jealous of its usurped 
 prerogative than careful of those international interests 
 with which America is more than ever bound up. But 
 the names of these two men are to be honoured and 
 their services gratefully recognized whenever the word 
 Arbitration is pronounced. 
 
 From the final blow struck by the Senate, a blow 
 below the belt. Lord Pauncefote never recovered. It 
 shattered his most cherished ideals. It shortened his 
 life. But the treacherous hostility of the Senate can- 
 not blunt the memory of the two nations of whom he 
 was the benefactor. It remains to us to hope that 
 the Senate of to-day may be inspired by better pur- 
 poses and abandon once and for all its role of obstruc- 
 tion and destruction and earn a better name than that 
 of the graveyard of treaties. The sins of the past 
 cannot be forgotten. Rightly remembered and aptly 
 recalled, they may become the stepping-stones to good 
 deeds in the future. But the pressure of an over- 
 whelming, an overmastering, public opinion is still 
 needed. Senators have defied it in the past. They 
 cannot withstand it for ever. Defiance is no mark of 
 
 N
 
 178 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 statesmanship. The Senate is an entrenched camp, 
 but the people of the United States are an irresistible 
 army. 
 
 Lord Pauncefote, I must add, was to a certain 
 extent personally unpopular with Senators. Often as 
 he had been urged to make himself -persona grata to 
 those mighty men, often as he had been assured that 
 it was even a diplomatic necessity, he would do nothing 
 to win favour with a body to whom he stood, as he 
 thought, in no diplomatic relation. He governed his 
 conduct to Senators, as he governed his conduct to 
 all men, by rules of uniform courtesy and good will. 
 Tribute or homage he would pay neither to them nor 
 to others. He was the representative of his Sovereign, 
 and sovereigns do not crook the bended knee to those 
 about them. Senators thought his simplicity and 
 friendly independence a rebuke to their pretensions, 
 and resented it. I do not say that such motives 
 influenced Senatorial votes on great questions of 
 public policy. But they created an atmosphere in 
 that august chamber the breathing of which did not 
 make for the easy ratification of treaties which bore 
 Lord Pauncefote's signature. 
 
 This first treaty of arbitration is Lord Pauncefote's 
 legacy to us. We owe it to his memory and to Mr. 
 Olney, happily still living, to enforce their earlier 
 counsels of perfection ; to accept their work as an 
 inspiration. For without the efforts of these men we 
 should not be where we are to-day. They still speak 
 to us by the mouths of the President and of his English 
 colleagues in their great mission of peace and in their 
 efforts for the peaceful settlement of disputes between 
 the two great nations they represent. 
 
 The Arbitration treaty was a crisis in Lord Paunce- 
 fote's life as Ambassador. The second crisis was of a
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 179 
 
 very different order, provoked by his rivals, of whom 
 three were conspicuous agents in its first stage. They 
 fashioned the material. They sent it to their govern- 
 ments, and one at least of those governments stored it 
 away for future use ; a deposit of dynamite. And at 
 the moment when it was thought most likely to de- 
 stroy Lord Pauncefote's influence and to make trouble 
 between England and the United States, a great 
 Potentate touched it off ; an Emperor-journalist, with 
 a journalist's love of the sensational ; the Hearst of 
 Berlin. 
 
 For to disturb the friendship between Great Britain 
 and the United States was then, and has since been, 
 and still is, one cardinal point of the Kaiser's policy. 
 His Imperial Majesty may suppose that his successive 
 and continuing attempts to this end are not under- 
 stood in America. But they are understood. Ask any 
 American naval officer against whom or what America 
 is building battleships, and listen to his answer. If 
 you asked Mr. Roosevelt his answer might be, for 
 reasons of State, less categorical yet still illuminating. 
 
 The story I shall tell is not new, for it goes back 
 in its beginning to 1898, and in its climax to 1902, 
 yet the facts are not, I imagine, fresh in the public 
 memory, nor so well known in England and America 
 as abroad, and I retell it briefly. 
 
 It is no secret that when we went to war with 
 Spain in 1898 the sympathies of Continental Europe 
 were on the side of Spain and not of the United States. 
 It is no secret that some of the skilled diplomatists who 
 represented those powers in Washington conceived a 
 scheme whereby effect might be given to those 
 sympathies. The leading mind among them — whether 
 the leading spirit I cannot say, though I am inclined 
 to think not — was the French Ambassador, M. Jules
 
 i8o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Cambon, brother to M. Paul Cambon, French Am- 
 bassador to Great Britain then and now. Among 
 them, at any rate, they agreed that each should send 
 to his own Government a proposal for a remonstrance 
 to be addressed by all their Governments to the United 
 States against the war. They were five in all. The 
 five met by themselves and agreed to ask the British 
 Ambassador to join them ; and not only to join them 
 but to draft the dispatch he and the five were to send 
 to their Governments separately. 
 
 It was a very subtle piece of diplomacy. They did 
 not disclose to Lord Pauncefote their real object. 
 They knew him as a lover of peace and they thought 
 it possible to induce him, as a lover of peace, to make 
 an appeal to the American Government in the name 
 of peace. This appeal they meant to turn to their 
 own ends. They well knew that Lord Pauncefote 
 would wittingly be party to no plot hostile to us. 
 But they thought he could be used without his know- 
 ledge. 
 
 Had Lord Pauncefote been one of the diplomatic 
 brotherhood, trained all his life in the arts of Con- 
 tinental diplomacy, no such scheme would have been 
 hatched, still less proposed to him. But he was a man 
 who used, as Burke used, " no arts but manly arts " ; 
 nor was it in his nature to suspect others of conduct 
 less loyal than his own. Assuming that his colleagues 
 came to him in good faith, in good faith he drafted 
 the dispatch they sought from him. It was upon their 
 initiative and request that he put upon paper his 
 thoughts on the situation and his suggestions for a 
 friendly proposal to the United States in the interests 
 both of the United States and of peace. There was 
 not a word at which an American could take offence. 
 
 But this did not suit the purpose of the Five who
 
 . LORD PAUNCEFOTE i8i 
 
 on that eventful morning walked across Connecticut 
 Avenue in a body from the Austrian to the British 
 embassy. When Lord Pauncefote had read his paper 
 a silence fell upon the company. Then one after 
 another criticized and proposed alterations. Finally, 
 M. Cambon offered to take it and redraft it in accord- 
 ance with the general opinion of the Five. He did 
 take it ; left the library where they were assembled, 
 went into the chancery of the embassy, was gone half 
 an hour, and returned with the new draft which he 
 read aloud. He had done his work with consummate 
 craft ; a craft equal in its way to Bismarck's with the 
 Ems dispatch. With the exception of a single phrase, 
 the paper was still, so far as words went, void of 
 offence to the general mind. But to the diplomatic 
 mind the new draft now read not as an appeal but a 
 remonstrance, and a remonstrance such as no govern- 
 ment addresses to another unless prepared to follow it 
 up in one way or another. But the object of it was 
 cunningly concealed in plausible phrases, and the 
 transformation, unhappily, was not at once evident to 
 Lord Pauncefote, and the offensive phrase passed 
 equally unperceived. 
 
 There was a further discussion ; the sitting lasted 
 long ; some verbal amendments were made, of no 
 significance, and in the end the British Ambassador 
 accepted and signed and sent to the Foreign Office in 
 London, as his own, M. Cambon's dispatch. But the 
 Foreign Office, with Lord Sanderson then its per- 
 manent head and always with a staff of men versed 
 in the rules of diplomacy, said latet unguis in herba, 
 and coldly made answer that Her Majesty's Govern- 
 ment did not think it desirable to forward the dispatch 
 to the American Government. And there, for the 
 time, the matter dropped. The conspiracy had failed.
 
 i82 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Four years later Washington was startled by a Press 
 dispatch from Berlin, obviously official or semi-official, 
 accusing Lord Pauncefote of having initiated and 
 sought to carry through a measure of European inter- 
 vention unfriendly to the United States and in aid 
 of Spain. This charge, we were told, rested upon the 
 contemporary dispatches of the German Ambassador, 
 Baron HoUeben, who had made a full statement of the 
 facts to his Government. But the German Emperor, 
 out of his infinite kindness and good will to America, 
 had himself intervened to frustrate that wicked British 
 plot. He had expressed upon the margin of the pro- 
 posed remonstrance his Imperial disapproval and his 
 Imperial command that no such remonstrance should 
 be sent. The dullest could not but infer that Germany 
 and not England was the true friend of the United 
 States. 
 
 Why Germany had waited four years to declare its 
 friendship, and why the declaration was made at a 
 critical moment in the relations of the three Powers, 
 the Emperor omitted to explain. But a high per- 
 sonage in Washington said : 
 
 " I do not believe the Imperial ink on the margin 
 of Holleben's four-year-old dispatch was dry when 
 the press telegram was sent from Berlin." 
 
 Ill 
 
 This blast from the Imperial trumpet at Berlin 
 rang through the land. It was a declaration of the 
 utmost gravity, and had to be met at once if the 
 mischief it meant were to be prevented. I went to 
 Lord Pauncefote early that morning and found him 
 in no little anxiety. He said at once :
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 183 
 
 " I know why you have come but I can tell you 
 nothing." 
 
 I asked Lord Pauncefote to consider the nature of 
 the accusation against him ; the source of it ; the 
 world-Vv^ide publicity given to it ; and the effect of it, 
 both here and at home, on his position as Ambassador. 
 
 " Yes, I have thought of all that, but it is not con- 
 sistent with my position as Ambassador to be drawn 
 into a personal controversy. I shall make no reply. 
 Better that I should suffer than that the interests of 
 my Government and the friendship of the two 
 countries should suffer." 
 
 Then I saw what I ought to have understood at 
 first, that Lord Pauncefote not only put aside his own 
 welfare and reputation, but that his refusal to explain 
 sprang from his belief that any explanation, since it 
 must be controversial, would be to the detriment of 
 the great public interests he had at heart. You could 
 read it in his face ; care-laden, anxious, distressed. He 
 looked older than yesterday ; bent, half -broken. The 
 shot fired from Berlin had reached him ; he was a 
 stricken man. In his thought for his country he was 
 doing injustice to himself. I saw it was useless to talk 
 to him of the wrong and outrage he was asked to 
 endure. There was but one appeal to make, and I 
 made it : 
 
 " Lord Pauncefote, I will do as you are doing. I 
 will leave you and your character and honour — for 
 both are assailed — out of the question. What I ask 
 you is from regard to your Government, which is 
 assailed through you, and from regard to the two 
 peoples whom you have done so much to bring to- 
 gether, to let the truth be known." 
 
 He thought, and presently said : 
 
 " No, I do not see it as you do, and I can say nothing
 
 1 84 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to you as Times correspondent. But you arc my 
 friend and I will tell you the facts in confidence." 
 
 So he began the story given in my last chapter, of 
 which I knew already the substance. But as he went 
 on I saw that if all this was in confidence I could no 
 longer use as they ought to be used the facts I had 
 learned at the time from other sources, and I inter- 
 rupted his narrative : 
 
 " Lord Pauncefote, this is far too serious to be 
 handled as a private matter between you and me. I 
 can listen to no more in confidence. Either our talk 
 m-ust end here or you must leave it to my discretion 
 to deal with the whole as I think right." 
 
 Again he hesitated and I rose to go, but finally he 
 said : 
 
 " Well, you may be a better judge than I of the 
 public interests at stake. If you will consider those 
 alone you may publish so much as you judge needful." 
 
 Then he went over the whole business. What I 
 have said was based partly on Lord Pauncefote's state- 
 ment, partly on other testimony. What I am concerned 
 to make clear now is the absolute loyalty and dis- 
 interestedness of the Ambassador at whom these 
 calumnies had been flung. When he had finished I 
 asked a few questions, which he answered. Then 
 I said : 
 
 " It is quite understood I am to use all this as I 
 think proper. I only wish to say that I hope it may 
 be possible to state all the essential facts in The Times 
 without explaining that any of them came from you." 
 
 On that we parted and I went to the President. 
 His first words were the same as Lord Pauncefote's : 
 
 " I know why you have come." 
 
 But he went on in a very different tone : 
 
 " I can answer your question before it is asked.
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 185 
 
 Not only do I not believe this Berlin story, but I 
 know it is false. I know Lord Pauncefote to be in- 
 capable of an act unfriendly to this country. Since 
 he has been Ambassador he has striven with all his 
 heart to promote good will between England and us. 
 If he had said and done what Holleben accuses him of, 
 it would have been disloyal to himself and treacherous 
 to us. He is incapable of that. He is incapable of 
 anything but true and honourable conduct." 
 " May I say in The Times that you said that ? " 
 The President's answer was characteristic. 
 " You may say that I said it, but not to you." 
 I obeyed at the time. But Mr. Roosevelt is no 
 longer President and I am no longer Times correspon- 
 dent ; it is a case of cessante ratione, cessat lex. We 
 shall never again stand to each other in the relation 
 in which we then stood. The reason for his caution 
 was evident. As it no longer exists, I hope he will 
 hold me absolved from a promise which I kept as he 
 meant it to be kept ; while there was any necessity 
 for keeping it. The jealousies of those days are, I 
 trust, extinct. 
 
 I cabled the full story to The Times in which it 
 appeared next morning. It was a statement which, on 
 the face of it, was based upon knowledge and upon 
 producible evidence. That, and its appearance in 
 The Times, killed the Berlin fiction dead. There was 
 a sort of half-apologetic telegram from Berlin on the 
 day following, but that particular attempt to make a 
 scapegoat of Lord Pauncefote and to embroil England 
 and the United States was abandoned. I think I never 
 did a more useful piece of work. The Emperor showed 
 his chagrin by recalling his own Ambassador. Holleben 
 deserved what he got, but he was not the one most to 
 blame.
 
 1 86 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 During the few months of life which remained to 
 him, Lord Pauncefote was faiUng fast but did his 
 work as before. The attachment to him in Washington 
 was such as no other Ambassador had ever called forth. 
 For years the British Embassy had never been spoken 
 of as the British Embassy. It was always " The 
 Embassy." Holleben was furious at the distinction, 
 and perhaps other Ambassadors, the Russian most of 
 all, were vexed. But Washington cared naught for 
 their anger, and when Count Cassini, having been re- 
 called from Washington and sent to Madrid, thought 
 fit to say he had been " promoted " to Madrid, Wash- 
 ington was only amused. The supremacy of " The 
 Embassy " as a diplomatic and social centre remained 
 untouched. Lord Pauncefote was the doyen of the 
 diplomatic corps ; thanks partly to the pains taken by 
 Lord Rosebery, Foreign Minister at the time, that 
 his credentials as Ambassador should reach him before 
 any of his colleagues could present theirs. He was 
 the first Ambassador who ever had audience of a 
 President of the United States. It was well that this 
 primacy should have been his ; and well that the 
 position had Lord Pauncefote to maintain it. The 
 social atmosphere of the Embassy was always delight- 
 ful ; a condition due not to the Ambassador only, 
 whose wife and family had a charm and popularity 
 of their own. There has not been since, and it is 
 not likely there will ever be, another Lord Pauncefote. 
 It is still less likely that another Ambassador will have 
 the opportunity of equalling his services to both 
 nations, since all the great controversies then open are 
 now closed. And Arbitration lights up the horizon. 
 
 The honours paid him on his death were without 
 example. The President, who calls on nobody, flung 
 etiquette to the winds and called in person on Lady
 
 LORD PAUNCEFOTE 187 
 
 Pauncefote to offer his condolences and his tribute to 
 the dead. The President personally gave orders that 
 the flags on every public building in Washington should 
 be half-masted. He personally ordered the State 
 funeral, an act which impressed England and all 
 Europe beyond all others, except perhaps when, a 
 little later, an American battleship, again by the 
 President's orders, bore the body of this British Am- 
 bassador home to Great Britain. The President, again 
 in disregard of a hitherto unbroken rule of etiquette, 
 was himself present at the funeral service in St. John's 
 Church. The orders to his Secretary of War for the 
 parade of fifteen hundred American troops in honour 
 of this British subject were the President's orders. 
 The fifteen hundred lined Connecticut avenue from 
 the Embassy to the Church. 
 
 All Washington was in mourning : in mourning for 
 a great Ambassador and for a friend. The streets were 
 thronged ; the people in black. If he had been an 
 American no deeper reverence could have been paid 
 him, nor would the grief have been more genuine. The 
 solemn service in the church ended, as if for a soldier, 
 with bugle notes ; " taps " ; the camp summons to 
 sleep ; now to a lasting sleep. When the coffin was 
 borne out, the President, his ministers and other 
 great officers of state, judges, generals, admirals, and 
 the foremost citizens of the capital, waited with heads 
 uncovered. The troops stood to arms, then swung 
 into column and moved on as the Ambassador's escort 
 on his journey. And so, to martial music and the 
 tread of armed men, the homage of War to Peace, this 
 great messenger and instrument of peace departed 
 from among us.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 THE PRESENT AMERICAN AMBASSADOR, 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 
 
 IX/TR. WHITELAW REID has now been seven 
 years American Ambassador in London ; a tenure 
 long enough to create a pleasing impression of solidity 
 in our diplomatic service. The impression, unhappily, 
 is an illusion. Mr. Reid's length of service is due, 
 not to any rule or custom of the State Department 
 in Washington, but to personal qualities and special 
 circumstances and previous experience. He had 
 been a successful Minister to France from 1889 to 
 1892. Before that he had twice declined the mission 
 to Germany. He was Special Ambassador at the 
 second Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897, and again 
 at the Coronation of King Edward in 1902. He had 
 been the leading member of the Peace Commission 
 of 1898 at Paris which framed the Treaty of Peace 
 with Spain and, under his inspiration, induced 
 President McKinley to agree to the acquisition of 
 the Philippines. When he came to London as Am- 
 bassador of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt was 
 President, and it was Mr. Roosevelt's habit to speak, 
 as a Sovereign might speak, of " my " Ambassadors. 
 But when Mr. Roosevelt ceased to be President in 
 1909, Mr. Reid remained Ambassador under President 
 Taft and Ambassador he still is in 191 2, not of Mr. 
 Roosevelt or Mr. Taft, but of the United States of 
 America. 
 
 188
 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 189 
 
 As the United States Government have not yet 
 thought it worth while to provide their Ambassadors 
 with Embassies, Mr. Reid took Dorchester House, 
 and there he and Mrs. Reid have ever since lived 
 and entertained with a splendour for which there 
 is no precedent. I refer to it for the sake of pointing 
 out one result of Jeffersonian simplicity and economy 
 in the pay of great public servants. The result of this 
 penurious policy, long out of date, is that only rich 
 men can afford to accept the higher diplomatic 
 posts, and to maintain them as in Europe they ought 
 to be maintained. Nor is the present Ambassador 
 the only proof. His two immediate predecessors, Mr. 
 Choate and Mr. Hay, serve also as illustrations. 
 In all three cases the Embassy has been supported 
 with dignity by private fortunes. 
 
 Mr. Reid's history before he came to London had 
 as many sides to it as that of most successful Americans ; 
 perhaps more. Born in Xenia, a little town of the 
 State of Ohio, seventy-four years ago, he graduated at 
 the Miami University in 1856, and straightway began 
 active life as a journalist ; plunging almost at once 
 into politics as a legislator. Then came the Civil War 
 and brilliant service as war correspondent and as 
 aide-de-camp to General Thomas and General Rose- 
 crans ; then journalism in Washington, followed by a 
 costly experiment as cotton-planter in Louisiana. But 
 the decisive step of his life was taken in 1868 when 
 Mr. Horace Greeley, then the greatest editorial force 
 in the United States, asked him to enter the New Tork 
 Tribune office. He became managing editor in 1869, 
 editor and chief propietor from 1872 to 1905. It 
 was a crisis in the history of that paper, and a crisis 
 which might have proved fatal but for the business 
 gifts and courage of Mr. Reid, who reorganized the
 
 I90 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 concern and brought it prosperity by salutary methods 
 which shareholders in want of dividends during these 
 lean years thought drastic, as they were. He had a 
 resourceful mind which shrank from no experiment. 
 The Tribune building was the first of the structures 
 which took a leap skyward : parent of the hundreds of 
 " sky-scrapers " now to be seen in New York. He 
 was the first to put to a practical and lucrative use the 
 linotype and other machines for cheapening and ex- 
 pediting printing. He rearranged the editorial scheme 
 of the Tribune, and it was in his reign that the great 
 successes in 1870 and 1871, during the Franco- 
 German war, were achieved. 
 
 One other crisis in Mr. Reid's life, a crisis fruitful 
 of good fortune, was his marriage in 1881 to Elizabeth, 
 only daughter of the late Mr. D. O. Mills, known to 
 all Americans as a man who had won a great name and 
 amassed great riches by wise and gentle means. The 
 paths strewn with ruined rivals were never his. This 
 auspicious union proved, among other things, that 
 even marriage with a sound financial basis on both 
 sides may be made in Heaven. London knows Mrs. 
 Reid as a hostess with a rare gift of organizing the 
 social successes which are almost a condition of an 
 all-embracing diplomacy. Her friends know her as a 
 woman with gifts still more rare ; with endowments of 
 patient sagacity and of skill in the conduct of life ; with 
 an influence the more potent because never ostenta- 
 tious ; with an organizing power of which her hos- 
 pitalities and her far-reaching charities are alike 
 examples ; with a trained judgment in great affairs ; 
 with the final charm of simplicity and generous 
 devotion to others. 
 
 In the midst of all his activities in journalism and 
 politics, Mr. Reid wrote books and delivered addresses
 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 191 
 
 and, first as member of the Board of Regents of New 
 York State, then as Vice-Chancellor, and finally as 
 Chancellor, became an authority in Education. Diplo- 
 matic offers and honours followed : his place in public 
 life broadened, and in 1892 he was the Republican 
 candidate for Vice-President of the United States, 
 marching to defeat in company with President 
 Harrison. I omit details which would find place 
 in a biography. My concern here is to mention only 
 such matters as influenced not only a career but an 
 individuality ; things that went to the forming of 
 the character which has impressed itself on the 
 attention of the English. But, as perhaps the best 
 illustration of all, I must find room for the story of 
 his Philippine experiences. 
 
 The true story, or the whole story, of the acqui- 
 sition of the Philippines was not told at the time. 
 Whether it has been published since, I cannot say. 
 What I knew in 1898 of the inner facts I knew 
 in confidence and could not then relate, but there 
 is now no reason why the essential part of the 
 narrative should not be given : even though another 
 leaf of the laurel which crowned Mr. McKinley's 
 brow has to be plucked away. He was then Presi- 
 dent, and as the Philippines became American 
 while he was President the annexation will always, I 
 suppose, be reckoned his work. In fact, he never made 
 up his mind about it. His mind was made up for him 
 and the Peace Commissioners to whom he was sup- 
 posed to give instructions ended by sending instruc- 
 tions to him. Not, of course, in the form of instruc- 
 tions. In form they were advising opinions, but they 
 were put in such a way that the President had no choice 
 but to accept them and act on them. If the attitude 
 seems a strange one for the President of the United
 
 192 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 States, it is no stranger than his attitude throughout 
 the Spanish troubles. In that war, or in the causes 
 that brought on the war, his was never the initiative. 
 After hostihties had ceased he still left to others the 
 initiative of peace and the terms on which peace was 
 to be made. 
 
 It was, of course, the President who appointed the 
 Peace Commissioners, five in number. They were 
 Judge Day of Ohio, then Secretary of State, Chairman ; 
 Senator Frye of Maine, Senator Davis of Minnesota, 
 Senator Gray of Delaware, and Mr. Reid. There was 
 both in the Commission and in the country a party 
 for and a party against the taking of the islands. Mr. 
 Reid's views were known to the President. He had 
 pubhshed an article in the Century magazine of New 
 York. The Commissioners held their first meeting 
 in Washington, in the Cabinet room of the White 
 House, ostensibly to receive their instructions from 
 the President who was at the meeting. But in fact 
 the President was not then (nor ever) ready to give 
 his instructions. He desired to hear the opinions of 
 his Commissioners and, having heard them and finding 
 them divided, dispatched the Commission to Paris, 
 without instructions. 
 
 Upon their arrival in Paris they were still divided. 
 Judge Day, a man of singularly cautious temperament, 
 wanted neither the PhiHppines as a whole nor any part 
 of them, except possibly a coahng station and even 
 as to that he was in doubt. Senator Gray was still 
 more strongly opposed to the pohcy of annexation. 
 Senator Davis, who had in him something of the 
 knight-errant and therefore a touch of chivalry which 
 might be called quixotic, declared himself in favour 
 of retaining the northern part of the Archipelago, but 
 was prepared, in his chivalrous way, to make a present
 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 193 
 
 of Mindanao and the whole southern part to Holland. 
 As I understood, it was to be a gift, not a sale, and 
 Holland was not to be asked to " pay anything " or 
 to give anything in exchange. But if that could not 
 be managed he was willing to make a bargain with 
 some other European Power, receiving in return 
 territory likely to be of more use to us. Senator Frye 
 was, at first, inclined to agree with Senator Davis. 
 Maine being one of the six New England States, and 
 throughout New England opposition to annexation 
 in any form having begun and seeming likely to grow. 
 Senator Frye was for the moment, like a good politician, 
 disposed to listen to the voice of the people who were 
 his people. 
 
 Mr. Reid, who spoke last, had no doubts. He was 
 for annexation pure and simple ; for annexing the 
 whole of the Philippines and not part. He took the 
 view which I think an English diplomatist accus- 
 tomed, as we were not, to dealing with problems of 
 this kind would have taken. He held that the United 
 States, having broken the Power which ruled the 
 Philippines, had come under an obligation to take 
 over the duties and responsibilities of that Power in 
 these islands. We could not honourably, he thought, 
 renounce these obligations, nor could we hand them 
 over to another Power. 
 
 A strong man who knows his own mind is apt to be 
 master of other men's minds, and so it happened in 
 this case. Mr. Reid's was the only clear policy an- 
 nounced, except the policy of doing nothing and leav- 
 ing the Philippines to become the prey of the Power 
 that most wanted them ; presumably Japan. The 
 Spaniards, meantime, had shown their hands ; reports 
 of the negotiations had been sent to the President, 
 and at last he called for detailed statements by in- 
 o
 
 194 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 dividual members o£ the Commission. Senator Day 
 and Senator Gray read written declarations in favour 
 o£ surrender. Mr. Reid read his, in favour of keeping 
 the islands. A discussion followed, at the end of which 
 Senator Davis and Senator Frye suggested to Mr. 
 Reid that his statement might, without altering any 
 essential doctrine, be put in such shape that they 
 could sign it. This was done. Signed by Davis, Frye, 
 and Reid, in the order named, it went to the President, 
 in company with the opposing opinions of Day and 
 Gray. Mr. McKinley's was a mind open to impres- 
 sions, prone to accept the views of a majority, and 
 grateful to those who would relieve him from the irk- 
 some duty of coming to a decision of his own. He 
 acceptedMr. Reid's policy ; and so Mr. Reid's conception 
 of public duty, which had gone to the President as an 
 expression of opinion by the majority of the Commis- 
 sioners, returned to them in the form of instructions 
 by the President, and the Philippines were annexed. 
 The agreement to pay Spain $20,000,000 (^4,000,000) 
 as compensation for public works and property on the 
 islands was in the nature of a solatium, and in no sense 
 was it purchase money. The islands were ours, had 
 we so chosen, without payment of a dollar. 
 
 I am writing of a man who for a quarter of a century 
 was my chief ; the editor of a newspaper which I 
 served abroad. We were friends before that, and 
 since, and I have had every means of knowing what he 
 was like. I look back over that long period with a 
 vivid sense of what I owe to Mr. Reid. Subject, of 
 course, to his authority, I was given a free hand in 
 European affairs. He took large and generous views 
 both in the editorship and management of The Tribune 
 and in his relations with his staff. I will restate what 
 I said in the first series of these Memories of the way
 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 195 
 
 in which he handled one matter, which seems to have 
 been misunderstood. 
 
 Like most American journals The Tribune was in 
 favour of Mr. Gladstone's first scheme of Home Rule 
 for Ireland in 1886. I was not, and I was allowed day 
 by day and week by week, by cable and by post, to 
 say what I thought on that subject. I doubt whether 
 at that time in any other important journal in the 
 United States the case against Home Rule and the 
 Home Rulers was freely and fully stated. It was a 
 subject which then interested Americans profoundly. 
 There, as here in England, the Irish Nationalists were 
 masters of the art of adroit misrepresentation. The 
 majority of the American Press and people were misled. 
 They were asked to believe, and did believe, that 
 the Home Rule which Ireland demanded would, if 
 granted, have left her in a relation to the Government 
 of Great Britain analogous to the relation between the 
 States of the American Union and the Union itself. 
 There was, of course, never a moment, and is not now, 
 when the Irish Nationalists would have accepted that, 
 but they induced the American people to believe they 
 would have accepted it ; and the delusion captivated 
 American sympathies. 
 
 On that and on the general issue I was allowed to 
 present the views of the English who did not wish to 
 see the United Kingdom broken in pieces ; all the 
 time in opposition to the editorial view of the paper 
 in which my letters and dispatches appeared. The 
 Tribune was criticized for allowing it, and I was 
 criticized for presuming to have an opinion other than 
 the general American opinion on that issue, I do not 
 know that The Tribune or I was ever a penny the worse 
 for these attacks. But to Mr. Reid is due an acknow- 
 ledgment of the wise liberality he showed ; perhaps
 
 196 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 the wiser and certainly the more liberal because of 
 his sensitiveness to criticism which he could well 
 afford to neglect. Mr. Gladstone was aware of the 
 facts. He knew that only by The Tribune was the 
 American support of his policy imperilled or dimin- 
 ished. It mattered little who held the pen. What 
 mattered was the publicity in The Tribune, but I was 
 never forgiven by Mr. Gladstone for my share in the 
 work. Against Mr. Reid he seemed to bear no grudge. 
 They met on friendly terms. Mr. Gladstone was not 
 likely to know much about the division of responsi- 
 biUties in journalism. Whether he did or not he made 
 no secret of his liking for Mr. Reid, in whom he 
 thought he recognized a type of American not familiar 
 to him ; yet essentially American in character and in 
 the wide range of his capacities and career. 
 
 I need not attempt a summary of Mr. Reid's work 
 as Ambassador in England. It ranges from the New- 
 foundland Fisheries, finally referred to the Hague on 
 his proposal, to opium conferences, Chinese proposals 
 of many sorts, the Liberian loan, the Central American 
 troubles, South American troubles, and many others 
 which might seem to have no direct relation to this 
 Embassy but are habitually referred to it, as the centre 
 of American diplomatic activities abroad. But Mr. 
 Reid's one great service beyond all others, and more 
 important than all others, has been his steadfast and 
 heartfelt advocacy of Anglo-American friendship as a 
 poHcy ahke beneficial and indispensable to both Powers. 
 That point needs no arguing. It has become an axiom 
 of diplomacy, and the work is carried on with equal 
 zeal in London and in Washington. Mr. Reid has 
 broadened the old diplomatic methods. He is Am- 
 bassador to the British people as well as to the British 
 Government, and to the British people has addressed
 
 MR. WHITELAW REID 197 
 
 himself on topics likely to appeal to them and to 
 elucidate American interests. He has spoken all over 
 the kingdom to sympathetic audiences, on the great 
 men of both countries ; on Burke, on Lincoln, on 
 America herself ; and last of all, at the yearly re- 
 opening of the Philosophical Institute in Edinburgh, 
 where he set forth with a wealth of new detail the 
 indebtedness of America to Scotland and Scotsmen. 
 
 For this kind of work his lifelong love of books and 
 of letters had trained him. Books he has always loved. 
 When Minister to France he collected French books 
 which, with still more ample stores of English and 
 American, may be seen in the fine libraries at his New 
 York house in Madison Avenue and his country house 
 in Westchester. At Dorchester House and at Wrest 
 Park he is still surrounded by books. With them he 
 has made friends as with the people among whom he 
 lives. Ambassadors come and go, but London and 
 that larger London which is England will long remem- 
 ber the long intimacy which has grown up between 
 Mr. and Mrs. Reid and the kin among whom they have 
 lived. 
 
 One compliment, a diplomatic but involuntary com- 
 pliment, he pays, Scot though he be by descent, to 
 the country of his diplomatic adoption. He resembles 
 nothing so much as a portrait of himself by Van Dyck, 
 and nowhere is the likeness so striking as in Dorchester 
 House, where other Van Dycks look down from the 
 walls on their American cousin.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY, AMERICAN 
 AND EUROPEAN* 
 
 TT seems to be believed in America that our diplo- 
 -■■ matic service in Europe has been, on the whole, 
 adequate and even distinguished. I do not think that 
 is quite so. We judge by exceptions. We do not 
 take account o£ the whole matter. We say, quite 
 naturally : " We have had very able ministers ; the 
 business o£ the country, when it became critical, has 
 been well done ; the men we have sent to do it have 
 been the intellectual equals of those whom they have 
 had to encounter, and the records of the State De- 
 partment in Washington are records of victories 
 achieved or of honourable and useful compromises." 
 
 Even were that so generally, as it is undoubtedly so 
 in part, it would not prove the case of those who argue 
 that our haphazard methods have brought as good re- 
 sults as might have been obtained by a system and a 
 service, neither of which have we ever had. For what 
 we have to consider is, at least in part, the general 
 impression produced on Europe by our Ministers and 
 our diplomatic procedure. That is what a country is 
 judged by in the long run, and not by the brilliant 
 exceptions. 
 
 If we compare ourselves with any European country 
 we may see, if we choose to see, what these old coun- 
 tries gain by their old methods. Suppose we take 
 
 * Not published in The Tribune. 
 198
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY 199 
 
 England ; not perhaps the instance which proves most, 
 but the most famiHar. She has, in the first place, a 
 Foreign Office completely equipped ; a permanent 
 official at the head of its permanent staff ; never ap- 
 pointed nor ever removed for reasons of party. It is 
 a branch of the Civil Service. She has, in the second 
 place, another body of Civil Servants who are Am- 
 bassadors, Ministers Plenipotentiary, Ministers Resi- 
 dent, Councillors, Secretaries, and Attaches. She 
 pays her Ambassadors, in round numbers, from ^^6000 
 to ^10,000 a year, and provides each of them with a 
 palace in which to live and do the business he is sent 
 to do. She neither appoints nor dismisses them for 
 political reasons. They enter the service as boys by a 
 competitive examination. They rise, to some extent, 
 by seniority, but for the highest posts seniority is 
 tempered by selection. 
 
 If, as has sometimes happened, especially of late 
 years, other men are needed than those available within 
 the strict line of diplomatic promotion, they are taken 
 from the outside, but have been, all save one, men of 
 diplomatic training and experience. Lord Paunce- 
 fote went from the Foreign Office itself, of which he 
 was Permanent Under - Secretary, to Washington. 
 Although in the Foreign Office, and because he was 
 in the Foreign Office, he was not in the line of pro- 
 motion for abroad. Sir Michael Herbert, already 
 Minister Resident at Paris, was made Ambassador to 
 Washington over the heads of many seniors. Both 
 rendered inestimable services to both countries. Lord 
 Dufferin, at Paris ; Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, at 
 Madrid ; Lord Currie, at Rome ; Sir Charles Har- 
 dinge, at St. Petersburg ; and Sir Francis Bertie, the 
 present Ambassador in Paris, are all illustrations, and 
 for the most part very brilliant illustrations, of this
 
 200 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 freedom of choice. The present British Ambassador 
 in Washington is another illustration ; which may also 
 be considered brilliant from a business point of view. 
 The Foreign Minister, who makes these outside ex- 
 periments, is accustomed to choose as Ambassador one 
 who is both a diplomatist and a man of the world. It 
 is unusual to choose one who is neither. 
 
 My point is, however, that this system, which in 
 theory is rigid, is in practice flexible, and accommodates 
 itself to the necessities of cases as they arise. This 
 elasticity in no respect impairs the advantages arising 
 from a settled order. The advantages of permanence 
 and of continuity remain, because permanence and 
 continuity are the rule, and outside appointments are 
 the exception, and have never been the rewards of 
 party service, save in this latest instance in Washington. 
 
 Whereas with us, permanence and continuity, if 
 they can be said ever to have existed, are the exception. 
 Till quite recently they did not exist at all. The rule 
 was instability, and I am afraid instability is still the 
 rule. A recent case will show how lightly we handle 
 such matters and, incidentally, to what financial 
 straits our diplomacy is reduced. Mr. John Ridgely 
 Carter, long known as Secretary of Embassy in London, 
 was " promoted " to be Minister to Roumania. He 
 was then offered, as a further promotion, the Argentine 
 Mission, which he declined on the ground that he 
 could not afford to accept it. The salary of the 
 American Minister to the Argentine is $12,000, or 
 ^^2400 a year ; and the rent of a suitable Legation in 
 Buenos Aires is $15,000 or ;£30oo a year. The State 
 Department is now able to supplement diplomatic 
 salaries from a contingent fund, but the sum allotted 
 in this case was far from sufficient, and so Mr. Carter's 
 services are lost to the Government. He deserved a
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY 201 
 
 better appointment and a better fate, but Mr. Knox, 
 who rules over the American Foreign Office, treated 
 Mr. Carter's refusal as a resignation. Mr. Knox is a 
 very able lawyer whose knowledge of diplomacy is a 
 recent acquisition. He has shown in this and other 
 matters a rigidity of mind which in the conduct of 
 international affairs does not make for efficiency. It 
 is a subject on which one is tempted to be indiscreet, 
 but I pass on. In the London Embassy, at any rate, 
 Mr. Knox has shown a sense of the fitness of things 
 which may go far to excuse mistakes elsewhere. In- 
 deed it would not be easy for a Secretary of State, 
 unfamiliar though he may be with European usages, to 
 undervalue Mr. Reid's services. 
 
 The first American Secretary of State to perceive 
 the inestimable value of continuous service was Mr. 
 Hay. He had lived much abroad ; privately and 
 officially. He knew Europe well. He knew that 
 England and France and Germany profited by their 
 ordered and continuing diplomacy. He knew the 
 prestige of their Foreign Offices ; organized solely in 
 order to conduct Foreign Affairs on business principles. 
 He knew what weight of authority attached to the 
 great embassies because, without exception, British 
 and French and German Ambassadors represented 
 not this or that party at home but the State. He 
 would admit, as we all do, that individual American 
 Ambassadors have put behind them party predilections, 
 and that their voice has been the voice of America. 
 But how was the foreigner to know that, when he 
 well knew that they were appointed first of all as 
 Republicans or Democrats and not as Americans ? 
 No British Ambassador was ever regarded as Con- 
 servative or Liberal. Probably he had no politics. 
 Certainly as Ambassador he had no politics. He was
 
 202 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 an Englishman, first, last, and all the time. Let us 
 reflect for one moment on what that means. 
 
 Mr. Hay had seen this system at work all over 
 Europe. He had studied it in its relation to different 
 Powers. When President McKinley made him Secre- 
 tary of State he set himself to imitate it. If the word 
 imitate excites a prejudice, I will phrase it differently. 
 He set himself to appropriate, so far as he could, what 
 there was best in it, and to adapt it to American uses. 
 He promoted Mr. Lloyd Griscom to be Minister, and 
 from Minister to Persia and Japan he became Am- 
 bassador to Rome, with the best results. Mr. Root, I 
 must say in passing, took up Mr. Hay's idea and acted 
 upon it with, in most cases, sagacity and discrimination. 
 I think it a misfortune for the public service that Mr. 
 Griscom should have ceased to be Ambassador at 
 Rome, though whether he resigned for private reasons 
 or in obedience to custom I know not. It is a mis- 
 fortune, although he had a competent successor. Mr. 
 Meyer was sent from Rome after five years' service to 
 St. Petersburg, where he remained two years ; in each 
 capital a capable representative. Mr. McCormick 
 was an instance of the blending of the two rules, the 
 rule of service and the rule of politics. He was Minister 
 to Austria-Hungary ; Ambassador to Russia ; finally 
 Ambassador to France. It looks on the face of it 
 like a beautiful example of the new rule of promotion 
 for good service. But Mr. McCormick's original 
 nomination and his successive transfers were due to 
 political influence of a kind that was thought irre- 
 sistible. The result was not such as to justify the 
 experiment. 
 
 The best instance of all is Mr. Hay's promotion of 
 Mr. Henry White, after twelve years' distinguished 
 service as Secretary in Vienna and in London, to be
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY 203 
 
 Ambassador in Rome, and from Rome to the Embassy 
 in Paris upon the unregretted retirement of Mr. 
 McCormick. In all these places Mr. White has been 
 a diplomatist of marked ability. At times — as at 
 Algeciras, where he found the formula which kept 
 that troublesome Conference together and brought 
 about agreement — he has shown himself equal to great 
 emergencies. London, Rome, Paris, all agree in their 
 high estimate of his capacity. Upon the expiration 
 of Mr. Roosevelt's Presidency, the one diplomatic 
 request he made of his successor was for the retention 
 of Mr. White as Ambassador in Paris. Mr. Taft, for 
 reasons which I do not understand and therefore do 
 not criticize, disregarded Mr. Roosevelt's recommenda- 
 tion, and accepted the resignation which Mr. White, 
 like every other American Ambassador, had offered as 
 matter of form and in obedience to custom. Mr. 
 White had made for himself not only a position in 
 Paris but a European reputation. No reason was 
 given for his removal. It passed as a Presidential 
 caprice. To say that it was regretted is to say nothing. 
 The official and social worlds of Paris were astounded. 
 The American Embassy had been, while Mr. and Mrs. 
 White were Ambassador and Ambassadress, a social 
 head-quarters not for Americans only but for what 
 there was best in French life. At the French Foreign 
 Office Mr. White was regarded as, in every best sense, 
 a representative of his country whose interests he knew 
 how to defend, while never forgetting the menage- 
 ments which diplomacy expects of every diplomatist 
 in high place. Experience, personal fitness, popularity 
 — all these counted for nothing and Mr. White was 
 dismissed. He has since been sent on an important 
 special mission to South America. Such a mission, for 
 which the President rightly thought Mr. White the
 
 204 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 right man, requires far more tact and more diplomatic 
 capacity than the Embassy to France. With France 
 our relations are those of easy friendship, of which 
 any disturbance is likely to be limited and momentary. 
 With the South American States we are in relations 
 which are always delicate and sometimes dangerous. 
 Upon the kind of protectorate exercised by the United 
 States in virtue of the Monroe doctrine, such Powers as 
 the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili look with a vigilant 
 scrutiny that may readily harden into suspicion. Their 
 susceptibilities have to be considered. They need a 
 gentle hand and sympathetic treatment throughout. 
 If Mr. White were equal, as he certainly was, to a 
 mission so difficult as this, what reason could there 
 have been for removing him from the Embassy at 
 Paris, where diplomacy goes sur des roulettes P I do 
 not know that any answer has been given to this 
 question. It need not be pressed, for the sending of 
 Mr. White to South America is a confession that his 
 recall from France was a mistake. 
 
 I should offer no criticism on President Taft or on 
 Mr. Knox, except this : that they imperfectly com- 
 prehend the situation abroad with which they are 
 called upon to deal. I will put it in this way. No 
 political or party advantage at home could counter- 
 balance the loss and injury abroad if Mr. Hay's and 
 Mr. Root's rule and practice are to be disregarded, 
 and the diplomatic nominations to be flung to the 
 wolves again. The wolves are the politicians. Mr. 
 Taft is skilled in politics, as we all know, but he is also 
 President of the United States, as we all know, and his 
 first obligations as President, and last, are to the United 
 States and not to the Republican party. With a State 
 Department still so imperfectly equipped as ours, 
 lacking money, men, organization, and much else, the
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY 205 
 
 obligation to keep good men in their places abroad is 
 the more imperative. The question for him and for 
 Mr. Knox is whether they will carry on the good work 
 begun by Mr. Hay, to whom President McKinley 
 gave a free hand, or whether they will break in upon 
 it and impair the diplomatic prestige Hay had begun 
 to establish. 
 
 Lord Rosebery, in that speech to the Imperial Press 
 Conference — which has gone echoing round the world 
 to re-echoing applause, as perhaps no other speech 
 in our time has gone — put the case for stability and 
 permanence with his wonted felicity and force. He 
 proposed, not quite seriously nor altogether in jest, a 
 new use for " surplus " battleships. He would have 
 Parliament vote supplies for two years " and then pack 
 itself in three or four of these obsolete warships and 
 go for a trip in order to find out something about the 
 empire." He continued : 
 
 " You might object at once, itt limine, to my scheme 
 and say, ' How would the country be governed while 
 all the Ministers were absent ? ' 
 
 " I reply with confidence that it would be governed 
 much as it is now, by the permanent heads of the 
 departments, and I am sure that some of us would 
 feel even greater confidence in the welfare of the 
 country if it were under that permanent and well- 
 ordered control." 
 
 That, of course, includes the Foreign Office, and 
 the Foreign Office includes diplomacy, and it cannot 
 be too often repeated that continuity of foreign policy 
 is one main secret of strength ; and continuity in the 
 diplomatic service one chief cause of efficiency. Lord 
 Rosebery has been Foreign Minister, a great Foreign 
 Minister, and knows as much about it as anybody. 
 This is his testimony ; the testimony of an expert. If
 
 2o6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 you proposed to any European Power to adopt our 
 happy-go-lucky practice you would be laughed at. In 
 all of them the diplomatic service is, first of all, a 
 service, to which men give their lives. We have no 
 service. It is in all European countries a first line of 
 defence. Before you can begin a war you have got to 
 get past the diplomatists. They are entrenched in 
 traditions, in fixed principles of international conduct, 
 in fixed methods of giving effect to their principles. 
 They have an understanding among themselves. 
 They speak a language of their own. No matter 
 whether it be English or German or French — it is 
 usually French — they use words in an acquired, tech- 
 nical, diplomatic sense, perfectly familiar to them, 
 unfamiliar to others. They have learned by long 
 experience how to make use of social forces. They 
 have studied not only national characteristics but 
 personal characteristics. There are, in the German 
 and other foreign offices, the dossiers of every Minister 
 and Ambassador in all Europe. They have a code of 
 morals all their own. 
 
 How is all this to be mastered by the able amateur 
 whom we send abroad, once in four years, to measure 
 himself with the professionals of every other Power ? 
 If he has a natural aptitude for such studies he will 
 see the complexity of the problem, and he will set 
 himself to solve it. With his American quickness and 
 flexibility of mind he will, at the end of two or three 
 or four years, have learned a good part of his new trade. 
 Then he will be recalled and a new man be sent to go 
 through a similar apprenticeship ; and he also, about 
 the time he has become fit for his work, will give way 
 to another raw hand. 
 
 We have often been well served abroad ; sometimes 
 brilliantly well. In such cases the merit is never that
 
 TWO METHODS OF DIPLOMACY 207 
 
 o£ the system but of the individual. There is no 
 system. If there be, it is the system of Monte Carlo. 
 We gamble with the international fortunes of the 
 Republic. We sometimes win, but the fact that a 
 cou-p comes off now and then does not prove trente et 
 quarante to be a wise poHcy for the conduct of great 
 affairs.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE AMERICAN SPEAKER, MR. THOMAS B. REED 
 
 T MENTIONED Gambetta, but it would be pos- 
 sible to find a much closer analogue to Mr. Lowther 
 in an American whose fame once covered a continent, 
 and perhaps still does ; I mean Mr. Reed, the " Tom " 
 Reed of Washington and Maine politics. Mr. Reed, 
 it is true, was far more tyrannical than it is possible for 
 the Speaker of the House of Commons to be. You 
 must make allowance for circumstances and for the 
 radical differences in the nature of the two offices which 
 bear the same name. Mr. Reed had a sense of humour, 
 as Mr. Lowther has, and the American sometimes 
 allowed his sense of humour to run away with him, 
 which the Englishman never does. It never would 
 have occurred to this or any other English Speaker to 
 set up a mastery over legislation, or even over the 
 business of the House, such as Mr. Reed established 
 and his successor has perpetuated and even strength- 
 ened. 
 
 I once asked Mr. Hitt, the accomplished chairman 
 of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, how he 
 managed to get his bills through the House. This 
 was at the time when Mr. Reed had consolidated his 
 great power as Speaker and had the House thoroughly 
 in hand. Mr. Reed and Mr. Hitt were great friends, 
 and I imagined this might make things easier for a 
 chairman in Mr. Hitt's position. Whether it did or 
 not you may judge from his answer : 
 
 208
 
 MR. THOMAS B. REED 209 
 
 " Of course it requires a little diplomacy. So con- 
 gested is the business of the House that to reach a 
 bill in its numerical order on the calendar would take 
 about fourteen years. But I will tell you what I do. 
 I wait till some afternoon toward the close of business, 
 shortly before six o'clock when few members are 
 present, and I look about the House to see if any 
 member is there who is likely to oppose the particular 
 bill I think it important to pass. It is my business to 
 know my opponents. If I see no one I rise and move 
 that this bill be made a special order for a specified 
 day some six weeks hence. If there is no objection, the 
 Speaker declares the motion carried. Probably no- 
 body present has any idea what the bill is. The effect 
 of such a motion is that my bill on the appointed day 
 has precedence and may be brought up whenever I 
 think best. Again I consider the state of the House. 
 It would be too much to expect the bill to pass un- 
 opposed in all cases, but at least it has a fair chance 
 and a majority of our friends are pretty certain to be 
 there, and so the bill goes through. The Speaker 
 has such a control over business that a party measure, 
 or a measure of which he and the leading members of 
 the party approve, is fairly safe. I need not tell you 
 that foreign affairs are not those in which the greater 
 number of Representatives are the most interested." 
 
 I used to think Mr. Reed's physical bulk gave him, 
 in a measure, or helped to give him, his mastery over 
 the House. He was nearly as big as the President of 
 to-day. When he rose he seemed to fill the desk and 
 almost the hall itself. He towered above the three 
 hundred and more Representatives ; dominated the 
 whole body ; sometimes domineered over it. Who 
 could dispute with such a mountain of humanity as 
 that ? From the slow movement of the huge body
 
 2IO ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 and the slowness o£ his speech the unwary were apt 
 to think the mind also was slow. But he was one of 
 those rather unusual men who speak slowly and think 
 quickly; as his assailants from the floor soon found. 
 Like Hamlet, he would speak daggers but use none. 
 But his enemies went down before him. 
 
 A fault in most presiding officers in the legislatures, 
 state or national, in America is the excessive use of 
 the gavel. Mr. Reed had it, but in less degree. It 
 is a vice which has grown. The last time I was in 
 the House of Representatives Mr. Speaker Cannon 
 pounded away as if he were breaking stones on the 
 road. The din was incessant and quite useless. Mem- 
 bers did not stop for the pounding. They stopped 
 when they had made as much trouble as they thought 
 sufficient for the purpose, or when they were tired. 
 It is a turbulent body, no doubt. You see the Speaker 
 erect and half a dozen or a dozen men on their feet 
 at the same time. In the House of Commons when 
 the Speaker rises every one else keeps his seat and is 
 glued to it till the Speaker resumes his chair. His 
 rising is a signal which no man disobeys. There are 
 scenes of tumult, no doubt, at times, and the House 
 becomes volcanic, but I am speaking of disorder as a 
 habit. It is a habit in Washington, in the Senate as 
 well as in the House, and it is not a habit at West- 
 minster. 
 
 One often hears it said that the Senate is the most 
 dignified legislative body in the world. I will not go 
 to the other extreme and say it is one of the least, but 
 it is certain that the European observer is not im- 
 pressed by its deportment. There also, as in the 
 House, may be seen half a dozen members all up 
 together, competing for the attention of the Presi- 
 dent, and continuing to compete after he has made
 
 MR. THOMAS B. REED 211 
 
 his choice. The noisy summonses to the pages and 
 the racing o£ the pages to answer them add nothing 
 to dignity. I suppose the President of the Senate, 
 when he is Vice-President of the United States and 
 therefore not a member of the Senate, has less authority 
 than has an elected Speaker of the House, or an elected 
 President of the Senate. But neither did Mr. Reed, 
 the greatest of Speakers, enforce any system of 
 unvarying good behaviour upon his unruly subjects. 
 He did not set a very high value upon tenue, in or out 
 of the House. You would see him, after the House 
 had adjourned, rolling comfortably up Pennsylvania 
 Avenue in a suit of clothes meant for country wear and 
 a bowler hat. Mr. Hitt would be with him, arrayed 
 in the same sort of costume. Mr. Hitt was of 
 slight build. There is a well-known caricature in the 
 Vanity Fair series of old days, with the late Mr. 
 Corney Grain, a rotund giant of a man, smiling down 
 on Mr. George Grossmith, who was anything but a 
 giant. The contrast in this case was much the same. 
 Mr. Reed had perhaps the finest mind among 
 politicians, or, if you like, statesmen, of his own day. 
 If I wanted an original view I used to go to Mr. Reed 
 for it, and got it, and sometimes even got leave to 
 use it. When you went to him you found him in a 
 dingy little room in the Shoreham, which he nearly 
 filled. The space that was left was devoted to a writing 
 desk, two chairs, and a tumbled mass of House bills 
 and other official papers, apparently all in confusion. 
 It was not a cell to which the Speaker should ever have 
 been condemned. Everybody knew that Mr. Reed 
 had no fortune and that as Speaker he was stingily 
 paid, as all great officers of State are in America from 
 the President down. I don't put it as a personal 
 question, nor is the chief fault of such a system the
 
 212 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 vexation to which it subjects distinguished servants 
 of the State. It is the dignity of the State itself which 
 is in question. It is the State which suffers when they 
 suffer. They are representative, and the State, out of 
 its $600,000,000 of yearly revenue, could perhaps 
 afford to pay them well enough to maintain in the eyes 
 of the world the dignity of one of the greatest Powers 
 in the world. But it does not. 
 
 I do not know that Mr. Reed cared. He was not 
 the sort of man to whom money comes first. Disap- 
 pointed ambition, a just ambition which it was the 
 interest of the country to gratify, was the real burden 
 on his life at the end. I suppose he could have had. the 
 Presidency if he would have made certain concessions. 
 But he would make none which he deemed dishonour- 
 able, or inconsistent with principles which all men 
 knew he held. 
 
 But I was saying that he had original views, and not 
 views only, but conceptions of public life. He was the 
 first man whom I ever heard point out the decay of 
 Irish influence in America. It must have been about 
 midway in the 90's that he announced this discovery. 
 He said : 
 
 " The Irish in the United States are on longer a 
 political force. Time has been, as you well know, 
 when the effort to secure the Irish vote was one of 
 the chief anxieties of politicians on both sides. This 
 anxiety showed itself in Congress, in the Press, in 
 State Legislatures, in political contests all over the 
 country. That day is past. You must have noticed 
 the change in the Press. The Press is free again, and 
 we here in Washington are free, and Americans and not 
 Irish now govern this country. There are exceptions, 
 but they are few. I do not think there are half a 
 dozen districts throughout the land where the Irish
 
 MR. THOMAS B. REED 213 
 
 vote now turns the scale, or where the bosses arrange 
 their campaign with a view to capturing it." 
 
 I asked why there had been such a change. He 
 answered : 
 
 " I cannot tell you why ; or if I could it would be 
 a long and complex statement. What is vital to us 
 is not the reason but the fact, and you may take the 
 fact from me. 
 
 " Yes, and if you like to tell your friends in England, 
 do so. It may help to improve the relations between 
 England and us, and it is for the interest of both 
 countries that they should be improved ; and they 
 will be improved at no distant date." 
 
 It is not my business to offer any opinion on this 
 declaration. But the fact that it was made, and 
 made at least fifteen years ago, has a great significance. 
 Since 1898, when England put her veto on the pro- 
 posed European coalition in favour of Spain — a proof 
 of good will which convinced the American people that 
 England was their friend and not their enemy, as 
 they had so long been taught to believe — it may seem 
 less remarkable than it did at the time it was uttered. 
 But as an illustration of Mr. Reed's political genius it 
 is all the more remarkable because it was made so 
 early. I do not know that he had many English 
 sympathies. When he came to England, shortly before 
 his death, he had planned to spend two months here. 
 But he went home long before that short period had 
 expired. He had come too late. He could not all at 
 once open his mind to new interests or new impres- 
 sions. 
 
 I end with an anecdote, of which the scene was 
 Ellerslic, Governor Morton's delightful place on the 
 Hudson, where you may form some notion of what an 
 English park is like without crossing the Atlantic.
 
 214 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Mr. Reed and Mr. Choate were two of the guests. 
 We were in the thick of our troubles in the PhiHppines. 
 Mr. Reed, as everybody knew, had opposed the ac- 
 quisition of the islands. One night after dinner, the 
 whole house party present, he and Mr. Choate debated 
 the matter at length and with great freedom. Mr. 
 Choate gave us in his forcible and forensic way — and no 
 man could state a case better — the reasons for keeping 
 the Philippines and reducing the " rebellious " Fili- 
 pinos to order. We all listened. Nobody interrupted 
 the flow of Mr. Choate's argument. Mr. Reed did 
 not interrupt. At the end Mr. Choate, urging that 
 surrender was impossible, asked triumphantly : 
 
 " What do you suppose the Filipinos would do if 
 we withdrew the American troops ? " 
 
 " Well," drawled Mr. Reed, " I don't suppose 
 they would pursue us further than San Francisco." 
 
 And that discussion came to an end.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 MR. JUNIUS S. MORGAN 
 
 T ONG before I knew Mr. Pierpont Morgan I 
 ■^ knew his father, Mr. J. S. Morgan, a name then 
 and now held in respect and admiration in the City of 
 London — that is, in the Enghsh world of finance — as 
 I hope and suppose it still is in New York. I remember 
 him for many kindnesses, and many pleasant associa- 
 tions, and still more for a force and dignity of character 
 rare at all times. He was a successful man in the City 
 before he became a power there. The date of his 
 becoming a power was 1871. Gambetta was at the 
 head of the Government of National Defence at 
 Bordeaux, and sorely in want of money. M. Laurier 
 was his Minister of Finance and undertook to negotiate 
 a loan for ^10,000,000. London would not look at it. 
 One great house after another declined to find the 
 money. It was not so much a question of price as of 
 security. The English bankers and financiers had no 
 confidence in the stability of this Government. They 
 had not forgotten that Thiers had called Gambetta a 
 fou furieux. They thought the future of France lay 
 in the hands of Germany, and that Germany would 
 restore the Emperor to his overturned throne ; that 
 the provisional Government at Bordeaux would be 
 swept out of existence, and that with it would go all 
 its works, financial and other. One and all they re- 
 fused to put the Laurier loan on the market. 
 
 At this juncture Mr. J. S. Morgan, not at that 
 time one of the great houses of finance, came for- 
 
 215
 
 2i6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 ward and offered to take the whole loan. His offer 
 was accepted. To the surprise of the Rothschilds, the 
 Hambros, and the rest, Mr. Morgan's operation 
 proved a success. The loan was floated. The public 
 bought. The price went up. Mr. Morgan made a 
 great deal of money and a reputation not to be 
 measured in money. He stepped at one stride into 
 the front rank. 
 
 All this I heard at the time or not long after from 
 various good sources. But nobody seemed to know 
 why he had done it, or whether it was anything but 
 a gamble followed by good luck. One day I asked 
 Mr. Morgan : 
 
 " Why did you take the Laurier loan ? " 
 He thought a moment before answering, then said : 
 " Oh, there's no secret about it, nor was it alto- 
 gether luck, as I believe some of my City friends 
 thought. When it first occurred to me that something 
 might be done, I looked up the financial history of 
 France. I found that since 1789 there had been a 
 dozen separate governments — Monarchy, First Re- 
 public, Directory, Consulate, Empire, the Bourbons 
 again, then the Orleanists, then the Second Republic, 
 followed by the Second (or third) Empire, and so on. 
 Between these successive governments there were 
 enmities of many kinds ; dynastic, personal, political. 
 Each successor, with one exception, hated its prede- 
 cessor. It was one long civil war. 
 
 " But I found this also. Not one of these govern- 
 ments had ever repudiated or questioned the validity 
 of any financial obligation contracted by any other. 
 The continuing financial solidarity of France was un- 
 broken. It was plainly a policy rooted in the minds 
 of the people and of the governing forces of France. 
 I saw no reason why it should be broken in this case
 
 MR. JUNIUS S. MORGAN 217 
 
 more than in any other ; less, perhaps, than in many 
 others since this money was wanted for the defence 
 of the country. That was good enough for me. 
 There was no gamble. I thought it a safe operation 
 as it turned out. That is the whole story." 
 
 Of course, Mr. Morgan knew it had been a great couf ; 
 knew what an authority it had given him in the City, 
 and there was a fire in his eye as he spoke which showed 
 he was not insensible to the triumph he had won. 
 Why should he be ? It was considered, and has ever 
 since been considered, an event in the history of 
 EngHsh finance. Now and then I have asked one of 
 the big men in the City : 
 
 " Why did none of you except Morgan think of it ? " 
 
 Generally there was no answer except a regret, or 
 a shrug of the shoulders, but one of them said : 
 
 " Because Morgan was a better man than any of us," 
 
 And to the day of his death he held the position he 
 had won. 
 
 Where is the American who does not read such a 
 narrative as that with pride ? We have had many 
 men who have done us honour abroad ; none that I 
 know of who did more for himself and his country 
 than Mr. J. S. Morgan. He made a great fortune. He 
 left a great name. The two do not always go together. 
 
 There are private memories which I cherish ; and 
 perhaps one or two which I need not keep to myself. 
 Dover House at Roehampton, now Mr. Pierpont 
 Morgan's, was not an important country place, but 
 a suburban villa standing in pleasant grounds which 
 in America, where land is scarce, would be thought 
 spacious. But in this narrow island in the narrow 
 seas nothing is thought spacious till you begin to 
 reckon by thousands of acres. However, you don't 
 expect thousands of acres in the near suburbs of
 
 21 8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 London, and Dover House has as many as you need 
 care for and be happy. Mr. Morgan's tastes were, in 
 a sense, simple. He cared nothing for display. Beauti- 
 ful things he loved, and Dover House was full of them. 
 He had what he wanted. The atmosphere of the 
 place was that of a home. There were gardens, and 
 when you walked in them with Mr. Morgan at the 
 right season he would take you to the strawberry beds 
 and without fear of his gardener turn you loose in 
 them, saying : 
 
 " If you can find finer strawberries anywhere per- 
 haps you will tell me where they are." 
 
 They were magnificent. Then to the stables ; not 
 large, but whatever there was in them that stood on 
 four legs showed the lover of horses and his knowledge 
 of horses. " There's blood for you," was his only 
 comment as he caressed the shoulders of his favourite 
 bay. Then a pair of carriage horses, blacks : 
 
 " They will take me from the door of Dover House 
 to the door of Prince's Gate in twenty-five minutes ; 
 and do, every morning." 
 
 The distance is seven miles, and the standard of 
 trotting speed is very different in this country from 
 the American standard. There were no motors, and 
 men were still of Dr. Johnson's opinion that life had 
 few better pleasures to offer than being whirled along 
 in a post-chaise or a phaeton. 
 
 Inside the house there were pictures and tapestries 
 and other works of art, but not too many. In a frame 
 hanging on the wall in the drawing-room was a piece 
 of Spanish embroidery, lustrous with old gold, I 
 think of the sixteenth century, from some monastery, 
 or more probably church, of Castile, a thing very 
 lovely in itself which had a fascination for its owner. 
 If you noticed, you would see his eyes turn often to
 
 MR. JUNIUS S. MORGAN 219 
 
 this and to one or another picture. To him they were 
 all friends. Dover House was not a museum, as Prince's 
 Gate was then beginning to be and has long since 
 become. Its treasures were not there for show, but 
 because they were treasures and because Mr. Morgan, 
 as I was saying, loved beautiful things. 
 
 Perhaps he was himself the most beautiful thing in 
 Dover House. The grave, strong beauty of his head was 
 remarkable, with the great sweep of the lines about 
 the temples ; the lined forehead, broad and high ; 
 the eyes full of light ; the face ending in an immovable 
 jaw, all will ; the mouth none the less kindly and the 
 lips smiling. When he gave you his hand you knew 
 whether he thought you a friend or not. Distinction 
 in every line and movement ; a man used to giving 
 orders and having them obeyed ; taking decisions 
 quickly and taking the right ones. He had fought 
 the long fight and won it ; with a life behind him of 
 accomplished purpose and unbending integrity. 
 
 I dined there often, sometimes alone, sometimes 
 with company. Mr. Morgan was one of those hosts 
 who knew how to take care of his guests without seem- 
 ing to. He carried his simplicity of demeanour into 
 every part of life. There was no effort, but things 
 went on as he meant them to. As a rule, he talked of 
 anything but business ; topics never failed him, nor 
 considered views. Once or twice I have seen him 
 angry, and he showed his anger by a sudden restraint 
 of speech and of manner. He had it in him to be, like 
 the husband of Elizabeth in her German Garden, a 
 Man of Wrath, but it was not allowed to appear in 
 these circumstances. He liked to find out what his 
 guests cared for and liked to surprise them, or perhaps 
 to see whether they were capable of surprises. I said 
 something one day at dinner about the champagne.
 
 220 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " You think it good ? " 
 
 " It's a wonderful wine." 
 
 "Do you know what it is ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Perrier Jouet of 1 865 ; and very nearly the last 
 of it. I am no longer allowed to drink it, but there 
 will be a bottle for you whenever you come." 
 
 Then he said he had once asked one of the great 
 champagne merchants at Reims what he thought the 
 best champagne ever known in the market : " Next 
 after your own, of course." The great man answered : 
 
 " There's no question of mine or of any other. 
 We all agree that the finest wine ever produced in 
 Champagne was the Perrier Jouet of 1865. The best 
 of the 74's don't touch it." 
 
 To me, as to everybody, in great matters and in less, 
 Mr. Morgan was as good as his word. The bottle of 
 Perrier Jouet was always there. He himself drank 
 only a tisane. If there were other guests it was the 
 same. The butler used always to say to me as he 
 filled my glass : " It is the wine Mr. Morgan ordered 
 for you, sir." 
 
 The accident which caused his death as he was 
 driving on the Riviera may be set down to whatever 
 authority is responsible for the road-building in that 
 part of the world. The causeway ended in a gutter 
 on either side, cut sharply away from the road, not 
 deep, but more than enough to upset a carriage. Mr. 
 Morgan stood up in his victoria, the horses swerved, 
 the wheels went over the edge, he was thrown out, 
 and that was the end. He was, I think, seventy-three 
 or seventy-four, but the fate which robbed him of 
 the years rightfully remaining to him was none the less 
 cruel ; to him and to his friends.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 
 
 I 
 
 T BEGIN with a financial anecdote, the date of 
 -*- which is long before I knew Mr. Pierpont Morgan. 
 Like some others to follow, the origin of it is 
 London; the City of London, where Mr. Morgan 
 has been in times past regarded with more awe than 
 affection. The Orientals, says Macaulay, or some of 
 them, pay their sincerest homage to the deities whom 
 they most dread ; indeed, they are chosen as deities 
 only in order to be propitiated. And perhaps in this 
 case, though the East is East and the West is West, 
 the East is West also. In any case, this is, I beheve, 
 the first transaction which brought Mr. Pierpont 
 Morgan into notice in the City as, in one sense, a 
 rival to his father, in whose lifetime the transaction 
 was carried out. 
 
 One of the foremost houses in London, or in 
 Europe, had been applied to by the United States 
 Government to arrange for the payment of a large 
 amount of outstanding Five-Forties. The amount 
 was $40,000,000. The proposal was made in the 
 spring, and our Government desired the operation 
 to be completed and the whole sum remitted to the 
 Treasury at a fixed date in the autumn ; I suppose 
 on the expiration of the first term of years when the 
 Government had a right to redeem the bonds. I 
 know the name of the London firm, but it is not 
 necessary to mention it. The head of the firm at 
 
 22 1
 
 222 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 that time — he died long since — was a man of great 
 capacity and authority, with an unrivalled knowledge 
 of finance and an unrivalled experience in great 
 financial enterprises. Naturally he was also a man of 
 conservative temperament. He thought $40,000,000 
 a very large sum of money to find all at once, and 
 to find, or have ready, six months hence, when no 
 one could foresee what might be the condition of the 
 money market. If conditions were favourable, there 
 would be a large profit on the transaction, but the 
 profit might be turned into a loss should the Bank rate 
 go up beyond a certain point. There were many other 
 things to be taken into account and other people to 
 be consulted. All this required time. Finally the 
 firm proposed to our Government to take $20,000,000, 
 with the option of taking the other $20,000,000 at a 
 specified date. 
 
 The morning after this proposition had been sent, 
 the firm received a dispatch from New York saying that 
 Mr. Pierpont Morgan had offered to take the whole 
 $40,000,000 on the terms originally submitted to the 
 London firm, and that the Government had accepted 
 his offer. 
 
 It was a surprise, and something more than a sur- 
 prise. Mr. Morgan was then a young man, a member 
 of the firm of Dabney, Morgan & Co. ; almost un- 
 known in London. There was no suggestion — there 
 could be none — that either he or the Government 
 had acted in bad faith or in disregard of any obligation 
 to London. It was simply a case where American 
 energy and courage, personified for the moment in 
 Mr. Pierpont Morgan, had anticipated the slower 
 movement of the English house. But it was re- 
 sented ; I should think bitterly resented at first, 
 and even when reflection had shown that neither
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 223 
 
 Mr. Morgan nor the Government could be blamed, 
 some of the bitterness remained. A firm like 
 this, with its great position and cautious methods, 
 perhaps thought itself entitled to notice before a 
 negotiation of that magnitude was broken off. At 
 any rate, it had slipped away from them, and Mr. 
 Pierpont Morgan suddenly appeared on the Western 
 horizon as a figure henceforth to be reckoned with. 
 It cannot have been very long after his father, Mr. 
 Junius S. Morgan, had electrified London by his 
 boldness and success in the Laurier loan, as I explained 
 the other day. In this American matter the father 
 had, as I understand, no share. But there were now 
 two Morgans instead of one, with only the Atlantic 
 between them, and what is the Atlantic ? 
 
 Years after, when Mr. Morgan began to launch one 
 scheme after another on the London market, some of 
 which failed, he was aware, I imagine, at times, of an 
 opposition which neither the merits of his schemes nor 
 the circumstance of the market explained fully. They 
 would tell you in the City that American methods of 
 finance were not altogether liked in London, that Mr. 
 Morgan's methods were not liked, that the commis- 
 sions paid tended to demoralize the market, and that 
 it was as well Mr. Morgan should let the fact that 
 London was not New York sink into his mind. Now 
 and then somebody would add : 
 
 " There are perhaps powerful interests that inter- 
 vene which are hostile to Mr. Morgan." 
 
 In short, it was said that the firm from whom Mr. 
 Morgan had taken away the $40,000,000 contract 
 with the American Government had not forgotten it, 
 and that they were not unwilling to put a spoke in 
 his wheel, once in a while, as a reminder. But I have 
 the best authority for saying this is not so. The fact
 
 224 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 that it was believed in the City to be so shows, perhaps, 
 or did show, a certain drift of opinion which ran 
 counter to Mr. Morgan's wishes. The names of some 
 of the companies or other enterprises which Mr. Morgan 
 undertook to float and did not succeed in floating, 
 or succeeded only in floating at the expense of those 
 to whom shares were allotted, are as well known in 
 New York as here. 
 
 Since I have begun with finance, about which I 
 know nothing except what I am told, I will go on. 
 One or two incidents made a deep impression on my 
 innocent mind when I heard them, and on other minds 
 less innocent than mine. One relates to that period 
 of distress in America when we were said to have been 
 within twenty-four hours of paying our debts in silver ; 
 in other words, of bankruptcy. Mr. Grover Cleveland 
 was then President, whom one of his friends and 
 advisers — not Mr. Morgan — once described to me as 
 ignorant of finance and all fiscal matters, saying : 
 
 " All he ever knew I taught him, and to teach him 
 was impossible. He would absorb the facts of a par- 
 ticular financial trouble and understand, or at least 
 adopt, the remedies I suggested ; and so he would pull 
 through. But the next time a difficulty occurred he 
 was just as helpless as before, and everything had to 
 be gone over with him again. He could not grasp a 
 principle. To the day of his death he understood 
 neither money nor business." 
 
 In the crisis I refer to I believe a loan was wanted 
 and gold was wanted ; a loan, if I recollect rightly, of 
 $200,000,000 ; and $40,000,000 of gold within a short 
 period. Mr. Morgan was summoned to Washington, 
 as so often happened. A conference took place between 
 Mr. Cleveland, with some of his official advisers to 
 help, and Mr. Morgan. Mr. Cleveland said :
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 225 
 
 " Mr. Morgan, you all seem scared in New York and 
 think we are in great difficulties here about money, but 
 I don't see that things are so bad as all that. The 
 Secretary tells me we have $7,000,000 in the Treasury 
 this morning." 
 
 Mr. Morgan answered : 
 
 " Yes, Mr. President, that is true, but I have in my 
 pocket a draft on the Treasury for $12,000,000, and 
 $7,000,000 won't pay it." 
 
 This concrete illustration presented things in a new 
 light to Mr. Cleveland, and he gave his assent to the 
 arrangements his official advisers were urging on him ; 
 which Mr. Morgan was then to carry out. The 
 $40,000,000 in gold was found within the agreed time 
 and paid into the Treasury, and we did not go on a 
 silver basis nor into bankruptcy. But when it became 
 known in New York that Mr. Morgan had pledged 
 himself to find these forty millions in gold, the great 
 bankers, I am told, shook their heads and said it 
 could not be done. 
 
 " Where is Morgan to get his $40,000,000 in gold ? 
 It is not to be had in America, and if he brings it 
 from abroad it will send exchange to a point which will 
 cause disaster." 
 
 And yet it was found, and exchange hardly moved. I 
 asked some of these great financial authorities how Mr. 
 Morgan managed it. They all said much the same 
 thing. 
 
 " You must ask Morgan. We do not know." 
 
 Perhaps the highest tribute that could be paid him, 
 for it was equivalent to saying : " He is in a class by 
 himself." In the end, from a banker of renown, I 
 got a better answer : 
 
 " I do not know what Morgan did in this case, but 
 I know Morgan, and I think it probable he had long 
 Q
 
 226 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 foreseen this demand for gold, and that when he was 
 asked to supply the $40,000,000 he had already ac- 
 cumulated the greater part of it, or arranged for its 
 transfer as wanted from I know not what vaults." 
 
 The English thought that. One of them said a 
 similar thing during the crisis of 1907 : 
 
 " Nobody looks so far ahead as Morgan. We are 
 told here that for many months before the crash came 
 he had been selling securities. When it came his bank 
 balances made him master of the situation. We have 
 had serious moments here in London, of which the 
 Baring trouble was the most dangerous, but in that 
 and other cases we have acted together. But we have 
 never known anything like that day in New York, when 
 money was 100 per cent and not to be had at that, 
 when Morgan flung on the floor of the Stock Exchange 
 $25,000,000 at 10 per cent, and the danger was over." 
 
 He continued : 
 
 " What I say of Morgan is that he has shown him- 
 self again and again a man who can take command of 
 a situation, and the greater the peril the more absolute 
 is his control." 
 
 There floated over to London at a later date a 
 different sort of story. It was, I think, during the 
 last of the crises, when Mr. Morgan summoned the 
 leading bank presidents and other magnates -in finance 
 and laid a plan before them, to which they all assented. 
 But one considerable personage had stayed away from 
 this meeting. When it was over Mr. Morgan sent for 
 him, and he came. Said Mr. Morgan : 
 
 " Mr. X., you know what we have agreed on. You 
 alone stand out. I think it important, in the interest 
 of your bank and of all the banks, that you should 
 
 come in." 
 
 " No," said Mr. X., " I shall not come in."
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 227 
 
 " Then I give you fair notice that if you do not I 
 will break you and your bank together." 
 
 And he came in. 
 
 Of course I do not know whether these things, or 
 any of them, happened in this way. I give you the 
 versions current in London and believed in London. 
 They help explain how it is that Mr. Morgan's prestige 
 has grown in England to its present height ; not among 
 men of finance only but with the general public. 
 Such mistakes as he has made do not seem to have 
 much diminished it. Napoleon, to whom he and all 
 other masterful men are likened, lost many a battle 
 and finally his throne. Mr. Morgan, too, has lost 
 battles but his fame and authority here in England, 
 where he lost them, were never so great as now. 
 
 II 
 
 An English banker said to me : 
 
 " Morgan's brain must be built on a plan different 
 from other men's. When a proposal involving a great 
 sum of money and complicated transactions is sub- 
 mitted to us we take time to consider it. We lay the 
 facts and figures before our accountants and experts, 
 who go through the whole and make a report to us. 
 Upon that we come to a decision. But Morgan de- 
 cides instantly." 
 
 Then he gave this illustration. 
 
 " He was asked to take charge of a financial opera- 
 tion requiring the transfer of a great property in a 
 foreign country, with drafts in the first instance on 
 New York and then from New York to London ; all 
 this at a time when exchange was unsettled and the 
 markets of the world were extremely sensitive. He
 
 228 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 had to calculate commissions and stamps on the trans- 
 fer and a twofold rate of exchange, and then make 
 up his mind what the price of money was likely to 
 be on the completion of the undertaking. He looked 
 at the papers, computed prices, exchange, middle 
 profits. Government dues, in his head there and then, 
 forecast the state of the market at a date some weeks 
 ahead, and within ten minutes had accepted the 
 proposal. Is it wonderful that he gets business away 
 from us in London, going as slowly as we do ? " 
 
 I knew of a matter in New York ; I believe in con- 
 nection with enormous traction interests at a time 
 when they were most confused. There, it is true, one 
 of his partners had been at work on the proposal for 
 some time, gone into the details and prepared a state- 
 ment. This partner asked his overlord one afternoon 
 at the close of business whether he would go into it 
 next morning, adding : " It will take some hours." 
 Said Mr. Morgan : 
 
 " No, I go to Washington to-night. Get into my 
 carriage and we will talk it over as I drive home." 
 
 Before they had reached Madison Avenue Mr. 
 Morgan had mastered the questions on which his firm 
 had spent weeks, and had given his answer which was 
 an acceptance. 
 
 They say he is hard, exacting, and expects from 
 those about him results not excuses. Very likely. A 
 lady who was his wife's guest in Madison Avenue said 
 to him : 
 
 " Mr. Morgan, you are kind and charming to us 
 here in the house, but I am told you are not always 
 like that in your office and they are all afraid of you." 
 
 He flushed, began an answer, cut it short, and 
 finally said : 
 
 " I am afraid you are right."
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 229 
 
 But now let us see what there is under this adaman- 
 tine surface. 
 
 There came to him one morning during a financial 
 crisis a merchant whom he did not know, or just 
 knew, who said : 
 
 " Mr. Morgan, I have no claim on you, but I shall 
 be thankful if you will look at this statement of my 
 affairs. My business is a good one, I am solvent, but 
 the banks, as you know, have shut down on their 
 customers, and if I cannot have half a million by to- 
 morrow morning I must go under. I have come to 
 ask you for the half-million." 
 
 We can all imagine what Mr. Morgan's first impulse 
 must have been. But he looked at the man's face, 
 looked at his paper, only a half -sheet, checked himself, 
 and said : 
 
 " Come to-morrow morning and you shall have 
 your answer." 
 
 When the man arrived next morning Mr. Morgan 
 without a word of greeting touched a bell, and to the 
 clerk who came in said : 
 
 " Make out a cheque for half a million dollars to 
 the order of Mr. Z." 
 
 And as Mr. Z. began to thank him, Mr. Morgan 
 with a smile held up his hand : 
 
 " No, it is a busy day. There's no time for that. 
 Good morning." 
 
 From what I have said before it may be guessed that 
 Mr. Morgan's knowledge not only of business in its 
 broadest aspects, but in all its particulars, is extra- 
 ordinary. I had heard business men describe it as 
 extraordinary, and one day I said to him : 
 
 " Mr. Morgan, they tell me you know every detail 
 of banking, and can do anybody's work in your office 
 better than the man whose speciality it is."
 
 230 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " Oh, I don't know about better, but what I do 
 know is that I can sit down at any clerk's desk, take 
 up his work where he left it and go on with it." 
 
 Presently he added : 
 
 " I don't like being at any man's mercy." 
 
 I remembered what I had heard the managing 
 partner of a firm of smart tailors in London say : 
 
 " I sat four years crosslegged on a board sewing 
 coats and trousers. That is why I am now managing 
 partner. If I did not know how every stitch ought to 
 be put in I could not check the men's work. They are 
 all afraid of me because I know, and they know I 
 know." 
 
 Perhaps I may as well explain that I am not writing 
 as I do about Mr. Morgan because we are friends. I 
 have known him a good many years, but I cannot 
 claim more than an acquaintance with him ; I hope 
 a friendly acquaintance, but one which leaves me quite 
 free to say what I think ought to be said. 
 
 And one thing I wish to say is that Mr. Morgan has 
 done more than any other American in any such 
 position as his to relieve us from the reproach of caring 
 for money and business and for nothing else. It is 
 not merely that his fame as a collector is equal to his 
 fame as a financier. It is that he is known to collect 
 not from ostentation but from real love of art and 
 of books and of his other treasures. And, of course, 
 an intelligent love. He is not the man to deal much 
 in what he does not understand. Expert advice is 
 at his call and, like most private buyers, he must 
 sometimes depend on it, but of pictures and books 
 and the like he has a genuine knowledge and judgment 
 of his own. 
 
 Only the other day I heard an interesting opinion 
 on Mr. Morgan's collection, and on Mr. Morgan, from
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 231 
 
 an expert. The expert in this case was no dealer but 
 himself a collector, known to every dealer as the best 
 judge o£ values among private buyers with a perhaps 
 unequalled knowledge of pictures, old silver, and many 
 other works of art ; an authority at Christie's, and in 
 Bond Street, or other streets where the feet of the 
 unwary tread sometimes rashly. He said : 
 
 " It is astonishing with what judgment Mr. Morgan 
 buys. His various collections are collections of 
 masterpieces." 
 
 I have heard it called in question but any such 
 doubts rest on separate instances and where is the 
 collector who is not sometimes deceived ? The British 
 Museum itself was deceived about the collection of 
 Tanagra figurines, long supposed to be the finest in 
 Europe, and then one morning swept into the cellars, 
 where they now repose, by the stern verdict of a French 
 critic. I have heard of Mr. Morgan buying for 20,000 
 francs at Aix-les-Bains a collection of " old " ivories 
 for which the dealer first asked 60,000. For the 
 moment it seems not to have occurred to him that the 
 difference between the asking price and the price 
 taken was too great, had they been in fact old. No 
 man's business acumen is always alert. All over Europe 
 the dealers are lying in wait for Mr. Morgan, and well 
 he knows it ; and well he knows the truth of Talley- 
 rand's saying — it is quoted in Sainte-Beuve's mono- 
 graph on him — that everybody's wit is more than a 
 match for anybody's ; sometimes. 
 
 Mr. Morgan knew the late Baron Alphonse de 
 Rothschild and must, I suppose, have seen that great 
 collector's marvellous collection in the Rue St. Florentin 
 in Paris. His was long the first name in Europe in 
 finance, and one of the first as a connoisseur. But 
 listen to a little story long told with relish in art circles
 
 232 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 all over Europe. The Baron was looking at an objet 
 (Tart in a certain shop in Vienna which the dealer 
 pressed him to buy. Finally the Baron said : 
 
 " No. I have no doubt you think it all right but 
 I am not quite sure, and you know I never admit into 
 my collection a piece about the authenticity of which 
 there is any doubt." 
 
 Upon which the dealer lost his temper : 
 
 " Monsieur le Baron, I know the contrary. I know 
 of five pieces in your galleries which are not old nor 
 genuine, but modern copies. I know it because I sold 
 them to you." 
 
 Nothing so tragic as that ever befell Mr. Morgan, 
 yet there comes now and then into the face of a famous 
 dealer an expression from which you infer he might 
 have an anecdote to relate if he would. If a man tells 
 you he has never had a fall in the hunting field, you 
 conclude he has never ridden hard to hounds. And 
 a man who has bought immense quantities of art works 
 in many kinds is fortunate if he is misled only now 
 and then. 
 
 To this, as to most other rules, Mr. Morgan comes 
 as near being an exception as any man well could. 
 He has fiair and he has luck. If you do not believe 
 in luck I will tell you another story. 
 
 In the double house at Prince's Gate in London 
 reposed for a long time an imperfect garniture de 
 cheminee in Sevres of the best period. The complete 
 set was of five pieces and Mr. Morgan had only four. 
 He had ransacked Europe. Every dealer in Sevres 
 knew of it and was on the look out, but Mr. Morgan 
 had relinquished all hope of finding the fifth. One 
 evening just before dinner the bell rang and the servant 
 brought up a message that a man at the door with a 
 parcel wished to see Mr. Morgan.
 
 ii 
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 233 
 
 Send him away," was the answer. But as the door 
 was closing Mr. Morgan, from pure caprice or im- 
 pulse as he described it but really from an inspira- 
 tion, called the servant back and told him to bring up 
 the parcel. There at last was the missing fifth piece 
 of the garniture de cheminee. " Now bring the man 
 up." He came. 
 
 " You wish to sell this ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " How much ? " 
 
 The man named the price. " I was not sure," said 
 Mr. Morgan, " I had so much money in the house, 
 but the sum was got together and paid and a receipt 
 taken." Then he asked : 
 
 " Had you any particular reason for bringing this 
 to me ? " 
 
 " No, sir, except that I had heard of you as a buyer 
 of good things and this is very fine Sevres." 
 
 " Yes, I am aware of that. Good evening." 
 
 If that was not luck, what was it ? But " luck comes 
 to him who with foresight, with patient courage, awaits 
 his opportunity." However that may be, Mr. Morgan, 
 who has had his fair share of what the gods have to 
 bestow, sets much store by his completed set of Sevres. 
 He has, as every man who buys much comes sooner or 
 later to have, the love of the chase. In a buyer devoid 
 of a love for art this passion degenerates into an 
 appetite for mere acquisition. Not so with him. No 
 doubt he likes, in the phrase of an earlier buyer, 
 " getting it away from the other fellow," but his real 
 delight is not so much in acquisition as in possession 
 and enjoyment. And except for the public service 
 these rival accumulators do by rescuing good things 
 from destruction, it is this, and this only, which makes 
 their ambitions respectable.
 
 234 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 III 
 
 There is, however, one other motive which makes 
 collecting respectable, and that is the willingness to 
 share with the public. Mr. Morgan is a conspicuous 
 instance o£ that but other instances are innumerable, 
 in England most of all. The Englishman who has a 
 fine place or a fine gallery throws it open to the public, 
 as a rule, once or twice a week, and the public tramps 
 through and gets as much good from it as it knows 
 how. He does that, and from time to time strips his 
 walls to lend to the yearly Winter Exhibition at the 
 Royal Academy, which the late Lord Leighton origi- 
 nated. But I can think of no other than Mr. Morgan 
 whose generosities of this kind benefit two hemi- 
 spheres. South Kensington in London and the 
 Metropolitan Museum in New York are his debtors 
 in like degree. His gifts are many and his loans are 
 almost gifts. 
 
 There were discontented critics who used to complain 
 that Mr. Morgan left so many of his art possessions in 
 England. A late Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. 
 Shaw, was one of them. He said : 
 
 " Morgan, why don't you bring your pictures and 
 miniatures and the rest to America, where the American 
 people can have a look at them ? " 
 
 " I can't afford to." 
 
 " Well, I knew you were a poor man but I didn't 
 know you were so poor as all that." 
 
 " Mr. Shaw, how much do you suppose your duties 
 on my collection would amount to if they passed 
 through the New York Custom House ? " 
 
 " I don't know — perhaps $200,000 or $300,000." 
 
 " At least $6,000,000 ! " 
 
 So the Secretary of the Treasury dropped that
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 235 
 
 subject. How much the recent alteration in the 
 tariff on antiques might diminish these official extor- 
 tions I do not know, but the reduction must be large. 
 It is a moment which tempts one to say something 
 about the effect of the present New York Collector's 
 administration on European opinion, but I pass on. 
 Nor do I see why Mr. Morgan may not be allowed to have 
 art treasures about him in his London home as well as in 
 New York, unless it should occur to Mr. Loeb to exact 
 a fine on the pictures their possessor does not import. 
 
 They say Mr. Morgan has put up the price of 
 pictures in Europe. They said the same thing of the 
 Rothschilds when Lord Rothschild and Baron Ferdi- 
 nand went into the market for Gainsboroughs and Sir 
 Joshuas. Quite truly. Mr. Alfred Rothschild has 
 done much the same thing for Paters and Lancrets, as 
 Sir Richard Wallace did before him for Greuzes and 
 Fragonards and many other masters. Tring Park and 
 Waddesdon and Halton, and the prices at Christie's 
 compared with the prices thirty years ago, are the 
 best evidences of these competing influences. Mr. 
 Morgan has done his share. He has been, perhaps, the 
 boldest and most persistent of them all. A Paris 
 dealer, if he is in the mood, will tell you that no very 
 long time ago he parted with three pictures to Mr. 
 Morgan at Mr. Morgan's own price. There had been 
 negotiations. Then, one pleasant morning, the 
 American walked into the Frenchman's shop. 
 
 " I will take those three pictures. I will not buy 
 any one of them separately. I will pay you $1,000,000 
 for the three, and they are to be packed and sent to 
 London at once. Good morning." 
 
 The story, I dare say, like other stories, gains some- 
 thing in the telling since it is the dealer who tells it. 
 He hesitated, he says. He had not sold the pictures.
 
 236 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Mr. Morgan had bought them. The dealer had neither 
 accepted nor refused. No payment had been made. 
 But in the course of the next few days the pictures 
 were deUvered at Prince's Gate. 
 
 Mr. Morgan is not the type of collector who collects 
 slowly and singly and tastes as he goes along. Not like 
 Sauvageot, who on a Civil Service salary of $600 a 
 year left when he died works of art valued at $600,000, 
 now in the Louvre, to which he bequeathed them at 
 half price. Nor, on the other hand, like Chauchard, 
 who seems to have made his picture buying a means of 
 advertising his shop. Mr. Morgan has his own ideas 
 and methods. He is Morgan and nobody else. His 
 range is perhaps wider than anybody's else. In pic- 
 tures and many other art-works the late Sir Richard 
 Wallace may have rivalled him. Hertford House 
 to-day contains, I suppose, the most miscellaneous 
 private collection in Europe ; everything first rate in 
 its kind, even including armour. But of Mr. Morgan 
 this may be said. He has : 
 
 One of the finest private collections of pictures in 
 the world, and beyond question finer than any other 
 American owner's. 
 
 The finest collection of miniatures. 
 
 The finest collection of glass. 
 
 The finest collection of such porcelain as he cares for. 
 
 The finest collection of modern authors' manu- 
 scripts. 
 
 And the finest private library in the world, of which 
 the manuscripts are part. 
 
 If there was an exception to this last statement it 
 was the late Due d'Aumale's library, in the Domaine 
 of Chantilly. But that is no longer private for it 
 is now dedicated to public uses. In his lifetime the 
 Duke would show it to anybody who seemed interested
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 237 
 
 in rare and beautiful books. But he had his own way 
 of showing it. He stood by you. The books were in 
 glass cases, locked. If you asked to see a particular 
 book he unlocked the case, took down the book, 
 opened and turned it over for you to see ; or showed 
 you the binding and discoursed on that. Into your 
 hands the book never passed. Mr. Morgan has no 
 Domaine of Chantilly, nor has America anything like 
 it, but he has built next to his Madison Avenue house 
 a white marble gem of a library which of itself ought 
 to have been included in the list above of the finest 
 things possessed by the private collector. The late 
 Mr. Miller McKim was the architect of it, whom I 
 will venture to call the first architect of his time in 
 America ; one of the first and most accomplished any- 
 where. He put his best talent and his art genius at 
 Mr. Morgan's service. 
 
 It was said of Richard Heber that he did not buy 
 books ; he bought libraries. It is not the best way, 
 but it may sometimes be the only way for a man whose 
 life is crowded with multifarious interests. Certainly 
 Mr. Morgan made no mistake when he bought the 
 Gosford library. Of this he had an illustrated cata- 
 logue made, privately printed, in large quarto, 192 
 pages, bound in levant morocco, gros grain, by the 
 " Club Bindery " ; curiously lettered on the back, 
 "J. P. Morgan Library. J. Toovey Collection " ; 
 in separate panels ; and at the bottom, " New York, 
 1 90 1." I ought not to criticize, for my copy of this 
 beautiful volume is a gift from Mr. Morgan. Nor 
 is there much to criticize. The title runs thus : 
 " Catalogue of a Collection of Books formed by James 
 Toovey, principally from the Library of the Earl of 
 Gosford. The property of J. Pierpont Morgan, New 
 York, 1 901." Which is not quite correct. The truth
 
 238 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 is that the late Mr. James Toovey, a Piccadilly book- 
 seller of none too savoury renown, bought the Gosford 
 Library en bloc. This is sufficiently stated in the Pre- 
 face. He added other books and the whole was sold 
 to Mr. Morgan by the son of Mr. Toovey ; I imagine, 
 with the condition that the bookseller's name should 
 be given. 
 
 The Aldines are " alphabetized " by themselves, 
 and most of the Aldine rarities are there ; the rare 
 first Aldine Horace, 1501, the much rarer first Virgil, 
 1 50 1, perhaps rarest of all Aldines in fine condition ; 
 the first Homer, 1504, and many more ; for the most 
 part fine copies though some are in modern bindings. 
 They fill 6^ pages ; the remaining 125 are devoted to 
 books in general literature. The descriptions are con- 
 cise, not always so full as one would like but done 
 with a precision rare if not unique in English book 
 catalogues on a French model. The coloured illus- 
 trations of bindings, I take it, are also French, prob- 
 ably by Danel of Lille. I know of no English artist 
 who can reproduce as Danel does the tones and the 
 very texture and surface of old morocco and old 
 gilding. As a whole, this catalogue is so excellent that 
 the production of it may be ranked among Mr. Mor- 
 gan's many contributions to the art-education of his 
 countrymen. 
 
 Here again it is true that Mr. Morgan follows the 
 golden rule of buying what he likes and understands. 
 Listen to him as he talks and you will be in no doubt. 
 If he thinks you care for such things he will begin on 
 manuscripts or books or pictures in those hours when 
 a man unburdens his soul ; hours of leisure which 
 most business men consecrate to business and he does 
 not. I have heard him, and know. If you have a 
 subject of your own you will very likely find it is his
 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 239 
 
 subject also, and he is ready to meet you. But the hour 
 or two after dinner offers a choice of opportunities. 
 If his hostess prefers bridge he will play bridge ; well, 
 but not too well. Except Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, I 
 can think of no great bridge player who is great in 
 other matters also. They say Mr. Morgan does not like 
 losing. Who does ? In the game of life it is his habit 
 to win. True, one ornament of the English peerage 
 might be named who inherited a few years ago a con- 
 siderable fortune, of which the first half is already gone, 
 at baccarat, trente-et-quarante, and in other not less 
 easy ways. But when he has had a bad night he says, 
 " Yes, but I have had a good gamble," and goes to 
 bed content. 
 
 When I think a little about Mr. Morgan I remem- 
 ber what the late Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt said to Mr. 
 Mills. Mr. Vanderbilt had recently made some 
 twenty odd millions in a single " deal " in Wall Street ; 
 probably risking his whole fortune to do it. Mr. Mills 
 said : 
 
 " You seem to like making money, Mr. Vanderbilt." 
 
 The railway king of that day reflected and answered : 
 
 " No, I don't know that I do, particularly." 
 
 The next time they met Mr. Vanderbilt remarked : 
 
 " I have been turning over what you said, Mr. Mills, 
 
 and I don't even now think I care much about money, 
 
 but I admit I like to see a good balance-sheet at the 
 
 end of the year." 
 
 I do not ask whether Mr. Morgan does, for, if I 
 understand him at all, what he cares for is power. 
 He is by nature a king of men, and the authority of a 
 king, or in these days of an Emperor with a moustache, 
 is what he likes to possess and use. 
 
 He and the Emperor with the moustache have met. 
 It would be interesting to know what each thought of
 
 240 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 the other, but one of the two is a man who keeps his 
 private thoughts to himself and the other's views 
 are not for publication. They say the German 
 Emperor knows a man when he sees him. Mr. Morgan 
 has an imperial authority of his own, an ascendancy 
 neither of divine right nor by any process of election. 
 All the same, he reigns and rules. President Roose- 
 velt, in the plenitude of his autocratic power, mea- 
 sured himself against the Wall Street financier and it 
 was not the President who had the best of that en- 
 counter. Mr. Morgan's services to his country have 
 not been primarily political, though he has been known 
 to take a hand in that game when not occupied with 
 things more important. But the services have none 
 the less been services ; frequent, far-reaching, benefi- 
 cent. His is the kind of patriotism which dispenses 
 with publicity. He does not seem to believe in that 
 government by newspapers on which Jefferson set so 
 high a value ; though he is said to consider a news- 
 paper a useful instrument of finance. Alone, or al- 
 most alone, among men foremost in public life he 
 refuses to be " interviewed." The reporters never 
 cease to pursue him and their reward is the pleasure 
 of pursuit. Never a word falls from his lips. If he 
 wishes to influence the market he has other means. 
 To public opinion he makes no appeal, or none by the 
 usual methods. It is not necessary to ask whether any 
 force in the world's finance has been equal to his. It 
 is sufficient to say that in no man's hands has rested 
 the control of such vast money resources ; the abso- 
 lute control and freedom to use so many hundreds of 
 millions. That position he created. His power is 
 personal. It was not inherited. It cannot be be- 
 queathed. It must die with him but the memory of it 
 will never die.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 
 I 
 
 MR. CARNEGIE AND HIS DEAL WITH 
 MR. PIERPONT MORGAN 
 
 A NOTE arrived early one morning which ran 
 -^^ thus : 
 
 " If you will come to lunch at 1.30 to-day I shall 
 have something to tell you which I think you may like 
 to hear. — A. C." 
 
 I went and found Mr. Carnegie alone. He was 
 living at the time in, I think, West 55th Street. I say 
 I think because I never felt it possible to be sure of 
 an address in New York without referring to one of 
 those extremely expensive directories or registers for 
 which the New York public joyfully pays fantastic 
 prices. A London Court Guide or Royal Blue Book 
 costs five shillings, the equivalent of $1.25. The 
 corresponding Social Register in New York, containing 
 much less matter, is published at $5. Perhaps because 
 the apparently simple but really complicated system 
 of street numbering makes it an article of necessity. 
 Mr. Halstead used to say : 
 
 " I never know your address. Sometimes I can 
 remember the number of your street, and sometimes 
 the number of your house, but I can never remember 
 the two together at the same time." 
 
 When Mr. Carnegie's note came I was living in 
 rooms at the Renaissance, an apartment house which 
 R 241
 
 242 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 was, I believe, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 
 West 43rd Street ; unless it was East 43rd Street ; or 
 perhaps East or West 45th Street. But at the time I 
 knew, and nearly always remembered where I lived, 
 and I knew where Mr. Carnegie lived because I had 
 been there pretty often, and his address was on the 
 top of his notepaper. 
 
 All this may seem in the nature of a stage aside, 
 but is really very pertinent to my story, since my story 
 deals with figures, and since Mr. Carnegie had not 
 then built himself that great barracks of a house be- 
 tween 90th and 91st Streets, in Fifth Avenue, or 
 between 91st and 92nd, or some other streets out of 
 the arithmetic. He and lunch were waiting when I 
 came in, and he began at once ; like the man of 
 business he is and always has been : 
 
 " I have sold the Homestead Works and all my steel 
 interests to Pierpont Morgan." 
 
 There had been rumours for some days of an im- 
 pending " deal," but the surprise was none the less 
 complete. Mr. Carnegie, always mindful of effects 
 and impressions, regarded with evident pleasure the 
 look of amazement there must have been on my face. 
 Amazement because Mr. Carnegie and Pittsburg and 
 the steel industry had always seemed to us all identical, 
 or indissolubly bound up each with the other. And 
 here was Mr. Pierpont Morgan coming in like a divorce 
 court judge to put asunder those whom circumstances 
 and long years had joined together. 
 
 Mr. Carnegie went on with his story as we lunched. 
 At that time it was all new, of course. So much of it 
 has since become known that I need not go very far 
 into those figures which, as I said before, I find, so 
 perplexing. I will sum it all up in one of those 
 tremendous sentences which, though they stupefy the
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 243 
 
 ordinary mind, are so much mother's milk to a man 
 Hke Carnegie, accustomed to think in milHons. He said : 
 
 " I suppose you would like to know the price. I 
 have sold at a price which secures to me a yearly in- 
 come, from this source alone, of -^3,250,000." 
 
 The world spun round as he named the sum. It is 
 always spinning round, but it spun a little faster than 
 usual for a minute or two. Mr. Carnegie, you will 
 observe, thinks not only in millions but in sterling. 
 To that extent he has remained a British subject. In 
 dollars the figure of his yearly income works out, 
 roundly, at $16,250,000. Needless to say that there 
 has been in all the history of the world no other such 
 fortune purely industrial. 
 
 I asked whether the transaction was complete. 
 
 " Practically, yes. But no papers have passed. It 
 takes time to prepare papers. But Mr. Morgan and I 
 talked the thing over yesterday and came to terms." 
 
 Then, still with an eye to stage management, Mr. 
 Carnegie paused ; then added : 
 
 " There is nothing in writing. Everything between 
 us has been by word of mouth." 
 
 " But you must have put a few figures on paper, if 
 nothing else." 
 
 " No, not one. If either of us should die to-night 
 the deal would be off." 
 
 Happily, neither of them did die that night. The 
 agreement was put in legal shape. The papers of the 
 Steel Corporation were also put in legal shape by Mr. 
 Victor Morawetz and Mr. Lynde Stetson. It took 
 them just eleven days to do it. Unless one of the two 
 should object, I will go so far as to say that I was told 
 afterward, on authority it would not be easy to dis- 
 pute, that their fee for these eleven days' work was 
 $500,000. I dare say that seems moderate in New
 
 244 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 York, where legal services are paid at a rate, and in a 
 manner, unknown in London. But when I have told 
 the story in London it has not always been believed. 
 
 Even when I explain that Mr. Morawetz and Mr. 
 Stetson are at the summit of their profession the 
 Londoner is still incredulous. Then I am driven to 
 explain further that one reason for the great sums 
 paid to these gentlemen and to Mr. Olney and to Mr, 
 Root and others of that rank — there are not many — is 
 that the deeds they draw are in fact insurance policies ; 
 that the great corporations are willing to pay great 
 prices because it is understood that the instruments 
 thus framed are to go through the fire of litigation and 
 come out unscathed. To a still sceptical Englishman 
 I have sometimes quoted the saying of a great financier 
 in New York, whose name you will search these pages 
 for in vain : 
 
 " When we put a new enterprise on the market the 
 difhculty is not in finding the capital but in keeping 
 inside the law." 
 
 A memorable declaration even when you put wholly 
 aside, as of course we all do, all the sinister meanings 
 to which the words lend themselves. 
 
 It was, I understood, Mr. Morgan who had pro- 
 posed to buy, and not Mr. Carnegie who had proposed 
 to sell. It may not much matter. Their minds met 
 with the ease natural to men to whom great affairs and 
 quick decisions and all-embracing views of complicated 
 questions are of daily occurrence. Whenever anything 
 has to be said of Mr. Morgan, whom I put among the 
 really great men I have known, this transaction must 
 ever be reckoned high up among those on which his 
 immense fame is built. There have been, I suppose, 
 moments in the history of the United States Steel 
 Corporation when the outside world — or shall I say
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 245 
 
 Wall Street ? — considered that Mr. Carnegie had the 
 best of this deal. Fleeting moments which now belong 
 to history and connect themselves with many outside 
 circumstances. 
 
 There was, at any rate, as I talked with Mr. Carnegie, 
 no sign of exultation in the sense of having got the 
 better of Mr. Morgan. These two great powers had 
 met and made a treaty, a treaty which involved neither 
 surrender nor discredit. There are such treaties. 
 Franklin, prone to epigrams and proud of his diplo- 
 macy, said in his letter to Josiah Quincy, " There 
 never was a good war or a bad peace." But that is a 
 professional opinion ; the sort of thing that Mr. 
 Bright also used to say ; not an historical statement 
 but a pious aspiration. Mr. Bright was less sweeping 
 than Franklin. He said to me : 
 
 " There has been no just war since William III, 
 except your war for the Union, and that was forced 
 on you." 
 
 In Franklin's mind lurked the thought that peace 
 and not war was the work and the object of diplomacy. 
 But it is by no means always so. 
 
 Mr. Carnegie continued : 
 
 " I take bonds in payment ; 5 per cent bonds 
 secured upon the entire property of all the seven 
 corporations [afterward eight] which merge in the 
 Steel Corporation. I think I know pretty well what 
 they are all worth, and if there's a better security any- 
 where than my mortgage will be I don't know where." 
 
 It may be noted that one of the parties to this great 
 bargain was a man of Wall Street. Mr. Carnegie, of 
 course, is not, and he is sometimes quoted as not liking 
 Wall Street or its methods. I have heard him say : 
 
 " Bring mc your money and I will give you 5 per 
 cent for it. Don't speculate. I have never bought a
 
 246 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 share or stock for the rise nor sold for the fall. It is an 
 agreement with my partners that no one of them shall 
 speculate." 
 
 So it is evident he is not a prepossessed witness in 
 favour of any of the Wall Street group. But when I 
 said to him, " You trust Morgan's word," he answered : 
 
 " Yes, but Morgan is Morgan." 
 
 And perhaps even Mr. Roosevelt, who admits, or 
 did admit, that there are good trusts as well as bad 
 trusts, would admit, or would once have admitted, 
 that there are men in Wall Street to whom honour 
 and good faith and business probity mean what they 
 mean to men elsewhere. 
 
 It was evident that much of what Mr. Carnegie 
 said to me was intended to be cabled to The Times, and 
 that some of it was not meant to be was equally evi- 
 dent. When I said so to him he answered in almost 
 the very words Prince Bismarck had used in similar 
 circumstances : 
 
 " It is for you to distinguish." 
 
 But as this was a matter of business and figures, I 
 said to Mr. Carnegie I would send him a copy of my 
 dispatch to look at before it went. I sent it at four 
 o'clock by messenger, asking him to let me have it 
 before six, the hour at which, as a rule, long dispatches 
 to London had to be filed, six in New York being eleven 
 at night in London. It came back at 4.30, with an 
 inscription at the bottom : 
 
 " O. K.— A. C." 
 
 Which I thought so interesting that I kept the 
 original and handed a copy to the cable messenger. 
 And I imagine there has seldom been a business dis- 
 patch which has so stirred the business world of London 
 as this account of the great treaty between Mr. 
 Morgan and Mr. Carnegie.
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 247 
 
 II 
 
 MR. CARNEGIE AS CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY, AS APOSTLE 
 OF PEACE, AND OTHERWISE 
 
 Deep down in the hearts of most men lurk super- 
 stitions about their fellow-men whose good fortune, 
 or what seems to them such, is above the average. 
 The belief in wizardry of one kind or another has 
 never died out. With respect to Mr. Carnegie 
 it took a form which perhaps did not wholly dis- 
 please him, since it tended to establish a belief in 
 his omniscience. It was said of him, for example, 
 that he knew all about metallurgy, chemistry, 
 mechanics, and other sciences and processes which 
 had to do with the making of steel. I asked him, 
 at a favourable moment, whether this was true 
 or how far true. He answered : 
 
 " It is not true at all. I know nothing about 
 any of these matters. That is, I have no exact know- 
 ledge on which I should build an opinion or judgment 
 of my own and act on it. The secret of my method 
 and my success is simple. I organize my business 
 into departments. I put the best man I can find 
 at the head of each department, hold him responsible, 
 and judge him by results. And I think the results 
 prove that I have been a pretty good judge of men." 
 
 I once put a similar question to Mr. Pierpont 
 Morgan but that will be found in its place else- 
 where. Mr. Carnegie's system was a good system so 
 long as he was at the head of it. He had a directing 
 mind and a deciding power, both in a supreme degree ; 
 qualities for want of which many a business goes to 
 pieces. What happened when he left the steel
 
 248 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 business to take care o£ itself may be seen from 
 the account I am going to quote ; an account, it 
 should be understood, which relates to the early 
 days of the Steel Corporation. Mr. Carnegie had 
 asked me to go with him as his guest to a St. Andrew's 
 dinner in New York, over which he was to preside. 
 He there introduced me to one of those heads of 
 departments above mentioned ; an appointee of his 
 own. I have forgotten both the name of this gentle- 
 man and the name of his department, and the story 
 is better without either. He talked to me for a long 
 time about the Homestead Works, and how and why 
 the business had prospered. His story bore out what 
 Mr. Carnegie had said, and strengthened it. As you 
 listened to him you could not doubt that Mr. Car- 
 negie was the soul and source of its prosperity. Finally 
 I asked him how things were going under the new 
 Corporation. He gave me an answer which I thought 
 striking : 
 
 " They are not going quite so well, and I will 
 tell you why. The business formerly had one head, 
 one executive authority. Now it has several. In 
 the old days a message would come from Mr. Car- 
 negie that he wanted to see me, or perhaps I had 
 a scheme in my head which I wanted to submit to 
 him. I will give you as an illustration a department 
 with which I had nothing to do. 
 
 " I had become convinced that we wanted, let 
 us say, a new wharf and warehouses at the port. 
 When I went to Mr. Carnegie I went with a complete 
 statement of reasons ; with plans and estimates also 
 complete. I stated my case and laid the papers before 
 him. He was a good listener, but asked questions at 
 the critical points and the answers had to be ready. 
 When I had finished he said : ' Leave the papers
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 249 
 
 and come to-morrow morning at ten o'clock.' At 
 ten o'clock next morning he said yes or no. If yes, 
 he expected the work to be begun at once. I was in 
 charge, and there would be no occasion to trouble 
 Mr. Carnegie again until I was in a position to ask 
 him to inspect the completed wharf and warehouses. 
 
 " Whereas now, I must lay my proposal, as a pro- 
 posal, before the manager, who in turn lays it before 
 the local board of directors, who in their turn lay 
 it before the general board at New York, who con- 
 sider it at their next meeting, whenever that may be. 
 All this may take three or four weeks or more, the 
 necessity all the while urgent in the face of competition 
 and the time lost much diminishing the competitive 
 value of the improvement. But this is the routine 
 through which every important proposal has now to 
 pass. There is not a man of us who would not like 
 to have Mr. Carnegie back again." 
 
 Whether this narrative may help explain why 
 Steel common at a certain moment stood at eight, I 
 cannot say, nor whether a return to Mr. Carnegie's 
 methods had anything to do with its rise later, or 
 the immense prosperity to which the new concern 
 presently attained. The story interested me, and is 
 told to you as a tribute to Mr. Carnegie. 
 
 It is, I suppose, since Mr. Carnegie retired from 
 the steel-making business that the world has heard 
 most of the steel-maker. His libraries, his later gifts 
 of great sums of money to other objects, his apostle- 
 ships, his dual existence in Scotland and in the United 
 States, and, last of all, his ten millions to promote, 
 or for aught I know to establish, the peace of the 
 world — all these are so many jets of limelight turned 
 one after the other on a figure in the centre of the 
 stage. I shall have nothing to say about any of them
 
 250 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 except where I happen to have known something 
 not of common knowledge. I did at one time mean 
 to write an article on Mr. Carnegie in one of the 
 English reviews, and asked him for material. He 
 kindly sent me a large parcel of books and I know not 
 what else. But on considering the matter I gave 
 up this plan and left the parcel of books unopened. 
 It remains unopened. I found that my article would 
 be too critical, or more critical than I wanted or 
 meant it to be. I admire Mr. Carnegie's capacity 
 for enthusiasm, but his enthusiasms are not mine. 
 There are few great public questions on which I have 
 been able to agree with him, nor can I see any clear 
 sign that the English public or the American public 
 agrees with him or is disposed to accept his leadership. 
 It was a long time before Mr. Carnegie was taken 
 seriously in England as a teacher. I am not sure 
 that that time has yet arrived. Even the splendid 
 list of ambassadors and other public officers whom 
 he has secured as trustees for his Peace Fund does 
 not convince Englishmen that his is anything more 
 than a counsel of perfection ; a pious opinion. The 
 English have made their way in the world and built 
 the British Empire by hard fighting. When Mr. 
 Carnegie tells them that war is barbaric they ask : 
 " Was Wellington a barbarian ? Was Nelson ? Was 
 Clive ? Is Kitchener ? " They will do what they 
 can to keep the peace in the future, but they do not 
 care to renounce their heroes nor their history. 
 They approve of arbitration in some things, but 
 there are certain questions they will never, no matter 
 what treaties they sign, submit to arbitration, and 
 if challenged on vital matters they will neither submit 
 them to arbitration nor will they surrender, but will 
 fight ; and fight as hard as ever they did, and as well.
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 251 
 
 Mr. Carnegie cannot change human nature, nor 
 turn a warhke race into htigants at The Hague. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, a great name often in Mr. Car- 
 negie's mouth, was supposed to wish for peace, 
 and no doubt did. But there were other things 
 he wished for more. His notion of peace was to 
 be ready for war. Why did he ask the House of 
 Commons to vote six miUions sterhng in 1870 when 
 Belgium was thought to be menaced ? Why did he 
 ask for _£i 1,000,000 at the time of the Penjdeh 
 quarrel with Russia, and tell the House " the book 
 is not yet closed " ? And what did he mean to do 
 with the money which the House voted unanimously ? 
 
 Lord Morley has always been a great authority 
 with Mr. Carnegie. He said : 
 
 " Don't make any mistake. Mr. Gladstone is 
 anything but a peace-at-any-price Minister. He 
 will fight as readily as Palmerston or Pitt, though 
 perhaps for different objects ; and once in for a war, 
 he would fight to the end." 
 
 And I should say of Lord Morley himself what 
 he said of Gladstone. That same Penjdeh incident 
 proved it. True, it was arranged and there was no 
 war, though for some weeks the two great empires 
 stood on the brink of war. But when the Emperor 
 of Russia gave a jewelled sword to General Komaroft", 
 who had been the chief agent in that perfidious 
 aggression, Mr. Morley was asked how he liked it, 
 and answered : 
 
 " Like it ? I should like to cram his jewelled sword 
 down his Russian throat." 
 
 Strong language ? It is. But the language actually 
 used was stronger still. And I never liked Morley 
 better nor respected him more than when he used 
 it. It would not prevent him from being one of
 
 252 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Mr. Carnegie's Peace Trustees, but it would prevent 
 him from tying his hands by any pledge meant to 
 restrict his right of appealing in all circumstances to 
 the ultima ratio of war. Make it as infrequent as 
 possible but you can never make it impossible ; 
 that, I think, would be Lord Morley's answer to his 
 Scotch-American friend. 
 
 I have long known Lord Morley and Mr. Carnegie 
 as friends ; a friendship, like so many others, cemented 
 by unlikenesses ; the friendship of a man of business 
 for a scholar ; of a man of impulses for a patient 
 thinker bent on going to the bottom of things ; of a 
 strongly self-confident man for a man alike of singular 
 modesty and invincible convictions. Lord Morley's 
 influence over Mr. Carnegie is, as it was over Mr. 
 Gladstone, intellectual. Mr. Gladstone recognized 
 a kindred spirit. He could appreciate as few could 
 the extraordinary range and precision of Morley's 
 knowledge and the use he made of his mind. Mr. 
 Carnegie's recognition of these qualities was less 
 complete than Mr. Gladstone's, and I rather imagine 
 he supposed Lord Morley his pupil in politics ; 
 which was not quite so. I remember an instance. 
 There was a crisis in Westminster as to which Mr. 
 Carnegie held strong views ; as he did on most sub- 
 jects whether he had found time to think them 
 completely out or not. Morley was in Russia. Mr. 
 Carnegie telegraphed him very urgently. 
 
 " But," said Mr. Carnegie, in a tone of surprised 
 dismay, " I cannot make Morley understand how 
 important it is he should return at once and take his 
 proper part in this contest. Still less can I under- 
 stand his reluctance to accept my view." 
 
 A little anecdote which gives you a glimpse, not 
 complete but clear of both men.
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 253 
 
 It was Mr. Carnegie's desire that Mr. Morlcy, 
 some years ago, should come to America and explain 
 to the American people what they ought to think 
 about " Progress " and other related topics. He 
 asked Morley to come as his guest, and Morley, 
 though certainly taking a less didactic view of his 
 mission, accepted Mr. Carnegie's invitation and 
 came. There was a celebration at the opening, I 
 think, of the Institute at Pittsburg, and before a 
 Pittsburg audience Mr. Morley delivered his address. 
 It was a piece of high thinking. The people of 
 Pittsburg, having resolved to take serious views 
 of life — of intellectual and art life as well as of in- 
 dustry and business — welcomed Mr. Morley, of whom 
 some had heard before and all now heard from Mr. 
 Carnegie whose dictatorship in the Iron City was 
 irresistible. They duly applauded the orator, 
 and it was plain that the dictator had chosen his man 
 wisely. 
 
 But Mr. Carnegie wished it to be understood 
 that Mr. Morley came to America not only as orator 
 on Progress but as an Ambassador in Literature ; 
 a part for which no other living Englishman was so 
 fit. He arranged therefore that distinguished and 
 some undistinguished Americans should meet him 
 elsewhere than on the platform. About one of these 
 receptions I will venture to say a word. 
 
 HI 
 
 MR. CARNEGIE AND LORD MORLEY THE LATE KING AT 
 
 SKIBO A PITTSBURG STORY 
 
 The dinner, or this particular dinner, which Mr. 
 Carnegie gave Mr. Morley was like no other dinner
 
 254 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 ever given by anybody to anybody. Not large enough 
 to be called public, but yet not private. It was given 
 in Mr. Carnegie's house in Fifth Avenue, and we sat 
 down twenty-two persons. I think what our host 
 intended was that English and American literatures 
 should meet and exchange greetings. There were, 
 however, on the American side men eminent in other 
 things than literature ; such as Arms, Law, and 
 Journalism. Mr. Carnegie, unhappily, was ill upstairs 
 and could not appear. With one of those graceful 
 intuitions which make women what they are in society, 
 Mrs. Carnegie took her husband's place. There was 
 no other lady. Dinner over, she rose, bade us good- 
 bye, and appointed Mr. Gilder to preside. 
 
 In front of each guest lay an engraved extract from 
 some book or other writing of Mr. Morley ; each 
 quotation different, but each with an engraved request 
 that the guest would take the passage before him as 
 the text of his speech. Mr. Gilder and Mr. Morley 
 alone were free to talk on what they liked. Mr. 
 Gilder presented — as if he were Mr. Charles Frohman — 
 Mr. Morley in a few words chosen with the scholastic 
 care characteristic of Mr. Gilder. Then Mr. Morley, 
 not wholly free from embarrassment, spoke rather 
 briefly but, as ever, weightily and, as ever, expressing 
 the thought which was his own in that language of 
 literature from which neither politics nor society ever 
 wholly withdraws him. 
 
 I know not how to go on. I will do nothing beyond 
 chronicling the fact that of the twenty-two men 
 present seventeen spoke. But for once the exuberance 
 of American after-dinner oratory was kept in check. 
 There were men present of a distinction such that 
 in ordinary circumstances they would have thought 
 themselves entitled to not less than half an hour apiece.
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 255 
 
 With a tact for which no praise could be too high, 
 they contented themselves with a modest five or ten 
 minutes. As I listened I remember hoping that each 
 speaker felt, as each listener felt, how much each little 
 discourse gained hy condensation. Probably they did, 
 since the characters of speaker and listener were 
 continually interchangeable. Every now and again I 
 looked at Mr. Morley. He had no notion what he 
 was to expect, and as presently it dawned upon him 
 that Mr. Carnegie had required a speech from almost 
 every one of his guests there came over Mr. Morley's 
 benignant face an expression of pleased bewilderment 
 which had about it something of religious beauty. The 
 Christian virtues, for that night at any rate, were his. 
 
 It was a scene which could have occurred nowhere 
 but in America and perhaps nowhere in America 
 except under Mr. Carnegie's roof. I have never told 
 the story in England. I was sure no Englishman 
 would believe me. I don't know whether Mr. Morley 
 ever told it. His rigorous accuracy of mind might 
 convince, yet an Englishman's power of belief in 
 novelties is never very great, and the notion of seven- 
 teen speeches at a semi-private dinner would have 
 seemed to him all but incredible. Yet had this same 
 sceptical Englishman been there he would have spent 
 an evening of fresh impressions and agreeable social 
 relations such as might have induced him to reconsider 
 his fixed conceptions of hospitality. 
 
 Mr. Morley was delighted with the views of 
 American life which Mr. Carnegie presented to him. 
 He had, however, a wish to see something of that 
 social fabric which exists for its own sake, and a friend 
 who knew of this wish arranged a luncheon for him 
 at Sherry's, which included two of the women whom 
 everybody would recognize, by their names and other-
 
 256 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 wise, as leaders in New York society. There were two 
 others o£ the same class and two men like unto them. 
 Mr. Morley sat between the two ladies first mentioned 
 whom he met, as he did the others, for the first time, 
 and his pleasure was plain to see. As we walked away 
 together after luncheon, he said : 
 
 " Pray have you many women in New York of the 
 force and beauty of Mrs. X ? And I might ask the 
 same question about any of the others." 
 
 If Mr. Carnegie will forgive one intrusion into more 
 or less private life, perhaps he will forgive another. 
 He must know how keen American curiosity about 
 Skibo is and that, often as it has been gratified, it is 
 still keen. I am not going to describe the castle which 
 I have seen only once. All I can offer you is an im- 
 pression. Mr. Winston Churchill and I were staying 
 at Dunrobin, fourteen miles away, and telephoned one 
 morning to ask if we might come to luncheon. We 
 motored over, partly in the belief that we should find 
 Mr. Morley at Skibo ; but he had gone. We found 
 instead a group of guests, all unknown to us, and all 
 with unusual gifts of silence. 
 
 Skibo was once old and I believe Mr. Carnegie 
 would have liked to keep it old ; but his architect 
 warned him there was no compromise between leaving 
 it a ruin and rebuilding from the foundations. He 
 chose the latter, and the result is that Skibo is probably 
 the newest old castle in the world. Mr. Carnegie is 
 modern and his castle is modern. It is an expression 
 of Mr. Carnegie. He is a man who knows what he 
 likes and generally gets it. He likes comfort, his own 
 sort of comfort ; why should he not have it ? What 
 feudal chieftain or what ancient Laird of Skibo would 
 have thought of building a swimming-bath ninety feet 
 long ? But Mr. Carnegie, to whom everything feudal
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 257 
 
 is alien, thought of it, and built it, and there it is to- 
 day. And many other things are there to-day, just 
 as free as the bath is from the feudal stamp. The 
 modern upholsterer has replaced the Highland robber. 
 
 The library interested me most. There are some 
 five-and-twenty thousand volumes all chosen by the 
 late Lord Acton, and what could be more stimulating 
 than to look over the collection of books which Lord 
 Acton had thought suitable as a library for Mr. 
 Carnegie ? You saw the meeting of two minds, each 
 highly remarkable and as unlike as it was possible for 
 two minds to be. Lord Acton was once asked how 
 much he read daily, on an average, and his answer 
 was : 
 
 " One big octavo volume a day, most likely in 
 German, beside odds and ends." 
 
 Mr. Carnegie, as we all know, has read much and 
 written much, excellently well, but until quite re- 
 cently the world knew him, since his retirement from 
 business, as a creator of libraries, or at least of 
 library buildings. I asked him that morning how 
 many he had given away during that month which 
 was nearing its end. He rang for his secretary who 
 said : " I will get the hst, sir," which presently he 
 laid before us. There were twenty-seven. 
 
 There are, of course, men, both scholars and men 
 of the world, who doubt whether Mr. Carnegie has 
 made the best use of his money in scattering library 
 buildings about, which can serve only local uses. 
 Even if you put the fiction question aside, is it worth 
 while to form collections of books in separate towns 
 which can never have any real importance as libraries ? 
 Is anything gained by multiplying copies of Hume and 
 Gibbon and Macaulay and other classics which no 
 gentleman's library should be without ? Mr. Carnegie, 
 s
 
 258 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 I know, was urged to make a different use of his 
 money : 
 
 " We have in America no Bodleian Library, no 
 British Museum. We have no library to which a 
 specializing student can go with the certainty of find- 
 ing the books he needs to carry on his studies to the 
 end. If you would found such a library at Yale or 
 Harvard or Columbia, or take the New York Public 
 Library, or the Congressional Library at Washington, 
 and complete them, or one of them, you would serve 
 American scholarship as it can be served in no other 
 
 way " 
 
 But Mr. Carnegie is a Democrat, and appHes the 
 principles and dogmas of his political faith to his 
 schemes for the improvement of mankind, and he 
 went his own way as I suppose he always will. And 
 yet it is not too late to try the other way. There is a 
 sense in which the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number is the happiness of number one. In other 
 words, raise the standard at the top and you lift a 
 whole people with it. But Mr. Carnegie has a faith 
 not only in Democracy but in himself ; which accounts 
 for many of his splendid successes, and perhaps now 
 and then for a failure. 
 
 It was in this Acton-Carnegie library that Mr. 
 Carnegie had lately received King Edward, who had 
 been staying at Dunrobin and had motored over for 
 luncheon. It was here that Mr. Carnegie welcomed 
 the King by reciting to him the poem which Mr. 
 Joaquin Miller had composed on the occasion of Mr. 
 Carnegie's birthday. I was shown the poem, em- 
 blazoned in colours on stamped cardboard. All about 
 the country-side the story of this poem had been told, 
 or several stories had been told. The King, it was 
 said, did not like Mr. Joaquin Miller's effusion. In
 
 MR. ANDREW CARNEGIE 259 
 
 truth, these verses of the Poet of the Sierras were not 
 conceived in a courtierlike spirit. They began with 
 invocations to the German Emperor, to President 
 Roosevelt, to the King, " Hail fat Edward " — " That's 
 you, sir," said Mr. Carnegie to the King — and then 
 swept aside all these great personages with Mr. Joaquin 
 Miller's personal assurance that he had rather shake 
 Mr. Carnegie's strong hand than all the others ; as 
 if they were all outstretched to him, which they do 
 not appear to have been. 
 
 It is true the late King was fat, which did not 
 prevent him from carrying himself with a distinction 
 that proved how little mere physique has to do with 
 dignity and personal charm. His mother had proved 
 it before him. But it is not the custom to dwell on 
 these matters with royalty. There is a story of a man 
 in a shooting party who said to the King as he missed 
 two or three pheasants flying high over his head : 
 " Sir, you are too fat to shoot rocketers." But he was 
 never again asked to shoot with the King ; nor perhaps 
 would Mr. Joaquin Miller have been. 
 
 I heard both at Skibo and at Dunrobin that Mr. 
 Carnegie was a good landlord and good neighbour. The 
 Duke of Sutherland is reported to have said of him : 
 
 " Yes, indeed, Carnegie has been a good neighbour 
 to me. He bought a good deal of my land which I 
 wanted to sell and paid me a good price, and I never 
 heard that any of the tenants were the worse for the 
 change. They and all the people about are, indeed, 
 better off than if the land had remained mine, for 
 Carnegie has spent more money on the property than 
 I could, and spent it wisely and kindly." 
 
 As the Duke owns something like a million and a 
 half acres, his testimony is to the point ; the more so 
 as he is himself a good and liberal landlord.
 
 26o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 In what used to be Mr. Carnegie's proper environ- 
 ment, Pittsburg, I heard a similar account of his 
 relations to those about him and under him. His men 
 knew him as a just master ; generous withal, and 
 abounding in human sympathies. If their faith was 
 ever shaken for a moment, it may have been at the 
 time of the great Homestead strike for which a firm 
 hand was needed and found, but not Mr. Carnegie's. 
 He was away in Scotland. When he returned, order 
 had been restored. He is reported to have said to 
 some of the men : 
 
 " Boys, I am sorry all this has happened. Perhaps 
 if I had been here it might not have happened. But 
 I could not go back on my partners, could I ? " 
 
 True or not, it is illustrative. With all his master- 
 fulness he knew when to concede, and perhaps when 
 to be in Scotland, and I suppose he never went back 
 on anybody.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR AND HIS 
 EXPERIENCES IN ENGLAND 
 
 I 
 
 TF I say anything about Mr. William Waldorf 
 Astor I shall encounter in the United States, 
 I suppose, a strong prejudice due to his having be- 
 come a naturalized British subject. But I must risk 
 that. The American point of view is apt to be 
 American. That, however, is not the only point 
 of view. There are others, whether we choose to 
 admit it or not. When a German or Scandinavian 
 casts off his German or Scandinavian nationality 
 and becomes a naturalized American citizen, we 
 welcome him. We do not feel bound to take note 
 of German or Scandinavian protests against his 
 abandonment of his native land. In the case of 
 Germany there are such protests, and very strong 
 protests. For a long time Germany refused to recog- 
 nize the right of expatriation, and if a naturalized 
 German returned to Germany she compelled him to 
 undergo military conscription as if still a German. 
 Once a German always a German was her motto. 
 It required a treaty, negotiated by the historian 
 Bancroft, then our Minister at Berhn, to relieve 
 him from that obligation. That was the German 
 point of view, and I think we may admit that the 
 German sentiment of nationality and love for the 
 Fatherland is not less strong than the American. 
 
 261
 
 262 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 But since we nevertheless incorporate some millions 
 of Germans, against the general wish of the German 
 people, into our American Republic, need we be so 
 angry with a single American who elects to become 
 an Englishman ? We may regret it. We need not 
 revile him. 
 
 Why Mr. Astor made this choice is not generally 
 known. Most New Yorkers are aware that his position 
 at home, for reasons I need not go into, was made 
 difficult for him, by no fault of his. At any rate, 
 he resolved to come over here and live. As his children 
 grew up they presented a problem. Were they to 
 be British or American ? They were to live in 
 England. If he became a British subject before 
 they were of age, they would be British also. Mr. 
 Astor was quite aware of the criticism which would 
 be made and of the obloquy that would follow upon 
 his decision. But he preferred to take that upon 
 himself rather than let it fall upon his children ; 
 and that is why he determined to be naturalized 
 while they were still minors. He may have been 
 right or wrong but the motive of parental piety 
 to his children is one that we can all respect. 
 
 So far as I know, Mr. Astor has made no explanation 
 and has made no answer of any kind to the invective 
 of his American assailants. He is a man with a great 
 firmness of character ; a great courage ; a great 
 power of enduring in silence what he believes to be 
 unjust censure. If I were to consult him, I imagine 
 he would give no sanction to the statement I am 
 making. But I know the facts from various sources 
 and I use them on my own responsibility. A man's 
 friends may sometimes say for him what he would 
 not say for himself. And if I thought it might a 
 little appease American wrath, I would add that
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 263 
 
 Mr. Astor, even as a British subject, has done much 
 to make the American name respected here. Briton 
 though he be in law, everybody thinks of him as 
 an American, and recognizes as primarily and essen- 
 tially American those qualities which give him a 
 place apart in this English life. As I knew him in 
 New York, and have known him all through his 
 English experiences, I offer my testimony for what 
 it is worth. 
 
 Mrs. Astor was living when her husband chose 
 London as a residence. No one who knew Mrs. 
 Astor could imagine that social ambitions influenced 
 her. It would not be a reproach if they had. Social 
 ambitions are respectable in themselves and many 
 American women have shown us to what brilliant 
 uses they may be turned abroad, and what an impress 
 they leave on English society. Mrs. Astor took the 
 place to which her beauty, her name, her wealth, 
 entitled her, but she took it very quietly and almost 
 indifferently. While they were both in deep mourning 
 for the loss of her father and his, Mr. Astor became 
 the tenant of Lansdowne House ; one of the few 
 houses in London standing in its own grounds, 
 and a palace rather than a house. I asked Mrs. 
 Astor why she cared to live in a mansion meant for 
 splendid hospitalities which, in the circumstances, 
 were impossible to them. She answered : 
 
 " Oh, we had looked at many houses, and Lansdowne 
 House is the only one which gave us the two things 
 wc most wanted ; perfect cleanliness and good nur- 
 
 series." 
 
 There spoke a true simplicity of nature. Later 
 they entertained, but never put the full resources 
 of the place to the test. They went about, of course, 
 among some of the best people, who admired this
 
 264 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 American lady's simplicity of nature as they did 
 her beauty. There was a dinner one night at Spencer 
 House, where Mrs. Astor sat on Lord Spencer's 
 left at the end of a table which stretched from end 
 to end of that noble dining-room, with its noble 
 pictures. She was herself the loveliest picture there, 
 and this well-bred company gazed and gazed till 
 even Mrs. Astor became aware of the homage offered 
 her. 
 
 Mr. Astor is a man who has ways of his own. He 
 orders his life in accordance with his own notions 
 of what his life ought to be. His tastes are positive 
 tastes and he gratifies them. He built himself a 
 Tudor mansion on the Victoria Embankment not 
 far west of Blackfriars Bridge. This he called at 
 first the " John Jacob Astor Estate Offices," which 
 has now been simplified into " Astor Estate." As 
 a place of business and of American business 
 there's nothing like it either in New York or 
 London or anywhere else. It stands back from 
 the roadway and from the river, looking perhaps 
 with its mullioned windows and stained glass and 
 its pointed architecture as much like an art gallery 
 as anything. The office proper is on the right as 
 you enter on the ground floor, and there this vast 
 business of real estate is transacted in an atmosphere 
 of such quiet and seclusion as exists nowhere in New 
 York. The complete records of both the New York 
 and London properties are there. New York sending 
 transcripts week by week. Mr. Astor's sanctum is 
 on the floor above, a great hall, of which the ceiling 
 is the roof ; the structural beams and rafters all 
 visible ; family portraits on the walls, gilt busts on 
 pedestals, and what we call " Colonial " furniture 
 all about ; which I suppose no truly patriotic American
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 265 
 
 will admit to be, as it is, furniture of George Ill's 
 time. A spacious, well-proportioned baronial hall, 
 with only Mr. Astor's desk to suggest that it is the 
 head-quarters of one of the greatest estates in the 
 world. There is a Hbrary of rarities ; a bedroom 
 with a Frangois Premier bed in it much too large for 
 the room, in which Mr. Astor sleeps when in London, 
 with his feet in the fireplace ; and much else. He 
 built it to please himself and it is one of the sights 
 of this ancient London ; not, I think, often shown 
 nor perhaps well known to the tourists. In Carlton 
 House Terrace, which is supposed to be his private 
 address, Mr. Astor never sleeps. The vast house 
 serves for a certain number, not many, dinners in 
 each season, followed by concerts of which Paderewski 
 is one attraction and Jeannie Granier another, and a 
 long roll of famous names. 
 
 When Mr. Astor bought Qiveden from the late 
 Duke of Westminster there was a dispute, of which 
 I suppose some echo found its way across the Atlantic. 
 The Duke, having sold the place with its contents, 
 claimed one item of the contents as still his own, 
 the visitors' book. If he had asked for it he would 
 have had it, but when he made a claim as of right, 
 Mr. Astor stood on his own rights and the two 
 quarrelled, about almost nothing. The Duke of 
 Westminster was a very powerful personage and 
 his friends took his part ; and Society, ever respectful 
 to Dukes, was a good deal on his side. The Duke saw 
 fit to make Mrs. Astor a party to the dispute, and 
 wrote her a letter which might better have been 
 left unwritten, and was left unanswered. After 
 keeping the book long enough to assert his right, 
 Mr. Astor sent it to the Duke. Yet the quarrel be- 
 came a feud and lasted till the Duke's death.
 
 266 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 The Duke claimed other things more important 
 than his visitors' book. He excepted from the contents 
 which were to pass with the house " a few prints." 
 He interpreted this exception as including prints 
 and pictures to the value of rather more than ^^10,000, 
 as inventoried by his own agent ; and these he re- 
 moved. Mr. Astor could have detained them but 
 he let them go without a word. 
 
 Cliveden as the Duke sold it was a beautiful thing ; 
 Barry's facade looking down on the gentle Thames 
 from its lofty terrace, amid woods and over fields 
 of a soft multi-coloured greenness only to be seen 
 in perfection in England. Its new owner made it 
 one of the most beautiful possessions anywhere 
 in England or in the world, of its kind. An English- 
 man of the olden time, or of the modern time with 
 the old traditions still strong in him, might not find 
 it to his taste. It has, or had, not more than three 
 hundred acres of land about it, and any more land 
 that might be bought would be divided from it by 
 high roads. Dropmore, hard by, is much more the 
 English idea of a country place, with its George III 
 house in the midst of three thousand acres of lovely 
 park. 
 
 Mr. Astor presently felt this land hunger strongly 
 and sought to enlarge his boundaries, regardless of 
 the high road. I believe he did acquire a certain 
 number of acres but the possessions he coveted were 
 not for sale, even at prices much beyond their market 
 value. One of his neighbours declined a cheque 
 for half a million for but a fraction of the beautiful 
 woods he owned, and still owns. There are men to 
 whom money is not everything, nor even the first 
 thing. In these days of Death Duties and Super- 
 tax and Lloyd George Budgets there are landowners
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 267 
 
 who find themselves obHged to sell ; and of the next 
 generation there will be many more. But they sell 
 under compulsion. Great estates and old families 
 are to be broken up. It is Mr. Lloyd George's avowed 
 object. The American who cares to see England 
 as it has been for centuries, in all its charm, must not 
 wait too long. 
 
 Possibly even Mr. Astor may not now regret 
 that his attempts to make Cliveden a landed property 
 failed. Land is becoming in England the most 
 expensive of all luxuries, and Mr. Astor is, by descent 
 and education, a man of business first of all, and a 
 man of business does not like paying more than a 
 thing is worth. Nor does a man of business, or any 
 man, Hke being despoiled of his property, whether by 
 the State or by unlegaHzed brigandage. Nor is the 
 doctrine of ransom, originally Mr. Chamberlain's 
 doctrine, yet accepted by the classes who have to 
 pay it. But those classes are a minority, and the 
 rights of the minority in England are at the mercy 
 of the new majority. 
 
 II 
 
 So Mr. Astor, unable to broaden the acreage 
 of Cliveden, applied himself to the beautifying 
 of the house and of such land as there was. I can 
 imagine he found some pleasure in improving upon 
 what the Dukes of Westminster and of Sutherland 
 had left behind them. Their decoration of the 
 interior was an example of the early Victorian manner; 
 commonplace, inartistic, Philistine. He swept all 
 that away except one little room, which he left 
 with its trellis-work and tawdry garlanded cornices
 
 268 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 by way of contrast to the new ; perhaps not without 
 a little mischievous pleasure in perpetuating these 
 ducal trivialities. 
 
 The great hall and the oaken staircase are now 
 fine specimens of modern work. The library is in 
 some strange wood from the antipodes, the name 
 of which I could never remember. The drawing- 
 room is brilliant Louis XIV ; the dining-room an 
 interior from a French chateau, with at one time 
 a cafe-chantant ceiling, painted with daring. The 
 bedrooms are models of luxurious comfort. In the 
 hall hang Romneys and Sir Joshuas and other masters ; 
 a gallery of art splendours. This is no place for 
 details but not the most careless glance can omit the 
 marble balustrade now edging the terrace, as if with 
 lace ; an exquisite piece from the Villa Borghese, 
 the export of which from Italy was strictly forbidden. 
 Mr. Waldo Story has established a group of white 
 marble ladies in charge of the great fountain past 
 which you drive to the entrance, and has adorned 
 the landing and the path to it with fantasies in coloured 
 marble designs, inspired from the Borghese original. 
 A miniature Italian garden and a miniature chapel 
 in gold and mosaic and marble nestle beneath the 
 cliff. 
 
 The late Duke of Westminster, whose name has 
 to recur now and then, had a liking for Queen Anne 
 architecture of which his London Mayfair property 
 is the extreme expression. He took it with him to 
 Cliveden. On either side of the approach to Barry's 
 Italian front were two Italian pavilions of grey stone, 
 reaching out with long arms or galleries from the 
 main building toward the fountain. The Duke tore 
 down one of them and built in place of it a red brick 
 parody of a Queen Anne Lodge. Vandalism or a
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 269 
 
 passion for grotesque, architectural ineptitude could 
 not go much further than that. Mr. Astor in his 
 turn tore down the Duke's work and replaced it by 
 a copy of Barry's original. Scarce anything he did 
 could have given him more pleasure than that ; or 
 more pleasure to the beholder. 
 
 Arriving one Saturday at Cliveden for the week- 
 end, I found the one vacant panel in the hall had 
 been enriched by a Romney, one of that painter's 
 most delicate creations. I was indiscreet enough 
 to ask Mr. Astor of whom he bought it ; indiscreet 
 because, in these days of legislative financial embarrass- 
 ments among the English families possessing such 
 treasures, pictures are sometimes sold on condition 
 that the name of the former owner is not to be 
 revealed. Not, however, in this case. Mr. Astor 
 had bought it of a dealer, whom he named but I 
 do not ; a sinister notoriety now attaching to the 
 name. 
 
 " It is the first picture I ever bought of him and 
 it will be the last." 
 
 " You don't doubt it's a Romney ? " 
 
 " Oh no, the picture is all right ; it is the price 
 which was all wrong." 
 
 That, too, was characteristic of Mr. Astor. He 
 did not mind paying a good price if he thought 
 he had been fairly dealt with ; if not, he closed that 
 book. 
 
 Having done all he cared to with Cliveden, he 
 gave it to his son Waldorf on his marriage with Mrs. 
 Shaw ; and there these young people have lived 
 and entertained ever since, the shining centre of a 
 shining circle of brilliant friends. Young Mr. Waldorf 
 arranges his life on independent lines ; racing in 
 moderation, and having now found a seat in Parlia-
 
 270 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 merit as Unionist Member for Plymouth. He made 
 a speech last session on National Insurance which 
 won him compliments from so great an authority as 
 Mr. Winston Churchill, and has a political career 
 before him should he care to follow it. 
 
 Before parting with Cliveden Mr. Astor bought 
 Hever Castle, in the county of Kent, some thirty 
 miles from London. A moated castle, its oldest 
 walls of the thirteenth century, the main fabric 
 Tudor, but with drawbridge, portcullis, and battle- 
 ments complete. Of no great size, and since Mr. 
 Astor wished to entertain week-end parties the 
 question arose. How to do it ? He had an inspiration 
 of genius. He perceived that to attempt to enlarge 
 the castle would be fatal. He therefore built outside 
 of it a Tudor village, connecting with the castle by 
 a covered bridge and each cottage connecting with 
 the other. Inside, you pass from castle to cottages 
 unaware that they are not all part of the same fabric 
 and beneath the same roof. Thus he houses some 
 five-and- twenty guests. His own rooms are in the 
 castle. Splendours everywhere ; galleries filled with 
 objets d'art, Venetian, Florentine, and others ; pictures, 
 furniture, treasures of many lands, all contriving 
 to seem at home in this old English abode and in 
 the home of Anne Boleyn. It is her name and names 
 associated with hers that give an historical interest 
 to this venerable pile, which has been restored to 
 something like what it was when that fascinating 
 minx dwelt in it. 
 
 Outside, Mr. Astor has built — a word to which 
 Mr. Gladstone objected when I applied it to the 
 Panama Canal — two broad lakes and an Italian 
 pergola, very spacious and imposing. There's an 
 Italian garden, of course ; without an Italian garden
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 271 
 
 and without an atmosphere of Italy about him he 
 could not live. Italy is in his blood, and when he 
 goes to his dehcious villa in Sorrento I don't doubt 
 he is more at home than in his Tudor castle, except 
 that he cannot gather about him so many friends. 
 Last summer at Hever he was ill with gout, a painful 
 attack, but when I asked him why he did not abandon 
 these cold clay lands and stone walls and seek the 
 sunshine of Sorrento, he answered : 
 
 " But how can I give up these parties of pleasant 
 friends ? " 
 
 There again spoke the Astor his friends know, if the 
 world does not. 
 
 But on Hever, as well as on Cliveden, his hand has 
 rested and his mind has spent its activities till not 
 much more remains to be done. For iive years he 
 kept eight hundred men steadily at work on the place, 
 Italy all the time paying him its forbidden tribute 
 till you think there is no room inside for another 
 cup of crystal or another gem of whatever sort. 
 What will he do with it all ? 
 
 " Well, I dare say I shall give it to John some day, 
 and then find myself another toy." 
 
 Something he must have on which to pour out his 
 quenchless energies ; the management of his Astor 
 properties on two sides of the Atlantic leaving him 
 leisure that has to be filled somehow. He fills it in 
 part with literature, using his pen with the vigour 
 he devotes to business. Now and then he buys a 
 newspaper or magazine. The Pall Mall GaTLette 
 and The Pall Mall Magazine are his. Quite recently 
 he has done a high public service ; buying The Ob- 
 server, the foremost of Sunday papers in London, 
 in order to keep Mr. Garvin its editor. Mr. Garvin 
 is the foremost of the younger English editing
 
 272 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 journalists, a man of such independence and con- 
 viction that he can surrender his convictions to no 
 proprietor, though ready to surrender his editor- 
 ship. In the crisis which besets this country he has 
 led the thought and put nerve into the purpose of 
 the Conservative chiefs. But there came a moment 
 when the owner of The Observer and the editor 
 of it differed, and it was supposed Mr. Garvin must 
 go. I could conceive no greater calamity to journalism 
 or to the Conservative cause. Then it was that Mr. 
 Astor bought the paper, asking Mr. Garvin to remain 
 and to conduct it as his conscience ordained. 
 
 Since then the Pall Mall Gazette also has passed 
 under Mr. Garvin's control. The great evening 
 journal which Mr. Frederick Greenwood created 
 has known many vicissitudes. It was a power under 
 Mr. Greenwood, and again under Mr. John Morley, 
 and again, of a very different sort, under Mr. Stead, 
 whose caprices of mind and purpose, always vigorous 
 and not always wise, led this journal along strange 
 paths to strange ends. It has had other editors, 
 no one of them, capable as they were, seeming to 
 find a permanent foothold. But Mr. Astor saw that 
 there was room for, and need of, a Conservative 
 evening paper conducted on lines different from those 
 of any existing journal, and he offered the Pall Mall 
 to Mr. Garvin. 
 
 It is no light matter to edit a daily and weekly at 
 the same time. But Mr. Garvin's power of work has 
 no known limits, and he shouldered the double burden 
 with a just confidence in himself. That he would 
 be content to edit the Pall Mall in any spirit of 
 routine or to imitate any of his predecessors, nobody 
 supposed. Overnight the process of transformation 
 began. To remodel any newspaper completely is
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 273 
 
 a serious task, to be accomplished step by step. In 
 the practical business of journaHsm Mr. Garvin 
 shows the same qualities which have made him the 
 great editor he is. He well knows that to preach 
 the gospel you must have a pulpit to preach from, 
 a platform from which you can reach the multitude. 
 So he has set himself to make the Pall Mall a news- 
 paper in the right sense of the word, as well as a 
 journal of ideas and convictions. In the leader 
 columns the revolution was instantaneous. Mr. 
 Garvin's unsigned articles are signed in every line. 
 He has in him that kind of intellectual energy which 
 is neither rhetorical nor forensic but the outcome 
 of fervent belief, religious in its intensity, kept in 
 order by knowledge, with a scientific basis for his 
 apostolic mission. The opportunity of saying at 
 once what ought to be said instead of waiting a week 
 is now his. He is eager to say it and the public 
 is eager to hear ; none more so than journalists them- 
 selves, whether with him or against him. To both 
 he is an inspiriting influence. 
 
 About Mr. Astor's conservatism there is no doubt, 
 and his American countrymen owe him a debt for 
 that ; since, on the matters now at issue, the con- 
 servatism of England and the conservatism of the 
 United States are twins. His principles and his 
 interests may coincide ; each a greater force for the 
 help of the other. When Mr. Lloyd George's first 
 Budget spread alarm among men who had something 
 to lose, Mr. Astor acted in his usual decisive way. 
 We were discussing at Hever the exit of capital from 
 England to safer homes. Stories were current of 
 fleeting millions. I asked Mr. Astor whether he 
 thought them true. 
 
 " I know of one that is true. Within the last three
 
 274 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 months I have remitted to New York a milHon and 
 a half sterhng ($7,500,000), which but for Mr. 
 Lloyd George's Budget I should have invested here." 
 
 " May I say so ? " 
 
 " Repeat it to whom you will. I care not who 
 knows it." 
 
 So there is a tribute from this expatriated American 
 to the financial security of the country that once was 
 his. 
 
 The truth is, Mr. Astor has remained, spite of 
 his British naturalization, an American. Nobody 
 could take him for anything else: in appearance, 
 in manner, in speech. He has the American abrupt- 
 ness, quickness, decision. He has been in close con- 
 tact with three civilizations, American, English, 
 and Italian, but it is the American which has left 
 its stamp on him ; an ineffaceable hallmark. He is 
 an American host, with that liking for precision 
 and straight lines which is certainly not English. 
 In earlier days the English thought him rather a 
 martinet who arranged the days a little strictly. 
 If that was ever so, it has long since worn off. They 
 imagined a story that when a Royal Princess was 
 staying with him at Cliveden who was unpunctual 
 at dinner, he went in to dinner without her ; no 
 doubt the invention of some guest who was not royal 
 and was late. In truth, there was no house in the 
 kingdom where you disposed of your time more freely 
 than at Cliveden. A choice was offered you but 
 you chose for yourself, or did nothing if you pre- 
 ferred that. It is the same at Hever Castle. I have 
 sometimes spent a Sunday alone with Mr. Astor 
 at CHveden. There is no better way of judging, 
 and he is then at his best. His talk ranges wide. 
 He touches life at many points, and neither the eye
 
 MR. WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR 275 
 
 nor the hand, neither the judgment nor the intuition, 
 is at fault. 
 
 His eldest son married an American, his daughter 
 an Englishman. The scales were held even. The 
 son was brought up as all Astors since the first have 
 been brought up ; to take life seriously. He was 
 educated to the business of managing a vast estate. 
 Again the American tradition, the Astor tradition, 
 cherished and practised here in England exactly as 
 in New York. He could not cast it off if he would, 
 and most certainly he would not. 
 
 You may call mine an estimate of friendship if 
 you like but, friendly or not, it is true as far as it 
 goes. I have written of the man as I know him. 
 He lives in England, but New York in its new develop- 
 ment, in the movements of population, in the values 
 and prospects of real estate, is as familiar to him as 
 if New York were still his home. And his services 
 to his native land are perhaps as great as if his nation- 
 ality and citizenship were still American.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER— ANECDOTES, 
 ESTIMATES, FRIENDSHIPS 
 
 T ONG since a literature has grown up about 
 "^ Whistler and there may seem no particular 
 reason for adding to it. A legend also has grown up, 
 as about all unusual men. But by dint of omitting 
 all the well-known stories concerning him it may still 
 be possible to say something. I knew him for many 
 years, in many places, in many ways. We were 
 friends till the inevitable end came. I have letters of 
 his, mostly brief, always pungent, sometimes epistolary 
 masterpieces, and his books which he gave me ; books 
 like none others. 
 
 I have a pencil drawing, also a gift : one of the 
 most beautiful he ever did ; a figure of a woman, 
 nearly nude, wholly nude, indeed, but for a per- 
 fectly transparent veil of gauze ; a cloud rather than 
 a veil, through which the delicate, full contours of 
 this modern goddess are visible, their values enhanced 
 by the mere suggestion of mystery thrown about 
 them. It is nothing to say that this is a poetic treat- 
 ment of purely physical facts. They are not purely 
 physical. The little drawing is a poem of exquisite 
 loveliness. The figure is at full length, about eight 
 inches high, the left arm outstretched ; the fingers 
 holding the drapery through which the outlines shape 
 themselves ; the right arm a little away from the 
 body; the body poised on the right foot, solidly planted 
 
 276
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 277 
 
 on the ground, if there be any ground ; the left just 
 ready to take flight. The whole aerial, unsubstantial ; 
 the fabric of a dream, yet drawn with a precision and 
 firmness as if for all eternity. And since, for all its 
 purity of treatment, there is a hint of fleshly beauty 
 and of temptation, it was probably drawn especially 
 for what is left of this Hfe before eternity begins. 
 Signed twice over with the butterfly, and signed in 
 every line and touch of the master. Even the frame is 
 Whistler's ; its expanse of white mount and narrow 
 edging of white wood and black lines one more proof 
 of his theory that the frame is part of the picture. 
 
 I knew Whistler long before his fame began, and 
 long after. He was always the same Whistler. Of 
 his own value and of his own work he never had any 
 doubt. Popularity was never with him a measure of 
 merit. Perhaps he never was so sure of himself as 
 when he was in a minority of one. When he brought 
 that unlucky action against Ruskin, ending in a verdict 
 of a farthing damages, he was never for a moment 
 disconcerted. I was in court with him, and when I 
 held out my hand to him in sympathy with his defeat 
 he grasped it warmly and cried out : 
 
 " I was sure you would see what a great triumph 
 
 it is." 
 
 What could you say to that ? I always thought 
 his case badly handled. His leading counsel, Mr. 
 Serjeant Parry, was an able advocate in a common- 
 place cause but quite incapable of putting Whistler's 
 view to the jury, which was quite incapable of seizing 
 it if it had been put. The great painter had been 
 grossly libelled by the great critic, yet the action ought 
 never to have been brought. The machinery of British 
 justice is ill adapted for judgments upon art. Ruskin 
 was the spoiled child of*critics: wilful, perverse, whimsi-
 
 278 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 cal, and dangerous because he was both brilliant and 
 sincere. A great authority with the public, then and 
 now ; but ask the artists what they thought of him. 
 One of the best of them, whom I think I had rather 
 not name, said of him : " He is never right." Another 
 applied to Ruskin what Thiers said of the Third 
 Napoleon : " Une grande incafacite meconnuer But 
 he was a rhetorician who captivated the public. What 
 more could you ask ? 
 
 It was at Whistler's house in Tite Street, Chelsea, 
 that I first saw the woman whose beauty was, I sup- 
 pose, more famous than any other of her time. I had 
 gone there to breakfast ; a twelve o'clock breakfast 
 such as Whistler liked giving in those days, with such 
 American delicacies as corn bread and buckwheat 
 cakes to astonish the dull palates of his British guests. 
 When the door into the parlour opened, this lady was 
 sitting on a low chair in the corner by the fire, and 
 the light of the fire shone on her face. A vision never 
 to be forgotten ; the colouring brilliant and at the 
 same time deHcate ; the attitude all grace. There was 
 a harmony and a contrast all in one ; the harmony 
 such as Whistler loved ; the contrast such as it pleased 
 her Maker to arrange, between softness and strength ; 
 the lines of the woman's full body flowing gently into 
 each other, but the whole impression one of vital force. 
 There was no one else in the room. As her renown, 
 presently to be world-wide, had just dawned in London, 
 I knew who it must be. We began to talk. When 
 Whistler a moment later came in, he said : " Of course 
 you and Mrs. Langtry know each other." That was 
 all the introduction we ever had. 
 
 I supposed Whistler was going to do her portrait, 
 but I cannot remember what it was like. The one 
 which London admired next May in the Royal
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 279 
 
 Academy came from a heavier brush than his and 
 was signed Millais. But Mrs. Langtry was the despair 
 of all the portrait painters. Other beautiful women 
 have been, and still are. Whistler himself was of an 
 uncompromising nature in the presence of beauty. 
 The story of Lady Eden's portrait needs no retelling. 
 The portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist was not to the 
 taste of that young lady's many admirers. It hung in 
 the studio that morning. Whistler was not a man 
 who asked for an opinion on his work or expected 
 you to give it unasked, as many artists do. If they do 
 not, for what was the institution of Show Sunday in- 
 vented ? But Mrs. Langtry, who even in those early 
 days passed Acts of Parliament for her private use, 
 took command of the situation : 
 
 " Oh, Mr. Whistler, what a lovely portrait ! I 
 have seen Connie Gilchrist only once but I'm sure it 
 is hers. Nobody but you could have done it so beauti- 
 fully." 
 
 As guests we could have no other opinion. As 
 critics we might think it a flimsy piece of work, as 
 Whistler in his heart probably did. But before this 
 he had said : 
 
 " A work of art is complete when it expresses the 
 idea in the mind of the artist." 
 
 He varied the formula but he held to his opinion 
 and painted on it, though not always. Miss Connie 
 Gilchrist with all her celebrity never, I think, forced 
 her way into the never crowded ranks of the pro- 
 fessional beauties, of whom Mrs. Langtry was the 
 acknowledged queen. She passed early in life from 
 the stage of the Gaiety Theatre to the ranks of the 
 aristocracy, becoming Countess of Orkney in 1892. 
 She is still living. What has happened to her portrait 
 I know not. On the stage she had, before all things,
 
 28o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 la beaute du diable — that is, the beauty of youth — 
 having begun her career or become known to the 
 public and to the gilded youth who then thronged 
 that theatre, at fourteen. 
 
 I stayed on after the company had drifted away, 
 and Whistler began at once with his explosive ques- 
 tions : 
 
 " Of course you knew Mrs. Langtry ? " 
 
 " I had never seen her." 
 
 " Then you had never seen the loveliest thing that 
 ever was. Don't tell me you don't think her perfect. 
 It doesn't matter what you think. She is perfect. 
 Her beauty is simply exquisite. But her manner is 
 more exquisite still. She is kindness itself." 
 
 I was in no mood to dispute any of these proposi- 
 tions, though when I saw more of Mrs. Langtry later 
 Whistler's account of her did not seem to me quite 
 complete. But with or without Mrs. Langtry, 
 Whistler's breakfasts were like none other ever given. 
 You could not have a Whistler breakfast without 
 Whistler. Certainly his conception of the duties of 
 host was not a conventional conception. In social life, 
 as in art, conventions were to him so many objects of 
 contempt. He, too, like Mrs. Langtry, passed private 
 Acts of Parliament for his private use. He was 
 hospitable, kindly, but despotic. The Acts of Parlia- 
 ment were for our use, too ; we were to obey them. 
 None of us minded, only it was sometimes difficult to 
 know when they were passed, and what they were, and 
 when they were repealed, and when a new Act came 
 into force. Whistler, from the head of his table, or 
 at any other table, it mattered not which, laid down 
 the law. His strident voice dominated all others. 
 
 In that he was like Hayward or Browning, both of 
 whom, when they chose to assert themselves, could
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 281 
 
 overpower the whole company. But both Hayward 
 and Browning were men of the world and of society. 
 Whistler was neither. He went much into the world 
 and often into society. But he went where he Hked ; 
 never for any lesser reason. The circle in which he 
 moved was of his own creation. Hayward was self- 
 made but for forty years a great social force in the 
 best London. He would raise his voice if he had a 
 story to tell for which he wanted a gallery. Browning 
 was content with those nearest him till he had a 
 proposition in metaphysics or a theory of music to 
 announce, and when that moment came it was useless 
 to compete with him ; nor did many men try ; or not 
 twice. 
 
 But Whistler's flashes and impulses of inspiration 
 were continuous. The subject did not matter. It 
 might be a dish which he had just been into the kitchen 
 to superintend. It might be an outrageous lampoon 
 on some one of those Enemies the making of whom 
 he held to be a " Gentle Art " ; an art embalmed in 
 the title of his book. It might be a sentence of homage 
 to Mrs. Langtry. In any of these cases or a hundred 
 others he disdained privacy. He desired to give the 
 world of his best, and desired that the world to be 
 benefited should be as large as possible. He poured 
 out the riches of his mind. Never, I should think, was 
 there a man whose confidence in himself was so com- 
 plete and so completely justified. He was a match for 
 anybody. His power of retort was tremendous and 
 "multitudinous. For this man he had a rapier thrust 
 and for the next a bludgeon, and he would use one 
 with just the same sense of artistic delight as the other. 
 I am not sure that he ever met his match. 
 
 People used to pit Mr. Oscar Wilde against him, but 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde went down before him as often as
 
 282 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 he tried to stand up to the master. Men whose wits 
 were far inferior to Whistler's would bowl Wilde over 
 with ease. Mr. Bernal Osborne did ; nay, for a long 
 time Mr. Bernal Osborne made Wilde his butt, and 
 Wilde had no defence. He had no courage. Bernal 
 Osborne had no very wonderful intellectual equipment, 
 though he was for a long time a distinguished figure in 
 London society, both before and after his accom- 
 plished daughter married the late Duke of St. Albans. 
 But Osborne had a dauntless soul. He did not care 
 whom he attacked ; nor was he an easy man to arouse, 
 still less to put down. I cannot recollect that I ever 
 saw him in collision with Whistler, but I have no 
 doubt what the result would have been, for I have 
 seen Whistler in many a duel with many a man of 
 whom Osborne was not the equal, and I never knew 
 Whistler to leave the field defeated. That is true of 
 him in all the circumstances, and they are many, in 
 which I have met him. 
 
 It has been said of Whistler, truly enough, that he 
 was proud of the white plume in his black hair. But 
 with his pride went, naturally, a certain sensitiveness. 
 He wanted his little tuft of white treated with re- 
 spect ; as a flag. It was sacred ; as the white flag was 
 to the Comte de Chambord. Most people respected 
 Whistler's wish, if not all. I went one day to a 
 lunch given by a lady whom her friends set up as a 
 rival to Mrs. Langtry. It was a large party. When 
 the ladies went upstairs most of the men were bidden 
 by their hostess to follow as soon as the first cigarette 
 had been smoked. Whistler was not told ; on the 
 contrary, a man was asked to hold him in talk for ten 
 minutes. Once in the drawing-room, the hostess pro- 
 duced a number of white feathers, one of which she 
 fastened into each man's hair, in front, where Whistler
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 283 
 
 wore his. Then she marshalled her men in line, facing 
 the door, and sent word to Whistler in the dining- 
 room that he was staying a long time and she would 
 like him to come up. He obeyed and when he opened 
 the door of the drawing-room found himself con- 
 fronted with a line of black-haired men, each decor- 
 ated with a white plume in imitation of his own. His 
 face turned red and then pale. He walked slowly past 
 the line to the end where stood his hostess enjoying 
 what she thought an innocent flaisanterie. But 
 Whistler's expression had in it much more of tragedy 
 than of comedy. " Ah, yes," he said, " very pretty, 
 very pretty indeed. To not one of you will I ever 
 speak again." With that he turned his back on his 
 hostess and her guests, and marched out of the room, 
 and downstairs, and out of the house. Yet his anger 
 did not last. 
 
 This was the lady whom I once beheld conversing 
 long in a drawing-room with Mr. Bernal Osborne. 
 When they parted I said to him : 
 
 " You seem to admire Mrs. X." 
 
 " Yes, I do, and I should admire her still more if 
 while she is talking to me she would not make eyes at 
 the footman over my shoulder." 
 
 I repeated this to Whistler who replied instantly : 
 
 " Yes, very good, very good. But it was I who 
 said it." 
 
 He made an extraordinary use of his imagination. 
 It affected all his relations in life. It affected his views 
 of art, quite naturally, but also his views of property 
 in art, or in his own art. He held, in at least one case, 
 that a picture he had painted and sold and been paid 
 for was still his picture to do as he liked with. He 
 said : 
 
 " How can an artist divest himself of his property
 
 284 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 in his own offspring ; a work into which he has put all 
 his genius, all his art, all his personality ; himself, in 
 fact ? " 
 
 And upon that he acted. I never doubted he was 
 sincere. He could look at such a question from his 
 own point of view and from no other. Whistler, like 
 another eminent American, might well have said : 
 
 " The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty 
 has always been and must always be to take from some 
 one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or 
 wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been 
 earned by service to his or their fellows." 
 
 Sir William Eden, in Whistler's view, had not 
 " earned " the picture of Lady Eden merely by paying 
 for it. The right of property was inherent in the 
 creator of the picture. But both these doctrines, 
 which are complementary, are a little subversive of 
 those on which society is founded. 
 
 Not less characteristic of Whistler is another in- 
 cident which befell in my hearing at dinner. He told 
 us the story after the ladies had left the table. 
 
 " I did not like to tell it while those lovely creatures 
 were here for it is not to be repeated just yet, and 
 though they are lovely, or perhaps because they are 
 lovely, they will gossip." 
 
 He then explained that he had long wished to paint 
 the portrait of Mr. Disraeh. After trying in vain to 
 get an introduction he had obtained a letter from a 
 great friend of the Prime Minister and gone down to 
 Hughenden with it : 
 
 " It was not the season when the primroses were 
 coming out, which Dizzy said he had never been 
 able to see because politics kept him at that time in 
 London. His saying that was one of the reasons which 
 made me want to paint him. I was told that after
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 285 
 
 luncheon would be a good time to catch him walking 
 in the park. I had no great faith in my letter ; at 
 any rate, I was resolved to meet him face to face, and 
 I found a back gate into the grounds near the house ; 
 slipped in and waited." 
 
 He went on to tell us at greater length than I can 
 quote how at last the great man appeared, and how 
 when Whistler approached him, letter in hand, he said : 
 
 " No, I want no letter, You are Whistler and I am 
 glad to see you. I suppose you wish to paint my 
 portrait." 
 
 There was a conversation which lasted many 
 minutes, and ended by Disraeli assuring Whistler he 
 could give him sittings but could not then fix the 
 dates. They parted on the friendliest terms. 
 
 We all listened with delight. The artist was vivid, 
 dramatic, picturesque, and gave us there and then a 
 portrait of Disraeli and of his manner of speech and 
 gesture that was lifelike. His narrative lasted alto- 
 gether some twenty minutes and ended with a fresh 
 caution to all of us to keep his secret, which we all 
 promised. 
 
 It was a romance from beginning to end. Nobody 
 had given him a letter to Disraeli. He had never met 
 Disraeli. He had never been to Hughenden. There 
 was no question of a portrait. Some time after, I 
 asked him whether the sittings had begun. He 
 laughed delightedly : 
 
 " Why, you don't mean to say you believed that 
 story ? But, of course, I saw you did at the time. It 
 was just an experiment, my dear fellow. I thought I 
 should like to see whether I could take you all in. I 
 wonder whether I shouldn't do well to write a novel." 
 
 " Religion," said Daniel Webster, " has nothing to 
 do with politics. There it makes men mad."
 
 286 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 And morals have nothing to do with art, and art 
 was the only thing with which Whistler cared to have 
 anything to do ; and he had a set o£ art-morals as 
 inflexible as those o£ the great men of the Renaissance 
 who painted portraits of their mistresses and called 
 them Madonnas. He chose to amuse himself at our 
 expense. I wish I could be amused again in the same 
 way. But there was only one Whistler and there will 
 never be another. He was absolutely the same man in 
 adversity, of which he had bitter experiences, and in 
 prosperity, which came to him late and perhaps never 
 with full hands. Never was he more imperious than 
 when the world looked coldly on him ; never more 
 triumphant than in defeat and neglect. If people tell 
 you that he was capricious, overbearing, self-centred, 
 vain, you need not pay too much attention. Con- 
 stancy and courage were the foundation of his char- 
 acter. 
 
 He came sometimes to a certain London club which 
 was, and is, a rendezvous for men who bring to it 
 exceptional gifts and who can talk. If it were permis- 
 sible to mention names many of them would be recog- 
 nized in America as readily as here. But, on the 
 whole, Whistler had not his equal in this brilliant 
 group. No other mind was so supple as his ; none 
 other had quite the same gift of spontaneity ; none 
 moved so quickly ; none had so singular an originality. 
 A retort came from him like a flash of lighting ; often 
 a growl of thunder following. He liked applause and 
 got it in large measure. If it was denied him he was 
 content with his own approval. 
 
 Whistler's quarrel with the Royal Academy was 
 only one more illustration of the unfitness of that 
 astonishing body to be the guardian of British art and 
 artists. The only thing it guarded effectually was
 
 JAMES M'NEILL WHISTLER 287 
 
 Philistinism in art ; a duty in which it had the help 
 of other institutions less well known but powerful in 
 their way. It was not the Academy which made known 
 Whistler's genius to the British public, nor any of the 
 other art societies flourishing then and still in this 
 British capital. But there came a time when his fame 
 could hardly much longer be disputed. The Portrait 
 of his mother hung in the Luxembourg, and the Paris 
 Salon had done him the justice which Burlington 
 House denied. Whistler had long since left London 
 for Paris. The incident I am going to retell was 
 described in a letter to The Times shortly after Whist- 
 ler's death, and I then named the Royal Academy as 
 the body which had sent the invitation. But the 
 Secretary of the Royal Academy explained that there 
 was no record of any such invitation, and he was quite 
 certain none such had been sent. I must therefore 
 presume that it came from some other English society, 
 and I must regret having wrongly attributed it to the 
 Royal Academy, and regret still more that the Royal 
 Academy is not entitled to the credit. 
 
 I got a letter from him dated Brussels, which was a 
 cry of victory. " Read the enclosed," he said. " At 
 last they have owned up. They acknowledge they 
 were wrong, they confess their sins, they appeal for 
 help." The enclosure was a letter from the Secretary 
 of one of these art-societies, with a circular announcing 
 an exhibition of pictures, and to this, in handsome 
 terms, they asked Whistler to contribute. 
 
 " You won't suppose for a moment," exclaimed 
 Whistler, " that I shall send them anything of mine. 
 Read my letter to them." 
 
 I read it with dismay. It was in his most belligerent 
 vein ; a letter of flouts and jeers ; reviling them for 
 their old injustice, and taunting them with their
 
 288 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 present futile effort to put themselves right. I thought 
 it unhappy and ill-judged. I wrote Whistler begging 
 him not to send it. They had offered him honourable 
 amends for the past. To reject it with insult would 
 only be to put himself instead of them in the wrong. 
 His answer came by telegraph. 
 
 " So sorry you too have gone over to the enemy." 
 From that day to the day of his death I never again 
 met Whistler nor heard from him. The book was 
 closed. It was impossible to reproach him ; impossible 
 to forget him or his friendship ; you could only regret. 
 You accepted him joyfully as he was or not at all ; 
 with all his caprices ; with a certain feminine irres- 
 ponsibility, or perhaps instability, of nature from 
 which he was never free. And if once you had an 
 affection for him the affection remained, as the admir- 
 ation of the world for the great artist remains and will 
 ever remain.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT 
 
 ** I ''HE man who has amused them is the man 
 to whom people are grateful, and the papers 
 overflow with eulogies on Sir W. S. Gilbert. The 
 cable says the American papers do likewise. Not 
 only eulogies but anecdotes abound. It is as if 
 every story, every repartee, every pun or quip of 
 his had been stored up as it appeared, and now they 
 fill columns. It may not be possible to quote one 
 saying of his which has not been quoted during 
 these last few days, and especially the day after 
 his death, which only proves that the obituary pigeon- 
 hole had long since been well stuffed. I will try to 
 repeat nothing that has been in print. 
 
 Not much remains for me, therefore, except 
 to give you a personal impression and perhaps one 
 or two personal incidents which have escaped the 
 general chronicler because they were personal to 
 Gilbert and to me. I do not mean to imply that 
 between us there was anything like a personal in- 
 timacy. There never was. Twice, at least, we stood 
 upon the verge of a personal quarrel, the last time 
 only a few weeks ago. My acquaintance with him 
 was a social or club acquaintance. The truth is, 
 he had a warlike nature. His panegyrists lay stress 
 on the kindliness of his satire in his plays and operas. 
 That is true enough, and it is true also that he was 
 full of kindliness in his relations with his own world. 
 u 289
 
 290 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 But it is true also that he had an arbitrary temper. 
 He hked to domineer. He Hked his own way better 
 than yours or mine. And I should think he got it 
 as often as most men. Ask the members of the 
 theatre companies whom he stage-managed. He was 
 a tyrant at rehearsals, and I will only add that it 
 would be better for the English stage if more English 
 authors had a knowledge and authority equal to his. 
 
 When I said he was warlike I might have said 
 military. He looked a cavalry colonel. He was tall, 
 square-shouldered, well-set-up, with a square fore- 
 head, a piercing eye, sometimes with an angry light 
 in it ; a red-bronze face, a well-trimmed moustache, 
 grey in later years, and an air of command. Indeed, 
 he had meant to be a soldier, a gunner, as they say 
 here, meaning an artillery officer, but the examination 
 was put off till he was over age and he had to content 
 himself with militia service and the rank of captain 
 in the Royal Aberdeenshire Highlanders, retiring 
 after fifteen years' service as brevet-major. 
 
 But he never really retired. He only transferred 
 to civil life his habit of giving orders ; not on the 
 stage only. When he had made a fortune, a large 
 one, and become a country gentleman and taken 
 his seat on the Board of Middlesex Magistrates, 
 he issued orders to his brother Justices of the Peace 
 with a severe politeness which disguised the form 
 but left the substance. He was proud, rightly enough, 
 of the position he had won and of his influence on 
 the bench. I should despair of explaining to American 
 readers the position and greatness of the English 
 Justice of the Peace, known to the discontented and 
 unsuccessful aspirants to that place as " The Great 
 Unpaid " ; a phrase which might come from Dickens, 
 and perhaps did, but I do not know Dickens. Nothing
 
 SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT 291 
 
 could be more characteristic than the remark of Mr. 
 Carlyon, chairman of the Wealdstone Petty Sessions. 
 He thought Gilbert so eminent a colleague that he 
 proposed a resolution of sympathy with his widow, 
 although Sir William had never been chairman, and 
 it had never been the custom to give official expres- 
 sion to their official sorrow for a magistrate who had 
 not held that exalted rank. Justices of the Peace are 
 appointed justices by no less a personage than the 
 Lord High Chancellor, whom the Radicals have lately 
 attacked in Parliament because he would not recognize 
 party services as a title to these judicial places. 
 
 Gilbert liked to refer to his magistracy and to 
 describe cases with which he had dealt. He desired 
 us all to appreciate his position and authority. A 
 friend who enlivens his life by " pulling the leg " of 
 friends who will let him has been known to condole 
 solemnly with Gilbert on his magisterial inferiority and 
 his inability to make his wishes supreme on the bench. 
 
 " I am sure. Sir William, the interests of justice 
 would be much better served if your colleagues did 
 not overrule you so often." 
 
 The taunt stung, and the great humorist of the 
 stage had not humour enough to cover his own 
 case, but resented the suggestion and insisted that 
 his judicial opinions were respected and followed. 
 Said the leg-puller : 
 
 " Once in each three months I can get this same 
 rise out of Gilbert. No man is so easy to draw." 
 
 On all subjects Gilbert took himself seriously. 
 It was only his friends and the public who were 
 proper subjects of jest. His knowledge of the stage 
 was so vast and his success as a dramatist so immense 
 that he could understand no trifling with this subject 
 or with himself as dramatic author. Whether he
 
 292 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 ever understood how much of his success was due 
 to his association with Sir Arthur Sullivan and Mr. 
 D'Oyly Carte may be doubted. He valued himself 
 at least as much on the dramatic work which was 
 exclusively his own as on the " books " which Sullivan 
 put to music and D'Oyly Carte financed. The 
 public did not always agree with him, nor the critics, 
 but he never yielded to the public or the critics. 
 Criticism he resented. I once heard an eminent 
 dramatist, happily still living, remark that the critics 
 know nothing of the stage — " absolutely nothing." 
 I suspect Gilbert thought so ; with reference to plays 
 of his which they disapproved. 
 
 It seemed that he sought for a personal motive 
 in any criticism that was not to his mind. Seemed ? 
 Nay, he did. There came a letter from him some 
 two months ago saying that my attack on him in 
 the volume of Anglo-American Memories he had been 
 reading could have been inspired only by personal 
 animosity, and he wished to know at what I had taken 
 offence. I could only answer that there was not, 
 so far as I knew, an allusion to him of any kind in 
 the book. He retorted that I had spoken of the jingle 
 about " Howells and James young men," of which 
 I said the music-hall was the proper home. " You 
 must know," continued Gilbert, " that the verse 
 is from my opera Patience, and the reference to 
 the music-hall is insulting." I was obliged, though 
 at the risk of giving further offence, to explain that 
 I did not know it, and that nothing could be further 
 from my mind than to affront a writer for whom 
 I had always felt and expressed a true admiration. 
 This he accepted, though not without a suggestion 
 that I ought to have known the line was his. So 
 finally we shook hands again and the sky cleared.
 
 SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT 293 
 
 and I am glad now to remember that it did. Not 
 once could it have occurred to him that while he 
 was complaining o£ my music-hall remark a one-act 
 piece of his was at that moment being played at the 
 Coliseum in London, the music-hall for which it was 
 written. 
 
 Once before he had been angry because I quoted 
 in T^he Tribune an epigram of his upon New York. 
 He had just returned from America and his gibe at 
 Manhattan, bitter but quite just at that time, was 
 flung broadcast about London. I heard it, as others 
 heard it, not from him, yet he thought the repetition 
 of it in print a violation of confidence and resented 
 it, and it was long before his wrath was appeased. 
 He had, in truth, a feminine element in him, and the 
 only point of view he could take was the personal 
 view. But he is gone and I will not again print what 
 he then said. If I write with some freedom about 
 him it is because I think that not otherwise can any 
 right impression of him be given, and because I 
 think he must on the whole gain by a free account 
 of his character and his way of life. 
 
 His convictions of stage discipline, and even the 
 maxims of war on which some of them seemed to be 
 founded, were applied with equal rigour to the training 
 of actresses in whom he perceived the seeds of art. 
 One of them was Miss Lily Hanbury, who had natural 
 gifts which in Gilbert's hands became artificial. 
 The other was no less a person than Miss Julia Neilson. 
 At the house of a friend in South Kensington, Mr. 
 Heseltine, a lover of all art, with many beautiful 
 possessions, I met now and then both Miss Julia 
 Neilson and Gilbert, and from both Miss Neilson 
 and Miss Hanbury I heard interesting accounts of 
 the tuition he bestowed on each. He was not content
 
 294 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to rely on nature or on natural aptitudes. He had 
 Procrustean rules of stage training to which all natural 
 gifts must be made to bend. So many steps to a 
 particular spot ; such a gesture to express such an 
 emotion ; the arms to be moved in accord with a 
 settled theory of plastic effect ; the tones of the voice 
 to be such as the master thought most likely to come 
 over the footlights ; and so on. 
 
 If in Miss Julia Neilson's mature methods there 
 be a suspicion of anything rigid or arbitrary, it 
 may be traced to these iron-bound laws laid down 
 for and enforced upon her by Gilbert in the days 
 of her girlhood. She was then, I think, not more 
 than eighteen ; with an original beauty of which 
 the copy may now be seen in her daughter, Miss 
 Neilson-Terry, the newest and perhaps strongest 
 of debutantes, playing Viola in Twelfth Night at 
 seventeen with a brilliant self-possession and ease 
 of movement in her boy costume. In her case there 
 is no Gilbert to control her individual impulses, 
 and it is interesting to see how the daughter wanders 
 at will in the Duke's Illyrian palace, or as Rosalind 
 in the Forest of Arden. An unconquered freedom 
 hers, if ever there were one. In his dealing with 
 the formed artists to whom he entrusted his stage 
 characters Gilbert was not less absolute. For the 
 first night or the three-hundredth night his will 
 was law, and there were penalties for a departure from 
 it if ever any actor or actress proved hardy enough 
 to vary by a hair's-breadth the instructions he imposed. 
 
 Certainly Gilbert's influence on the stage was, 
 in respect of morals, altogether good. He himself 
 said he had never cared to transgress the unwritten 
 law of English life which would keep the theatres 
 open to the English girl ; as the French theatres
 
 SIR WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT 295 
 
 are not to the French girl. He added that he had 
 never found the limitations a restriction upon his 
 dramatic work or aims. But he went beyond that. 
 A story will show you how far. 
 
 There was during the period of his best operas 
 an English singer who both as singer and actress 
 was at least the equal of the best who won fame 
 at the Savoy. Musical critics thought her voice 
 and training both of a high order. I asked Gilbert 
 why she had never sung for him. He answered : 
 
 " Because my companies consist of ladies and gentle- 
 men. The singer you name was for a short time with 
 us during rehearsals, but she was impossible." 
 
 And he explained why she was impossible. The 
 anecdote is not suitable for print but to Gilbert's 
 mind it was conclusive. He drew a broad line between 
 the Savoy operas and musical comedy or what was in 
 those days known as burlesque. He would tolerate 
 no licence on or off the stage. He was a more im- 
 placable censor than the Lord Chamberlain ; and over 
 the Lord Chamberlain or his reader, Mr. Redford, 
 he had this advantage : that whereas Mr. Redford 
 knew only what was in the manuscript submitted 
 to him, Gilbert was his own producer of plays and 
 no look or gesture or innuendo escaped him. While 
 he lived and while his operas at the Savoy held the 
 town, and while his plays were an attraction to a 
 more select public, his influence was a very potent 
 one. There was a period of a quarter of a century 
 during which it was vital, and was always a purifying 
 influence, and always tended to bring literature and 
 dramatic art into closer relations. That is not all 
 but with that we may well be content, as with his 
 seventy-three years of completed achievement and with 
 his death in a generous effort to save a younger life.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE— HER ART— HER 
 LETTERS— HER LIFE 
 
 'O FADING lately proofs of some of these Memories 
 I came upon a sentence about Mile. Aimee 
 Desclee. Of her I undertook to say something. 
 It was a promise of which I needed no reminding, 
 for if there is anything of which I have a vivid memory 
 it is of her and her acting. In America she was un- 
 known. She never crossed the Atlantic. In London 
 she was not unknown, for she played here during 
 one season at the Princess's Theatre, but she is for- 
 gotten. Often as we moralize on the oblivion which 
 is the early fate of almost all great actors, this is the 
 most melancholy of all. For Desclee was the greatest 
 of emotional actresses, and nothing is so transitory 
 as an emotion except the expression of it on the stage. 
 M. Alexandre Dumas, his, with whom as an author 
 her fame as an actress is for ever bound up, says 
 of Desclee without any qualification that in her art 
 she was the first. He adds : 
 
 " It was for us to write Le Misanthrope ; she 
 would have been Celimene. It was for us to write 
 Romeo ; she would have been Juliet. We have 
 done only what we could ; she has done more than 
 she ought, and thus it is that she killed herself." 
 
 I saw Aimee Desclee often in Paris at the Gymnase, 
 and often in London at the Princess's. In neither 
 city was she one of that glittering company of artists 
 
 296
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 297 
 
 whose celebrity lay outside of her art. I do not mean 
 that she led a life of order ; she did not ; but that 
 the splendour of a lawless existence had no attraction 
 for her. The truth about the matter is to be found 
 in that astonishing book, Lettres de Aimee Desclee a 
 Fan/an, published in Paris in 1895; a human docu- 
 ment if ever there were one. But it is one which 
 ought never to have seen the light of day. The 
 editor of it is M. Paul Duplan, a name of no great 
 authority in literature. But the true author of it 
 was M. Alexandre Dumas the younger. He inspired 
 it, and for it he must be held responsible. He wanted 
 at all costs a record of the career, of the genius, of 
 the brilliant personality which he had enlisted in the 
 service of his drama ; of the actress for whom he 
 wrote three of his best plays, and to whom he had 
 been indebted for an interpretation of a kind which 
 no other actress could have given him. He might 
 well have written her life or paid an adequate tribute 
 to the actress. He preferred instead to publish, or 
 to sanction the publishing, it is the same thing, of 
 her letters to her lover. That the public might be 
 sure to remember the actress and the plays she had 
 acted, he flung them the woman. 
 
 It is not known who Fanfan was. He has earned 
 a sort of anonymous immortality and the name 
 which Desclee gave him will be remembered by her 
 letters. All that can be said about him is that he 
 was an officer of the French army. 
 
 But to M. Paul Duplan Fanfan was known. They 
 were kinsmen and friends. He too died young. His 
 portrait is by the side of Desclee's in M. Duplan's 
 study. 
 
 " There he is, as I knew him, with his happy, 
 grave, good look ; in uniform, his chest starred with
 
 298 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 decorations. A tall young fellow, carrying jauntily, 
 intelligently, a fine soldier's name ; well taught, a 
 man o£ letters, with a marked elegance of manner, 
 an expressive face, a soldier's face, made more soldierly 
 by a long moustache which his mistress, the gamine 
 or mome as he calls her, used to love to lift, ' to see 
 what there was underneath, and to find what she was 
 looking for, white teeth and kisses.' " 
 
 And that seems to be all we are likely to know of 
 Fanfan, save what Desclee herself tells us in her 
 letters. While the soul of the woman who loved 
 him was stripped naked, his identity was carefully 
 concealed. I would print his name if I knew it, 
 but I do not. I have often asked. Nobody seemed 
 to know, unusual as it is in Paris for secrets of that 
 kind to remain secrets. It is fair to say that the 
 French standard of honour is on this one point less 
 rigid or less universal than in England or in America. 
 A French lover kisses and tells ; though Fanfan 
 perhaps did not. The certainty or the possibility 
 that he will tell ought to put virtue, and also vice, 
 on its guard. It is not quite clear that it does. A 
 French writer like Dumas, of the first order as a 
 writer of plays, betrays the confidence a woman 
 gives him when she trusts him with letters, her own 
 and another's. 
 
 The public which thinks itself the gainer by this 
 looseness of honour may be disposed to condone 
 the offence. M. de Guibert must have been a con- 
 senting party to the printing of the letters of Mile. 
 de Lespinasse, incomparable letters as they are, yet, 
 like those of Desclee, letters all passion. But since 
 the letters of Mile, de Lespinasse were written 
 a century and a half ago and the letters of Desclee 
 only yesterday, the offence in this last case seems less
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 299 
 
 pardonable. It is not certain how far M. de Guibert 
 was really in love with Mile, de Lespinasse, or whether 
 he returned her passion. The inference you draw 
 from Desclee's letters is that Fanfan really did care 
 for her, though for no very long time, and of the 
 nature of the relations between them there is no 
 doubt. 
 
 A worse thing has to be said of Dumas. He pub- 
 lishes letters from which you cannot but suppose, 
 nor doubt you are meant to suppose, that at one 
 time Desclee was in love with him. Her love for 
 him he first rejects, then proclaims. He is not a 
 man of too many scruples. We are allowed to under- 
 stand that many other actresses have flung themselves 
 at his head, vainly. With his abstention, morals 
 have nothing to do. But he assures us that, as between 
 author and actress, he considers such relations in- 
 convenient and compromising; a business mistake, 
 in fact. His relations with other women he blazoned 
 abroad. Not a few of his scenes of love in his plays 
 are understood to be autobiographical ; especially if 
 with women of fashion and title. One such woman 
 asked him : 
 
 " Mais ou done avez-vous etudie toutes ces femmes- 
 la ? Chez elles ? " 
 
 " Non, madame, chez moi." 
 
 Against which may be set the pathetic saying of 
 Desclee, from out her life of hardship and poverty 
 and truth to art : 
 
 " Mon amour n'a jamais ete un amour venal ; et 
 la preuve, c'est mon cinquieme etage et mon piano de 
 location." 
 
 Hers had indeed been a life of struggle. Twice 
 she had appealed to Paris, and twice in vain. Paris 
 was at that time busy in burning incense before
 
 300 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Mile. Rose Cheri. If the public had eyes for any 
 other they looked to the Theatre Fran^ais, where 
 Madeleine Brohan was still in the full bloom of her 
 talent ; where Croizette had established the position 
 which Sarah Bernhardt was just challenging ; where 
 there was a whole group of artists we shall never 
 see again. It was after these two failures that Dumas 
 one night found Desclee acting in Brussels, and went 
 round to her box to tell her that gifts like hers could 
 bring her the fame that was her due in Paris only. 
 
 " No," said Desclee, " I have shaken the dust 
 of Paris off my feet. I will never go back." 
 
 Dumas pleaded with her, promised to use his 
 influence with Montigny at the Gymnase, promised 
 her a play, promised her success. She hesitated 
 long, finally yielded, went back to Paris, and again 
 failed. It was not till she created Meilhac's Froufrou 
 that she finally conquered the stubborn pubHc of 
 the City of Light. 
 
 In truth, Desclee had much against her in that 
 long battle, and her best self was probably never 
 revealed till success came. She needed the inspiration 
 which only victory can give. I never saw her till 
 after the contest was over between them. She was, 
 at first sight, disappointing. There stepped out 
 from the wings a plain little woman, none too well 
 dressed, without much symmetry of figure or grace 
 of movement. If you looked for beauty you hardly 
 found it except in the beauty of brown eyes and a 
 broad, low, Greek forehead. What you saw was 
 almost insignificant, but what you felt you had never 
 felt before, unless perchance you had seen Rachel. 
 Different as the two were, they had this in common, 
 the power of taking possession of an audience with- 
 out a word spoken. Nobody has yet found the word
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 301 
 
 or phrase which really describes or defines this power. 
 You may say it is magnetic, -or sympathetic, or hyp- 
 notic, but that does not carry us far. What Rachel 
 did, what Desclee did, and what no other actress I 
 have seen could do, was to create a communion of 
 souls between herself and the men and women who 
 were before her. Desclee's was a soul of fire. By 
 some process she herself could not make clear, the 
 fire passed from hers to yours. 
 
 In such a part as the Princesse Georges the first 
 words of the piece are electric, but before they 
 were uttered the spark had found its way from her 
 to you. The entree en scene is, as Dumas wrote it, 
 masterly, abrupt, rapid, empoignant, but as Desclee 
 acted it the lightning is playing about the house while 
 the first sentence remains unspoken. 
 
 Severine has been rendered by many an actress 
 since, including Sarah Bernhardt herself. But when 
 you had seen Desclee in it the piece became another 
 piece with anybody else. In technique, in range, 
 in much else, Sarah was superior to Desclee. But in 
 temperament Desclee stood alone. She had passion 
 and the power of expressing passion in a supreme 
 degree. It was not men only who felt it. I once 
 sat next a lady who saw Desclee as the Princesse 
 Georges for the first time. This lady had, in fact, 
 never seen her in anything. As the curtain went 
 down on the first act she said : 
 
 " I have never had an experience like this. When 
 you told me what I was to expect I thought you 
 must be in love with Desclee. But what you told 
 me was nothing to what I feel." 
 
 Then a pause ; then : 
 
 " Whether you are in love with Desclee or not, 
 I am. No man ever loved like that. No passion I
 
 302 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 have known or felt in anj man or in myself is like 
 Desclee's." 
 
 It was not, therefore, sexual, or not mainly so. 
 It was a passion of the soul ; not intellectual first of 
 all, nor was the rendering of it an effort with which 
 the mind had anything to do ; nor did it depend on 
 technique, or even on art. It was felt. It was passion 
 and nothing else. The impression left on you was 
 not that Desclee was trying to open her soul to you, 
 but that she was trying to hide it ; trying to suppress 
 and moderate all this tumult of feeling. She never 
 overstepped the line. There was no extravagance 
 of gesture nor distortion of the face. This was 
 simply a woman in whom passion blazed and burned ; 
 who was in agony ; who could not control it ; who 
 would not have told you of it if she could have helped 
 it. And all the time there were unplumbed depths 
 of emotion of which you were allowed to know nothing. 
 
 Yet with all this, Desclee was too great an artist 
 to be this and nothing more. In Froufrou and 
 in the Princesse Georges and in the Visite de Noces 
 she touched every note. While she played Frou- 
 frou she was Froufrou, " that pretty little Parisian 
 soul, born in laughter and vanishing in tears." 
 Everybody knows the scene between the two sisters 
 at the end of the third act. I have seen it played by 
 Desclee and by Sarah Bernhardt. It is one of those 
 whirlwind scenes in which Sarah is supposed to be 
 at her best, and perhaps is. She knew she had memories 
 of Desclee to contend against, and played it accordingly. 
 But Desclee had played it with a concentrated rage 
 of jealous intensity to which no rival ever attained. 
 
 Still more marked was the difference between them 
 in the first scene of the fourth act, after Froufrou 
 has fled with her lover to Venice. They are break-
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 303 
 
 fasting together in the hotel restaurant, and the lover 
 is called away, as they both know, by a message from 
 the husband ; for the comedy has become a tragedy 
 and nears its end. Sarah does not seem to mind very 
 much. She looks about her as if bored by her solitude, 
 and her first remark is uttered carelessly in a tone 
 of intellectual detachment as if it concerned some one 
 else. Hers is, in fact, an intellectual appreciation 
 and nothing else. There is no appeal to sentiment, 
 no sign of deep feeling. She is cool, speculative, 
 almost indifferent. But Desclee sat there alone, 
 in torment, her head resting on her hand, dejection 
 in every line of her figure, and a world of pathos 
 in her eyes. The words of which Sarah made so light 
 came from Desclee's lips one by one like so many 
 sobs : 
 
 " Une heure de colere et voila ou j'en suis." 
 The smooth tones — passion- laden, vibrating, 
 poignant, remorseful, as if only then had the folly 
 of her flight and the wreck of her life become visible 
 to her — stirred a passion of pity, as they were meant 
 to, in all hearts. For Desclee was an actress who 
 could act only what she felt at the moment. To 
 have felt it once and to repeat the outward signs 
 of it ever after was not to her a possible method of 
 producing an effect. 
 
 In one of the notes — they are really essays and 
 generally very personal — which Dumas appended 
 to many of his plays in the Edition des ConiedienSy 
 he tells, or partly tells, a rehearsal story which illumines 
 both him and Desclee. The rehearsal was of Une 
 Visite de Noces^ which Dumas had written for her. 
 It was characteristic of him that he expected an 
 actress to rehearse her part with the same complete 
 surrender of herself as if before an audience. He
 
 304 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 was not content with what he himself calls Desclee's 
 marvellous intuition and her profound knowledge 
 of her art. He must have for the service of his play 
 not only the comedienne but the woman ; and into 
 every critical moment of her acting the woman 
 must put her soul. With the selfish coolness in which 
 Dumas had no superior, he remarks that he knew 
 very well what it cost her ; not only a great expendi- 
 ture of her forces mais un ehranlement fhysiologique. 
 But there was a moment when he wanted, and would 
 have, a certain cry which meant to her complete 
 exhaustion for the moment. She shrank from it. 
 " You shall have it when I act ; don't ask for it now." 
 He insisted, and finally wrung it from her, and with 
 the last ounce of strength she had left she said to 
 him : 
 
 " Tenez, le voila votre cri, et vous savez bien que 
 cela me dechire les entrailles ! " 
 
 Dumas softens the sentence a little but this is 
 the authentic text. He admits that she added : 
 " You will kill me," and that he replied : 
 
 " What does that matter if the play succeeds ? " 
 
 But though these inexorable demands may have 
 hurried on her death, I don't suppose Dumas was 
 primarily responsible for the catastrophe. Nor is he, 
 I will admit, without some sort of pretext for publish- 
 ing the letters. He tells us that two or three days 
 before her death Desclee sent him back all his letters 
 to her, and also the letters by her written to " finconnu 
 de Nafles,^'' saying : 
 
 " Take this correspondence which was restored to 
 me when I asked for it. If I do not die you will 
 return it to me ; if I die, read it and do with it what 
 you think it right to do." 
 
 None the less is the step a long one between Desclee's
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 305 
 
 trustful appeal to Dumas, and the use he makes o£ the 
 discretion left to him. He may well enough have said 
 that the letters were too precious to be burnt. You 
 will search far before you find anything like them. 
 Desclee had the gift of expression by words as well 
 as by acting. If she had not much literature she had 
 that kind of genius to which literature is only the 
 handmaid. She never seems to seek for a phrase, but 
 the phrase comes. She is bent on nothing but the 
 revelation to her lover of her feelings, her thoughts, 
 herself. She writes with absolute freedom, both to 
 Fanfan and to Dumas. She writes, at times, on sub- 
 jects not usually discussed even between lovers. 
 But with her freedom goes a delicacy of nature which 
 would serve as a veil for the coarseness, if coarseness 
 there were. This delicacy she never loses, even amid 
 excesses which are deplorable ; the overflow, as she 
 calls it, of her primitive nature. At times, her art 
 seems to her a mere hypocrisy ; un metier de saltimbanque. 
 " With a conviction which is artificial, declaiming 
 certain things of which you believe not a word — 
 lying, in a word ; deceiving the eyes and ears of a 
 more or less considerable quantity of people in order 
 to amuse them for a few hours." 
 
 That is what she says of acting, in her desperate 
 m€)od. The letter is to Dumas, and Dumas publishes 
 many letters from her to him dealing more or less 
 with questions of art, yet in which the artist too often 
 leaves the stage and the woman appears. The great 
 dramatist, for great he is, printed in one form or 
 another many letters which a right feeling would 
 have wholly suppressed ; and they appear in many 
 editions. I do not know that we need think the worse 
 of Desclee ; it is Dumas whose name is blackened by 
 these treacheries.
 
 3o6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 M. Paul Duplan's volume, Lettres de Aimee Desclee 
 a Fan/an, appeared in 1895. But Desclee died in 
 1873, and was already half-forgotten. The book 
 had no success. It never so much as went to a second 
 edition. During these fifteen last years I have sent 
 many copies of it at intervals to many friends, all 
 of the first edition, and it is still in print. All I 
 can say is that the impression made by her letters 
 is very much the impression made by her acting. 
 In her own life, as in the women she impersonated 
 on the stage, she suffered much, loved much, sinned 
 much. Her own confessions are the evidence against 
 her, but when you have read them all and mourned 
 over them, she remains a woman whose real nature 
 was true. 
 
 And true is the word I have heard Mme. Sarah 
 Bernhardt use to describe Desclee's acting, and in 
 Sarah's mouth perhaps no other word means so much, 
 or conveys a eulogy so high. If you have everything 
 else in acting, or in any art, and though you speak 
 with the tongues of men and of angels and have 
 not truth, you are become as sounding brass or a 
 tinkling cymbal. Whereas, if you have truth in the 
 true sense, it seems to matter little what else you have, 
 or have not. 
 
 When Mile. Aimee Desclee returned from Brussels 
 to Paris, or rather when she appeared in Froufrou, 
 she was twenty-nine years of age. She died at thirty- 
 three of a cruel malady which made her last few 
 months one long agony. Into these four years, from 
 1869 to 1873, she crowded the triumphs of a lifetime. 
 To win them she wore herself out, and she won them 
 almost against her own wish. Her longing was for 
 repose, a convent, or no matter what. Yet into 
 the mimic life of the stage she put her whole soul ;
 
 MLLE. AIMEE DESCLEE 307 
 
 her strength, her passion, her h£e. I use these words 
 often but there are no others. She knew well it 
 was a slow suicide. In the midst of her dazzling 
 success as the Princesse Georges her prayer for a 
 retreat and rest is heard again : 
 
 " But, mon Dieu, why am I not happy or even 
 content ? Shall I never be that ? I make no com- 
 plaint. How many women in my place would thank 
 Heaven ! The house full, each night flowers and 
 triumphs enough to satiate tous les minotaures des 
 theatres. Yet for all that I care nothing. It all 
 comes to this, that I shall end beneath a nun's cap. 
 I don't wish to kill myself but I would gladly die. 
 At the convent I shall live in an ecstasy. I shall 
 adore my Christ, and He perhaps will give me back 
 what I give to Him. There only shall I at last be 
 content with my lot ; that perhaps is my true vocation. 
 Still, I struggle on. Nobody cares that I should stay 
 where I am. My disappearance will at least make 
 a few people, a few women, happy. A place vacant. 
 Whose turn is it ? " 
 
 That is the voice of a woman who had all Paris 
 at her feet, the greatest dramatist of his time to write 
 plays for her, the most critical public in the world 
 crowning her with laurels ; her fame world-wide. 
 Whatever she might say at times, she loved her art. 
 But the disease which was to kill her had already 
 laid hands upon her ; and in the bitterness of her 
 reproaches you hear the cry of unendurable pain. 
 From that time on her life was a martyrdom and 
 death came as a deliverance.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 
 
 THE SOCIAL SIDE CRITICISM AND FINANCE 
 
 T SAW much of Irving, first and last, and in many 
 ways. He was to be met at many houses and his 
 social gifts were remarkable. He had in private the 
 fascination he had on the stage. His manner had a 
 charm alike for men and women ; and many women 
 were devoted to him. The word which best describes 
 his manner is not kindly or even attaching, the word 
 Matthew Arnold and Froude loved to use, but 
 affectionate. And his manner was aft'ectionate be- 
 cause his nature was affectionate. He made of his 
 hospitality something between a passion and a fine art. 
 Who has not heard of the suppers at the Beefsteak 
 Rooms in the Lyceum ; which are not to be confounded 
 with the Beefsteak Club, a wholly different matter. 
 On Sundays the suppers became dinners. I have many 
 memories of both. They were often what is called 
 brilliant, and men and women of great position were 
 there. But whoever was there it was Irving who was 
 the central figure. In a patrician company the host 
 was the most patrician of all. In all companies he had 
 distinction, and as a host he had most distinction of all. 
 If you went to his rooms in Grafton Street it was 
 the same. He met you with a welcome which was 
 both friendly and beautiful. If he dined with you 
 
 308
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 309 
 
 your dinner was sure to go off well. He interpreted 
 his obligations as a guest largely, and felt it his duty to 
 regard the dullest woman as delightful. If he was 
 bored nobody ever found it out. If you knew his 
 ways, or his wishes, you were always prepared to spend 
 the greater part of the night with him, or that he 
 should spend it with you. He would always offer to 
 take leave when others went but what he really liked 
 was to stay on, with one or two others, till three or four 
 in the morning or later. Then he talked with an 
 openness and a magic of speech that were all his own. 
 He had a gift of epigram. Sentences came carelessly 
 from his lips, in polished phrasing, quite perfect in 
 form and, when need was, penetrating and sometimes 
 deadly. But he was as a rule amiable, charitable to 
 all, indifferent to enmities. He liked to talk of his art. 
 If you asked him he would talk of himself and of his 
 past ; that long period of failure and privation which 
 tempered the steel there was in him. 
 
 The supper which Irving gave to celebrate the 
 hundredth night of 7 he Merchant of Venice was perhaps 
 the most memorable of all. It was a great and dis- 
 tinguished company which assembled on the stage of 
 the Lyceum. Lord Houghton was to make, in the 
 name of the guests and of the public, the speech of 
 congratulation to Irving on his Shylock, which by 
 common consent ranked among his best creations, and 
 on the run of the beautifully staged piece. Lord 
 Houghton at that time was still an important figure 
 in the world of London, spite of his occasional eccen- 
 tricities and uncertainties and spite of the general 
 decay of his poetic reputation. He was, at any rate, 
 a man of letters and he had a conspicuous place in 
 society. He still gave breakfasts and perhaps was seen 
 to more advantage at those early hours than later in
 
 3IO ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 the day. The Stanley incident, which had points of 
 likeness to the one I am going to relate, had not then 
 occurred. The outburst in the presence of the Prince 
 of Wales had not occurred. He seemed a very suitable 
 person to accomplish handsomely if not brilliantly the 
 duty assigned to him at this supper. 
 
 But when Lord Houghton rose to make his speech, 
 the unexpected happened. Instead of the eulogy for 
 which we all looked there came a bitter criticism, and 
 something more than criticism. The speech was a 
 lampoon. He ridiculed Irving and his Shylock. He 
 ridiculed the production of the play. Irving's concep- 
 tion of Shylock, his acting, his stage management, all 
 came in for a share of Lord Houghton's invective. 
 He was a guest and he disparaged his host. He was the 
 mouthpiece of this company of Irving's friends and 
 admirers, and he spoke as an enemy to whom Irving's 
 genius was hateful. He came to bless and he remained 
 to curse. 
 
 Now Irving, of course, had prepared a fitting reply 
 to the speech of compliment he supposed Lord Hough- 
 ton would make. He had to suppress the whole of it 
 and reply to a harangue of a wholly different kind. 
 Irving was known as a good speaker but those who dis- 
 liked him used to say he could only deliver discourses 
 written out beforehand and memorized. His friends 
 knew better, but nobody had seen him put to such a 
 test as this and curiosity was keen when he rose. But 
 you had only to look at him to see that he was master 
 of the situation. He was smiling. His manner was the 
 perfection of courtesy. His tones were smooth. I 
 will quote, of course from memory, a sentence or two : 
 
 " I cannot thank you enough. Lord Houghton, for 
 the speech you have delivered. I am grateful to you 
 for coming here to testify by your presence, if not by
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 311 
 
 your words, to your appreciation of the effort I and 
 my associates have made to do what justice we can 
 to The Merchant of Venice. I am grateful to you for 
 the advice you have given me about the acting of 
 Shylock. I should have been more grateful still had 
 you given it earlier, so that I might have profited by 
 it, so that my audiences might have profited by it, so 
 that Shylock might have been presented to the public 
 not according to my unaided conception of the part, 
 but with the help of your views of his true nature and 
 your ripe experience of the stage to eke out my im- 
 perfect knowledge. If you would have come to the 
 rehearsals, think what we should have learned ! Nay, 
 dare I suggest that your appearance on the stage would 
 have supplied for this theatre a sensation it never had 
 before ? " 
 
 By this time we were all cheering, sentence by 
 sentence. Irving went on to ask Lord Houghton for 
 specific instructions. Would he prefer that Irving 
 should come on with three hats ? Would it be right 
 he should carry a bag of ducats ? Ought the ducats to 
 be heard jingling, " to help the hurt that honour 
 feels ? " Did he think it would improve matters if he 
 exchanged parts with Portia ? And so on, all with 
 a light touch, all in the spirit of banter, all good- 
 humoured, but altogether a stinging rebuke to Lord 
 Houghton. The supper resolved itself into two parties. 
 One consisted of Lord Houghton. The other included 
 Irving and every one else present. Lord Houghton 
 moved restlessly in his chair. He was red with anger, 
 but he had met his master and knew it and sat silent. 
 There are few moments in Irving's career which his 
 friends recall with greater delight ; few in which the 
 fine qualities of the man showed themselves with more 
 decision.
 
 312 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 To the question of criticism and its effect upon the 
 actor there is, o£ course, a financial side when the 
 actor is the owner or lessee of his theatre. Criticism 
 may or may not be felt in his dressing-room but it is 
 sure to be felt in the box-office. A theatre is a com- 
 mercial enterprise. If it is to live it must pay and 
 in order to pay the actors and actresses, or some of 
 them, must attract the public. Depreciate the actor 
 and you reduce the receipts, and if you reduce them 
 below the living wage you close the theatre and send 
 the performers out into an unappreciative, or too 
 appreciative world. All this is obvious, yet it has to 
 be restated as often as you estimate the influence of 
 criticism on the actor. 
 
 In Irving's case many other things than criticism 
 conspired to bring about failure at the end ; for failure 
 it was. The management of the Lyceum was lavish. 
 It was so lavish that purely fanciful stories of the sums 
 invested in the production of particular plays were 
 current. They ran as high as ^25,000. Irvingsaid to 
 me : 
 
 " You have seen that The Merchant of Venice cost 
 me ^20,000 ? " 
 
 " Yes ; that is what some of the papers say." 
 
 " Well, I will not tell you what The Merchant oj 
 Venice cost for I do not yet know. These gentlemen 
 of your profession know a good deal more than I do. 
 But I will tell you that the highest sum the production 
 of any play has ever cost me is less than £jooo. If I 
 had spent what the papers say, I should have been in 
 the Bankruptcy Court long before this." 
 
 The expense was, in any case, far too great ; and it 
 was supplemented by other expenses arising not out 
 of business necessities, real or supposed, but out of 
 Irving's uncalculating kindness of nature. He had a
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 313 
 
 pension list quite as much out of proportion to the 
 deserts of his pensioners as that of the United States 
 is to the services actually rendered in war by many of 
 its countless beneficiaries. No man ever found more 
 difficulty in saying no to a suitor. As manager of the 
 Lyceum Theatre he had to dismiss many an actor and 
 actress whom he found unsuited to the work he wanted 
 done. Other managers do the same thing constantly. 
 They must do it. But when it was discovered that 
 Irving had given some of these ladies and gentlemen 
 a continuing allowance, other ladies and gentlemen 
 applied for allowances. So quick and wide were his 
 sympathies that he presently found himself paying 
 salaries, or half salaries, to a great number of persons 
 from whom he got nothing in return. That was not 
 business. It meant bankruptcy. 
 
 When I last saw him in New York, as he was sailing 
 for England, he told me he had had a wonderful 
 season. He had been in what he still called " The 
 States " from autumn to spring, playing throughout 
 to good business. He said : 
 
 " America is the place to make money ; first, last, 
 and all the time. Yours is a generous public ; generous 
 in applause, generous in support. I am taking ^^30,000 
 home with me." 
 
 What became of it, and why at the end was he 
 forced by need of money to go on acting when he 
 ought to have rested ? That, and that only, caused his 
 death. 
 
 During this last hour in New York he looked tired 
 but in great spirits. There was always in his face 
 something of the ascetic ; of the great ecclesiastic. 
 It was stamped with lines of thought and of other 
 hard work. He had always worked. If his had been 
 a life of splendour, that was because it had also been
 
 314 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 a life of toil. He and Sarah Bernhardt were alike in 
 that and in their genius for splendid squandering. 
 He did the work of three men ; of the actor, of the 
 producer, and of the manager. He shouldered re- 
 sponsibilities lightly, but never shirked them. His 
 face was the record of a great career and the outward 
 expression of a great soul. 
 
 II 
 
 THE ARTIST, THE MAN, AND SOME OF THE PARTS 
 
 BOTH PLAYED 
 
 Whoever knew Irving at all well must be in some 
 doubt whether his memories of Irving the artist or 
 of Irving the man have left the deeper impression. 
 In truth they are inextricably intertwined. You can- 
 not separate them, nor could his audiences in the 
 theatre, and it is this intimate union between the 
 qualities of the actor and his personal qualities which 
 accounts for no small part of Irving's immense and 
 permanent fame. When you try to distinguish be- 
 tween the two you find yourself sometimes on one 
 side of the border line and sometimes on the other ; 
 and you do not always know when you have crossed 
 it. And perhaps it does not much matter. In what 
 I have to say of Irving I shall let the impressions take 
 care of themselves. There was a real Irving who was 
 just as real when he was playing a part as when you 
 met him in private life. 
 
 All this was evident in his acting of such a part as 
 Mephistopheles in Faust. There are in the imper- 
 sonation of every great role certain moments, seldom 
 very many, which reveal to you as by flashes of lightning
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 315 
 
 the genius of the actor, or his want of it, or his fitness 
 or unfitness for that particular part. Such a moment, 
 one of his happiest, was that when Irving, all in 
 the conventional red and red cock's feather of the 
 conventional Mephistopheles, floated — there is no 
 other word for it — down the stage to the footlights 
 and breathed out into space in hardly more than a 
 whisper, but a whisper audible in the remotest spot 
 of the great auditorium, the one sentence : 
 
 " I am a spirit." 
 
 And he was a spirit. You felt it. He belonged not 
 to this world but to another world. He was almost a 
 disembodied spirit. His possession of a body was 
 accidental. The essential thing was the spirit. He 
 was of all time, past and future ; immemorial, im- 
 mortal, eternal. Whether a spirit of evil or a spirit 
 of good mattered not. He was a spirit. That was 
 what he meant us to understand. That is what we 
 did understand. The laws of nature and of evidence 
 were for the time being suspended. You took his 
 word for it. If he had not said so we should still 
 have said to ourselves, " He is a spirit." It was a 
 spiritual presence, a dweller of another world, a being 
 of a nature not human but divine, a divinity of the 
 nether world ; a spirit of light though the light 
 shone from below. 
 
 Is anything but genius, and a very high order of 
 genius, capable of producing such an effect as that ? 
 The two Irvings met in Mephistopheles. If either 
 of the two had been absent it would not have been 
 Mephistopheles, or not this Mephistopheles. The 
 slightness of his physique added to the effect. You 
 were not disturbed by anything corporeal or gross. 
 There was just body enough to hold the spirit; no 
 more. And there were the eyes, luminous, haunting,
 
 3i6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 melancholy, with the far-away look in them which 
 befitted one w^ho had just traversed infinite space to 
 reach the earth. It was a vision. It is five-and-twenty 
 years or more since I beheld it, and the like of it I 
 have never seen since, and shall never see. 
 
 Yet have I seen other actors masquerading as 
 Mephistopheles, and one quite recently, an actor of 
 renown, of wide popularity. The contrast to Irving 
 is physical as well as spiritual, for it is a stout Mephis- 
 topheles which he presents to the public. He takes, 
 and expects us to accept, a humorous view of Goethe's 
 creation, since he has nothing to do with any other 
 world than this, nor with this except on the stage. 
 Goethe's Mephistopheles has a psychological signifi- 
 cance ; or even, if you like, psychical. So had Irving's. 
 But this latest fiend of the twentieth century is of the 
 earth earthy. Irving regarded his victims with a smile 
 of polished ferocity that filled you with terror. This 
 more recent Mephistopheles leered at them and at 
 you. He played it, in a word, as he would play the 
 lead in a modern farce, with great abilities, greatly 
 misused. Nothing could be more remote from Faust, 
 in which even the scenes with Martha are pure comedy; 
 as other scenes are pure tragedy. Irving, though the 
 version in which he acted was but a pale reflex of the 
 original, had found and kept the true note. He was 
 not a man to miss the distinction characteristic of the 
 real play. His Mephistopheles was a great gentleman, 
 and if Mephistopheles be not a great gentleman he is 
 not the Mephistopheles of Goethe. 
 
 In much of the drama and dramatic criticism of the 
 day it is easy to see that the magic of Irving's influence 
 survives. It survives, I think, because of his constant 
 appeal to the imagination, and because of the want 
 of any such appeal on the stage as it is. When Sir
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 317 
 
 Herbert Tree produces Henry the Eighth and announces 
 himself as Cardinal Wolsey, he has to confront the 
 spectre of Irving's Cardinal. It was the same when 
 Faust was given ; the Mephistopheles of Irving 
 haunted the stage of His Majesty's Theatre, the ex- 
 pression of his face more sardonic than ever. 
 
 Irving's Wolsey bore no likeness in face to Henry's 
 great Minister, but in soul and spirit was the real 
 thing. As you looked upon the actor you saw a great 
 ecclesiastic. He had the finesse which is the stamp 
 set by the Roman Catholic Church, then and now, 
 upon all its chief dignitaries. You saw him as he 
 moved about the stage, subtle, evasive, implacable, 
 unscrupulous ; Rome in him and about him ; the 
 Seven Hills visible and minatory. He was an ascetic. 
 There seems to be a form of power over the minds of 
 men not to be had otherwise than by the practice of 
 privations. That also Irving had. It was not an effect 
 of make-up, but of nature. He was the Cassius of the 
 Lyceum, lean and hungry. 
 
 There was in Irving a resemblance to Cardinal 
 Manning — you cannot say in the flesh, for Manning 
 had none — but in skin and bone, and, at moments, in 
 the cruelty of his look. He was a Torquemada in all 
 but the power to translate his cruelty into the con- 
 crete form of the rack and the stake. I disliked Man- 
 ning so much that I shrink from my own comparison 
 and from a confusion of memory in any particular 
 between Manning, whose nature was selfish, and 
 Irving, whose nature was generous. But the likeness 
 was there. Irving would not have resented it. His 
 business was to produce upon the stage the illusion of 
 actual life, and he would have held it a compHment to 
 be told that as Cardinal Wolscy he reminded you of 
 a living Cardinal, whether Manning or another. Wliat
 
 3i8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 he aimed at was verisimilitude. He must have met 
 Manning, and while he did not consciously imitate 
 him — in no case did he ever do that, or ever repro- 
 duce upon the stage the lineaments or bearing or dress 
 o£ real life — he may well enough have been aware how 
 Cardinal Manning looked, and the impression of that 
 austere presence may have remained with him. Some- 
 thing may have passed from the soul of the one to the 
 soul of the other, for Manning, with all his faults and 
 some of them unforgivable, was a figure in this great 
 Protestant community; not less so because he was a 
 relentless servant of Rome. His biographer Purcell 
 has laid him bare. 
 
 Irving played three great prelates ; Richelieu in 
 Bulwer Lytton's play of that name ; Wolsey in 
 Henry the Eighth ; and Becket in Tennyson's metrical 
 experiment in play writing. No one of these three 
 impersonations was like either of the other two. He 
 had studied each of the three independently. How- 
 ever, it is only Wolsey who concerns us to-day, and 
 he concerns us because never before has there been 
 such an opportunity to measure Irving's greatness as 
 by a visit to-day to His Majesty's Theatre. Sir Herbert 
 Tree may rightly enough claim to be judged on his 
 own merits and not by comparison with the first of 
 English actors since Garrick ; and, for aught we know, 
 Garrick's equal. In what Mr. Roosevelt, steeped in 
 literary calm, would call strenuousness, Irving was 
 Garrick's superior, since Garrick acted, from year's 
 end to year's end, less than twice a week and Irving 
 six or seven times. Irving must therefore have had 
 a much larger reserve of power, and used it much more 
 freely than Garrick. 
 
 But I am not judging Sir Herbert Tree. That is 
 no part of my duty. I use him, in no unkindly spirit,
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 319 
 
 to bring out Irving's resplendent merits. For once, 
 instead of the limelight of which he is so fond, Sir 
 Herbert must be content to be a background. I am 
 sure he will not object. He will rejoice to offer a 
 sacrifice on this altar. He owes much to Irving. What 
 living actor is there who does not ? Moreover, it is 
 quite possible to praise Sir Herbert's Wolsey. It has 
 been praised, though with some reserve, by the public 
 press. It has been acclaimed in the theatre. Tried 
 by the box-office test, it is a highly successful per- 
 formance. The play as produced by Sir Herbert is a 
 pageant. Scenery and costumes are splendid. He is 
 a manager of great energies and great capacities, and 
 an accomplished actor of many parts who tries to look 
 at his part, whatever it may be, with the eyes of the 
 audience. He sits in front and brings his mind's eye 
 to bear on his own conception and performance of 
 Wolsey. He gives his audience little or no credit for 
 subtlety of perception. He assumes that what they 
 want is the obvious, the common, the everyday view. 
 An imaginative treatment is to them, and therefore to 
 him, superfluous. 
 
 Far otherwise was Irving's way. He did — and in 
 this Sir Herbert Tree follows and imitates him — 
 everything to attract an audience by splendour of 
 mounting and dressing and by the strength of his 
 cast. There he stopped. When he came to consider 
 the part he was going to act, he retired into his closet 
 and took counsel with his own soul. Into that retreat 
 were admitted no delegates of the outside world. He 
 forgot the existence of the box-office. He remembered 
 only his art and himself. All his art and all his wonder- 
 ful personality he put at the service of the character 
 he was about to impersonate. New part or old, it 
 mattered not. He composed it for himself as if it had
 
 320 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 never been played before. He knew all the traditions 
 and o£ them all was independent. They were his 
 servants ; not he theirs. He took what he wanted ; 
 the rest were the property of the next comer. He 
 thought out all his problems and all the difficulties of 
 his part in his own way and to his own end. He read 
 everything and knew what to remember and what to 
 forget. There was no detail which escaped him, and 
 none which embarrassed him. By reading and deeply 
 reflecting upon the man he was to depict, his mind 
 became saturated with this new conception. Upon 
 it, and upon each new one in succession, he lavished, I 
 repeat, all his gifts, all his technique, all his over- 
 mastering individuality ; and of them all he made an 
 imaginative use. His Richelieu was one thing, his 
 Becket another, and his Wolsey a third. 
 
 His Wolsey was one of those pictures, like Millais's 
 portrait of Cardinal Newman, which never fade from 
 the mind. Irving had, in a measure, the benignity 
 of Newman, in whose face benignity contended with 
 strength. But since benignity was only an occasional 
 and perhaps hypocritical trait in Wolsey, Irving never 
 allowed it to be paramount. It was transitory, yet 
 while it lasted you thought it there for ever. His face 
 was wasted by fasting ; the scourge had been laid on 
 his shoulders ; the daily torture of the hair shirt was 
 his. In this leanness of visage lay one of Irving's 
 resemblances to Cardinal Manning ; the skin clung 
 to the bones. But if Irving had studied Manning he 
 made no mistake ; he was under no delusion. He did 
 not impute to Wolsey the cunning of his successor ; 
 he was clad in the lion's skin, not the fox's. The 
 Wolsey who came down to the Lyceum footlights was 
 he who wrote " Ego et rex meusT Punch, in describing 
 the inventory of Sir Herbert's stage properties, men-
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 321 
 
 tions a portrait of Tree as Wolsey, on the frame of 
 which the last three words of the sentence have been 
 rubbed out. 
 
 Among all the visions of all the Irvings which live 
 in one's memory this of Wolsey is among the most 
 vivid. He had taken the trouble to send to Rome to 
 get the exact shade of rose-scarlet of which the silk 
 robe of a cardinal ought to be made. I believe Sir 
 Herbert had done the same, but he had not taken the 
 precaution to fit it with that expression of disdainful 
 power which Irving's face bore. The great actor of 
 the Lyceum seemed never to care, though of course 
 he did care, whether you applauded him or not. He 
 wanted you to see and understand what was in his 
 mind, what kind of character he was seeking to 
 present to you, and to believe that while Irving was 
 on the stage this character, Wolsey or another, was 
 what you saw and heard. No meaner triumph than 
 this contented him. He sometimes failed, but it was 
 so high an ambition that when he succeeded the 
 failures were as if they had never been. And he suc- 
 ceeded in Wolsey. 
 
 I have seen Irving when he had to face a hostile 
 verdict from his own first-night public ; for practically 
 the house was on a first night his own ; with Mr. Bram 
 Stoker as the amiable but inexorable guardian of the 
 gateway to this theatrical paradise, since paradise it 
 was on these occasions. Stoker had become a kind of 
 second self to Irving, thinking his thoughts, knowing 
 what he wanted done, and carrying out his wishes with 
 equal energy and intelligence. If even among this chosen 
 company of the faithful there was discontent, and dis- 
 senting cries mingled with the cheers, Irving met them 
 with an air of ingenuous, incredulous surprise, as if 
 they could not mean it. He was wounded in the house
 
 322 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 of his friends. He did not resent it. He seemed to 
 be sorry, not for himself but for an audience which 
 could misunderstand so sadly. Altogether, the grand 
 manner ; neither defiant nor deprecatory but im- 
 partial, as if not he but a third person were concerned 
 and they who disapproved were simply mistaken. I 
 used to think these scenes among the finest in which 
 Irving ever appeared. After a time he stilled the ex- 
 pressions of dissent ; they died away as if in truth the 
 authors of them had become aware they were wrong, 
 which perhaps they did feel, and as if Irving were 
 after all right ; which sometimes he was not. 
 
 But the grand manner has departed with him ; 
 there was no one to take the torch from his dying 
 hand. When you come to a question of personal de- 
 portment it is a delicate business and I name no names. 
 I only ask, who among the best and most successful 
 of the actors now to be seen in London holds his head 
 high when he takes his call ? The actor-managers are 
 on their own ground. The theatre is theirs. They 
 could close it to-morrow and turn their audiences into 
 the street if they liked. Yet there are among them 
 those who face a cheering or a howling house with the 
 air of a tradesman in dread of offending his customers. 
 
 But Irving ? Irving, without the least touch of 
 arrogance, looked about him as a King upon his sub- 
 jects. The natural majesty of the man was better seen 
 in these crises than at any other time. He was per- 
 fectly self-possessed, perfectly fearless ; while inside 
 of him burnt a contemptuous anger he was far too 
 much the aristocrat to show. The public liked him 
 the better for it. He said to me once : 
 
 " I have had to make a study of audiences. I have 
 studied actors also in their relation to audiences, and 
 I feel sure that, whether as actor or manager, he who
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 323 
 
 defers too much to the public loses his hold on the 
 public. Those people in front, even if they have paid 
 for their places, expect the actor to know his business 
 better than they do ; and even if he is wrong they like 
 him to hold to his own view. So with the manager. 
 They are not such fools as to think they know better 
 than he how to stage a play. You must stand up to 
 them. A bad first night may cost me thousands of 
 pounds but the greater the funk I'm in the less I 
 show it." 
 
 There is the real Irving. It was a three o'clock in 
 the morning speech ; cool, quiet, collected, convinced, 
 and entirely sincere. The virile note you heard from 
 him in private goes far to explain him on the stage. 
 It is a commonplace to say that Irving owed much of 
 his fame as an actor to his personality. I have said 
 it myself. But even a commonplace may be true, and 
 may be a compliment, as this is, for you can hardly 
 praise an actor better than by saying that an actor's 
 success in depicting other men is due to his own man- 
 liness. 
 
 He lives, and will ever live, in the memories of men 
 and women and in tradition ; not in books. There 
 have been books about Irving which are thought to 
 be disappointing. I am not expressing my own 
 opinion for I have read none of them. When I have 
 known a man, I like to keep my own impressions of 
 him. To read a book about him, except for the facts 
 and for the times in which he lived, is to displace or 
 disturb one's own impressions and to accept other 
 impressions instead. The picture becomes a blur. 
 One's own memory may not be accurate, and is pretty 
 certain not to be complete, but it is one's own. 
 
 Though he had an immense acquaintance and a vast 
 number of admirers Irving had not very many intimate
 
 324 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES ■ 
 
 friends, and there were sides of his Hfe which, I 
 imagine, he did not reveal even to them. In private 
 as in pubHc he played a part ; many parts. I suppose 
 I knew him as well as most men knew him but I was 
 not an intimate friend. The most I could say is that 
 there were moments of intimacy, and a long, friendly 
 acquaintance, perhaps a friendship. I hope so. 
 
 The relation between an actor and a journalist can 
 never be entirely unembarrassed. The journalist must 
 speak his mind, and the actor is apt to think that 
 criticism ought to take the form of eulogy. It cannot 
 always, nor ought personal regard for the actor to 
 affect the critic's judgment though perhaps it some- 
 times does. Whether it does or not, a great artist 
 expects and likes recognition and he is sensitive be- 
 cause he is an artist. Irving could afford, if anybody 
 could, to face the truth. He had a great public behind 
 him. But he had men about him who sought to per- 
 suade him to resent freedom of speech. I don't think 
 they succeeded, or ever succeeded permanently. 
 
 We all agree now that his acting was unequal ; that 
 in some things he was great ; in others less great ; and 
 in some of the most famous parts he attempted, such 
 as Macbeth, he was deplorable. The most heroic, the 
 most masculine, the most tragic parts seemed to be 
 beyond him. He was an ideal lago but Othello was a 
 sealed book to him. He could not render the majesty, 
 the nobility, the childlike simplicity of the Moor. 
 And Lear was beyond him ; is perhaps beyond 
 anybody. 
 
 So far as I am concerned the production of Macbeth 
 was the critical moment in our relations, if there were 
 ever a critical moment. I saw it on the first night, as 
 I saw many other first nights at the Lyceum, and I 
 cabled to The Tribune a column of comments on the
 
 SIR HENRY IRVING 325 
 
 performance. They were not very favourable. They 
 were not meant to please Irving, nor yet to displease 
 him. The dispatch was a record of first-night im- 
 pressions and opinions. Probably they were too blunt. 
 The English sometimes suggest that we Americans 
 have a habit of speaking our minds too freely ; in 
 print and otherwise. What they soften here, we say 
 outright. 
 
 But in Sir Thomas Fuller's recent Life of Cecil 
 Rhodes^ an illuminating and most human book, he 
 tells this story. There was an English journalist, now 
 dead, Edmund Garrett, who was editing at Cape 
 Town a journal called, I think, 7 he Cape Times. He 
 was a friend of Cecil Rhodes. Lunching one day at 
 Rhodes's place, Groote Schur, Garrett found his host 
 angry at an article of the day before which ran counter 
 to his views and perhaps attacked him. Rhodes told 
 him such an article ought never to have been pub- 
 lished. Said Garrett : 
 
 " Mr. Rhodes, it is a good thing for you that your 
 paper should be edited by a man who doesn't care a 
 damn whether he pleases you or displeases you." 
 
 There was a silence. Then Rhodes answered slowly : 
 
 " It may be you are right and I am sorry to have 
 questioned it. I have never tried to control your 
 policy but I think you might at least have taken the 
 trouble to find out the facts." 
 
 I am quoting from memory but the illustration is 
 too apt to omit. Apt because here was one English 
 journalist, and a distinguished one, who was as 
 downright as any American could be, and another 
 Englishman, the greatest of his time, to whom the 
 soft answer which turneth away wrath seemed all 
 sufficient. 
 
 Whatever the brutality of my criticism on Irving's
 
 326 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Macbeth may have been, it put no real strain, or no 
 lasting strain, on our relations. He himself preferred 
 his Macbeth to all his other creations, or rather to any- 
 one of them. If the public did not, he rested content, 
 I hope, with his own approval. 
 
 The range of his powers as a tragedian was not very 
 wide. He was a comedian of the first order. The 
 scenes with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet 
 were proof enough of that. In character parts like 
 Louis XI he was supreme. And we shall see what 
 Mme. Sarah Bernhardt thought of him in such a play 
 as ^he Bells. Take him for all in all, he was so 
 great that nice criticism seems ineffectual. He is a 
 haunting figure. He had possession of the stage and 
 of the imaginations of men and women during a 
 quarter of a century. He can no more be displaced 
 than Garrick can be displaced. And even Garrick could 
 not play everything, and in his best parts he was un- 
 equal.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 MME. SARAH BERNHARDT AND SIR HENRY IRVING 
 —AN EVENING AT THE LYCEUM 
 
 I 
 
 T GIVE Mme. Sarah Bernhardt her full name, but 
 there is no reason why I should except out of 
 respect to the liking of New York for needless exacti- 
 tudes. The full name of the greatest of all tragedians 
 was Elizabeth Rachel Felix, but who ever spoke of her 
 otherwise than as Rachel ? In the same way, Paris 
 always calls its present stage divinity Sarah. In early 
 days I asked her whether she liked it and she said : 
 " Yes, of course. C'est un hommage." The French 
 Press used it ; so I think we may, if New York does 
 not object. I have heard it used in private as well 
 as in public, and by men who were on no particular 
 terms of intimacy with her. 
 
 The French season in London was over and Sarah, 
 who was staying on for a little, asked me to take her 
 to see Irving in The Bells. Sarah understood, at that 
 time, little or no English and I foresaw that I should 
 have to interpret as the play went on. But I wrote to 
 Irving that Sarah wanted to see him. He of course 
 was delighted and sent us his best box next to the 
 stage. Sarah for once was punctual and we were in 
 our places before the curtain went up. 
 
 Sarah knew very well that The Bells was founded on 
 Le Juif Polonais of Erckmann-Chatrian. The story 
 
 327
 
 328 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 was familiar to her and she knew what to expect. 
 But she had never seen Irving and of him she had 
 no idea what to expect. When he entered she ap- 
 plauded, but that she always did. She had, more than 
 any other actress I have ever known, the sense of com- 
 radeship. She was bon public. She knew what ap- 
 plause was worth to the actor or actress ; that it is 
 to them the breath of life. She has often told me that 
 the want of it is, even to her, embarrassing and even 
 distressing. A cold house is an impossible house and 
 acting becomes impossible. 
 
 " They say I sometimes walk through my part. 
 Perhaps I do, but if I do it is always the audience which 
 begins the walk. The audience and the actor are two 
 parts of the same whole, and neither can get on with- 
 out the other. They say I have moods. I don't deny 
 it, but I am never careless to a house which is friendly 
 
 to me." 
 
 From the moment of Irving's entrance upon the 
 stage she sat absorbed. Understand his language she 
 could not but she studied the man, watched every 
 movement, every expression, every gesture. Now 
 Irving was before all things a personality. You might 
 like his acting of a particular part or you might not, 
 but you felt yourself in the presence of a man. It 
 was a commanding and a sympathetic presence at the 
 same time. I doubt whether Sarah had ever heard 
 this said of him. She knew only his general reputation, 
 and he was then at the height of his fame. But the 
 attention she paid to him was quite different from 
 that she gave to an actor as an actor. I sat looking, 
 not at Irving but at her, and it was plain that his 
 magnetism had made itself felt from the beginning. 
 For what else passed upon the stage she had at first 
 no eyes. There was Irving and there was nobody
 
 BERNHARDT AND IRVING 329 
 
 else. Presently, without turning from the stage, she 
 said to me : 
 
 " Mais il m'enerve ; dans le bon sens, bien entendu." 
 
 No literal translation would convey to an English 
 reader what she meant. The word hypnotize is too 
 strong, but it may serve. Sarah was not in a trance 
 for she was in her most critical and perceptive mood. 
 The best proof of it was not merely what she said. I 
 soon found that I was seldom wanted to translate. 
 Knowing the plot and the general course of the play, 
 she was in no difficulty as to what was going on or 
 about the stage business. But from Irving's expression 
 and gestures she inferred what he was saying ; what 
 he must be saying. This was to me a new kind of 
 thought reading and it appeared to be, unlike thought 
 reading in general, unerring. I had seen Irving often 
 as Mathias. I had never seen him play the part with 
 the same precision, the same abundance and accuracy 
 of detail, the same illuminating touches both in the 
 great scenes and in the ordinary progress of the play, 
 or the same inspiration. He was playing to Sarah. 
 She was the inspiration. He knew that she knew no 
 English, and in order that she might appreciate the 
 whole he was playing it in pantomime. He seemed 
 to have forgotten all about his voice, and his voice, 
 left to itself, grew stronger and clearer and more 
 melodious. Sarah said : 
 
 " Why do they find fault with his voice ? The 
 tones are pure and full, the sentences flow smoothly, 
 his elocution is rhythmical and distinct." 
 
 She began after a time, in the commercial phrase, 
 to take stock, not of the man only but of the actor: 
 
 " But he is a great actor. He does things, some 
 things, which no French actor can do. He makes no 
 mistakes. He never misses a point. He does what
 
 330 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 he likes with his audience ; yes, with you and me as 
 well as the rest. Don't tell me you don't think him 
 great." 
 
 I did not tell her that, for I did think him a great 
 actor ; in the right parts, and Mathias was one of 
 them. The Bells, of course, is a play to which you 
 must give yourself up. You do not surrender your 
 critical faculty but you must accept the atmosphere ; 
 and live and move and have your being in that atmo- 
 sphere till the curtain goes down. I thought of what 
 Sarah had said about Coquelin ; an actor, but not an 
 artist. But she thought Irving an artist also. He 
 had the art temperament. 
 
 Nor was she disconcerted by such things as the 
 throwing open of the door of the great stove, and the 
 firelight flaming out blood red on Irving's face. 
 
 " C'est un gros effet, mais c'est un effet." 
 
 In other words a legitimate effect, an appeal to the 
 less delicate intuitions of the audience ; to the men 
 and women who required at every moment and by all 
 just means that the identity of the murderer should be 
 brought home to them. 
 
 Mr. Henry James said of Irving in The Bells, " You 
 would know him for a murderer a mile off." The 
 inevitable exaggeration of the epigram is there ; and 
 the grain of truth also. Mr. James said it rather too 
 contemptuously. It was a reproach. Mr. James has 
 a great knowledge of the theatre and is a critic of 
 renown. But he did not in this instance distinguish 
 between his own perceptions and those of the audience 
 in general. He did not himself require to have it 
 brought to his attention that Mathias was a murderer. 
 He forgot that the average playgoer might wish to be 
 reminded of it. And Irving, like that great comedian 
 at the Bar the late Lord Russell, had two sides to
 
 BERNHARDT AND IRVING 331 
 
 his face. He wore a mask to the personages in the 
 play, and on the uncovered half of that speaking 
 countenance he allowed the spectators to see the 
 ravages of remorse and the stamp of guilt which be- 
 trayed his guilt to them, but to them only. Having 
 Mr. James's remark in mind I asked Sarah if she thought 
 he made his crime too evident. She answered : 
 
 " Certainly not. He is a murderer and these sug- 
 gestions of guilt are so many psychological truths. No 
 criminal ever hides his crime completely ; least of all 
 on the stage. And you must never perplex your 
 audience. Especially an English audience. If you 
 can imagine yourself on the stage your suspicion will 
 not be excited." 
 
 So I think we may set Sarah's testimony against 
 Mr. Henry James's and rest in the comfortable belief 
 that Irving knew his business. His method in this 
 matter was indeed part of his stage management. He 
 did not restrict stage management to mechanical or 
 artificial arrangements. His ideal, in respect of elocu- 
 tion and of the tuition of individual actors and 
 actresses, came far nearer to the French ideal than 
 that of other English managers. Sarah thought him 
 far and away the best she had ever seen. 
 
 " Not at the Fran?ais itself have I ever seen any- 
 thing so good. The way in which he uses the lights 
 is his own. No stage in France is lighted as this is. 
 None has the same scheme of illumination or uses it 
 in the same way. The groupings are just as good, and 
 all the stage business shows a master hand." 
 
 She asked if I knew whether Irving himself looked 
 after this all. I said yes. It's not only a master hand 
 but a master mind ; and it is Irving's. He has, of 
 course, able lieutenants but the conception is his and 
 at rehearsal no detail escapes him.
 
 332 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " I was sure of it," said Sarah, and added : 
 
 " It's not merely that the details are so well con- 
 sidered but there's a general effect which I can only 
 call imaginative. Whoever staged this play had in his 
 mind from the beginning a complete conception of 
 the whole, as a whole. He saw it all. He understood 
 the relation of each part to the whole. What you do 
 not see is almost as remarkable as what you do see. 
 He has known what to leave out. I am certain he has 
 suppressed much, and either deleted or modified points 
 which were good in themselves but not good for the 
 general impression of the piece. He is an artist who 
 understands that nothing is good unless in the right 
 place. Stage management in his hands is an intellec- 
 tual triumph. He has not his equal among us." 
 
 Yet I had often heard Sarah describe and extol the 
 sternness of the discipline on the stage of the Frangais. 
 There the regisseur is master. He is more than master. 
 He is a despot. 
 
 " He has made me recite a single line fifty times till 
 I delivered it to please him ; me, Sarah ! " 
 
 But in the rehearsal of a new piece the author 
 steps in. He is then the despot, and from his decree 
 there is no appeal. 
 
 When The Bells came to an end Sarah turned to 
 me with a long sigh : 
 
 " I feel as if I had been acting myself. I have never 
 spent such an evening." 
 
 But the end of the evening was not yet. 
 
 n 
 
 A LYCEUM SUPPER " LA TOSCA " IN PARIS 
 
 No, it was not the end of the evening. I had seen 
 The Bells and Irving anew, through Mme. Sarah
 
 BERNHARDT AND IRVING 333 
 
 Bernhardt's eyes ; understanding the play and the 
 actor more completely than ever before, by help of 
 her intelligence. When she chose, that great actress 
 could be a great critic ; appreciative, sympathetic, 
 kindly ; but always loyal to her art. What she had 
 said of Irving, she thought. She may have said less 
 than she thought but never more. She had seen in 
 him those qualities which had created for him a 
 place by himself; and put him in a class by him- 
 self. Sometimes denied to him by English critics, 
 this most subtle of French critics had recognized 
 them. 
 
 Criticism in France, whether dramatic or other, 
 is a more exact science than criticism in England. 
 When it is dramatic, its relation to the stage is far 
 more intimate than here, where the critic has but 
 seldom the training or equipment which only a know- 
 ledge of the stage, and of acting as seen on and from 
 the stage, can give. Sarah, of course, had this last 
 in a supreme degree. She was quite free, moreover, 
 from jealousy. Some of the French actors who came 
 here were not. Coquelin was not ; though in his 
 case there was a feeling which predominated over 
 jealousy. He held his own art to be so immeasurably 
 superior to all others that he did less than justice to 
 others. But, as we have already seen, Sarah thought 
 Coquelin an actor but not an artist. Ever since this 
 night I have found Sarah's eulogies upon Irving the 
 best answer to Irving's detractors. If the detractors 
 were not convinced they were silenced. 
 
 Irving had asked us to come to supper after the play, 
 in the Beefsteak Rooms in the Lyceum Theatre. 
 With a merciful kindness and tact for which we were 
 both grateful, he had asked nobody else. The Beef- 
 steak suppers were often delightful but, as Sarah
 
 334 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 and Irving had never met, this was to each of them a 
 chance of knowing the other too valuable to be thrown 
 away. A free talk between two people who had no 
 language in common was difficult enough at best. 
 Irving had no French and Sarah had no English, 
 so that in a company there could have been no 
 meeting of minds. By themselves, with an inter- 
 preter, it might be managed. 
 
 They met on even terms. Irving had when he 
 chose the grand manner and so had Sarah, and both 
 were on their best behaviour. Irving received his 
 guest with distinction, and Sarah greeted her host 
 with just that touch of ceremony which is expected 
 on the stage ; to be dropped instantly for a cordial 
 acceptance of his welcome. She thanked him for the 
 box he had sent her and burst at once, like the true 
 Frenchwoman she was, into a shower of compliments 
 on his Mathias. 
 
 Said Irving in his polished way : 
 
 " They are compliments v/hich I cannot deserve, 
 but I like to have them and I acknowledge them as 
 compliments." 
 
 But Sarah broke in : 
 
 " No, not compliments ; not as between artists. 
 I offer you none. I owe to you the truth. You can 
 afford to hear it, as I could." 
 
 Her compliments, or whatever they were, had to 
 be translated sentence by sentence into English, 
 so that the full effect of the explosion was missed, 
 but it was none the less overwhelming. The colour 
 rose in Irving's pale cheeks, and spread, and the eyes 
 grew luminous and deep. He was not sure what 
 impression he might have made on a French mind. 
 He coveted Sarah's praise and he had it in full measure. 
 He asked me afterward whether she had said to me
 
 BERNHARDT AND IRVING 335 
 
 in the box as much as she had said to him and when 
 I told him " More," he was content. 
 
 When we sat down to supper the talk turned upon 
 things dramatic. To that they kept, and they dis- 
 coursed through nearly four hours. They discussed 
 technicalities, and technicalities of the stage are not 
 always easy to translate from French into English 
 or vice versa. The drama has a vocabulary of its 
 own. But if I did not know both French and English 
 for a particular term I could generally paraphrase, 
 and so the extraordinary conversation flowed on. If 
 it was difl[icult it was illuminating. Here were the 
 two consummate artists of the French and English 
 theatre ; the greatest French actress, the greatest 
 English actor ; and each of them with a more com- 
 plete knowledge of all matters pertaining to the theatre 
 than anybody save the other. As I listened I felt 
 how little experience had taught me and into what 
 new realms of knowledge I was being shown the way. 
 I had never learnt so much as I learnt in those hours. 
 
 Nor was it only the things of the stage. I had 
 known both Irving and Sarah long and well. But here 
 was a new Irving and a new Sarah. They revealed 
 themselves to each other, and incidentally to me. 
 For the first time I felt as if I were seeing the theatre 
 and some of its mysteries from the inside. I saw, 
 at any rate, what it meant to those who were of the 
 mystery themselves. The talk was simple, true, 
 direct. They put off all artifice, pretence, disguise 
 and the masks they wear to the public. The two artists 
 opened their souls to each other, and in their frank- 
 ness, in their half-unconscious disclosures of their real 
 natures and their real thoughts, they were more 
 admirable than ever. The intuitions of art stood 
 to them in the pl.^ce of that community of speech
 
 336 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 which was denied them. They had more than their 
 art in common. They were sympathetic to each 
 other. They made friends. 
 
 I will go so far as to say that here, and in the most 
 unlikely way, was a beginning of that better under- 
 standing between England and France which was 
 in later days, and under an august inspiration, to take 
 the place of old enmities. In London and in New 
 York that may seem an exaggeration. It would not 
 seem so in Paris where the theatre has a direct and 
 continuing influence upon life and upon opinion. 
 Nor need it seem so even in London ; or not always. 
 You would not think so if you had seen Sarah holding 
 a court in her art gallery in Piccadilly to which came 
 men and women of great distinction in great numbers. 
 Last of all Mr. Gladstone came also, whom Sarah 
 received (Tegal d egal, as Victor Hugo said he received 
 the Emperor of Brazil. The company fell away, 
 leaving as for royalties an open space about the two, 
 and they conversed apart for some minutes. Perhaps 
 that also was another beginning of the later entente. 
 Or you might date it, if you liked, from Mr. Glad- 
 stone's appearance at the theatre when Sarah was 
 playing Phedre ; the old man in a stage box, leaning 
 forward ; a book of the play before him ; his hand 
 to his ear ; his blazing eyes fixed mostly on the 
 tragedienne, for he needed .the book only on account 
 of his deafness ; and, when it was over, going behind 
 the scenes to offer his homage to the artist. 
 
 But I like to think of Sarah and Irving as having 
 planted the first seed. It was not known. The news- 
 papers published no account. If Paul planted there 
 was then no Apollos to water. But it came up as 
 a flower if not as a tree ; it had fragrance if not 
 strength ; and it had beauty.
 
 BERNHARDT AND IRVING 337 
 
 One hears of girls who wish to go on the stage 
 because they think it an easy Hfe. They might 
 take a lesson, or several lessons, out of Sarah's life ; 
 a life of great successes won by tremendous efforts. 
 The public thinks her a genius, and these girls think 
 that because of her genius she may dispense with study 
 and the drudgery of the profession. Sarah herself 
 never thought that. I will offer these ambitious 
 young ladies one example of her method. 
 
 When La Tosca was produced in Paris at the Porte 
 St. Martin I saw it the first night. During the second 
 entr^acte I went to Sarah's dressing-room to pay the 
 compliment one is expected to pay in Paris if one knows 
 the actress. She was playing, we all thought, her best. 
 The success was brilliant, the applause unstinted. 
 Needless to say that no French author, and certainly 
 not Sardou, would allow his piece to be produced 
 until he was satisfied with the rehearsals. Still less, 
 perhaps, would any actress of Sarah's position come 
 before the footlights until her own conception and 
 composition of a new part were to her mind, and until 
 the ensemble was complete. In Paris these things are 
 taken for granted. The French critic is inexorable ; 
 the French audience not less so, and a play not per- 
 fectly rehearsed would get scant mercy from either 
 critic or audience. 
 
 The next morning I left for Italy, was gone six 
 weeks, and on returning to Paris went again to sec 
 La Tosca, and again between the acts went round to 
 see Sarah. I said : 
 
 " You are in great form to-night. It is much better 
 than it was on the first night." 
 
 There came into the face, and especially into the 
 eyes, of the actress one of those challenging looks 
 one saw there when she was in a warlike mood. The
 
 338 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES ; 
 
 blue of the eyes, sometimes soft, hardened into the ; 
 
 famous hleu d'acier, with points of flashing light as ; 
 
 hard as the steel-blue itself. I saw the storm rising j 
 
 but I had no idea why. She stood silent for a second | 
 
 or two as if to allow her mood to be seen ; then in her ; 
 
 most metallic tone : ! 
 
 " Ah, you think I play my part better than when i 
 
 you first saw it ? " i 
 
 " You certainly do." I 
 " And you think it is because I am in good form 
 
 to-night ? " ; 
 
 " Well, you certainly are in good form." ! 
 
 " Merci, mon ami. But you are right about one | 
 
 thing. It is better than it was the first night, and I will ; 
 
 tell you why it is better. It is because I have worked | 
 on it six hours a day for six weeks. That is why." 
 
 My mistake had been in suggesting that the improve- '>, 
 
 ment was because of her being in good form that i 
 particular evening. She wanted credit for her six 
 
 weeks' hard labour. She was then at the summit of ' 
 
 her fame. She had done her best with her part for | 
 
 the first night. She had satisfied her public, and the \ 
 
 Press, and Sardou. But because she had not satisfied I 
 
 herself, the artist that was in her, she toiled on. | 
 
 And that is the history of Sarah Bernhardt's art life. |
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT * 
 
 I 
 
 AS POLICEMAN AND AS GOVERNOR OF NEW YORK STATE 
 
 ONG before Mr. Roosevelt became famous I 
 
 E 
 
 knew him ; and during the height of his fame ; 
 and now that it seems, for the moment, a little ob- 
 scured I think I may set down a few impressions. 
 We were told here that, since the unhappy results of 
 his attempt in the autumn of 1910 to resume control 
 of the Republican Party, he had been laid gently on 
 the shelf, and that the American people were willing 
 he should rest for a time from his arduous labours 
 in their behalf. But the English who have seen some- 
 thing of Mr. Roosevelt seem to doubt whether he 
 will ever be content with a shelf as an arena for his 
 quenchless energies, or ever consider himself in need 
 of a rest. Said Carlyle of Bismarck, in 1866, after he 
 had brought Austria to her knees : 
 
 " He is the only man who has been appointed 
 by God Almighty his Vicegerent here on this earth, 
 and knows that he has been appointed." 
 
 I am very far from meaning to suggest that any 
 parallel can be drawn between the creator of the 
 German Empire and Mr. Roosevelt. It is however 
 possible that the ex-President, while he was President 
 or even before and since, conceived that his mission, 
 
 * The first four of these Roosevelt papers were written in August, 
 191 1 ; the last two in November and later. 
 
 339
 
 340 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 or commission, was apostolic. Even in England he 
 thought it his duty to preach the gospel to the 
 heathen. He would not have been rude enough to 
 describe his admiring hosts as heathen, and he did not. 
 But it was felt that, to Mr. Roosevelt's mind, the 
 heathen were, and always are, those who did not agree 
 with him, or did not act as he would have them. 
 But I must leave England till its turn comes. 
 
 My experiences of Mr. Roosevelt relate largely to 
 his official life ; necessarily, since till he ceased to be 
 President he had been almost continuously in public 
 life for near thirty years. But they will be personal 
 reminiscences and impressions ; not historical. As I 
 was abroad during his legislative and Civil Service 
 career, I begin with 1895-7 : the years during which 
 he was President of the New York City Police Board. 
 He said to me one evening : 
 
 " Come to the Police Head-quarters to-morrow 
 morning at eleven. We are going to hold one of our 
 weekly courts, and you might like to see how the police 
 Commissioners administer justice on their own men." 
 
 It was interesting enough ; perhaps chiefly interest- 
 ing to a lawyer from the disregard of legal methods 
 and of the ordinary rules of evidence. Mr. Roosevelt 
 had his own rules for getting at the truth, but the 
 truth and only the truth was what he wanted to get 
 at ; and perhaps generally did. His intuitions were 
 almost feminine ; his fairness was conspicuous ; and 
 mercy went with justice ; a much-needed handmaid. 
 When we left the court-room for luncheon, on foot 
 and at race-track speed, I asked Mr. Roosevelt whether 
 he found police work interesting. 
 
 " Interesting ? I've never had such fun in my life." 
 
 " Fun." That struck a keynote. Much later, 
 and in very grave circumstances, Mr. Roosevelt
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 341 
 
 showed himself capable of taking humorous views of 
 affairs, and of extracting fun from them. Whether 
 his fellow Commissioners got as much fun as he did 
 out of it may be doubtful. He treated them with 
 civility, with consideration, but the opinion he 
 respected was his own. 
 
 New York had experience of this respect for his 
 own opinion in very serious matters ; some of them 
 serious enough to interest Europe, and to fill much 
 space in The Times. In the midst of one such crisis 
 I went to Oyster Bay for the week-end. Sagamore 
 Hill was not then so large a house as it is now, nor 
 had Oyster Bay become a world-famous name. One 
 important English journal believed it to be in Florida. 
 The charm of it, apart from pleasant scenery, was its 
 simplicity ; an American, or what Jefferson would 
 have called Republican, simplicity. Mrs. Roosevelt 
 ruled over it with a gentleness, a composure, which 
 more or less disguised the firmness beneath. I heard 
 it said long afterward that hers was the influence 
 which weighed most with her husband ; at critical 
 moments and in the ordinary course of life. I can 
 well believe it. Later, and in far other circumstances, 
 the atmosphere of Oyster Bay was to be breathed in 
 the White House. 
 
 I should say, though probably I ought not, that 
 throughout his public life and in all his intercourse 
 with all sorts and conditions of men, it was Mr. Roose- 
 velt's aim to convince them that his and their views 
 of social life were on a level. The fact remained that 
 he was born and bred what is called a gentleman. 
 I do not mean to suggest that he sought to disguise 
 it. What he sought, or what he suggested, consciously 
 or unconsciously, was the essential oneness of all honest 
 and honourable men, to whatever station in life they
 
 342 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 had been called. Neither riches nor social rank 
 counted. What counted was the manliness of the 
 man. Given that, he could accept — I had almost 
 written tolerate — much. At Oyster Bay he had some- 
 thing to accept. For one reason or another uncon- 
 genial personalities were to be met there, and there- 
 fore it was that I then had the chance of observing 
 the large Democracy in his character and nature. 
 He cared little or nothing for mere observances 
 from those who were in a different class. But let a 
 man in his own class forget himself and he was quickly 
 reminded of his lapse. Not long after he had been 
 chosen Governor such a man, a friend, hailed him in 
 a New York club : " How are you, Teddy ! " There 
 came a look into Mr. Roosevelt's eyes which induced 
 his friend to add : " I beg your pardon ; I mean 
 Governor." Whereas from the multitude he seemed 
 to regard " Teddy " as a term of affection, or perhaps 
 of respect. 
 
 At Oyster Bay he came into the room where I was 
 looking over a completed cable dispatch to The Times. 
 It related to a subject we had been discussing, and I 
 saw what I thought an inquiring look in his eyes, and 
 answered, " Yes, it does." As the look of inquiry 
 persisted, I said : 
 
 " It's rather against rules but there's really no 
 reason why you shouldn't read it if you care to." 
 And he did ; handing it back with the remark : 
 " But your point of view is very American." 
 " Why else do you suppose The Times chose an 
 American as its American representative ? It's the 
 American point of view they want. No other could 
 be of so much use to them." 
 
 Which I thought obvious, but it seemed slightly 
 to surprise Mr. Roosevelt at that time.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 343 
 
 His belief in himself and in his own opinion was 
 presently to become so familiar to the American people 
 that it is needless to dwell on it. But his friends first 
 knew how complete it was when he threw up his 
 Assistant Secretaryship of the Navy to enlist his 
 regiment of Rough Riders and take them to Cuba 
 for what we called the Spanish War. All his friends 
 advised him against it and told him he was sacrificing 
 his future ; the prophetic vision not being theirs. 
 He answered : 
 
 " If I believed it would end my career I should none 
 the less go. I have urged on this war. If I should 
 stay in Washington while it is fought I should be 
 disgraced ; I should be ridiculous." 
 
 And thus it was that he came to be the historian 
 of those military excursions in Cuba, and to give 
 Mr. Dooley the opportunity of writing his master- 
 piece on Teddy Alone in Cuba ; with a lunch at the 
 White House as his reward. For " Teddy's " temper 
 was proof against the Irishman's " fun." 
 
 However, in those days the American people took 
 serious views of the Spanish War and have had occasion 
 to take serious views since ; and of Mr. Roosevelt 
 as Governor of New York and President ; a child of 
 the War. Some time after he had been installed as 
 Governor I spent two or three days with him at 
 Albany in that " Executive Mansion " which the State 
 provides as a residence for its Chief Magistrate. 
 Mrs. Roosevelt was away and my hostess was a young 
 lady whose name has since floated round the world ; 
 then a girl of fifteen, with a brilliant manner and a 
 friendly conception of her duty to her father's guests 
 which captivated them all. Even in her early girlhood 
 Miss Alice Roosevelt was very competent, thoughtful, 
 picturesque, with an inexhaustible stock of pleasant
 
 344 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 surprises. Said Governor Roosevelt next morning at 
 breakfast : 
 
 " I v^ant you to come to the State House and spend 
 the day with me in the Executive Chamber. You shall 
 see everything and hear everything. I want you to 
 know how the State o£ New York is governed." 
 
 We walked over. Republican simplicity and a 
 certain carelessness of tetiue was still the note, as at 
 Oyster Bay. The Governor kept no state and took 
 little thought of appearances. For his progress through 
 the streets of his capital he wore a lounge suit and a 
 soft, black, shapeless, slouch hat ; but he walked as if 
 his time belonged to the State and every minute had 
 a value. From ten o'clock till six in the afternoon 
 people flowed into and out of the Executive Chamber. 
 Politicians, many of them, to whom politics were the 
 most important business of State, but many who had 
 real business to transact. The Governor sat at his 
 desk ; his visitors sat or stood as the case might 
 be. Some were dismissed with a few decisive words ; 
 the Governor judged from an opening sentence or 
 two how much time need be spared to each. They 
 came from all over the State, on every sort of errand. 
 There were State officials, municipal also, though I 
 cannot recollect that Tammany had a representative 
 that day ; and private citizens not less important, 
 some of them, than the holders of State office. The 
 Corporations were there ; especially railway corpora- 
 tions ; a College President ; and the Speaker of the 
 Assembly. The procession that moved through the 
 Chamber was a microcosm of the State. When secre- 
 taries came in with papers to sign I was asked to look 
 at some of them. When a Senator approached the 
 Governor, to him I was expected to listen as to lesser 
 men ; to his surprise and perhaps displeasure. At five
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 345 
 
 o'clock arrived the reporters, to whom the Governor 
 gave audience in mass. He and they were evidently 
 on good terms. I had never seen the interview 
 transacted in that way and when I remarked on it 
 he said : 
 
 " But don't you see what a convenience it is ? 
 I am left in peace all day, and they all know that at 
 five o'clock they will all hear all the news there is, and 
 to no paper is any preference shown." 
 
 Excellent, no doubt, from the Governor's point of 
 view, but it reduced journalism to a kind of trades 
 union level with its " one man as good as another " 
 maxim ; equalizing chances but neutralizing the 
 advantages to which superior energy and capacity were 
 entitled. 
 
 An interesting day all through and I learned my 
 lesson, though not perhaps just the lesson I was meant 
 to learn. As we walked away from the State House 
 the Governor asked me whether I now understood 
 better than in the morning how the State of New York 
 was governed. 
 
 " Yes, I think I do." 
 
 " Well, what do you say ? " 
 
 " All I can say is that the State seems to be governed 
 by the will of Theodore Roosevelt." 
 
 An answer which he did not appear to expect, 
 but it was inevitable. In view of all that has since 
 happened it has become a commonplace. 
 
 There was a dinner in the evening with a company 
 of guests various enough to show, as perhaps it was 
 meant to show, how little politics were allowed to 
 affect social relations. There were men of all parties 
 and of no parties. Tammany was there in the person 
 of an eminent East Side district captain. The Court 
 of Appeals was represented by one of its best judges.
 
 346 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 There were law-makers and law-breakers ; and the 
 judiciary to hold the balance even between the two. 
 The Governor had laid aside his robes of State, i£ he 
 ever had any, and was no longer Governor but 
 Theodore Roosevelt ; genial, cordial, making no 
 distinction o£ persons ; his guests all on an equality so 
 long as they were his guests. Yet the note of authority 
 was never long absent ; it was only softened because 
 we were guests and he was host. 
 
 II 
 
 AS PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 The two or three days I spent with Governor 
 Roosevelt at Albany left me with the impression that 
 his masterful good intentions would lead him far. 
 We all now know that they did, though whether we 
 have even yet measured the whole distance may be a 
 question. For the considered judgment of the com- 
 munity embodied in statutes he seemed to have less 
 respect than for his own individual opinion. He had, 
 I thought, less reverence for law than most Americans 
 have ; or once had. Those who have studied his seven 
 years' Presidency will judge whether the impression 
 derived from his Governorship was right or wrong. 
 
 It was my business during five of those years to 
 follow him step by step and to compose a daily history 
 of his administration for The Times. I saw him often. 
 Sometimes he sent for me. Sometimes I asked for an 
 audience. He talked, as a rule, freely ; not always for 
 publication. He meant to hold the balance even as 
 between all journalists and all the papers they repre- 
 sented. I rather imagine that if ever by inadvertence
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 347 
 
 he did not, he was sharply reminded of it. If — it can 
 only have been seldom — The Times published a piece 
 of news exclusively, he or Mr. Loeb, his secretary, 
 would be asked why favour should be shown to an 
 English paper, or to me. I do not think it ever was 
 shown intentionally. The President knew, of course, 
 that any such news would be re-cabled to America 
 and he had no wish to rouse needless jealousies. What- 
 ever kindly feeling he might have for me his instinctive 
 preference would be for an American rather than for 
 an English journal. 
 
 His Americanism was a prevailing, continuous, over- 
 mastering passion. He was American all the time ; 
 and perhaps quand meme. Whether England then 
 came next, longo intervallo, after America, I should 
 doubt. During the Boer War his sympathies appeared 
 to be with the Boers. Dutch blood flowed in his veins, 
 not a drop of English, as he himself often said. He 
 took pains to be civil, and something more than civil, 
 to the Irish enemies of England. There came a change, 
 but he does not seem to have been one of those 
 Americans who in 1898 were convinced by England's 
 resistance to European intervention in behalf of Spain 
 that England was really our friend and not the enemy 
 held up to execration in America's schoolbooks and in 
 Senator Lodge's biographies, possibly it was not till 
 Mr. Hay's farseeing diplomacy brought the United 
 States into the circle of world-powers that President 
 Roosevelt perceived clearly why co-operation between 
 England and the United States was for the interest of 
 both ; and for ours not less than hers,/ 
 
 Next after Mr. Hay, it was perhaps Lord Paunce- 
 fote whose influence on the President led him gently 
 to an attitude of benevolence toward the Mother 
 Country. He accepted Lord Pauncefote as a type.
 
 348 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 The British Ambassador had a directness of method 
 and a transparent honest sincerity in all his dealings 
 which profoundly impressed the President. He knew 
 that when Lord Pauncefote said a thing it was so, and 
 that in all Anglo-American issues the Ambassador's 
 voice was the voice of England. Therefore it was that 
 the German cabal in 1902 against Lord Pauncefote 
 left the President cold ; or, rather, to speak more 
 truly, impelled him to reject the Berlin story and to 
 make it the occasion for a noble tribute to Lord Paunce- 
 fote and a complete public recognition of his friend- 
 ship for America. He expressed it to me. It was not 
 asked for, and it was almost the only occasion on which 
 the President allowed himself to be quoted at first 
 hand. " You may say I said it, but not that I said it 
 to you." 
 
 With all due reserve in great matters and with 
 strict precaution President Roosevelt, like Governor 
 Roosevelt before him, was ever ready to take the Press 
 into his confidence when he could. The Press owed 
 him much, and he owed much to the Press. He made 
 use of the Press ; a most skilful and legitimate use ; 
 and not of the Press only. He said to me once : 
 
 " You think I am impulsive and perhaps I am. 
 But I will tell you one thing. Never yet have I entered 
 upon any great policy till I was satisfied I had behind 
 me a great body of public opinion." 
 
 Some of this evidence of public opinion he must 
 have derived from the Press, and from representatives 
 of the Press. He could, and did, put questions as well 
 as answer them. He held that a journalist who knew 
 his business must know what was thought and said in 
 his own constituency. From some other and not less 
 useful sources of information he deliberately cut him- 
 self off. He set the business world against him ; and
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 349 
 
 the big men of finance in New York and elsewhere 
 had no reason for giving him help or expert counsel 
 except where some great public interest was concerned. 
 In the year of the crisis and shortly before the climax 
 of it, I was for six weeks in and about New York. I 
 met a great many people, some of them among the 
 most important in the world of finance and business. 
 Neither from any one of them nor from any other 
 human being did I at that time hear one good word 
 said for the President. He had alienated the business 
 world. He was hated. They thought him a menace 
 to peace and prosperity. Yet somehow or other the 
 President knew what was going on in those upper 
 regions. I should think no President was ever better 
 served ; and surely no President was ever more adroit 
 in tapping the sources of opinion. He had his own 
 standard of values. At one critical moment he said : 
 
 " I have means of knowing that the thirteen Bishops 
 of the Methodist Episcopal Church are with me. 
 That being so, I don't care who is against me." 
 
 He liked to declare himself in that large way, but 
 of course he did care very much who was against him. 
 What he meant was that the thirteen Bishops were 
 representative ; that they did not divorce religion 
 from politics ; that their authority over their millions 
 of co-religionists was great, and that they spoke for 
 these millions as well as for themselves. 
 
 That sense of " fun " which came out in the Police 
 Commissioner was not always repressed in the Presi- 
 dent. As I sat with him in his private room we saw 
 through the open door into the Cabinet chamber two 
 men enter. 
 
 " Do you know these men ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " They are men in whom America is just now much
 
 350 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 interested ; Reynolds and his colleague whom I sent 
 to Chicago to inquire into the stockyards and slaughter- 
 houses. Part of their report, enough for my pur- 
 pose, has been sent to Congress and no doubt you 
 have read it. The rest is too awful to publish. You 
 would like to see it, wouldn't you ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " You never will." 
 
 Often enough the surprise in which he delighted 
 came in a different way. During a crisis which affected 
 England as well as the United States he sent for me 
 and began : 
 
 " I am going to talk to you in confidence ; not a 
 word for print. I think it desirable you should know 
 privately what the view of the Government is and 
 what, in certain contingencies, I intend to do." 
 
 His statement lasted for twenty minutes. He talked 
 with that lucidity and force which came to him when 
 he dealt with great affairs. Now and then I asked a 
 question which he answered without reserve. When 
 he had finished I said : 
 
 " I, of course, understand that what you have told 
 me is not to be repeated. But may I say that from a 
 talk I have had with a high official authority I draw 
 such and such conclusions ? " 
 
 The lips parted over the white teeth, the eyes 
 gleamed behind the glasses, and the President answered: 
 
 " That is why I sent for you." 
 
 I was to take the responsibility and not he. It 
 was my business to take it, and I did. If my con- 
 clusions had been challenged I had all the evidence 
 to support them and could have used none of it. 
 But that is one of the risks which a journalist has to 
 accept. In fact, there was no challenge from any 
 quarter worth noticing, and The Times dispatch
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 351 
 
 had, I think, the effect the President meant it to 
 have. 
 
 One other detached and I hope illustrative anecdote. 
 
 When I came back from Ottawa with Sir Wilfrid 
 Laurier's authority to repeat to Mr. Hay and the 
 President what he had said to me about Alaska, I 
 brought with me a long memorandum which both the 
 Secretary of State and the President read. It con- 
 tained the substance of several conversations and a 
 statement of what I believed Sir Wilfrid ready to do. 
 I have always thought that if the President had then 
 had a free hand, he would have been disposed to avail 
 himself of this knowledge of what was in Sir Wil- 
 frid's mind, as a basis for negotiations. But there 
 stood the Senate, in its most implacable mood, and 
 neither Mr. Hay nor the President thought the mo- 
 ment propitious for approaching that august body 
 with any fresh proposals. I was given to understand 
 that, much as the Canadian Prime Minister's desire to 
 close the controversy was appreciated, no step could 
 then be taken. During a long audience I pressed it as 
 much as I thought permissible, and finally said to the 
 President I was still unwilling to take No for an answer. 
 I felt that he was as unwilling to give it as I was to 
 take it. He answered : 
 
 " Well, you are coming here this evening and I 
 will consider the whole question meantime. Stay 
 on after the others arc gone and we will have a 
 final talk." 
 
 Mrs. Roosevelt had a reception after the dinner and 
 it was past midnight before her guests departed. Then 
 Mr. Roosevelt and I tramped up and down the long 
 passage between the East Room and the Conservatory 
 till half-past one. At the end the President said : 
 
 " I am very sorry but it must be No."
 
 352 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " Then I can only say good night. I oughtn't to 
 have kept you so late." 
 
 " Late ? You think I am going to bed ? I have 
 
 a hundred and sixty pension bills to read before I 
 
 turn in." 
 
 " Why not veto them all unread ? " 
 
 " That's easy for you to say but did you ever hear 
 of the Grand Army of the Republic ? " 
 
 Upon which we parted. Politics had to come in. 
 They often had. They were never very far from the 
 President's mind. An old and loyal friend of his said 
 to me : 
 
 " No man's sense of public duty is higher than the 
 President's but he is the ' slickest ' politician of them 
 all. He can give points to Piatt or anybody else. And 
 yet he somehow manages to put duty first and politics 
 afterward." 
 
 An appreciation which I hope Mr. Roosevelt will 
 himself appreciate. 
 
 Ill 
 
 AS PRESIDENT IN RELATION TO FOREIGN AFFAIRS 
 
 The confidence, the deserved confidence, President 
 Roosevelt had in Mr. Hay led him to give his Secretary 
 of State a free hand in most matters which the De- 
 partment of State had to deal with. He knew well 
 enough that Mr. Hay had relinquished the Embassy 
 in London and become Foreign Minister against his 
 own wish upon the summons of President McKinley. 
 He knew that Mr. Hay would have preferred, for per- 
 sonal reasons, to leave the Department upon the death 
 of Mr. McKinley. He knew that in this matter, as in 
 others, a sense of public duty prevailed with Mr.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 353 
 
 Hay ; and a man with an overruling sense of public 
 duty was the kind of public servant Mr. Roosevelt was 
 always looking for. He knew also that Mr. Hay's 
 experience as Ambassador abroad and as Assistant 
 Secretary of State at home had given him the training 
 and experience which neither natural abilities nor 
 missions from on high could replace. In this case, 
 therefore, the President acted, so far as it was in him 
 to act, on the maxim to choose the best man, hold 
 him responsible, and judge him by results. As the 
 results were, among others, to give the United States a 
 place in world politics and an opportunity of exercising 
 the kind of missionary influence dear to the President, 
 he may be supposed to have been content, and more 
 than content, with these results. 
 
 When, therefore, the President and the Secretary 
 were agreed on a point of foreign affairs vital to the 
 national welfare and to peace, as in the Alaska Boundary 
 and Sir Wilfrid Laurier's proposal, there was in the 
 minds of most men a presumption that they were right. 
 But not in the minds of the Senate. I do not wish to 
 go over again a matter on which I have written much. 
 In what I said of Sir Wilfrid Laurier in these Memories 
 I told as much of the story as I well could. I refer to 
 it once more only to add that after the midnight talk 
 with the President, briefly referred to in a previous 
 letter, I came away convinced that President Roose- 
 velt saw eye to eye with Mr. Hay and both with 
 Sir Wilfrid Laurier. The Senate, and the Senate only, 
 then stood in the way of a favourable settlement of that 
 menacing question. It is well to keep that in mind. 
 For once more to-day the Senate, and the Senate 
 only,* stands in the way of those arbitration treaties 
 with England and France which President Taft 
 
 * But now, March, 191 2, reinforced by Mr. Roosevelt. 
 
 2 A
 
 354 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 framed and signed. Nothing, not even Mr. Hay's 
 diplomacy, ever did so much to give the United States 
 a foremost place in the world's diplomacy. No 
 President ever originated a scheme of peace so far- 
 reaching and beneficent. If it be too far-reaching, 
 time and experience will set that right. But to peace 
 and to American leadership in a great world-policy the 
 Senate prefers its own usurped privilege, its own 
 jealousy of constitutional executive authority, and the 
 present animosity of some of its members to one of 
 the greatest of Presidents. 
 
 I do not know whether Mr. Roosevelt has thought 
 of writing a history of his own administration, or of 
 those policies and acts which made it memorable. If 
 I were a publisher I would never leave him alone till 
 he had promised to do it ; not in detail but broadly, 
 and therefore briefly. It would be interesting to see 
 if he could be brief, and whether, if he were, his 
 written style might not gain in clarity and balance. 
 It would be still more interesting if he should condense 
 into a chapter his relations with the Senate and his 
 judgment on that policy of obstruction and treaty- 
 wrecking which has filled the American mind with 
 distrust of its patriotism. 
 
 It was understood at the time that one reason for 
 the appointment of Sir Michael Herbert as British 
 Ambassador in succession to Lord Pauncefote was 
 the relation of friendship existing between Sir Michael 
 and the President. That is but one example of the 
 weight which the personal wishes of a President may 
 have abroad as well as at home. I don't enlarge on it, 
 for I hope to write more fully at another time con- 
 cerning Sir Michael and his services to both countries 
 as Ambassador. It is true that a European Govern- 
 ment always considers whether a candidate for a high
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 355 
 
 diplomatic post is likely to be agreeable to the Govern- 
 ment to which he is sent. But it is also true that the 
 question seldom turns on the other question o£ 
 personal intimacy between the Head of a Govern- 
 ment and the proposed Ambassador or Minister. Mr. 
 Roosevelt's personality had won him a kind of prestige 
 abroad which made the intimation of his liking for a 
 particular man a powerful factor in his appointment. 
 I doubt whether any similar case can be cited from 
 the past. But I am quite sure that were any of the 
 great Embassies now to fall vacant President Taft 
 would be informally consulted about filling it, for 
 President Taft has succeeded to that European heritage 
 of fame and confidence which President Roosevelt 
 was at one time supposed to have carried into retire- 
 ment with him. 
 
 There was, I suppose, no European ruler with whom 
 President Roosevelt stood on terms of such close in- 
 timacy as with the German Emperor. Down to the 
 time of Mr. Roosevelt's progress through Europe and 
 visit to Potsdam, the two had never met. But events 
 had brought them together. They corresponded by 
 cable and by letter. They exchanged gifts. The 
 German Emperor seems to have misunderstood the 
 President on more points than one. It was partly 
 because of the supposed German sympathies or pre- 
 possessions of Mr. Roosevelt that Prince Henry of 
 Prussia was sent to the United States on that mission 
 of which the political purpose was at first denied and 
 then admitted. When Prince Henry went to Wash- 
 ington Mr. Roosevelt received him cordially. They 
 spent much time together ; dined, walked, and rode 
 together. The papers were full of it. I imagine the 
 Prince thought he made a certain degree of progress 
 with his mission ; which was nothing less than to
 
 356 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 drive a wedge between England and the United States 
 to the profit of Germany. I was in Washington not 
 long after and said to the President in answer to a 
 question : 
 
 " Mr. President, it seemed that all through your 
 reception of Prince Henry you meant to emphasize 
 the personal side of your relations ; as if there had 
 been no political or diplomatic side at all." 
 
 " Ah, you noticed that, did you ? " 
 
 He said neither yes nor no but I hope I may add 
 that the expression of his face seemed full of meaning. 
 It was an expression of assent. He meant, indeed, that 
 his personal attitude to the Prince should be seen of 
 all men. He knew very well what was in the mind 
 of the German Emperor. Later the President was 
 asked : 
 
 " If there arose between Germany and the United 
 States a controversy, how much would the mission of 
 Prince Henry affect the policy of your Government 
 touching that controversy ? " 
 
 " By not so much as the weight of my little finger," 
 answered the President. 
 
 The phrase " my Government " was almost as often 
 in his mouth as the phrase " my policy." So it became 
 a custom for others to say to him, " your Govern- 
 
 ment." 
 
 When Baron von Holleben, the German Am- 
 bassador at Washington, went home on leave of 
 absence he brought back with him an account of the 
 audience granted him by the Emperor, saying in 
 substance : 
 
 " His Imperial Majesty asked me many questions 
 about the President, which I answered as freely as I 
 thought consistent with the respect due both to the 
 Emperor and the President. I had always considered
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 357 
 
 they had much in common, personally and as rulers. 
 Of course, I could not say that to the Emperor but 
 I answered his questions in such a way that presently 
 he exclaimed : 
 
 " ' Why, Mr. Roosevelt must in some respects be 
 very much like me.' " 
 
 The German Ambassador gave his account of this 
 incident to the President, and the President in turn 
 repeated it to various persons. All their narratives 
 agreed in substance, so the HoUeben story may be 
 accepted as true. He was not the man to have in- 
 vented it ; nor had he in any high degree the gift of 
 imagination ; nor would he risk incurring his master's 
 wrath by an inaccurate version of a story sure to find 
 its way back to Berlin and to Potsdam. Mr. Roose- 
 velt's admiration for the Kaiser was such that he cannot 
 have taken his friend's comparison amiss. 
 
 There were, however, critics who held and ex- 
 pressed a different view. To establish a likeness of 
 character between the Kaiser and the President was, 
 if you listened to them, to establish a likeness of con- 
 duct. It helped to explain to their minds Mr. Roose- 
 velt's preference for arbitrary methods. The Kaiser, 
 as we all know, is the ruling force in Germany, and 
 still more is he, as King, the ruling force in Prussia. 
 Neither the Reichstag nor the Landtag is a good ex- 
 ample of what we understand and intend by repre- 
 sentative government. The efficient principle, alike in 
 the Empire and in the Kingdom, is not Parliamentary 
 but Kingly. And there were at that time many men 
 in both Senate and House of Representatives who 
 thought they discovered in Mr. Roosevelt a disposition 
 to put his own convictions of right above the con- 
 sidered convictions of the American people expressed 
 in statutory law. Mr. Roosevelt, according to a cable
 
 358 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 dispatch from Washington to the London papers, said 
 to the investigating committee which, during the 
 summer of 191 1, inquired into his action in promoting 
 or permitting in 1908 the sale of the Tennessee Coal 
 and Iron Company : 
 
 " What I did was absolutely wise and absolutely 
 right." 
 
 His critics seem to think he violated, or to say the 
 least disregarded and enabled others to disregard, the 
 law. I have heard that opinion expressed in England 
 where the phrase " dispensing power " has a sinister 
 historical significance. And I have heard Newman 
 quoted as saying, before he went to Rome : 
 
 " The Pope's claim to infallibility implies an ad- 
 ditional claim. He must not only be infallible but 
 infallibly certain he is infallible." 
 
 That Pope and Kaiser and President were all acting 
 from high motives and from a profound belief that they 
 were doing good in the world is in each case equally 
 evident. 
 
 Holding the views he did, it is no matter for wonder 
 that the President should sometimes pay scant atten- 
 tion to etiquette in his dealings with the Ambassadors 
 in Washington. One of them said : 
 
 " Your President thinks nothing of sending for us 
 at any hour of the day or night. It is not usual that 
 the personal representative of a Sovereign should be 
 ' sent for,' but we waive that and go. Once at the 
 White House he says to us whatever comes into his 
 head. We are lectured, chided for our own faults or 
 those of our Governments, told to behave better in 
 future, and so dismissed. We do not take offence. We 
 recognize the good intentions of the President. We 
 know that he cannot always control his impulses or 
 confine his apostolic mission to purely domestic affairs.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 359 
 
 But we do not think it is a good way of doing business 
 nor one that tends to smooth away diplomatic differ- 
 
 ences." 
 
 But that was not the limit of the President's 
 diplomatic activities. It was no secret in Washington 
 that the recall of Sir Mortimer Durand, British Am- 
 bassador from 1903 to 1906, was due, directly or in- 
 directly, to the President's dislike of him and to his 
 expressed opinion that Sir Mortimer " was not a man 
 with whom you could do business." There were 
 other complaints which need not be dwelt on. Yet 
 Sir Mortimer had had a distinguished career in India 
 where he had been Foreign Secretary for ten years ; 
 had been Minister to Persia for six years and Am- 
 bassador to Spain for three years. When his proposed 
 appointment to Washington had been made known, it 
 was welcomed by the President. He was a very loyal, 
 able, honourable man. It may be true that his abilities 
 were not of the kind best suited to Washington ; 
 always a difficult post. It is certainly true that the 
 Ambassador and the President were not sympathetic 
 to each other. Again I am sure the President thought 
 himself " absolutely wise and absolutely right," and 
 had reason for thinking that Anglo-American interests 
 and a general good understanding between England 
 and the United States would thrive better with 
 another tenant for the Embassy in Connecticut 
 Avenue. If a fine career had to be ruined for reasons 
 of State, or from a strain of impatience in the 
 President, it does not follow that any censure need 
 be pronounced on Sir Mortimer Durand.
 
 36o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 IV 
 
 HIS INTERVENTION BETWEEN RUSSIA AND JAPAN 
 
 Much has been said about President Roosevelt's 
 intervention in the Russo-Japanese War and his success 
 in securing an agreement between Russia and Japan 
 at Portsmouth. For his untiring efforts and complete 
 devotion to the cause of peace no praise could be too 
 high ; nor for his ingenuity and energy in bringing 
 the two Powers together in Conference. Whether a 
 Treaty of Peace might not have been made elsewhere 
 and on the same or similar terms, without his inter- 
 vention, is perhaps an unprofitable subject of specula- 
 tion. I was in Washington when he entered upon his 
 campaign of persuasion. The President's first notion 
 was to receive the Plenipotentiaries of the two Powers 
 in Washington and let them negotiate there. When 
 it was suggested to him that Washington in August 
 could hardly be depended on for the degree of cool- 
 ness desirable in a difiicult discussion, he seemed 
 surprised and said : 
 
 " So far as I am concerned, I don't care whether 
 I have to do my work on the Congo or at the North 
 Pole." 
 
 He did, however, admit that others might be less 
 careless about climate than he was, and that the 
 humidity and heat together might make Washington 
 an unsuitable place of meeting. Why Portsmouth 
 was chosen I never knew. It had a variable climate 
 and was often very hot and better suited for the 
 mosquitoes, which held a conference of their own 
 in great numbers, than for diplomatists. It was 
 uncomfortable in many ways and the distance from
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 361 
 
 the hall where the Japanese and Russians met to the 
 hotel made the difficult work of the journalists more 
 difficult still. Few places combined so many dis- 
 advantages. Of the one hundred and twenty 
 journalists who were there for the Conference, many 
 were foreigners ; Russian, Japanese, English, French, 
 German, and so on. I am not sure whether the 
 President, who remained, not in Washington but at 
 Oyster Bay, ought to be reckoned a journalist or not. 
 He certainly supplies the Press of the world with a 
 great deal of copy. 
 
 Having been ordered from England, whither I had 
 gone for a holiday, to Portsmouth, I crossed the 
 Atlantic with an English colleague on a North German 
 Lloyd ship, on which Count Witte, the head of the 
 Russian Embassy, was a passenger. Then and at 
 Portsmouth and on the return voyage I saw much 
 of Count Witte, and shall have something to say of 
 him presently. My colleague was Sir Donald Mac- 
 kenzie Wallace, formerly Foreign Editor of The Times. 
 I wrote from New York to the President, asking 
 leave to bring Sir Donald to see him, and the President 
 named a day. The President's Secretary, Mr. Loeb, 
 who has since been Collector of the Port of New York 
 with a flaming sword in his hand, telegraphed us to 
 come by a morning train to Oyster Bay and present 
 ourselves at 3.30 p.m. at Sagamore Hill. As this 
 involved a long wait in the village I asked whether we 
 might not be received at four o'clock, for which there 
 was a convenient train. But Mr. Loeb was inflexible, 
 and even when I suggested to him that an Englishman 
 of some distinction might not like to be kept waiting 
 for hours in a little Long Island town, sent a " No " 
 more peremptory than before. Even as Secretary 
 he had his flaming sword ready for all comers.
 
 362 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 I knew that Count Witte was to lunch with the 
 President that day, and that his audience was Hkely to 
 last till later than half-past three. Mr. Loeb knew it 
 too. The President, I assume, knew nothing of his 
 Secretary's arbitrary ways. We had, at any rate, 
 to choose between doing as we were told by Mr. Loeb 
 and giving up the visit ; and though Wallace and I 
 both thought we were being rather rudely treated, 
 we went. After some hours in the village we drove to 
 Sagamore Hill, arrived at 3.30, waited till 4.30, saw 
 Count Witte depart, and were admitted. Wallace, 
 long a courtier and regarding the customs of royalty 
 as holding good with the President, had insisted we 
 should go in frock-coats and tall hats, and we did, 
 much to the entertainment of the village. Count Witte 
 was content with the travelhng suit he had worn 
 on the steamship and a battered shapeless straw hat. 
 Autre fciys, autres mceurs. 
 
 Since my former visit to Oyster Bay the house had 
 been enlarged, and the President now occupied as his 
 reception-room a large library-parlour on the ground 
 floor. He talked to us rather freely about the Con- 
 ference but said little that can be quoted even now. 
 To Sir Donald he was cordial enough to make it plain 
 he knew nothing about Mr. Loeb's discourtesies, 
 and the Englishman brought away an agreeable im- 
 pression of the President. To us, as to others, he said 
 that when Japan and Russia had agreed to meet at 
 Porstmouth he considered his work done. He had no 
 intention of taking part in the proceedings — " no more 
 to do with them than you have, nor so much." He 
 hoped for the best but was not over-confident. 
 
 " I have brought them to a cool spring. It remains 
 to be seen whether they will drink of it or not." 
 
 We all know that he changed his mind later and
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 363 
 
 that his intervention at Portsmouth, at Tokio, and 
 at St. Petersburg was frequent, energetic, and in a 
 sense successful. As I am not writing a history of 
 the Conference I confine myself here to the Presi- 
 dent's share in the Portsmouth proceedings. Pre- 
 serving an appearance of impartiality and being, so 
 far as the machinery of the Conference was concerned, 
 really impartial in the beginning, he found himself, 
 as he thought, compelled by circumstances unforeseen 
 and undesired to take a hand in the game. He was, 
 as both Japanese and Russians knew, Japanese in his 
 sympathies. When Count Komura, the chief of the 
 Japanese Plenipotentiaries, laid upon the table his 
 demand upon Russia for a war indemnity of 
 $600,000,000, the President thought it ought to 
 be paid. For the sake of clearness I omit all reference 
 to other demands. It was upon this that the success 
 or failure of the Conference depended. 
 
 When Russia refused to pay this enormous sum 
 the President at first took the refusal as a piece of 
 diplomacy. He thought Russia was holding out for 
 better terms. He little guessed that Russia's answer to 
 Japan's demand had been settled before Count Witte 
 left St. Petersburg. He did not know — how could he ? 
 — that Count Witte had accepted his appointment 
 as Plenipotentiary only on the condition that in no 
 circumstances should he be required to assent to an 
 indemnity. He thought it possible to bring pressure 
 on Count Witte and his colleagues. He believed 
 Japan would persist, as he thought she had a right 
 to persist, in the exaction of these $600,000,000, and 
 that if they were not paid the Conference would 
 break up and the war be renewed. 
 
 Hence his memorable attempt to induce the 
 Emperor of Russia to give way. In his zeal the Presi-
 
 364 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 dent had long since forgotten that he was not going to 
 try to make the two Powers drink of the cool spring 
 near which he had brought them. He kept the wires 
 between Oyster Bay and Portsmouth hot, and presently 
 the cable to St. Petersburg was heated seven times 
 hotter. He instructed " his " Ambassador, Mr. Meyer, 
 to ask an audience of the Emperor and to urge upon 
 him that he should surrender to this Japanese demand. 
 Mr. Meyer was to lay before the Emperor the reasons 
 of the President for his yielding. The Emperor 
 received the President's Ambassador, listened to him, 
 and finally told him that a formal answer would be 
 sent him by the Foreign Office. It came as a docu- 
 ment of live hundred words to go by cable, and cabled 
 it was to Oyster Bay. The five hundred words could 
 all be condensed into a monosyllable : " No." 
 
 The President, naturally, was dissatisfied. He 
 directed his Ambassador to see the Emperor again 
 and renew his appeal. Mr. Meyer did as he was told 
 and again the answer, much briefer than at first, 
 was a refusal. The President — it is all but incredible 
 yet true — sent Mr. Meyer a third time to the Emperor, 
 and a third time the refusal was given ; this third 
 time with a peremptory brevity which even the 
 President understood to be final. When Count Witte 
 described to me what had taken place, he added : 
 
 " I do not think His Imperial Majesty, my Master, 
 is in the habit of being asked three times whether he 
 means what he says." 
 
 By this time the President was alarmed, and with 
 good reason. A great change had occurred. When the 
 two Embassies arrived in the United States, public 
 opinion, beyond all doubt, was on the side of Japan. 
 Before a fortnight had passed it veered about and 
 became largely Russian. I will explain why later.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 365 
 
 Now it is only necessary to say that Count Witte 
 had shown himself open-minded to the Press and had 
 stated to the American journalists day by day the 
 Russian case with consummate skill. The Japanese 
 held aloof. Count Komura saw no journalist. Baron 
 Takahira, having been Minister at Washington and 
 better understanding American ways, was nevertheless 
 forced to be silent. So with the Russian arguments 
 and facts daily spread before them and nothing or 
 almost nothing from Japan, the American people 
 were naturally and inevitably influenced by what they 
 read ; and began to believe that the Russians must be 
 in the right. 
 
 Now no man ever read more quickly and surely 
 the minds of the American people than did Mr. 
 Roosevelt. He saw what was happening. He became 
 anxious about his Conference ; for his Conference it 
 was. And when once he became convinced that 
 Russia would never pay the $600,000,000 he executed 
 a complete volte-face and told the astonished Japanese 
 whose demand he had vigorously supported that the 
 demand must be withdrawn. He cabled Tokio as he 
 had cabled St. Petersburg, only in an opposite sense. 
 He warned Tokio and the Japanese Plenipotentiaries 
 alike that they had alienated in a great measure the 
 goodwill of the American nation, and that the only 
 way to recover it was to renounce their claim for an 
 indemnity. He told them of his own knowledge 
 that whether they renounced it or not they never 
 could get the money, for Russia never would pay it. 
 And he prevailed. The Japanese withdrew their 
 demand, peace was made, the President's Conference, 
 which more than once had been on the point of break- 
 ing up, came to an agreement, and the world breathed 
 freely again.
 
 366 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 With what feehngs towards Mr. Roosevelt the 
 Japanese departed from Portsmouth I dare not con- 
 jecture. He had forced them to act wisely, and they 
 probably knew that their decision was wise if only 
 because it was inevitable. But no man likes to be 
 forced to be wise. The Japanese, if the truth may 
 be told, had arrived at Portsmouth in an arrogant 
 mood. They left it in a chastened mood. Victors 
 in a great war, they had not been victors in the Con- 
 ference. They had been outgeneralled by Count 
 Witte. They had been forced to abandon their claim 
 for a war indemnity ; money which they had regarded 
 as already in their pockets. Their prestige had suffered 
 a cruel blow. Their popularity in America was 
 grievously impaired. For all this they held the 
 President responsible. For some part of it he un- 
 doubtedly was responsible. We remain on good terms 
 with Japan ; for reasons of self-interest on both sides. 
 But if you ask American travellers whether Americans 
 are popular in Tokio and throughout Japan, you may 
 be told that the Japanese are anything but grateful 
 for the part we played at Portsmouth, and that they 
 are not likely soon to forget what share President 
 Roosevelt had in their humiliation. 
 
 HIS INTERVENTION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND EGYPT 
 
 As Mr. Roosevelt seems still * inclined to emerge at 
 intervals from his well-earned retirement, it may not 
 be too late to say yet another word about this eminent 
 ex-President. From no account of him ought the im- 
 pression he made on European opinion, and especially 
 
 * November, 191 1.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 367 
 
 on English opinion, to be omitted. Many narratives 
 went by cable. I shall try to confine myself to memories 
 not likely to have reached America in that way. 
 
 I will come at once to the critical moment when 
 Mr. Roosevelt thought it his duty to admonish the 
 English Government and people concerning their 
 duty to Egypt, and to England in Egypt. He had 
 been in Egypt, on his return from his adventures as 
 naturalist to the Smithsonian Institution, long enough 
 to form a just conception of the position of the 
 English and of the changes, in administrative efficiency 
 if not in policy, which had taken place since Lord Cromer 
 had retired and Sir Eldon Gorst had been in nominal 
 command. I say nominal because it seems clear that 
 the relaxation of English authority under Sir Eldon 
 Gorst was the direct result of instructions from the 
 home Government ; a Government saturated with 
 Radical notions of the Rights of Man, notions to be 
 put in force regardless of race, regardless of political 
 conditions, regardless of expediency, regardless of 
 Imperial interests and necessities. Mr. Roosevelt 
 himself holds, or has held, views of human brother- 
 hood not less visionary than those for some time past 
 prevailing at Westminster. But he did, at any rate, 
 consider that the business of a Government was to 
 govern, and no President ever acted on that belief 
 with more energy than President Roosevelt did. And 
 he saw clearly that in Egypt the Government was 
 ceasing to govern, and that Radical theories were 
 endangering the supremacy and the beneficent in- 
 fluence of England in Egypt. Seeing this, and having 
 formed a strong opinion about it, he could not, I 
 suppose, help expressing it ; and he did express it at 
 the Guildhall in a way which astonished Englishmen. 
 He said to them, almost in so many words :
 
 368 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " You must either govern Egypt or get out." 
 
 He was at that moment the guest of England or, 
 if not strictly of England, of the City of London 
 where he was speaking. No doubt he knew there is 
 such a thing as a social code which forbids a guest 
 to undertake to regulate the affairs of his host's 
 household. But what are social codes to a missionary 
 spirit ? What obligations of courtesy are binding 
 on the vicegerent of the Almighty ? • Even an Old 
 Testament or a New Testament evangelist would 
 disregard them, much more an American ex-President 
 with a message from on high. It was not with him a 
 matter of choice. He had to speak, and speak he did. 
 
 In a way it was a useful deliverance. It woke up 
 England, always disposed to be sluggish in far-off 
 Imperial affairs till a cannon-shot breaks her slumbers. 
 It found an echo in that great body of convinced 
 but for the most part silent Imperialists to whom the 
 Empire is a living thing. It startled and even impressed 
 the Radicals themselves who could hardly understand 
 how an American Republican should be preaching an 
 Imperial gospel. The English Press reflected these 
 impressions and through the English Press they found 
 their way, no doubt, into the American Press. And 
 there were, I have heard, multitudes of Americans 
 who felt a patriotic pleasure in this spectacle of a 
 distinguished American hitting out straight from the 
 shoulder at his English friends. 
 
 Not for worlds would I say a word to disturb this 
 patriotic ecstasy. But there is, in fact, a very con- 
 siderable difference between the methods of the 
 English Press and the American Press in dealing with 
 a matter so complicated as this. We should have said 
 pretty nearly what we thought. If an Englishman 
 had stood up at a Chamber of Commerce dinner in
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 369 
 
 New York and told us we were letting things go to 
 the devil in the Philippines — at a time when they were 
 going to the devil — we should have resented it, 
 Mr. Roosevelt first of all, and told him it was no 
 business of his, and that an exhortation by an English- 
 man to Americans about American affairs, and a 
 criticism on our conduct of them, was an imperti- 
 nence ; as it would have been. 
 
 Not so the English papers. They dealt gently with 
 Mr. Roosevelt. Those who agreed with him about 
 Egypt said they agreed, and some of them said it was 
 well they should be reminded of their duty; though 
 they did not say by a foreigner. They even took a 
 humorous view of this incident. They thought it 
 natural enough that Mr. Roosevelt's apostolic fervour 
 should blind him to considerations of time and place ; 
 though they delicately hinted that it might be possible 
 to be apostolic and polite at the same time. 
 
 Far otherwise was the tone in private life. If in 
 print the English put decorum first, in private they 
 speak out. They, in fact, said in private very much 
 what we should have said in print. The men who 
 agreed with Mr. Roosevelt about Egypt said the 
 hardest things of him. I used to hear their most 
 explosive criticisms for the most part at second- 
 hand ; since even in their wrath they were mindful 
 of the civilities they thought Mr. Roosevelt had 
 violated, and would not condemn him to an American. 
 But American or not, you could not live here without 
 becoming aware of the state of feeling. To Mr. 
 Roosevelt himself they made, I think, only smooth 
 speeches. Not in the presence of any American 
 would they talk about " Yankee impudence." But 
 among themselves they appear to have used even 
 stronger phrases.
 
 370 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 A public luncheon or dinner, moreover, is neutral 
 ground unless avowedly political. In the presence of 
 Ministers or of Ministers' friends, no Enghshman 
 would have attacked Ministers or their policy. I 
 know the ice is getting thin, but I will venture to say- 
 that such an attack as Mr. Littleton made on the 
 President and his trust policy at a dinner where the 
 President was the guest of honour would have been 
 impossible in England. It would have been thought 
 unmannerly, inconsistent with that political and social 
 decency expected of public men. Mr. Roosevelt's 
 offence was not of the same kind or degree, but it 
 was nevertheless according to English ideas an 
 offence. And, in the long run, it injured the cause 
 he meant to support. The injury was not, we may 
 hope, permanent. Ministers have done what they 
 could to remedy their tolerance of the Nationalist 
 movement in Egypt. They have put Lord Kitchener 
 in charge ; and Lord Kitchener's name alone was 
 sufficient to restore order. 
 
 Apart from this Egyptian business, Mr. Roosevelt 
 left none but pleasant memories behind him. He 
 came among the English with a renown greater than 
 that of any American they had seen, General Grant 
 excepted. He left them with his renown undiminished. 
 They recognized his great qualities. They saw in him 
 a man ; and that is what they like best. His frankness 
 appealed to them. If it amused them to find him 
 so very glad to meet so many total strangers, that did 
 him no harm. They thought him sincere, though 
 exuberant ; with an essential sincerity of character. 
 Possibly they knew he has not a drop of English blood 
 in his veins and is rather fond of saying so, but they 
 none the less recognized in him a kinship of soul and 
 of character. He was a force, and to them a sympa-
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 371 
 
 thetic force. They like a man who has done things ; 
 who has played a great part greatly. They knew he 
 had been a strong President, and sometimes arbitrary, 
 and liked him none the worse for that. With this 
 nation of sportsmen his exploits in Africa had set 
 the seal to his fame. They expressed it in their 
 moderate colloquial English way : 
 
 " There can't be much the matter with a man 
 who goes for big game." 
 
 They thought it graceful and fitting that he should 
 have wished to be Special Ambassador at the funeral 
 of King Edward ; a King whose greatness looms larger 
 year by year. His appearance at that ceremony 
 was not what it might have been. He was one of 
 three in a royal closed carriage. A European news- 
 paper told us that he himself did not like it, saying : 
 
 " I put myself in the hands of the authorities 
 and was ready to do what they liked, but I did not 
 expect to ride with a Dago and a Chinkie." 
 
 I quote it only to remark that, widely circulated 
 as the speech was, it cannot have been uttered by 
 Mr. Roosevelt, His companions were the French 
 Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Persian Minister. 
 The English would have liked to see the ex-President 
 by himself on horseback, perhaps in the uniform of 
 a Rough Rider ; not in a tall hat and evening clothes. 
 But that mattered little. What mattered was his 
 presence and all that it signified. The presence of 
 his daughter, Mrs. Longworth, added to the content 
 of the English who had admired and liked the Alice 
 Roosevelt of earlier days, and paid homage to her 
 beauty and her delightful originalities, and to all the 
 attractions they loved the better because they were 
 American and not English. 
 
 Of Mr. Roosevelt's political misadventures since his
 
 372 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 return, I don't think the English knew much until he 
 suddenly appeared as an opponent of the President's 
 Arbitration Treaties. There his attitude perplexes 
 them. The fact of his opposition is better known 
 than the grounds of it. The cable does not much 
 concern itself with reasons. It gives results. But 
 embittered phrases come to us from beneath the 
 Atlantic. The Arbitration Treaties and the support of 
 them are, says Mr. Roosevelt, a " hypocritical move 
 against the interests of peace and against the honour 
 and interests of the United States and civilization." 
 In his magazine and in his letter to the Peace Dinner 
 Committee, the words hypocrisy and hypocritical are 
 used more than once. To whom do they apply ? 
 President Taft appears to be accused of hypocrisy 
 because he did not submit to arbitration the issue 
 between Russia and the United States touching the 
 Treaty of 1832, which he gave notice he would abro- 
 gate. President Taft replied civilly and conclusively 
 that there could be no question of arbitration. He 
 terminates the Treaty not because it has been violated 
 but because it is obsolete. Under the Treaty when 
 negotiated, the American theory and the Russian theory 
 of expatriation were the same. They are no longer the 
 same and therefore a new Treaty must be made. 
 I should never apply to Mr. Roosevelt the language 
 he uses to President Taft, whom he must in his sober 
 moments know to be incapable of hypocrisy. Mr. 
 Roosevelt is as sincere as he is intemperate. Let us. 
 admit, and regret, that he honestly believes it im- 
 possible to differ from him honestly. 
 
 The Arbitration Treaties are popular in England, 
 and with all classes of Enghsh. Not an influential 
 voice has been raised against them. They are believed 
 to be popular in America, the Senate, of course.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 373 
 
 excepted ; it being well understood that to that 
 august but difficult body all treaties, as treaties, are 
 objects o£ suspicion and hatred. The English do not 
 understand party divisions or personal animosities in 
 American politics. They cannot be expected to. I 
 sometimes wonder whether we understand them our- 
 selves. And so they ask in a dazed way why Mr. 
 Roosevelt should be so often in antagonism to the 
 President whom he chose, so far as he could choose, 
 to be his successor ; who was the heir to his policy 
 or policies ; and who has carried steadily on, though 
 by less violent methods, the work which Mr. Roosevelt 
 began. To-day Europe regards Mr. Taft as a sagacious 
 and great Chief Magistrate of the great American 
 Republic. The censoriousness of The Outlook has not 
 diminished Mr. Taft's fame abroad. Has it at home ? 
 I impute no ill motive to his critic, nor does anybody 
 here think Mr. Roosevelt moved by jealous envy of his 
 successor. The only serious comment I have heard is 
 that an energetic Executive is not necessarily an effec- 
 tive critic of policies or purposes in which he no longer 
 has an active share. 
 
 VI 
 
 PERSONAL INCIDENTS POLITICAL NIHILISMS 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt's English sympathies, of which our 
 Irish friends and enemies sometimes complain, are I 
 think of comparatively recent growth. His attitude 
 during the Boer War was, to say the least, critical. 
 His reception of Irish emissaries during his Presidency 
 lacked no clement of cordiality to the Irish, and some- 
 times provoked comment in England, where however 
 incidents of that kind have been too frequent to cause
 
 374 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 surprise. The Englishman who is aware of them 
 mutters something about the Irish vote in America, 
 and turns a bhnd eye to the cable dispatches which 
 record these singular manifestations of friendship 
 to a friendly Government. 
 
 Nothing, indeed, is more characteristic of the 
 Englishman than his indifference to proceedings of 
 the kind Mr. Roosevelt and other Presidents before him 
 have thought consistent with international comity. 
 He knows little about them and cares less. A question 
 may be asked in Parliament or in private. Somebody 
 asked one the other day about Mr. Champ Clark and 
 his schoolboy talk of annexing Canada. The new 
 Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Acland, 
 answered with polite contempt that he did not suppose 
 Mr. Champ Clark was to be taken seriously. Nor does 
 it appear that his buffooneries disturb the good feeling 
 happily existing in both countries. The cable, I 
 suppose, must report them and the papers must print 
 them, but not a ripple is left on the surface. 
 
 The Senate of the United States once refused to 
 adopt a resolution expressing the regret of the Ameri- 
 can people at the death of Mr. John Bright, the best 
 and most powerful friend the American people had 
 in England in the days when they had few. Years 
 afterward, upon some reference to it, Mr. Bright's 
 son told me he had never heard of it and asked if it 
 was true. Of President Roosevelt's coquetries with 
 Mr. O'Connor and other Nationalist agents not much 
 more notice was taken. One Englishman, a man as 
 likely as anybody to be sensitive in such a matter, 
 said ; 
 
 " Well, O'Connor is an amusing devil and I suppose 
 he amused Mr. Roosevelt." 
 
 The Boer sympathies of Mr. Roosevelt were de-
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 375 
 
 veloped before he became President, and probably 
 were never declared in such a way as to attract atten- 
 tion in England. For that was a subject on which even 
 an Englishman had susceptibilities. Mr. Roosevelt's 
 Dutch blood did not run in his veins for nothing. 
 He probably thought of the Boers as Mr. Gladstone 
 thought of the Confederates, " a people rightly 
 struggling to be free " and to keep other people in 
 slavery, since in the annals of slavery there is nothing 
 more horrible than the cruelties of the Boers to the 
 African natives. But, to quote Mr. Disraeli once more, 
 a great deal has happened since then, and I pass from 
 the subject. Nor do I mean to question the sincerity 
 of Mr. Roosevelt's conversion. He has since proved 
 his goodwill to England on some memorable occasions. 
 Even his outburst in the Guildhall about Egypt was, 
 in his own view, an expression of friendship. 
 
 The English, in any case, if they knew of Mr. Roose- 
 velt's Boer partialities, bore no malice. When the ex- 
 President started after big game in a part of Africa 
 under English jurisdiction, the Governor of the pro- 
 vince not only gave him all facilities, but a territory 
 to himself ; from which, so long as Mr. Roosevelt was 
 pursuing his game and his natural history researches, 
 all other sportsmen were excluded ; a stretch of the 
 Governor's authority, perhaps, though sanctioned at 
 home, but excellent evidence of good nature. This 
 again contributed to swell his renown as a mighty 
 hunter and to augment the cordiality of his reception 
 in London. I believe Mr. Roosevelt thought London 
 more friendly than all other European capitals ; 
 and it was from London that he carried with him, 
 it may be, the extreme conception of his own power 
 which led him to undertake that disastrous political 
 campaign at home two months later.
 
 'i,']6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 He was just as human after he became President 
 as before ; and just as much Roosevelt. His hking 
 for " fun " was not less evident in the White House 
 than in the Police Head-quarters in New York or the 
 Executive Mansion at Albany. At one moment the 
 ringing laugh of boyhood ; at the next, all seriousness 
 and firm purpose. It was just after one of these ex- 
 plosions of irrepressible good humour that I took up 
 a new pattern of policeman's club lying on his desk, 
 a thing of solid india-rubber or gutta-percha, and 
 asked him whether he was going to adopt it for the 
 police force. Instantly his face grew grave. 
 
 " No ; it is too lethal." 
 
 I told him I had seen men drop dead from a blow 
 with the clubs then in use. He said : 
 
 " No doubt ; but the fewer the better." 
 
 Yet he would not shrink from strong measures. 
 At the time of the great Pennsylvania strikes a notion 
 spread among the trade unionists that the President 
 was on their side and would not interfere to keep order, 
 no matter to what violence they resorted. I said so to 
 him. The lines of the jaw tightened, and he answered : 
 
 " If they think I am going to tolerate mob law they 
 will find out their mistake five minutes after they have 
 begun." 
 
 There spoke the President we admired and trusted. 
 Whatever else he might be, he was the inflexible 
 guardian of public order. The Washington negroes, 
 or some of them, a turbulent crew, misunderstood him 
 in much the same way and thought him their champion 
 for all purposes. A black burglar seized by the police 
 as he was entering a house, shook his huge fist in their 
 faces, saying : " That man up thar will look after 
 me." " Up thar " was the White House. But he 
 went comfortably to prison all the same.
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 377 
 
 The history of Mr. Roosevelt's relations with the 
 Senate would make a chapter, or a volume, invaluable 
 for public use and for a just appreciation of that 
 remarkable body and its oligarchical tendencies. 
 While Vice-President and presiding officer of the 
 Senate, he had seen this assembly of patriots at close 
 quarters. Even then they showed a curious dislike 
 or distrust of him, and thought it desirable to read 
 him a lesson. As Vice-President he was an outsider, 
 and the Senate prefers one of its own members to 
 guide, or not to guide, its deliberations, when it gets 
 a chance to choose. When Mr. Roosevelt arrived, 
 new to these duties and with all sorts of laurels, 
 municipal, military, and executive, the Senate, or some 
 of the Senators, benevolently undertook to begin his 
 education over again. The rules of this body are 
 at best elastic, but certain rules and customs and 
 traditions are rigid enough, and some of these the 
 inexperienced young man who had been in Cuba " all 
 alone," and had governed the seven millions of people 
 who compose the State of New York, disregarded. 
 He had a notion, not shared by the Senate, that rules 
 were meant to facilitate business, and used them to 
 that end. I don't say that a trap was laid for him but, 
 however it happened, he found himself at odds with 
 some of the Senate leaders, his rulings questioned, and 
 precedents quoted against him. He gave way, but it 
 may well enough be that, though the King forgot, or said 
 he forgot, the grievances of the Dauphin, the President 
 remembered the affront put on him as Vice-President. 
 
 I had sat one day for half an hour with the President 
 in the Cabinet chamber, where at that time he gave 
 audience or, if you like better, received visitors who 
 had appointments. When I rose to go he said with a 
 whimsical look in his eyes :
 
 378 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " Do you know you have been keeping Senators 
 waiting all this time, and they don't like waiting ? " 
 
 And when I suggested that it was in his power, 
 but not in mine, to make these great men dance 
 attendance outside, he said : 
 
 " It is good for them. I am President, after all. 
 But don't go. Sit on that sofa in the corner and hear 
 what they have to say. It may amuse you." 
 
 " But it may not amuse them." 
 
 " Never you mind. When I think you ought to 
 go I will tell you." 
 
 I did as I was bidden. The faces of the Senators 
 who one after another came in were studies in surprise 
 and some stronger feelings. The President received 
 them as usual and as if nobody else was there, and 
 talked, though they did not, with freedom. When they 
 hesitated he said, " Oh, go on," and to the end enjoyed 
 the " fun." Some of the Senators I knew and they 
 me, but that did not seem to relieve the situation. 
 There were others beside Senators, among them 
 district political managers — bosses, in short — with 
 candidates to urge for offices. The President listened 
 to them, but when they had stated their case it 
 presently appeared that he knew as much as they did 
 about their districts and candidates and local affairs. 
 He may have been coached beforehand, but there 
 seemed no detail of local politics or men unknown to 
 him. I thought of Gambetta, with a secret service 
 spreading all over France. It was said of the great 
 Frenchman that one reason of his supremacy was his 
 mastery of affairs and his all-embracing knowledge. 
 It might be said of Mr. Roosevelt. 
 
 Twice I saw the President in less august company. 
 His barber came in and shaved him while he talked 
 without ceasing. " It's the only time I can get,"
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 379 
 
 remarked Mr. Roosevelt. " I hope you don't mind." 
 I did not mind. It was one trait the more. 
 
 Twice in his PoHce and Vice-Presidential days I 
 met him in odd ways. Once was at the Oriental Hotel 
 where Mr. Piatt, then in the height of his power 
 or not far from it, was staying. " I think we might 
 call on Mr. Piatt," said Mr. Roosevelt, and we did. 
 We spent an hour with him, and this time he carried 
 discretion so far as to leave politics wholly aside. 
 During most of the visit he discoursed to Mr. Piatt 
 and me on early Macedonian history, with elucidations 
 of the policy and doctrines of Antigonus, Antipater, 
 and I know not who else. Mr. Piatt's face meanwhile 
 was a mask. Much later we both dined with Senator 
 Depew in Washington, who had as guest Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison from London whose knowledge of ancient 
 history was certainly much greater than Mr. Piatt's. 
 To Mr. Harrison also Mr. Roosevelt enlarged after 
 dinner on this same topic of Macedonia. He might 
 have been a college professor expounding history to 
 his pupils. Mr. Harrison, who has always thought 
 himself better fitted to teach than to learn, listened 
 with politeness, not without surprise, and abstained 
 from all comment on the lecturer's views. He re- 
 covered himself later in England, upon the appearance 
 of a friendly review of Mr. Roosevelt's Cromwell 
 by Lord Morley ; asking Morley, " How could you 
 praise such a book as that ? " But I imagine most of 
 us would sooner accept Morley's opinion than Harri- 
 son's. 
 
 It may not be an auspicious moment to revive the 
 memory of the President's hospitality to Mr. Booker 
 Washington, nor do I know whether the true story of 
 that incident has been told. Nothing could be simpler. 
 The President had seen Mr. Booker Washington in
 
 38o ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 the morning, and they had discussed together Mr. 
 Washington's plans for the education and other 
 improvement o£ the negro. They could not finish, 
 and in order to go on with the talk the President 
 said to Mr. Booker Washington : " Come back to 
 dinner and we can take the matter up again." Said 
 the President : 
 
 " I asked him just as I asked Mr. Powderly the other 
 day in the same circumstances ; in both cases with no 
 other thought than to dispatch as quickly as possible 
 the business we had in hand." 
 
 Whoever knows Mr. Roosevelt will see at once how 
 natural, and of course true, is this explanation. It 
 was thus and not otherwise that the invitation was 
 given. Nobody was more astonished than the Presi- 
 dent that an incident so trivial in itself, or which he 
 thought trivial, should have roused the whole South 
 to fury, and have led the ex-Confederates or their 
 children to believe that he meant to establish a 
 social equality between white and black ; which surely 
 never entered his mind. 
 
 I have referred before to the meeting of the Presi- 
 dent and of Mr. Oliver Borthwick, the young English- 
 man whose achievements and charm of character 
 delighted everybody and delighted Mr. Roosevelt. 
 When I told him how much the President had relished 
 his talk at lunch, Borthwick said : 
 
 " That's awfully good of him, but you know it 
 was he who did the talking." 
 
 Similar stories are known of Mr. Gladstone and 
 Sir Arthur Godley, and of Mr. Gladstone and Lord 
 Edmund Fitzmaurice when he had been appointed 
 Commissioner to the Balkans. Fitzmaurice told me 
 of his own experience, so that two of the three anec- 
 dotes are certainly true. Why should they not be ?
 
 MR. THEODORE ROOSEVELT 381 
 
 Nobody ever wished to interrupt either Mr. Gladstone 
 or Mr. Roosevelt. 
 
 Yet to interrupt Mr. Roosevelt might have been, 
 at certain moments, to do him a service. One such 
 moment was during his speech at Osawatomie when 
 he denounced the Supreme Court of the United States 
 because some o£ its decisions were not in accord with 
 the trend o£ modern opinion ; in other words, with 
 Mr. Roosevelt's opinions. Still more grotesque was 
 his conception of that great tribunal when he declared 
 that in its decisions in the Standard Oil and Tobacco 
 Trust cases it had " legislated." Had that been true 
 it would have discredited the Court, but Mr. Roosevelt 
 said the Court was right to legislate. He went further 
 still. He proclaimed it the duty of the Supreme Court 
 to legislate whenever Congress should omit to pass 
 such laws as ought to be passed in the interests of the 
 Republic. If Congress did not do what Mr. Roosevelt 
 thought it ought to do, then the Supreme Court 
 must usurp the legislative authority of Congress. 
 There is no other remedy, said Mr. Roosevelt in his 
 impetuous way ; forgetting two things. Forgetting, 
 first, that it is not for any one American, however 
 eminent, to determine what the public good im- 
 peratively demands, but for the whole American 
 people. Forgetting, secondly, that the people has 
 the remedy in its own hands, and the power to elect 
 another Congress to do what this Congress neglects. 
 Forgetting also that the Constitution divides the 
 powers of the Government into legislative, executive, 
 and judicial, and that for any branch to assume the 
 functions of any other is an act of usurpation. 
 
 Still more recently he has been urging that there 
 should be some sort of appeal from the Supreme Court 
 to the people. Certain decisions of the Court are to
 
 382 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 be subject, apparently, to a referendum. The judicial 
 powers which the Constitution has placed in the hands 
 of the Court are to be, in the last resort, annulled by- 
 popular vote. The Oklahoma doctrine of " recall " — 
 the power of removing unpopular judges by a plebis- 
 cite — is to be applied, not to the judges but to their 
 considered and final judgments. Jefferson in his 
 wildest exaltation of Democracy never touched the 
 confines of a madness like this. 
 
 For many years Mr. Roosevelt has been under- 
 mining the reverence of the American people for law 
 and for the Constitution which is our fundamental 
 law. He would substitute — he has at times substituted 
 — for law his own convictions ; forgetting again the 
 memorable declaration that a Constitution was framed 
 " to the end that this may be a government of laws 
 and not of men." If respect for the Constitution goes, 
 and for the Supreme Court as the authorized inter- 
 preter of the Constitution and of the laws, everything 
 goes. The foundations of the American Republic 
 will have disappeared. 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt to-day is one of the forces that make 
 for their destruction, and the doctrines he preaches 
 are the doctrines of Anarchy.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 COUNT WITTE AND WHAT HE DID AT 
 PORTSMOUTH 
 
 CINCE 1905 Count Witte has withdrawn from 
 pubHc life and his name is not often mentioned. 
 But forgotten he can never be, nor can history ever 
 be silent concerning the man who won a diplomatic 
 victory for his country at Portsmouth after her defeat 
 on the battlefields of Asia. Count Witte was the real 
 hero of the Portsmouth Conference. By his adroitness 
 the Conference was kept alive when but for him it 
 must have collapsed. By his courage, his unbending 
 resolve, his masterly and masterful diplomacy, was the 
 triumph for Russia achieved. He has had none too 
 much recognition ; reason enough why he should 
 have a little more and why some part of the truth 
 hitherto withheld should now be stated. 
 
 When I left London, reluctantly enough, for 
 Portsmouth, I took passage on the Kaiser Wilhelm der 
 Grosse because Count Witte was known to be going 
 by that ship. We sailed from Southampton Wednes- 
 day noon, expecting to pick up the Russian at Cher- 
 bourg by six o'clock that evening. But there was 
 delay and the ship anchored at the Needles. Nobody 
 would tell us why, though finally an oflRcer assured us 
 we should start at three o'clock next morning. Upon 
 this I assumed that there was an accident to the 
 machinery and that it would take all these hours to 
 
 383
 
 
 384 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 make repairs. Not on any other theory could the 
 fixing of a precise hour for restarting be explained. 
 At seven o'clock we dined. The North German, by 
 which I mean especially Prussian, cuisine is the most 
 highly coloured in Europe, and whether you dine 
 at a big hotel in Berlin or on a North German Lloyd 
 ship the prismatic hues of the dishes are much the 
 same. The food is various, abundant, and well suited, 
 I doubt not, to the German taste. 
 
 After dinner I went on deck, to find the ship still 
 anchored at the Needles and a brilliant starlit evening. 
 Presently I met a high officer of the ship and asked 
 him how the machinery repairs were getting on. With 
 a surprised air he answered : 
 
 " The machinery is all right." 
 Then what are we waiting for ? " 
 We can't move till the fog lifts." 
 
 I looked at him and then at the sea and sky. Above 
 and below it was clear as daylight for as many miles 
 as the eye could reach. But my friend said : 
 
 " Oh, it's the fog in the Channel that keeps us." 
 
 And as I suppose I still looked puzzled, he added : 
 
 " Don't you know that the Channel is the great 
 highway of the world's trade from East to West and 
 from West to East, and that to cross the line of this 
 traffic, as we must, from North to South is a dangerous 
 business ? " 
 
 What a remark to make to a passenger ! But again 
 he said : 
 
 " If you will come to my cabin I will show you a 
 thick pile of telegrams all reporting dense fog all over 
 the Channel." 
 
 I had it on my lips to say that I thought a British 
 captain would at least have gone on till he found the 
 fog. But I did not ; nor did I look at the fog tele-
 
 COUNT WITTE 385 
 
 grams, but thanked him and said good night and sat 
 down in my deck chair to meditate on the different 
 methods of seamanship prevaihng in German and 
 British ships. It was long past midnight when I 
 turned in ; the big ship still anchored and myriads o£ 
 stars still mirrored in the smooth waters about us. 
 What time we finally got away I never knew, but the 
 ship was under full steam at breakfast, and we reached 
 Cherbourg, a six hours' passage, between two and three 
 o'clock that Thursday afternoon ; some twenty-seven 
 hours out from Southampton. A tender met us in the 
 harbour with the passengers who had left Paris Wednes- 
 day morning expecting to embark that same afternoon. 
 The hotels of Cherbourg could put up but a fraction 
 of the whole number. The rest had spent the night in 
 the railway station or in the streets, and looked it. 
 Some of them complained bitterly that they had not 
 been warned of the delay before leaving Paris. But the 
 French railway authorities look with no loving eye on 
 German ships, and, though I believe they have now 
 come to some sort of terms, the stories of inconveni- 
 ence and even hardships were for years many. 
 
 Count Witte, like his fellow-passengers on the 
 tender, looked the worse for wear. He was easily 
 distinguishable by his great height and Slav face. His 
 wife was with him but here they parted and he came 
 on board the Kaiser by himself, the people on the 
 tender and the ship saluting him. The Captain and 
 other officers were at the gangway to receive him, and 
 I imagine they told him they had been delayed by 
 fog. When he asked me about it some days later I 
 did not then like to repeat the conversation as above 
 given and I said that, so far as I could make out, the 
 German word for fog and starlight was the same. He 
 himself spoke German indifferently well, but I think 
 2 c
 
 386 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 he did not take my suggestion too literally. A Russian 
 of the Witte pattern is a quick-witted person. 
 
 Sir Donald Wallace, my colleague on The Times, had 
 met Count Witte in Russia and proposed to introduce 
 me. But whereas Wallace's sympathies were known to 
 be Russian, mine, if I had any, and I think I then had, 
 were Japanese, and this I knew Count Witte had been 
 told. I preferred, therefore, to wait for a signal, and 
 for two days or perhaps three the ceremony was 
 postponed. On the third morning Wallace said he 
 had arranged it, and I was taken up to Count Witte 
 and " presented." He was sitting far back in his 
 chair, out of which he slowly uncoiled his long body, 
 climbed to his feet and, with some perceptible hesi- 
 tation, held out his hand. His eyes looked distrust- 
 fully, almost fiercely, into mine. The penetrating 
 glance was one you would not forget when once you 
 had endured it. The whole force of the man was con- 
 centrated in his eyes and in the great arched forehead 
 above them. The other features were irregular, the 
 nose " aquiline with the curve reversed " ; the mouth 
 loose-lipped. Huge as his body was, it gave you no 
 great impression of power. The frame was nowhere 
 closely knit ; the long arms seemed double- jointed, 
 and he carried himself carelessly, whether standing or 
 walking. 
 
 I was to see Count Witte almost daily for the next 
 six weeks, but the first impression held good all through. 
 You could not mistake him for anything but an extra- 
 ordinary being. He was born at Tiflis but describes 
 himself as, on his father's side, a descendant of Dutch 
 emigrants to Russia. No doubt but, as usual, it is 
 to the mother we must look for a male child's essential 
 characteristics, and his mother was not Dutch, but of 
 the Caucasus. He had an almost childlike openness of
 
 COUNT WITTE 387 
 
 manner and behind it an impenetrable reserve. You 
 never were sure that you had got inside his mind. He 
 had the true Oriental subtlety. Tartar or Slav or 
 whatever else, all Russians have this Oriental stamp 
 upon them ; this aloofness from the Western world. 
 I knew Count Witte's history, knew him as a man of 
 the people who had grown from nothing, highly 
 educated but as a boy a railway servant like Carnegie ; 
 and in him a giant business capacity, also like Carnegie. 
 He rose high in railway management, then passed into 
 the Government service, came to be Railway Director 
 in the Ministry of Finance, then Minister and remained 
 Minister for ten years. During that time he restored 
 the railway and other finances of Russia, put finance 
 on a gold coinage basis, created a State monopoly in, 
 I think, spirits and tobacco, at any rate in something ; 
 restored her credit and reorganized the service. A 
 great piece of work by a great Minister, and all in ten 
 years. 
 
 Everybody on the ship of course knew Count Witte 
 by sight, and I suppose a few persons knew that I was 
 The Times representative and had a curiosity to see the 
 meeting between the two. A little group collected. 
 Said Count Witte : 
 
 " You represent The Times in Washington." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Your dispatches, or some of them, have not been 
 friendly to Russia." 
 
 " If you would say they had been friendly to Japan, 
 I should agree. But American friendship to Russia is 
 traditional and older than to Japan." 
 
 This olive branch he accepted, and looking at the 
 company surrounding us said : 
 
 " Don't you think we could talk better if we walked 
 the deck a Httle ? "
 
 388 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Thus began the first o£ many, many interesting 
 and often engrossing conversations. He started warily- 
 enough ; by no means putting off all his suspicions at 
 once. He sought neutral ground. But before the 
 day was over he had so far relaxed as to say : 
 
 " You are going to Portsmouth and you will want 
 to know what happens. Whenever you will come to 
 see me I shall be happy to tell you what I can." 
 
 He kept his word. So long as we were on the 
 Atlantic he talked mostly of other subjects. He was 
 bent on finding out how matters stood in the United 
 States, and what Americans thought about the rela- 
 tions between Russia and Japan. He was curious con- 
 cerning President Roosevelt, and hearing that I had 
 long known him said : 
 
 " I don't wish to ask you any questions you are not 
 quite willing to answer, but it is your President who 
 has set this Conference going, and anything you will 
 tell me about him will be of great interest. He has 
 brought us a long way, but the Japanese have had a 
 longer journey still, so we don't complain." 
 
 It was easy to see what a burden of anxiety he bore. 
 It could not be otherwise. He did not complain of 
 that either. It was inevitable. The fortune of peace 
 or war, perhaps the whole future of Russia, lay in his 
 hand. Yet he bore himself light-heartedly enough. 
 He gave all his thoughts to the subject of the moment, 
 whatever it was, and put his mind to that. When once 
 it was understood that we were not to discuss the work 
 of the Conference, the rest was easy. 
 
 Or easy with one exception. All our talk was in 
 French. Count Witte had no English and I had no 
 Russian. French he spoke fluently, inaccurately, with 
 a royal contempt for grammar and genders, and with 
 an accent which he may have brought with him from
 
 COUNT WITTE 389 
 
 the Caucasus. The words tumbled over each other 
 out of his mouth. The Frenchmen themselves hardly 
 speak their own language with such rapidity. To add 
 to the difficulty a cigarette was always in his lips. At 
 Portsmouth it was worse, for there we walked up and 
 down for ever on a wooden piazza, and the noise of 
 two pairs of feet was one confusion the more. Some- 
 times I asked him to repeat a sentence. He did it at first 
 suspiciously, as if he thought I had another motive, 
 but when I told him I could not always understand, he 
 laughed and said : 
 
 " True, it's not my language nor yours." 
 He had, moreover, the diplomatist's habit of 
 generalities. He liked being a little vague when hand- 
 ling a delicate matter. Yet for his own purposes he 
 had a sufficient mastery of this tongue which was not 
 his own, and you could not afford to miss a word. 
 Often the balance of his thought and the expression 
 of it depended on a shade. But he thought so clearly 
 and the force of his mind was such that if he had 
 spoken Choctaw his meaning would somehow have 
 found its way to your mind. 
 
 n 
 
 What had first impressed me in my talks with 
 Count Witte on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse was 
 his cheerfulness. He was on his way to make a Treaty 
 of Peace at Portsmouth with a Power which had beaten 
 Russia to a standstill and, as most people thought, to 
 accept such terms as Japan might see fit to impose. 
 But he himself had never the air of a beaten man. I 
 understood that the President at Oyster Bay had been 
 not a little surprised to find him serene and apparently 
 confident. Certainly the American public, prone at
 
 390 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 that time to believe that its President's will must pre- 
 vail, had looked upon the conclusion of the Portsmouth 
 negotiations as foregone. There would be discussions, 
 of course. There might be concessions hy Japan on 
 minor points. But the main issues had been settled 
 on the battlefields of Asia, and Portsmouth was only 
 to register the results. 
 
 When we arrived at Portsmouth the one hundred 
 and twenty journalists were nearly all of that mind, 
 and we were all so many barometers whose minds were 
 made up for us by the atmosphere we breathed. All, 
 or almost all, the first dispatches from this queer little 
 seaport watering-place were written in Japanese. If 
 the language was not Japanese the spirit was. The 
 American Press was Japanese, and of course the English 
 since England was the ally of Japan, and the Treaty 
 between them, already ten years old, had profoundly 
 modified the politics of the East. Within a few days 
 a change came. The atmosphere of Portsmouth had 
 changed. The barometers no longer stood at set 
 fair or at what the Japanese considered set fair. The 
 American Press itself had changed. 
 
 I cannot say whether Count Witte went there with 
 the fixed purpose of converting journalists and Press 
 to his side. He was, at any rate, a man with an extra- 
 ordinary quickness and flexibility of mind. He under- 
 stood the situation as nobody else understood it. He 
 understood the American people, and how they were 
 to be influenced. When he was appointed Plenipo- 
 tentiary men said of him : 
 
 " Yes, an able man, but no diplomatist. He has 
 had no diplomatic experience." 
 
 They said of Count Komura, the Japanese Pleni- 
 potentiary : 
 
 " Yes, a great diplomatist with great diplomatic
 
 COUNT WITTE 391 
 
 experience. Count Witte will be a child in his 
 hands." 
 
 These opinions had to be revised almost at once ; 
 and for two reasons. It was seen that the Russian was 
 using such means o£ conciliating American opinion as 
 lay ready to his hands, and that the Japanese were not. 
 The journalists found themselves welcome at the 
 Russian head-quarters, and the doors shut in their 
 faces by the Japanese. Then, though the proceedings 
 at the Conference were secret and no journalist ad- 
 mitted, it became known as soon as the formalities were 
 over that the Russians did not seem to be in a yielding 
 mood. Now a journalist in search of news is rather 
 apt to think nothing but news matters, and his per- 
 sonal good will — for even journalists are human — goes 
 out to the man who gives him what news he can, and 
 not to the man who withholds what he might give. 
 The conditions of secrecy were just as scrupulously 
 observed by the Russians as by the Japanese, yet 
 within a week the Russian view had been put before 
 the world in such a way as to unsettle American sym- 
 pathies with Japan. 
 
 Count Witte might not be able to say much about 
 the proceedings of the Conference, and did not. But 
 he talked freely on matters of common knowledge. 
 He stated the Russian case. The trained journalists 
 who found him so ready to receive them were equally 
 ready to present his statements to their distant publics, 
 if only because they had little else to present. Count 
 Witte was far too shrewd to argue, or to let it be seen 
 that he was making an appeal to America and to the 
 world. He let fall a sentence as if it had slipped un- 
 awares from his mouth. It might be a fact or a sug- 
 gestion. It might touch the business of the Confer- 
 ence or it might be a reminiscence of the past. He
 
 392 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 offered it to you as if for want of something better, 
 with a regret that the obHgations of secrecy forbade 
 him to tell you what had happened that day at the 
 Conference. The journalist, or group of journalists, 
 to whom he said it caught at it eagerly, spread it on 
 the wires, perhaps a little fuller in form than when 
 uttered, and next morning some millions of people 
 in two hemispheres were reading it. 
 
 Presently it came back to us in print, and in print 
 it seemed a more pregnant saying than it had seemed 
 when hurriedly written out for the telegraph or the 
 cable. Some of these dispatches to European journals 
 were sent in duplicate to American journals, so that 
 they were all soon back again in Portsmouth. I omit, 
 of course, from this account the dispatches to the 
 Japanese papers. They were wholly of Japanese 
 origin, or the Japanese correspondents supposed they 
 were. Whether even the little brown brothers en- 
 tirely escaped the influence of the atmosphere in 
 which they lived may be doubtful. It was, I believe, 
 thought in Tokio and other Japanese towns that the 
 news supplied to them was meagre, as it was. 
 
 After this process had gone on day by day for a 
 week or more I took a single series of dispatches and 
 read them all over. I confess I was astonished as I 
 saw how much ground they covered and on what 
 broad lines the Russian case had been built up. I 
 began to understand what an artist Count Witte was, 
 and how the separate touches of his brush grouped 
 themselves even in this early stage into something 
 like a picture. The use he made of his material was 
 consummately skilful. Then I began to consider what 
 the effect of all this must be on the American mind ; 
 or, for that matter, on the English. I compared my 
 own daily impressions of what Count Witte had said
 
 COUNT WITTE 393 
 
 :o me with the sum of all these impressions when taken 
 together, and I became aware how far we had all 
 travelled on the road which the Russian had opened 
 before us. It was not my fault nor anybody's fault, 
 but the road led undoubtedly by many a winding 
 path and through a pleasing landscape toward the 
 Russian camp. I repeat, no other road was open to 
 us, no map was at our disposal except that provided 
 by Count Witte, but the result was the same. We 
 had all been composing for our readers a guide book 
 to Russia. 
 
 Thinking it all over, I resolved to set forth this 
 view to Baron Takahira. To ask to see Count Komura, 
 the chief Japanese Plenipotentiary, was useless. I 
 had already asked and had been given to understand, 
 as others were, that whatever Count Komura wished 
 to be known would be made known by Baron Takahira. 
 The daily bulletins issued by the Japanese and read 
 aloud to all comers in the entrance hall of the hotel 
 conveyed no real information, and were meant to 
 convey none. Such conversations as I had had with 
 Baron Takahira were not much more enlightening. 
 I had known in times past, often in very critical 
 times, a certain number of Ambassadors and Foreign 
 Ministers. Not one among them all had been so 
 closely boutonne as these Asiatics. The Asiatics had 
 adopted, for reasons sufficient to them, a policy of 
 silence, and from this they were resolved not to 
 depart. But I thought the moment had come to make 
 a final attempt, and I made it. 
 
 Baron Takahira received me, as usual, with a grave 
 poHtcness which did not altogether conceal a certain 
 hardness of temper, or even a sense of embarrassment 
 arising out of the role he was obliged to play. He said 
 at once :
 
 394 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 " I am afraid I can tell you little or nothing beyond 
 what I have said already." 
 
 You can never be sure of surprising a diplomatist 
 by the most unexpected statement, still less can you 
 expect him to show that he is surprised. But I meant 
 to try, and I said : 
 
 " Excellency, I come to you, of course, as a journal- 
 ist, but not wholly as a journalist, nor am I at this 
 moment in search of news. I come as a journalist 
 whom you have known to be, and who still is, full of 
 good will to Japan. What I want to say to you is that 
 I think the interests of Japan have been very gravely 
 compromised within the last week, and that it is 
 you and your chief who have compromised them." 
 
 For once I had succeeded in surprising this astute 
 Oriental, and for one second he even showed that he 
 was surprised. Then, with his usual inscrutable 
 serenity, he asked me to explain what I meant. I 
 explained as I have explained above ; with less direct- 
 ness but not less plainly, and at far greater length. 
 He Hstened patiently. I gave him facts, quoted 
 dispatches, told him what I believed to be the general 
 opinion of the journalists then present in Portsmouth, 
 and laid before him extracts from editorial articles 
 in important English and American papers. I thought 
 then, and I still think, that this mass of evidence 
 ought to have convinced him of the peril to which 
 the Japanese policy was exposing the Japanese cause. 
 To my mind it was conclusive. It proved that a change 
 had been going on in the American mind, a change 
 wholly unfavourable to Japan ; that this change was 
 due primarily to Count Witte's relations with the 
 American Press, and to the refusal of the Japanese to 
 make, in their own interest, a legitimate use of the 
 columns open to them. I urged upon him that, though
 
 COUNT WITTE 395 
 
 the mischief had gone far, it was not yet too late to 
 stop it but soon would be, and I asked him to put the 
 whole case before Count Komura. I did not expect 
 nor ask Baron Takahira himself to do more than 
 that. 
 
 I do not think I made any impression whatever 
 upon him. Now and then he asked a question but, 
 for the most part, was content to listen. When I had 
 finished he replied in a sentence : 
 
 " I am much obliged to you. I have always known 
 you as friendly to my country and I have no doubt 
 you still are. But our policy in this matter has been 
 well considered." 
 
 Then in a flash there came into Baron Takahira's 
 face a look I had never seen there before, as if for one 
 moment he had forgotten his reserve, and in that one 
 moment the native arrogance of a victorious and over- 
 confident people blazed out. He flung his arms wide 
 apart and high, as if to dismiss to the winds all he had 
 heard from me, and what sounded like a battle- 
 cry came from his lips : 
 
 " We are Japanese. We are Japanese." 
 
 As if to say : 
 
 " What matters to us any opinion but our own ? " 
 
 In his metallic tones rang out the invincible belief 
 of the Japanese in themselves and their scarce-con- 
 cealed contempt for the rest of the world. The sword 
 of the Samurai whistled through the air once again. 
 Not only that. Baron Takahira added : 
 
 " If you think it advisable to say anything about this 
 in print, I hope you will let it be seen that we must 
 continue to act on our own judgment." 
 
 Not only was he arrogant ; he wanted it known 
 that he was arrogant. The answer, of course, was 
 decisive, the rebufi complete, and though I continued
 
 396 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 to see him the subject was not again mentioned. 
 Within less than a week President Roosevelt had 
 notified Japan that American opinion would no longer 
 allow him to press Russia for the payment of the 
 indemnity of $600,000,000, and he must appeal to 
 them to withdraw their demand. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Count Witte knew very well what the Japanese 
 were doing and not doing. Every day brought him 
 fresh evidence that he had outwitted those subtle 
 Orientals, whom he understood far better than we 
 did. Once or twice he said to me : 
 
 " Your Japanese friends don't seem to take the 
 American public into their confidence." 
 
 Once he said : 
 
 " I wonder whether Count Komura is aware that 
 there are journalists in Portsmouth, and that there 
 really is a certain amount of American and European 
 interest in our proceedings." 
 
 He watched every move in the game. So far as 
 the Conference was concerned, he was disposed to 
 think that the question of Peace and War turned 
 rather upon outside influences than upon what took 
 place in the Conference itself. At any rate, on the 
 decisive point, the payment of a war indemnity by 
 Russia to Japan, his mind as we have seen had been 
 made up in advance and, momentous as the issue 
 was, it could not be much affected by debate between 
 the Plenipotentiaries. Of debate there was little. 
 There was no one language which all the Pleni- 
 potentiaries spoke or understood. 
 
 I had heard, though not from Count Witte, that 
 at the early meetings the Japanese had been over-
 
 COUNT WITTE 397 
 
 bearing in manner. They did not seem to be aware 
 that the Members of the Conference met, and could 
 only meet, on terms of equality. That is an elemen- 
 tary and essential maxim of diplomacy. But the 
 Japanese were still new to the methods of the West. 
 They had accepted in theory these traditions and 
 usages of the West, but they wore them as awk- 
 wardly as they wore frock-coats and trousers. They 
 were plainly surprised by the tone and attitude of 
 the Russians, and most of all by the jaunty bearing 
 of Count Witte ; in whom there was no trace of 
 humbleness nor any touch of that solemnity which 
 the Japanese thought suitable to the occasion. 
 
 There could indeed be no greater contrast than 
 between Count Witte and Count Komura. The 
 Russian could have put the Japanese in his pocket ; as 
 in the end he did. You hardly realized how big the 
 Russian was till you saw the little brown man beside 
 him ; or under the same roof, for I am not sure they 
 ever met in public except in the dining-room of the 
 hotel. Well over six feet tall, powerfully made, loose 
 jointed, broad in the chest, easy in movement though 
 not graceful, a good-natured, smiling giant, the eyes 
 roving, piercing, seeing everything from beneath a 
 lofty forehead and apparently never at rest, he was a 
 child in simplicity of manner, in spontaneity, and in 
 the total absence of any effort at effect. In other days 
 I had known Turgenieff, the one great artist in Russian 
 literature, and it was of him that I was always reminded 
 when with Count Witte. They had the same ready 
 laugh, the same geniality, the same naturalness, the 
 same willingness to meet all comers on a level. You 
 could not but like them and you liked both of them 
 for much the same reasons. 
 
 As for Count Komura, he might have come from
 
 398 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 another planet ; or from Lilliputia so diminutive was 
 he. I am told the Japanese think us overgrown and 
 that there is a physiological advantage in being under- 
 sized ; the heart pumping the blood to the brain 
 through shorter channels and therefore with less 
 effort. Grant them that, but still they are not 
 impressive externally. Count Komura did not look 
 the able man he was. An intelligent face, but of parch- 
 ment written all over in hieroglyphics, a body en 
 lame de couteau, with the mechanical movement of 
 a marionette, a gravity of demeanour so complete 
 that you thought it must be a pose ; eyes and features 
 wilfully expressionless ; well, it will out, he looked like 
 a mummy. We have no standard in common with 
 the Japanese to measure them by, and for aught I 
 know what seem to us defects may seem to them high 
 merits, and they might be able to admire Count 
 Komura's appearance as they rightly did his 
 abilities. 
 
 It was not till after the Conference was over and 
 done with that I came to know the history, or part of 
 the history, some of which I have written. Count 
 Witte said to me toward the end : 
 
 " If we go back on the same ship I can tell you much 
 which here I cannot tell you." 
 
 I did go with him on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Zzveite, 
 which the Germans thought so perfect a ship that they 
 have reproduced her to the last particular in the 
 Kronprinzessin Cecilie ; or meant to, as one of her 
 officers told me. " Tons les gouts sont respectables,''^ 
 remarked Voltaire, to whom respect was not a per- 
 manent attitude of mind. The most vivid picture the 
 Count painted of their sittings was at its most critical 
 moment : 
 
 " There was a deadlock. Count Komura had laid
 
 COUNT WITTE 399 
 
 on the table in writing what we understood to be his 
 final demands, including the indemnity. We had 
 made our final answer. We could not accept them. 
 There was no attempt at compromise or even dis- 
 cussion. We had found out before the futility of 
 discussion. Nothing was said. I mean it literally. 
 Not a word was spoken on either side. All of us thought 
 we had reached an impasse and that the conference 
 must break up and the war go on. In the midst of 
 this momentous silence I took out my cigarette-case 
 and lighted a cigarette and began smoking. Then 
 Count Komura took out his cigarette-case and lighted 
 a cigarette and began smoking. I smoked rapidly, 
 and when my cigarette was finished I lighted another 
 and then Komura lighted another. The silence 
 remained unbroken. If there was to be another move 
 it must come from the Japanese, since they had made 
 their proposal and we had rejected it, and we had no 
 counter proposal to offer. Everything turned on the 
 indemnity, and we had made it clear that our refusal 
 to pay the indemnity was not open to revision. It 
 took the Japanese, who had entered upon these 
 negotiations, not as negotiators, but as conquerors, 
 a long time to understand that on this point our minds 
 were immovable and had been immovable from the 
 beginning. 
 
 " At last, very slowly, the words dropping reluctantly 
 from his lips, Count Komura said : ' Suppose we 
 adjourn till Tuesday ' — three days off. I agreed to 
 that. Believing the end was upon us, I had looked 
 at my watch as I lighted my cigarette. I looked at it 
 again when Komura made his suggestion. Just eight 
 minutes had elapsed. The Conference had been within 
 eight minutes of utter collapse. We all understood 
 that Count Komura's motion to adjourn till Tuesday
 
 400 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 was meant to give time to communicate with Tokio 
 and St. Petersburg." 
 
 Count Witte paused a moment in his story. We had 
 been tramping up and down the deck of the Kaiser 
 Wilhelm. We stopped. I felt sure something else 
 was coming, and it came. Said the Count : 
 
 " That was the moment your President chose to 
 intervene ; not, as before, to urge my Imperial 
 Master to pay $600,000,000 to Japan, but to tell 
 Japan she must withdraw that demand. When we 
 next met Count Komura said, ' I withdraw the de- 
 mand for an indemnity ' ; and I said, ' I accept 
 that.' There were other points, as you know, but in 
 those two sentences peace was assured." 
 
 " Suppose the war had gone on ? " 
 
 " We had considered that and, as you know, there 
 was a strong party in Russia which preferred war. 
 There were men about His Majesty the Emperor 
 who pressed it upon him. I was not one. My business 
 was to make peace if I could. But I was never one 
 who thought the military power of Russia exhausted, 
 nor that of Japan invincible in the long run. We 
 reckoned that Japan had money and munitions of 
 war to last till next spring. She would have had a 
 winter campaign before her, deserts and vast spaces 
 to travel as we retired ; she growing weaker as she 
 advanced and we stronger as we retreated upon our 
 base. How was she to raise money to go on ? She 
 had pledged everything she had, except her women. 
 Russia had pledged nothing. Her credit was impaired, 
 in a sense, but that only meant that we should have to 
 pay a higher rate for a new loan. The price of issue 
 would have been low but we should have got the 
 money. I did not want to re-enter upon the struggle, 
 but I would infinitely rather have done that than pay
 
 COUNT WITTE 401 
 
 the indemnity. Who could say with what result ? 
 C^est a la guerre comme a la guerre.'''' 
 
 I sum it all up in this way : It was Count Witte 
 who, with that " fortunate astuteness " which is 
 Machiavelli's ideal in The Prince., brought the American 
 people back to their ancient friendship for Russia, 
 and with them the President. It was Count Witte 
 who formed that body of American opinion without 
 which Mr. Roosevelt, as I have elsewhere related, 
 never, he said, entered upon a great policy. In so far 
 as the President, having failed to coerce Russia, 
 compelled Japan to renounce her money claim, he 
 was indebted to Count Witte for the opportunity. 
 I go further back than that. It was when Count 
 Witte told the Czar that he would never agree to pay 
 an indemnity, and would go to Portsmouth only on 
 that condition, that the Conference became possible. 
 The Japanese thought he was bluffing. At last, almost 
 too late, the withdrawal of the claim which Japan 
 had never doubted she could enforce, was seen to 
 be the sole alternative to that renewal of the war 
 which Japan had never thought possible. It was 
 therefore first of all Count Witte, and perhaps 
 secondly the Russian Emperor, who were the real 
 authors of the Peace of Portsmouth. President 
 Roosevelt's intervention was useful and was made 
 with great courage and judgment at the right moment. 
 But of itself it would not have availed. 
 
 The short specimens I have given you of Count 
 Witte's talk are specimens only. Both at Portsmouth 
 and on the Atlantic his conversation had a quality 
 of its own. If it suited his purpose he was diffuse. 
 He could discourse at length and say nothing not less 
 plausibly than the diplomatist who had spent his 
 official life in that exhilarating practice. He could be 
 2 D
 
 402 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 concise also when he chose, and pack as much into 
 a sentence as most men. At a critical instant of the 
 Conference he was pressed for a statement. He 
 answered : 
 
 " The Treaty between England and Japan has just 
 been revised and renewed for ten years. If you will 
 get me a copy of it I will tell you everything that has 
 passed at the Conference." 
 
 A safe offer, but it silenced his questioner. He 
 talked much about Russia and at times a little about 
 himself. I had suggested that he was going back 
 after a memorable victory and that his reward would 
 be memorable. He shook his head : 
 
 " You do not know what influences there are against 
 me, nor how close they are to His Imperial Majesty. 
 A decoration, perhaps, but I do not expect to re-enter 
 public life as a Minister. Whatever seems good to 
 the Emperor will be good for me." 
 
 This rather melancholy forecast proved true. A 
 title, a place in the Council of the Empire, an order 
 I think, and that was all. But Russia well knew how 
 she had been served and what her debt was to Count 
 Witte. Court favour is, at best, precarious and a 
 Republican may think it of doubtful value. But the 
 great Plenipotentiary of Portsmouth, hitherto little 
 known out of his own country and out of the world of 
 finance, takes a permanent place in history. In a great 
 crisis he had shown great qualities. Out of the nettle 
 danger he had plucked the flower safely. A novice in 
 diplomacy, he overmatched a veteran. He came to 
 Portsmouth an apprentice. He left it a master. In 
 three weeks and in circumstances which would have 
 tested the craft of a Metternich or the genius of 
 Bismarck, he did a service and won a renown which 
 can never pass from the memory of men. What
 
 COUNT WITTE 403 
 
 matters a ribbon more or less ? What matters is that 
 Count Witte is still in the plenitude of his powers, 
 and when Russia again needs a man for another hour 
 pregnant with fate, his unequalled gifts and his de- 
 votion will again be hers.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Acheson, Viscount, marriage, 39 
 Acton, Lord, on his daily reading, 
 
 257 
 Alaska boundary question, 53, 54, 
 
 351, 353 
 Althorp Library, 146 
 
 Sold, 143, seq. 
 Althorp, Lord, Chancellor of Ex- 
 chequer, 139 
 American after-dinner oratory, 
 
 254 
 American women who marry 
 
 Englishmen, 37 
 Arbitration question, 109, no, 
 
 176, 186, 353, 372 
 Arnold, Matthew ; Oxus, 8 
 Asquith, H. H.— 
 "Ambassador," 107 
 Attitude towards Woman Suf- 
 frage, 117 
 In Switzerland, 109 
 Parliament Act, 8, 49, 50, 52 
 Relations with Winston 
 
 Churchill, 91, 95 
 Surrender to Redmond and 
 
 Home Rule, 114 
 Tribute to Balfour, 46 
 Astor, Waldorf, marriage, 269 
 Astor, William Waldorf— 
 "Astor Estate" Offices, 264 
 Buys Cliveden, 265 ; improves 
 
 it, 267, 268, 269 
 Buys Hever Castle, 270 — builds 
 cottages near, 270 
 
 Astor, William Waldorf {cont.) — 
 Buys Observer and other 
 
 papers, 271 
 Characteristics, 262, 264, 269, 
 
 273, 274, 275 
 Dinners and concerts, 265 
 Experiences in England, 201 
 
 seq. 
 Gives Cliveden to his son, 269 
 Lansdowne House, 263 
 Naturalized British subject, 261, 
 
 262, 263 
 Pall Mall Gazelle and Maga- 
 zine, 271, 272 
 Astor, Mrs. W. W., 263, 264, 265 
 
 B 
 
 Balfour, Arthur, 45 seq. 
 As Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
 
 55 
 As debater, 57, 59 
 
 At Whittingehame, 55 
 
 Attitude towards Anglo-Ameri- 
 can Disputes, 53, 54, 176 
 
 Death Duties, 65 
 
 Parliament Bill, 52 
 
 Tariff Reform, 48 
 
 Woman Suffrage, 1 1 7 
 
 Characteristics, 19, 45, 50, 52, 
 55, 56. 57 
 
 Compared with Pascal, 51 
 
 Criticism of his policy, 50. 
 
 Defence of Philosophic Doubl, 
 112 
 
 405
 
 4o6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Balfour, Arthur {cont.) — 
 Ill-health, 46 
 On Winston Churchill in 
 
 Sidney Street, 91 
 Proposed Gully as Speaker, 126 
 Rebellion of followers, 49 
 Rejects Winston Churchill's 
 
 application, 91, 99 
 Resignation of leadership, 45 
 seq., 50, 60 
 Bancroft, U.S. Minister at Berlin, 
 
 261 
 Bath, Marquis of, Longleat and 
 
 Death duties, 64 
 Bathurst, Countess, control of 
 
 Morning Post, 47 
 Bering fisheries question, 53 
 Bernhardt, Sarah, 300, 314, 327 
 seq. 
 Characteristics, 333 
 Compared with Descl^e, 301, 
 
 302, 303 
 Hard work, 338 
 In La Tosca, 337 
 In Phhire, 336 
 On Descl^e's acting, 306 
 Receives Gladstone, 336 
 Sees Irving in Bells, 326, 327 
 
 seq. 
 Supper at Lyceum, 333 seq. 
 Bertie, Sir Francis, 199 
 Biggar, pioneer in obstruction, 
 
 120 
 Birmingham audiences, 5, 6, 8 
 Bismarck, Prince, 75, 104, 246 
 
 Ems dispatch, 181 
 Borthwick, Oliver, 380 
 Brand, Sir Henry (Viscount 
 Hampden) Speaker, w^ seq. 
 Characteristics, 119 
 On rules of House, 121 
 Bright, John, 374 
 As debater, 57 
 Dramatic gift, 5 
 On just war, 245 
 
 Brington Church, burial-place of 
 Washingtons, 148 
 
 British Museum, Tanagra figu- 
 rines, 231 
 
 Brodrick, St. John, 81 
 
 Brohan, Madeleine, 300 
 
 Browning, as man of society, 281 
 
 Bryan, criticism of English rule 
 in India, 162 
 
 BuUer, Sir Redvers, 81 
 
 Biilow, Prince, 20, 21 
 
 Burgon, Dean, 160 
 
 Burke, murdered, 134 
 
 Burne-Jones,SirEdward,pictures, 
 
 57 
 Butler, General Sir William, 81 
 Byron quoted, 19 
 Bystander, The, 157 
 
 Cambon, Jules, 179, 181 
 Cambon, Paul, 180 
 Cambridge, Duke of, Commander- 
 in-Chief, 80 
 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry, 
 
 107 
 Canada, relations with United 
 
 States, 157, 160 
 Cardwell, Lord, 79 
 Carey, informer, shot, 136 
 Carlton Club, disaffection at, 50 
 Carlyle, Thomas — 
 
 On big-nosed men, 166 
 On Bismarck, 339 
 Carlyon, Mr., 291 
 Carnegie, Andrew — 
 As captain of industry and 
 
 apostle of peace, 247 seq. 
 As landlord and neighbour, 259 
 Deal with Pierpont Morgan, 
 
 241 seq. 
 Dinner to Morley, 253 ; 
 
 speeches, 254 
 Friendship with Morley, 252, 
 253 seq.
 
 Carnegie, Andrew {cont.) — 
 
 Libraries and gifts, 249, 257 
 
 Methods in business, 247, 248 
 
 On Wall Street, 245 
 
 Peace Fund, 250 
 
 Receives Edward VII, 258 
 
 Relations with workpeople, 260 
 
 Skibo, 256 ; library, 257, 258 
 Carnegie, Mrs., 254 
 Carson, Sir Edward, 49 
 Carter, John Ridgely, 39 
 
 DeclinesArgentine Mission,2cx> 
 Cassini, Count, 186 
 Cavendish, Lord Edward, 29 
 Cavendish, Lord Frederick, mur- 
 dered, 34, 134, 135 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, i seq. 
 
 Achievements, 16 seq. 
 
 As debater, 9 
 
 At Birmingham, 4, 6, 8 
 
 Boer War and, 17, 25 
 
 Characteristics, i, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 
 
 14, 19 
 Colonial policy, 17 
 Leader on Tariff Reform, 48 
 Municipal politics, 15 
 President of Board of Trade, 13 
 Public speaking, 5, 7 
 Relations with Sir Charles 
 
 Dilke, 9 seq. 
 Reply to Prince Biilow, 20 
 Tariff Reform policy, 18 
 Chambord, Comte de, 282 
 Champagne, Perrier Jouet, 1865, 
 
 220 
 Chatsworth, 33, 34 
 Chauchard, picture buying, 236 
 Cherbourg, 385 
 Cheri, Rose, 300 
 
 Choate, American Ambassador, 
 in London, 189 
 On annexation of Philippines, 
 214 
 Churchill, Lord Randolph- 
 Dispute with Prince of Wales, 
 
 27 
 On Chamberlain, 16 
 
 INDEX 40-7 
 
 Churchill, Lord and Lady Ran- 
 dolph ; at Great Forsters, 87 
 Churchill, Winston, 87 seq., 256 
 
 Administration of Home Office, 
 95, 100 
 
 Argument with Bourke Cock- 
 ran, 98 
 
 As First Lord of Admiralty, 100 
 
 At Blenheim, 96 
 
 Books, 89 
 
 Censures on, 91 
 
 Characteristics, 90, 91, 92, 94 
 seq. 
 
 Escape from Boer prison, 89 
 
 Joins Liberal Party, 91 
 
 Lectures in America, 89, 90 
 
 LifeofLordRandolphChurchill., 
 
 92 
 Marriage, 97 
 Story of boyhood, 88 
 Clark, Champ, on Canada, 374 
 Clemenceau, M., 4 
 Cleveland, President, 3 
 
 Interview with Pierpont Mor- 
 gan, 224 
 Cliveden, 265, 266 
 Cockran, Bourke — 
 
 Argument with Winston 
 Churchill, 98 
 Coquelin as actor, 330, 333 
 Cornell, 156, 158, 161 
 Criticism in France and in Eng- 
 land, 333 
 Croizette, position in Paris, 300 
 Cromer, Lord, 367 
 Cuba, 343 
 Currie, Lord, 199 
 Czar, 401 ; gives jewelled sword 
 to General Komaroff, 251 
 
 D 
 
 Dalhousie, Lord, 143 
 Danel of Lille, 238 
 d'Aumale, Uuc, library, 236 
 Davis, Senator, 192, 194
 
 4o8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Day, Judge, 192, 194 
 Death Duties, 62, 63 
 
 Effect of, 64 
 Debate in House of Commons, 8, 
 
 46 
 Depew, Senator, 379 
 Derby, Countess of, 39 
 Desclde, Aimde, her art, letters, 
 and life, 296 seq. 
 
 As Princess e Georges, 301, 302, 
 
 307 
 
 Characteristics, 300, 301, 302, 
 305, 306, 307 
 
 Compared with Sarah Bern- 
 hardt, 301, 302. 303 
 
 Creates Meilhac's Froufrou, 
 300, 302, 306 
 
 Death, 304, 306, 307 
 
 In Paris, 299, 300, 306 
 
 Letters to Dumas, 305 
 „ "I'Inconnude Naples," 
 
 304 
 Letires a Fan/an, 297, 306 
 On acting, 305 
 Rehearsing Visiie de Noces, 
 
 303 
 Triumphs, 306 
 
 Devonshire, Duchess of (late), yj 
 seq. 
 Characteristics, 40, 42, 43, 44 
 Daughters, 39 
 Sketch of career, 38 
 Devonshire (8th), Duke of, 
 22 seq. 
 As speaker, 24 
 Attitude towards Death Duties, 
 
 Characteristics, 22, 23, 25, 26, 
 27,30, 31, 32, 35, 36, 40, 41, 
 139 
 
 Intervenes in dispute between 
 Prince of Wales and Lord 
 Randolph Churchill, 27 
 
 Interviews with Gladstone, 32 
 
 Lismore, 34 
 
 Devonshire, Duke of {cotit.) — 
 Lord President of Council, 27 
 Minister of War, 85 
 On Boer War, 17, 25 
 Relations with his father, 35 
 Statue, 22, 33 
 Devonshire House, 29 
 Dilke, Sir Charles — 
 
 Relations with Chamberlain, 10 
 
 seq. 
 Relations with Gladstone, 1 1 
 Under-Secretary for Foreign 
 Affairs, 13 
 Diplomacy, American and Euro- 
 pean methods, 198 seq. 
 Methods and language, 206 
 Principle of continuity in, 200, 
 201, 205 
 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beacons- 
 field)— 
 Admiration for Duchess of 
 
 Manchester, 39 
 Attitude towards debate, 8 
 On Biggar, 120 
 On Gladstone's oratory, 124 
 Quarrel with Goldwin Smith, 
 
 159 
 
 D'Oyly Carte, 292 
 
 Dufferin, Marquis of, 199 
 
 Dumas, Alexandre, fils — 
 
 On Desclde, 296, 297, 298, 299 
 Use made of Descltfe's letters, 
 
 305 
 Visite de Noces, rehearsal story, 
 
 303 
 Duplan, Paul, 297, 306 
 Durand, Sir Mortimer, British 
 
 Ambassador to U.S., 359 
 
 E 
 
 Eddy, Prince (Duke of Clarence), 
 
 164 
 Eden, Lady, portrait, 279, 284 
 Education Bill (1902), 50
 
 INDEX 
 
 409 
 
 Edward VII— 
 
 Dispute with Lord Randolph 
 
 Churchill, 27 
 Liking for Mr. Gully, 126 
 3rd Batt. Scots Guards and, 116 
 Visits Carnegie, 258 
 Egypt, Roosevelt's advice to Eng- 
 land on, 367 
 Criticisms on, 369 
 Eighty Club dinner to Parnell, 140 
 Elliot, Life of Goschen, 154 
 Emerson — 
 
 On taking a man by surprise, 57 
 On Valdarfer Boccaccio, 147 
 Empress Frederick, 150 
 England — 
 
 Ambassadors, selection of, 199, 
 
 200 
 Attitude towards United States 
 during war with Spain, 180, 
 181, 182, 213, 347 
 Civil servants, 199 
 Foreign office and diplomacy, 
 199, 205 
 England and France, beginning 
 of better understanding, 336 
 Erckmann-Chatrian,Z,(?/«z/'/'t'/(?- 
 
 nats, i2y 
 Esher, Lord, on Territorials, 1 1 5 
 Expatriation, views on, 261 
 
 Fitzmaurice, Lord Edmund, 380 
 
 Forster, Arnold, 79 
 
 Forster, W. E., Education Act 
 (1870), 2 
 
 Fowler, Sir Henry (Lord Wolver- 
 hampton), 107 
 
 France, financial solidarity, 216 
 
 Franklin, letter to J. Quincy — 
 peace and war, 245 
 
 Free Trade, 18 
 
 Frye, Senator, 192, 194 
 
 Fuller, Sir Thomas, Life of Cecil 
 Rhodes^ quoted, 325 
 
 2 D 2 
 
 Gambetta, President of French 
 Chamber of Deputies, 129 
 Called an opportunist, 72 
 Provisional government at Bor- 
 deaux, 215 
 Weight of brain, 7 
 Garrett, Edmund, story of Cecil 
 
 Rhodes and, 325 
 Garrick, Irving compared with, 
 
 318, 326 
 Garvin, editor of Observer^ 271 ; 
 
 Q.nd.PallManGazeite,-z-]2^2J2> 
 On Lord Goschen, 155 
 George V of Hanover, 38 
 George, Lloyd, 23 
 Censures on, 91 
 Budget, 62, 98, 114 ; effects of, 
 
 267, 273 
 Object of Death Duties, etc, 267 
 German philosophy and science, 
 
 112, 113 
 Germany, attitude towards ex- 
 patriation, 261 
 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck, 
 289 seq. 
 As Justice of the Peace, 290 
 Association with Sullivan and 
 
 D'Oyly Carte, 292 
 Characteristics, 289, 290, 291, 
 
 292, 293 
 Eulogies on and anecdotes, 289 
 Influence on stage, 294, 295 
 Tuition of actresses, 293 
 Gilchrist, Connie (Countess of 
 
 Orkney), portrait, 279 
 Gilder, Mr., 254 
 Gladstone, W. E., 4, 73. 164 
 Appreciation of Morley, 252 
 As debater, 57 
 As leader, 10, 12, 13 
 Attitude towards debate, 8 
 
 „ Gordon, 84 seq. 
 ,, Goschen, 155 
 „ Navy, 141, 142 
 „ Radicalism, 10 
 
 »
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 410 
 
 Gladstone, W. E. {cont.) — 
 Dramatic gift, 5 
 Foreign policy, 74, 75 
 Home Rule Bill (1886), 14, 138, 
 
 195 
 
 — Revolt against, 155 
 
 Interviews with Lord Harting- 
 ton, 32 
 
 Liking for Whitelaw Reid, 196 
 
 Nominates Arthur Peel as 
 Speaker, 123 
 
 Notion of peace, 251 
 
 On Sir Edward Grey, 102 
 
 Proposed Gully for Speaker- 
 ship, 125 
 
 Reply to Sir Charles Dilke, 
 II 
 
 Seeing Sarah Bernhardt in 
 Phedre, 336 
 
 Stories of, 380 
 
 Views on Cabinet-making, 11, 
 
 75 
 
 Glenesk, Lord, owner of Morning 
 Post, 47 
 
 Godley, Sir Arthur, 380 
 
 Gordon Relief Expedition, 80, 84 
 
 Gorst, Sir Eldon, 367 
 
 Goschen, Viscount (the late), 149 
 seq. 
 As man of business, 149 
 As speaker and debater, 153 
 Conversation, 150, 154 
 Description of himself, 149 
 Founds Unionist Party, 155 
 Free Trader, 152 
 Led revolt against Home Rule, 
 
 155 
 Offices held and declined, 154 
 Personal appearance, 152 
 Theory of Foreign Exchanges, 
 152 
 Gosford, Countess of, 39 
 Grant, General, 370 
 Granville, Lord, ']'] 
 Gray, Senator, 192, 194 
 
 Greeley,^ Horace, 189 
 Greenwood, Frederick, 272 
 Grenville, Stamp Act, 8 
 Grey, Sir Edward, 75, 102 seq. 
 Characteristics, 105, 106, iii 
 Fishing, 102 
 
 Foreign Minister, 107, 108 
 Radicalism, 107, 108, 117 
 Speeches on Arbitration and 
 Moroccan Question, 102, 109, 
 176 
 Under-Secretary for Foreign 
 
 Affairs, 103, 105 
 With Roosevelt in New Forest, 
 103 
 Grey, Lady, character, 106 
 Griscom, Lloyd, United States 
 
 Ambassador to Rome, 202 
 Guibert, M. de, 298, 299 
 Gully, Viscount Selby,as Speaker, 
 125, 126 
 
 H 
 
 Hague Tribunal, no 
 Haldane, Viscount, 112 seq. 
 
 "Ambassador," 107, 114 
 
 As Socialist Radical, 117 
 
 As War Minister, 114 
 
 Characteristics, 112, 114, 116, 
 118 
 
 Practice as barrister, 114 
 
 Scheme for army, 79 
 
 Speech on army reorganization, 
 
 113 
 Translates Schopenhauer, 113 
 Halsbury Club, 49 
 Halsbury, Lord, attitude towards 
 
 Parliament Bill, 49 
 Halstead, on New York addresses, 
 
 241 
 Hamilton, Duchess of, 39 
 Hampden, John, 119 
 Hanbury, Lily, 293
 
 Harcourt, Sir William, 6i seq. 
 
 As jurist, 67 
 
 Attitude towards Navy, 141, 
 142 
 
 Characteristics, 62, 66 
 
 Crimes Act, 135 
 
 Death Duties, 33, 62, 63, 64 
 
 Dispute with Lord Rosebery, 
 • 65 
 
 Mai wood, 66 
 
 On great Americans, 148 
 
 Relations with his son, 6r 
 Hardinge, Sir Charles, 199 
 Harrison, Frederic, 379 
 Harrison, President, 191 
 Hartington, Lord. See Devon- 
 shire, Duke of 
 Haversham, Lord and Lady, 153 
 Hay, American Ambassador in 
 London, 189 
 
 Effect of his diplomacy, 347 
 
 On value of continuity in di- 
 plomacy, 201, 202, 204 
 
 Secretary of State, 351, 352 
 Hay ward, as a social force, 281 
 Heber, Richard, buying libraries, 
 
 237 
 
 Henry of Prussia, Prince, mis- 
 sion to U.S., 355 
 
 Herbert, Sir Michael, British 
 Ambassador, 199, 354 
 
 Heredity, 128 
 
 Hertford, Marquess of, 139 
 
 Heseltine, lover of art, 293 
 
 Hever Castle, 270 
 
 Hitt, 211 ; on way of passing 
 bills, 209 
 
 Holden, Sir Isaac, 63 
 
 Holleben, Baron, 182, 185, 186 
 
 Homburg, von der Hohe, 125 
 
 Home Rule : 
 
 Opinion in America on, 195 
 Wolseley's judgment of, 86 
 
 Home Rule Bill (first). See 
 under Gladstone 
 
 INDEX 411 
 
 Houghton, Lord, 309 
 Speech at Irving's supper, 310, 
 
 311 
 House of Commons : 
 
 Debate in, 8 
 
 Obstruction in, 120 
 
 Rules, 120, 121 
 
 Standing Orders, 122, 130 
 House of Representatives, Wash- 
 ington, 122 
 Hugo, Victor, on receiving Em- 
 peror of Brazil, 336 
 Huxley, Professor, 19 
 
 On death, 44 
 
 On Germans as scientists, 113 
 
 I 
 
 Invective in debate, 83 
 Ireland, murders in, 135, 136 
 Irish in New York, 90 
 Irish influence in U.S., decay of, 
 
 212 
 Irish Nationalists, policy of ob- 
 struction, 120 
 Irving, Sir Henry, 308 seq. 
 As artist and man, 314 seq. 
 Becket, 318, 320 
 Hamlet, 326 
 
 lago, Lear, and Othello, 324 
 Macbeth, 324, 326 
 Manager of Lyceum, 313 
 Mephistopheles, 314 seq. 
 Richelieu, 318, 320 
 Wolsey, 317,318, 320, 321 
 Characteristics, 308, 310, 317, 
 
 319, 321, 322, 323 
 Compared with Garrick, 318, 
 
 326 
 Criticism and finance, 312, 313 
 In Bells, 326, 337 seq. 
 Influence, 316 
 Resemblance to Manning, 317, 
 
 320 
 Study of actors and audiences, 
 322
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 412 
 
 Irving, Sir Henry {cojit.) — 
 
 Supper on hundredth night of 
 
 Merchant of Venice, 309 seq. 
 Supper to Sarah Bernhardt, 
 
 333 seq. 
 
 J 
 
 James, Henry, on Irving in Bells, 
 
 330 
 Japanese, attitude towards Ameri- 
 cans and Roosevelt, 366 
 Jersey, Lady, -^p 
 Journalists : 
 
 At Portsmouth, 361, 390, 391, 
 
 392 
 Relations with actors, 324 
 
 K 
 
 Khartoum, siege of, 85 
 Kitchener, Lord, 115 
 
 In Egypt, 370 
 Knox, head of American Foreign 
 
 Office, 201, 204 
 Komarofif, General, 251 
 Komura, Count, 365 
 
 At Portsmouth Conference, 
 
 390, 393, 395, 398 seq. 
 Characteristics, 398 
 Contrasted with Witte, 397 
 Demands war indemnity, 363 
 
 Langtry, Mrs., 278, 280 
 
 Portraits, 278, 279 
 Lansdowne, Lord, 49 
 
 War Minister, 81 
 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 351, 353 
 
 Minister of Finance, 215 
 Law, Bonar, as leader, 45 
 Lawley, Frank, 68, 70 
 Leighton, Lord, originates Winter 
 Exhibition at Royal Acad- 
 emy, 234 
 Lespinasse, Mile, de, letters, 
 298, 299 
 
 Lewis, Sir George, 94 
 Lincoln, President, 6 
 Lodge, Senator, 54 
 Loeb, as Secretary to Roosevelt, 
 347, 361, 362 
 
 Collector of Port of New York, 
 361 
 Londonderry, Lady, 58 
 Lonsdale, Earl of, 128 
 Lowe, R., on Lord Hartington, 31 
 Lowther, James, Speaker, 127 seq. 
 
 Compared with Gambetta, 129, 
 208 ; with " Tom " Reed, 208 
 
 Qualities, 129, 130, 132 
 Lowther Lodge, 129 
 Lowther, Mrs., 129 
 
 As hostess, 131, 132 
 Lowther, Hon. William, sketch 
 
 of, 128 
 Lucy, Sir Henry — 
 
 " Essence of Parliament," 59 
 
 On Sir Edward Grey, 108 
 Lyndhurst, Lord, on Brougham, 
 
 M 
 Macaulay, Lord — 
 On Grenville, 8 
 On Orientals' homage, 221 
 Machiavelli, Priftce, " fortunate 
 
 astuteness,'' 401 
 McCormick, U.S. Ambassador 
 
 to France, 202, 203 
 McKenna, R., leaves Admiralty, 
 
 100 
 McKim, Miller, 237 
 McKinley, President, 205, 352 
 Agrees to acquisition of Philip- 
 pines, 188, 191, 194 
 Appoints Peace Commissioners, 
 192 
 Manchester, (7th) Duke of, 38 
 Manning,Cardinal, compared with 
 
 Irving, 317, 320 
 Marlborough, (ist) Duke of, 139 
 Marlborough, (7th) Duke of, 94
 
 Marlborough House, garden party, 
 
 164 
 Meyer, U.S. Ambassador to St. 
 Petersburg, 202 
 Interviews with Czar, 364 
 Midleton, Lord, 79, 81 
 Millais, Sir John — 
 Portrait of Gladstone, 140 
 Portrait of Cardinal Newman, 
 320 
 Miller, Joaquin, poem for Car- 
 negie's birthday, 258, 259 
 Mills, D. O., 190 
 Milner, Lord, 161 
 Minto, Lord and Lady, in Ottawa, 
 
 89 
 Monroe Doctrine, no, 204 
 Morawetz, Victor, 243, 244 
 Morgan, Junius S., 215 seq. 
 Characteristics, 219 
 Death, 220 
 
 Dover House, 217 seq. 
 Laurier loan, 215, 223 
 Morgan, Pierpont, 221 seq. 
 Art gifts and loans, 234 
 As collector, 230, 231, 232, 236 
 Buying pictures, 235 
 Collections, 236 
 Deal with Carnegie, 242 seq. 
 Encounter with President 
 
 Roosevelt, 240 
 Financial anecdote of, 221 
 Financial methods, 226, 227, 
 
 228 
 Gosford Library, 237 ; catalogue, 
 
 238 
 Interview with President Cleve- 
 land, 224 
 Library, 236, 2^7 
 Likes power, 239, 240 
 Meets German Emperor, 239 
 Services to his country, 240 
 Morley, Lord, 73 
 Address at Pittsburg, 253 
 Compared with Goldwin Smith, 
 
 161 
 Edited Pali Mall Gazette^ 272 
 
 INDEX 413 
 
 Morley, Lord {cont.) — 
 
 Friendship with Carnegie, 252, 
 
 253 j-^^. 
 Influence with Gladstone, 252 
 Life of Gladstone, 1 1 
 
 — On Gordon Relief Expedi- 
 tion, 85 
 
 — On Lord Spencer, 137 
 On Gladstone's notion of peace, 
 
 251 
 Reviews Roosevelt's Cromwell, 
 
 379 
 Mornitig Post, attitude towards 
 
 Balfour, 47 seq. 
 Moroccan question, 102 
 Morris, Sir Henry, 167 
 Morton, Governor, 213 
 Murders in Ireland, 135, 136 
 
 N 
 Napoleon on ideologues, 3 
 National Liberal Federation, 16 
 Neilson, Julia, 293, 294 
 Neilson-Terry, Miss, as Viola, 294 
 New Radicalism, growth of, 10, 
 
 13 
 New York directories, 241 
 New York, parent of " sky- 
 scrapers," 190 
 Newman, Cardinal, 320 
 On Pope's infallibility, 358 
 
 O 
 
 Observer, bought by Astor, 271 
 Obstruction in House of Com- 
 mons, 120 
 O'Donnell shoots Carey, 136 
 Olney, Mr., 53, 176, 244 
 
 First Arbitration Treaty be- 
 tween England and United 
 States, 177, 178 
 Osborne, Bernal, 282 
 Ottawa, 351 
 
 Government House in, 89 
 Outlook, attitude towards Taft, 
 
 373 
 Oyster Bay, 34 r, 342, 361, 362 -
 
 414 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette, owned by 
 
 Astor, — editors, 272 
 Palmerston, Lady, 37 
 Palmerston, Viscount, 19 
 
 Conception of British Fleet, 104 
 Use of social influence, 56 
 Parliament Bill, 8, 49, 50, 52, 118 
 Paris theatres, their influence, 336 
 Parnell, C. S.— 
 Attitude towards Phoenix Park 
 Murders and Crimes Act, 135 
 Policy of Obstruction, 120 
 Parry, Serjeant, Counsel for 
 
 Whistler, 277 
 Pascal — 
 Pensdes, 50 
 
 Provincial Letters^ 50 
 Pauncefote, Lord — 
 As Anglo-American Ambassa- 
 dor, 1 70 seq. 
 Attitude towards Senators, 178 
 Characteristics, 172, 173, 174, 
 
 183 
 Conspiracy against, 180 seq., 
 
 348 
 Death and funeral, 186, 187 
 Doyett of Diplomatic Corps, 1 86 
 First Arbitration Treaty with 
 
 United States, 177, 178 
 Influence with Roosevelt, 347 
 Permanent Foreign Under- 
 Secretary, 171, 199 
 Peel, Arthur (Viscount) — 
 As Speaker, 123 seq. 
 Oratory, 124, 125 
 Peel, George, Future of England, 
 
 quoted, loi 
 Peel, Sir Robert (first), 124 
 Pembroke, Earl of, Wilton and 
 
 Death Duties, 64 
 Penjdeh incident, 251 
 Philippine Isles acquired by 
 United States, 188, 191 seq., 
 
 Phoenix Park murders, 134, 135 
 Pitt (younger) portrait, 4 
 
 Pittsburg, 260 
 
 Morley's address at, 253 
 Piatt, Mr., 379 
 
 Portsmouth, Conference between 
 
 Russia and Japan at, 360 seq. 
 
 Portsmouth, Peace of, real 
 
 authors, 401 
 Press — 
 American, attitude on Ports- 
 mouth Conference, 390, 394 
 Methods of English and Ameri- 
 can, 368 
 Use of, 348 
 Prince of Wales. 5(?^ Edward VII 
 Psychical Society, 51 
 Punch — 
 
 Caricatures of Palmerston and 
 
 Lord John Russell, 6 
 " Essence of Parliament," 
 
 Prince Arthur, 59 
 On Tree's stage properties, 320 
 
 Queen Mary, 164, 165 
 
 Queen Victoria, 164 
 
 Influence and authority, 73 
 On Lord Rosebery as Foreign 
 
 Minister, 74, 78 
 
 R 
 
 Rachel (Elizabeth Rachel F^lix), 
 
 327 
 As actress, 300, 301 
 Radnor, Earl of, Longford and 
 
 Death Duties, 64 
 Redford, reader to Lord Chamber- 
 lain, 295 
 Redmond, J. E., 95 
 Reed, Thomas B., American 
 Speaker, 208 seq. 
 Attitude towards annexation of 
 
 Philippines, 214 
 Characteristics, 211, 212 
 Compared with James Lowther, 
 
 208 
 On Irish influence in America, 
 212
 
 INDEX 
 
 415 
 
 Reid, Mrs., 189, 190, 197 
 Reid, Whitelaw, American Am- 
 bassador in London, 188 se^., 
 201 
 
 Advocacy of Anglo-American 
 friendship, 196 
 
 As editor of Tribune, 189 
 
 Attitude towards annexation of 
 Philippines, 192, 193, 194 
 
 Career, 188, 189, 191 
 
 Love of books and of letters, 197 
 
 Marriage, 190 
 
 Questions treated, 196 
 
 Speeches, 197 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 17 
 
 Story of Edmund Garrett and, 
 
 325 
 Roberts, Lord, in South Africa, 80 
 Roosevelt, Alice, (Mrs. Long. 
 
 worth), 343 
 At King Edward's funeral, 371 
 Roosevelt, Mrs., 341, 343, 351 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 179, 188, 
 
 339 ^eq- 
 Alienated business world, 349 
 Anecdotes of, 342, 345, 349, 351 
 
 376, 379, 380 
 As Governor of New York 
 
 State, 343 seq. 
 As President of New York City 
 
 Police Board, 340 seq. 
 As President of U.S., 346 seq. 
 — Relation to Foreign Affairs, 
 
 352 seq. 
 At King Edward's funeral, 371 
 Attitude towards Arbitration 
 Treaties, 176, 
 372 
 „ „ England, 347, 
 
 373, 374 
 „ „ Law, 381,382 
 
 „ „ Pauncefote, 
 
 185, 186, 348 
 » „ Taft, 2,Ti 
 
 Boer partialities, 347, 373, 374 
 Cables to St. Petersburg, 364 ; 
 to Tokio, 365 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore {cont.) — 
 Characteristics, 340, 341, 342, 
 
 346, 348, 349, 356, 358, 370, 
 372, 376 
 Compared with Kaiser, 357 
 Confidence in Hay, 352 
 Coquetries with O'Connor, 374 
 Cromwell., 379 
 Dealings with Ambassadors, 
 
 358, 359 
 Encounter with Pierpont Mor- 
 gan, 240 
 Hunting in Africa, 371, 375 
 Intervention between England 
 and Egypt, 
 366 seq. 
 , „ Russia and 
 
 Japan, 360 
 seq., 396, 
 400, 401 
 Military excursion in Cuba, 343 
 On good and bad trusts, 246 
 Politics, 352 
 Reception of Prince Henry, 
 
 355 
 Relations with German Em- 
 peror, 355 
 Relations with Senate, 1']'] 
 Speech on Supreme Court, 381 
 " Teddy," 87 
 
 With Sir Edward Grey in New 
 Forest, 103 
 Root, Mr. 244 
 
 Acted on Hay's diplomatic 
 policy, 202, 204 
 Rosebery, Lord, 19, 68 seq. 
 Advice on Tariff Reform, 72 
 " Ambassadors," 107 
 As Foreign Minister, 74 seq., 
 
 104, 186 
 As orator and debater, 59 
 Attitude towards Gladstone, 74 
 Characteristics, 70, 71, 72, 78 
 Conception of British fleet, 104 
 Diplomatic equipment, ']^ 
 Dispute with Sir William Har- 
 court, 65, 71
 
 4i6 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Rosebery, Lord {cont.) — 
 
 Misunderstood, 71 
 
 On heredity, 128 
 
 Prime Minister, ']2) 
 
 Speech to Imperial Press Con- 
 ference, 205 
 
 Use of social influence, 56 
 Rosecrans, General, 189 
 Rothschild, Baron Alphonse de, 
 collections, 231 
 
 Story of, 232 
 Rothschild, Baron Meyer de, 69 
 
 Mentmore, 70 
 Rothschild, Lord, on Death 
 
 Duties, 63 
 Ruskin, John : 
 
 Criticism of Whistler, 277 
 
 On art, 151 
 Russell of Killowen, Lord, 330 
 
 On Sir George Lewis, 94 
 Rylands, Mrs., buys Althorp 
 Library, 144 
 
 St. Albans, Duchess of, 282 
 Salisbury, Marquis of, 27, 49, 53, 54 
 
 Foreign policy, 75 
 
 On British fleet, 104 
 
 On qualities essential to a dip- 
 lomatist, 76 
 
 Relations with United States, 
 171 
 
 Retirement, 75 
 
 Use of social influence, 56 
 
 Sanderson, Lord, 181 
 
 Sardou, La Tosca^ 337 
 
 Sargent, on his portraits, 97 
 
 Saunderson, Colonel, reasons 
 against Home Rule, 34 
 
 Sauvageot, art collection, 236 
 
 Schopenhauer, 113 
 
 Scots Guards, 3rd Battalion, and 
 King Edward, 116 
 
 Sedan battle, 104 
 
 Selborne, Lord, 49 
 
 Shaw, on Morgan's art collec- 
 tions, 234 
 
 Smith, Goldwin, Scholar and 
 Apostle, 156 seq. 
 As journalist, 157, 159 
 Compared with Lord Morley, 
 
 161 
 Letters, 156 
 Oxford career, 160 
 Quarrel with Disraeli, 159 
 Reminiscences, 2 5 
 Style, 159 
 Theory about Canada, 157, 160, 
 
 162 
 United States : An Outline of 
 Political History, 158 
 South African War, 17, 25 
 Speakers of the House of Com- 
 mons, 1 19 seq. 
 House, 132 
 Salary, 133 
 Spencer, Earl (ist), 139 
 Spencer, Earl (5th), ^z, 92, 1 34 seq. 
 As First Lord, 141 seq. 
 As Irish Viceroy, 134 seq. 
 Characteristics, 137, 139, 141, 
 
 144, 145, 147, 148 
 
 On Gladstone's influence, 141 
 
 Sells Althorp Library, 143 j^j^. 
 
 Supports Home Rule, 138 
 
 Spencer, Lady, 137, 139, 145, 146 
 
 Spencer, Robert (6th Earl), 134, 
 
 i35> 140 
 Spencer, Mrs. Robert, 140 
 Spencer House, 143 
 Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust, 
 
 381 
 Stead, GdixitA Pall Mall Gazette, 
 
 272 
 Steel Corporation, 248, 249 
 Stetson, Lynde, 243, 244 
 Stoker, Bram, 321 
 Story, Waldo : 
 Bas-reliefs, 105 
 Statues at Cliveden, 268 
 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 292 
 Sunderland (3rd) Earl of, 139 
 Sutherland, Duke of, on Carnegie 
 
 as neighbour, 259
 
 INDEX 
 
 417 
 
 Taft, President, 188, 355 
 
 Accepts White's resignation, 
 
 203, 204 
 Arbitration Treaties, no, 176, 
 
 353, 372 
 Fame, 373 
 
 Proposes an Arbitral Court, 
 no 
 Taine, on root of philosophy, 58 
 Takahira, Baron, 365, 393 seq. 
 Talleyrand, on everybody's wit, 
 
 231 
 Tariff Reform, 18, 48 
 Taylor, General, President Zach- 
 
 ary, 98 
 Teck, Duke of, 164 
 Teck, Duke and Duchess of (late), 
 
 163 
 Teck, Prince Francis of, 163 seq. 
 As Chairman of Middlesex 
 
 Hospital, 167 
 As soldier, 166 
 Automobile Club, 167, 168 
 Characteristics, 166, 168 
 Death, 165, 169 
 Teck, Princess Mary of. See 
 
 Queen Mary 
 Tennant, Sir Charles, 140 
 Tennant, Sir Edward, 140 
 Territorials, 1 1 5 
 Trade Union Bill, 50 
 Tree, Sir Herbert, 318, 319 
 As Wolsey, 319, 321 
 Henry the Eighth, 317 
 Trevelyan, Sir George, Chief 
 
 Secretary for Ireland, 136 
 Tribune, The (New York), 1 3, 120 
 Appreciation of Sir Julian 
 
 Pauncefote, 175 
 Policy on Home Rule, 195, 196 
 Whitelaw Reid as editor, 189 
 Thomas, General, 189 
 Turgenieff, compared with Witte, 
 
 397 
 Turner. Mr., 54 
 
 U 
 
 United States- 
 No system of diplomacy, 204, 
 
 206 
 Officers of State badly paid, 2 1 1 
 Penurious policy towards Am- 
 bassadors, 189, 200 
 Senate and House of Repre- 
 sentatives, 210 
 Senate, attitude towards arbi- 
 tration, 177, 35 1. 353. 
 354, 372 
 „ President, 2n 
 Supreme Court, 381 
 War with Spain, 179 
 — Peace Commissioners, 191 
 seq. 
 
 V 
 
 Vanderbilt, W. H., on making 
 
 money, 239 
 Venezuela question, 53, 55, 76, 176 
 
 W 
 
 Waddington, M., dinner of fare- 
 well to, 125 
 
 Wallace, Sir Donald Mackenzie, 
 361, 362 
 
 Wallace, Sir Richard, collections, 
 
 235, 236 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, letters on 
 
 woman suffrage, 109 
 Washington — 
 Climate, 360 
 
 Mourning for Lord Paunce- 
 fote, 187 
 "The Embassy," 186 
 Washington, Booker, 379 
 Washington, Lawrence, burial- 
 place, 148 
 Webster, Daniel, on religion and 
 
 politics, 285 
 Westminster, Duke of (late) — 
 Liking for Queen Anne archi- 
 tecture, 268 
 Sells Cliveden, 265 
 Stories of, 140
 
 41 8 ANGLO-AMERICAN MEMORIES 
 
 Whistler, James McNeill, 276 seq. 
 Action against Ruskin, 277 
 Books and letters, 276 
 Breakfasts, 280 
 Characteristics, 281, 282, 283, 
 
 284, 286, 288 
 Pencil drawing, 276 
 Portraits, 279, 287 
 Quarrel with Royal Academy, 
 
 286 
 Reply to invitation from Art 
 
 Society, 287 
 Story of, 282 ; Disraeli's por- 
 trait, 284 
 White, Henry, U.S. Ambassador 
 
 to France, 39, 203 
 Mission to S. America, 203 
 William, Emperor of Germany — 
 As ruler, 357 
 
 Meets Pierpont Morgan, 239 
 Policy towards England and 
 
 United States, 179, 182 
 Relations with Roosevelt, 355 
 Witte, Count, 361 
 
 Account of Conference, 398 seq. 
 At Portsmouth Conference, 363, 
 
 364, 366, 383, 390 seq., 401 
 Audience of President, 362 
 Characteristics, 385, 386, 387, 
 
 389, 397, 401, 402 
 
 Witte, Count {cont.) — 
 
 Contrasted with Komura, 397 
 
 Conversation, 401 
 
 Relations with journalists, 391, 
 
 392 
 Sketch of career, 387 
 Wolff, Sir Henry Drummond, 199 
 Wolseley, Field-Marshal Vis- 
 count, 79 seq. 
 Characteristics, 83, 84 
 Commands Gordon Relief Ex- 
 pedition, 86 
 Conversation and invective, 83 
 On Home Rule, 86 
 Passed over in Boer War, 81 
 Photograph, 82 
 Short service, 80 
 Sketch of career, 80 
 Wolseley, Lady, 81 
 Woman Suffrage question, 108, 
 
 117 
 Wyndham, George, 49 
 
 Young, John Russell, managing 
 editor of Tribune, 120 
 
 Z 
 
 Zobeir, 85 
 
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