THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 SANTA BARBARA 
 
 COLLEGE 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 Mrs. J. R. Sackridfr 
 
 / 01
 
 UNGENSORED CELEBRITIES
 
 UNCENSORED 
 CELEBRITIES 
 
 BY 
 
 E. T. RAYMOND 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 1919
 
 Printed in Great Britain 
 
 All rights r curved
 
 UNIVFF.STTT OF CALIFORNIA 
 5 \a k ,i a^JSTA UAJWtJAKA COLLEGE LIBRA*! 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In the political world, as in all others, the war has 
 created new standards, and the following sketches, 
 slight though they be, are designed to assist the 
 process of revaluation . 
 
 They are not meant for the hero-worshipper. The 
 Hero as Politician, always rare, is not discoverable 
 just now by the present writer. " The Man " of 
 the newspaper articles has still to appear, though 
 he has been regularly announced every three months 
 or so. For the most part one can only say of political 
 things that they have got themselves transacted 
 somehow. But while, like the angry ape, certain 
 politicians have played " fantastic tricks before high 
 heaven," others have emerged with credit from the 
 supreme test, and still others have meant exceedingly 
 well . 
 
 In his task of classification the author has paid 
 scant attention to party labels, and has always 
 preferred the wider to the narrower loyalty. The 
 most important question to be asked of any public 
 man at this time, "Is he a good Englishman ?" 
 cannot be resolved by purely intellectual tests. 
 Judge Jeffreys used to say that he could " smell " a 
 certain kind of person " a mile off." The present 
 
 5
 
 6 PREFACE 
 
 writer can claim no such delicacy of perception ; yet 
 he is not ashamed to admit that in some doubtful 
 cases he has relied chiefly on his nose. 
 
 /With one or two exceptions, the impressions here 
 assembled were first published in Everyman.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George - 
 Sir Edward Carson - 
 Mr. Asquith - - 
 
 The Earl of Derby - 
 Viscount Grey of Fallodon 
 
 Lord Robert Cecil - 
 
 Mr. Balfour - 
 
 Sir F. E. Smith 
 
 Mr. Bonar Law 
 
 Mr. Reginald McKenna 
 
 Lord Newton and Others - 
 
 Mr. Winston Churchill 
 
 Mr. Harold Cox - 
 
 IIO 
 
 Viscount Milner - 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb 
 
 General Smuts 
 
 Mr. Arthur Henderson 
 
 Mr. Horatio Bottomley 
 
 The Marquess of Lansdowne 
 
 Viscount Northcliffe 
 
 Mr Austen Chamberlain 
 
 THE " MOVING POST " AND H>. R A. GWVNNE 
 
 Mr. Walter Long - ' 
 
 Lord Beaverbrook - 
 Earl Curzon of Kedleston 
 
 7 
 
 27 
 
 54 
 62 
 
 69 
 75 
 
 8i 
 
 89 
 
 96 
 
 103 
 
 no 
 
 132 
 141 
 
 147 
 152 
 159 
 166 
 172 
 178 
 
 191
 
 8 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Viscount Haldane ... 
 
 Lord Burnham and the " Daily Telegraph 
 
 Mr. W. M. Hughes - - - - 
 
 Sir Auckland Geddes 
 
 Mr. H. A. L. Fisher 
 
 Sir Mark Sykes 
 
 Lord Buckmaster of Cheddington 
 
 Mr. Samuel Gompers- 
 
 PAGE 
 
 197 
 203 
 
 208 
 
 216 
 
 222 
 
 228 
 
 233 
 
 238
 
 UNGENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 
 
 It is not very material to this or any other generation 
 that Mr. Lloyd George has been " filmed." But 
 posterity, in its study of this time, will be grateful 
 that he has been painted by a man of genius. 
 
 To our successors most that has been written con- 
 cerning this eminent man must make for sheer be- 
 wilderment. It is " hot ice and wondrous strange 
 snow." They will read of a white negro, a dwarf ten 
 feet high, a demagogue who tyrannized over the mob, 
 a sycophant who bullied and plundered the rich. 
 Many quite rational people believe that Shakespeare 
 never wrote the plays and sonnets simply because 
 the only dependable portrait of him is that mournful 
 Droeshout engraving showing what Gainsborough 
 called " as damned stupid a head as ever I saw." 
 What degree of mis judgment might not be possible 
 to men examining, after the lapse of centuries, a 
 newspaper illustration of Mr. George opening a 
 bazaar or patting an election baby ? 
 
 But Mr. Augustus John's notable canvas will tend 
 to avoidance of the grosser kind of error concerning 
 Mr. Lloyd George's character. Just as the painting 
 of Vandyke tells us more about the essential Strafford 
 than all the careful pages of Clarendon, so this 
 remarkable study reveals the true personality of 
 Mr. George better than many volumes of Hansard 
 and the Parliamentary sketch-writers. In regarding 
 
 9
 
 10 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 it one begins to understand wiry the subject stands 
 where he is to-day. One realizes for the first time 
 that there is great strength in the man. Physical 
 strength first, despite the lack of inches : sturdy build, 
 bull neck, powerful shoulders, the whole man approxi- 
 mating to that southern European type which pro- 
 duces the greatest masters of swordsmanship, a type 
 that surprises in the test of battle those northerners 
 who are prone to overvalue mere stature. One feels 
 that in other times and other circumstances the 
 owner of this physique might have fought many duels 
 and yet died in his bed. As things are one is not 
 surprised to learn that he bears fatigue easily, can 
 sleep anywhere and at an}' time, and is not readily 
 daunted by difficulties, so long as they challenge his 
 interest. In the features can be read an inflexibility 
 of purpose compatible with infinite pliability of 
 method ; an impatience of opposition ; even a certain 
 ruthlessness — one of the abler Roman Emperors of 
 the later period, from Illyria or Spain, might have had 
 much such a face. It is not the face of a great master 
 of statecraft ; the brain behind those rather sceptical 
 and mocking eyes is quick and vigorous, but neither 
 capacious nor subtle; it enjoys an intellectual game of 
 draughts, but chess is rather beyond it. Still, so far 
 as they see, the eyes see clearty, and the brain, within 
 its limits, is an admirable instrument. For the 
 special purposes of its owner, perhaps as good an 
 instrument as he could have. 
 
 For Mr. Lloyd George belongs essentially to the 
 empirical school of statesmanship. He does not look 
 " before and after," but only about him. He stands 
 in small awe of precedent, principle, and doctrine; he 
 is always readier to experiment than to think. In- 
 tensely interested in the things of the moment, in 
 himself and the people he likes, in the " causes 
 
 i >
 
 MB. LLOYD GEORGE 11 
 
 which appeal to him in his varying moods, no man 
 has less sense of the continuity of human things. 
 For him the present tick of the clock has all the 
 dignity of the eternal. He is, in truth, as much a 
 man of action as any foxhunter of the shires or any 
 leader of a forlorn hope. Withal there is in him 
 something of the poet ; he has a touch of the true 
 Promethean fire, and only when he is very tired does 
 the coin from his phrase-mint ring tinny. Occasion- 
 ally, like the German Emperor, whom he somewhat 
 resembles in his knack of saying memorable things 
 on trivial occasions (as well, it must be added, as 
 trivial things on some memorable occasions), he rises 
 to very considerable heights; if the Victorian book- 
 making fashion still held, a very tolerable collection 
 of " Beauties " could be made from his speeches. 
 But, though he keenly enjoys his gift of eloquent 
 utterance, and sometimes takes a more languid 
 pleasure in the eloquence of others, words are for him 
 only missiles and munitions, better or worse; the 
 fight is the main thing. The fever of doing, the gust 
 and passion of perpetual movement, the revolt against 
 passivity, are in his very blood. If thought is a 
 malady, he is of all men most healthy. His poor 
 acquaintance with history and literature are less the 
 consequence of lack of opportunity than of his innate 
 dislike of hard study. He is in a sense indolent 
 through excess of energy. What can be done at a 
 sitting he does as well as most men; but he quickly 
 tires of monotonous application, and his only idea of 
 repose is change of effort. Hence the just criticism 
 that he raises many questions and settles few, that 
 whatever he touches he leaves a litter for some less 
 gifted person to clear up, and that the more passion- 
 ately he advocates a policy the less he can be trusted 
 to carry it to its logical conclusion.
 
 12 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 The energy was no doubt inborn ; the lack of 
 discipline may be partly traceable to the desultory 
 education to which he was condemned by the failure 
 and early death of his father. He is fond of referring 
 to himself as a child of the people, and his enemies 
 used to speak of him as an essentially cultureless man. 
 Both descriptions are misleading. Mr. Lloyd George 
 belongs to a class with a social pride no less highly 
 developed than that of the heraldic gentleman. His 
 grandfather and father were both entirely " respec- 
 table " — the former a yeoman farmer and the latter 
 a schoolmaster who narrowly missed the ministry. 
 Half the peerage might search in vain for as creditable 
 a beginning of their famity trees. It was accident, 
 and not birth, that threw the infant George -among the 
 poor. There is a curious resemblance between his 
 early life and that of Charles Dickens, and a parallel 
 might be drawn, not inappropriately, between the 
 effects of precocious experience of misfortune on these 
 two men. Had John Dickens been a success, Charles 
 would have found life smoothed for him by school, 
 university, and the rest ; he would doubtless have 
 gone to the Bar or passed into the higher Civil Service, 
 and would have ended the usual " brilliant career " 
 in knighted and pensioned ease. But John Dickens 
 made shipwreck of everything, and Charles, with his 
 vivid nature and wounded middle-class pride, filled 
 bottles with blacking and his soul with bitterness. 
 To the end of his days he was haughtily conscious of 
 the outrage, and let it envenom every dart of satire 
 he hurled against English society. What would have 
 happened had the paternal George lived to coach his 
 son for scholarships, despatch him cheaply to Oxford, 
 and throw the necessary monetary sop to the Inner 
 Temple or Gray's Inn Cerberus ? Probably Mr. 
 George would have still entered politics, but it
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 13 
 
 would have been as an Asquith or a Simon, funda- 
 mentally satisfied with things as they are, and 
 " except in opinion not disagreeing " with his late 
 enemies the Dukes. 
 
 As things were, he started the world without what 
 is called education, but with such substitute as a lad 
 of quick parts and vivid temperament may pick up 
 at a village school and from the conversation of his 
 elders. Such disadvantages may be easily over- 
 estimated. There are many worse tutors than the 
 village shoemaker who was his uncle and second 
 father; and it may be doubted whether the Oxford 
 Union offers a better training for tne embryo politician 
 than the debating circ! j oi a Welsh Nonconformist 
 chapel. At any rate } f oung George scraped together 
 enough information to qualify as a solicitor at the 
 age of twenty-one ; he became a practised speaker in 
 two languages before he had need of a razor; and at 
 fifteen he knew more of the realities of life than most 
 men do at thirty. He was not, and is not, possessed 
 of formal culture. But many of the greatest scholars 
 have had smaller opportunity. If he learned only 
 what was immediately necessary for his purpose the 
 fault was mainly his; application, as has been already 
 noted, was painful to him, and what could not be 
 picked up sparrow fashion he never acquired. But 
 to speak of such a man as " uneducated " is merely 
 snobbish. 
 
 It is in that last word that we have the secret of 
 much. In America a politician thus " raised " and 
 instructed would feel no sort of handicap, and nobody 
 would feel it for him. If he did not know one set of 
 facts, what matter ? There are too many facts for 
 one man to know. Education of any kind is to the 
 purpose: mode and place of education matter little. 
 But in this country schools and universities, though
 
 14 UNCEXSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 in some incidental way concerned with education, 
 are very much more concerned with another thing. 
 They aim chiefly at manufacturing gentlemen. In 
 this age of progress we have only negatively improved 
 on the ideal of the great Dr. Arnold. His scheme 
 was for the multiplication of" Christian gentlemen;" 
 we have dropped the adjective and intensified the 
 substantive. Otherwise Arnold's theory holds in all 
 its massive simplicity. Against the undoubted advan- 
 tages of this view is to be set one trifling drawback. 
 A certain number of quite talented young men con- 
 stantly fail, from some reason or another, to receive 
 the recognized hall-mark of good form, and, according 
 to their natures, resent the fact either lazily or 
 vehemently. Some run to satire, more or less good- 
 humoured ; some take up a fiercely hostile attitude 
 to the established order of things. There are few 
 men — and very few Englishmen — so philosophical 
 as to be indifferent whether they are thought gentle- 
 men, and the most sensitive of all are those who, well 
 educated " privately," find a subtle barrier between 
 themselves and the men of Balliol or Trinity. They 
 are snobs, of course, to trouble about the matter; but 
 they would not trouble about it but for the general 
 snobbery. 
 
 The mischief operates in two directions. It breeds 
 not only an irritation which sometimes takes dis- 
 tinctly anti-social forms, but an involuntary over- 
 estimation of academic and social advantages which 
 not seldom leads the tribune of the plebs, once 
 arrived at power, to yield undue homage to great 
 wealth and settled position. The same man who 
 declaims against privilege in the abstract is apt to 
 be overflattered when privilege in the concrete 
 invites him to a country-house week-end. 
 
 It may be doubted whether Mr. Lloyd George was
 
 MB. LLOYD GEORGE 15 
 
 much troubled by his educational or social limitations 
 when he entered Parliament at twenty-seven for 
 Carnarvon . His rebellion then was against something 
 less subtle : something personified by the squire of his 
 district and the parson of his parish. But as he 
 gradually ceased to be a Welsh Nationalist and 
 developed into an English Radical there can be little 
 doubt that an additional touch of venom was imparted 
 to his attacks on the " gentlemanly party " by the 
 fact that it was so very gentlemanly. Though 
 Joseph Chamberlain was the chief object of his 
 youthful fury, it was not against him but against the 
 grandees of Conservatism proper that the real vendetta 
 existed. Mr. Lloyd George no doubt felt much of 
 the passion he expressed during the Boer War; one 
 of the finest features of his character is a hatred of the 
 more theatrical kinds of oppression, and he quite 
 sincerely saw in the warfare of the African republics 
 the resistance of a weak thing in the right to a strong- 
 thing in the wrong. He little cared that the Boer 
 had been himself a considerable oppressor. But 
 though he might assail Mr. Chamberlain with every 
 weapon in an armoury that included invective, satire, 
 personal gibe, and imaginative appeal, he could 
 hardly feel against that great man as he did against 
 the hereditary hidalgos. Both he and Chamberlain 
 belonged to the middle class; both were destitute of 
 what is called the higher culture; Chamberlain had 
 made his way, as the young Welshman hoped to make 
 his, by sheer force of ability and character. And if 
 some secret sympathy may have mingled with 
 antagonism even at this period, there was assuredly 
 more when Chamberlain, flinging out of office, started 
 on that last campaign which exhausted his ebbing 
 vitality. Such an act of courage was very much in 
 Mr. George's own way. Besides, he was not quite
 
 16 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 at home in the battle of the economists. He declaimed 
 rather than argued on stock party lines ; it is doubtful 
 whether his mind was so constituted as to understand 
 the deeper issues. Possibly it was fatigue of the 
 Tariff controversy as much as anything that urged 
 him to the great Budget diversion of 1909; during his 
 two years at the Board of Trade he was certainly as 
 silent, and probably as bored, as at any period of his 
 life. But he had made some business reputation in 
 that office. True, he was nothing to boast of as a 
 departmental chief; penny plain business has never 
 attracted him like twopence coloured adventure. He 
 left the permanent staff to manage things much as 
 they liked; he revealed, however, a capacity in 
 negotiation which surprised many who had so far 
 seen in him no more than an unusually clever agitator. 
 But the comparative narrowness of the job irked him, 
 and when Mr. Asquith became Prime Minister it 
 is believed that one of his first difficulties was 
 Mr. George's demand for instant promotion. The new 
 Chief is said to have fancied Mr. McKenna as his 
 successor at the Treasury. But Mr. Lloyd George 
 made it plain that he would be Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer or nothing, and Mr. Asquith could not 
 afford to let him be nothing. 
 
 As for Mr. George, he had determined to be some- 
 thing in the most emphatic sense. " I care not who 
 makes my country's laws if I make its songs," said 
 a rather foolish phrase-monger. Mr. George cared 
 not who presided over the Cabinet so long as he made 
 the Budget. He was determined to create a sensation, 
 and he succeeded. The Budget of 1909 was hardly 
 revolutionary; in these days of really " confiscatory 
 taxation " the fierce debate on Mr. George's proposals 
 seems in retrospect theatrical and unreal. But if 
 the Chancellor had really proposed to inscribe the
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 17 
 
 words " National Property " over Chatsworth and 
 Bowood he could have hardly done it with a more 
 apocalyptic air. There is no doubt that he enjoyed 
 the whole thing immensely. He was avenging all 
 the slights of the little Welsh lad, all the stately 
 tolerance of the village attorney, all the polite sneers 
 levelled at the rising politician. Never was public 
 duty so happily wedded to private inclination. 
 There was always something a little feline in Mr. Lloyd 
 George, and he now took a perfectly cat-like pleasure 
 in tearing out the tail feathers of some solemn, 
 gorgeous, jewelled bird, some peacock of the peerage 
 who rasped out denunciations of his wickedness. He 
 rejoiced in his new character as a political Attila or 
 Hammer of God, and positively revelled in what he 
 called the " howls from Belgravia." He shrieked 
 with gay laughter — as who would not? — when told 
 that he would never, no never, be again invited to 
 Blenheim ; he drove Lord Rothschild into terrified 
 silence with a single quip. No man in our time has 
 ever enjoyed such extremes of popularity and detesta- 
 tion ; it was the mark of good-breeding to vilify him 
 as the " little Welsh solicitor," and in the more select 
 suburbs of London he was known as the " Cad of the 
 Cabinet." All this glory could not last, and if there 
 had been no Insurance Act and no Marconi affair 
 Mr. George's vogue must have suffered some diminu- 
 tion . Still, though his prestige was somewhat dimmed , 
 the outbreak of war found him still the most powerful 
 of British ministers. 
 
 It will probably be many years before the world 
 knows precisely how it came to pass that the most 
 pronounced Pacifist of the Pacifist Liberal Cabinet, 
 the man who had declared that we were " building 
 Dreadnoughts against a phantom," and had but six 
 months before begun a passionate crusade against
 
 18 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 armaments, sided in the fateful decision of August 4, 
 19 14, against Lord Morley and Mr. Burns and with 
 the Prime Minister and Sir Edward Grey. The fact 
 having been taken for granted, its decisive impor- 
 tance has hardly been enough realized. Opposition 
 to war was far stronger than is generally supposed. 
 The great financial interests were against participation ; 
 so far from the war being a " capitalists' war," it was 
 declared in the teeth of the cosmopolitan money kings. 
 A majority of the Cabinet was either unconvinced or 
 lukewarm; the great Quaker supporters of the 
 Ministry were naturally adverse; the " Socialists " 
 were up in arms; even the undeniably patriotic 
 Parliamentary leaders of Labour were deeply dis- 
 trustful. Had all these elements been united under 
 a leader of genius and great Parliamentary skill, 
 the decision of the Cabinet might well have been in 
 favour of neutrality, or at the best Great Britain 
 would have entered the war a State not only militarily 
 unprepared but divided against itself. It is idle to 
 give imagination rein as to the conceivable limits of 
 the might-have-been. But it is hardly fanciful to 
 sa}'' that, when some instinct saved Mr. Lloyd George 
 from a capital error, it also preserved civilization from 
 a crowning calamity. 
 
 " The ill that's done ye can compute, but never 
 what's resisted." The same applies to good. Many 
 may have forgotten, but none can dispute, as none 
 can estimate with precision, the service Mr. George 
 rendered to the Allied cause by merely espousing it. 
 But there is naturally more division of opinion con- 
 cerning the value of his specific contributions to the 
 prosecution of the war. The whole question is so 
 mixed up with personal and party considerations that 
 it is almost hopeless to look for an impartial judgment 
 from British men of this generation. Let us, however,
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 19 
 
 make an effort to view facts as they would appear to 
 posterity or even to a contemporary foreigner. The 
 war work of Mr. Lloyd George divides itself roughly 
 into two periods : his service as a nominally subordi- 
 nate but exceedingly powerful Minister and his 
 service as titular head of the Government. During 
 the first period Mr. Lloyd George was one of three men 
 of British race who in the political sphere stood out as 
 world figures; the others were Mr. Asquith and Sir 
 Edward Grey. There can be no question as to which 
 of the trio most impressed the imagination of non- 
 British mankind. Mr. Asquith 's words might carry 
 more weight with a select minority ; Sir Edward Grey's 
 lightest whisper caused strained attention in every 
 gathering of official men. But it was Mr. Lloyd 
 George's voice that reached everywhere the masses; 
 in France, Italy, the United States, and the British 
 Dominions he, perhaps the one politician (save 
 Lord Milner) least typically British, figured as specially 
 the representative of the British people. 
 
 The fact, of course, was due to that extraordinary 
 gift of expression which Mr. Lloyd George has brought 
 to the highest possible pitch of cultivation, while 
 wisely refraining from anything which would spoil its 
 peculiar race and flavour. He has the great advan- 
 tage of being a real orator in an age when oratory 
 hardly exists. It would be tempting to discuss how 
 it happens that rhetoric, most artificial of the arts, 
 was most assiduously cultivated when Parliament 
 was most real, and has declined with the veracity of 
 Parliament. An off-hand answer would be that 
 statesmen thought it worth while to cultivate the art 
 of persuasive appeal so long as votes might be 
 influenced by speech, but disdain such devices when 
 Whips can inform a Prime Minister long before the 
 event what the result of a division will be, assuming
 
 20 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 that this group is placated, and that group effectively 
 threatened. Be that as it ma}', there is no doubt 
 that public speaking, if it had not exactly degenerated, 
 had wholly changed its character before Mr. Lloyd 
 George showed that passionate and compelling 
 rhetoric still counts. A dry and parsimonious manner, 
 of which Mr. Asquith is perhaps the most notable 
 exemplar, was the model for the High Court of 
 Parliament as well as the King's Bench; the style of 
 Burke was as obsolete in the one place as that of 
 Buzfuz in the other. There could be no greater 
 reproach to a Parliamentarian than to class his 
 speaking as florid and " high-faluting." Macaulay 
 described the best Parliamentary oratory as " reason 
 penetrated and made red hot by passion." In 
 much modern speaking plausibility depends on low 
 temperature; things which would seem wholly mad 
 if declaimed gain a certain appearance of sanity by 
 the moderation of their presentation. It is certain 
 that a languid House of Commons has accepted many 
 measures at the suggestion of a frigid under-Secretary, 
 and in face of tepidly rational objections, which 
 would have been rejected had they been justified by 
 the stately periods of Pitt and opposed in the splutter- 
 ing eloquence of Fox. 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George has to some degree respected the 
 modern House of Commons humour, but the larger 
 audience of the nation he treats to the full power of 
 his verjr real eloquence, and, somewhat to its astonish- 
 ment, the British people finds that, Carlyle notwith- 
 standing, the talker is vastly important. Mr. Lloyd 
 George's talk has been of incalculable service during 
 the war. I am not referring here to his more ambitious 
 efforts of statesmanlike utterance; Mr. Asquith 
 could always reply to a German or Austrian statesman, 
 or to a great neutral, with more weight and dignity.
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 21 
 
 I am thinking rather of speeches addressed straight 
 to the British people, telling them things already 
 familiar, but in tones that vibrated to the very centre 
 of their being. Mr. Asquith could tell the people 
 why they must fight as a duty. Mr. Law could tell 
 them what they would lose by not fighting. Lord 
 Lansdowne could explain why they must fight until 
 the real pinch came. But only the Welsh orator 
 could say a simple thing in this simple but yet enor- 
 mously effective way: 
 
 " We have been living in a sheltered valley for 
 generations. We have been too comfortable and too 
 self-indulgent, many perhaps too selfish, and the stern 
 hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we 
 can see the everlasting things that matter — the great 
 peaks we had forgotten, of Duty, Honour, Patriotism, 
 and, clad in glittering white, the towering pinnacle of 
 Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to heaven." 
 
 Many of these speeches, as one reads them now, 
 cause at once a thrill and a shiver — the thrill because 
 they revive in throbbing reality the emotions of a 
 moment past, the shiver because one thinks for an 
 instant, thanking Heaven for its mercy, what might 
 have been had this power been exercised on the other 
 side. It is a power almost independent of the 
 personality of the orator. Those who most distrust 
 Mr. George yield to the spell of his eloquence at its 
 best with the facility of his most enslaved admirers. 
 Time and again he has met, in the House of Commons 
 and elsewhere, an audience under the cloud of a great 
 misfortune, sullen, suspicious, unfriendly; hardly 
 ever has he sat down without bringing its mood in 
 harmony with his own. Occasionally he has been 
 tempted, by the consciousness of his power, to abuse 
 it ; but on the whole a splendid and unique talent has 
 been well employed.
 
 22 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Of Mr. Lloyd George's purely official activities 
 during the earlier war period it is only possible to 
 speak in general terms. When the whole fabric of 
 finance threatened to topple, large and bold measures 
 were taken by a Treasury of which he was the head. 
 They were justified by their success, and it is worth 
 noting that when it was proposed to remove the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer to another field the City 
 of London, once bitterly critical, petitioned that he 
 should remain in charge of national finance. His 
 work at the new Ministry of Munitions was a monument 
 to his energy, if cool examination could not fail to 
 detect a good deal of incidental sloppiness in the 
 execution of a grandiose plan. Under his management 
 the department rapidly expanded, and produced and 
 spent (even squandered) on a scale before unimagin- 
 able. New industries were created, old industries were 
 adapted, to meet the colossal requirements of war, 
 and undeniably the main object was attained in full 
 measure. If all difficulties were not met, they were 
 at least skilfully dodged ; some sort of concordat was 
 established with Labour as to the relaxation of trade 
 union rules impeding production, and though there 
 has been constant friction there has been no al solute 
 breakdown. It is pretty certain that nobody but 
 Mr. Lloyd George would have had the courage to 
 attempt the fifth of what he actually achieved, and 
 that in doing so he sacrificed much of his prestige with 
 a certain " democratic " section to which he had 
 always looked for support must be counted unto 
 him for righteousness. 
 
 With Mr. Lloyd George's departure from the 
 Ministry of Munitions the first period of his war 
 administration may be said to end ; his tenure of the 
 War Office was featureless, and hardly matters in a 
 review like the present. We now approach the most
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 23 
 
 debatable part of his career — the coup d'etat of 191 6. 
 It can at once be said that the methods employed to 
 displace Mr. Asquith could only be justified on one 
 ground — that of pressing national necessity. " I 
 can save the country, and no other man can," said 
 the elder Pitt ; and that is, too, Mr. George's apologia. 
 Established in office, he certainly showed by every 
 action that he possessed illimitable confidence in his 
 power to bring the State through its troubles. He 
 began by a not inconsiderable constitutional revolu- 
 tion : the Cabinet system was destroyed at a blow; 
 the supreme governing power was put in the hands of 
 a knot of men who need not necessarily be members 
 of either House of Parliament or even citizens of the 
 United Kingdom. " Party claims " could not be 
 ignored entirely, but men of " push and go " from 
 great business houses, railways, and elsewhere were 
 recruited for the Ministry. New departments were 
 created with a lavish hand. The control of food, 
 travel, and other necessities of life was vastly extended . 
 Immensely increased demands were made on the man- 
 hood of the country, and the cost of the war and the 
 public services mounted sharply. An enormous but 
 rather undisciplined energy pervaded the administra- 
 tion; there was bustle enough; whether bustle was 
 always business was not so clear. 
 
 In some respects the new Government had very bad 
 luck, and misfortunes which no skill could have 
 avoided rendered judgment difficult regarding those 
 which derived from want of foresight and co-ordina- 
 tion. The Russian revolution destroyed all the fair 
 hopes built on the military position after the Battle 
 of the Somme. Unrestricted submarine warfare, 
 while bringing in an ultimately powerful AII3-, pro- 
 duced also an immediate situation of the most alarm- 
 ing kind. In the air, as at sea, we were on the defen-
 
 24 UNCEXSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 sive, and on land small and transient successes, gained 
 at great cost, were all that could be set off against 
 a great disaster like Caporetto. At home the food 
 troubles grew daily more insistent ; and Irish difficulties 
 were accentuated. On the whole, however, it was 
 plain that the new Government had certain definite 
 advantages over the old. It was more united as to 
 its objective; it was in a certain sense what it pro- 
 claimed itself to be, a " win-t he-war " Government. 
 In discarding elements wear}' or lukewarm, it had 
 gained in momentum, and had behind it the energy 
 of a people with new hope. On the other hand, 
 evidence was quickly forthcoming of one grave fault, 
 which is sufficiently indicated in the recurrent cry 
 for better " co-ordination." The right hand of the 
 Administration knew too little what the left hand was 
 doing ; and the head seemed to know even less concern- 
 ing either hand. Ministers were set up with an hotel 
 and an expensive office establishment and told to make 
 themselves busy, with such results as were revealed 
 in the extreme case of the first National Service 
 experiment . Meanwhile powerful newspaper interests 
 which had favoured the dismissal of Mr. Asquith 
 attempted to dictate policy in headlines, and all these 
 factors combined to give an oddly vacillating char- 
 acter to administration. Certain great things were 
 achieved; the food troubles were met with success; 
 and the signal advantage of unity of command, 
 pursued by somewhat devious means, was at length 
 attained. But undeniably the new arrangements did 
 not make for orderliness or economy in the public 
 service. 
 
 The character of the Prime Minister, in brief, was 
 reflected in the character of his Administration. It 
 cannot be a rational complaint that he attacked his 
 work in the only way compatible with his, tempera-
 
 MR. LLOYD GEORGE 25 
 
 ment . It is useless to expect a Michael Angelo to have 
 the finish of a Dutch " little master," and Mr. Lloyd 
 George's fancy is all for the " grands contours du 
 dessin "; he recks little of the finishing touches. 
 
 He has a quite unusual capacity for getting to the 
 heart of any matter to which his attention is specifi- 
 cally directed ; his judgment is shrewd ; his courage 
 high; his driving power remarkable. But the very 
 intensity of his nature forbids calm envisagement of 
 things as a whole. He has little faculty for exercising 
 a general command, and his talent for discovering 
 talent, though considerable, is not always allowed full 
 pla} r ; the claims of private partiality, political affinity, 
 or convenience and so forth are often given undue 
 weight. Thus he is often badly served, does not 
 discover the fact till too late, and too often fails to 
 correct what is wrong even after it is manifest. Mr. 
 Lloyd George's Minist^ is like an orchestra composed 
 of performers of very unequal merit, under a conductor 
 who only occasionally troubles to conduct, being 
 engaged in writing the music, looking after the stage 
 carpentry, advertising the performance, and even 
 selling the tickets. It is not quite an adequate 
 compensation that the conductor himself is a master 
 on many instruments, and can always be relied on to 
 snatch trombone or piccolo from a pretender and show 
 how the thing should be done. 
 
 Allowance must be made, however, for many 
 difficulties, from which his predecessor also was not 
 exempt. His efforts to shake himself free from party 
 have not been wholly successful ; in that he resembles 
 the man who finds his trouble far from ended by 
 separation from a troublesome wife. Of some of his 
 colleagues one might repeat the French wit's dictum on 
 women : one can't live with them and can't live without 
 them. The scheme by which Mr. George was to
 
 26 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 supply the ideas and energy, and others the " calm 
 wisdom," was perhaps inherently unworkable; it has 
 not in fact worked . In attending to the only interests 
 about which the public cares, Mr. George has had 
 to keep a watchful eye on interests for which the 
 public cares nothing, but the management of which 
 is essential to the maintenance of his position. He 
 has had to work with many tools he would not have 
 chosen, and, like other tailors, has had to cut his coat 
 to his cloth. 
 
 That garment is still in the stage of shreds, thrums, 
 and chalk-marks ; it is yet too early to say what will 
 be the final result. In the language of a discarded 
 philosophy, we can only wait and see. But we cannot 
 honestly withhold admiration from much we have seen, 
 even if we have to place limits to our worship . And we 
 wait in a spirit of increasing hope, tempered, perhaps, 
 with some little concern lest at a critical moment 
 audacity should degenerate into recklessness or that 
 the instinct which dictated the right course in 1914 
 should falter in face of things almost as vital and far 
 more complex.
 
 SIR EDWARD CARSON 
 
 I remember well the afternoon in the early summer 
 of 191 5 when the first Coalition Government met an 
 anxious and rather angry House of Commons. 
 
 While discarded Ministers gloomed at them from 
 the Speaker's left hand the members of Mr. Asquith's 
 new team made a brave show of coalescing in public. 
 Mr. Long exchanged elaborate civilities with Mr. 
 Birrell. Mr. Bonar Law, with something of the self- 
 consciousness of a schoolboy presented to the squire 
 at a prize-giving, tried to be at ease in Zion with Mr. 
 McKenna. Mr. Harcourt showed princely urbanity 
 to some understrapper recruit. 
 
 It was not very hopeful or convincing. Yet men 
 did hope. They thought there was a chance for the 
 Government, and were disposed to give it its chance. 
 
 And then something happened that even the visitor 
 in the Strangers' Gallery could feel, though he might 
 find it mysterious. A tall, gaunt man entered behind 
 the Speaker's chair, and perched himself, like Poe's 
 raven on the bust of Pallas, at the very extremity of 
 the Treasury Bench. A very ravenlike personage, 
 black, aloof, and sinister. He spoke to none. He 
 listlessly turned over the pages of his order paper, 
 yawned with the easy but terrifying grace of one of 
 the higher carnivora, surveyed the House with super- 
 cilious, heavy-lidded eyes, and presently went out. 
 
 It was nothing, and yet everything. The coming 
 of Sir Edward Carson, the new Attorney-General, had 
 cast a shade which his departure did not remove. 
 For the sight of that hatchet face — the profile of an 
 
 27
 
 28 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Indian brave, the heavily pomaded black hair combed 
 back from the low forehead, the dew-lapped eyes, the 
 humourless, scornful mouth, the projecting Habsburg- 
 like chin — reminded all but a few how slight was the 
 chance on which they relied. A few moments ago 
 the political equation looked hard, indeed, but not 
 insoluble. But here was the intractable surd that 
 was bound to complicate everything. 
 
 It is just this difficultjr at arriving at the square 
 root of Sir Edward Carson that makes him so interest- 
 ing a man and so impossible a politician. Trotsky and 
 his like are hard enough to understand. Still, they 
 remain Trotskys. But there have been so many 
 Carsons. First, as the foundation of all subsequent 
 Carsons, we have the young ex-Liberal barrister who, 
 in the da}*s of " resolute government," entered into 
 the dreary task of repression with a zealot's gusto that 
 almost dignified it. Then come some years of high 
 official rank and emolument ; Sir Edward Carson, 
 English Solicitor-General, quietly enjoys the reward 
 of strenuous party service. With the Unionist defeat 
 of 1906 emerges another Carson, for we can almost con- 
 sider the great advocate of the King's Bench in his 
 best period as different in kind as well as degree from 
 all earlier Carsons. It was not until this time that 
 he showed all his gifts at their fullest — unmatched 
 dexterity in cross-examination, masterful logic, cor- 
 roding satire, a deadly suavity, wonderful skill in 
 suggestion. 
 
 Then suddenly the briefs are shot back at the attor- 
 neys; Sir Edward will not come into court at any 
 figure ; he has greater work on hand : there is an Ulster 
 Government to be formed, an Ulster Army to be 
 raised and drilled, guns to be " run," laws to be broken. 
 Once, indeed, the great man relented and put on his 
 wig — to represent a member of that Government
 
 SIR EDWARD CARSON 29 
 
 which he was defying and denouncing. On the 
 strength of such piquant incidents in the life of 
 a Frondist, there are those who hold that all that 
 complicated business of the Ulster Force and the 
 Provisional Government was a gigantic bluff. Who 
 knows ? True, it is not usual for a real rebel to have 
 a house in Eaton Place and a week-end cottage at 
 Rottingdean, to insist on a fire in his bathroom, and 
 to remain " the most popular man in the House of 
 Commons " by virtue of his social gifts. But nature 
 is rich, and one anomaly the more means little to her. 
 
 Perhaps it is better frankly to give up as hopeless 
 the attempt to discover what Sir Edward Carson 
 really is, and devote ourselves to the simpler problem 
 of defining what he is not. We now know that he is 
 not a statesman. He is as little a statesman as Sir 
 Frederick Smith. The rather vague hopes built on 
 the fact that he could speak well (if rather confusedly), 
 that he was rich, and that he was excessively pug- 
 nacious, are now seen to have been entirely fallacious. 
 Sir Edward Carson has been many things. He was 
 an excellent tomahawk in the hands of others. He 
 has shown, like Parnell and Lenin, a certain power of 
 destructive organization. He has even filled routine 
 posts with fair credit. But of the higher statesman- 
 ship of creation, or even the lower statesmanship of 
 imaginative administration, he has indicated no trace. 
 His mind is, indeed, only strong on the negative side. 
 Even in advocacy he always relied rather on breaking 
 an adversary's case than on developing his own. 
 " My lord, I must object," is his attitude to everything. 
 He objects to Prussia, as he did to Home Rule. But 
 he has no positive formula with which to confront 
 Prussianism, any more than he had a positive pro- 
 gramme to confront Home Rulers. 
 
 Indeed, it would be hard for him to evolve one, for
 
 30 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 he is himself not a little touched with the infertile 
 spirit of Prussia. So personally amiable a man could 
 not, of course, have anything but loathing for the 
 grosser abominations of Potsdam. He has none of 
 the Junker's blood-lust, and none of his griping avarice. 
 But he is cursed with not a little of the Prussian 
 sterility. His mind has the harshness of the East 
 wind of the Baltic flats and the gritty unfriendliness 
 of the soil of Mecklenburg. It is destitute of sym- 
 pathy, of insight, of flexibilit}^. His head is hard, with 
 the hardness of iron-wood, which is still wood. 
 
 Within its narrow limits the Carson intellect is as 
 keen as the razor-like Carson face. But nothing will 
 grow on a razor except the rust that spoils it. Even 
 in his own profession Sir Edward Carson has produced 
 little but verdicts and. vast fees. He does not belong 
 to the Mansfields and Eldons. No eager student at 
 the Temple will ever turn to him for illuminating 
 exposition of that enormous legend of the law. Only 
 those who aim to be masters of the art of browbeating 
 will study with emulous admiration the classics of 
 cross-examination which lie to his credit. 
 
 In some respects the Prussian has an advantage 
 over Sir Edward. He, at least, knows Europe, though 
 with the lower knowledge of hate; Sir Edward does 
 not even know England, perhaps not Ireland. The 
 Prussian has some wooden sense of construction, 
 though we may chiefly pray to be saved from what 
 he builds: Sir Edward Carson has only made name 
 and fame as a critic or a destroyer. The Prussian aims 
 at a soulless kind of S3^mmetry : Sir Edward strives for 
 the perpetuation of the amorphous. He is rightly 
 insistent on the satisfaction of the French claim for 
 Alsace-Lorraine. Yet his attitude to the Irish of his 
 own native Dublin is that of the Prussian garrison 
 in Alsace. He regards them with the stiff Prussian
 
 SIR EDWARD CARSON 31 
 
 intolerance for a happier and perhaps healthier 
 race. 
 
 The whole truth about the Ulster intrigues will 
 probably not emerge in our lifetimes. Whether the 
 fanatic or the party man was uppermost when Sir 
 Edward Carson blessed the Covenant of contingent 
 rebellion in the presence of the Ulster lords and 
 Galloper Smith — this we do not and cannot know. 
 But we do know now — Mr. Gerard has made it clear — 
 that Potsdam betted heavily on Carsonism. Potsdam 
 may have been wrong. But some part of the readiness 
 with which Germany accepted a great risk was un- 
 doubtedly due to the conviction that the schism was real 
 and serious, that it affected the discipline of the British 
 Army, and would probably paralyze British diplomacy. 
 In the general truce and amnesty of 19 14 these 
 things were more or less forgotten in England. Un- 
 happily they could not be forgotten in Ireland. When 
 the Coalition of 191 5 was formed, Mr. Redmond stood 
 out ; Sir Edward Carson came in ; and with his entry, 
 conveying the implication that Home Rule was dead, 
 went the last hope of maintaining Irish unity, already 
 impaired by War Office mistakes. The only apparent 
 explanation of this great political blunder was that 
 " Ulster's strong man " would be safer inside the 
 Cabinet than out. But Mr. Asquith lost Ireland with- 
 out even gaining Sir Edward Carson. In a few months 
 he flung out of the Cabinet in a pet, and became the 
 centre of a new set of disintegrating intrigues. 
 
 His reputation gained enormously by a dramatic 
 revolt against supposed incompetence, and there were 
 millions who hailed him as chief Sandow when Mr. 
 Lloyd George formed his Cabinet of strong and silent 
 men. But Sir Edward Carson was fated not to satisfy 
 these expectations. That force of character which 
 had prevailed against the British Cabinet and the
 
 32 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Irish Government was powerless against the German 
 submarine and the Admiralty " dug-out." It was 
 understood that the Carson broom was to make a 
 clean sweep of all the cobwebs which had collected 
 under Mr. Balfour's gentle sway. It may have been 
 all a myth ; there may have been no cobwebs. In any 
 case Sir Edward Carson's advent made no perceptible 
 difference. He announced betimes that he knew 
 nothing of naval affairs and should be guided in all 
 things by his advisers ; that pledge he seems to have 
 fulfilled to the letter. Before, however, he had well 
 settled down the Prime Minister decided on placing 
 Sir Eric Geddes, the ex-railway manager, in his place, 
 and it was announced that Sir Edward Carson's calm 
 wisdom would now be unrestrictedly at the disposal 
 of the War Cabinet. 
 
 Shortly it appeared exactly how the calm wisdom 
 was to be employed. Propaganda, it seemed, was 
 needed to bring home to the British masses the justice 
 of the cause for which this country had been fighting 
 for over three years. It had to be explained that our 
 sword was drawn in the interests of small nationalities, 
 for the vindication of public law, and for the further- 
 ance of democratic ideals. It might be thought that 
 this quite measurable task could have been entrusted 
 to a statesman of less questionable eminence — one who 
 had never employed a private commander-in-chief, 
 landed guns for contingent rebellion, or obtained con- 
 ditional promises from " some of the greatest generals 
 in the Army." Yet Sir Edward Carson was chosen 
 to convince the British Pacifist of his errors. It was 
 a grim and costly jest on Mr. Asquith's part to en- 
 trust him, as Attorney-General, with the guardian- 
 ship of laws he had boasted of breaking. It was an 
 even subtler pleasantry to make him the chief director 
 of our spiritual munition department.
 
 SIR EDWARD CARSON 33 
 
 Sir Edward Carson is troubled, however, with no 
 inconvenient sense of humour, and stolidly carried 
 out his duties despite the toning down of his " Talk 
 to me of a League of Nations " speech, and other 
 rather embarrassing outbursts. But the re-emergence 
 of the Irish question at last brought matters to a head. 
 It became plain that Sir Edward could no longer serve 
 the King and " Ulster " at one and the same time. 
 He chose Ulster, and resigned for the second time in 
 three years. It might have been thought that at 
 last his mind was made up to confine himself to Irish 
 affairs. But his political ambitions, despite the con- 
 tempt he always expresses for politics, are believed 
 to be too importunate for comfort in the cold shades. 
 There is already talk of new combinations. It is 
 suggested that Sir Edward is more than a little in- 
 terested in the so-called " National " Party, chiefly 
 consisting of dissatisfied Unionists. But it may 
 well be questioned whether this singular man, the 
 strangest fanatic the present generation has seen, will 
 ever lead any considerable body of Englishmen. 
 
 For Sir Edward Carson has no quality that appeals 
 to the English except his undoubted courage. His 
 solemn rants are not understood by a people prone to 
 under-expression of their deeper feelings. Even in 
 1 914 his heroics, like the speeches of the German 
 Emperor, savoured faintly of ridicule. Now they 
 seem quite unpleasantly out of harmony with the 
 general mood. Mere verbal intemperance, however, 
 is often treated by the English with strange tolerance. 
 It is levity in action which arouses the deep and lasting 
 distrust of the masses in this country. Lord Randolph 
 Churchill was considered to have stuff in him until 
 he resigned; after that, though he often talked more 
 wisely than before, he had no audience. 
 
 Sir Edward Carson lost any popular following he 
 
 3
 
 34 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 might have had in Great Britain when his second 
 resignation was published. What hold he may retain 
 on individual Unionist statesmen is less easy to deter- 
 mine ; it is whispered that nobody is precisely anxious 
 to co-operate with him again. But Irish miseries 
 acquaint politicians with strange bedfellows, and 
 while it is impossible to get on with Sir Edward it may 
 well prove equally impossible to get on without him.
 
 MR. ASQUITH 
 
 There are certain things that England does very 
 well, and Mr. Asquith is one of them. One may 
 quarrel with the stuff and the fashion; but given 
 material and mode of treatment, malice itself cannot 
 deny that the product in its own way is very perfect. 
 
 If one had to express this eminent man in terms of 
 chemistry, the chief s3^mbols would stand for his 
 native Yorkshire town and for Balliol and its famous 
 master, that rather cynical instructor of budding 
 statesmen, Dr. Jowett. Mr. Asquith may be called 
 the Jowettate of Middleclassdom. The base of the 
 compound is of course his own sterling English intel- 
 ligence, weighty and acute, but rather prosaic; but 
 its character has been profoundly modified by the 
 culture of Oxford. 
 
 Herbert Henry Asquith was born in 1852 at Morley, 
 and almost his earliest recollection is of walking as a 
 Sunday-school child in a local procession to celebrate 
 the Crimean peace. Morley is one of those smaller 
 towns of the West Riding which, while closely con- 
 nected with the great seats of the staple industries, 
 remain free from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of 
 Leeds and Bradford, and conserve a strongly de- 
 veloped local consciousness. A town of little gra- 
 ciousness of aspect, rather overweighted architectur- 
 ally with Nonconformist chapels, it is hardly a spot 
 to which the weary man of the world, qui mores 
 hominum multorum vidit et urbes, returns lovingly in 
 his old age. But there are many worse places a 
 clever and ambitious youth of the middling class 
 
 35
 
 36 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 might choose to be born in. The village and the 
 country town tend to stagnation; in great centres 
 youth is apt to be stunned by the vastness of every- 
 thing : the seeming futility of a duel between the im- 
 mature individual and his environment has no doubt 
 crushed many a young Londoner of good natural 
 parts. A place like Morley, itself quite measurable, 
 but in no sense shut in, was capable at once of dis- 
 satisfying and stimulating. There was little to en- 
 courage passivity where the horizon was the chief 
 interest. Of Morley, with its breadth and narrow- 
 ness, its hard common-sense and rather raw material- 
 ism, there is still a good deal in Mr. Asquith. With 
 all his culture there remains much of the middle-class 
 mind, with its good and its not so good. Despite an 
 excellent acquaintance with literature, and a generally 
 good taste therein, he is in many matters something 
 of a Philistine. He belongs distinctly to the Vic- 
 torians, and would be wholly at home in Gath and 
 Askelon. In political tendencies as in literary tastes 
 he is old-fashioned . Fate has mixed him up with the 
 social reformers, but his heart has never been with 
 them; it beats constant to Stuart Mill. Perhaps 
 here again Morley helps; the statesman remembers 
 certain realities noted by the middle-class youth; 
 and that recollection forbids any illusion as to the 
 sudden perfectibility of the working masses, or, for 
 that matter, of their masters. Mr. Asquith is no 
 democrat. But he is very sincerely a Liberal of the 
 old individualist philosophy, and therefore a real 
 and sane thing, if a limited one. His Nonconformist 
 ancestry is little visible in externals; no man likes 
 better the theatre, cards, the chatter of attractive 
 women, or the consolations of good fiction. But there 
 is nevertheless in the grain of him a good deal of the 
 Puritan, old and new; the old came out in his obstinate
 
 MR. ASQUITH 87 
 
 duel with the Peerage, the new (more soft-hearted 
 and less hard-headed) was shown in his incapacity 
 to understand the real Prussia. 
 
 It is tempting to speculate how the mind and char- 
 acter of Mr. Asquith would have reacted to circum- 
 stances such as those of Mr. Lloj^d George's boyhood. 
 Would they have mellowed or embittered, widened or 
 narrowed, made him more or less human ? How 
 much has Mr. Asquith or the British world gained or 
 lost by the circumstance that life was made smooth, 
 but not too smooth, for him? " I can't have your 
 advantages, and you can't have mine," wrote the 
 self-made American to his son. " One man learns 
 the value of truth by going to Sunday School and 
 another by doing business with liars. One man is 
 sober because he had a good mother, and another 
 because his father drank the boots off his feet." 
 If Mr. Asquith was destitute of Mr. Lloyd George's 
 peculiar educational advantages he enjoyed many of 
 a different kind, and made the most of them. At the 
 City of London School he captured all the prizes; at 
 Oxford he became President of the Union, took the 
 highest degrees, carried off the Craven Scholarship, 
 made the right kind of friends. Jowett was rightly 
 proud of him. " Asquith is the one pupil of mine," 
 he said, " for whom I can most confidently predict 
 success in life." " Asquith will get on," he said, on 
 another occasion, " he is so direct." Jowettery was 
 the philosophy of getting on in its most dignified 
 guise, a sublimated opportunism, in which worship 
 of the main chance was robbed of its grossness and 
 made a fit faith for a scholar and a gentleman. 
 
 Jowett was justified of his spiritual child. Young 
 Asquith did get on, and by " direct " means. Apart 
 from the paternal means which assured him a first- 
 rate education, no man of our time owes less to
 
 38 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 external help or more to his own abilities. The Bar, 
 with Westminster in the offing, naturally attracted 
 him. At a very early age he had confided to a friend 
 his ambition — either to be Lord Chancellor or Prime 
 Minister — and the Bar was his only road to the Wool- 
 sack or the Treasury. The capacity of getting at 
 facts and stating them with the utmost lucidity was 
 Mr. Asquith's from boyhood. Certain pleadings, 
 drawn by an unknown junior, attracted the attention 
 of a great lawyer by their grasp and clearness; and 
 from that moment the professional success of the 
 young aspirant was assured. A wider reputation 
 was achieved by his appearance before the Parnell 
 Commission ; and this had hardly been confirmed 
 before Mr. Gladstone, struck by the quality of his 
 first Parliamentary speech, offered him the great post 
 of Home Secretary. There were many who saw 
 rashness in the experiment ; but such doubts could 
 not long survive; in his first official job Mr. Asquith 
 acquitted himself as if years of experience were 
 behind him; he spoke like a wise old man and acted 
 like a young and courageous one. Yet, despite this 
 precocious success, he hardly impressed his contem- 
 poraries as a future Prime Minister. It was not then 
 quite so emphatically as now the day of the lawyer- 
 politician ; the Woolsack rather than Downing Street 
 was the normal goal of a barrister M.P. To people 
 soaked in the Gladstonian tradition, too, the coldness 
 of Mr. Asquith's temperament, reflected in a most 
 austere diction, seemed to disqualify him for a party 
 leader. The hardness of youth has since been some- 
 what toned down ; advancing years have given rather 
 more warmth and humanity to Mr. Asquith's periods. 
 But his then st}de of speaking, though of great merit, 
 was somewhat too bare and bloodless to delight a 
 generation accustomed to the Victorian grand manner.
 
 MR. ASQUITH 39 
 
 A better description could not be than that of Mr. 
 Asquith's present wife when she was still Miss Tennant 
 and a comparative stranger: " He has a very good 
 voice and the rare qualities that make a great speaker 
 — imagination, restraint, brevity, and Voreille juste. 
 He does not strain the attention by discursive 
 parentheses, and is neither too precious, too pedantic, 
 nor too prepared to be listened to with confidence 
 and pleasure." 
 
 Higher praise in its kind could not be given ; but 
 this style of speaking was hardly even caviare to the 
 select of those days. But there was probably a 
 deeper reason for the failure to recognize in the young 
 Home Secretary something more than the ordinary 
 careerist lawyer. Mr. Asquith has at no time given 
 the impression of all that is in him. He does not 
 advertise. He has never cultivated the Press. He 
 has made no obeisance to the mob, even to the mob 
 called society. He disdains all kinds of display, and 
 habitually understates his personality. Moreover, 
 he exercises a curious economy of effort, almost 
 amounting to miserliness. There are some statesmen 
 who give the impression of being indefinably above 
 their best in performance; there are others who 
 occasion a constant surprise, not that they fail to 
 acquit themselves well, but that they are able to 
 carry out their functions at all. Mr. Balfour is the 
 great living representative of the former type. A 
 net cast at random anywhere in Whitehall would 
 secure a specimen of the latter. Mr. Asquith occupies 
 an almost unique position between these extremes. 
 He has never, like Mr. Balfour, suggested a vague and 
 even disappointing superiority, making one feel that 
 the result is less than it ought to be: he generally 
 appears adequate, and a little more, to the particular 
 task in hand, while somehow failing to give the idea
 
 40 UXCEXSOIiED CELEBRITIES 
 
 of supreme power. One might summarize by saying 
 that he has strength without mystery. He shows 
 an easy mastery, an almost careless competence, 
 as that of an express locomotive which always has a 
 little " in hand " even on its fastest run. Its steady 
 mechanical puff contrasts with the laboured panting 
 of some little shunting engine; it does its regular 
 fifty miles an hour, rises now and again to sevent}^, 
 and might do a hundred for all one knows. But there 
 is no witchery in the business, except perhaps to a 
 savage; indeed, it is rather the other way: the splen- 
 dour of the performance is obscured by its very ease 
 
 Thus it was that, even in his Liberal Imperialist 
 days, Mr. Asquith was counted second to a brilliant 
 trifler like Lord Rosebery; that it was considered 
 quite natural that he should serve under a mediocrity 
 like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman ; and rather 
 unnatural that on the death of the latter King Edward 
 should send for him as the only obvious Prime 
 Minister. Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Churchill were 
 far more in the public eye; Mr. Haldane had achieved 
 a success apparently as solid and rather more 
 picturesque; Sir Edward Grey enjoyed a perhaps 
 larger prestige. 
 
 As Chancellor of the Exchequer — after all only his 
 second official post — Mr. Asquith had shown himself 
 competent, but hardly inspired; the merit of Old Age 
 Pensions, which he had provided for, was claimed 
 by others ; and the memory of the services he had 
 rendered to the Liberal Party by his great speeches 
 in the Tariff controversy seemed scarcely more recent 
 to the Radical stalwarts than the (to them) less 
 fragrant recollections of his " Tabernacle " and 
 " Clean Slate " days. The Liberal Part}'- had had 
 one bitter experience of a leader out of touch with the 
 rank-and-file of the party ; there were very many who
 
 MR. ASQUITH 41 
 
 believed Mr. Asquith would prove as disastrous a 
 liability as Lord Rosebery. A year or two later the 
 same men were comparing him, with good intentions 
 but real unkindness, to Cromwell, in their laudation 
 of his victory over the House of Lords. 
 
 On the merits of that great conflict nothing need be 
 said. But as a mere exhibition of tenacity, tactical 
 skill, and patient courage the fight that followed the 
 Lords' rejection of the Budget of 1909 was remarkable. 
 Mr. Asquith not only inflicted defeat ; he made 
 recovery impossible. He was, of course, helped by 
 the mistakes of the enemy; Lord Lansdowne might 
 explain away his final surrender as a submission to 
 force majeure, but he had already given away the 
 moral case by his own Reform proposals. The House 
 of Lords emerged from the struggle not only worsted, 
 but a self-confessed anachronism, an admittedly 
 class institution, composed for the most part of men 
 whom its leader had deliberately described as unfit 
 to discharge the functions of a Second Chamber. It 
 had, moreover, been placed in the invidious position 
 of at least seeming to prefer the trumpery of titles, 
 dignities, ribands, and social prestige to real power 
 and dignity in the State. Nor was it the least bitter 
 part of the whole business that in the long conflict 
 moderation, restraint, and legalistic propriety were 
 on the side of the Prime Minister, while revolutionary 
 froth, violence, and lawlessness were the badge of the 
 defenders of privilege. 
 
 The conduct of this campaign established Mr. 
 Asquith 's reputation as a great master of Parlia- 
 mentary craft. The sequel was to reveal his weaker 
 side. The Unionist leaders, manoeuvred into a false 
 position, twice defeated at the polls, faced with schism 
 over the belated submission to threats of a swamping 
 creation of peers, played their last desperate card.
 
 42 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 They produced from their sleeves the Ulster trump, 
 the Knave of anarchy, and Mr. Asquith would not or 
 could play the King of lawful authority. He decided 
 only to wait and see, and did actually see at the last 
 what he should have foreseen from the first. The 
 reputation which had been impaired by a practical 
 breakdown of government in the spring and summer 
 of 1 9 14 was partially restored during the first months 
 of the war. Mr. Asquith then emerged, if not as a 
 great war Minister, at least as the splendid spokesman 
 of the nation. He is often sneered at as a mere 
 lawyer. But it was the lawyer's horror of Prussian 
 lawlessness that moved the man so tremendously as 
 to give his earlier war speeches the moral fervour of 
 a crusade as well as the balance and precision of a 
 statesman. Mr. Asquith 's words at this time were of 
 almost incalculable worth to the Allies in a world 
 still largely neutral, by no means unfriendly to Ger- 
 many on general grounds, and keenly critical of all 
 kinds of pretensions. A mishandling of our case 
 might have had the gravest effects; it was, in fact, 
 handled with supreme skill. 
 
 Administration was also characterized by great 
 energy and judgment. With marvellous smooth- 
 ness, considering the tremendous blow delivered to 
 the habits and prepossessions of centuries, the transi- 
 tion was made from a state of profound peace to 
 a state of war on every ocean and in almost every 
 continent. Mr. Asquith has been assailed both for 
 our unpreparedness for war, and for the delay with 
 which, after the actual declaration, our latent 
 resources were made available. The fuller knowledge 
 of another generation will probably render an entirely 
 different verdict. It will lay stress on the speed with 
 which moderate existing means were mobilized, on 
 the astonishing efficiency of their employment, and
 
 MR. ASQUITH 48 
 
 on the wide scope and vigorous nature of the measures 
 taken for the ultimate increase of Great Britain's 
 contribution. Whether this enormous energy could 
 in any case have been maintained is a question that 
 cannot be resolved. It is scarcely doubtful that it 
 was not maintained. The formation of the First 
 Coalition Government may have proceeded from Mr. 
 Asquith's conviction that new blood was necessary, 
 or it may have been forced on him by quite different 
 considerations ; but in any case the fall of the Liberal 
 Administration was a practical confession of failure 
 somewhere or somehow. 
 
 In some respects the record of the reconstructed 
 Government was even more melancholy than that of 
 its predecessor. For rapidly multiplying resources 
 were more than nullified by multiplying reverses and 
 misfortunes. The gloomy years 191 5 and 19 16 could 
 show little to the credit of an account which displayed 
 on its debit side the disappointments of Gallipoli and 
 Mesopotamia, the great and immediately unfruitful 
 expenditure of life on the Western front, the Russian 
 reverses, the overrunning of Serbia and Rumania, 
 the losses by submarine, the unchecked aerial in- 
 vasions, and the Irish rebellion. How far Mr. 
 Asquith, as head of the Administration, could be 
 justly held responsible for military and diplomatic 
 failures is a question not to be lightly answered ; 
 while it would be unjust to ignore the skill with which 
 he reconciled the nation to conscription and Labour 
 to the modification of trade union practice. But, 
 when every allowance is made, both for the inherent 
 difficulties of the exterior situation and for constant 
 Cabinet and Parliamentary intrigues which embar- 
 rassed and finally overthrew him, it may well be that 
 there will remain something unrebutted in the 
 general indictment of Mr. Asquith as a war minister.
 
 44 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Indeed, there are features of his character and 
 general habit of mind which would largely explain 
 such failure. Though he prefers to give the world an 
 impression of coldness, he is really a most kindly man, 
 in whom loyalty to friends and the desire to " get on " 
 are dangerously prone to affect judgment. Macaulay 
 has remarked that the worst of all rulers is he who 
 puts the feelings of those he sees daily before the 
 interests of the millions he will never see and who 
 will sacrifice a distant province in order to be sur- 
 rounded by smiling faces. Mr. Asquith, who has been 
 described as " the comrade rather than the chief " 
 of his fellow-Ministers, would no doubt not consciously 
 neglect a public duty on account of a private partiality. 
 But in fact his policy often suffered because it 
 pained him to throw over a friend or irked him to 
 put his foot down on a rebel. It was so in peace, 
 and it has been so in war. A wise regard for 
 " national unity " has, it may be suspected, some- 
 times been reinforced by disinclination to be dis- 
 agreeable. Moreover, he is an easy man in another 
 sense. The word " indolent" might be more accur- 
 ately used but for the fact that it is so little under- 
 stood how much of the best work of the world is done 
 by indolent people. Mr. Asquith possesses immense 
 reserves of mental energy, but, like many millionaires, 
 he likes to keep a large balance and has an objection 
 to drawing cheques. He can get through the work 
 of half a dozen men when pressed, but he prefers to 
 economize effort when possible. This tendency has 
 been the main cause of the many embarrassments in 
 which he has been involved. Again and again, before 
 the war, it looked as if the Government must fall, 
 when Mr. Asquith has put matters right by a master- 
 piece of legerdemain. But this very skill in saving 
 desperate situations, and loosing the most fearsome
 
 MR. ASQUITH 45 
 
 tangle " familiar as his garter," only proves the 
 existence of a weakness. The finest driver may be 
 unfortunate sometimes, and when an accident happens 
 to his team it goes to his credit that he has made the 
 best of a bad job. But the man whose horses are 
 always going down on their knees will not be chosen 
 as a Roj^al whip, though he possesses a very genius 
 for getting them on their legs again without serious 
 damage. The plain man takes the view that the best 
 coachman is he who needs such dexterity least. Mr. 
 Asquith showed great resource, for example, in dealing 
 with the miserable Curragh affair. A less dexterous 
 Minister would have been ruined. But many Ministers 
 of quite moderate capacity would have avoided the 
 trouble altogether. 
 
 This lack of vigilance is partly, no doubt, due to the 
 lawyer's habit of leaving things till they arise. It is 
 the only way for a barrister in large practice. The 
 advocate who has to prosecute a forger on Monda} r , 
 to defend an interesting murderer on Tuesday, and 
 to lead in a sensational libel action on Wednesday 
 week, will concentrate his mind on the first before 
 he even begins to think about the others ; he knows 
 nothing will happen in thejneanwhile : the interesting 
 murderer will not be hanged before he has disposed 
 of the forger, and nothing will happen without notice 
 in the libel case. In the realm of action, however, 
 nothing can be left unwatched ; the price of safety 
 is perpetual vigilance. Yet the habits of a lifetime are 
 apt to govern the lawyer-statesman, and he often 
 tends to make his power of rapidly grasping a situa- 
 tion when it arises the excuse for not foreseeing and 
 providing for it in advance. The fault, it may be 
 observed, is by no means confined to statesmen be- 
 longing to the higher branch of the profession. 
 
 But if it ma}' reasonably be contended that Mr.
 
 46 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Asquith has most real defects as a chief Minister, and 
 that those defects were reflected in his war administra- 
 tion, common gratitude should have recognized the 
 great value of his contribution to the common stock, 
 and common decency should have prevented the 
 base outcry against him when he left office. The 
 cold magnanimity with which he has passed over 
 much public injustice and much private treachery 
 is a quality peculiar to him. Few men have been 
 attacked with more virulence; he is almost alone in 
 never replying to such attacks. Yet his forbearance 
 does not conciliate, and is probably not meant to do 
 so. There is, indeed, something enormously insulting 
 in his professed indifference — professed only, for he 
 is at bottom a sensitive man and feels keenly wounds 
 he disdains to betray by a wince or a whimper or 
 a retort. He will go to immense pains to defend a 
 colleague when the colleague is in the right, and often 
 when he is in the wrong ; but when he himself is con- 
 cerned slander goes unanswered. Like William III., 
 when asked why he did not notice a foul libel, he 
 would doubtless say, "J'ai pense que c'etait au- 
 dessous de moi." 
 
 Few politicians, too, can boast so complete an 
 immunity from any form of untruth. There have 
 been times when it seemed impossible to believe that 
 Mr. Asquith was stating the facts, yet circumstances 
 have always established his absolute veracity in 
 spirit and in letter. It is, indeed, little short of 
 marvellous that he is so seldom betrayed into un- 
 conscious inaccuracies. But his principles are fixed, 
 if he shows some squeezability in detail ; he has really 
 what is rare enough to-day, a political philosophy. 
 Few men more consistently refer to first principles 
 in dealing with problems of the moment; and, know- 
 ing himself how to reason, it is easy to understand
 
 MR. ASQUITH 47 
 
 that he has some contempt for those who know only 
 how to declaim. His memory is extraordinary; his 
 intellect is always under control ; and his language, 
 though precise, is guarded. It is probably little 
 known how much care often goes to the composition 
 of utterances which fill the discerning critics with 
 despairing admiration. Mr. Asquith can, indeed, 
 speak well without any kind of preparation. His 
 mentality is so disciplined, and his instinct for the 
 right word is so infallible, that his impromptus are 
 scarcely less clear-cut in their bronze massiveness 
 than his more elaborate efforts. But when he is 
 engaged on a speech or a document which he regards 
 as vitally important no pains are too great ; he will go 
 over the whole thing, line by line and word by word, 
 submit and resubmit it to criticism, and part with it 
 only when he is assured that it cannot be bettered. 
 In preparing statements meant for American reading, 
 for example, he is infinitely careful not to employ any 
 expression, however correct according to our usage, 
 which might have a different shade of meaning on the 
 other side of the Atlantic. 
 
 But, after all, Mr. Asquith is a wholly truthful 
 man, chiefly because he is also, with all his limitation, 
 a wholly true man. Behind his intellectual accom- 
 plishment is a character that extorts respect from all 
 who are themselves worthy of being respected. 
 He is not least English in his complete honesty. The 
 machine of his mind may not be fitted for some work, 
 but it is true and well wrought. His character may 
 lack some of the graces, but its foundations are as 
 adamant. The victim of much small meanness is 
 himself incapable of anything small or mean. Opinions 
 may vary widely as to Mr. Asquith 's political game. 
 But the candid observer must admit that he has 
 always played it like a gentleman.
 
 THE EARL OF DERBY 
 
 Lord Derby is not the sort of man of whom one would 
 
 wish to speak flippantly. He is entitled to the same 
 
 sort of respect one pays to a fifteenth-century manor 
 
 house now used as a tavern. It bears witness to a 
 
 venerable past. It enjoys a comfortable and useful 
 
 present. Lord Derby has the same double claim on 
 
 our regard. As a monument he is more interesting 
 
 than the Albert Memorial. As a human individual he 
 
 is not destitute of a certain modest merit. He has 
 
 censored Press telegrams, convicted poachers, done 
 
 a little soldiering of the ornamental kind, gone through 
 
 the motions of controlling the Post Office (the real 
 
 workers have not forgotten that he called them a set 
 
 of " bloodsuckers "), and done most of the things a 
 
 great noble is supposed to do. And there is much 
 
 health in him. 
 
 His earlier war service now belongs to history, and 
 
 we will let history deal with it. He carried through 
 
 the voluntary recruiting campaign with much bustle 
 
 and hustle, and rounded it off with probably the most 
 
 confused statement ever published as an official paper. 
 
 Still, the thing was done. As Under-Secretary for 
 
 the War Office in Lord Kitchener's time, he was not 
 
 conspicuously wanting; he knew something about the 
 
 Department, and he was not the man to stray far 
 
 from the beaten track. No doubt Lord Derby has 
 
 all kinds of virtues in a subordinate position. He 
 
 might even go unchallenged as a chief in times when 
 
 it is clearly understood that public work matters little, 
 
 and party claims matter much. Unfortunately, these 
 
 4 8
 
 THE EARL OF DERBY 49 
 
 times are wholly different. It does matter who con- 
 trols the War Office during the greatest war of history ; 
 and when Lord Derby assumed that control his 
 inadequacy was too obvious to be obscured by any 
 irrelevant prestige. 
 
 If blue blood supplied the place of grey matter, and 
 the intricacies of a family tree were as important as 
 the convolutions of a living brain, Lord Derby need 
 have feared no criticism. He has almost too much 
 blue blood. It deepens the ruddiness of his pleasant 
 face, and even gives him rather the effect of wearing 
 too tight a collar. No living man can claim more. 
 On his mother's side he descends from the Clarendons, 
 and he is the seventeenth Stanley to sign himself 
 " Derby." One of his ancestors was that Lord 
 Stanley who betrayed Richard III. at Bosworth, and 
 earned the favour of the unkingly Richmond. An- 
 other sat in judgment on Mary, Queen of Scots. The 
 Derbys enjoyed regal powers in the Isle of Man, and 
 one of the race refused the throne of Greece some 
 time last century, preferring, in Disraeli's bombastic 
 phrase, Knowsley to the Parthenon and Lancashire to 
 the Attic Plains . 
 
 In personal honours and endowments, Lord Derby 
 is equally fortunate. His ancestors, common-sense 
 men who kept steadily on the right side in politics, 
 have handed down to him title-deeds to seventy thou- 
 sand acres, including the site of a good deal of Liver- 
 pool. He is a Knight of the Garter. For better or 
 worse he is also a Knight of Grace of St. John of 
 Jerusalem and a member of the Jockey Club. And 
 he is a fine large man, who looks extremely well in 
 his robes; perhaps a little less well in the ordinary 
 dress of a well-to-do Englishman, for all the skill of 
 his tailor does not hide the fact that there is just a 
 
 little too much of him. 
 
 4
 
 50 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 If you should happen to meet Lord Derby, know- 
 ing who he was, you could hardly fail to think him 
 a very remarkable man. You would revel in his fine 
 bluff English manner. You would find a subtle charm 
 in the way in which, as his admirers note, he " calls 
 a spade a spade." The blunt features, the full neck, 
 the shrewd eyes, and unfurrowed forehead would all 
 become significant. For it is not in human nature — 
 certainly not in British nature — to separate the man 
 from his title, his acres, his pedigree, and the fuss and 
 prestige of it all. 
 
 But if you were to meet Lord Derby in a first-class 
 carriage going North, 3 r ou would probably get the im- 
 pression of a prosperous manufacturer blossoming into 
 a Park Laner. He has just a suspicion of the Lan- 
 cashire accent, and more than a touch of the Lanca- 
 shire brusqueness. He radiates, too, the strong but 
 limited common sense of the type. 
 
 Again, if you transferred his Lordship from first 
 class to third, took off his Jermyn Street kit and 
 clothed him in cheap tweeds, you might just as easily 
 take him for a trade union delegate. I remember, in- 
 deed, seeing him pointed out, on an occasion when 
 Ministers were on show, as one of the Labour Members, 
 whereas Mr. George Barnes was unconsciously masque- 
 rading as a member of the hereditary aristocrac3 r . 
 Indeed, Lord Derby, had some night-tripping faity 
 changed him at birth, might with no great incongruity 
 fill the part of secretary to the Amalgamated Society 
 of Brewery and Aerated Water Trades Transport 
 Workers. 
 
 He has something of the Tudor roughness. Like 
 Harry the Eighth, one can well imagine him wrestling 
 with a butcher on a village green, and kissing the 
 butcher's sweetheart after giving him his licking. 
 He is equally at home with the masses and the classes.
 
 THE EARL OF DERBY 51 
 
 He is not only a man of the world but a man of more 
 worlds than one. The shades of sixteen Earls of the 
 Stanley blood do not prevent him from descending, on 
 selected occasions, to demagogy. He is at home with 
 a comedian in the green-room, a bookmaker on the 
 turf, or an interrupter at a public meeting. If the 
 late George Wyndham might be taken as the Athos 
 of British aristocracy, and Lord Lansdowne as its 
 Aramis, Lord Derby is even more its Porthos. So 
 rich, so insolently brave, with so much muscle, and 
 — well, Porthos needs no further description. 
 
 But Porthos had, with all his bluffness, an occa- 
 sional weakness for the part of Aramis . He sometimes 
 intrigued — though not in the manner of M. l'Abbe. 
 Now intrigue is exactly what Lord Derby cannot abide. 
 " We'll have no intriguers here !" he has said, in the 
 decisive tones of Mistress Quickly on " swaggerers." 
 The mere facts are, of course, that in the transactions 
 that led to Mr. Asquith's resignation Lord Derby played 
 a not unimportant part. He supported Mr. Lloyd 
 George militant, and received his reward from Mr. 
 Lloyd George triumphant. But was there here any 
 intrigue ? Let Lord Derby himself answer. In the 
 course of a handsome eulogium on himself, delivered 
 a few days after the change of Government, he re- 
 marked : " I know of no intrigues. I would not have 
 been in one if I had known it, you may rest assured." 
 And, as if this were not enough, he returned to the 
 subject ten minutes later. " I hope you will believe 
 that I will never be disloyal, and I will never enter 
 into an intrigue." He had, he said, " no personal 
 motive of any sort or kind," " no ulterior motive 
 whatever " : there never was such a categorical nega- 
 tive since the Grand Inquisitor's in The Gondoliers. 
 
 Of course, one takes the noble Earl's word for it. 
 But one cannot help feeling rather like Mr. Micawber
 
 52 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 after his wife has assured him for the sixtieth time 
 that she would never desert him : " My dear, I am not 
 conscious that you are expected to do anything of the 
 sort." It needed no such emphasis to make us believe 
 Lord Derby; indeed, such is the inconsistency of 
 human nature, we might have had a somewhat more 
 profound sense of his disinterestedness had he less in- 
 sisted on calling attention to it. Nobody thinks Lord 
 Derby self-seeking in the vulgar sense. Men with 
 seventy thousand rich acres are seldom that. Becky 
 Sharp has put it on record that she would have 
 been an innocent lamb on fifty thousand a 3^ear. 
 There are, however, other objects of ambition beside 
 the salary of a Minister. 
 
 At any rate, though he does not intrigue, Lord 
 Derby is by no means indifferent to things which some- 
 times interest intriguers. He knows how to manage 
 an editor just as well as an audience. Perhaps Mr. 
 Lloyd George told him all about it. He fully under- 
 stands what is meant by a good Press. He is even 
 suspected of deliberately adopting the John Bull pose 
 — as deliberately as Mr. Bottomley, whom he rather 
 resembles in Bullish frankness and sturdy indiscretion. 
 Unlike Mr. Balfour, he diligently reads the papers, 
 and is not altogether displeased when they comment 
 on his upright and downright slap-a-man-on-the- 
 shoulder heartiness. It was perhaps not quite an 
 accident that the idea of a Centre Party began to gain 
 ground just after his elevation, though it was, of 
 course, pure chance that " a level-headed, patriotic, 
 practical, all-British and no-nonsense statesman — Lord 
 Derby is the type of man who springs to the eye " — 
 was immediately suggested as the Centre Party's Chief. 
 
 Lord Derby's newspaper reputation stood him in 
 good stead during a year of great office. He might not 
 be brilliant, but who wants brilliance in England ?
 
 THE EARL OF DERBY 53 
 
 He might not be very apprehensive or sympathetic, 
 but Holdfast and Grumble are the dogs for many 
 Britons' money. Lord Derby had two qualities that 
 rendered others unnecessary. He was English, and 
 he was Straight. A more rectilinear politician could 
 not be. The malignant critic might point to verbal 
 inconsistencies. He might show an unkept promise 
 here, an unfulfilled calculation there, an indefensible 
 piece of red-tape somewhere else. That was the 
 system. It could not be Lord Derby, the moral 
 parallelogram of the British peerage. 
 
 But at last people began to ask why Lord Derby 
 should be at the War Office at all, if the " system " 
 ran itself. Murmurs began to be heard, and presently 
 swelled into a considerable volume of straight speech. 
 It became the fashion to talk of the " soullessness " 
 of the War Office. Lord Derby, it seems, had been 
 expected to radiate soul in Whitehall. More sub- 
 stantial critics suggested that the Department had 
 by no means kept pace with the increasing demands 
 on its intelligence and resource. For some time this 
 flood of censure was, as usual, pooh-poohed in public 
 and anxiously discussed in private. Mr. Lloyd George, 
 always quick to distinguish between criticism with 
 and criticism without a popular backing, was not 
 long in deciding that a change was necessary. 
 
 The manner of the change was highly characteristic. 
 The Prime Minister satisfied at once his instinct for 
 the safe course and his relish for a practical jest. 
 He made Lord Milner Secretary for War and Lord 
 Derby Ambassador in Paris. The French are said 
 to be delighted. The English were amused, and not 
 displeased. The voice of criticism was silenced. 
 Ambassadors, like Kings, cannot be exposed to com- 
 mon censure.
 
 VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON 
 
 Viscount Grey — he prefers the more formal style to 
 avoid confusion with other lordly Greys — is, or was, 
 known in Germany as " Liar Grey." To Germans, 
 in their present haste, all Englishmen are liars. But 
 this Englishman is prince and chief of liars. He 
 stands on a lonely pinnacle. His home is in the higher 
 Alps of mendacity, far above the line of stunted truth 
 and the eidelweiss of small deceit, in the region of 
 eternal falsity. 
 
 It is a curious example of the mirage effects of an 
 atmosphere of war and hate. In this country Vis- 
 count Grey has many critics and possibly a few 
 enemies. He has been attacked as a reckless Im- 
 perialist and derided as a futile and bewildered Pacifist. 
 There are some who think that he might have avoided 
 war by concession, and more who think that he might 
 at least have postponed it b} r boldness. He is an 
 object of real mistrust to a section of his own part}', 
 and of affected contempt to those who denounce what 
 they call the " Old Gang." In the reaction against a 
 once common idolatry there are many who suggest 
 that his solemnity was only the mask of puzzle- 
 headed mediocrity. More rationally it is held that no 
 man was ever so wise as Viscount Grey looked, and 
 that no small part of his great prestige was due to his 
 Roman profile, his aloof manner, and his rigid economy 
 in speech. 
 
 Viscount Grey, indeed, has been, since his resigna- 
 tion, a target for all the shafts that go the way of 
 the wounded buck. But nobody in this country has 
 
 54
 
 VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON 55 
 
 yet cast an imputation on his veracity. There are 
 some accusations that malice itself rejects. Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw's bitterest enemy never accused him of 
 Vitellian gluttony. The Archbishop of Canterbury 
 has escaped denunciation as a fanatic. It is rarely 
 suggested that Mr. Belloc's great-grandfather was a 
 rabbi, or that Mr. Chesterton draws his main income 
 from an illicit cocoa factory. So with Viscount Grey. 
 Nobody accuses him of lying for the same reason that 
 nobody compliments him on telling the truth ; it would 
 be simply silly to do so. 
 
 That is the common view among Englishmen. If it 
 be objected that we are partial the answer is " Call 
 Prince Lichnowsky." The late German Ambassador 
 watched the late Foreign Secretary, during many 
 critical months, with close and suspicious scrutiny. 
 He had, of all men, motive and opportunity to apply 
 the severest tests. Writing in retirement, far from 
 an}' - associations likely to disturb his judgment, he 
 has set down in a document intended only for posterity 
 his deliberate judgment of the man his countrymen 
 denounce especially as a liar. " The simplicity and 
 honesty of his ways," says the Prince, " secured him 
 the esteem even of his opponents. Lies and intrigue 
 were equally repugnant to him." 
 
 How then are we to account for the fact that, while 
 Mr. Asquith and others are attacked on various 
 grounds, the consistent German charge against 
 Viscount Grey is that so coarsely conveyed in the 
 epithet applied to him ? In all German outbursts 
 one constant note is struck with evident sincerity. 
 We are the " treacherous " English. The Germans 
 clearly believe the expectations they formed concern- 
 ing our attitude to be rationally founded : hence their 
 rage against the man who misled them. The truth, 
 it may be guessed, can be expressed in the reversal
 
 56 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 of a famous epigram. " II ment toujours; il ne 
 trompe jamais," said Talleyrand of a Teutonic states- 
 man. Sir Edward Grey never lied, but he did de- 
 ceive. It was not his fault, of course. He told the 
 simple truth on every occasion, expecting himself 
 to be understood as doing so. German statesmen, 
 accustomed to weigh every possibility but this, 
 always read into his words more or less than their 
 face value, which happened to be also their real value. 
 
 In 191 3 Viscount Grey's policy was generally 
 applauded in this country as not only generous but 
 wise. In many quarters it is now conceived to have 
 been less wise than generous. But it was always 
 perfectly consistent and straightforward. He clung 
 to the understanding with France, of which Mr. 
 Balfour's prescient wisdom had seen the necessity. 
 He extended that understanding to Russia. But 
 while maintaining these friendships, he sought to 
 remove all causes of friction with German}', as a 
 preliminary to establishing better relations all round, 
 and placing the peace of Europe on a stable basis. 
 
 We know now that it was all a dream. But there 
 are some who still believe, despite a mass of evidence 
 to the contrary, that it was a dream not only capable 
 of realization, but very nearly realized. No doubt 
 Viscount Grey, perhaps misled by the enthusiasm of 
 Lord Haldane, gravely miscalculated the forces in 
 Germany making for war. It is pretty certain that, 
 when the feeble German peace party was overwhelmed, 
 every honest attempt on his part to reach an accum- 
 modation only made matters worse. Soils- Bismarcks 
 of the Kiderlen-Waechter stamp, Pan-Germans enrages 
 like Tirpitz, only interpreted his bids for German 
 friendship as half-promises to betray France and 
 Russia on suitable terms. Every approach was mis- 
 read. Plain statements were invested with sinister
 
 VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON 57 
 
 significance. There are, indeed, no mistakes so coarse 
 as those of the clever cynic in dealing with a man of 
 plain average intellect and more than average honesty, 
 and the fury of a woman scorned is mild resentment 
 compared with the rage of the practised deceiver who 
 is outwitted by mere integrity. Each little world has 
 its own code of honour, often monstrously at variance 
 with the code of the great world. To the able diplo- 
 matists of Berlin Viscount Grey was not playing 
 " cricket " when he used words to express his thoughts. 
 They could have forgiven him had he lied and lost. 
 They might have felt less bitterly had he lied and won. 
 But they hate him above all others because, so to 
 speak, he hit diplomatically below the belt, and used 
 truth as a knuckleduster. To them he is the supreme 
 liar by virtue of an unprofessional veracity. 
 
 We cannot regret that a man who represents the 
 highest type of English character was in charge of our 
 affairs during the years of disturbed equilibrium that 
 preceded the war. We ma}' have much to lament ; 
 we have nothing to blush for. It is a proud thing 
 for our nation that, while every addition to our know- 
 ledge of those years throws into blacker relief the 
 dishonesty of the Jew and Junker combinations of 
 Berlin and Vienna, the spotless integrity of Viscount 
 Grey, like a snowclad mountain when dawn is chasing 
 night away, reveals itself more dazzling with each 
 increase of light. But it might have been better for 
 England and Europe if that English straightforward- 
 ness had been modified by another quality. Viscount 
 Grey's mind is wholly innocent of irony. He went to 
 the European fair with something of the guilelessness 
 of Moses Primrose when he invested in the gold- 
 rimmed spectacles. The German cynics were foolish 
 to deny the existence of gold ; but there is something 
 to be said for a healthy scepticism. Viscount Grey
 
 58 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 was a little too much impressed by the undeniable 
 shagreen spectacle cases. He was a shade too 
 gentlemanly to apply an acid test to the spectacle 
 rims. 
 
 The truth is that, with the highest qualities of his 
 caste, he has some of its defects. Though capable of 
 much work, he is constitutionally indolent. It is 
 astonishing, indeed, in view of his character and cir- 
 cumstances, that he was ever induced to shoulder the 
 great burden he bore for ten years. Of vulgar ambi- 
 tion he possesses no trace, and the objects of a healthy 
 ambition were his without effort. With ample 
 possessions, a pedigree more noteworthy than that 
 of any but a dozen noble families, a singularly sane 
 and wholesome temperament, tastes that demanded 
 no more than his patrimony could easily supply, there 
 was every reason that a life of dignified obscurity 
 should handsomely suffice him. Patriotism, friend- 
 ship, or what not turned the scale of his inclinations, 
 but his character remained. He did his work, but 
 not as a workman who loves his work as a mistress. 
 With unequalled experience, he was always something 
 of the amateur. He did not even trouble to acquire 
 the tourist's knowledge of foreign countries. He never 
 went abroad; he fished instead. He understood only 
 French, and did not speak that. What was more im- 
 portant, he lacked that instinctive understanding of 
 the European mind which in some Foreign Ministers 
 has compensated for the want of first-hand knowledge. 
 Looking through his despatches, he saw Grey where 
 another would have detected red, or black, or Im- 
 perial purple. To him there was one Grey at the 
 Quai d'Orsay, another in the Wilhelmstrasse, another 
 in the Balplatz — all English Greys, as upright, as 
 limited, as wholly reasonable. That peculiarly English 
 quality which may be described as cosy aloofness
 
 VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON 5Q 
 
 was his; the quality which made us look on our 
 island as an anchored ship and the few miles of Channel 
 as an impassable barrier against the envy of less happy 
 lands. His judgment of European problems was 
 coloured by the assumption that the superiority of 
 our moral and physical position rendered us immune. 
 We see him often busy on the circumference of the 
 problem — Agadir and the like — up to the last dread- 
 ful disillusionment. There is no evidence that he 
 reached the heart of the matter, that he recognized 
 that Britain might, instead of acting the part of 
 dignified referee, have to fight for very life. 
 
 It was, after all, the common heritage from the 
 Victorian time, this notion that alone among nations 
 Great Britain was safe: safe to attack, if the mood 
 took her, safe from being attacked. If Viscount Grey 
 failed to estimate in time the full perils of his policy, 
 it is his glory that he did not shrink from them when 
 they were revealed . To his sense of honourable obliga- 
 tion, and perhaps also to his youth — for he was not 
 old enough to be under the full spell of the Victorian 
 tradition — the nation owes it that it trod from the 
 first the rude and thorny path of dut}\ Had he 
 blenched, he would no doubt have turned the scales 
 in favour of an unrighteous and precarious neutrality, 
 and we should be to-da\ r paying the full price of that 
 betrayal. 
 
 After all allowance is made, some criticism seems 
 justified of the rather nerveless policy pursued by the 
 Asquith Cabinet before the war, a policy for which we 
 know, on the authority of Prince Lichnowsky, Viscount 
 Grey was responsible. Of the petulant outcry raised 
 against him for his course during the earlier war 
 period it is difficult to speak with moderation. The 
 house that is building is not as the house that is built. 
 In the security of the American alliance it is easy to
 
 60 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 forget that in dealing with a people so legally (and 
 indeed legalistically) minded as the Americans, an 
 arbitrary policy might have repeated, with fatal 
 results, the tragedy of 1812. The impartial historian 
 will probably decide that Viscount Grey, by courteous 
 inflexibility on essentials and by concession in all 
 doubtful cases, gained as much as we could reasonably 
 expect during that critical period before Germany 
 had wholly alienated American opinion. 
 
 A few months ago all this discussion might well 
 appear unprofitable. Viscount Grey's career seemed 
 to be closed. Judgment on it seemed to be an affair 
 for more leisurely times. But there are signs of some 
 reaction against the hurried verdict of 1916, and it is 
 well that the man who may yet be called on to under- 
 take great tasks — he must be called before he comes — 
 should be seen in a dry light. He is not what we 
 ordinarily understand as a great man. He lacks the 
 showier qualities. He has no power of compelling 
 speech. He wields not the bejewelled scimitar of 
 Mr. Lloyd George, nor the active rapier of Mr. Balfour, 
 nor the trenchant Roman blade of Mr. Asquith. In 
 sheer intellectual power he must yield to many of his 
 contemporaries. Even in the day of his greatest 
 prestige it was difficult to point to any specific superior- 
 ity, character apart, in explanation of his unique 
 position in England and Europe. 
 
 But Viscount Grey is an example of the truth that a 
 man may be larger than the sum of his qualities. If 
 he is not a great man, he is certainly a great English- 
 man. His chief weakness as a Foreign Minister was 
 that he was too English. It is, I think, his chief 
 strength to-day. He stands for English justice, 
 English moderation, English avoidance of extremes. 
 The world knows exactly what he means when he 
 speaks of a League of Nations — that he is neither
 
 VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON 61 
 
 chasing a sentimental will-o'-the-wisp nor fashioning 
 an instrument of permanent oppression for the de- 
 feated. The English people know what he means 
 when he avows himself a democrat while leading the 
 life of an aristocratic recluse. For they see in him 
 more than in most of his contemporaries that old 
 liberality which so long made the English oligarchy 
 almost popular. It may be that the world is doomed 
 to a worse anarchy than that which germinated the 
 seeds of the present desolation. It may be that this 
 country is destined to suffer the pangs of intestinal 
 strife as well as the cleaner wounds of foreign war. 
 But if those calamities are to be avoided it is to men at 
 once sanely democratic and wholesomely conservative 
 that we must look for leadership, and of that type 
 this country possesses no greater example than the 
 clean-souled and high-minded statesman who pained 
 many of his friends for the first and last time when 
 he consented to become the first Viscount Grey of 
 Fallodon.
 
 LORD ROBERT CECIL 
 
 Concerning Lord Robert, the most important fact is 
 that he is a Cecil. Next in importance is the circum- 
 stance that he happens to be a lawyer. He is, for 
 better or worse, the thrall of the family temperament. 
 But he is also a Cecil trained to an exacting and in 
 some senses a liberalising craft. 
 
 Every Cecil is a Cecil before everything. In no 
 English family does the type remain more constant. 
 There have been Cecils good and bad, brilliant and 
 stupid, fools and men of great qualities, if never quite 
 of the greatest. But running through ten generations 
 are discernible certain mental traits a good deal more 
 enduring than any physical feature. 
 
 I have read somewhere that the founder of this 
 distinguished house was a prosperous linen-draper 
 who " cut " his trade and turned squire. If so, we 
 may be pretty sure that he was an industrious appren- 
 tice of a type very different from the Hogarthian prig. 
 His eyes might be fixed firmly on the main chance and 
 the master's daughter; he might go to church with ex- 
 emplary regularity; but that would not prevent his 
 playing tricks incompatible with copybook perfection. 
 
 Five qualities are hereditary in the Cecils: a cer- 
 tain lordly care for the interest of the Cecils them- 
 selves which would be indelicate in men of lesser 
 breed ; a passionate attachment to the Church ; an in- 
 stinct of compromise which enables them, while main- 
 taining the extreme Tory position, to avoid the re- 
 proach of mere bigotry; a detachment which would 
 
 savour of pure arrogance were it not allied with con- 
 
 62
 
 LORD ROBERT CECIL 63 
 
 siderable simplicity of manners; and a singular vein 
 of grave rowdiness which breaks out in every 
 generation. 
 
 Macaulay has remarked upon the great Burleigh's 
 tendency to practical jokes when he lay at Gray's Inn, 
 and observes that to the last he was " somewhat 
 jocose." Only a very flexible statesman could have 
 saved his head and his fortune under Edward VI., 
 Lad} 7 Jane Grey, and Mary, to rise at once to great- 
 ness with the accession of Elizabeth. Only a very 
 zealous Protestant could have kept his reputation for 
 passionate orthodoxy after going regularly to Mass 
 while the fires of Smithfield were burning. And 
 Burleigh's integrity, no less than his care for future 
 Cecils, was shown by the circumstance that he left 
 behind him " only " three hundred distinct landed 
 properties, though by improper practices he could have 
 amassed a much larger fortune. 
 
 The great Lord Salisbur} 7 was Burleigh on a some- 
 what contracted stage. He had his period of squib- 
 writing at the Temple and of" ragging " in the House. 
 He helped the Church and his family where he could. 
 He stood quite aloof, and still retained a certain popu- 
 larity. He killed more " Liberal measures " than 
 any man, and yet contrived never to bring about a 
 life-and-death fight between Lords and Commons. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, though only half a Cecil, inherited 
 much of the Cecil character. His Fourth Party in- 
 subordination, his gay tyranny in Ireland, his con- 
 stant patronage of a Church with which he has little 
 intellectual sympathy, the taste for dialectical horse- 
 play which he shows even at an advanced age, his 
 capacity for escaping from every cul-de-sac prepared 
 for him by Free Traders and Tariff Reformers, the 
 kindness to kin which led him to shower places and 
 pensions among deserving Cecils, all derive from the
 
 64 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 original Burleigh; " fair " (when it was quite con- 
 venient) and " free »' (with the pickings of office). 
 
 Ot the great Victorian Cecil's sons, none has yet 
 achieved a place in which full play can be given to 
 all the Cecilian characteristics. Lord Hugh is still 
 in the tadpole stage, and Lord Robert is only just 
 emerging. The present Marquis looks as if he would 
 never emerge. But that they are true Cecils in every 
 respect their record has already made clear. 
 
 Mr. Gardiner's story of Lord Hugh gravely com- 
 plaining to his mother of the Socinian tendencies of 
 his nurse is excellent, but obviously inadequate. Had 
 his five-year-old lordship really suspected heresy in 
 that quarter, he would assuredly have adopted a quite 
 different formula of exorcism. He would have put 
 mustard in nurse's tea, kicked her shins, laid booby 
 traps for her, screamed and plunged, and made her life 
 impossible. For, while there is no question of the 
 sincerity of the Cecilian affection for " religion 
 orthodox " members of the family have no objection 
 to " apostolic blows and knocks " for its sake. They 
 will use in the defence of the Establishment all the 
 dodges of a welshing bookmaker to secure his evil gains. 
 Let an impious politician lay hands on the holy ark, 
 and the Cecils are not willing to leave him to Divine 
 vengeance. Trip him up, butt him in the waistcoat, 
 pull his hair, call his grandmother names; nothing 
 is amiss in dealing with the heretic. 
 
 These are qualities not altogether amiable. If they 
 were the only Cecilian qualities, or even if the Hugh- 
 ligan cast were predominant in the family character, 
 there would be little to distinguish its cadets from 
 dozens of mere partisan rowdies.' But if they some- 
 times do not care to remember that they are hereditary 
 gentlemen, the Cecils seldom permanently forget that 
 they are hereditary statesmen. And this is conspicu- 
 ously the case with Lord Robert.
 
 . LORD ROBERT CECIL 65 
 
 It is with something like a shock that one recalls 
 that he is fifty-three. That is another peculiarity 
 with the Cecils — their premature antiquity and their 
 prolonged immaturity. Lord Robert was never young, 
 and he grows old with difficulty. His political salad 
 days had scarcely ended when he accepted the sober- 
 ing burden of office. It seems but yesterday that 
 he was engaged on the Marconi hunt, which he en- 
 jo3^ed perhaps as a chase even more than as a political 
 purity crusade, though, to do him justice, he was 
 probably as shocked as most people with the " indeli- 
 cacies " he was probing. Marconi was not in the 
 Cecilian grand manner; when a Cecil jobs he does it 
 with a stately disregard of common opinion which 
 robs the thing of any suggestion of turpitude. 
 
 Those who saw it will always remember Lord 
 Robert's face when Mr. Asquith's name cropped up in 
 that inquiry. Mention was made of a certain letter 
 written by the Prime Minister. The gaunt pale 
 features of Lord Robert flushed with excitement ; he 
 humped his shoulders almost to deformity; the little 
 tuft produced by the friction of his wig fairly stood 
 upright ; his long neck emerged from his rather loose 
 collar until he gave the impression of some bird of the 
 vulture species scenting a new feast. I believe there 
 is such a thing as a Secretary bird . Lord Robert looked 
 like that, or at lowest like an Under-Secretary bird. 
 
 His disappointment was painful when the letter was 
 read ! It turned out to run something like this : "How 
 dull everything is ; nothing in the papers but Winston." 
 
 The artless innocence of that letter was a real blow 
 to Lord Robert. Not that he hated Mr. Asquith, but 
 it would be such fun to harpoon a victim of that dig- 
 nity. It was precisely the same spirit that barbed his 
 father's attacks on Gladstone: " The right honourable 
 gentleman reminds me of a pettifogging attorney 
 
 5
 
 66 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 (Oh, oh !) I beg the House's pardon. I have done 
 a great injustice to an honourable profession." 
 
 But there was just as much of the paternal Salisbury 
 in the resolution with which Lord Robert and his 
 brother went out into the wilderness over Tariff Reform . 
 Others might bow the knee to the Birmingham Rim- 
 mon; they must be excused. Excommunications 
 descended harmless on them. They lost their seats 
 and their tempers, but they stuck to their principles. 
 That, again, is the Cecil way. If there is the possi- 
 bility of making the best of both worlds, the Cecils 
 have no ambition for martyrdom. Burleigh thought 
 his head worth a mass, and his son bemoaned that 
 " 'Tis a great task to prove one's honesty without 
 marring one's fortune." But on some subjects 
 honesty must be proved, though there be as many 
 Chamberlains as there are iron plates in Birmingham. 
 
 This disinterestedness was the more obvious because 
 for the brothers there could be no question of a change 
 of allegiance, as in the case of Mr. Churchill. The) 7 
 were more bitter Tories without a party than with one. 
 The Cecil shawl could never be degraded by an alien 
 fringe, Celtic or otherwise. So they scratched and 
 kicked and screamed at friend and foe until Ireland, 
 the Church in Wales, and other questions came to 
 heal the breach. 
 
 At the beginning of the war the two lost sheep had 
 fairly got back to the home pasture, though hardly to 
 the fold. But even so late as the formation of the 
 Coalition there were not a few Unionists who resented 
 Lord Robert's inclusion, just as there were many 
 Marconi-mindful Radicals equally hostile. It is a 
 proof of the statesmanlike capacity which underlies 
 the more debatable elements of the Cecil character 
 that Lord Robert has lived down the latter prejudice 
 much more completely than the former. His only 
 bitter critics are the former Die-hards, who are now
 
 LORD ROBERT CECIL 67 
 
 Fight-hards, in the sense that they want the fight to 
 be as hard as possible. They decry him because we 
 are not now at war with America over a spirited 
 blockade stroke, because he has grasped the truth that 
 England and English interests are not the sole elements 
 in this world struggle, because he has declared whole- 
 heartedly for Mr. Wilson's policy. 
 
 All this, say his detractors, argues the spirit of the 
 trimmer, and Lord Robert is reminded of what his 
 great ancestor would have done. Of course, the great 
 ancestor would have done precisely the same. He did , 
 in fact, much the same. His whole virtue as a states- 
 man was a caution that never relaxed, a prudence that 
 was never tempted. That moderation which used 
 the rack as seldom as possible, and only " as gently as 
 such an uncivil thing could be used," also preserved 
 England from the fearful dangers to which a reckless 
 genius might have exposed her. 
 
 Lord Robert has shown a similar understanding of 
 the position and powers of this country. His lawyer 
 training has only strengthened a transmitted instinct 
 for temperance in claim and tenacity in negotiation. 
 His various replies to German pretensions have been 
 admirable in tone and matter. He has faults of style, 
 but he keeps them for the smaller occasions. He has 
 all the limitations of his caste and temperament, but 
 he does not allow them to interfere with a broad judg- 
 ment on the great questions. He would prefer an 
 England on the old pattern in a world such as we 
 knew before the war. But his Toryism is at least con- 
 servative; it aims at preserving. And Lord Robert 
 sees clearly that unless the world is to go a very long 
 way back it must take a considerable step forward ; 
 there is no staying still. 
 
 This perception is the explanation of a success 
 which has grown steadily more apparent. Lord 
 Robert has shown himself an excellent man of busi-
 
 68 VNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 ness in his Department; he is also the one recruit to 
 the Government who has given promise of much higher 
 things. For him the party truce has been a reality; 
 against the arch-conspirator of old da}'s attaches no 
 suspicion of entering into personal or party intrigue. 
 He was loyal to Mr. Asquith, because Mr. Asquith, 
 for the time, represented for him England alone. He 
 is loyal to his present chief for no better or worse 
 reason. Until the present business is over, he is 
 neither Whig nor Tory, but a British Minister. And 
 he sees much farther than most of his colleagues. 
 His main defect probably is that his vision is too 
 telescopic. He understands, like Mr. Balfour, the 
 necessity of solidarity with world-democracy. It is 
 yet doubtful whether he has come to understand that 
 there must be a fuller expression of democracy at home. 
 
 After all, he is the son of the statesman who de- 
 scribed an Indian Member of Parliament as a " black 
 man," and thought the English people would be more 
 interested in a circus than any extension of local self- 
 government. He is the brother of Lord Hugh, who 
 once said that no labouring man wanted a bathroom. 
 He lives, in short, physically in St. John's Wood, but, 
 morally, within the palings of the ancestral park. 
 
 Lord Robert has all the Cecil indifference to dress, 
 all the Cecil absence of personal affectation. With 
 his soft hat, black coat, and light trousers he might 
 pass for a Socialist intellectual. But there is a hard 
 core of aristocratic exclusiveness beneath. He typi- 
 fies that old house at Hatfield, which, on the very 
 verge of Greater London, is far more distant from the 
 Londoner than Chatsworth or Eaton Hall. 
 
 He will probably miss true greatness through this 
 detachment, which is one of the Cecil heirlooms. But 
 he is destined, doubtless, to go much further. Of all 
 the new men in the Government his is the solitary 
 figure which suggests_large possibilities.
 
 MR. BALFOUR 
 
 Among the writer's most vivid memories is that of 
 a dull meeting in a dull room in a dull street in the 
 City of London, looking its dullest in the gloom of a 
 late autumn afternoon nearly seven years ago. 
 
 Mr. Balfour, after defying for years the slings and 
 arrows of outrageous Tariff enthusiasts, had decided 
 on abdication. In a speech of great dignity he gave 
 an account of the stewardship he was about to sur- 
 render. He had reached an age, he said, when it was 
 commonly supposed that the powers of the mind and 
 will were on the wane. He could not honestly say 
 he had noticed any signs of degeneration in his own 
 case, but he was no impartial judge, and must bow to 
 the general sentiment that the leadership of the party 
 should be placed in younger and more vigorous hands. 
 
 The full irony of this valedictory oration was not 
 appreciated until, after an agitated interval, Mr. 
 Bonar Law reigned in Mr. Balfour's stead. Perhaps 
 it is not wholly appreciated still. For the conquerors 
 in the fight which Mr. Balfour had lost were wholly 
 innocent of irony. Had the dragon beaten St. George 
 it would no doubt have munched him without the 
 smallest suspicion that the dinner might be something 
 greater than the diner. With the same stolid gusto 
 the Confederates triumphed over their fallen leader. 
 It was the victory of the simple over the complex, of 
 an eager empiricism over a doubting philosophy. Mr. 
 Balfour fell because, like that very complete English 
 Tory, Hamlet, he was only sure of the disadvantages 
 of every course of action, and on the whole would 
 
 69
 
 70 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 rather endure the ills he had than fly to others that 
 he knew not of. With almost all the gifts that make 
 men great, he had one fatal disqualification for the 
 leadership of the Conservative Party as it existed in 
 191 1. He was a true conservative. And the Con- 
 servative Party was then everything but conservative. 
 The last thing it wanted was to stand still. It was 
 possessed by a Gadarene frenzy for advance, and Mr. 
 Balfour's offence was that he would not lead decisively 
 down the steep places of its desire. 
 
 To a superficial view at this time, Mr. Balfour's 
 career, however brilliant, must have given the pre- 
 dominating impression of failure. The memory of 
 the Irish Secretaryship had faded; events, too, were 
 daily giving a decisive though belated answer to that 
 talented essay in repression; the Irish problem might 
 not be insoluble, but certainly twenty years of resolute 
 government had not solved it. As to Mr. Balfour's 
 later career, the party under his leadership had gone 
 to pieces ; his authority had vanished ; he, the cham- 
 pion of Parliamentary fence, had been worsted by the 
 plain claymore of " C.-B."; his personal prestige had 
 been dimmed by the blaze of Mr. Chamberlain's glory. 
 Men had begun to speak of him as a philosopher. 
 There is only one lower level for an English statesman 
 of undeniable intellectual standing. It is to be called 
 a doctrinaire. 
 
 The war, however, has led to a general revaluation, 
 and Mr. Balfour's is one of the few reputations that 
 has constantly risen. True, this appreciation is con- 
 fined to a somewhat narrow circle, and applies only 
 to the more obvious aspects of Mr. Balfour's work, his 
 American mission, and so forth. For full justice he 
 will have to await the deliverance of posterity. But 
 the guess may be ventured that when all these vast 
 transactions have fallen into historic perspective his
 
 MR. BALFOUR 71 
 
 will be one of the two or three great figures emerging 
 from the crowd of small and very small men. At 
 present we are too near the canvas to see the picture ; 
 at the proper distance touches that seem irrelevant 
 and even grotesque will probably fall together as in 
 a masterpiece of Velasquez. 
 
 For example, that brilliant duel with Mr. Chamber- 
 lain, with all its incomparable skill, seems to the eye 
 of a contemporary pure futility. Mr. Balfour aimed 
 at preserving party unity, and split his party hope- 
 lessly. He tried to establish a common formula, and 
 actually succeeded in evolving half a dozen mutually 
 hostile cliques. He steered his barque with marvellous 
 skill past numberless snags, only to run it on a sand- 
 bank in the end. All this is incomprehensible — 
 remembering that we are dealing with a man of first- 
 rate mind and great Parliamentary talent — if we 
 consider Mr. Balfour only as a British statesman with 
 a vital interest in the fiscal question. It is easily 
 explicable if we view him as a Gallio on the issue 
 between Cobdenism and Chamberlainism, but also as 
 the one British statesman of European mind, chiefly 
 intent on the enormous European problem then shap- 
 ing. Just about the time Mr. Chamberlain launched 
 his Tariff campaign, Mr. Balfour discerned the new 
 tendencies on the Continent, and took the first steps to 
 meet them. His delaying tactics on the Tariff con- 
 troversy, his calm endurance of party insubordination, 
 his insensibility to ridicule and blindness to electoral 
 warnings, may be understood if we also grasp that 
 time was essential to confirm the new orientation in our 
 foreign policy, and that it was precisely for time for 
 this object that he was fighting. 
 
 His " weakness " at a later period is explicable on 
 similar assumptions. He wished to protect the 
 " rights " of property. He desired to guard the in-
 
 72 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 terests of the Church. He was determined if possible 
 to prevent Home Rule. But he knew where to stop. 
 He might use Carsonism ; he would not be its instru- 
 ment. Mr. Balfour can only be understood if we 
 recognize in him a dual personality. He has the 
 mind and spirit of a great European statesman in the 
 body of a rather limited English Tory. His broader 
 self belongs rather to the Richelieus than the Pitts; 
 Parliamentary successes notwithstanding, his subtle 
 brain better fits the closet than the Senate. His 
 smaller personality finds its spiritual home with the 
 genteel inhabitants of Cheltenham. On more philo- 
 sophical grounds he shares the prejudices of the half- 
 pay major and the cultivated rentier. 
 
 Mr. Balfour's lack of sympathy with democratic 
 ideals is, in fact, based on something less robust than 
 the Cecilian arrogance. It is rather the shrinking 
 of a provincial blue-stocking from what she considers 
 " vulgar." Mr. Balfour's low vitality may have as 
 much to do with it as his mental fastidiousness. But 
 his conscious objection to democracy would seem 
 to be based on a fear that the pleasanter things of 
 life — art, literature, cultivated manners, personal 
 distinction — would be obliterated if privilege disap- 
 peared. For the mass of men he seems to feel there 
 is no possibility of advance; the democratic flood 
 would not fructify the deserts, but only obliterate the 
 oases. There is not enough culture to go round ; why 
 lose what we have in a vain attempt to give everyone 
 his share ? 
 
 This frame of mind is no more responsive to the cry 
 for liberty than to that for democratic equality. The 
 subordination of inferior to superior races — right of 
 definition being one of the privileges of superiority — 
 is logically connected with the subordination of class 
 to class. Mr. Balfour's attitude to the " Celtic fringe "
 
 MR. BALFOUR 7 
 
 o 
 
 springs from this same notion of the world as a wilder- 
 ness with a few cosy corners. Hundreds of kindly 
 pagans in Roman days held much the same views, 
 and justified slavery and the subjugation of nations 
 on similar grounds. To say that Mr. Balfour was 
 content with the old Europe, any more than with the 
 old England, would no doubt be profoundly untrue; 
 he is far too intelligent and honest to be satisfied with 
 the pretences that lull the consciences of ordinary 
 people of the comfortable class. But though it was 
 no doubt all profoundly unsatisfactor}^, would stirring 
 up the hell-broth improve matters ? As with all his 
 class, quieta non mover e was to him the highest 
 wisdom. The status quo was the true aim of states- 
 manship, and to him, as to Hamlet, the " cursed 
 spite " of his fate was that the times were so out of 
 joint as to compel some readjustment. 
 
 Being the man he is, it is to the credit of Mr. Balfour 
 that, under the shock of reality, he has had the can- 
 dour to revise his judgment. He does not like de- 
 mocracy, but he accepts it, bad as it may be, as better 
 than Csesarism as it is now revealed. He accepted 
 the formula of Dr. Wilson, and he has adhered to it, 
 despite the set-back that doctrine suffered in some 
 quarters through the follies of Bolshevism. The 
 mental habits of a lifetime are hard to break, and there 
 are occasions when Mr. Balfour suggests that if we 
 are to have the spirit of democracy it must not be taken 
 neat." He is an autocrat in his own department, 
 and a very Metternich in his enthusiasm for the 
 sacredness of diplomatic mysteries. But no man is 
 straighter or sterner on the main issue, and none can 
 be found to unite such dexterity of method with such 
 rigidity of principle. 
 
 It was quite without feeling against Germany that 
 Mr. Balfour set about his great work in laying the 
 
 <<
 
 74 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 foundations of the Entente. Like most educated 
 Englishmen, he was rather inclined to German culture, 
 and not a little tolerant to Prussian ambitions. The 
 Treaty referred to in Prince Lichnowsky's memoir 
 shows how far he was ready to go in order to preserve 
 the relations of the Victorian time. When compelled 
 to new courses, he had no more animus against Ger- 
 many than a mathematician, in calculating the tra- 
 jectory of a new gun, has against friction and the force 
 of gravitation. He was merely taking precautions 
 as chief trustee of the British Commonwealth. 
 
 But his blood, if anything too cold and temperate, 
 has been stirred deeply by the events of the war. He 
 has the more loathing for the Prussian doctrine of 
 force, because he was at one time rather apt to admire 
 it in its less hideous manifestations. As a well-bred 
 man he is repelled by German arrogance ; as a civilized 
 man, by German barbarity; as a diplomatic man, 
 by German unreason. That quiet stubbornness which 
 has made him, on the whole, a national liability in 
 domestic affairs is, in his present position, a national 
 asset of prime importance. It ensures that perhaps 
 the finest intellectual weapon in our armoury, guided 
 by a perception of European problems quite unique 
 among Englishmen, will be used without remorse 
 when the time comes for settling the great account.
 
 SIR F. E. SMITH 
 
 He should, of course, be called Sir Frederick, but 
 there are two excuses for retaining the familiar initials. 
 In the first place they constitute a subtle kind of 
 compliment, and the sincere critic must in this case be 
 thrifty of all material for compliments. It is some- 
 thing of an achievement for a modern Smith to succeed 
 in impressing his simple initials on the public, and 
 that " F. E." has done so argues a certain stature. 
 All credit to him that he did not try to ease the battle 
 for notoriety by making himself a Roper, Parkinson, 
 Plantagenet, or Montmorency Smith. Perhaps a 
 negative virtue in this matter attaches to godfathers 
 and godmothers, but we all know that their omissions 
 are frequently repaired by the ambitious bearer of a 
 commonplace name. 
 
 In the second place, " F. E." seems oddly suited to 
 our Attorney-General; much better suited than his 
 inexplicable baronetcy. It might, like its owner, 
 stand for anything. It combines challenge and re- 
 serve, the adroit union of which is largely the secret 
 of " F. E.'s " success. It suggests the artful modesty 
 of a clever coquette, who knows that she can sell best 
 when she gives nothing away. Men can often be 
 judged better (the graphologists notwithstanding) by 
 what they sign rather than by how they sign them- 
 selves, and the letters " F. E. " are quite symbolical. 
 
 "Dost know this water-fly?" Hamlet's words 
 come trippingly to the tongue when one contemplates 
 a career like this. Osric, the point-device courtier, is 
 the eternal type of the ephemeral. With as much 
 
 75
 
 76 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 difficulty one associates the idea of immortality with 
 " F. E." It irks Osric not at all to change his views. 
 He describes the weather one moment as "indifferent 
 cold," and the next as " very sultr}'," for no better 
 reason than Hamlet will have it so. And in this he 
 only anticipates " F. E.'s " attitude to the British 
 electorate. 
 
 Osric had " only got the tune of the time and out- 
 ward habit of encounter." Nobody ever suspected 
 " F. E." of more. Osric knew nothing of the deeper 
 causes of the quarrel, but was enormously interested 
 in the mere rapier play and the swords themselves, 
 finding them " very dear to the fancy, very responsive 
 to the hilts, most, delicate carriages, and of a very 
 liberal conceit." " F. E." is equally bored by the 
 deeper things in the minds of combatants, and equally 
 immersed in the millinery and upholstery of the lists. 
 He is a judge of " palpable hits," no judge at all of 
 things real enough to be impalpable. 
 
 Finally Osric was " spacious in the possession of 
 dirt "; " F. E." must be doing well, too. For we 
 must not think of the water-fly merely as a type of 
 insignificance. It is also the most agile, energetic, 
 and voracious of creatures, with a great instinct for 
 the nourishment of its slim and elegant form. While 
 it seems to be just dancing for joy of the thing it keeps 
 its hundred-lensed eye on the main chance. Really, 
 the further the similitude develops the better it pleases. 
 For example, how quickly the water-fly passes through 
 the stages from grubdom to maturity ! And it stings. 
 
 " F. E." stings. His sting is perhaps his chief 
 feature ; at any rate he owes to it most of the great- 
 ness that has descended upon him and now threatens, 
 extinguisher-like, to press him down altogether. By 
 virtue of it he has become Attorney-General, a baronet 
 of the United Kingdom, a Bencher of his Inn, one of
 
 SIR F. E. SMITH 77 
 
 His Majesty's Counsel officially (and therefore, of 
 course, accurately) described as learned in the law, a 
 Privy Councillor, and a Lieutenant-Colonel in the 
 Army. By vice of it he may yet have a fall. But 
 thus far the capacity of uttering pungent impromptus, 
 the rarer capacity of sitting up half the night to invent 
 them, has brought to the briefless barrister of twelve 
 years or so ago all the outward show of greatness. 
 Examining this pomp a little closely we may detect 
 signs of Master Shallow's borrowed doublet stuffed 
 out with straw; but the world is not over-critical, and 
 there are, perhaps, some who still think " F. E." a 
 great statesman and a profound lawyer. But the 
 first class are now sparely represented at Westminster, 
 and the second have never inhabited the Temple. 
 
 The bubble of " F. E.'s " reputation was blown by 
 a single emission of the breath, though heaven alone 
 knows what anxious thought went to the compound- 
 ing of the parent mixture. There are secrets of 
 political alchemy that must be jealously kept from 
 the vulgar. Like Disraeli, whom he took for his 
 model, " F. E." became famous through a single 
 speech. It was not a very good speech. Read in 
 cold blood to-day it is found not a little schoolboyish 
 in its studied provocation, its sixth-form satire, and 
 its elegantly insincere scorn. Only those who heard 
 it can understand why, when the slim, well-tailored, 
 dandyish young man with the long, pale face and the 
 arrogant lips had sat down in a tumult of cheers, the 
 lobbies buzzed with excited wonderment over the 
 discovery of a new fighting leader on the Unionist side. 
 
 But if the speech was in no sense that of a great 
 man, however immature, it was eminently that of a 
 very clever tactician. It acted like a charm on the 
 small Unionist remnant that had escaped the rout of 
 1906. In its gay insolence and cheery defiance it
 
 78 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 contrasted brilliantly with the savage gloom of Mr. 
 Chamberlain and the depressing fatalism of Mr. 
 Balfour. It restored the instinct of fight — especially 
 important in the case of men with nothing very 
 obvious to fight for. Nobody believes now — perhaps 
 few believed even then — that the young M.P. for 
 Walton spoke from anywhere far behind his teeth. 
 But the sick man inclines rather to the quack who 
 gives him an energizer than to the physician who 
 recommends a long course of low living, and " F. E.," 
 though largely responsible for leading the Tory Party 
 through strange places, was remembered only for the 
 draught that revived while it poisoned. 
 
 The young lawyer had treated the House of Com- 
 mons like a jury, with a single eye to the verdict, 
 and he got it. Two worlds were henceforth his oyster. 
 The briefs came trooping gaily to his chambers, and 
 there was little he might not hope for in politics if only 
 the Liberal majority could be whittled away to nothing. 
 The levity with which he went about the task of 
 reduction can only be explained by reference to the 
 habits of water-flies. The} 7 may incidentally enjoy 
 stinging, buzzing, and darting from point to point; 
 but all these things have a quite definite purpose; if 
 water-flies possess no very consistent theory of life 
 they have a deep-seated instinct for living. 
 
 It is only just to admit that " F. E." played a big 
 and dangerous game with great skill. But he is, for 
 all that, hardly a player in the great manner. Spiritu- 
 ally, he has affinities with the Churchills, father and 
 son; he is all for the legitimate gamble. But he does 
 not stake his shirt on a number at the roulette table, 
 though he might perhaps stake an incifferent party's 
 whole wardrobe; he is rather for " first and third 
 dozen " and other games where, if you have a cool 
 head and a system, you may win a good deal, and
 
 SIR F. E. SMITH 79 
 
 can hardly be ruined. The Scottish lord in " The 
 Fortunes of Nigel " had the same talent, and acquired 
 something of the same reputation. For by this time 
 nobody quite trusts " F. E." He is too cautiously 
 violent to please his friends or to terrify his foes. 
 
 " F. E." is a daredevil with reservations. For 
 pretty well any cause he is ready to die in the last 
 ditch, but he holds himself free to decide which is the 
 last ditch, and how the final sacrifice shall be made. 
 It would really be very interesting to know exactly 
 what Sir Edward Carson, who has none of this 
 light Jesuitry, thinks of him to-day. Five years 
 ago " F. E." was gallantly conjugating the verb " to 
 gallop." " You gallop; they gallop; let us all 
 gallop; but especially I will gallop." There never 
 was so mad a fellow since Master Shallow lay at 
 Clement's Inn. Others might occasionally shiver at 
 the idea of civil strife in earnest. It is only right to 
 suppose that the Londonderrys and Carsons sometimes 
 had misgivings. Not so our doughty Templar. He 
 was always buoyant. " Civil war — certainly. Red 
 ruin and the breaking up of laws — why, my dear sir, 
 wait till we get really well started. Of course it will 
 be a nuisance — I shall probably have to give up my 
 huntin' — but if the Rads persist, something must flow. 
 I hope it will not be human gore." 
 
 jYet " F. E.," with all his anxiety to burn his boats, 
 worked hard to insure them before applying the torch. 
 Probably no man had moments of more acute anxiety 
 in 1914, when it seemed possible that he must either 
 gallop in earnest or betray; no man, it is safe to say, 
 more sincerely welcomed the Party truce which gave 
 him an opportunity of getting safely out of his Ulster 
 saddle. Since then there is no evidence that he has 
 given a second thought to his dear and dour friends. 
 
 I was once defending our political system against 
 a cynic. I held, perhaps rashly, that principles still
 
 80 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 counted . My friend at once asked : ' ' What particular 
 principle does ' F. E.' — who is a very typical politician 
 — stand for ?" And I was at a loss to answer. There 
 may be points, hitherto unrevealed, on which he feels 
 deeply. Perhaps he is not entirely happy with his 
 party; he has sometimes given hints of a languid 
 speculative preference for a less negative creed. 
 Some truth there may be in the old story that he tossed 
 with Sir John Simon at Oxford as to which side each 
 should take, as one party could not contain both. 
 " F. E." lost, and went in for Unionism. Certainly his 
 success has been bought at a not inconsiderable price. 
 Conservatism always treats its leaders as valets, and 
 more than once " F. E." has been made to feel his 
 position in conflict with the Wellbore-Wellbores of his 
 party. He is a proud man and a sensitive, and such 
 earn all they get in this employment. 
 
 Still, it may be well doubted if he is fit for any 
 other. There is one infallible touchstone to-day for 
 men of affairs. Are they mere creatures of the 
 moment, or have they some touch with the eternal ? 
 Their attitude towards the full policy of President 
 Wilson — its refusal to parley with evil no less than its 
 search for a healing formula — distinguishes statesmen 
 as the sheep are separated from the goats. Every fool 
 can point out the difficulties of that policy, but every 
 truly wise man knows that those difficulties must 
 either be conquered, or they will conquer mankind. 
 
 Sir F. E. Smith left his not unimportant office as 
 chief legal adviser to the Crown to go propagandizing 
 in America. He returned in circumstances of some 
 mystery. According to his own published statements 
 his mission was wholly a success. Yet there are those 
 who still doubt. The} r base their judgment on no 
 isolated incident, but on the general incompatibility 
 of so light a temperament with the tremendous 
 earnestness of the great Republic.
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 
 
 There is no very obvious connection between Mr. 
 Bonar Law and the Ancient Mariner. Yet the last 
 time I saw the Leader of the House of Commons, a 
 depressed figure on the Treasury Bench, somehow 
 suggesting in his gloomy preoccupation a political 
 Eugene Aram with moral gyves upon his wrists, the 
 lines of Coleridge came unbidden to my mind : 
 
 " Like one that on a lonesome road 
 
 Doth walk in fear and dread, 
 And, having once turned round, walks on. 
 
 And turns no more his head ; 
 Because he knows a frightful fiend 
 
 Does close behind him tread." 
 
 It is of that fiend which clogs Mr. Law in his earnest 
 attempts to walk straight that one must mostly speak 
 in dealing with him. As the case of Ireland reminds 
 us, the chief importance of the past is that it is nine- 
 tenths of the present. It would be a pleasant task to 
 discuss Mr. Bonar Law only as a War Minister. We 
 could then speak of him as one who has worked, not 
 always wisely, but well ; we could acknowledge cheer- 
 fully that of the few politicians who have emerged 
 from the great test with enhanced reputations he is 
 one; we could pay tribute to his io3'-alty to engage- 
 ments, his unselfish co-operation with men he has 
 never liked, his acquiescence in measures little to his 
 taste, his honest desire to sink all personal prejudices 
 for the common cause. 
 
 Certainly such commendation would be given with 
 due qualification. Mr. Law is in no sense a great 
 
 81 fl
 
 82 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Minister. His abilities, though useful, are eminently 
 ordinary. The whole tone of his mind is common- 
 place. He lacks almost every essential of a leader of 
 men, and has often shown himself unequal to the quite 
 measurable task of controlling that small mob of 
 men called the House of Commons. But, on the other 
 hand, he is, according to his lights, thoroughly 
 straightforward, and not, as politicians go, a self- 
 seeker. If there were only his war record to be con- 
 sidered, little need be said of him. Decent mediocrity 
 is a sterile text. 
 
 But, unhappily, the main fact concerning Mr. Bonar 
 Law is not himself. It is not the haunted man, but 
 the thing that haunts him, that matters most. It is 
 the fiend, not the constrained wayfarer, that occupies 
 the centre of our picture. To drop parable, it would 
 be a very small matter whether Mr. Bonar Law, as a 
 human individual, remained to pursue his course of 
 small usefulness in the Government, or made way for 
 someone not much better or much worse. But during 
 all these months of war there has been a fearful 
 danger involved in his relations to his party and his 
 party's relations to Sir Edward Carson. 
 
 jThat danger has been aggravated by the very 
 honesty which is one of the most agreeable features 
 of Mr. Law's character. " The construction of his 
 mind," says a witty observer, " has no shadows, or 
 ingle-nooks, or cosy corners." He is upright and 
 downstraight, without a savour of double entendre in 
 his nature, innocent of artifice in little things as well 
 as great. It was his large innocence, more than any- 
 thing else, that delivered Mr. Law into the hands of 
 the Carsonites, and has kept him there. Mr. Balfour 
 had for years played with Ulster, as he had played 
 with Tariff Reform, without committing himself. Mr. 
 Law had scarcely assumed the leadership before Mr.
 
 MB. BONAR LAW 83 
 
 Asquith could truly say that the new " dogma of 
 anarchy " had been " countersigned by all the leading 
 men of the Tory Party." 
 
 jVery skilfully Sir Edward Carson transferred from 
 his own shoulders to those of an English statesman the 
 burden of responsibility for everything that might 
 happen, until at last Mr. Law was definitely pledged 
 to support Ulster in her resistance to Home Rule, 
 even though the keeping of that pledge might involve 
 ' something more than making speeches." Such was 
 the situation before the war. It would be ungracious 
 and mischievous to recall these facts if the past were 
 not still very much the present. The pledge, given 
 with reckless straightforwardness, was not withdrawn 
 when the Ulster lunacy was dwarfed by a greater peril. 
 Instead of making himself a free man, Mr. Law, mis- 
 led by that imperious integrity of his, bound himself 
 with new fetters. Having tied his party hand and 
 foot to the chariot of Sir Edward Carson, he proceeded 
 to bind himself with chains as tyrannous to his party. 
 He entered the Coalition pledged to retain office only 
 so long as the majority of the party approved of his 
 leadership. The consequences have been seen, or 
 rather felt, during more than three unhappy years. 
 Nobody took the party truce more seriously than Mr. 
 Bonar Law. None tried more consistently to observe 
 it in letter and spirit. None risked more, in personal 
 position, for it. But he failed to take the only steps 
 which could have made his good intentions really 
 operative. He did not free himself or his party from 
 the past. The party — or rather that section of it 
 which has usurped power — has followed Sir Edward 
 Carson, and Mr. Law has followed the party. 
 
 Enough has already happened to show how great 
 a misfortune was the absence of strength, sanity, and 
 self-control in the Tory leadership during those fateful
 
 84 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 years before the war. But for the Ulster alliance, 
 indeed, the whole course of events during the past four 
 years might have been different. Blame lies on all 
 parties and on nearly all individuals, but the heaviest 
 indictment at the bar of history must be answered by 
 one man. On Sir Edward Carson rests much respon- 
 sibility for all the blood split in the Sinn Fein rebellion, 
 for the wrecking of all the fair hopes of Irish unity, 
 for the loss of Irish battalions, for grave moral injury 
 to the Allied cause, and — to descend from the great 
 to the very small — for the mutilation of Mr. Bonar 
 Law's public usefulness. 
 
 It may be questioned, however, whether, even 
 apart from this malign influence, Mr. Law is fitted for 
 any great share in such a struggle as the present. His 
 modest parts might suffice if the} r were reinforced 
 by great and animating ideals. But Mr. Law unites 
 a hot head with cold feet. There is a sterilizing touch 
 of pessimism in his character. He may have large 
 charity. He has little faith or hope. He confessed 
 once that he was an " enthusiast " for Tariff Reform, 
 but it is highly characteristic that he espied the road 
 to that Eldorado in " two bad winters." His enthu- 
 siasm for any wider cause is not very obvious. Fight- 
 ing autocracy, he seems to yield it the tribute of 
 a despairing admiration. Everybody remembers his 
 anticipative dirge (in the form of a vote of congratu- 
 lation) on the Russian Revolution. It rather resem- 
 bled the speech of a morose bachelor uncle at a 
 christening: " A fine child, you say. Yes. But I've 
 always heard that the finest children are most sus- 
 ceptible to whooping cough, measles, thrush, and 
 diphtheria in their infancy, and to consumption, 
 paralysis, and spinal complaints as they grow into 
 adolescence." 
 
 How far the Girondists of Russia were helped by
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 85 
 
 this singular (and unhappily prophetic) tribute history 
 does not relate. It certainly depressed the spirits 
 of friends of liberty in England. Some time later, 
 again, Mr. Law indulged in melancholy musings on 
 the futility of that freedom on which President Wilson 
 and others set much store. " Democratic institutions 
 with free Parliaments," he said, " are not the best 
 instruments for carrying on a war." There is an 
 old saying (which happens also to be true) that the 
 bad workman always complains of his tools. Mr. 
 Law surely cannot with grace accuse the weakness of 
 some forms of representative government. Exactly 
 what results Mr. Law would achieve with the powers 
 of a Bismarck must remain a matter of speculation. 
 But it is pretty certain what a Bismarck would have 
 done with Mr. Law himself four or five years ago. 
 
 We need not discuss whether Great Britain is really 
 " democratic," or how far the German Government 
 has enjoyed greater freedom than our own to dispose 
 of life and libert}'. Certainly no German Minister 
 has dared to impose taxation comparable to that which 
 the House of Commons and the nation have accepted 
 with resignation and even with applause. It is 
 certain, too, that " democratic institutions " have not 
 prevented the United States making war with great 
 vigour. Perhaps Mr. Law means that under our 
 own peculiar system there is no way of dealing with 
 mischievous people who hrppen to have behind them 
 great social influence or voting power. That charac- 
 teristic weakness has certainty had signal illustration 
 of late years. But an impeachment of our institutions 
 on such grounds should surety come from another 
 quarter. 
 
 This rather suburban cant about the defects of 
 " democracy " — a system yet to be tried in this 
 country — may be simply borrowed from men with a
 
 86 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 deeper political philosophy than Mr. Law's. He is 
 himself no aristocrat, and, to do him justice, no snob. 
 He does not decry " democracy " on the genteel 
 grounds of a similar faith in Wimbledon or Maiden- 
 head. But he seems to take Carlyle and his " great- 
 man " notions rather more seriously than younger 
 men, and, like most patriots of his generation, is 
 steeped in second-hand and second-rate German 
 thought. Sedan was more than a victory over the 
 French Arnry; it was the crowning triumph of the 
 German spirit. For forty years France plunged into 
 pessimism, and England into something worse, a kind 
 of despairing admiration of the pickelhaube in things 
 both material and spiritual. It became the mark of a 
 patriotic Englishman to wish his country more like 
 Germany. The part of an enlightened citizen was to 
 depreciate England and exalt " German methods." 
 In his character of Tariff Reformer Mr. Law followed 
 a bad fashion with special zeal, and it would almost 
 seem that in fighting Germany he has not ceased to 
 admire her. This spirit, so common in our ruling men, 
 happity so rare in the ruled, lies at the root of that 
 servile labouring to follow a German lead which was 
 the most conspicuous and disastrous folly in the 
 earlier stages of the war. Bernhardi has described 
 such imitation of externals as the surest sign of in- 
 capacity, and indeed common sense rejects the notion 
 of fighting anything with " its own weapons." As 
 Mr. Chesterton has put it, who scratches a tiger or 
 bites a shark ? 
 
 But this lack of sympathy with older English ideas 
 is only part of the general foreignness of Mr. Law's 
 outlook and personalit}-. He refuses to recognize 
 Irish nationality, and really Mr. Dillon is as English 
 as he. He represents the denationalization of English 
 Toryism, as well as its temporary conquest by the
 
 MR. BONAR LAW 87 
 
 merely urban — one might almost say suburban — 
 elements. He has never been regarded by the people 
 who still are the real strength of the Tory Party as 
 more than a stop-gap. Squiredom and farmerdom 
 are even yet bewildered (as well they may be) that 
 this Canadian-born Glasgow iron merchant, landless, 
 Presbyterian, and teetotal, should stand for them. 
 Mr. Law occupies a position rather analogous to that 
 of Lord Rosebery when official head of the Liberal 
 Party — he is only recognized with reservations. The 
 ordinary Tory is told that Mr. Law is leader, and must 
 have his way, and internally answers, like Talleyrand 
 to the poet, "Je ne vois pas la necessity." Mr. Law 
 is uneasily conscious of the essential falsity of his 
 position ; he knows that the unstable equilibrium 
 resulting from the temporary defeat of Hatfield by 
 Birmingham cannot indefinitely endure; and this 
 consciousness is at the root of half the trouble. 
 
 A leader more sure of his right would have shaken 
 himself free of the pledge to the Carsonites; would 
 never have consented to enter a Cabinet, like a trade 
 union delegate, with his resignation (so to speak) 
 written out beforehand ; would have been bound by 
 no instructions in setting out to navigate an un- 
 charted sea. It may be added that such a leader 
 would not have consented to Mr. Law's present posi- 
 tion in the House of Commons as the mere mouth- 
 piece of a body consisting mainly of his own nominal 
 subordinates who sometimes tell him things and some- 
 times do not. The duties of that anomalous position 
 he has carried out manfully, and with a certain skill. 
 His Parliamentary manner has immensely improved 
 in the process, though he still occasionally lapses into 
 the "new style" of his Opposition leadership. His 
 own special work has been well done on the whole. 
 He is not a great Chancellor of the Exchequer,
 
 88 UNCEXSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 but there is a businesslike neatness in his methods, 
 contrasting well with the grandiose messiness of a more 
 vivid personality. 
 
 This efficiency is, indeed, his strong side. In him 
 industry and cool common sense in some small things 
 contrast oddly with strong delusion in many great 
 things. He is a composite of Don Quixote and 
 Sancho Panza, in which the knightly side is also the 
 prose side. The qualities which make him a useful 
 Minister would never have made him a party leader. 
 The qualities which made him a party leader have led 
 him into entanglements which seriously diminish his 
 usefulness as a Minister.
 
 MR. REGINALD McKENNA 
 
 If, by choice or chance, you should happen to lose 
 yourself behind Westminster Abbey — and there are 
 worse places for the straying philosopher — you are 
 prett}' certain to find yourself in Smith Square. 
 
 Supposing that \ r ou affect only the picturesque, you 
 will get out of it as soon as may be; if you have a 
 leaning to the study of social phenomena the chances 
 are you will be interested. It is not a large square 
 or a handsome one; there is no bloom of old red-brick 
 or freshness of verdure to delight the eye; the houses, 
 handsome in their way, are too new and too exposed 
 to have the delicious cosiness of Cowley Street just 
 round the corner. The Abbey is quite close at hand, 
 but the characteristic flavour of Smith Square is not 
 the dust of medievalism ; it is rather straw and grit 
 from the Horseferry Road, and the aroma of manure 
 barges on the river, against which the scents of a new 
 and rather raw civilization maintain a hopeless 
 struggle. Not two hundred yards away is slumdom 
 unmitigated. But Smith Square, save in that matter 
 of flavour, is morally distant as if a broad province lay 
 between. There are certain streets leading from it 
 where you may occupy a house " replete," as the 
 agents say (and we wish they wouldn't) " with every 
 modern convenience," and have for your literal next- 
 door neighbours four hunger-smitten families living 
 in a frowsy tumbledown den. These thoroughfares 
 are passing through the transition stage, which in the 
 case of Smith Square has been happily completed. 
 There the rich middle class has not quite pushed out 
 
 89
 
 90 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 the proletarian, and must at least recognize his phy- 
 sical existence. In Smith Square it is different ; the 
 process is complete. St. John's Wood has as much 
 in common with Lisson Grove as Smith Square with 
 poor Westminster. 
 
 At Number 36 lives Mr. Reginald McKenna, late 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer. If you have a nodding 
 acquaintance with Mr. McKenna you might almost 
 pick out the house. It seems extremely natural that 
 Mr. McKenna, model of the high bourgeoisie, and 
 therefore rather farther removed from the common 
 run of men and women than any Sir Leicester Ded- 
 lock, should have chosen Smith Square for his town 
 house. But it is more than natural — it seems inevit- 
 able — that, having chosen Smith Square, he should 
 live in Number 36. The house is so like him. It is 
 solid, efficient, advantageously placed, built of the 
 very best pressed bricks, irreproachably British, and 
 a little forbidding in its aggressive freshness. Go 
 inside, and you will find every evidence of taste and 
 education; the Persian carpets and the English 
 classics will be of the best ; there will be the due touch 
 of old culture to correct the oiled smoothness of 
 modern convenience; and yet — well, if you happen to 
 be fanciful you will feel the grit just as you did outside. 
 
 For grit, in both senses, enters into the very being 
 of Mr. Reginald McKenna. He showed grit when 
 he rowed bow for Cambridge in the famous victory of 
 1887, an occasion as important as any in his life. He 
 showed grit in the years between 1895 and 1906, when 
 he clung to the House of Commons, though the pros- 
 pects were none too good for a highly practical and 
 go-ahead young man. He showed grit in every office 
 he held . He was a minor success as Financial Secre- 
 tary to the Treasury. But he did not hesitate to risk 
 this limited reputation by taking the Board of Educa-
 
 MR. REGINALD McKENNA 91 
 
 tion after Mr. Birrell had failed to conquer or conciliate 
 the raging clerical. At the Admiralty he stubbornly 
 held his own against those who wanted many Dread- 
 noughts and those who wanted none. As Home 
 Secretary he bore with stoicism a load of unpopularity 
 which would have crushed a more sensitive man : 
 Suffragists, Labour men, the Bishop of St. Asaph, 
 and the Daily Mail, furious crank and fiery anti-Hun, 
 made no impression on his adamantine nerve. Prob- 
 ably he never lost an hour's sleep over all of them. 
 At an} T rate, he survived to make, as Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer in the first Coalition Ministry, the first 
 businesslike War Budget, and only resigned office 
 when Mr. Asquith was driven out. 
 
 Grit, in the complimentary sense, cannot be denied 
 to a statesman with such a record. But Mr. McKenna 
 is gritty in another way; there is something really 
 disconcerting in his matter-of-fact composition. 
 Every writer, sooner or later, refers to the iron hand 
 in the velvet glove. Mr. McKenna's glove is made of 
 emery paper, and there is a scratchiness even in his 
 geniality. His intellect might be geologically classi- 
 fied as old red sandstone. At Cambridg he wooed 
 the " cross-grained muses of the cube and square " 
 with success, but it would be ridiculous to speak of 
 him, as some have clone, as a great mathematician. 
 The highest in that kind is not destitute of a kind of 
 poetry, and there is less poetry in Mr. Reginald 
 McKenna than in Mr. Kipling. His mathematics are 
 those of the actuary; there are scores of men in banks 
 and accountants' offices of at least equal attainments. 
 But politicians who go farther than the rule of three 
 are exceptional, and any little aridity there might be 
 in the by-products of Mr. McKenna's mind was com- 
 pensated by his real understanding of figures. One 
 might summarize the matter by saying that he has
 
 92 UNCENSOEED CELEBRITIES 
 
 succeeded by being something of a man and a good 
 deal of a ready-reckoner. He has never lacked 
 courage of a sort, he has played the party game with 
 more straightness and loyalty than a good many, he 
 hits straight from the shoulder, and he has that 
 happy lack of humour which saves a man from being 
 hurt either by self-criticism or the satires of opponents. 
 On his business side he is methodical in getting up a 
 case, neat in his exposition, and masculine in his con- 
 tempt for rhetorical fiddle-faddle — unless he avoids it 
 because he knows he could not manage it well. His 
 defects are the complement of his qualities ; he lacks 
 breadth, humanity, and enthusiasm; he is more out 
 of touch with life and ideas than a Blue-Book. 
 
 Such men often go far under any constitution. 
 There were McKennas in Stuart England and in 
 Bourbon France, whose eminence is a puzzle to the 
 historian exploring in vain all contemporary record 
 to find a single phrase or action to mark them as extra- 
 ordinary. There are probably McKennas even in 
 China. The type flourishes on the whole better under 
 autocratic conditions; a clever monarch uses men of 
 the kind for his particular purpose, and decisively 
 excludes them as general counsellors; Colbert is given 
 his head in finance, but must not meddle with high 
 policy. Under our system, absurdly enough, a per- 
 fect multiplication table of a man has to pretend that 
 he wants more voters or fewer public-houses. Still, 
 there must be in every Government people who do 
 know the drier elements of public business, and it is 
 easy to understand the value set on Mr. McKenna 
 once he had reached the position of a possible Under- 
 Secretary. But, as in the case of the fly in amber, a 
 good many people have wondered how he got there. 
 The story is worth repeating as an illustration of the 
 chancy methods of our political recruiting.
 
 MR. REGINALD M KENNA 93 
 
 It has been mentioned that young McKenna was bow 
 in the victorious Cambridge boat in the year 1887. 
 The late Sir Charles Dilke was as keen on rowing as 
 on things intellectual and political, and never allowed 
 a good oar to escape him. McKenna was much on 
 the Thames after leaving the Cam, and the riverside 
 intimacy between him and Sir Charles ripened into 
 one of those pathetic friendships which often subsist 
 between disappointed men and young people in whom 
 they see something to remind them of their earlier 
 selves. Sir Charles and his protege had a good many 
 points in common. The elder man possessed vastly 
 more talent, but the younger one had enough of his 
 more sober qualities to make patronage a subtle kind 
 of self-praise. It was a mutual affair, like the some- 
 what similar friendship of Wycherley and Pope. 
 Dilke 's interest was flattering to a young man fresh 
 from the Universit}^. McKenna 's reverence was 
 soothing to a man of Dilke 's bitter experience. Dilke 
 found, after years of waiting, that though he might 
 return to the Commons he could not return to official 
 politics ; there were influences too strong to be over- 
 come. He had, however, a hold on the official politi- 
 cians, and, if he could not get the promise of a place, 
 the embargo did not apply to his adopted political 
 son. There was a tacit understanding that when the 
 opening came the man in readiness should not be 
 overlooked. Thus it happened that when " C.-B." too 
 took office in 1905 Mr. Reginald McKenna figured in 
 his first list of Ministers. Had he been thrice the man 
 he was without that pull, he would have remained 
 private member for the North Monmouthshire con- 
 stituency which he has represented for twenty-three 
 years. With that pull he started on a ladder which 
 a man of his character and qualifications was bound 
 to climb.
 
 94 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 His talents, such as they were, were highly appre- 
 ciated by his official chiefs. There is a story that Mr. 
 Asquith actually appointed Mr. McKenna as Chan- 
 cellor of the Exchequer when he himself gave up the 
 Treasury on becoming Prime Minister, but that Mr. 
 Lloyd George, jealous of his rights, threatened trouble 
 unless the choice was revoked in his favour. Had 
 Mr. Asquith stood to his guns — assuming the truth 
 of the story — the whole history of the years between 
 1908 and 1 914 might have been different. It is 
 possible for men like Mr. McKenna to create revo- 
 lutions without knowing it ; Grenville, a man of some- 
 what similar type, actually did so. But he would 
 certainly never have ventured consciously into deep 
 waters. Possibly a quarrel over the Treasury ten 
 years ago may have had its influence on the events of 
 the last month of 19 16; possibly it was personal 
 loyalty to Mr. Asquith and nothing more that deter- 
 mined Mr. McKenna 's course, and has kept him, 
 unlike Mr. Montagu, steadfast in it. But in any case, 
 it must have been a strain for a man of his tempera- 
 ment to work with one of the Prime Minister's. Mr. 
 Lloyd George in one respect at least resembles Chat- 
 ham : he does not care a jot for money, and is even 
 proud of the sacrifices he induces the nation to accept . 
 Mr. McKenna thinks chiefly of the price of glories. 
 He has never been credited with an enthusiasm for 
 the war, and, whatever his views on the general ques- 
 tion, he has regarded with steady jealousy the claims 
 of the Army, as against those of commerce and in- 
 dustry. It is the cobbler's faith in leather — not to be 
 altogether disregarded, nor yet to be blindly shared. 
 
 It was generally believed, when Mr. McKenna 
 accepted the offer of his banking friend, Sir Edward 
 Holden, that he had made his gesture of farewell to 
 politics. Certainly at that time there were grounds
 
 MB. REGINALD McKENNA 95 
 
 for supposing that he was convinced the new world 
 had no place for him. Since he has taken the trouble 
 to correct the rumour, it may be assumed that he 
 retains, or has recovered, faith in the fortunes of 
 official Liberalism and of his own star. Yet it is not 
 easy to see a great place for Mr. McKenna in the 
 politics of the future. He may repeat himself. He 
 can do little more. For of all the " Old Gang " — or, 
 more accurately, that part of it which the present 
 Prime Minister failed to take with him — Mr. McKenna, 
 despite his superficial modernity, is the oldest and 
 the least elastic. There are few administrations in 
 which he could not be useful in a humdrum way. 
 It is impossible to imagine a successful administration, 
 in the times we are likely to see, of which he could be 
 the chief. For a successful chief must understand 
 the national temper, and from the national temper 
 Smith Square is almost more aloof than Lansdowne 
 House.
 
 LORD NEWTON AND OTHERS 
 
 The old lawyers invented dummies to represent sub- 
 stantial plaintiffs and defendants, and it is chiefly as 
 a John Doe or Richard Roe that Lord Newton is here 
 mentioned. The thing he stands for is more impor- 
 tant than himself. 
 
 Lord Newton is, indeed, of no special importance. 
 It is rather remarkable that, with parts so good, and 
 with a decided inclination for public life, he has done 
 so little. The explanation probably resides equally 
 in his rather flighty temperament and his possession 
 of ample fortune and hereditary rank. Station is 
 rather like a cork waistcoat. It enables heavy, inex- 
 pert people to keep afloat who would otherwise in- 
 fallibly go to the bottom. But it tires and impedes 
 an active man, and prevents him ever developing into 
 a first-class swimmer. Men like Lord Newton are 
 too intelligent and original to resign themselves to 
 the role of the dead-dog politician, of whom Carlyle 
 spoke as surging up and down the flood by virtue of 
 superior levity, going nowhither, but admired by 
 some for his conspicuous situation. On the other 
 hand, they lack incentive, and rarely acquire that 
 habit of hard work and that insensibility to disap- 
 pointment and disgust which, more than any extra- 
 ordinary talent, bring the self-made statesman to 
 great position. 
 
 Lord Newton is Lord Rosebery on a smaller scale. 
 He has the same dawdling disposition. He has the 
 same relish in scoring off others, especially if they 
 happen to be his political friends. He has the same 
 
 90
 
 LORD NEWTON AND OTHERS 97 
 
 intense distaste for being himself scored off. He has, 
 like Lord Rosebery, a good deal of wit, some wisdom, 
 and an excellent style, He has dabbled in many 
 things : in diplomacy, literature, public business, 
 mastiff-breeding, 3'eomanry tactics. As a writer, an 
 Ambassador, or a Minister, he might easily have won 
 real eminence had he given his not inconsiderable 
 abilities full play. As it is, he is chiefly famous for a 
 few rather flippant speeches, for an excellent life of 
 Lord Lyons, and some illuminating reflections on 
 diplomacy, for heretical views regarding the dismal- 
 ness of county cricket, and for routine work in the 
 oversight of British prisoners, which some time ago 
 brought him into a prominence that he appeared to 
 resent. 
 
 Into the details of that controversy it is unnecessary 
 to enter. The only indictment to be framed against 
 Lord Newton, and through Lord Newton against the 
 class he represents, concerns the manner rather than 
 the matter of his defence. His lordship was clearly 
 thinking less of the prisoners than of attacks made 
 on himself and his Department. Against the poor 
 halfpennyworth of bread which formed the prisoners' 
 portion in that feast of reason, his apologia in the 
 House of Lords, we had an intolerable deal of sack 
 in which Lord Newton drank his own health, and 
 conve3 r ed complimentary sentiments to his colleagues. 
 All his wit — and on this occasion he hardly did justice 
 to his reputation — was used against " editors and sub- 
 editors," officers released from internment, and other 
 noxious people who dared suggest that Lord Newton 
 might possibly have done better. 
 
 Now it is certain that Lord Newton is not a callous 
 man. He is not a stupid man. Probably he is not 
 a particularly egotistical man. He is only displaying 
 with a naivete rather surprising in one with so 
 
 7
 
 98 UXCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 decided a sense of humour, the attitude of his caste 
 towards public affairs. It is, I think, an attitude in 
 some ways quite peculiar to this country, and is the 
 natural but singular consequence of the disturbance 
 of the old balance of the Constitution which took place 
 two centuries ago. 
 
 In some countries Ministers are still truly the 
 servants of the Crown, and in a very real sense respon- 
 sible to the monarch. In other countries Ministers 
 are under a constant obligation to satisfy Parliaments, 
 or Parliamentary groups, or Parliament ar}' com- 
 mittees. But in England, though some of the Hano- 
 verian monarchs were allowed a most dangerous 
 liberty in foreign affairs, they were not in a position, 
 as the German Emperor is, to call their Ministers 
 to account for every action. On the other hand, while 
 public opinion no doubt rules in England in the long 
 run, the run is often very long indeed. A party re- 
 turned to power is secure against anything except 
 formal defeat. In theory a Government is constantly 
 under check, liable to dismissal for any indiscretion 
 or misbehaviour; in practice it can look forward to 
 enjoyment of power as long as it likes to stay, short 
 of the full legal term. The minority in Parliament 
 may ask questions, but they need not be answered ; it 
 may propose votes of censure, but they are readily 
 defeated. There is really no check on Ministers 
 beyond their consciences, the prejudices of their sup- 
 porters, and the fear of being beaten at elections. 
 The fact is recognized in Parliamentary terminology. 
 A Government is said to be " strong " when it has 
 not only a secure majority, but a long period before it. 
 It is said to be " weak," whatever the majority, when 
 a General Election is within measurable distance. 
 Politicians speak of an " exhausted mandate." 
 What they really mean is that a Government nearing
 
 LORD NEWTON AND OTHERS 99 
 
 the end of its tether must act with a quite unaccus- 
 tomed sense of responsibility, and is therefore, in 
 view of its general habits, not likely to act with 
 vigour. 
 
 In peace time, when the consequences of failure in 
 office are less manifest, Ministers are generally able 
 to defeat the critic, either b} r raising new issues or by 
 opposing to him the obedient mass of their voting 
 power. This safety breeds an astonishing indiffer- 
 ence to public opinion. But in war, when effect 
 follows cause with startling rapidity, critics, especially 
 out of Parliament, tend to be more severe and more 
 persistent, and party bonds are apt to loosen. Habit, 
 however, persists in the ruling class. Placemen are 
 not less but more hostile to what they regard as inter- 
 ference, and more disposed than usual to resort to 
 the old dodges: "contrary to public interest," 
 " advice of the responsible officials," " need of con- 
 sulting other interests which cannot be too closely 
 specified," and so forth. Hence the phenomenon, 
 spoken of as if it were something extraordinary, of a 
 Government out of touch with the House of Commons, 
 and a House of Commons out of touch with the 
 country. 
 
 Men like Lord Newton especially, men of good 
 family and large possessions, take a view of their 
 responsibilities which is almost humorous in times 
 like these. They conceive themselves as having done 
 a great favour to the nation in emerging from their 
 pleasant country-houses to bear part of the burden 
 and heat of the day. Being well-bred men and 
 patriots, they are not likely to remind the nation of 
 its debt so long as the nation " behaves." But when 
 the nation begins to ask whether they are really doing 
 their duty, this high calm is apt to evaporate in a 
 spluttering indignation. We saw a good deal of the
 
 100 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 spirit during the Budget fight. " We are a priceless 
 blessing to the nation," said the ruling class in effect, 
 " and are willing to continue so — on our own terms. 
 On any other we propose to make ourselves objection- 
 able." 
 
 The steady progress of this anarchic temper in the 
 English ruling classes, following as night the day all 
 attempts to decrease their power, seems natural 
 enough to people who express astonishment at similar 
 phenomena in other countries. That ugly chapter of 
 Ulster, for example, is chiefly remembered as a joke 
 (carried a little too far) by those who find marvellous 
 the action of German-speaking barons in Baltic 
 Russia. We are ready enough to condemn Junker- 
 dom's objection to bear its fair proportion of the 
 burdens of German taxation — an objection which had 
 much to do with the decision for a war of conquest, 
 and had still more to do with the continuance of a 
 war for indemnities. But the Budget revolt could 
 take place without the breath of suspicion being cast 
 on the patriotism of our great landowners. We have 
 been so used in this country to a class which clings 
 stubbornly to privilege, while disclaiming more than 
 the duties it cares to undertake in its own way and 
 for its own profit, and we have been so fortunate thus 
 far in escaping the due pains and penalties for such 
 a state of things, that it is difficult to realize that our 
 own Junker order — polite, pleasant, and liberal- 
 minded in indifferent matters — is in essence quite as 
 class-conscious as Germany's, and much less conscien- 
 tiously national. 
 
 But incidents like that of Lord Newton, arriving 
 together with that extraordinary appeal to the Prus- 
 sian Order of St. John by our own members of the 
 Order, come as an emphatic reminder of the difference 
 between a true democracv and a bundle of anomalies
 
 LORD NEWTON AND OTHERS 101 
 
 like our own State. The nation's passionate interest 
 in ordinary common Englishmen, simple non-com- 
 missioned officers and privates, contrasted sharply 
 with the offended dignity of Lord Newton. The 
 nation's detestation of the Prussian aristocracy 
 brought out in strong relief the almost obsequious 
 approach of the English knights of St. John. The 
 nation thinks of the Prussian notables who compose 
 the Order of St. John as ordinary blackguards in an 
 extraordinary position. But to the princely and 
 noble British members they are still men of honour 
 who can be addressed without incongruity by men 
 of honour. A large part of the nation looks forward 
 to a League of Nations. It has an uneasy notion 
 that too many of its hereditary statesmen look back- 
 ward on the old International League of Nobs, and 
 hope that the family party of Europe will not 
 be altogether broken up by the present misunder- 
 standings. 
 
 Of course, no Englishman can view without strong 
 dislike the breach by Germany of every civilized con- 
 vention. But there is a world of difference between 
 the man who regards Germany as having "not alwaj r s" 
 adhered to the standard code of " sport " and fair 
 play, and the man who sees no essential difference 
 between the crimes of decorated Germans and the 
 murders and dirtinesses of vulgar people. The one 
 will be ready hereafter to receive socially German 
 princes and counts, though he will no doubt con- 
 tinue to dislike the German people. The other pro- 
 mises himself that he will forgive the German people 
 on condition that they get rid of their princes and 
 counts, but on no other condition. Both may have to 
 compromise, but the main difference in their present 
 position is fully visible: the English populace is 
 fighting for the extinction of Prussianism, and the 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOfcM* 
 44JITA BAJ4JBARA COLLtGiJ Lla&A&i
 
 102 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 English ruling class is fighting for a favourable 
 accommodation with Prussians whom it expects at 
 no distant date to meet at the dinner-table. And, 
 as has happened so often in great matters, the wide, 
 noble, and generous view is that of the common man, 
 while the narrow, selfish, and snobbish view is that 
 of the Olympian god, "careless of mankind," but 
 most mindful of the Almanack de Gotha.
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 At thii^-seven men looked on Mr. Churchill as a 
 statesman of some achievement. At forty-seven he 
 is discussed as a politician of considerable promise. 
 
 Mr. Churchill's case is perhaps unique. There 
 have been rises even more rapid. There has probably 
 been no fall comparable with his which was not final. 
 If the dramatic proprieties were consulted, this Lucifer 
 should not hope again. In fact, he is hoping again 
 and trying again, for all the world as if he were a 
 Smiles hero. He has served the Crown as Under- 
 Secretary of State for the Colonies, President of the 
 Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the 
 Admiralty, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, 
 Hussar Colonel, and Minister of Munitions. And 
 now that he is beginning life again (not from the 
 bottom, but from the top, or somewhere near it), his 
 future is debated with something of the curiosity 
 attaching to some beardless wonder fresh from the 
 Oxford Union. 
 
 In the days when Mr. Llo} r d George was Lime- 
 housing, still more when, on the very eve of the war, 
 he led an agitation against our bloated armaments, 
 many believed that Mr. Churchill would some day 
 play Elisha to Mr. Asquith's Elijah. The reversion 
 to the Premier's mantle seemed to lie between him 
 and Sir Edward Grey; and Sir Edward Grey had 
 little ambition that way, while Mr. Churchill was 
 understood to be a very Barkis for willingness. There 
 is every indication that Mr. Churchill had familiar- 
 ized himself with the notion of becoming Mr. Asquith's 
 
 103
 
 104 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 heir, and perhaps, following the rule of young men 
 of great expectations, looked forward 'with some 
 impatience to the time when that statesman would go 
 to his own, i.e.,' 1 another place." 
 
 Undeniably Mr. Churchill went into active train- 
 ing for the part. He affected the eye severe, the 
 mind of formal cut, the wise saws and modern in- 
 stances of responsible maturity. He emphasized in 
 the strongest possible way the contrast between his 
 own moderation and the sansculottism of Mr. Lloyd 
 George. The more violently the latter swung to the 
 left, the more heavily Mr. Churchill leaned to the 
 right. He seemed to enjoy the " Ohs " of the 
 Outhwaites no less than the " Hear, hears " of those 
 who wanted eight and would not wait. 
 
 Now and again he used the tones of the strong party 
 man and the sturdy democrat. But he generally pre- 
 ferred to suggest sane Imperialism, defence without 
 defiance, unfrenzied finance, temperate reform, nation 
 before faction. His new austerity never reached a 
 higher pitch than during the Marconi episode. Nothing 
 could be more admirably dramatic than his indignation 
 when called to give evidence before the Committee. 
 How he rated the chairman for taking him away from 
 the King's business about a sordid affair in which 
 he could have no possible interest ! The part, like 
 most of Mr. Churchill's, was perhaps a little overdone, 
 but at any rate he made it quite clear to the public 
 that one Radical Minister at least need not fear cross- 
 examination as to his investments. The advertise- 
 ment may have been quite unintentional. But it 
 was there, legible as a sky-sign. 
 
 It would be interesting to know what ironical 
 memory of that time remained with the Prime Minister 
 when he strained the allegiance of some of his Con- 
 servative followers by inviting Mr. Churchill to join
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 105 
 
 his Government as Minister of Munitions. Equally 
 pleasant would it be to share Mr. Churchill's inmost 
 thoughts on the subject — and Mr. Asquith's also. 
 But if we cannot explore these forbidden regions, we 
 may at least discuss how it happens that Mr. Lloyd 
 George was able to take this particular form of revenge, 
 and how perhaps the best-equipped intellectually of all 
 our younger men of affairs is now watched with some 
 anxiety in a post for which the modest abilities of 
 Dr. Addison were considered adequate. 
 
 There is no doubt about Mr. Churchill's capacity. 
 None but a first-rate man could survive so many first- 
 rate mistakes. Had he not been, despite his reverses, 
 formidable as an opponent and valuable as a col- 
 laborator, Mr. Lloyd George would assuredly not 
 have encountered severe criticism on his behalf. Nor 
 would Mr. As quit h have thrust him forward from one 
 great position to another. Some savour of ridicule 
 must always attach to the very young man who makes 
 omniscience his foible. Less kindly emotions are 
 roused by the spectacle of precocious talents for in- 
 trigue and that hunger for place and power that shows 
 most ungracefully in youth. Mr. Churchill upset his 
 critics' gravity when at twenty-seven he affected the 
 airs of a political Manfred, weighted with an intoler- 
 able burden of care. The bowed shoulders, the 
 thoughtful frown, the tense manner, contrasting with 
 the extreme boyishness of his face and figure, be- 
 longed to the realm of pure comedy. On the other 
 hand, it was as unpleasant to mark his hungry egotism 
 as to watch the greed of a child miser. But even in 
 those early days, whether one smiled or railed, one 
 could not dismiss him as an ordinary poser or an 
 ordinary place-seeker. 
 
 If he overplayed the thinker, he did think. If he 
 was overeager in his bids for office, he had obviously
 
 106 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 a right in the auction-room. Little short of a genius 
 for affairs could have enabled him to take, as his first 
 essay, under a dummy chief, the real direction of a 
 Department so important at the time as the Ministry 
 of the Colonies. In fact, Mr. Churchill has genius, 
 and of a quite high order. It is shown in his purely 
 literal work; there is little better in its way than 
 the biography of his father, while his River War is 
 altogether excellent. His best speeches are distin- 
 guished by a technical quality, a power of luminous 
 exposition, a dignity of phrase, a mastery, a breadth 
 and grasp that one seeks in vain in the Prime Minister's. 
 Nor is he merely a man of words. The turn of his 
 mind is, indeed, rather towards action, and it is prob- 
 ably in administration that it finds the keenest satis- 
 faction. He has gifts, in short, which might entitle 
 him without presumption to expect the highest posi- 
 tion in the State, were they not intermingled with 
 other qualities which make him still, after a life of 
 extraordinary activity, little more than a man of 
 promise. 
 
 Perhaps the chief reproach lies with his ancestors. 
 At this distance there is visible in him more than a 
 trace of the termagant humour, the restless levity, 
 and the inordinate vanity of Sarah Jennings. He 
 has the blood also of that Spencer whose name was 
 a byword for unprincipled intrigue in the most un- 
 principled period in our political history. From the 
 great Duke he inherits, perhaps, his courage, his war- 
 like tastes, much of his intellect, and no little of his 
 facility for espousing new causes and deserting old 
 ones. With John Churchill's steady baseness, cool 
 treachery, and single eye to the main chance, he might 
 easily have rivalled the glory and shame of the founder 
 of his house. 
 
 But Mr. Churchill is neither great enough nor bad
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 107 
 
 enough nor narrow enough for that. The American 
 strain in him, mingling oddly with that old English 
 blood, is perhaps responsible for many things. It 
 may have given him a certain impatience for what he 
 once called — while joyously admitting that he had 
 long talked it as a matter of business — " Tory clap- 
 trap." It may have imparted an extra touch of reck- 
 lessness in speculation, while giving him also a dog- 
 gedness which was not visible in his father, and for 
 want of which Lord Randolph went to pieces after 
 his first defeat. To it may be traceable, more than to 
 any English source, a lack of simplicity, a taste for 
 self-advertisement uncommon in an English aristo- 
 crat, an unbridled tendency to naked " bossing " of 
 any " show," and other peculiarities which make Mr. 
 Churchill a difficult man for many plain Englishmen 
 to " get on with." 
 
 It is just this failure to get on that lies at the root 
 of the whole mystery of Mr. Churchill's maimed career. 
 He did not get on with the Unionists. After the 
 first raptures he failed to get on with most Liberals. 
 He did not get on with Lord Fisher. It was perhaps 
 not surprising that he did not get on with the Coalition 
 Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy — a post for senile 
 wisdom rather than for young pushfulness. Whether 
 the Army did not get on with him, or he with the 
 Army, only he and the Army may sa)'. But the 
 grand gesture with which he went to the trenches was 
 too soon followed by a return to Westminster to sug- 
 gest entire compatibility. 
 
 The whisper goes round that at the Ministry of 
 Munitions Mr. Churchill still fails to get on. His 
 ability is not questioned, but he has that type of 
 masterfulness which irritates while it fails to subdue. 
 Of his relations with the War Cabinet less is said, 
 possibly because there is nothing to say. When the
 
 108 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 late Lord Salisbury received a suggestion that he 
 should offer a place to Lord Randolph Churchill and 
 thus silence that distinguished outcast's opposition, 
 he replied in parable. " I once had," he said, "a 
 carbuncle on my neck. If I can avoid another I 
 shall do so." The Prime Minister has no such fear of 
 Lord Randolph's son, and perhaps he is right. It may 
 be that adversity has taught Mr. Churchill some 
 lessons which he failed to master in the days of his 
 facile success. 
 
 It would be to the advantage of the country, no 
 less than of Mr. Churchill, if he could master them. 
 " For the love of Christ, gentlemen," said Oliver 
 Cromwell once to the Parliamentarians, "I beseech 
 you to think it is possible you may be mistaken." 
 Mr. Churchill's infallibility is one of his chief weak- 
 nesses. Taking all knowledge as his province, he 
 cannot help being superficial, but then every states- 
 man necessarily is that, and it must be said for Mr. 
 Churchill that he will learn more of a subject in six 
 months than most politicians do in six years. Un- 
 fortunately he will assume that, as soon as he is bored 
 with learning, there is nothing more to learn, and 
 will imagine that he is fit to undertake, not merely 
 the general control which is the business of a political 
 chief, but the technical ordering of his department. 
 He goes up in an aeroplane, down in a submarine, 
 " swots " Mahan and a few textbooks, and considers 
 himself qualified to be quite other than a Sir Joseph 
 Porter as Ruler of the King's Navee. Teaching your 
 grandfather his own business is fully as futile as teach- 
 ing your grandmother a business less obviously hers. 
 
 Mr. Churchill should also learn not to be too much 
 in a hurry. I have not in mind here those speeches 
 of his concerning " rats " and " legitimate gambles " 
 and " victories such as the world has never seen " — ■
 
 MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 109 
 
 though in each case he would have been wiser to await 
 the event. I am thinking more of his personal record. 
 He would have got on faster at a slower pace. He 
 has been too busy looking after his next job to think 
 enough of the one in hand. Had he been content 
 to work steadily and play the game according to the 
 rules, had he, so to speak, masticated life instead 
 of wolfing it in great gulps, he would probably have 
 gone quite as far, without going back at all. But 
 with him impatience assumes almost the aspect of 
 nervous disease. He does not know how to wait. 
 He is a victim of the " Do it now " craze — " it " being 
 more or less undefined. The sedative influence of 
 principle he is unhappily denied. Indeed, there is a 
 good deal of his great ancestor's century in Mr. 
 Churchill. " Restless, unfixed in principles and place, 
 in power unpleased, impatient of disgrace," he has 
 rather close affinity with those brilliant but somewhat 
 ineffective men whose weaknesses and talents Dryden 
 has described with such unerring touch in Absalom 
 and Achitophel. 
 
 Few men fight successfully against their natures; 
 and though Mr. Churchill is still young, as statesmen 
 go, it is probable that time, though it may tame, will 
 not reform him. It is a pity, for he has the stuff, if 
 it were not marred, to make a second Chatham, and 
 half a dozen Pitts. As things are, he is perilously 
 near a second edition of his father, with just the differ- 
 ence due either to some added tenacity in himself or 
 some increased tolerance on the part of the public.
 
 MR. HAROLD COX 
 
 It is easy to understand why nobody speaks ill of Mr. 
 Harold Cox. It is not so clear why all men should 
 conspire with exaggeration to speak well of him. 
 
 People of every party think it the proper thing to 
 pay him the tribute of their usually far from supple 
 knees. The Liberals reverence him in his quality of 
 custodian of the Lares of Cobdenism. The Socialists 
 owe him some tenderness, as a former Fabian, for 
 what he was, and perhaps for something of what he 
 still is. The Tories, in opposition at least, respect 
 him for his quarrels with official Liberalism. 
 
 Thus he has won high praise from very different 
 people. I seem to remember words of eulogy from 
 Mr. Balfour. Mr. Asquith once declared him " indis- 
 pensable " to public life. He received the ominous 
 commendation of Lord Rosebery in a panegyric which 
 would have been a trifle extravagant for Burke. 
 And whenever the Adullamites are gathered together 
 part of their rites is the swinging of a censer before 
 Mr. Cox. After general denunciation of House of 
 Commons decadence and the tyranny of the party 
 machine, Mr. Cox is pretty sure to be mentioned as an 
 example of the kind of man the country wants and 
 cannot get. 
 
 It seems to be everybody's business to give Mr. Cox 
 a friendly shove forward. But what is everybody's 
 business is also nobody's. With all this reverence for 
 Mr. Cox no man or party seems fiercely anxious to 
 secure him with hoops of steel. Mr. Asquith found 
 him indispensable, but dispensed with him. Lord 
 
 no
 
 MR. HAROLD COX 111 
 
 Rosebery gave him a character when he could give 
 him nothing else. He rather resembles the village 
 grocer whom the local magnates respect highly, while 
 dealing exclusively with the stores. For him there 
 is always a pleasant " good-morning " and a courteous 
 raising of the whip hand, but the gentry continue 
 to get their currants from town. 
 
 There is a reason for everything, and it is not by 
 sheer accident that Mr. Harold Cox has latterly given 
 to the Edinburgh Review what everybody agrees 
 was meant for mankind. He belongs, prob bly, to a 
 class of men noted by Lytton in his slight but sug- 
 gestive sketch of that forgotten notability, Sir James 
 Mackintosh: " men who are less valued for any pre- 
 cise thing they have done than according to a vague 
 notion of what they are capable of doing." The 
 quotation may be continued with advantage. " Their 
 powers of comprehension," says the critic, " are greater 
 than their powers either of creation or exposition ; and 
 their energy, though capable of being roused occasion- 
 ally to great exertions, can rarely be relied on for any 
 continued effort. They collect, sometimes in rather 
 a sauntering manner, an immense store of varied 
 inform tion. The faculty of comprehending genius 
 may give them, in a certain degree, the power of 
 imitating it, whilst ambition, interest, and necessity 
 will at times stimulate them to extraordinary exertions. 
 As writers they usually lack originality, ease, and 
 power; as men of action, tact, firmness, and decision. 
 In society, however, the mere faculty of remembering 
 and comprehending a variety of things is quite suffi- 
 cient to obtain a considerable reputation." 
 
 It might be added that a common characteristic of 
 such men is excessive reverence for authority and a 
 tendency to quote it chiefly in a negative sense. 
 " There is a Parliament wit," says Halifax, " to be
 
 112 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 distinguished from all other kinds ; those who have it 
 do not stuff their heads only with cavils and objec- 
 tions." Closely regarded, " cavils and objections " 
 are the main stock-in-trade of men like Mr. Cox. 
 Often the cavils are justified and the objections sound ; 
 Mr. Cox's warnings against profligate expenditure 
 and unscientific taxation during the present war 
 might have been profitably heeded by three Chancel- 
 lors of the Exchequer. But there are limits to the 
 usefulness of a critic of this kind, and there are occa- 
 sions when he is not useful at all. It needs no ghost 
 come from the grave of old systems to. tell us, as Mr. 
 Cox does, that there are manj 7- difficulties in the way 
 of a League of Nations. That ever3 r body knows. 
 What we want is wise counsel as to how the difficulties 
 may be overcome. 
 
 There is something curiously illuminative in one 
 little fact of Mr. Cox's early life. He belongs to the 
 distinctly upper stratum of the middle classes. His 
 father was a county court judge. I am aware that 
 county court judges are — or were — counted hardly 
 human (except in their liability to err) by my lords of 
 the King's Bench, but ordinary people quite rightly 
 regard them as personages of considerable dignity and 
 emolument. Mr. Harold Cox was thus from his 
 cradle in an atmosphere of refined enlightenment. 
 He imbibed everything in the way of academic 
 culture that Tonbridge and Jesus College could give 
 him, distinguished himself greatl}- in mathematics 
 and political economy, and acted as an Extension 
 Lecturer in the latter subject. 
 
 Then, " in order to gain an insight into the life of 
 English labourers," he spent a j'ear working as an 
 agricultural labourer in Kent and Surrey. There is 
 nothing very extraordinary in this fact . It was a com- 
 paratively common thing in the eighties, when social
 
 MR. HAROLD COX 113 
 
 questions were very much to the fore, for educated 
 young men to take a turn at manual work with a view 
 to qualify as " authorities " on such questions. But 
 it may be suggested that, while this sort of thing may 
 be very good fun, and capital experience in its way, 
 the man who embarks solemnly on such an enterprise 
 in order to " gain an insight " is not to be trusted 
 with his gains. He will be much farther off reality 
 when he has finished than before he started. 
 
 The only way to understand the poor is to be poor. 
 There is no tighter freemasonry in this world than 
 that of those who live on a pound a week or under; 
 and the coarsest mistakes concerning the manual 
 worker are those of people who pride themselves on 
 knowing him through and through. No less reliable 
 guide exists than the Bishop who boasts that he is 
 more at home in Canning Town than at Fulham Palace, 
 or the " social worker " who specializes in slums. 
 The poor will occasionally be frank with richer people 
 who approach them naturally; they shut up like 
 oysters to those who want to stud} 7 them or to " do 
 good." After all, it is only natural. An evangelist 
 from Mile End, a cookery expert from Bethnal Green, 
 or an earnest seeker after social truths from Wapping, 
 would receive but a cold welcome in Berkeley Square. 
 
 Not that undue stress need be laid on this youthful 
 adventure. But it does seem relevant to a discussion 
 of Mr. Cox's mentality. It suggests at once the 
 lucidity and rigidity of his mind. It would be in- 
 accurate as well as rude to call it wooden. Let us 
 rather say it suggests the polish of fine mahogany: it 
 reflects much light and yet gives none. There is a 
 certain affinity between Mr. Cox and Mrs. Micawber of 
 glorious memory. Mr. Cox wanted to get an insight 
 into labour conditions, and the first thing was to see 
 the labourer for himself. Mrs. Micawber wanted to 
 
 8
 
 114 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 get an insight into the Medway coal tn.de, and the 
 first thing was to see the Medway for herself. She 
 saw the Medway, and little came of it. Mrs. 
 Micawber's marked logical faculty is also faintly 
 suggestive of Mr. Cox's. She arranged her major and 
 minor premises delightfully, and proceeded with re- 
 sistless majesty to the syllogism — which generally 
 demonstrated the impossibility of feeding a man, 
 woman, and a growing boy (to sa} r nothing of the 
 twins) on 3s. 9c!. worth of commission in three months. 
 You are buoyed up with continual hope that some- 
 thing practical is going to emerge from this splendid 
 lucidity — and nothing does. Mr. Cox disappoints in 
 rather the same way. That beautiful logical mill 
 of his grinds to perfection, and produces — what ? 
 
 The barrenness of Mr. Cox's achievement, as con- 
 trasted with the reputation he bears, is perhaps 
 explained if we understand his as a mind following 
 generally received ideas rather than its original inspi- 
 rations. As suggested above, it gives back light, and 
 does not produce it; it reflects but does not think. 
 Such minds are seldom fruitful, though they often put 
 forth an impressive amount of foliage. They also tend 
 under a great outward show of consistency and calm 
 reason, to real confusion of thought. 
 
 If we examine Mr. Cox's record closely we shall 
 find a sterilizing conflict in fundamentals. He was, 
 as has been noted, a Fabian. That is to say, at one 
 period of his life at least he must have thought himself 
 in favour of the enlargement of the powers of the State 
 to a degree utterly inconsistent with the very root 
 principles of individualist Liberalism. Yet he sat as 
 a Liberal for Preston from 1906 to 1909. Of course 
 an easy explanation is that the Socialistic } r outh cooled 
 into the moderate Liberal in his progress to ultimate 
 Conservatism, and this theory would seem to gain
 
 MR. HAROLD COX 115 
 
 strength by the clear fact that Mr. Cox is now nearer 
 the right than the left, and that sometimes he even 
 seems a considerable distance from the centre. Occa- 
 sionally he speaks rather more like a Tor}' than a 
 disgruntled Whig, and his views on Ireland are hardly 
 distinguishable from Lord Lansdowne's. 
 
 But, whatever the case about his Liberalism, it is 
 not easy to square the undoubted fact that he was once 
 a Fabian with the other undoubted fact that he has 
 been a lifelong Free Trader. Free Trade may be a 
 good or bad thing, or it may be sometimes good and 
 sometimes bad. But the very soul of Collectivism 
 is combat, and the very soul of Free Trade is acquies- 
 cence. The Collectivist says economic forces must be 
 consciously controlled, or there will be chaos; the 
 Free Trader believes that the only safe plan is full 
 liberty for economic forces to act and react. The 
 Free Trader's attitude to the State resembles that of 
 Artemus Ward to the fire brigade, whom he thanked 
 for " kindly refraining from squirting." The Col- 
 lectivist would have a constant stream of vivifying 
 interference. 
 
 It is, therefore, I think, clear that at one period of 
 his life, at least, Mr. Cox was in a state of confusion 
 on fundamentals — not an uncommon case with young 
 men, and a quite forgivable case with the majority — 
 but rather serious in the special cicumstances, for 
 Mr Cox's whole position as a teacher is that of ex 
 cathedra infallibility. The point of honour must 
 always be considered. You and I might do what is 
 not done at a duke's dinner party, and still hold up our 
 heads as human beings ; not so a lifelong professor of 
 good form. The claim of the Coxes is not that they are 
 sometimes very right, but that they are never wrong. 
 And one mistake is fatal to the whole pretension. 
 
 I imagine the Free Trader was even at the time more
 
 116 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 the real Harold Cox than the temporary Fabian. For 
 Free Trade — or more correctly the idea behind Free 
 Trade — is his natural element. To his acute and well- 
 regulated mind the impregnability of the Cobdenic 
 doctrine to purely logical attack would necessarily 
 appeal. It is just as impossible to deny that free 
 exchange, taking a large area, favours the production 
 of wealth, and that protective duties retard it, as it 
 is to deny that plenty of beef and bread, taking the 
 mass of mankind, are more favourable to vigour than a 
 restricted diet. But some men will die of a steak, and 
 some industries — perhaps even some nations — will die 
 of Free Trade. One seems to catch here the mur- 
 mured reflection "Why keep them from dying? Is 
 it an advantage to bolster up the clearly inefficient ?" 
 —a remark that at once reminds one that Free Trade 
 is the political equivalent of Darwinism . ' ' Supply and 
 demand," " buy in the cheapest market and sell in 
 the dearest," " natural operation of economic law," 
 "economic tendencies which cannot be resisted": 
 what is all this but a variant of the survival of the 
 fittest ; " fittest " meaning only those who survive ? 
 Free Trade and the doctrine of evolution are both 
 deserving of high respect as an explanation of economic 
 and biological phenomena; but it is hardly fanciful 
 to see in the modern extensions of both the secular 
 cousins of Calvinism. 
 
 Calvinism of any kind is a dreary creed, and a 
 certain despair is discernible in most of the economists 
 from whom Mr. Cox has sucked inspiration. His 
 own writings reveal much of the cheerful hopelessness 
 — it is not easy to describe the mood — of a school 
 convinced that, while Manchester was very horrible, 
 it was the best we could reasonably look for, and must 
 be borne with stoicism and even satisfaction, pending 
 the " evolution " of better things. The calm with
 
 MR. HAROLD COX 117 
 
 which philosophers of this school discuss " displace- 
 ment of labour " through the introduction of new 
 methods or the swift decay of old trades affords 
 perhaps the best illustration of what is here meant. 
 
 The extreme ability with which Mr. Cox acts as the 
 exponent of Free Trade doctrines may explain the 
 esteem in which he is held by one party. The 
 general good-will to which allusion has been made 
 can only be understood by those who have come in 
 contact with a singularly engaging personality.
 
 VISCOUNT MILNER 
 
 When Lord Milner became a member of the War 
 Cabinet the prevalent feeling was vague distrust. 
 His appointment to the War Office was as generally 
 approved, and not merely on the ground that, com- 
 pared with his lordly predecessor, his intellectual 
 qualities " stick fiery off indeed." 
 
 The truth is that the average man strongly sus- 
 pects Lord Milner in the capacity of spiritual guide; 
 but, in spite of his many failures, retains faith in 
 his talents for administration in matters where poli- 
 tical bias is of small account. He feels, too, that the 
 ruthlessness which appears to lie at the core of Lord 
 Milner 's character is an asset in his present office. 
 The War Office wants a head. It has never had one 
 since Lord Kitchener's death, and even Kitchener, 
 who was not in 191 5 the Kitchener of Omdurman, 
 could not quite master the job. Mr. Lloyd George 
 was simply a picturesque figurehead and Lord Derby 
 an unimpressive one. Lord Milner is qualified to 
 be much more. He has brains and industry. He 
 dislikes incapacity, and is believed to be no respecter 
 of persons. 
 
 In some regards he is exceedingly well fitted to deal 
 with that specially British curse — the lenity to well- 
 connected muddlers, which has evoked the bitter 
 sneer that the English will see their best division 
 broken rather than break their worst General. For 
 while he is a man of no family, and has therefore 
 no relatives to consider, Lord Milner is also the last 
 
 to be impressed by family trees. That is the common 
 
 118
 
 VISCOUNT MILNER 119 
 
 fate of English middle-class statesmen as soon as they 
 have reached the stage when it is considered worth 
 while to flatter them. Lord Milner's intellectual 
 arrogance makes such abasement impossible . Indeed , 
 he would probably enjoy the discomfiture of a fool 
 all the more because he belonged to a caste. 
 
 The common respect for Lord Milner as an instru- 
 ment, as contrasted with the equally common dis- 
 trust of him as an influence, has, like most popular 
 instincts, a sufficiently rational foundation. The 
 public respect his Prussian efficiency, but are re- 
 pelled by his Prussian mind. Much malignant and 
 vulgar nonsense has been written about the accident 
 of Lord Milner's German connections. But, while it 
 is absurd to suggest that he has the smallest sympathy 
 in this war with the land with which he has been so 
 closely connected, there is no gainsaying the fact that 
 his mind, like his features, is of a very Prussian cast. 
 Environment has, indeed, toned down the harsher 
 lineaments of the character. Lord Milner is a pleasant 
 man to talk to. He has a real gift of friendship. 
 He is an intelligent and kindly patron of young men 
 of promise; in fact, no part of his character is more 
 amiable than the paternal tenderness which he, a 
 bachelor, well on in the sixties, shows for clever people 
 very much his juniors. He is not really " reactiona^." 
 He believes in progress as much as any man; he is 
 farther from the mere Tory than he is from Mr. 
 Sidney Webb. His patriotism, in its kind, is indis- 
 putable. He has himself laughed at the folly which 
 imputes to him, " an out-and-out British Imperialist," 
 a divided allegiance. But in nothing, truly, is his 
 Prussianism better revealed than in that same " out- 
 and-outness " ; nothing more signally illustrates his in- 
 tellectual and temperamental affinities to the professors 
 of Welt-Politik, whom it is now his business to fight.
 
 120 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 The old English word for colonies was " planta- 
 tions," and the idea of a garden still best indicates 
 what was long the underlying principle of English 
 colonization. What we call the British Empire is a 
 gigantic absurdity considered as an Empire; it is a 
 wonderful thing considered as a natural growth. 
 Our gardens have occasionally been watered by un- 
 justly spilled blood ; some of them were Naboth's 
 vineyards wrongfully seized. But in the main they 
 have been made by the spade and not by the bayonet ; 
 the}- are the monument of free men and free 
 forces. 
 
 The German idea of a colon}', on the other hand, 
 has always been a well-managed factory of raw 
 material, with everything — more especially the native 
 and the colonist — put in its right place. Some thirty 
 years ago the German colonial idea, in the general 
 worship of German things which followed 1870, began 
 to gain ground in this country, and Lord Milner must 
 be credited with his part in that cynical reaction. 
 Coolly examined, the whole notion of modern Imperial- 
 ism in its extreme expression is Prussian. The United 
 Kingdom is to be made as " efficient " a workshop as 
 Germany, a clearing-house and central power-station, 
 and a pleasure-place for plutocrats from everywhere. 
 The Dominions, too big to be forced, are to be shep- 
 herded into a state of dependence, their development 
 canalized and stereotyped. The tropical dependencies 
 are merely to subserve the interests of great British 
 monopolies. The only material difference between 
 the German nd the English school is that in Germany 
 aims are discussed frankly and pursued logically, 
 whereas here realities are obscured by sentimental 
 talk, and policy is subject to sharp variations. 
 
 About a generation ago South Africa happened to 
 be in a position half-way between the Crown Colonies
 
 VISCOUNT MILNER 121 
 
 and the more developed States of Australia and 
 Canada, and to its great misfortune the great gold 
 and diamond discoveries precisely synchronized with 
 the rise of the new eagerness for exploitation on 
 Prussian principles. In the older States foundations 
 were laid by hardworking pioneers, and the edifice 
 was completed by citizens. In South Africa gamblers 
 began the work, and S3mdicates continued it. There 
 was real danger at one time of a veritable dictator- 
 ship by boards of directors. It is due to Lord Milner 
 to note his dislike and hostility to the low men who 
 wished to impose on half a continent the most degrad- 
 ing of all tyrannies . He worked his hardest to transfer 
 practical sovereignty from the Randlords to the British 
 Crown, and in the end he won. His imperialism was 
 not mixed up, like that of even Rhodes, with baser 
 ingredients. He regarded only what he thought the 
 true interests of Britain and Africa. Moreover, he 
 was free from some singular illusions of Rhodes and 
 others. Rhodes shared an error common both to the 
 British Pacifist and the British Imperialist. He 
 acted as if England, by some law of nature, was 
 always safe. The Pacifist thought nobody would 
 ever attack us if we were inoffensive. The Imperialist 
 went a step farther, and could not conceive that even 
 aggression might be risky. The simplicity of the 
 Jameson raid plotters was really more wonderful than 
 their lack of scruple. To Rhodes and his fellows the 
 attempt to subvert the South African Republic was 
 little more than an affair of commercial policy, hardly 
 more important than the despoilment of Lobengula. 
 Their naive surprise at the noise made by their ex- 
 ploit is truly wonderful in retrospect. 
 
 Lord Milner 's wider intelligence was capable of no 
 such self-deception. It is true that his judgment 
 has occasionally been deflected by a singular vein of
 
 122 UXCEXSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 rashness — " damn the consequences " is with him 
 more than the mood of a moment — and in not avoiding 
 the Boer War he committed a capital error; perhaps 
 he had not reckoned on the Victorian War Office. 
 But in a general way he recognized the danger of an 
 adventurous policy unsupported by adequate military 
 force. Hence his anxiety to earn 7 Prussianism to its 
 only logical conclusion, an intense militarism. Lord 
 Milner's enthusiasm for conscription long antedated 
 the present war. For him it seemed mere common 
 sense that strong policy should be supported by 
 strong armaments, and, granting his premises, his 
 conclusions were unquestionabfy just. Only a people 
 so illogical as the English could at once huzza 
 for " Dr. Jim " and cut down naval and milit arr- 
 est im at es. 
 
 Indeed, such virtue as resides in consistency can- 
 not be denied Lord Milner. His politics are in some 
 senses a little vague. He fits into no English mould. 
 He is in many ways the most lonely figure in our public 
 life. But one principle runs like a rod of steel through 
 his career — a sovereign contempt for the democratic 
 idea. Not that he is in any way kin to the " shoot- 
 'em-down " Conservatives with whom he has been 
 brought into casual association. His model State 
 would tolerate squiredom as little as the walking- 
 delegate; for his main quarrel with the democratic 
 idea is that it is inefficient, and his hatred of waste 
 would equally predispose him against a mere gentle- 
 man do-nothing caste. He has no manner of use 
 for looking backward to a supposed golden age. He 
 looks eagerly forward to an iron one; his real ideal 
 is Krupp and culture; a highly educated and hard- 
 working upper class, and the masses well fed, well 
 drilled, and broken into contented subordination. 
 And here we arrive at Prussia once more.
 
 VISCOUNT MILNER 123 
 
 The Milner type of mind is tolerably antique. It 
 held, long ago, that man was made for the Sabbath 
 and not the Sabbath for man. It conceives the citi- 
 zen as existing for the State and not the State for 
 the citizen. And, just as the claims of the individual 
 are nothing beside the claims of the State, so the 
 rights of a great State outweigh those of a small one. 
 The same tidiness of mind which finds individual 
 liberty wasteful and disorderly also deplores the 
 loss of power implied in small nationalities. One can 
 well imagine Lord Milner agreeing with that German 
 professor who saw something positively wicked in the 
 existence of an independent and " slippered " Holland. 
 No doubt the British public has not consciously 
 weighed every act and word of Lord Milner. 'But it 
 has certainly smelt his essential Prussianism, and 
 has felt with no incertitude his incongruity as a 
 spiritual leader in a war " ostentatiously " — to use 
 the Prime Minister's rather unhapp)' word — waged 
 in defence of individual liberty and national right. 
 
 The strength of this distrust is really an inverted 
 compliment to Lord Milner. He is certainly not 
 alone in his views. But the)' are held by him with 
 absolute sincerity, and the lover of freedom rightly 
 sees his real enemy in the man who hates freedom on 
 principle, and not because his pocket is affected. 
 Lord Milner inspires fear as a disinterested fanatic, 
 for that is really what he is, with all the coolness of 
 his head and heart. He does not merely object to 
 what fails to fit into his system; he hates it. And 
 Lord Milner 's system is just bureaucracy. He is the 
 civil servant above everything. His dislike of democ- 
 racy is simply, in the ultimate analysis, the dislike 
 of a civil servant for people who " want to know, you 
 know." Democracy is our old friend Tite Barnacle's 
 ogre "the public": that public which impudently
 
 124 UXCEXSOJRED CELEBRITIES 
 
 insists on questioning and criticizing, when it should 
 be content with paying taxes and being managed. 
 It is true that Lord Milner 's Civil Service would not 
 be a How Not to Do It Department ; it would really 
 work, as it does in Prussia. He would do his duty by 
 the herd. But he damns the public as heartily as 
 he did the consequences. 
 
 He has been described by his admirers as "the 
 finest flower of human culture the University of 
 Oxford has produced in our time " — which means 
 that he is quite a well-educated man. On the other 
 hand, he has been accused by his critics of committing 
 more coarse and stupid blunders than any public 
 man of his day. The two extravagances contain a 
 morsel of truth. Lord Milner might be considered 
 a youthful prodigy at Oxford, but one doubts whether 
 his powers attracted much attention at Tubingen. 
 And the very things which we are all agreed were 
 errors would never be thought such in the Wilhelm- 
 strasse. Just as alcohol always retains a flavour of 
 the substance of origin, so Lord Milner is just a little 
 foreign in his strong points and his weaknesses. He 
 is too well educated to retain an instinct. He is too 
 intelligent to be altogether wise. In nothing is he 
 less English than in the splendid confidence with 
 which he steers straight for a wrong conclusion which, 
 by all known rules, should be the right one. His argu- 
 ments against the grant of self-government to Africa 
 were really unanswerable ; at any rate, they were never 
 answered. Yet " C.-B.," not a very clever man, was 
 right, and Lord Milner, a desperately clever man, 
 was demonstrably wrong. 
 
 It is just this want of the homely wisdom of the 
 common Englishman that makes it a little doubtful 
 whether Lord Milner will succeed wholly in his new 
 task. All will be done that a cultivated and strong;
 
 VISCOUNT MILNER 125 
 
 intelligence, directed by patient industry, can do. 
 But the man who is to make the most of the New 
 Army wants something more than intelligence. He 
 must be able to feel and to smell what is right and what 
 is wrong. And there are two things deficient in Lord 
 Milner, judging by the facts of his career — he has no 
 nose, and not too much heart.
 
 MR. AND MRS. SIDNEY WEBB 
 
 These twain the Heavens and the Heavies — the 
 Eternal Blue and the Eternal Blue- Book — have joined 
 together; let no man put them asunder. 
 
 No man with a sense of the fitness of things is likely 
 to try. For here, if anywhere, is the perfect mar- 
 riage: two minds with but a single set of thoughts, 
 two typewriters that click as one. It is hard to 
 imagine Marshall without Snelgrove, Swan divorced 
 from Edgar; but all that is nothing to the strain of 
 thinking of Beatrice and Sidney Webb as two distinct 
 and unrelated individuals. 
 
 There was a time, of course, when it was impossible 
 to speak of them as " the Webbs." The couple were 
 in fact, of quite mature years when, as far back as 
 1892, Miss Potter, eighth daughter of a former Great 
 Western chairman, decided on the uncertain co- 
 operative venture called marriage. It was natural 
 that she should be attracted to Sidney Webb. They 
 vrere both Fabians. They had both a fancy for arid 
 subjects. She had " personally investigated social 
 and industrial conditions," and written much indiges- 
 tible matter thereon ; the authorship of The Co-opera' 
 live Movement in Great Britain already stood to 
 her credit, and her maiden fancy was musing on 
 The Case for the Factory Acts. He, on the other 
 hand, after picking up educational scraps from every- 
 where, including the sandy wastes of Mecklenburg- 
 Schwerin, had wandered from the City to Whitehall, 
 from one Government office to another, and into the 
 London County Council. 
 
 126
 
 MR. AND MRS. SIDNEY WEBB 127 
 
 A Cockney of Cockneys, sharp as the London 
 sparrow, and mentally as omnivorous, he had from 
 the first gained his special niche in the Fabian move- 
 ment. He was its Chief of Staff and Minister of 
 Munitions. There were plenty of excellent artillerists, 
 dashing cavalry leaders, shrewd organizers of ambus- 
 cades, clever raiders and camouflagers, who won 
 applause, laughter, and — what they prized equally — 
 the alarmed detestation of the comfortable classes. 
 But, far behind the screen of fighting men, sat the 
 pallid, short-sighted strategist, supplying his troops 
 with facts and figures, arguments and plans of cam- 
 paign. Mr. Webb has never aspired to the limelight; 
 he never goes " over the top " ; his place, and he knows 
 it, is twenty-five miles from the front. Hence nine 
 people out of ten, though they have often heard the 
 name, have the dimmest idea of the man; and the 
 tenth person, who does know him, mingles esteem 
 with a slight tincture of distrust. 
 
 It was, it may be repeated, natural that these two 
 should come together; yet the completeness of their 
 union is none the less remarkable. In style they have 
 nothing in common. The man might pass at a Social- 
 ist conference for a proletarian of any country; the 
 woman's fine profile gives out the flavour of English 
 exclusiveness, Those who know them best say that 
 this facial dissimilarity is indicative of fundamental 
 differences in their outlook. They go the same road 
 for the same end, but from different motives. Mr. 
 Webb has a whole-hearted delight in regimentation 
 for its own sake. He would like to see the world 
 docketed, drilled, ordered, regulated — himself and 
 his like, of course, doing the docketing and regulation 
 — because he honestly thinks that the world would be 
 happier and better for such guidance. 
 
 Liberty to him means simple anarchy. It is the
 
 128 VN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 cause of all our troubles. Leave a child in a room 
 without a fireguard and you get only material for 
 an inquest. Similarly, the ordinary man, with red 
 blood and troublesome appetites, is sure to go wrong 
 unless he delivers himself over to the direction of the 
 brainy, who alone are to be trusted. It is a friendly 
 instinct, mingled with a passion for ruled columns 
 and decimal points, that leads Mr. Webb to his posi- 
 tion, and, if only men and women were without souls, 
 no system could be better than his. 
 
 Unfortunately, they have tastes as well as stomachs, 
 passions as well as appetites, tendencies to love, 
 quarrel, and gamble, as well as to work and eat. It is 
 these uneconomic proclivities that fill Mr. Webb with 
 gentle disapproval. It is, for example, highly irra- 
 tional, from his point of view, that the German 
 should go to his death singing " Deutschland fiber 
 Alles," but even more irrational that the Frenchman 
 should have contributed to that German's mania by 
 resenting for the best part of fifty years the inclusion 
 of Alsace-Lorraine in the German Empire. On the 
 Webb plan there would have been no " Revanche " 
 trouble. For life, after all, is a question of wages, 
 doctoring, police, lamp-posts, post-offices, and efficient 
 sanitation. So long as men work and barter in peace, 
 are taxed with something like equality, and are dis- 
 posed of scientifically when dead, what more can they 
 properly ask ? Now, German doctors, police, lamp- 
 posts, post-offices, and drains are demonstrably as 
 good as French, and probably there are now very man}^ 
 more of all these blessings — especially police — in 
 Alsace-Lorraine than there were in 1870. Why, then, 
 worry over the childish business of one tricolour 
 or another ? It is pure unreason on both sides. Let 
 us have more reason, says Mr. Webb, and if reason 
 is incompatible with human nature, let us get rid of 
 human nature. We shall be much better without it.
 
 MR. AND MRS. SIDNEY WEBB 129 
 
 Mrs. Webb, on her side, is credited with a rather 
 severer basis for her views. She believes in shep- 
 herding the masses not so much because they are 
 foolish as because they are desperately wicked. She 
 distrusts the natural man, just as she distrusts the 
 untutored mother. The latter will probably feed 
 her baby (which she should never have had, and 
 would not have had but for the gross neglect of 
 eugenic science) on porter and chipped potatoes. 
 The former will indulge, if he gets the chance, 
 certainly in pitch-and-toss, and quite possibly in 
 manslaughter. Look at the statistics. And there 
 follows the dismal family history of Ann Veronica 
 Patterson, married in 1814, whose 483 descendants 
 have wallowed in every kind of infamy, and have 
 cost the ratepayers and taxpayers £83,359 18s. 6|d. 
 Also the beneficial effect of State Socialism in East 
 Prussia, where parents are allowed no choice in 
 regard to the future of their offspring — a joint com- 
 mittee of schoolmasters, professors, employers, and 
 Civil Service officials deciding what trades the children 
 shall follow when they have reached the age of 
 fourteen. Mrs. Webb never changes. It is believed 
 she discusses Reconstruction in bed when air-raids 
 banish sleep. It is certain that she quelled the 
 nervousness of her maids by getting them insured, 
 and showing them the smallness of the premium. 
 How could they harbour panic when trained statis- 
 ticians estimate the betting at more than 4,000 to 1 1 
 
 The Webbs might have been compounded out of 
 half a dozen Dickens's characters. There is a good 
 deal of Gradgrind in them — " facts, facts, give me 
 facts." Their investigations into foreign affairs 
 rather recall the methods of Count Smorltork. They 
 have something of Miss Rosa Dartle's habit of getting 
 information and extracting admissions, under the 
 
 9
 
 130 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 cloak of an enormous and quite fictitious innocence. 
 They toss the ball from one to the other with all the 
 skill of Mrs. Heep and her son. And in other ways 
 they suggest the philanthropists of Bleak House. 
 True, 41, Grosvenor Road, where Mr. and Mrs. Webb 
 sometimes give modest dinners to very great people, 
 is as different as can be, in its ordered neatness, from 
 the dingy den in Thavies Inn whence Mrs. Jeltyby 
 directed her African projects. Yet there is a certain 
 flavour of Borriaboola-gha in the Webb activities. 
 The white man is a hobby to them as the black man 
 was to Mrs. Jellyby. They have an affinity for all 
 other people with missions, as she had. Secretaries 
 get in the soup, and Blue-Books into the conversation. 
 There is a general flavour of paper in the entrees and 
 of red ink in the claret, excellent as it may be. When 
 an unrepentantly human being gets in that company 
 he begins to understand why the Girondists had such 
 short shrift, why the " intellectual " everywhere, 
 while he helps to promote revolutions, is the first to 
 s ffer from them. Mere despair of arguing with 
 people who do not argue in return, but only refer you 
 to what the Actuary-General of Friendly Societies 
 said in 1872, makes one want to knock this modestly 
 assured omniscience on the head. 
 
 The Webbs are Girondists. One may almost call 
 them the English Rolands. True, they are not 
 " out " for anything dramatic in the revolutionary 
 way; and if Mrs. Webb had to mount the scaffold, 
 her last words would probably be statistical. Nor 
 can one figure Mr. Webb, however disconsolate, 
 throwing himself on the point of his sword; the 
 sword is not in his line. But the pair are, all the 
 same, playing something the same part the Rolands 
 played. They have done much to create the Moun- 
 tain, and they are already distrusted by it. /I have
 
 MR. AND MRS. SIDNEY WEBB 131 
 
 heard that Messrs. Chesterton and Belloc were at one 
 time under the fascination of the Webbs, just as 
 Robespierre yielded to that of the Rolands; to-day 
 they are already playing with their snickersnees. 
 
 Nor does the rank and file of " Labour " altogether 
 trust or like the Webbs. They draw up the " settle- 
 ments of the European map," " programmes of indus- 
 trial reconstruction," and the rest of it, because they 
 can hardly be dispensed with. After all, a party 
 pretending to domination must make some show of 
 understanding the larger questions of the day. The 
 Webbs at least give rational form to these aspirations. 
 They can invest most proposals with plausibility. 
 It is only natural that their general attitude at this 
 time should rather repel the simple-minded patriot, 
 who forgets that the Webbs, in the Minority Report 
 on the Poor Laws, did fight on the side of the angels. 
 But they are wholly sincere and disinterested. They 
 are in no sense hypocrites, or even fanatics, except as 
 an asylum warder may be fanatical against strong 
 delusion. They look on this war as on any other 
 form of waste, as pure madness, and they want to 
 place the world in a strait waistcoat. Is it their 
 fault that the straitest of all strait waistcoats are 
 made in Germany ? 
 
 That, of course, is the whole secret of the sleepless 
 suspicion with which this amiable couple are watched 
 in many quarters to-day. The social system they 
 stand for has largely been realized by one State. 
 Germany has gone farther along the Webb route than 
 any other nation. In the rebound against all Ger- 
 man things it is natural, even if unreasonable, that 
 all apostles of regimentation should incur some 
 degree of depreciation. Before the war Webbism 
 had begun to be a weariness. It is now perhaps 
 viewed with a more positive dislike.
 
 GENERAL SMUTS 
 
 There are two men who most nearly express the 
 inarticulate heart of half — and that not the least 
 intelligent half — of the English people. And neither 
 of these men is English. One is the exceedingly 
 powerful personage who speaks for the American 
 people. The other is the South African Dutch bar- 
 rister who eighteen years ago took the field against 
 us under Delarey. 
 
 The fact, superficially surprising, is capable of 
 ready explanation. President Wilson and General 
 Jan Christian Smuts represent things which the great 
 dumb England has really had in mind during decades 
 of Whig-and-Tory, Imperialist-and-Little-Englander 
 nonsense. In the past we have had to choose, 
 broadly, between undiluted Outhwaite and Lans- 
 downe neat; and now, somewhat to our astonishment, 
 we find the two not so far from each other, and very 
 far from us. 
 
 It was said of the French Revolution that the 
 
 actors were pigmies on the most colossal stage ever 
 
 set by fate. That is far truer of the present drama. 
 
 In eighteenth-century France, if the men were small, 
 
 their ideas were not. In the England of 191 8 our 
 
 little men are rather bigger than their thoughts and 
 
 words. Mr. Asquith has often spoken with a grave 
 
 eloquence worthy of the times. Mr. Lloyd George 
 
 has coined one or two phrases of pure gold among a 
 
 barrowload of pinchbeck tokens. But the ludicrous 
 
 " business as usual " catchwords have predominated, 
 
 and, on the whole, our public men recall the players 
 
 132
 
 GENERAL SMUTS 133 
 
 in the wood near Athens. We know that Pyramus 
 is really Bully Bottom, that the British lion is one 
 Snug the joiner, that all of them " sweat for bread 
 upon Athenian stalls " instead of being really the 
 great of the earth. We feel, too, that they are dread- 
 fully afraid of being hanged, " every mother's son," 
 should they play the part too convincingly. 
 
 Small wonder, indeed, that the mere politician 
 should be a little confounded by the portents of these 
 times ! For he is most ignorant of what he should 
 be most assured. He knows nothing of Europe, and 
 almost nothing of his own people — less than nothing 
 (since Mr. Kipling is his main interpreter) of those 
 English-speaking peoples who belong to what we call 
 the " Empire." 
 
 Some two generations ago England made up its 
 mind that it did not belong to the European system. 
 Its attitude to Continental questions is well expressed 
 by Carlyle : " Tumble and rage, ye rotten waifs and 
 wrecks (the great States of Europe) ; clash and collide 
 as seems fittest to you ; and smite each other into 
 annihilation at your good pleasure." There was a 
 time when this nonsense at least sounded sublime, 
 when it suggested splendid strength and self- 
 sufficiency. But in reality our magnificent isolation 
 was simply a rather undignified sleeping partnership 
 with Prussia. In practice our indifference to Euro- 
 pean problems resolved itself into thanking Heaven 
 that Bismarck and William I. were pious men and 
 good husbands, and relying on them to trounce 
 France whenever she should need it. Meanwhile we 
 would go on with our civilizing mission in the wild 
 places of the earth. We would be a Colonial Power, 
 a Mohammedan Power, any kind of Power but a 
 European Power. As such we could have no kind of 
 collision with the Teutonic cousin — the " whale and
 
 134 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 the elephant " would never fight a duel — and we 
 could make our money in peace. 
 
 It is not easy, however, to think in watertight com- 
 partments. After some decades of pro-Prussianism 
 in foreign politics we began to " think Imperially " 
 after the Potsdam manner. Mr. Kipling was the 
 Aaron of British Prussianism, and Joseph Chamber- 
 lain its Moses; both showed extreme toleration of 
 the golden-calf worship of Rhodes and the Rand- 
 lords, which, indeed, was in no sense incongruous 
 with their Imperial creed. Mr. Chamberlain's scheme 
 was wholly Prussian as far as it went. True, he 
 proposed to employ silken chains instead of the 
 heavy fetters of militarism; but the object was to 
 restrict, canalize, and stereotype in the true Prussian 
 way. Canada was to be the granary and lumber- 
 store of the Empire; South Africa its mine and 
 vineyard; Australia its wool farm. On the other 
 hand, Great Britain was to serve the Dominions as 
 workshop, drawing-room, and park. In the pleasant 
 southern counties and the Scottish deer-forests the 
 plutocrats of industrial England and the grain and 
 meat kings, the diamond and gold millionaires of 
 the Oversea States, were to hold sway over a meek, 
 dependent race; in the grimy North and Midlands 
 and the spoiled valleys of Wales a breed of rough 
 helots, content with slightly dearer food on account 
 of certain wages improvements worked out to the 
 farthing 's-worth, would perennially labour in order 
 to supply Greater Britain with all it needed in the 
 way of machinery and manufactured stuffs. 
 
 There was no thought in all this of the principle 
 to which we now do at least lip service — the principle 
 of nationality. Eternal tadpolism was the vision for 
 the Empire; eternal helotry for the Mother Country. 
 There was no thought that Australia, South Africa,
 
 GENERAL SMUTS 135 
 
 Canada, or New Zealand might conceivably like to 
 grow up in their own way; that they might wish to 
 evolve their own foreign policy, their own arts, their 
 own standards of taste, their own scheme of life in 
 every direction— in a word, that they might want to 
 be nations. We may call it pure Prussianism, if we 
 divest Prussianism for the moment of the quite 
 incidental association of barbarous cruelty. Prussia 
 is capable of vileness and brutality astonishing to 
 the modern Englishman, but she is not gratuitously 
 bloodthirsty; she only wades through slaughter to 
 an ideal. She would, no doubt, if she got her way, 
 strive faithfully to make Poland richer, more produc- 
 tive, and even (in the lowest material sense) happier, 
 than ever before. The one thing she will not do 
 willingly is to permit Poland to develop on Poland's 
 own lines, and it was precisely such liberty that 
 Chamberlain's scheme forbade to the British 
 Dominions. 
 
 The Kipling-Chamberlain view, so far as it holds 
 to-day, is a real danger to what we call the British 
 Empire, but what General Smuts (as we ought to 
 note carefully) prefers to call the British Common- 
 wealth. If we go on thinking All-Red, if we imagine 
 that " Imperial sentiment " is to be fostered by toss- 
 ing a few trumpery peerages and orders across the 
 seas, if we conceive of the " daughter States " as a 
 mob of barges to be towed wherever the Mother- 
 Country steam tug cares to drag them, our mistake 
 will be fatal. These young communities are not 
 fighting for Britain or " the Empire," but for their 
 own menaced nationhood . They are having a dread- 
 ful tussle to withstand Prussianism in shining armour. 
 They will not voluntarily abase themselves before 
 Prussianism in pantomime properties. 
 
 Read with discernment, the speeches of General
 
 186 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Smuts will be found to contain more than one hint on 
 this point. Of his loyalty there is as little doubt as 
 of his penetrating intelligence. The first has been 
 proved by deeds which are already great history. 
 The latter has been illustrated in the astonishingly 
 varied successes of a man yet less than forty-eight. 
 When Smuts was a mere lad, son of a farmer in Cape 
 Colony, the attention of Cecil Rhodes, among whose 
 virtues the capacity to discern and the will to assist 
 native ability was conspicuous, was turned to his 
 great powers of mind. The Dutch stripling was 
 given every chance, and fully availed himself of his 
 opportunities. At Cambridge he took a double first 
 in the Law Tripos; he fought brilliantly during the 
 Boer War; he played an influential part in the peace 
 negotiations; as a Minister he applied himself, when 
 the Constitution was granted, to the work of national 
 reconstruction and racial conciliation; he shares with 
 Botha the credit of quelling the rebellion of De Wet 
 and Beyers; and he broke the back of the German 
 resistance in British East Africa. Perhaps we must 
 go back to Clive before we find, in the case of a man 
 not bred to arms, so complete a union of the talents 
 of the soldier and the administrator. 
 
 But there is a certain coldness and hardness, as of 
 the diamond, in all this brilliance. That General 
 Smuts is a humane man we know from every action 
 of his life. There was no mistaking the genuineness 
 of his emotion when he reluctantly declared for an 
 aerial reprisal policy against German}' on the grounds 
 of military necessity. But it needs only one glance 
 at the high forehead, the steely eyes, the straight 
 eyebrows depressed in an habitual half- frown, the 
 emphatic nose, the tightly closed lips, and the granitic 
 chin to beware of trusting to any human weakness 
 deflecting the deliberate judgment of his intelligence.
 
 GENERAL SMUTS 137 
 
 He is a type altogether un-English, innocent of 
 English double vision and compromise; he under- 
 stands nothing of partly circular triangles and " liberal 
 oligarchies." His mind is perhaps as clear of cant 
 as any living man's, while most Englishmen clothe 
 themselves in cant as in a garment. 
 
 This must be remembered in assessing the loyalty 
 of General Smuts. It is not loyalty to a King- 
 Emperor. It is still less loyalty to Downing Street, 
 Park Lane, or Berkeley Square. It is loyalty to 
 a country and to an idea, not to an " Empire." 
 Smuts's country is South Africa; his idea is demo- 
 cracy: the rule of the people, and not the rule of 
 any section of the people, be it " Labour " or some 
 other. And his " democracy " is no molluscoid 
 organism fit only to exist in a world of molluscs. 
 He is for a League of Nations, but he means it to 
 be something very different from an International 
 Band of Unfulfilled Hope. For him democracy is 
 indeed the rule of peace, but a rule potentially terrible 
 to the enemies of peace. 
 
 And it is clear that, while willing enough to help 
 the old world to throw off its fetters, he looks with 
 greatest hope to the new world. His piercing intelli- 
 gence was the first to recognize the immense differ- 
 ence brought about by President Wilson's decision to 
 enter the war. To-day he, above all other statesmen, 
 realizes that this is no dynastic struggle to be patched 
 up by another Berlin or Vienna Conference, but a 
 life-and -death fight between two principles. The old 
 world lived in a state of unstable equilibrium, and 
 the collapse was bound to come. A jumble of pure 
 autocracies, mixed constitutions, related dynasties, 
 scheming kings, insincere diplomacies, in Europe; a 
 rotting anarchy of dying systems in Asia; weakly 
 violent Governments and dangerously rich territories
 
 138 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 in South America ; and elsewhere young communities 
 in moral and intellectual habit far more remote from 
 the aristocracy-hidden European than the Prussian is 
 from the Japanese — how could such a chaos subsist 
 indefinitely ? Germany's enterprise, properly under- 
 stood, was to give the world the uniformity of an 
 efficient rule from above. She wanted to be a new 
 Rome, giving law to the world as Rome did, but 
 perhaps, like Rome, not unwilling to learn from her 
 captives. The German sense of tidiness was affronted 
 by the disorderly arrangements of the old world ; the 
 German sense of thrift rebelled against the spectacle 
 of competing armaments, pegged-out and undeveloped 
 claims, and unemployed resources. We shall wholly 
 misunderstand the philosophical basis of pan-Ger- 
 manism if we fail to recognize a certain inhuman 
 grandeur in the conception of a whole world as well 
 ordered, as well developed, and as well disciplined as 
 the great Hohenzollern farm which we call the 
 German Empire. 
 
 And it is still the question to-day whether the 
 German idea shall prevail or another the world has 
 still to test. There can be no question of status quo. 
 There must be the symmetry of freedom or the sym- 
 metry of a triumphant tyranny. Despotism must 
 conquer or be conquered, now and by present weapons, 
 or later, and with still more frightful means. We 
 must all be slaves or all be free. General Smuts has 
 happily decided that we must all be free; one shudders 
 at the thought of what might have happened had 
 his mind been captivated by the other ideal, which 
 now, as in Napoleon's time, satisfies many brilliant 
 intellects. But let us not fail to draw the correct 
 inference. The British Monarchy need not share in 
 the fall of other venerable thrones; but the British 
 Empire must become the British Commonwealth . The
 
 GENERAL SMUTS 139 
 
 new Poland must be paralleled by a new Ireland ; 
 there must be free co-operation everywhere or frank 
 divorce; there must be no attempt to treat the 
 Dominions as mere pawns in the game of European 
 politics. With the British people General Smuts is 
 ready to make common cause; but does he quite 
 identify the British people with the British ruling 
 class ? What virtually amounted to the assertion 
 by General Smuts of a Monroe Doctrine for South 
 Africa passed almost unnoticed ; it was in reality a 
 most important declaration, and one to be well 
 pondered by our statesmen. It laid down the prin- 
 ciple that the Dominions are nations, and that the 
 pressure of the heel of a single European soldier in 
 white man's Africa will be resented just as we should 
 resent the presence of a foreign garrison in the Isle 
 of Wight. The statement has implications which 
 deserve close consideration. 
 
 It may be an exaggeration to say that General 
 Smuts was included in the War Cabinet in order to 
 reassure the British people. But it is certain that 
 his inclusion has had that effect ; the public mind 
 accepted him as a counterpoise to elements it dis- 
 trusted wholly. This is the more remarkable because 
 a certain shadow of suspicion once rested on the 
 General. Labour had not forgotten his part in the 
 suppression of the Syndicalist strikes in Johannes- 
 burg. In more exalted circles there may have 
 lingered doubts based on his enigmatic character. 
 How he is now regarded by the thoroughgoing 
 Imperialist is uncertain. But the British people, 
 always wiser than its rulers, looks to him rather than 
 to some of its own race for the right word. More 
 than once the War Cabinet has taken shelter behind 
 the prestige of his name; it will be wise to mark 
 with understanding and without resentment the
 
 140 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 slight suggestion of warning which lies behind some 
 of his utterances. 
 
 General Smuts may be relied on to do his best for 
 Great Britain, however foolish, as against Germany. 
 But he is not necessarity allied for ever to British 
 Imperialism. At the risk of being wearisome, it 
 may be well to point out once more that he has 
 frequently said he prefers the words " British 
 Commonwealth " to the words " British Empire." 
 It may be that General Smuts is a fanatic for fine 
 shades of meaning, like that Sir James Mackintosh 
 who debated for six months whether he should say 
 " utility " or " usefulness," and changed the ideas 
 of a lifetime after half an hour's conversation with 
 Pitt. 
 
 It may be. But most people, after a quite insig- 
 nificant personal contact with General .Smuts, would 
 say that he is not quite that kind of man.
 
 MR. ARTHUR HENDERSON 
 
 He used to be called "Uncle Arthur " by his fellow 
 trade unionists. Perhaps he still is, the " Right 
 Honourable " notwithstanding. For the nickname 
 is too good an inspiration to be lost. There is some- 
 thing richly avuncular in Mr. Henderson. He is too 
 young and vigorous to be grandfatherly, far too 
 dignified to become mere " mate," too sympathetic 
 to be without a familiar appellative. 
 
 " Uncle " exactly suits him in his capacity of 
 Labour leader. He smiles at an audience as if he 
 had just tipped each individual member of it, and 
 in such sort as to suggest a pocket still bulging with 
 sixpences. He has the weight of experience, as an 
 uncle should, but all an uncle's tolerance for the 
 pranks of youth. " Boys will be boys, but when 
 
 you're as old as I am " and then follows the sage- 
 
 ness of counsel which fails to offend. How could it, 
 with that good-humoured face, innocent of all irony, 
 that well-groomed, prosperous figure, and that heavy 
 watch-chain, all telling of the battle of life well won? 
 
 A comfortable man is Mr. Henderson. He belongs 
 to the " aristocracy of Labour." He has worked with 
 his hands — he was apprenticed as a moulder on Tyne- 
 side — but it was long, long ago. He has been in 
 trade union work these many years. He has brought 
 up a family on it, and three of his sons have done 
 their duty as soldiers in the war. He got into Parlia- 
 ment through it some fourteen }rears ago, winning 
 Barnard Castle (which he still holds) in a three- 
 cornered contest. Since then he has been at the 
 
 141
 
 142 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 very heart of the Parliamentary Labour movement, 
 and now seems almost to enjoy the freehold of its 
 chairmanship. He has found time for civic activities ; 
 he has never ceased to be a local preacher of the 
 Wesleyan persuasion, and at Bands of Hope, Pleasant 
 Sunday Afternoons, and the like he is an honoured 
 figure. All this experience has given him a gift of 
 pontifical speech, a considerable knowledge of many 
 things, a practical faculty in public business. It has 
 helped to give him also a certain very British woolli- 
 ness of mind, which explains much in his recent career. 
 
 I remember reading a speech by Mr. Henderson 
 very early in the war. He stated that he first had 
 his doubts as to the wisdom and justice of our refusal 
 to remain neutral, but after spending a whole Sunday 
 afternoon reading the British Blue-Book he came 
 to the conclusion that war was justified and indeed 
 inevitable. That is very typical of the man. Words 
 convinced where deeds did not. He was not going 
 to condemn the tiger because he saw it actually 
 rending a lamb; that might be unjust to the tiger. 
 But he could not resist affidavits from the official 
 shepherds and an authoritative zoologist from South 
 Kensington. 
 
 It is, of course, the more to Mr. Henderson's credit 
 that, being thus constituted, he did, in fact, after 
 accepting the evidence, accept also the logical con- 
 sequences of his conversion. He drew apart from the 
 Keir Hardies and MacDonalds. A pacifist by nature 
 and habit, he threw himself energetically into war 
 work, and the value of his influence in those early 
 days can hardly be overstate^,. His honesty is unim- 
 peachable. But the story of this particular pleasant 
 Sunday afternoon is none the less significant. In 
 case of an escape of gas one trusts the man with a 
 nose rather than the man who looks up Sanitary
 
 MR. ARTHUR HENDERSON 148 
 
 Hints for Householders. Mr. Henderson had no nose 
 for Junker German}'. The fact makes one wonder 
 whether he has a nose for many other things. 
 
 He certainly had none for revolutionary Russia. 
 He is not to be blamed for the failure of his mission. It 
 was bound to fail. Apart from the damnosa hereditas 
 of Lord Milner's junketings with the Sturmers and 
 Protopopoffs, every circumstance conspired to make 
 impossible Mr. Henderson's task of People's Ambas- 
 sador to the triumphant proletariat. He was sent 
 out by a Cabinet quite undecided whether to welcome 
 or reprobate the revolution. Among his credentials 
 was that extraordinary speech of congratulation by 
 Mr. Bonar Law which was half dirge and half insult. 
 He knew no word of any language but his North- 
 Country English. His Socialism was destitute of any 
 philosophical basis. The whole habit of his mind was 
 bourgeois. He knew the British Labour movement 
 through and through, and this knowledge at least 
 served him well in contact with the Petrograd zealots. 
 For when they began to quote that Bible of Collec- 
 tivism, Das Kapital, of Karl Marx, Mr. Hender- 
 son could always deftly turn the conversation to 
 practical trade union organization, of which his hosts 
 were abysmally ignorant. 
 
 Mr. Henderson thus retained a certain personal 
 prestige. But in that whirlpool of conflicting ten- 
 dencies, among the Girondins, the ferocious logicians 
 of the Extreme Left, the interested schemers, the 
 cosmopolitan spies, and the mere miscellaneous black- 
 guards with whom the Russian capital swarmed, it 
 was impossible for him either to control or divine 
 tendencies. He could only judge things by their 
 names, and the same names mean very different 
 things in different countries. Mr. Henderson was 
 misled, and he misled his chief when he returned.
 
 144 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 We do not know the complete history of the 
 Stockholm Conference. But there is every reason to 
 believe that the Prime Minister coquetted with the 
 idea for some time before he threw it over, and, 
 with it, Mr. Henderson. A Minister can hardly be 
 retained in a Cabinet which decisively rejects his 
 views on a vital question. The ejection was in- 
 evitable, but it was a right instinct which protested 
 against the manner of it. It was felt that Lord 
 Curzon would not have been treated in that par- 
 ticular way. The " doormat " incident was resented 
 by thousands who had little sympatlry with Mr. 
 Henderson's views. That it has rankled with its 
 victim there can be little doubt; probably wounded 
 self-pride has thrown him considerably more to the 
 left than he would otherwise have gone. He is not 
 a little vain; a certain pliability mingles with some 
 stubbornness in his character, and there are clever 
 people not slow to take advantage of these weaknesses. 
 
 Mr. Henderson, the least sphinx-like of figures, 
 remains rather an enigma. He is busily, and with 
 some success, building up a new party organization. 
 Is it a case of " Sic vos non vobis"? Will he use 
 the instrument himself, or is it being prepared for 
 another ? And if he is to be the leader, what lead 
 will he give ? Certainly no politician has a larger 
 opportunity. A great political genius, with no point 
 of view but that of the architect, would prefer his 
 materials to any at present available. He could be 
 sure of a great and fairly permanent majority. He 
 might have with him the men who do the best work 
 with their hands and those who do the best work 
 with their brains. He could settle for ever problems 
 soluble by no other formula. He might make us 
 democratic without vulgarizing us still further. He 
 might preserve all that is useful and dignified in the
 
 MR. ARTHUR HENDERSON 145 
 
 remains of aristocracy, while calling into life a whole 
 world of new energies. He might make of our lop- 
 sided country, with its starved land and overgrown 
 towns, its contrasting superfluity and indigence, a 
 thing of health and symmetry — not the " workshop 
 of the world," or its counting-house, or a million- 
 aires' pleasure-garden, but the home of a sanely 
 developed race. 
 
 But though England is inclined to democracy, 
 England is by no means disposed to the rule of mere 
 11 Labour." It was probably never less inclined for 
 experiments of the Russian kind. It is not going 
 simply to swap oligarchies, and it thinks, with some 
 reason, that a purely Labour oligarchy would be 
 probably the worst of all oligarchies. Besides, Mr. 
 Henderson, the product of the chapel and the trade 
 union, with little intellectual energy, and an overplus 
 of Victorian primness, is hardly the man one figures 
 either as the chief of a faction or the leader of a 
 nation. In the whole Labour Part}', indeed, there is 
 no evidence of a mind capacious enough for the work 
 of social and political reconstruction on broadly demo- 
 cratic lines. It is much more probable that the work 
 Mr. Henderson is doing will be completed by some 
 quite unknown person now in a trench in Flanders 
 or Artois. And probably that person will be either 
 a poor man of family or a true sansculotte. 
 
 It is, after all, seldom that one of Mr. Henderson's 
 
 type successfully guides any great movement. Small 
 
 respectability is at a disadvantage in appealing to the 
 
 masses in times of great exaltation. It knows men 
 
 neither at their best nor at their worst. It is without 
 
 either the intuition of genius or the sympathy born 
 
 of experience. Great popular leaders generally come 
 
 from above or from the very depths. I think it was 
 
 Lamb who remarked that while no sense of fitness is 
 
 xo
 
 146 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 outraged by the King's marriage with the beggar 
 maid, we should resent a Royal wedding with the 
 grocer's daughter as bride. 
 
 And Mr. Henderson belongs rather to the grocer 
 scheme of things. His abilities and virtues are all 
 on the back-parlour scale. His nose is not to be 
 trusted, as we have seen, and his eyes are by no 
 means " double million gas microscopes of hextra 
 power." He is shrewd in a Sancho Panza way, and 
 by no means deficient in judgment where his own 
 interest is concerned. He is ambitious, too, and in 
 quiet times aspiring and unresting mediocrity often 
 wins the race against great talent. But the present 
 emergency demands a very extraordinary man, and 
 Mr. Henderson is rather a quite ordinary man in a 
 very extraordinary situation.
 
 MR. HORATIO BOTTOMLEY 
 
 Appearances notwithstanding, it is a mistake to 
 think of Mr. Horatio Bottomley as a twentieth- 
 century Englishman. He belongs to all ages and 
 all countries, and to a good many limited liability 
 companies. 
 
 There is nothing so enduring as the ephemeral. 
 Creatures which are born and die within the limits of 
 a summer day came into the world countless ages 
 before the diplodocus, and will gyrate countless ages 
 after man and all his works have disappeared. And 
 in human things nothing is quite so ancient as ex- 
 treme modernity. The man who above all others 
 seems to belong to the hour, in reality belongs beyond 
 all others to the ages. Pascal and Augustine might 
 find a difficulty in understanding each other; Beau 
 Brummel and one of Juvenal's dandies would have 
 none. 
 
 I have not the advantage of Mr. Bottomley's 
 acquaintance. For any knowledge of him I am in- 
 debted to newspapers and popular rumour, and to 
 the evidence of his writings and speeches. I did not 
 know, until I turned to a reference book, that he lives 
 in Pall Mall (in company with a stuffed racehorse), 
 and that he has a country place extraordinarily and 
 yet somehow appropriately called " The Dicker.'' 
 Of his " large financial undertakings in the City,' 
 of the part that he played as " pioneer of West 
 Australian mining," I know exceedingly little. I 
 remember vaguely something about the Hansard 
 Union, and more vividly two cases of Regina versus 
 
 M7
 
 148 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Bottomley and Rex versus Bottomley, in which the 
 defendant was complimented by his judges on the 
 success with which he conducted his own defence. 
 I have watched Mr. Bottomley in the House of 
 Commons as an Independent Liberal, and I have 
 heard of him on the Turf. 
 
 A slight qualification, this must seem, for the task 
 in hand, and, curiously enough, little help comes 
 from the professional biographer, who is a little 
 vague just where one's curiosity is most deeply 
 stirred. Yet I think I know Mr. Bottomley exceed- 
 ingly well. I have never met him at Pall Mall or 
 " The Dicker," but I perfectly remember him in 
 Revolutionary Paris. I seem to remember also a 
 Mr. Bottomley who called himself something else in 
 the time of good King George. There was a Mr. 
 Bottomley, sometimes Cavalier and sometimes Round- 
 head, in Stuart England. And I distinctly recall 
 Mr. Bottomley when he shouted for a Business 
 Emperor in fourth-century Rome, and for a Business 
 Consul five hundred years before. He was active at 
 the time of the Punic War, and never more inde- 
 fatigable than when he led the shout in Athens of 
 " Down with Aristides and the Old Gang." Whether 
 it was the same Mr. Bottomley whose cymbal was 
 loudest over the fall of Pharaoh's army, and whose 
 criticisms were harshest of the Mosaic commissariat 
 and water supply, I cannot definitely say. But it 
 was certainly one of the family. 
 
 It is only by thus tracing Mr. Bottomley through 
 the ages that we arrive at the secret of his influence 
 to-day. Mr. Bottomley is always with us; he has 
 conducted his financial operations in talents, ses- 
 terces, ducats, pieces-of-eight, and probably in cowrie 
 shells ; he has been a pioneer (though not of the pick 
 and spade kind) in Ophir and Golconda as well as
 
 MR. HORATIO BOTTOMLEY 149 
 
 Western Australia; he has told people in every 
 dialect what people like to hear. But, just as the 
 ever-present germ is only noticed in conditions 
 favourable to an epidemic, so Mr. Bottomley only 
 becomes important in times of great and rather un- 
 healthy excitement. Carlyle has pointed out that 
 the sceptical ages are always the most credulous because 
 they are the least wholesome. It is certainly true that 
 there is a credulity of unbelief as well as a credulity of 
 faith ; that a certain class of practitioner flourishes on 
 overknowingness rather than on simple ignorance. 
 
 They that are whole need not a physician, but they 
 that are sick. And the sicker a certain kind of man 
 becomes the more he delivers himself over to the 
 sort of physician who is coldly viewed in Harley 
 Street. " Cure guaranteed " is so much more cheering 
 a formula than " Wait and see." It is pleasing to 
 be told that you will eat your Christmas dinner in 
 peace and comfort ; it may even do you good in 
 certain circumstances. You may smile at Blinkum's 
 Pills when you are well, you ma} r scoff at the Some- 
 thing Electro-Magnetic Knee Belt when you have never 
 known rheumatism . But if you really feel ill, and have 
 no faith in doctors, it is quite probable that you will 
 succumb to the wizardry of the irregular practitioner. 
 
 When the British nation felt easy in body and mind 
 it treated Mr. Bottomley as the healthy man treats 
 the patent medicine advertiser — as one of the stock 
 jokes of the day. It had, as a whole, small interest 
 in his financial undertakings, just as the newspaper 
 reader cares nothing about the money side of " Life 
 Pellets, Limited," or about the ultimate effect of that 
 company's products on the agonized young typist to 
 whom they are alleged to have brought instant relief. 
 The public did not take Mr. Bottomley very seriously, 
 either as a pioneer of mining or a politician. But it
 
 150 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 was amused by his talk and rather admired his 
 undoubted cleverness. There was more than one 
 moment when the case appeared to be " Bottomley 
 contra Mundum," and Bottomley always won. It 
 was said of Liberty Wilkes that you might strip 
 him, stab him, shoot him, throw him over London 
 Bridge, and next morning he would turn up with a 
 cocked hat, a smart coat, ruffled cuffs, a gold watch 
 in his fob, and a hundred guineas in his pocket. To 
 this irrepressibility much of his popularity was due ; 
 the British public admires " gameness" above every- 
 thing else. The illustration is arbitrary. Mr. Bot- 
 tomley in no way suggests Wilkes, saVe in this single 
 particular of winning sympathy that has no kinship 
 to approbation. He excited in his salad days the 
 same sort of interest men show in the patter of a 
 clever cheap-jack at a fair. One may have a shrewd 
 guess that the silver English lever jewelled in eighty- 
 seven holes is not good value for twenty-nine and six ; 
 one knows quite well that honest Hodge has no 
 money to waste on such a thing; but the laugh is 
 always against Hodge and with the dashing salesman 
 when the lot is knocked down and Hodge's wife 
 begins to scold him. 
 
 Of Mr. Bottomley 's cleverness there can be no 
 doubt whatever; he has no intellect in the higher 
 sense, but in brain power of a certain kind he has 
 probably but one living equal. He has a perfect 
 understanding of the common man of a not too 
 pleasant type, who plays " darts " in public-houses 
 and makes a book in sixpences, and sees all life 
 through the gin-dimmed windows of a bar. I 
 imagine Mr. Tittlebat Titmouse, when still a draper's 
 assistant, would have considered " John Bull " prime, 
 and when he arrived at his " ten thousand a year " 
 would have got Mr. Bottomley to write his election 
 address. Mr. Bottomley possesses that kind of
 
 MR. HORATIO BOTTOMLEY 151 
 
 frankness that makes an excessive appeal to men 
 who judge all corn by their own mean little private 
 bushels. The more generous world, too, is so used 
 to high professions and low performances, that when 
 a man says, " I pretend to be no better than I am," 
 it is apt to believe that he is much better than he 
 pretends. The saint who steps forth to whip hypo- 
 crisy is handicapped first by the suspicion that he 
 may not be a saint after all, and next by the assump- 
 tion that if he is really a saint his judgment of 
 average humanity will be faulty. But there is 
 always a sympathetic hearing for the man who 
 begins: " You all know me, and I couldn't humbug 
 you even if I wanted to." Mr. Bottomley stands, in 
 the popular eye, for " no humbug " and anti-Puri- 
 tanism, and that is really the secret of such influence 
 as he possesses. 
 
 It would be unjust to Mr. Bottomley to deny that 
 that influence has on the whole been exercised in the 
 right direction during the war. It is probably not 
 very great; though a high value seems to be put on 
 his services as a propagandist, if one can judge from 
 the accounts of a local meeting held the other day. 
 Mr. Bottomley is a patriot in his way; and it is 
 credibly stated that his religious convictions have 
 ripened during the war. Some rhapsodies of his 
 have been the delight of the wicked and the astonish- 
 ment of the serious, but they are said to represent 
 the author's feeling — at the time. His champion- 
 ship of the under-dogs is equally sincere; he loves 
 to make the widow's heart to sing for joy, and is un- 
 questionably a good-natured man. 
 
 But when all allowance is made, it must be said 
 that he is a queer figure for a national hero. In the 
 words of the sage of Chelsea, if he is to be so regarded, 
 then England is " dreadfully off for demi-gods."
 
 THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE 
 
 " It hath been an opinion that the French are wiser than they 
 seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are; but howso- 
 ever it be between nations, certainly it is so between man and 
 man; for, as the Apostle saith of godliness, ' Having a show of 
 godliness, but denying the power thereof,' so certainly there are, 
 in points of wisdom and sufficiency, they that do nothing or 
 little, very solemnly. . . . Generally such (seeming wise) men 
 in all deliberations, find ease to be of the negative side, and affect 
 a credit to object and foretell difficulties." — Bacon. 
 
 Henry Charles Keith Petty-Fitzmaurice, fifth 
 Marquess of Lansdowne, is partly French in blood, 
 but inclines intellectually to the Spaniard as Bacon 
 describes him. Of " seeming wise " men he is per- 
 haps the best example extant. He has done nothing 
 or little, but in such solemn sort that even those who 
 least regard him deem it decent to pay a tribute 
 to his ripe experience, his distinguished talents, his 
 mellow judgment, and the rest of it. 
 
 It is only when one looks at all this pomp and 
 prestige with half-shut eyes, resolute not to be blinded 
 by any " property " sun, that one finds how negative 
 the real man is. At " objecting and foretelling diffi- 
 culties " he has no fellow; but one looks in vain for 
 guidance of the positive sort. Lord Lansdowne in 
 that regard is only a polished version of Tony 
 Lumpkin. You want to go to Mr. Hardcastle's. 
 He tells you you can never get there; he describes 
 it as a " long, dark, boggy, dirty, dangerous way "; 
 dilates on the terrors of Quagmire Marsh, Squash 
 Lane, and Crackokull Common; and indicates four 
 roads — you must " be sure to take only one of them " 
 
 152
 
 THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE 158 
 
 — which he knows perfectly well lead nowhere. In 
 manner and motive only he differs from Mr. Lumpkin. 
 He does not want you to get the heiress, and it is 
 with perfect breeding that he takes care that you 
 shan't. 
 
 Examine the whole of the noble Marquess's life 
 history; trace him from the Under-Secretary larva 
 of forty-six years ago to the Elder Statesman imago 
 of to-da3 r ; follow him through every step of his 
 career — Simla, Ottawa, War Office, Foreign Office, 
 leadership of the House of Lords — and the main 
 impression given is that of superficies claiming the 
 dimensions of a solid. Neither depth nor bulk is 
 there. He has every quality appertaining to the 
 wise man except wisdom itself. His moderation is 
 notable where courage is the only currency; he is 
 bold where Danton would step with fear and trem- 
 bling ; outspoken where secrecy is imperative ; secretive 
 where a frank word might work wonders. He does 
 everything the wise statesman might, except at the 
 right time and in the right place. 
 
 Generally the charge of inconsistency against a 
 public man is the dullest of cheap sneers. The deadly 
 fact concerning Lord Lansdowne's changes is that 
 they are really consistent ; he has an infallible instinct, 
 not for the lost cause, but for the cause that ought 
 to be lost. 
 
 He was a Whig when Whiggism was the least 
 liberal of political faiths; he became a Conservative 
 in its late bad manner; he pursued an adventurous 
 foreign policy as Foreign Minister, and now argues 
 in retirement for a stultifying peace; he claimed for 
 the House of Lords powers that upset the balance of 
 the Constitution, and then admitted by his reform 
 proposals that peers were wholly unfit to exercise 
 even their admitted functions ; in the present war his
 
 154 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 influence, above that of any subject born this side 
 of St. George's Channel, has made Ireland a material 
 and moral liability to the Alliance. As a Parlia- 
 mentary strategist he resembles that Duke of York 
 who marched his men up a very high hill and marched 
 them down again. For both operations no doubt 
 textbook authority may be found. But generalship 
 does not consist alone in doing right things. They 
 must be done at the right time. Lord Lansdowne is 
 the kind of man who would treat as dangerous a. 
 cow that is only aching to be milked, and, having 
 vexed it to madness, would seek to placate it by the 
 offer of a nice crimson overcoat. He is gruff to the 
 lamb and the coney; he is mild courtesy to the tiger. 
 
 Since the famous letter of last autumn a singular 
 company has gathered round the ambiguous standard 
 of the Marquess. These men may quite misunder- 
 stand his purpose, but they are themselves well 
 understood, and, since the Marquess has never dis- 
 owned them, it is not unfair to suppose him willing 
 to use them. Socialists, S}mdicalists, Quakers, re- 
 presentatives of cosmopolitan finance, aristocratic 
 Liberal intellectuals — a more ill-assorted group was 
 never brought together by flood or prairie fire. To 
 most of them Lord Lansdowne two years ago was an 
 English Junker; now one reads of such a marvel as a 
 "Lansdowne Labour Committee." Yet Lord Lans- 
 downe was probably never farther than he is to-day 
 from the moral position of the Outhwaites, Lees 
 Smiths, Ramsa} r MacDonalds, and Noel Buxtons. The 
 worst that can be said of these is that they fight 
 in unprincipled fashion for a principle. For what 
 principles does the Marquess of Lansdowne stand ? 
 
 He has no Quakerish scruples against war, or he 
 would not have supported Mr. Chamberlain in his 
 belief that the conquest of the Boer Republics would
 
 TEE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE 155 
 
 be cheap, short, and profitable. He has no passion 
 against secret diplomacy; he hurried the Anglo- 
 Japanese treaty through hugger-mugger, without 
 reflection as to its ultimate consequences, because 
 the need of the moment appeared to be the check- 
 mating of Russia. He made tentative advances 
 towards a German alliance before he set about lay- 
 ing the foundations of the Entente Cordiale, and in 
 both cases hour-to-hour expediency was the only 
 motive. He coolly tore open the sores of Ireland 
 merely to complicate the issue his timorous violence 
 had raised in English politics. Then he tried to throw 
 into the quarrel the Colonies, and finally the Army. 
 Truly there is little in this record to suggest that at 
 seventy-three his heart beats in tumultuous sympathy 
 with Mr. Snowden, or that his tired eyes have glorious 
 visions of universal brotherhood. 
 
 A more congruous explanation may be suggested 
 of the attitude which has brought Lord Lansdowne 
 all this strange homage. Lord Lansdowne is an aris- 
 tocrat of a quite peculiar class. I believe he has in 
 him a few drops of the blood of Talleyrand, and some- 
 thing of that great sceptic's temperament has also 
 come down to him. When all Paris was repeating 
 that in a fortnight the Emperor would have crossed 
 the Niemen, Talleyrand's only comment was " Mais 
 a quoi bon passer le Niemen ?" Talleyrand happened 
 to be right in this instance. But " A quoi bon ?" is 
 the natural comment of the unmilitary aristocrat, 
 who has little emotion and much interest, who is too 
 big to take the vulgar view of martial glories, and 
 possibly too little for the only passions that make 
 war respectable. War, yes, for things that seem 
 worth the price. Have there not always been wars 
 of that common-sense kind ? But war that is piling 
 up debt at the rate of seven millions a day, that
 
 156 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 means working-class unrest, super-taxes, land taxes, 
 taxes of all kinds to be paid, not merely by the 
 creatures who die to-morrow, but by the families that 
 decay for ever — a quoi bon ? 
 
 After all, the whole thing may well seem a sordid 
 stupidity to this cool grandee. He belongs to the 
 Victorian time, when our sleeping partnership with 
 Prussia enabled us to go lightly armed and lightly 
 taxed. It was an ideal arrangement — our Navy- 
 keeping the seas, the German Empire keeping the 
 Continent, each agreeing that there could be no real 
 quarrel between the whale and the elephant. Pan- 
 German stupidity, which must have all, upset this 
 admirable theory. Even our Eldest Statesmen had 
 to take warning by the portents of the last fifteen 
 years. But that is not to say that they have ceased 
 to regret the old days, or that they would not welcome 
 them back if it were feasible. And what if we have 
 really backed the wrong horse ? 
 
 In this mood it is natural to take stock of the 
 situation. Alsace-Lorraine? TheTrentino? Poland? 
 " Self-determination " for the serfs of the House of 
 Habsburg ? We can imagine the courtly shrug of 
 the shoulder Lord Lansdowne must give when he 
 revises these idealist war aims. Why should he pant 
 for the resurrection of Poland when he has so long 
 politely denied any imperfections in the government 
 of Ireland ? 
 
 The League of Nations ? Yes. But is it the 
 League of Nations according to President Wilson that 
 he favours ? Is it not rather a League of Nations 
 such as Count Hertling had in mind ? Mr. Wilson 
 sees in his policy the only means by which the com- 
 mon sense and instinctive morality of the common 
 man shall triumph over the follies of the wise and 
 the sordid ambitions of the great. Lord Lansdowne
 
 THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE 157 
 
 appears to contemplate some new Holy Alliance that 
 will guarantee permanence to another artificial re- 
 casting of the map of Europe. It is not surprising 
 that long ago he discerned in German statesmanship 
 a returning reasonableness not generally apparent. 
 Perhaps he and Count Hertling were not so far apart. 
 The Englishman has better manners and better 
 morals than the Bavarian, but each may view man- 
 kind from much the same standpoint. For each the 
 thing that has been is the thing that must be; there 
 can be nothing new under the sun. Louvain will go 
 the way of Magdeburg; the Lusitania will be for- 
 gotten . The new democratic heaven of the Washing- 
 ton professor shall pass away; the old hell of aristo- 
 cratic, plutocratic, or autocratic Europe shall not 
 pass away. Let us forget the things of time, and 
 occupy ourselves with the eternal. The fickle mob 
 will forget, and we, the Olympian gods, will have 
 nothing to remember except such taxation as we can- 
 not decently pass on. Our wives, our daughters, have 
 nothing to complain of; our sons may have fallen, 
 but our houses remain. 
 
 So, no doubt, argued the seeming wise Britons who 
 made treaties with Hengist and Horsa; so argued the 
 seeming wise Saxons who agreed to pay Danegelt; 
 so argued the seeming wise Roman patricians who 
 bought off the Vandals and Huns. Their letters are 
 not preserved, but they were probably filled with 
 acute observations on the essential moderation of an 
 enemy still burning and slaying and treaty-breaking. 
 They probably abounded, also, in suggestions of 
 domestic trouble if counsels of reason should be long 
 disregarded, and of the ruin of civilization if peace 
 should be long delayed. 
 
 The seeming wise man is generally short-sighted, 
 and Lord Lansdowne is no exception. He seems at
 
 158 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 bottom to build on a common interest between the 
 classes in this country and the classes in Prussia to 
 resist any movement from below. He forgets, on the 
 one hand, that Prussia has no kind of loyalty, and 
 that even if we earned the wages of infamy she 
 would not pay them; we cannot get back to the 
 old relations by mere surrender and betrayal. He 
 forgets, on the other hand, that the only dangerous 
 England is a half-defeated England. If the cause 
 triumphs, our oligarchs may survive; at worst they 
 
 will be not unkindly shelved. If not But I 
 
 make no pretence to second sight.
 
 VISCOUNT NORTHCLIFFE 
 
 Four } T ears ago Viscount Northcliffe was merely a 
 newspaper miracle. Lately many people have specu- 
 lated, not unsympathetically, whether the country 
 would accept him as Prime Minister, with the powers 
 of a dictator, for it is understood that he would take 
 office on no other terms. Many others regard his 
 present indirect power as one of the chief dangers of 
 the State. Outside the circle of his business activi- 
 ties Lord Northcliffe used to be regarded as a kind of 
 joke. Now friends and foes — and he has both in 
 plenty — agree in taking him most seriously. 
 
 It was said of Napoleon III. that he deceived all 
 Europe twice: first when he pretended to be a fool, 
 and secondly when he pretended to be a statesman. 
 Possibly there has been a somewhat similar misjudg- 
 ment regarding Lord Northcliffe. He was certainly 
 underrated in his vigorous youth ; it may be that in 
 middle age the blaze of his prestige is too blinding 
 for a reasonable estimate of his real qualities. Apart 
 from the artist sort, he is, of all the men I ever met, 
 he who best satisfies my conception of genius. I 
 hasten to add that I reject altogether the definition 
 of genius as the capacity for taking infinite pains, 
 and equally Carlyle's idea of it as a general power of 
 intelligence capable alike of writing Shakespeare's 
 sonnets or ruling a State. Lord Northcliffe 's genius 
 is like that of certain men for games of skill : it can 
 coexist with something very like general mediocrity. 
 Lord Northcliffe 's genius is perhaps as narrow as 
 that of a great chess-player. But nobody who has 
 
 i59
 
 160 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 had the privilege of observing his methods as a news- 
 paper man — he is very much more than a newspaper 
 proprietor — can possibly fail to acknowledge a power 
 quite different in kind as well as in degree from mere 
 business or professional acumen. 
 
 Lord Northcliffe, in his proper business, has the 
 gift of intuitive perception in extraordinary measure. 
 He possesses a supreme instinct for the right thing 
 in the sense of the expedient thing. He knows 
 exactly what the public wants, or rather what the 
 public would want if it knew how to make its wants 
 known. A good many caterers in his line are shrewd 
 enough judges of what the common man says and 
 feels to-day. It is Lord Northcliffe 's special gift that 
 he knows what the common man will be saying the 
 day after to-morrow, and says it in advance. In 
 great things and small, he has always been a little 
 ahead of his rivals. He was in the forefront of the 
 cycle boom, both as a writer and a racer. He was 
 the first to vitalize the eld scrap journalism of the 
 Tit-Bits type, to infuse into its Victorian formlessness 
 and respectability new elements appealing less to the 
 middle class than to the first flower of Board School 
 culture. He aimed at the " man in the street," and 
 hit him hard in every issue of Answers, with its 
 " strong sex interest," its " Five Pounds a Week for 
 Life " competitions, its attention to the " romance " 
 of crime, food, and money, and its general air of 
 knowingness. 
 
 Answers was Alfred Harms worth's campaign of 
 Italy. As its conductor he reached the high-water 
 mark of his genius. Great men in the making are 
 always more wonderful than great men made. After 
 the 1 8th Brumaire all was comparatively simple for 
 Napoleon; the real miracle was his early career. 
 After Answers Alfred Harmsworth could only repeat
 
 VISCOUNT NORTHCLIFFE 161 
 
 himself with variations. He bought the moribund 
 Evening News, " Answerized " it, and made it pay. 
 He brought out the Daily Mail as a morning Answers, 
 with the best cable service money could buy. He 
 made one mistake in his penny Daily Mirror for 
 moneyed women; the moneyed women would not 
 pay the penny. But that failure he almost instan- 
 taneously turned into a gigantic success by appealing 
 to millions who had never taken a newspaper before. 
 Within a week of the change from good fashion 
 blocks to poor pictures every office boy and milliner's 
 apprentice was buying " the world's only halfpenny 
 picture paper." Lord Northcliffe, with an eye like 
 Napoleon's for the " enemy masses," had suddenly 
 guessed that brains are to eyes as units to tens, and 
 that the mind too inert to read even a serious para- 
 graph may find pleasure in a news picture and 
 information in its " caption." 
 
 There is some significance in Lord Northcliffe 's 
 choice of heroes — Dickens in letters, Napoleon in 
 history. Dickens he admires for the sureness with 
 which he aimed at the heart of the masses, Napoleon 
 for the way in which he controlled men and got things 
 done. The truth is that he is himself a sort of com- 
 posite parody of the two men. His message to the 
 common man is perhaps not worth delivering, but he 
 gets it delivered. The things he has got done may 
 not have been worth doing, but he has no living equal 
 in the art of getting those things done. 
 
 And he has also the Napoleonic gift of enslaving 
 the intellects of other men without recourse to vulgar 
 tyranny. The Jesuit had to be like a corpse in the 
 hands of his superior. In the Carmelite order of 
 journalism the neophyte must yield a similar obedi- 
 ence. He must give, not only his work, but his spirit. 
 He may gain little or much by the bargain. He may 
 
 ii
 
 162 UXCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 rise to twenty thousand a year, with a knighthood, 
 many motor-cars, and appurtenances to match. Or 
 he may remain a mere cog in that great machine. 
 But on every fragment of human metal in the fabric, 
 whether common cast-iron or finely lacquered brass, 
 is stamped the motto and device of the master. 
 Gurth with his brass collar was less the born thrall 
 of Cedric than the Carmelite editor of Lord North- 
 cliffe. For Gurth could at least think his own 
 thoughts, and the editor's thoughts are prescribed 
 for him. 
 
 It has been said of Lord Northclifife that he was the 
 first man to build a factory in Bohemia. He has cer- 
 tainly gone far towards industrializing journalism, 
 and in doing so has given it a commercial stability 
 and an intellectual flightiness oddly in contrast. The 
 shares of his concerns have more than the stolidity of 
 Government securities; it is their editorial opinions 
 that fluctuate madly. This levity is partially due, 
 no doubt, to the constitutional jerkiness of Lord 
 Northcliffe 's intelligence. He thinks in headlines and 
 works in " stunts." He has been steady in but one 
 thing, the consolidation of his business ; and that 
 business has been largely built up on the flexibility of 
 his mind on public questions. But there is possibly 
 another reason for the eccentricity of his course. I 
 said that he greatly admires Napoleon and Dickens. 
 Napoleon shut up the deputies; Dickens retained 
 through life a massive contempt for the House of 
 Commons. From his earliest days Alfred Harms- 
 worth seems to have been equally attracted and 
 irritated by politics. He desired the double pleasure 
 of despising the game and playing a part in it . Though 
 he might speak of the House of Commons as an 
 antiquated vestry, he tried to enter it through the 
 borough of Portsmouth. Portsmouth would have
 
 VISCOUNT NORTHCLIFFE 163 
 
 none of him, and from the day of that defeat he has 
 consistently belittled representative institutions, and 
 assailed politicians of all parties with a contempt 
 sometimes just, but seldom entertained on just 
 grounds. His only consistency has been the con- 
 sistency of hatred for a theatre for which he has not 
 the industry, or perhaps the talent, to qualify. 
 
 To some who knew him best, it was rather surpris- 
 ing that he should have accepted, first, a baronetcy, 
 and then a peerage, from Mr. Balfour. In the first 
 place he somewhat diminished the independence 
 which he had by this time, after some attempt to play 
 the party game, adopted as his line; in the second, 
 he parted with a considerable source of moral strength. 
 For in his young days he did stand for a kind of 
 democratic reality. He has never had much eye for the 
 greatest — it is remarkable, for example, that he has 
 never brought out a really first-class writer in any line 
 — but at one period no man had a surer perception of 
 the mere fool, however gilded. Holding himself aloof 
 from society, refusing to be entangled in any set, 
 busying himself solely in his wealth and newspaper 
 influence, he might in a negative way have been of 
 considerable service to the country in his part of 
 independent critic. But since his ennoblement a 
 certain degeneration has been noticeable. His cam- 
 paigns have tended to become personal vendettas. 
 He is no longer outside party; his judgments and 
 quarrels are party judgments and quarrels, though 
 his party consists only of one. It is never quite 
 certain whether any step he takes is dictated by prin- 
 ciple; there is always the possibility that he has 
 made a new friend or quarrelled with an old one. 
 
 This suspicion, far more than any single mistake 
 or failure during the war, is responsible for the wide- 
 spread resentment of his Press methods. He has
 
 164 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 generally contrived to put himself wrongly on the 
 right side. His purely official work is said to have 
 been fairly successful, but certainly of no such in- 
 spired character as to justify the arrogance with 
 which he declines to join a Government without ruling 
 it. On that question of his being accepted as a sort 
 of dictator, little need be said. The cook who cannot 
 produce a dinner of some sort without complete recon- 
 struction of the kitchen is not the cook one would 
 naturally put in charge of a kitchen when recon- 
 structed. One distrusts entirely the " strong " man 
 who can only work in conditions he himself prescribes. 
 We have to take the world and the British Constitu- 
 tion as we find them; both are profoundly unsatis- 
 factory, but not to be changed in a hurry. 
 
 Lord Northcliffe has one of the " strong " man's 
 weaknesses. He has never been crossed, has never 
 had to argue a case, has never had to withstand in 
 his own person a personal attack, since he was a boy. 
 He has pilloried all sorts of people; he has never 
 been pilloried except by rival newspapers, and the 
 public quite rightly refuses to get excited over Pott 
 and Slurk heroics. " Newspaper shrapnel," as he 
 calls it, he can ignore; and he has never let himself 
 come within the range of a really heavy gun. He 
 will not meet an attack in the Lords; he takes part 
 only in that sort of public gathering where the 
 decencies permit of no plain speaking. In his office 
 he is surrounded by stipendiary cherubim and sera- 
 phim, raising an eternal chorus of " Brainy, brainy, 
 brainy." For a quarter of a century he has been a 
 Commander of the Faithful, with cunning mixers of 
 sherbet and deft manipulators of the bowstring 
 around him. Hence that curiously arrogant shyness, 
 that eagerness for power without responsibility, that 
 passion for publicity and shrinking from its conse-
 
 VISCOUNT NORTHCLIFFE 165 
 
 quences, that make him at once the most and the 
 least known man in English public life. 
 
 Caught }^oung, before the mischievous kittenish- 
 ness of Answers days had hardened into cat hood, he 
 might have developed into a considerable statesman, 
 though it may be questioned whether that real but 
 narrow genius of his, so suited to its tiny purpose, 
 could have been expanded to embrace the larger 
 things of life. Even now he might, under due con- 
 trol, do useful work in some department in which he 
 is really interested — matters aerial, for example. But 
 Pegasus will not work in harness, and it wou d be 
 madness to give him the reins.
 
 MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 Mr. Austen Chamberlain's return to office was 
 welcomed mainly on the ground that he is an honest 
 man, and condemned mainly on the ground that he 
 is a politician. 
 
 Regarding the first point, the implication is suffi- 
 ciently alarming. Lord Morley, in his last book, tells 
 how, as Irish Secretary, he " turned down " a nomin- 
 ation to the County Bench because the person in 
 question had the character of being " moderately 
 honest." His lordship took the old-fashioned view 
 that moderate honesty is as unsatisfactory as reason- 
 able chastity. We have been accustomed to look on 
 integrity in public life not as a virtue in itself, but 
 as the indispensable foundation of all other virtues. 
 One can imagine Gladstone's feelings had he been 
 publicly described as a statesman of conspicuous 
 honesty and some capacity. Have we really arrived 
 at the pass when we must be told that if the country 
 is not safe in a statesman's hands, at least the country's 
 safe is safe ? 
 
 For the moment we will assume, however rashly, 
 that every public man is honest, and pass from Mr. 
 Chamberlain's chiefly advertised virtue to his chiefly 
 advertised crime. It is, perhaps, useless to try to 
 stem the cataract of nonsense now roaring against 
 " professional politicians." But it may be said at 
 once that Mr. Chamberlain's solitary claim to a place 
 in the Government resides in this very fact that he 
 is first and foremost a politician — that is, that he has 
 a considerable grip of Parliamentary things and much 
 
 166
 
 MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN 167 
 
 knowledge of official ways. True, he is not the sort 
 of man one would naturally choose to ride the whirl- 
 wind and direct the storm. " Pitt is to Addington 
 as London is to Paddington," wrote Canning to 
 another amiable mediocrity. Mr. Chamberlain is 
 decidedly Paddingtonian. His abilities, though sedu- 
 lously cultivated, are at best second-rate; he lacks, 
 above all, power; he rather reminds one of those 
 pallid city youths who, with a bedroom exerciser, 
 attain a certain muscular development, but never 
 achieve " punch " or natural vigour. 
 
 In the case of such a person it is merely foolish to 
 blame Mr. Muldow's system for his rather unsatis- 
 factory condition; the question is rather what he 
 would have been without Mr. Muldow. When one 
 hears an Oxford graduate talking great nonsense 
 (which happens occasionally) the first tendency may 
 be to condemn the University; second and sounder 
 thoughts prompt the inquiry what sort of nonsense 
 the same man would have talked had he stopped short 
 at a primary school. Certainly it is an unprofitable 
 business sending poor grist to a first-class mill, and 
 the care lavished on Mr. Chamberlain's political edu- 
 cation doubtless might have been better expended on 
 another subject. But to suggest that Government, 
 of all trades, is one in which talents are not improved 
 by training is merely silly, and to complain that Mr. 
 Chamberlain knows at least part of his trade is surely 
 irrational. 
 
 One part of his trade he knows very well indeed. 
 He is an excellent House of Commons man. He 
 would probably make a very fair Leader of the House, 
 and it would not be surprising to learn that the astute 
 Prime Minister, with an eye to possibilities, had ear- 
 marked him for that position should it fall vacant. 
 Second-rate men often make first-rate leaders, just
 
 168 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 as some extremely brilliant statesmen have failed 
 calamitously in that capacity. The House of Com- 
 mons is like a certain type of horse, which will allow 
 a favourite child to manage it, and will respond to a 
 master whip, but shows every vice in the hands of a 
 semi-competent. Some men dominate the House by 
 sheer force of character; others conquer by tact; still 
 others get their wa}^ because the House likes them, 
 and knows they like the House. The latter was the 
 secret of the conspicuous success of very ordinary 
 people like W. H. Smith and " C.-B.," and Mr. 
 Chamberlain might well develop in the same direc- 
 tion. He has, it is true, some handicaps from which 
 they were free. In humour he is slenderly endowed, 
 and he has not that cheerful sense of his own limita- 
 tions which is often the greatest asset of the second- 
 rate statesman, enabling him, without raising 
 jealousies, to guide men with whom he could not 
 seriously compete. 
 
 " C.-B.," by shrewd judgment and good-humour, 
 succeeded in managing a team of which seven indi- 
 viduals out of ten were his intellectual superiors. 
 Mr. Chamberlain has not quite learned that savoir 
 faire which is based ultimately on perfect self- 
 knowledge. There are times when he still gives the 
 impression of believing himself to be a statesman in 
 the grand manner. But the amiable illusion has 
 shown signs of weakening since the Tariff Reform 
 days; it suffered one great shock when Mr. Bonar 
 Law was chosen Unionist leader, and another when 
 the Mesopotamia report was issued. In regard to 
 that melancholy business Mr. Chamberlain's prompt 
 recognition of his responsibility was to his credit, but 
 common sense rebels at fellow-politicians' description 
 of his resignation as a mere quixotry on the part of 
 a man only nominally to blame. Mr. Chamberlain's
 
 MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN 169 
 
 fault was negative but real. It was not so much that 
 he was wrong as that he was not vigorously enough 
 in the right. 
 
 But vigour is just the quality Mr. Chamberlain 
 lacks, though he tries hard to imitate the masterful- 
 ness of his father. I once had the singular experience 
 of visiting the house of a rich man with a gruesome 
 hobby. He had spent his life going round che great 
 picture galleries of the world and employing copyists 
 to reproduce their chief treasures. These he put in 
 gorgeous imitations of old Florentine frames, and, 
 at a cost adequate to papering his walls with minor 
 masterpieces, was able to flatter himself that he was 
 surrounded by the highest in art. I am reminded of 
 that disconsolate collection of sham Titians, Rem- 
 brandts, and Raphaels, stiff and smooth as anything 
 at Madame Tussaud's, whenever I happen to be at 
 the House of Commons when Mr. Chamberlain is 
 "up." He is so like, yet so unlike, his father. The 
 outlines are there, as in Signor Spaghetti's copies, 
 but there is no vigour of colour, no force of expression, 
 no power in modelling. All is flat and tame. Joseph 
 Chamberlain's words cut like a whip; his anger had 
 sometimes almost the effect of physical shock; his 
 monocle could be as terrifying as the eye of Poly- 
 phemus. Mr. Austen's is no more formidable than 
 Mr. Weedon Grossmith's. The elder man penetrated 
 his utterances with real passion. The younger tries 
 to do the same, but his artificial indignation rather 
 recalls the dog that went mad " to serve some private 
 ends." Men easily recover from that sort of bite. 
 
 In middle age, Mr. Austen Chamberlain has to some 
 extent dropped conscious imitation, and he is getting 
 to be as much himself as he will ever be. Tempera- 
 mentally he differs from his father, and is really what 
 his father never was — a Conservative. But he has
 
 170 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 not shaken off what his father also never lost — that 
 kind of provincialism which one may call suburbanity. 
 With all his great qualities, Joseph Chamberlain 
 retained to the end some trace of Camberwell. He 
 had Mr. Lloyd George's bad habit — the two men have 
 many points of resemblance — of discussing great 
 affairs in a dialect neither stately nor statesmanlike. 
 He was the man of a world rather than a man of the 
 world. He chid foreign Ministers as if they were 
 Irish Members. He told the French to " mend their 
 manners " with the same readiness that he called 
 Mr. Dillon a " good judge of traitors." In his 
 dealings with rural questions he was as Cockney as 
 Mr. Pickwick at Dingle}' Dell. With less excuse, 
 Mr. Austen Chamberlain is even more limited. He 
 has industriously " got up " the Empire with the 
 help of the Blue-Books, but shows no real under- 
 standing of it, and no man in affairs knows less about 
 Europe. His abilities, such as they are, are simply 
 suited to the things of the caucus and the House of 
 Commons. There he makes a quite respectable dis- 
 pla}'. He always speaks neatly, and sometimes, as 
 when moved over the Press attacks on Sir William 
 Robertson, with force and point. Add that he is a 
 fair administrator, and you have said all that can 
 be said. 
 
 That, with so slender an equipment, Mr. Chamber- 
 lain can hardly be called a failure is surely sufficient 
 rebuttal to the unintelligent outcry against the 
 " professional politician." That poverty of political 
 talent which has occasioned the demand for " business 
 men "is, in fact, chiefly due to the increasing domina- 
 tion of the House of Commons by elderly tradesmen. 
 A seat in Parliament is no longer the object of young 
 (and poor) ambition; the House of Commons is 
 rather a Tom Tiddler's ground where the " arrived "
 
 MR. AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN 171 
 
 grub for ribands and titles. If any moral is to be 
 drawn from Mr. Chamberlain's position it is the 
 need of something to replace the old patronage 
 system which secured a steady supply of brilliant 
 youngsters for the public service. 
 
 Our " democratic " system has done away with the 
 one valuable feature of the borough-mongering days 
 — the search for talent irrespective of wealth and 
 social position. But it has greatly intensified the 
 reverence paid to the hereditary principle. The 
 owner of a dozen rotten boroughs might allot six to 
 his friends and relations, but he wanted to get political 
 value out of the rest; hence the hungry quest for 
 brains and the rise of Pitt, Canning, Gladstone, and 
 so many others. If Mr. Chamberlain is found " in- 
 dispensable " because he has learned the tricks of 
 the trade, and is still not quite a first-rate man, the 
 inference would seem plain. Instead of declaring 
 that there are no tricks to be learned, and laying down 
 the principle that in politics there shall be only 
 amateur players, it would be more intelligent to teach 
 those tricks to young men of real talent. But that 
 would mean in many cases a preference for plain 
 Smith and Brown over Vavassour-Smith and Pon- 
 sonby-Brown, and it may be doubted whether British 
 snobbery, more rampant than ever in the decline of 
 English aristocracy, would assent to so levelling a 
 doctrine.
 
 THE " MORNING POST " AND 
 MR. H. A. GWYNNE 
 
 There are one or two instances of men who began 
 life as footmen shaking off all trace of servile origin. 
 Craggs, the peculating Secretary of State of South 
 Sea Bubble times, was, however immoral, no laugh- 
 ing-stock socially or mentally; and there has been 
 an example in our own time of an ex-servant whom 
 it requires a strong effort to remember in connection 
 with plush and powder. 
 
 But in general there hangs round the " gentleman's 
 gentleman " a flavour of ridicule that follows him 
 through life, and the manners and mannerisms of the 
 servants' hall are apt to cling to the most successful 
 of the class. Thus the Morning Post has never quite 
 outlived the reputation, or indeed the habits, of its 
 early days. True, it is no longer, as it used to be, 
 the laughter of the wits. In early Victorian days 
 the extraordinary English of its leading articles was 
 as much a joke as its reverential attention to the 
 doings of the great. Thackeray is never tired of 
 jeering at it, though one feels uneasily that he always 
 looked the paper through to see whether his own name 
 was given as attending a " rout " or a dinner party. 
 The Tories, whom it served with valet-like respect, 
 treated it — like a valet. Macaulay in 1831 put on 
 record his view of its importance as a political force. 
 Speaking of a duel that was fought by its editor in 
 1777, he says : " It certainly seems almost incredible 
 to a person living in our time that any human being 
 
 172
 
 " MORNING POST " AND MR. GWYNNE 173 
 
 should ever have stooped to fight with a writer on the 
 Morning Post." 
 
 To-day most of that is changed. The Morning 
 Post is the most individual of all the London morning 
 papers. It is also the best written. Its chief con- 
 tributors really are scholars, though, like ladies, when 
 young and fair, they have the gift to know it, and 
 occasionally annoy by a display of elementary classical 
 lore. It still makes a feature of those fascinating 
 paragraphs regarding increases in aristocratic families, 
 engagements and marriages of " gentlemen of fashion" 
 and " ladies of quality," and the dignified obsequies 
 of all, from a Duke downwards, who can afford its 
 rather high charges for " personal announcements." 
 But, editorially at least, this department no longer 
 dominates. It was otherwise only a few years ago 
 A distinguished literary man was once invited by 
 the late Lord Glenesk to take the editorial chair 
 He waited patiently for his lordship to outline the 
 attitude of the paper to certain questions at that 
 moment assuming a new importance. Instead of 
 attending to such minor matters his recently created 
 lordship dwelt on the extreme importance of having 
 names wholly accurate and in their right order. The 
 point was elaborated until the candidate, who joined 
 to a high regard for the nobility and gentry of these 
 islands some sense of humour and proportion, re- 
 marked that what seemed to be really wanted was 
 a proof-reader, and took his leave. 
 
 Such an incident, when taken alone, might give 
 a poor impression of the mental standing of Algernon 
 Bwithwi^k. Yet it was he, the highly educated son 
 of Peter Borthwick — a shrewd self-made Scotsman, 
 who had acquired the paper during one of its recurring 
 crises — who laid the foundations of the Morning Post 
 as we now know it. Algernon Borthwick, clever,
 
 174 UN CENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 pleasant, a great respecter of persons, cautiously 
 enterprising, extraordinarily limited, but the more 
 efficient for his purposes through those limitations, 
 might have proceeded direct from the imagination 
 of Samuel Warren, the author of that perfect snob- 
 novel, Ten Thousand a Year. Much of his ability, 
 something of his thrifty disposition, and not a little 
 of the asperity which tempered his veneration for the 
 upper classes, have descended to his daughter, who 
 married in 1893 the seventh Earl Bathurst. 
 
 Under her control the Morning Post has gradually 
 abandoned the deferential " as-your-lordship-pleases " 
 manner of its earlier days. While the old Times 
 adopted of set policy the pose of independence, with 
 an acknowledged bias in favour of the Government 
 of the day, while the Standard of Mudford days spoke 
 plain English about its own leaders, the Morning 
 Post was content to " say ditto to Mr. Burke." It 
 would probably be saying " ditto " still but for the 
 fact that changes in Fleet Street ended by leaving it 
 the only true-blue Tory morning paper in London. 
 The Standard declined and died ; the Times changed 
 hands and methods; the Telegraph did not change, 
 but remained what it has always been, mainly intent 
 on its advertising columns. Conscious of its new 
 position, the Morning Post began to indulge an 
 autocratic temper of which it had not hitherto been 
 suspected. 
 
 Readers of Thackeray will remember that masterly 
 scene in which Mr. Morgan, who had submissively 
 combed Major Pendennis's wigs and prepared his 
 footbath for years, suddenly called on that old war- 
 rior to stand and deliver. " Shall I wring your old 
 head off and drownd yer in that pail of water ? Do 
 you think I'm a-going to bear your confounded old 
 harrogance, you old Wigsby ?" And so forth and
 
 " MORNING POST " AND MR. GWYNNE 175 
 
 so on. Far be it from me to compare this hypo- 
 critical old blackmailer, grown shamefully rich on 
 menial service, to the most " high-class " of English 
 newspapers, which was content to claim not the 
 largest, but the " best " circulation. But there is 
 really some suggestion in Mr. Morgan's insurgence 
 of the change that came over the Morning Post 
 when it was left the solitary oracle of old-fashioned 
 Toryism. In its old days it had been the well-trained 
 footman ; in its new style it rather suggests a flustered 
 and revolting butler. 
 
 The change has not quite s3mchronized with the 
 reign of its present editor, Mr. Howell A. Gwynne. 
 The revolt against Mr. Balfour, the alliance with 
 Confederates, Die-Hards, " antique bantams of the 
 fighting breed " (as the Morning Post once lyrically 
 described the venerable Lord Halsbury), et hoc genus 
 omne, dated rather earlier, and may perhaps be ex- 
 plained, not only by disagreements on policy, but by 
 some obscure prejudice against the Cecil family. But 
 certainly the peculiar wildness of the Morning Post 
 has attained its zenith under the editorial direction of 
 this talented Welshman. 
 
 Mr. Gwynne is a fighting rather than a thinking- 
 editor. He knows everybody in politics, but strangely 
 little of political questions. Though he gives little 
 evidence of any grave study of economic problems, 
 he is a Tariff Reformer, as Falstaff was a respecter of 
 royalty, " on instinct." He is a strong Imperialist, 
 on instinct again, plus the inspiration of Lord Milner, 
 his ideal in statesmanship, and Joseph Chamberlain, 
 to whose spell he succumbed when he accompanied 
 that great man to South Africa in his Reuter cor- 
 respondent days. In literature he has one idol, Mr. 
 Kipling, and several betes noires, of whom Mr. H. G. 
 Wells may be taken as the type. He hates aliens,
 
 176 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Nonconformists, Radicals, Welshmen, Irish Catholics, 
 Humanitarians, Free Traders, and Anti-vivisectionists 
 about equally, and probably thinks they are all very 
 much the same thing. His experience as a war 
 correspondent gave him a real love of arms and 
 armies, and no great abhorrence of war itself. This 
 war he can hardty like; the wars for his money are 
 snug, profitable, picturesque wars, ending in more of 
 the map painted red. 
 
 Force is his remedy for everything. He was for 
 force in South Africa. He is for force in Ireland. 
 He has seriously recommended, during times of 
 industrial trouble, systematic siege operations in the 
 affected areas. He laughs to scorn the notion that 
 this war is being waged, or should be waged, for any 
 other than the narrowest national objects. He 
 refuses altogether to believe that the common man, 
 whose blood is being spilt, can have any ideal but 
 his own terribly simple one of a foreigner-tight, all- 
 red, self-supporting, self-sufficing, imperialistic, ag- 
 gressive, and thoroughly vulgar " Empire." He will 
 laugh at German " Kultur " notions. But he is all 
 for a British " Kultur " as illiberal, less brutal indeed, 
 but perhaps even more sordid, because it would imply 
 a frank contempt for intellect which, to do the 
 German justice, is not his characteristic fault. 
 
 These are Mr. Gwynne's quite honest ideals. They 
 would seem to distinguish him in no way from some 
 of the dullest of living Englishmen. But this intel- 
 lectual simplicity is combined with a capacity for 
 manoeuvre that will secure his name some prominence 
 when the secret history of the last fifteen years is 
 laid open. He has a talent for influencing men much 
 more able than himself. He was a very considerable 
 force in the Budget fight. He did much to precipitate 
 the Parliament Act crisis. He had a great deal to
 
 " MORNING POST " AND MR. GWYNNE 177 
 
 do with the deposition of Mr. Balfour and the sealing 
 of the fatal Unionist-Carsonite alliance. He worked 
 as hard to get Mr. Lloyd George into power as he has 
 latterly worked to get him out . With prejudices firmly 
 fixed, and all else in a state of flux, it is not surprising 
 that there is a sort of stormy unity in his journalistic 
 career ; few men have been more violently and variously 
 wrong. 
 
 With more balance, and equal distinction in 
 writing, the Morning Post might under him be a 
 tremendous power for evil; without the piquant 
 charm of his chief leader-writer's style, it would be 
 merely contemptible. Things being as they are, it 
 is a sort of Puck-Mephistopheles, chiefly effective in 
 its more freakish side. Its graver plots have a habit 
 of miscarrying. But it can always snatch three- 
 legged stools from beneath the unsuspecting, and 
 create a general atmosphere of commotion. 
 
 The Morning Post once boldly likened itself to a 
 toad. That is the last comparison on which the 
 polite critic would venture. But since it has been 
 made, it may be adopted in order to conclude on a 
 note of just compliment. " The toad, ugly and 
 venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head." 
 The venom of the Morning Post is all too apparent. 
 Its valuable qualities are less obviously displayed. 
 They include an absence of vulgarity on all non- 
 political topics, an abhorrence of sensational methods, 
 a generally enlightened literary judgment, honesty 
 and balance in the presentment of news, a consistent 
 hostility to the more sordid forms of " influence " 
 and political intrigue, and a " City page " of out- 
 standing ability. The pity is that the corpus sanum 
 does not lodge a spirit quite in keeping. 
 
 12
 
 MR. WALTER LONG 
 
 Mr. Long is a time-defying type. Of course, the 
 years have had their usual physical effect on him. 
 They have somewhat enlarged the tonsure of a con- 
 stitutional baldness. They have deepened the russet 
 of his cheeks, slightly blanched his blonde moustache, 
 taken something from the once ramrod-erectness of 
 his horseback seat. But mentally it is the same Long : 
 as he was in the beginning, he is now, and shall be. 
 
 In Mr. Long the type overpowers the individual. 
 True, he has a personality. But so has a pedigree 
 bull. It may be roguish or gentle, brindled or red, 
 or black and white, with its own tastes and preju- 
 dices in the matter of hay and mangels. But, after 
 all, the main fact about it is that it is a Shorthorn or 
 a Hereford. When 3^ou have stated the breed you 
 have said all that is necessary in a general way. 
 
 ■Mr. Long is a pedigree squire. Few others are 
 so genuine. The Longs have neither ascended into 
 the ranks of the great nor sunk into the general mass. 
 They have lacked the ambition and ability of certain 
 other ancient families, and, on the other hand, they 
 have never been given to the vices which dissipate 
 patrimonies. For centuries pursuing the safe path of 
 mediocrity, they have kept their own, and grown with 
 the times. There were West-Country Longs, doubt- 
 less, before there was a county of Wilts; it is certain 
 that Wilts had Longs before England had a Parlia- 
 ment, and almost since Parliament was Wilts has sent 
 Longs to it. One Long sat during the Wars of the 
 Roses. Another figured in one of the stormy Parlia- 
 
 178
 
 MR. WALTER LONG 179 
 
 ments of Charles I. A third held office of some 
 dignity under the Merry Monarch, and if one cared 
 to rummage in Dryasdust one would be pretty certain 
 to find in every reign a Long who was something, 
 but not very much. No Long ever sounded all the 
 depths and shoals of honour, or played the part of 
 the little wanton bovs who swim on bladders. The 
 family produced no subtle thinker or ambitious 
 plotter. One never reads of a Long exchanging 
 conceits with Sir Thomas More, or verses with 
 Spenser, or maxims with Bacon, or guilty confidences 
 with Shaftesbury. If any Long swam in a gondola 
 we may be sure he never came back that " Diavolo 
 Incarnato," the Italianate Englishman. If any Long 
 shared Charles I.'s travels we may be sure he carried 
 everywhere with him the air' and the accent of the 
 chalk downs. 
 
 Mr. Walter Long, like his ancestors, is unadul- 
 terated squire, with a great deal of the good and some 
 of the not so good that belongs to that character 
 But he has one gift that distinguishes him from the 
 generality of the genus. He is a talking squire. He 
 has the talent of articulate speech. He can talk on 
 any subject. He does not talk well; but a talking 
 squire is like a talking horse; as Johnson sa} T s, " the 
 wonder, sir, is not that the thing is not done well, but 
 that it is done at all." I remember Mr. Long when 
 he first entered Parliament for the Northern Division 
 of Wiltshire in the pre-Distribution Act days. He 
 was then very young; in fact, he made the neat and 
 original point of apologizing for a fault that time 
 would cure. But he spoke without hesitation or 
 remorse, and he has been speaking unhesitatingly 
 and remorselessly ever since. 
 
 Of course, this fluency would not of itself have 
 advanced Mr. Long to the Front Bench. Had he
 
 180 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 come from the suburbs of a North-Country town the 
 healthy pink of his complexion would have remained 
 an ornament of the unofficial benches. But he 
 enjoyed, like Lord Chaplin, the advantage of being 
 the representative of an important class in which the 
 capacity of coherent expression is rare. Lord Chaplin, 
 who possesses the same easy power of aqueous elo- 
 quence, together with an elephantine majesty peculi- 
 arly his own, would probably have gone farther than 
 Mr. Long had he not been carried away by his Pro- 
 tectionist leanings at a time when Fair Trade was 
 banned as a dead and damned heresy by the Tory 
 Caucus. Mr. Long made no such mistake. At 
 farmers' ordinaries and puppy-walking luncheons in 
 Wilts and Gloucestershire he might drop hints that 
 made the beer mugs or champagne glasses rattle with 
 a joyous music, but in Whitehall he was strictly 
 orthodox — until the time came when it was orthodox 
 to profess Protection once more. 
 
 In this timely conformity and equally timely con- 
 version we have the man. For Mr. Long's eyes, so 
 frank, so honest, so English in their attractive colour- 
 scheme of turquoise in a coral setting, have always 
 been fixed on the main chance politically, and have 
 not disdained to regard the main chance in private 
 matters either. He is a shrewd man in a land deal, 
 and he has a good deal of land, both in England and 
 Ireland, where he benefited largely by the will of 
 his grandfather, Mr. William Hume-Dick, from whom 
 he derives his second name. He holds the simple 
 faith of the squire, that a man has a right to do 
 what he likes with his own, and that land exists 
 chiefly for the nurture of landlords. The English 
 squire is, perhaps, the most manly, honourable, 
 healthy-minded, and selfish man this earth has pro- 
 duced — too fond of sucking blood to shed it uselessly,
 
 MR. WALTER LONG 181 
 
 too lazy and too careful of his own mental comfort 
 to tyrannize in the fashion of a Prussian Junker, too 
 proud to go back on his word except to inferiors, 
 too fond of sport and jollity to live ungenially among 
 his own people. But his compromises have been as 
 fatal as other despots' logical cruelties, and under his 
 open smile the English countryside has become largely 
 an open and smiling desert. We do well to make the 
 most of men like Mr. Long, to applaud them as the 
 fine flower of our manhood. For truly we have 
 reared them at a prodigious cost. 
 
 It is not a little singular that, while at Westminster 
 people think little of Mr. Long as a statesman and 
 much of him as a county magnate, in Wiltshire he 
 is regarded as an inspired politician but as nothing- 
 very special as a landowner or a sportsman. Rood 
 Ashton, with all its dead and gone Longs, is a small 
 affair beside Badminton or Longleat. Mr. Long, 
 who hunts occasionally, is a minor hero compared 
 with those who " show sport " six days in the week. 
 It is just this action and reaction of Westminster on 
 Wiltshire and Wiltshire on Westminster that have 
 been the secret of Mr. Long's solid success in politics. 
 Wiltshire said, " Send Mr. Long to the talking-shop; 
 he knows how to talk." Westminster said, " Long is 
 not brilliant, certainly, but he knows all about 
 fertilizers, turnips, foot-and-mouth disease, goose- 
 berry mildew, and how to talk to Hodge; he's safe, 
 he isn't faddy, and one must have one man who can 
 be put up to reply without a stutter to Radical land 
 nonsense." Once in the Cabinet, Mr. Long showed, 
 as in the case of the Local Government Act of 1888, 
 a certain Quarter Sessions shrewdness and Board of 
 Guardians common sense that marked him as a useful 
 man in his way, and the tradition of his indispensa- 
 bility in a Conservative Government rapidly took root.
 
 182 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 If we may believe a once well-known story, the 
 inclusion at last became automatic. " Who's that 
 very pleasant-looking man ?" Lord Salisbury is said 
 o have asked of Mr. Balfour, as Mr. Long bowed to 
 them in Downing Street. " That," explained Mr. 
 Balfour, " is the President of the Local Government 
 Board, Walter Long." "Ah," said the Prime Minis- 
 ter, '■ I felt sure I had seen that face somewhere." 
 One wonders what the ironic Cecil, a great man in 
 his kind, would have thought had he foreseen that 
 in a very few years the party he led, rich in general 
 talent and graced by one or two fine intellects, would 
 be divided on the question whether the pleasant-look- 
 ing squire, or Mr. Chamberlain's rather disappointing 
 son, or a Glasgow iron merchant still unknown, 
 should command it. 
 
 The choice of Mr. Long might have been happier 
 than that of Mr. Bonar Law, for at least he does stand 
 for something quite definite. He is a plain Tory of 
 the Shires, and not a fantastic Conservative of the 
 suburbs. He is " out " simply for himself and his 
 friends, for land, Church, and the trade. I believe 
 he has, or had, relatives in each. Under him Toryism 
 might have gone back to its old simplicity for awhile, 
 healthily slumbering until a more vital spirit arose. 
 But such speculations are idle. The practical point is 
 that Mr. Long, having once been, to adapt the Papal 
 formula, " Prime Ministerable," was confirmed for 
 life in his right to be considered in the party, and 
 so, when the first War Coalition was formed, the 
 claims of Mr. Long, in the classic phrase, " could not 
 be ignored." The Coalition Cabinet must be " repre- 
 sentative"; who so representative as the squire of 
 Rood Ashton ? Unfortunately, Mr. Long has been 
 far too representative to be used to the best purpose. 
 
 He has qualities, to be quite fair, which might
 
 MR. WALTER LONG 183 
 
 have fitted him for certain Departmental and House 
 of Commons work. He has piloted necessary Bills 
 through Parliament with some skill, and no doubt 
 has worked honestly and well, according to his lights, 
 in Whitehall. But unhappily, so " representative " 
 a man could not be treated merely as a junior Minister. 
 He had to be called into counsel on some of the most 
 important questions before the Cabinet, and Mr. 
 Long is a calamitous counsellor on anything more 
 complex than a dog-muzzling order. It was, for 
 example, a tragic absurdity to call on him to take a 
 principal part in the attempt to straighten out the 
 Irish tangle. His very experience as Irish Secretary 
 was a handicap. For he is rather a vain man, and 
 the fact that he went through a quiet period without 
 grave trouble has given him exaggerated notions of 
 his own capacity as an Irish administrator, and a 
 quite inadequate conception of the situation produced 
 by the crimes and errors of recent years. 
 
 It is a sad fact, but the war has rendered Mr. Long 
 obsolete as more than an underling, and he can 
 scarcely be that with his record. There might have 
 been a place for him in the England of ten years ago. 
 To-day he is a political megatherium. For the 
 England of the Longs has passed away. The landed 
 gentry of the cosy Victorian time, with many privi- 
 leges and no duties save what they found fun or 
 profit in undertaking, can hardly survive in any case. 
 If they survive it will only be by transforming them- 
 selves into something unrecognizable. They can no 
 longer maintain themselves on the basis of " showing 
 good sport ' ' and distributing, in virtue of being rich men , 
 poor justice. And even if the class changes by some 
 miracle, Mr . Long at least is unchangeable. The farewell 
 to him will be kindlv in form, but definitive in effect.
 
 LORD BEAVERBROOK 
 
 " As to leaders in parties, nothing is more common than to 
 see them blindly led. The world is governed by go-betweens. 
 These go-betweens influence the persons with whom they carry 
 on the intercourse, by stating their own sense to each of them as 
 the sense of the other; and thus they reciprocally master both 
 sides." — Burke: Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. 
 
 It is nearly thirty-nine years ago since the family 
 circle of the late Rev. William Aitken, Scottish 
 minister, of New Brunswick, Canada, was gladdened 
 by the arrival of a boy baby, who, when he renounced 
 the powers of evil, was given the names of William 
 and Maxwell. In later life he dropped the first 
 Christian name and shortened the second, and it was 
 as Max Aitken, tout court, that he became, as early 
 as twenty-five 3 r ears of age, a rich man. 
 
 It would be interesting to trace the origins of that 
 fortune which has enabled the Presbyterian clergy- 
 man's son to play a considerable part in English 
 affairs, and to become successively Knight, Baronet, 
 Peer of the Realm, and Minister. Unfortunately a 
 certain obscurity invests the earlier business life of 
 Lord Beaverbrook. It is understood that he had a 
 short and highly successful career in the West Indies 
 before he set up in business in Halifax and Montreal. 
 In Canada he achieved great things as a financier and 
 " bond merchant," and it is certain that, in whatever 
 pursuits he made money, he made it very rapidly. 
 
 In the year 1910, Max Aitken invaded England. 
 No other verb quite expresses the fact. He came, he 
 saw, he overcame. In the early months of that year 
 
 T84
 
 LORD BEAVERBROOK 185 
 
 the mention of his name, in any but a very limited 
 circle, would have conveyed nothing. At the end of 
 the year he was well known in the City and even 
 better known at Westminster. His social and politi- 
 cal progress rather recalled that of Mr. Veneering in 
 Our Mutual Friend. People who had known him 
 a fortnight somehow felt the} 7 were the chosen com- 
 rades of his boyhood. He rapidly collected round 
 him more old and intimate friends than the ordinary 
 man makes in a lifetime. In company with some of 
 these (of at least three weeks' standing) he went down 
 to Ashton-under-Lyne, as Mr. Veneering did to Pocket 
 Breeches, and won a whirlwind election campaign. 
 There was no resisting his big car, his bevy of tame 
 editors, his powerful gift of speech. 
 
 The next 3~ear he was knighted. Mr. A^quith, of 
 course, was not so conscious of the merits of a politi- 
 cal opponent as to confer this honour of his own 
 initiative. But it is the custom from time to time to 
 confer a certain number of honours on the suggestion 
 of the Opposition leader, and Mr. Aitken had by this 
 time won a position in the Unionist Party sufficient 
 to justify Mr. Balfour in putting forward his name. 
 It is safe to say that Mr. Balfour himself had only a 
 formal share in the transaction. His star was already 
 fast declining, and Mr. Aitken was the last man in the 
 world to take an interest in " back numbers." He 
 had allied himself with the extreme Tariff Reformers ; 
 he was searching London for a daily paper to push 
 himself and his creed ; he was hand-in-glove with 
 those who had already resolved on Mr. Balfour's 
 deposition. The true credit for the bestowal of this 
 honour no doubt belongs to Mr. Bonar Law. He and 
 Mr. Aitken were on close terms of intimacy; they 
 came from the same province ; they shared the same 
 economic convictions. It was only natural that Mr.
 
 186 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Law should put in a word for his pushful and am- 
 bitious friend. 
 
 Sir Max, as we must now call him, grew rapidly 
 in political stature. He was one of those members 
 who are seldom heard in the House, but are constantly 
 felt in the Lobbies. Even before he obtained control 
 of a newspaper he exercised considerable influence 
 through journalistic friends, who shared his week- 
 ends and his lightning trips between this country and 
 Canada. Quite impervious to a rebuff, possessing a 
 remarkable talent for finding the weak side of every 
 man, amazingly frank in manner, and extremely 
 subtle in method, he hustled his way into the inner 
 circle of the " Die-Hards. " His part in the plot that 
 dethroned Mr. Balfour was undoubtedly considerable, 
 and later he threw the whole weight of his influence 
 on the side of the Ulster extremists. In due course 
 his ambitions for direct newspaper influence were 
 gratified, and in three or four years the mysterious 
 visitor from Canada had attained a power none the 
 less formidable because it was largely exercised from 
 behind cover. 
 
 Without a knowledge of these facts it is not easy 
 to understand the strong feeling created by Lord 
 Beaverbrook's appointment as Director of Propa- 
 ganda. They are necessary, also, in order to appre- 
 ciate the part he played in the drama which led to a 
 change of Government in 191 6. The full faces are 
 not known. But it is certain that in the movement 
 culminating in Mr. Asquith's retirement the Canadian 
 knight was an actor of prime importance. He was 
 the go-between who, as Burke puts it, often governs 
 by suggestion, and becomes the master of those he 
 seems to serve. 
 
 Towards the end of 191 6 there was much disunion 
 in the Cabinet and great discontent in the country.
 
 LORD BEAVERBROOK 187 
 
 Mr. Lloyd George, while on terms of personal friend- 
 liness with Mr. Asquith, was profoundly out of 
 sympathy with some features of his policy. He had 
 drawn apart from most of his colleagues, and was in 
 close relations with Sir Edward Carson, who had 
 angrily flung out of the Cabinet a year before in 
 protest against the supposed supineness of the Prime 
 Minister. Mr. Bonar Law was extremely uncomfort- 
 able. The debate on the sale of enemy properties in 
 Nigeria, in which he had been placed in a position of 
 antagonism to the extreme Tariff Reformers, had 
 greatly disturbed him, in view of his pledge not to 
 hold office in the Coalition longer than he retained 
 the confidence of his party. Between him and Mr. 
 Lloyd George there was at this time less cordiality 
 than before or after, and events had somewhat 
 strained his relations with Sir Edward Carson. Sir 
 Max Aitken — I am adopting the version given by 
 " An Independent Liberal " in his illuminating little 
 book — used his influence to bring these three together. 
 The history of the crisis is really the history of the 
 scores of meals, breakfasts, dinners, and suppers 
 which these four enjo} r ed under the friendly roof 
 of the member for Ashton-under-Lyne during the 
 November of 1916. 
 
 It is unnecessary here to recall all the attempts at 
 accommodation and the events which led to the final 
 breach. Mr. Law was undoubtedly actuated by two 
 motives, and two only — to improve the administra- 
 tion and to unify his own party. Mr. Lloyd George 
 was unwilling to force Mr. Asquith into resignation, 
 though determined to get his point. Sir Edward 
 Carson was probably well enough pleased with the 
 actual issue. That issue was perhaps inevitable. But 
 in the sudden frustration of all attempts at compro- 
 mise we seem to trace the influence of a master
 
 188 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 of intrigue. Somebody gave information on which 
 The Times based its article of December 4, represent- 
 ing the Prime Minister as having agreed practically 
 to become a roi faineant, " an irresponsible spectator," 
 to borrow Mr. Asquith's own phrase. That there 
 was a le kage is certain; who supplied the facts on 
 which this insulting gloss was made has never been 
 revealed, and probably never will be. 
 
 Sir Max Ait ken survived only a few days the fall 
 of the Asquith Ministry. He disappeared for ever, 
 and Baron Beaverbrook took his place. In this 
 country there was little comment at the time on this 
 curious coincidence. After all, we are accustomed 
 to the ennoblement of rich men with no very obvious 
 public claims. In the Dominions, on the other hand, 
 titles are not popular at the best, and the bestowal 
 of this particular title caused a feeling little under- 
 stood on our side of the Atlantic. In honouring Sir 
 Max Ait ken it would really seem that the Prime 
 Minister had not succeeded in persuading Canada that 
 Canada was honoured. Comments described in the 
 House of Commons as " amazingly frank and even 
 libellous " appeared in the free-spoken journals of 
 that free land; they were read on this side; and the 
 criticism of Lord Beaverbrook's appointment as Chief 
 Propagandist was largely based on these strictures. 
 
 On other grounds the attacks made on Lord 
 Beaverbrook's conduct of the Ministry of Informa- 
 tion have so far failed to convince. True, he is in 
 many respects quite unfitted for the task. He brings 
 to it neither the appropriate education nor the neces- 
 sary knowledge of European affairs. The smallest 
 part of that business is drum-beating, cinema-filming, 
 and vulgar advertisement. It demands a deep 
 knowledge of affairs, close touch with European 
 history during the last fifty years, some perception
 
 LORD BEAVERBROOK 189 
 
 of what part religion still plays in the lives of men, 
 and a delicate sense of what may be called the 
 personality of nations. The coarsest mistakes are 
 possible to a person of small culture, and the hustle 
 and bustle of the shrewd, sharp business man con- 
 stitute an actual disqualification. But when that is 
 said, there appears no special reason to believe that 
 Lord Beaverbrook is less suitable than any other of 
 the pushful type. He is undoubtedly shrewd, and 
 has done some things which deserve recognition. 
 For example, he has appreciably relaxed the foolish 
 policy of reticence. He has seen the advantage of 
 bringing to the notice of Colonial journalists the real 
 facts of the war. He has done something to break 
 down the wall of misunderstanding between Great 
 Britain and her Allies as to our share in the general 
 burden and sacrifice. Critics, indeed, have been 
 driven to dwell less on what he has done than what 
 he might do. 
 
 And that really is the chief strength of their case. 
 Lord Beaverbrook may be, and probably is, a fit 
 recipient of the favour of the Crown, and might, 
 in many capacities, be a highly useful public 
 servant. But there was a crudity about the con- 
 ferment of his titles that struck many, and it is 
 undeniably a little disquieting to observe the ease 
 with which an ambitious man, coming as a stranger 
 to this country, can in a few years raise him- 
 self to a position of great and undefined political 
 influence. Still more disturbing is the extraordinary 
 public indifference to such a phenomenon. Even a 
 quarter of a century ago opinion was powerful enough 
 to prevent any but the lesser honours going the way 
 of the South African millionaires, and, with the 
 exception of Rhodes, they were unable appreciably 
 to deflect political currents by their wealth.
 
 190 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Lord Beaverbrook, a comparatively small man 
 financially, has scaled heights forbidden to the great 
 Randlords, and possesses a control of the Press which 
 Rhodes, in the plenitude of his power, never attained. 
 This particular ascent into Olympus may be satis- 
 factorily explained. But the facility of the thing 
 suggests doubts as to the quality of the largely 
 increasing population of divinities.
 
 EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON 
 
 It is with a slight shock that one recalls that Lord 
 Curzon is very nearly sixty. It used to be equally 
 hard to realize that the Honourable George Nathaniel 
 Curzon was not more than thirty. Mr. Curzon 
 seemed too promising to be so young. Earl Curzon 
 seems too promising to be so old. 
 
 There was never a stage in Lord Curzon 's career in 
 which he did not promise rather more than he has 
 actually performed, notable though his record has 
 been. The Honourable George Nathaniel — Nathaniel 
 is a constantly recurring name in the family, like 
 Benjamin among the Bathursts and Charles and 
 Cosmo among the Gordon-Lennoxes — seems to have 
 resembled that precocious genius of whom Captain 
 Shandy spoke with mingled pity and disapproval. 
 " They should have cleared it away and said nothing 
 about it," quoth Uncle Toby, when told of an " im- 
 mortal work " composed at an unnaturally early age. 
 The peer-parson who was Lord Curzon 's father seems 
 to have acted on this sensible principle, for we have 
 few anecdotes concerning the earliest manifestations 
 of the future Viceroy's genius. But the doctor who 
 assisted him into the world is said to have remarked 
 that he had a special conformation cf the head 
 that only goes with greatness, and we know that 
 at Eton he was a mature politician at fourteen. One 
 admirer who remembers him there describes him as 
 a most remarkable boy, full of beauty, vigour, and 
 genius. 
 
 He is recalled bj>- other contemporaries for his 
 decided views, and the fluent energy with which he 
 
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 192 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 expressed them, no less than for the queer solemnity 
 of his chubby face, the glossiness of his hats, the 
 scrupulous neatness of his clothes, the lustre of his 
 black hair, and his strong objection to compulsory 
 football. He used to talk of what he would do when 
 Prime Minister. He promised one admiring chum 
 the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and nobody 
 laughed at him for doing so. 
 
 George was not entirely happy at Eton. But there 
 is no record of the youthful politician experiencing 
 at school any of that rough discipline extolled as the 
 one virtue of our higher educational system. The 
 process of " knocking the nonsense " out of our 
 gilded youth operates very uneventy. If the public 
 school crushes one clever boy as a prig, it accepts 
 another as a hero. Boys, like most barbarians, err 
 on the side of simplicity in their judgments of excep- 
 tional people; they have no half-way house between 
 the Tarpeian rock and the Capitol. With the same 
 qualities, young Curzon might have suffered torture; 
 as things were, he was perhaps spoiled by the reverence 
 of his little clique. The University has more balance, 
 and Balliol, while noting the brilliance of the Honour- 
 able George Nathaniel, was not slow to satirize his 
 pomposity. To an undergraduate wit we owe the 
 immortal couplet : 
 
 "My name is George Nathaniel Curzon; 
 I am a most superior purzon." 
 
 The lines are unforgettable, chiefly because Lord 
 Curzon has never allowed them to be forgotten. 
 Superiority in him is not an excrescence; it is an 
 aroma. Like the musk in the mortar of St. Sophia 
 at Constantinople, it is destined to last as long as the 
 fabric. Whence Lord Curzon derives this superiority 
 is his own secret. It may be innate. It may have
 
 EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON 193 
 
 been nurtured by the atmosphere of his parsonage 
 home. In philology and in fact, a parson is " The 
 Person " of his parish, and if the parson himself 
 forgets it his sons rarely do. But when the parson 
 is no mere Vicar of Wakefield, when he employs 
 enough curate power to be eased of his duties without 
 neglecting them, and when he is incidentally a Peer 
 of the Realm, a baronet of early Stuart creation, a 
 large landowner, and possessor of a pedigree quite 
 genuinely traceable to the Conquest, it is not odd that 
 the parson's son should imbibe a more than strictly 
 necessary sense of his position. 
 
 Superiority in Lord Curzon has long been recog- 
 nized as no boyish foible, but as a permanent and 
 most important element in his character. He went 
 round the world in a highly superior way, staying at 
 embassies as lesser men do at hotels, presented to 
 pagan potentates, not as an irrelevant globe-trotter, 
 out as a statesman in training. In such books 
 as that entertaining Problems of the Far East 
 (which, I believe, Lord Curzon will not allow to be 
 reprinted), the author reveals himself not only as a 
 shrewd, if rather superficial, observer, but as the 
 possessor of a quite complicated superiority, racial, 
 social, and personal. 
 
 As Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs his supe- 
 riority shone undimmed. The House of Commons is 
 easily bemused with even a dexterous show of know- 
 ledge on a department of public business of which it 
 is abysmally ignorant, and Mr. Curzon had real know- 
 ledge as well as the power of implying omniscience. 
 It was a delight in those days to hear him explaining 
 a concession in Persia or a mission to the Amir. 
 " Arthur thinks we are a vulgar lot," said Sir William 
 Harcourt of Mr. Balfour. " George," as " Arthur " 
 called him, was no less impressed with the mental 
 
 13
 
 194 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 incapacity of his udience. A tolerant and patient 
 contempt, as of a teacher with an idiot child, was 
 the basis of his official attitude towards the faithful 
 Commons. 
 
 The memory of his Viceroyalty is still green in 
 man}'' Anglo-Indian memories. No such splendid 
 figure had been seen in India since the days of 
 Aurungzebe. Somebody has said that there are three 
 ways of ruling men: by the force of arms, by the 
 force of justice, and by the force of trumpery. Lord 
 Curzon specialized in displa} 7 . He tightened up the 
 ceremonial paraphernalia of Calcutta and Simla to a 
 degree that irked the honest Sedleys and Dobbins of 
 the Civil Service and the Indian Army. " Such 
 language was never heard west of Constantinople," 
 grumbled General Conway, after an interview with 
 the elder Pitt. A good many veterans who trudged 
 through avenues of troops and officials to pay their 
 court to the Viceroy must have felt that the West 
 had little to learn from the East in the way of Byzan- 
 tinism. There is a story that once at a church in 
 Simla the collection bag was offered to Lord Curzon 
 by the ordinary sidesman. The Viceroy remained 
 blandly unconscious. Thinking it was a case of 
 mental absorption, the sidesman gently rattled the 
 bag. Still no sign of life on the part of the Viceroy. 
 Then an aide-de-camp had a happy inspiration. He 
 took the bag and offered it in due form to His Excel- 
 lency, who immediately revived, and paid his due to 
 Heaven as befitted the representative of no mean 
 earthly majesty. 
 
 This dignity of Lord Curzon is indeed a wonderful 
 thing. He cannot bid for a picture or a curio at 
 Christie's without seeming to patronize Cellini or 
 Rembrandt as well as the auctioneer. Some time 
 ago he was one of a group of Ministers watching the 
 American troops march through London. The others
 
 EARL CURZON OF KEDLESTON 195 
 
 were quite human. Mr. Balfour, whom it is the 
 fashion to call a cold philosopher, was waving a 
 handkerchief with boyish enthusiasm. But Lord 
 Curzon stood bolt upright, stiffly gracious, combining, 
 like the Duke of Plaza Toro, " a pose majestic with 
 a d meanour nobly bland," much as if he were 
 receiving a belated but sufficient apology for the 
 Declaration of Independence. 
 
 Just as it is not easy, in looking at an Infanta by 
 Velasquez, to focus attention on the face, so absorbed 
 is one in the cascade of crinolined drapery, so the 
 mannerism of Lord Curzon does seriously increase 
 the difficulty of a steady survey of his real qualities. 
 We know that he is enormously clever. He would 
 be clever if he belonged to any class, and on his social 
 stilts even moderate intellectual stature looms up 
 gigantesque. He has done many things brillir.ntly. 
 It is less easy to say that he has attained a solid 
 success in any one thing. Still harder is it to say 
 that he has failed decisively and specifically. In fact, 
 there is a good deal of mystery bout the whole 
 matter. Much difference exists in instructed opinion 
 as to the wisdom of his policy in India. In domestic 
 politics it is hard to place him; one can only say 
 that he has hardly fulfilled the promise of his youth. 
 The value of his presence in the War Cabinet is 
 wholly unknown to the outside public. He is said 
 to be a strong man; but so was Sir Edward Carson. 
 We have, indeed, almost come to the stage of using 
 the adjective " strong " when at loss to quality 
 more precisely. 
 
 One quality undoubtedly he possesses in full 
 me sure. He is a master of statety and luminous 
 speech. In this respect he has shown continuous im- 
 provement throughout his career. In other regards 
 one is conscious of some disappointment, like that 
 which one feels in reading Vivian Grey. The
 
 196 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 wonderful boy of Disraeli's sketch ends as a wonder- 
 ful bore. Lord Curzon is not that; he will always 
 remain interesting. But there is in his case, as there 
 was in Lord Rosebery's,a feeling that a brilliant first 
 and second act are leading up to a tame denouement. 
 Something may be owing to a physique never quite 
 equal to the demands on it. More may be due to the 
 early satisfaction of ambitions not perhaps of the 
 highest, even in the most worldly sense. Lord 
 Curzon is paying the penalty of a premature dignity. 
 When he was tempted as a young man to take the 
 Viceroyalty and its attendant honours he astonished 
 many friends and delighted some enemies ; they re- 
 membered how Atalanta lost the race through picking 
 up a golden apple. 
 
 It may be that the explanation is altogether wider. 
 It may be that Lord Curzon 's only handicap is that 
 he is an anachronism. Certainly he would have been 
 temperamentally better at home in the old England 
 of rotten boroughs and " great ladies " than in the 
 new England of plutocracy modified by the trade 
 union vote. His temper rather than his convictions 
 keeps him apart from the magnates ; his convictions 
 as well as his temper prevent him even successfully 
 assuming any sympathy with the common man. He 
 was probably born a hundred and fifty years too late, 
 for his affinities are rather with the Georgians than 
 with the Victorians. He shares their contempt for 
 the " swinish multitude," their intense national 
 egoism, their wonderful confidence, and perhaps a 
 little of that quality which gave us the reputation 
 of " perfide Albion." 
 
 A rather lonely figure, in our singular collection 
 of war lords, he seems to typify that " ruling class " 
 which has lost one knack of ruling without acquiring 
 another, but retains all its passion for the toys and 
 gauds of public life.
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 
 
 The wisdom of the ancients notwithstanding, there 
 are few things people quarrel more furiously over 
 than taste, and that no doubt is the reason brothers 
 are divided, and father is estranged from son, con- 
 cerning Lord Haldane. For the bland and learned 
 Viscount is not simply a man of affairs, to be judged 
 on his record. He is a flavour. If you like the 
 flavour, it is exactly the flavour you like; if you 
 dislike it, it may throw you into fits, as the smell of 
 patchouli did Napoleon. 
 
 The Haldane cult is not a popular one. Had Lord 
 Haldane always dissembled his love for the German 
 classics he would still have been suspect to the great 
 body of the English people — the present writer is not 
 in a position to judge concerning the Scottish. 
 Englishmen might pardon Lord Haldane's defects, 
 but they could hardly forgive his virtues. To take 
 one point alone, his enormous volubility, Lord Hal- 
 dane offends because he talks so well, rather than 
 because he talks so much. We are quite tolerant to 
 men whose speeches are merely long — one might say 
 merely Walter Long. We have no complaint against 
 those who make demands on our time; but we do 
 dislike those who make excessive demands on our 
 attention. Lord Haldane has been classed as chief 
 of bores largely because there is too much matter in 
 his speeches, and because he pays his hearers the 
 compliment of supposing them to be as earnest and 
 interested as himself. Say that he is a cultivated 
 Scotsman, with the Scottish passion for knowledge 
 
 197
 
 198 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 for its own sake, the Scottish logic, and the Scottish 
 love of exhausting a subject, and you have said 
 everything that need explain the instinctive irritation 
 of the Southron. 
 
 The war has only intensified an existing prejudice. 
 Other men of affairs had their spiritual homes in 
 Germany ; many were intimately connected with 
 German families; nearly all looked eastward, like 
 Lord Haldane, with intense admiration, slightly 
 tinctured with fear. It was not Lord Haldane who 
 first called the North Sea the German Ocean; one 
 can find the name in any eighteenth-century atlas. 
 Even if fluent command of German were a crime, 
 Lord Haldane was not the only criminal. If a 
 passion for the German philosophy dishonours a 
 patriot, then most of our thinkers for a century past 
 must plead guilty of conduct unbefitting a Briton. 
 Coming to things more concrete, if Lord Haldane is 
 to be condemned for believing in modern German 
 methods, copying German legislative models, and 
 dreaming of an " understanding " with our " cousins," 
 then nearly all the Cabinet, most ex- Ministers, and 
 the cream of English society should stand in the 
 same dock for sentence. Yet it is Lord Haldane, and 
 Lord Haldane alone, who is denounced as a stealthy 
 pro-German and even a conscious traitor. 
 
 So stupid and so vulgar has been the outcry against 
 the German side of Lord Haldane that even to refer 
 to it is distasteful. Yet that German side is so im- 
 portant an element in the man, and has had so much 
 influence on his career, that it cannot be ignored. 
 It is, of course, his weaker side, as it was Carlyle's. 
 And, as in the case of Carlyle, it is the side of which 
 he is immoderately proud. Harvey said of Bacon, 
 " The Lord Chancellor writes of science — like a Lord 
 Chancellor." Bacon's successor has won fame as a
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 199 
 
 metaphysician chiefly among his political and legal 
 friends. His contributions to philosophy are rather 
 lik • the poems with which Thackeray's publisher 
 loaded his magazines, because their names carried 
 weight in society. Nobody would ever dream of 
 taking note of them but for the eminence of the 
 author in another world. They give proof of a strong 
 memory and a considerable power of comprehension ; 
 in no way do they suggest that an immortal thinker 
 was lost through Lord Haldane's absorption in things 
 of the moment. 
 
 One might go farther, and suggest that if Lord 
 Haldane has ever a tendency to twaddle, it is when 
 he engages in acts of hero-worship. A great scientist, 
 who was also a Roman Catholic, remarked that he 
 shut one compartment of his mind when he left the 
 laboratory and opened, another when he entered the 
 oratory. Lord Haldane is, in the same way, two 
 distinct beings. With a practical faculty too little 
 recognized, he is all shrewdness and scepticism in 
 business. But when he enters his Hegelian joss- 
 house he seems to have little more sense of proportion 
 than the poor Indian of the untutored mind. He 
 talks of Kant, Goethe, and Schiller as " the men who 
 taught mankind what was meant by the wonderful 
 power of thought," as if Konigsberg or Weimar 
 were the Bethlehem of philosophy. Lord Haldane's 
 excessive reverence for the great Germans is no more 
 traitorous than the ignorant contempt of some of his 
 critics is patriotic. But it is certainly provincial. 
 We rightly laugh at the Sinologue who eternally 
 thrusts on us the wisdom of Confucius because he 
 happens to have studied that philosopher in the 
 original. Why should we regard with submissive 
 solemnity the enthusiasms of learned gentlemen with 
 a fancy for Kant and Fichte ? The question, like
 
 200 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 golf talk, is largely one of manners ; in pushing his 
 Germans down our throats Lord Haldane is guilty of 
 a social solecism. 
 
 There is, too, a somewhat more serious side to the 
 matter. Lord Haldane, with his masterful disposi- 
 tion, has not been content to let the German bee buzz 
 unproductively in his own bonnet. He has always 
 been anxious that it should make honey. In plain 
 English he has exercised a great deal of influence 
 over his associates, and the adoption of Prussian 
 legislative models during the last few years has 
 probably been due chiefly to his suggestion. For 
 the Liberal Cabinet he was an unofficial purveyor 
 of ideas, and all his ideas were derived either from 
 the dead or the living " very big men " of Germany. 
 Of his own work at the War Office — as Lord Chan- 
 cellor he made little impression — it becomes us to 
 speak, if not with gratitude, at least with respect. 
 He made, no doubt, some mistakes. The whole 
 credit of his achievements is not his. But when all 
 deductions are made, there remains the great fact 
 that, while at the beginning of the Boer War it took 
 five weeks to despatch fifty thousand men, nearly 
 three times that force was landed in France, without 
 hitch or fuss, within a fortnight of the declaration of 
 the present war. Moreover, under him was created 
 a Territorial organization which permitted the use 
 of battalions after two months' war training. 
 
 If Lord Haldane could be judged on this record 
 alone he would have little reason to wince at present- 
 day criticism or to anticipate the adverse judgment 
 of history. But in his case there is some reason to 
 believe that the part is greater than the whole. 
 Haldane the man was an admirable instrument, 
 clear-headed, industrious, indomitable. Haldane the 
 flavour was, on the whole, probably an unfortunate
 
 VISCOUNT HALDANE 201 
 
 influence. Of his patriotism there can at no time 
 have been any doubt. But strong partialities must 
 necessarily affect the judgment, and almost any 
 counsel was better during the years preceding the 
 war than that of a man so obsessed. It is a pity that 
 Lord Haldane lacked the control of a master's hand. 
 There was a strong side of him which might have 
 been developed to even greater advantage — his busi- 
 ness faculty and driving power in administration. 
 Unfortunately, the weaker side which he himself 
 fancied fascinated also his chief, who took counsel 
 where he should have exacted only service. 
 
 The same mistake has been made with Lord Hal- 
 dane during the war. It may seem a heresy to sug- 
 gest that if Mr. Asquith had had the courage to instal 
 him at the War Office, leaving Lord Kitchener free 
 to attend to his real duties, the result might have 
 been more satisfactory than the muddled control of 
 the first year of the war. But certainly that belief 
 is shared by many who are by no means favourable 
 to Lord Haldane on general grounds. As things are, 
 we have made the worst of both possible Haldanes. 
 We have deprived ourselves of his strong practical 
 understanding and tireless energy as administrator, 
 and we have forced into undesirable activity the 
 pseudo-wisdom which makes him the least reliable 
 of advisers. The only way to silence Lord Haldane 
 is to get a bit in his mouth and set him to hard work. 
 We have turned him loose in a forty-acre field, and 
 he tires the very echo. 
 
 It is a nuisance, to put it no higher, to have Lord 
 Haldane advocating schemes of education that shall 
 be wholly German, and yet have no Germanizing 
 tendency; to have him holding out to our working 
 men, who know at least what they don't want, ideals 
 founded on Kartel and Kultur models: to have him
 
 202 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 lauding the German talent for " self-organization," 
 though a little " clear thinking " might show that 
 the war itself is the result of the utter incapacity of 
 the German tribes to manage their own affairs. It 
 is merely irritating to hear from him, after some new 
 exhibition of brutality, that the German nation, 
 " taken in the mass," is " very like our own." But all 
 this is only part of the price we pay for not providing 
 Lord Haldane with a concrete job, hard enough to 
 make him forget Gottingen. 
 
 The country does not want Lord Haldane 's ideas. 
 It rightly suspects him as a guide. But it might 
 have done with him as a workman. It has gone 
 farther, and fared much worse.
 
 LORD BURNHAM AND THE 
 " DAILY TELEGRAPH " 
 
 The first Lord Burnham belonged to the earliest crop 
 of newspaper-owning peers, and his son wears the 
 fifteen-year-old coronet with the easy grace of a man 
 of pedigree. An intelligent foreigner might confuse 
 him with the quite new nobility. Lord Burnham 
 himself makes no such mistake. He is affable with 
 new arrivals in the House of Lords ; he is affable with 
 everybody. But he draws a sharp line of distinction 
 between Edwardian and later creations. He was 
 greatly apprehensive of an " adulteration " of the 
 peerage in the unhappy Veto days, and he had 
 decided views on the sale of honours. One wonders 
 what is his real opinion of Lord Beaverbrook. 
 
 Lord Burnham 's father had the honest pride of 
 the arrived. There was something touching in his 
 affection for the great newspaper he had created. 
 Highly creditable, too, was the interest he took in 
 the men who had helped him build his immense 
 fortune. Fame, it is true, they were denied. The 
 Daily Telegraph has had no " great editor," like the 
 Times and the Standard. The Levy family jealously 
 guarded their authority; they permitted no Mayor 
 of the Palace. The patriarch of Peterborough Court 
 showed every favour to his Eliezers. But Eliezer 
 had to recognize his place ; he was bondservant to the 
 family, to young Isaac as well as to old Abraham. 
 
 The Daily Telegraph has thus been in an excep- 
 tional degree the reflection of a single personality. 
 The first Lord Burnham was exactly fitted to supply 
 
 203
 
 204 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 a " long-felt want " of the later Victorian time. The 
 man in the street was yet unquoted. But the lower 
 middle-class man of the suburb and the country 
 town was there, and by no means satisfied either 
 with the price or the quality of daily papers. They 
 were too dear, and too narrow in their outlook. 
 Edward Levy, afterwards Edward Levy Lawson, 
 shrewdly saw his opportunity. He gave the public 
 a paper at the popular price of one penny, and in that 
 paper he printed what the public wanted. He cut 
 down politics, devoted great attention to the Divorce 
 Court, specialized on murders, systematically re- 
 frained from attacks on any kind of religion, and 
 played up to the growing taste for piquant writing 
 of a kind which places no strain on the intellect. 
 
 Himself of no very deep convictions, cheerful, 
 healthy, shrewd, content to take the commonplace 
 view of any subject, judging men and things from 
 the standpoint of material success or failure, without 
 ideals, but with a great deal of human sympathy, 
 he was precisely the man to cater for the class which 
 believes itself to be educated. The Daily Telegraph 
 had its early vicissitudes. It was more than once 
 doubtful whether it would win through the difficulties 
 arising from an inadequate capitalization, and quaint 
 stories are still told of the weekly hunt for money to 
 pay wages. But once the thing was well started 
 nothing could stop it. 
 
 The Porphyrogenitus is seldom quite equal to the 
 man who has battled for the purple. The present 
 Lord Burnham had not his father's advantages. On 
 the other hand he has enjoyed advantages of his own . 
 Eton and Balliol gave him of their best. He entered 
 the House of Commons when he was a mere boy, and 
 sat there intermittently — sometimes as a little Liberal 
 and sometimes as a little Conservative — until he 
 went to another place. He succeeded to power in
 
 LORD BURNHAM 205 
 
 " the office " when the memory of early struggle was 
 very dim indeed ; the newspaper was no longer a 
 business adventure, but a family estate solid as, and 
 vastly more profitable than, the four thousand acres 
 on which it was the first Lord Burnham's delight to 
 play, like Disraeli, the part of Buckinghamshire squire. 
 
 Starting with such a generous handicap, Lord 
 Burnham, it might be imagined, co'ild have won 
 pretty well anything he fancied. Great political 
 preferment was open to him. Or he could, if he 
 pleased, satisfy a purer and perhaps more useful 
 ambition. Assured of a prodigious income from his 
 established success, he could have done something 
 not merely for English journalism but for English 
 literature. He could have helped, by a judicious 
 and possibly not unprofitable expenditure, to remove 
 a great reproach. The barrenness of English thought 
 during the last thirty years is not accidental. It 
 arises partly from the conviction of British publishers 
 that no book which is hard to read will yield 
 a profit, and possibly even more from the com- 
 plete indifference of British Governments to any 
 intellectual considerations. Even in the humble 
 matter of translation our record is deplorable. It is 
 a fact that before the present war the works of 
 Treitschke could only be studied in the original, or 
 in a foreign medium. True, Treitschke was not 
 inherently worth much notice, but in the peculiar 
 circumstances it might be thought that it was some- 
 body's business to bring this dreamer of unpleasantly 
 practical dreams to the attention of the people he 
 threatened. There is scarcely a limit to the good a 
 thinking man with Lord Burnham's ample means 
 could have affected in half a dozen directions. 
 
 Lord Burnham, however, has been content to 
 carry on. He has not cut the shop. He is greatly 
 interested in it — as a shop. The advertisement
 
 206 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 columns of the Daily Telegraph seem to be his special 
 care. Paper shortage notwithstanding, the Blooms- 
 bury boarding-house can still advertise its inexpensive 
 inclusive terms, the cultivated family in Tooting can 
 still disclose its yearnings for the society of a refined 
 paying guest, and the owner of a smart governess 
 cart for which the owner has no further use owing to 
 the war can still reach the middle-aged lady who 
 wants one to suit her cob of 14*1. But when we 
 turn to the editorial columns we find little light or 
 leading. I remember once going through the file of 
 Galignani's Messenger for the Hundred Days. It 
 had been very severe on Napoleon after the abdica- 
 tion ; it was very severe on him after Waterloo ; but 
 during the Hundred Days its leading articles were 
 on all kinds of queer things — the favourite perfumes 
 of Ninon de Lenclos and the wonders of the Alhambra 
 — quite unconnected with affairs in France. 
 
 The Daily Telegraph for some years, and especially 
 since the war, has given the same impression of 
 embarrassed irrelevance. It may consciously steer for 
 nowhere. It certainly gets there. There are a few 
 subjects on which it still speaks with a certain voice. 
 It is all for national unity, which it would appear is 
 to be attained by agreeing, say, that Mr. Hayes Fisher 
 is indispensable. It is always ready to enlarge 
 dithyrambically on the glory of France, or the glory 
 of Serbia, or the glory of the British Navy, or any 
 kind of glory. It makes at regular intervals the 
 discovery that " His Majesty was never nearer the 
 hearts of the people than when," etc. But all these 
 things get us no forwarder, nor, it must be confessed, 
 do the Daily Telegraph's dissections of Lord Lans- 
 downe's contributions to its post-bag. 
 
 It is, in fact, becoming inceasingly difficult to 
 find what class of man derives stimulus from Lord 
 Burnham's editorial direction. The paper is still
 
 LORD BURNHAM 207 
 
 the oracle of the boarding-houses, and, perhaps 
 propter hoc, is invariably the one London journal 
 which the visiting foreigner reads. By old habit, if 
 for no better reason, a number of suburban and 
 country families continue to take it in. Even in 
 these da}'s of paper famine it still has a decided 
 advantage in bulk ; its usefulness for wrapping things 
 in, and putting under the carpets, recommends it to 
 economical households. But what special kind of 
 intellectual hunger it satisfies is less easy to discover. 
 The theatre-goer has got beyond the simple standards 
 of Clement Scott, but the Daily Telegraph has not. 
 Few serious-minded men care anything about the 
 kind of politics it professes. Its literary tastes are 
 too ingenuous for the new generation. Its facetious 
 reporters fail to cheer with their lumbering gaiety. 
 There is only a languid echo of the buoyant vulgarity 
 of its early days. It was said of the Bourbons that 
 they forgot nothing and learned nothing. It may be 
 said of the Daily Telegraph that it has learned little 
 and forgotten much. 
 
 Still it prospers amazingly. There is often more 
 profit in selling ready-made and partly worn-out 
 things than in supplying a more dignified need. 
 Few trades are more prosperous than that of the old 
 clothes dealer in a really big way. The continued 
 commercial success of the Daily Telegraph would 
 seem to suggest that cast-off ideas yield as handsome 
 a profit as cast-off garments. The paper may be 
 little more to Lord Burnham than a property, but it 
 is a very handsome property. And, after all, an old 
 clothes shop is a very useful institution. Mr. Isaac 
 Moses is probably fulfilling a more vital social func- 
 tion than many professed philanthropists, and Lord 
 Burnham may have his uses in supplying those who are 
 permanently hard-up in an intellectual sense. At any 
 rate, he does uncommonly well out of the business.
 
 MR. W. M. HUGHES 
 
 Thirty-four years ago two young men stood on 
 London Bridge, as Tom Pinch and his sister once did, 
 watching the boats. One of them need not concern 
 us. The other concerns us a good deal. 
 
 He had been born some twenty years before in 
 South Wales, but had lived nearly all his life in 
 London. Educated at the Baroness Burdett-Coutts 
 Foundation School in Westminster, he knew the 
 greyer life of a region in which social contrasts are 
 perhaps as violent as in any part of London. Mr. 
 William Morris Hughes has told us that as a lad he 
 was often engaged in fighting the Wesleyan boys in 
 the Horseferry Road, and that he once won a prize 
 for French: a tongue not easily acquired, it might be 
 imagined, in such an institution as that which served 
 him as Alma Mater. It may be fairly inferred, from 
 these facts, that young Hughes was quick and of a 
 combative temperament. Probably he had also some 
 capacity for reflection, and it is easy to picture him 
 musing on such monuments of the past as West- 
 minster Hall, the Abbey, and Westminster School, as 
 well as on evidences of the present, like the rookeries 
 off the Horseferry Road and the old Millbank Prison. 
 
 How would London, as he saw it, strike the sharp 
 Welsh lad, with all sorts of vague ambitions stirring 
 within him ? For him all the higher things would 
 be represented by stone. The Abbey would stand for 
 a petrified religion; Westminster Hall would typify 
 the sterile antiquities of an obsolete constitution; 
 Westminster School would remind him that such as 
 he could expect nothing from what was once specially 
 
 208
 
 MR. W. M. HUGHES 209 
 
 designed for his like. Here were clergy with their 
 antique prayer mills, politicians with their hoary 
 platitudes, schoolmasters with their scraps of Latin 
 and Greek syntax, and good form and the other 
 things that go to make a gentleman — all entirely 
 oblivious of the real needs of the living London and 
 the living England. And there were the packed 
 slums in which every vice grew rank and every virtue 
 took some distorted form. That was what lay behind 
 the lad as he looked over the bridge. 
 
 Before young Hughes lay the water path to 
 "the Colonies," what are now called, in a politely 
 embarrassed way, the Oversea States. In England, 
 apart from some unusual luck or very adroit 
 dishonesty, he could hope for nothing more than 
 a living; in the Colonies there was slightly more 
 chance of going under, but considerably more chance 
 of coming to the top. Hughes and his friend, looking 
 at the steamboats, suddenly decided to take one. 
 They packed up and went to Australia. There 
 followed the usual confused attempts to fashion 
 something tolerable out of the void. Hughes tended 
 stock, took jobs on coasting craft, did a little mining, 
 did a little of everything, until he found his niche as 
 trade union official, agitator, Labour Member, and 
 the rest of it. His early combativeness developed. 
 Instead of fighting Wesleyans, he attacked mono- 
 polists. His talent for picking up information grew 
 with enlarged circumstances. He picked up law as 
 he had picked up French, became a barrister, and 
 acquired a good grip of Australian public questions. 
 Ten years only had elapsed from the Hughes Hegira 
 before he had reached the position of a prominent 
 member of the New South Wales Parliament. When 
 Australian unity became a fact, he was among the 
 first elected to the Commonwealth Legislature.
 
 210 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 That is how " the Colonies " take hold of our sur- 
 plus raw material, and work it up for their own pur- 
 poses. Or, rather, that is how, in a free atmosphere, 
 men of talent grow in the measure of their capacities, 
 their virtues, and it may be of their vices. It would 
 be pleasant to leave Mr. Hughes arrived at a deserved 
 eminence, a man to adorn any Colonial tale, and to 
 point the moral of the losses we suffer by the emigra- 
 tion of discouraged young ambition. Unfortunately, 
 events have conspired to make it impossible to con- 
 sider the Prime Minister of Australia solely in the 
 Smiles spirit, as a bright example of self-help. He 
 has partly been forced, but has also partly chosen, 
 to come into violent contact with things not purely 
 Australian, and it is that part of his activities which 
 is necessarily more vividly impressed upon us than 
 his wholly admirable record in the Antipodes. 
 
 In 1915 Mr. Hughes visited this country. He 
 knew very little of English life, but he had his early 
 memories, which sufficed to give him a just contempt 
 for many of our institutions, but also a most unjust 
 notion of the real qualities of the nation. He either 
 did not know, or had forgotten, that our old and 
 polished society breeds in great numbers persons 
 who are described by the police as confidence men. 
 Scotland Yard takes cognisance only of the coarser 
 varieties of the class. It affects to know nothing of 
 those who infest political society, lying in wait for 
 innocents from overseas and the provinces. Mr. 
 Hughes's first speech had much the same effect on 
 these gentlemen that the appearance of a stout 
 Suffolk farmer might on a roomful of professional 
 " crooks." He found himself surrounded with per- 
 sons flashing great wads of Bank of Patriotism notes, 
 which he, poor man ! could not possibly detect as 
 spurious. Before honest Mr. Hughes well knew what
 
 MR. W. M. HUGHES 211 
 
 he was doing, he was hocussed, and he has not yet 
 succeeded in throwing off the influence of the drugs. 
 
 It suited the political purposes of a certain clique 
 to represent Mr. Hughes as the one earnest man 
 struggling to free the British Commonwealth from 
 German influences, but frustrated in that endeavour 
 by a knot of English party politicians. Broadly 
 speaking, this clique, of all others, was most natu- 
 rally hostile to every ideal Mr. Hughes stood for in 
 Australian politics. It desired Protection in the 
 interests of British landlords and manufacturers, and 
 not, as in Australia's case, in the interests of the 
 workers. It stood for a kind of Imperialism which, 
 in the long run, must have come into collision with 
 the quite natural desire of Australia to become more 
 and more a distinct nation. It stood for minority 
 rule both in Great Britain and in Ireland. It had 
 been, as much as any party — there is really little 
 degree of guilt — responsible for the stagnation which 
 young Hughes of the Horseferry Road had found 
 intolerable. But it found in the fervour of the 
 maturer Hughes a weapon which it could use, and 
 that weapon was used without scruple. 
 
 Mr. Hughes as an Australian statesman must be 
 left to the judgment of Australia. Australia has 
 declined twice to pass a mandate for conscription at 
 his invitation — some add because of his invitation — 
 and it is whispered with some assurance that the 
 Prime Minister is not precisely anxious to terminate 
 his present visit to London. It is pointed out by 
 Australian critics that the great work which he 
 claims credit for, " cutting the tentacles of the great 
 metal octopus," etc., was merely a matter of official 
 routine ; contracts with German firms had necessarily 
 to be broken when war came. There is, in fact, no 
 evidence from the Antipodes that Mr. Hughes is
 
 212 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 regarded as a man of very exceptional calibre, and 
 it is pretty well known that he retains office chiefly 
 because it is undesirable to complicate the political 
 position. 
 
 Still, Mr. Hughes is an Australian, and Australia 
 would no doubt be with him in any serious collision 
 with British opinion. It is that possibility which 
 makes so exceedingly serious the transformation of a 
 Dominion Prime Minister into a British party asset. 
 The formal relations of Australia, or any other 
 Dominion, to the Mother Country, are of less import- 
 ance than many people imagine. It really does not 
 matter very much whether we continue to send 
 second-rate noblemen to represent the King in the 
 Commonwealth. What does matter is that there 
 shall be no sense of grievance or incompatibility 
 between the two communities, that Australia shall 
 have no feeling of being used by Britain, and that 
 Britain shall be free from any impression of being 
 bustled or hustled by Australia. 
 
 It would be unfair to accuse Mr. Hughes of con- 
 sciously imperilling a good understanding. He has 
 " butted in," to adopt Mr. Lloyd George's Ameri- 
 canism, with the best intentions. He believes " but- 
 ting in " is really appreciated by the mass of people 
 in this country. He is, indeed, a man singularly 
 ingenuous. He does not seem to have suspected in 
 the least the very suspicious people who have " run " 
 him in London; he does not appear even to be con- 
 scious of being " run." He has a good many points 
 in common with our own Prime Minister. He makes 
 it a rule never to see more than one side of a case 
 at a time, though he may see all sides in turn. He 
 is more the slave than the master of his own rhetoric. 
 His eloquence has not the same poetic quality as 
 Mr. Lloyd George's; he lacks the unerring instinct
 
 MR. W. M. HUGHES 218 
 
 for effect which make even Mr. George's most com- 
 monplace efforts distinctive. He seldom coins a 
 phrase; his figures come from the till and not from 
 the mint, and mainly belong to the copper currency. 
 But he has something of the same power of reaching 
 the ordinary man, and not a little of the same habit 
 of intoxicating himself as well as his audience. 
 
 Such a man may be useful if his energies "are pro- 
 perly controlled and applied to a suitable objective. 
 He may easily become a calamitous nuisance if he 
 runs amuck, and Mr. Hughes has, in fact, rather run 
 amuck during both his visits to Great Britain. It 
 cannot be a good thing to permit any considerable 
 party in the United Kingdom to believe that they have 
 a determined enemy in the Prime Minister of an 
 Overseas Dominion. Nor can it be for the benefit of 
 the Alliance as a whole that Mr. Hughes should 
 declaim at this time a Monroe Doctrine for the 
 Pacific. Strangely enough, the world at large is no 
 more interested in the special Australian point of 
 view than it is in the special Montenegrin point of 
 view. We cannot blame Mr. Hughes for failing to 
 see things in their exact proportion ; there were 
 British propagandists who once believed that France 
 and Russia, Italy and the United States, were enor- 
 mously interested in the bombing of Broadstairs 
 and the shelling of Hartlepool. 
 
 But it is a fact that the world thinks very little of 
 New Guinea and Samoa, and a great deal about the 
 avoidance of further dispute about such trifles as 
 Samoa and New Guinea. Monroe Doctrines of any 
 kind belong, like spheres of influence and places in the 
 sun, to the old world which has perished in this war. 
 Mr. Hughes, with all his progressive notions, seems 
 too old-fashioned even to conceive what the new 
 world must be if it is to be a world worth living in.
 
 214 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 The idea behind the League of Nations is, indeed, 
 still generally misunderstood. That League does not 
 threaten German Imperialism alone, but all Im- 
 perialisms. If it aimed simply at fixing for ever the 
 status arrived at after the war it would be only 
 another Holy Alliance, an instrument of oppression 
 which could as easily be used for purposes of indus- 
 trial slavery as for the destruction of nationalism. 
 It would seem that Mr. Hughes envisages a world in 
 which what is called Anglo-Saxondom will be all- 
 powerful. That may be very pleasing to " Anglo- 
 Saxon " racial pride. Have we the smallest guarantee 
 that the rest of the world — a not inconsiderable 
 fragment — will be content ? 
 
 The Pacific Monroe Doctrine will be useless if the 
 new order comes. If that vision fails to materialize 
 the Pacific Monroe Doctrine will have, like many 
 more important questions, to be the subject of much 
 huxtering on the old plan. In any case, insistence 
 on it at the present moment can be of no possible 
 benefit and may be a real disadvantage. It would, 
 of course, be calamitous to suggest to the Dominions 
 that their sacrifices will not entitle them to a voice, 
 and a powerful one, in the settlement. It is equally 
 out of the question that the demands of France, Italy, 
 and Belgium shall be passed over. But just as there 
 is unwisdom in wrangling over Continental claims in 
 the presence of an enemy watching for any oppor- 
 tunity to create divisions among the Allies, so there 
 is a very practical inconvenience in the shouted 
 discussion of those details which Mr. Hughes has 
 naturally so much at heart. 
 
 Let us win the war, and all these things — or things 
 much better — will be added to us. But the main 
 aim will not be advanced by a furious quarrel between 
 one of the British political parties and the Premier
 
 MR. W. M. HUGHES 215 
 
 of the Australian Commonwealth. That is why many 
 people who have sympathy and admiration for Mr. 
 Hughes entertain misgivings which they hardly dare 
 express. For the position is not a little awkward. 
 It is never pleasant to give a hint to a guest, and 
 there is here the added danger that it might be 
 construed into an affront to a nation.
 
 SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES 
 
 There are some Ministers who are distrusted chiefly 
 because they are known, and others who are little 
 known and much trusted. To the latter fortunate 
 category Sir Auckland Geddes belonged until quite 
 recently. 
 
 The Geddes myth is a curious example of the 
 growth of legend in an age when ninety-nine people 
 out of a hundred must base their impressions on 
 printed matter. The general public is quite without 
 means of estimating the true merits of the Geddes 
 brothers. It knows, on the whole, about as much 
 about them as of Hengist and Horsa. Yet for months 
 it went on chanting with Islamic simplicity, " Brainy 
 is Eric, and Auckland is his brother." No doubt the 
 legend has some foundation in fact. There are some, 
 in the War Cabinet or elsewhere, who do actually 
 know how far Sir Eric Geddes is an inspired First 
 Lord, and in what degree Sir Auckland Geddes has 
 succeeded as Minister of National Service. But the 
 million to whom the efficiency of the Geddes brothers 
 was an article of faith were, like the Athenians of old, 
 performing an act of worship to an unknown god. 
 
 The case of our present subject is more remarkable 
 than that of Sir Eric, who was obviously an excellent 
 railwayman if nothing else. In the earlier career of 
 Sir Auckland Geddes we search in vain for am-' 
 illumination. Those biographers who are always 
 ready to discern evidence of precocious talent in men 
 who arrive have, of course, done their best in his 
 case. We are told that young Geddes 's speeches at 
 
 216
 
 SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES 217 
 
 the Edinburgh Union left an abiding impression on 
 all who heard them. He enchanted his friends with 
 his acute comments on men and things. There was 
 something in his long, gaunt face men could never 
 forget. His " keen eyes," we are told, as if it were 
 something to admire, " flashed from cavernous hol- 
 lows at every passing stranger." As a strong Tory, 
 he was a terrible antagonist for Mr. Hogge, now 
 M.P., who led the Liberals. It seemed to his ad- 
 miring intimates that he had only to choose from 
 a dozen brilliant careers. He might even become a 
 Sherlock Holmes of real life. But all this youthful 
 prestige did not save him from settling down into 
 a mild assistant anatomical demonstrator. 
 
 After some years of humdrum, broken by service 
 in South Africa, Geddes went to Canada as a Pro- 
 fessor of Anatomy in the McGill University. This 
 not specially adventurous enterprise is described as 
 " obeying the call of the wild " — Montreal being a 
 notoriously unsettled place. There was a slightly 
 higher salary and increased social position, but the 
 post was quite in keeping with the mediocrity that 
 had preceded it. In fact, the cold, inexorable truth 
 is that if Geddes were an extraordinary man, his 
 career was, until the outbreak of war, about as far 
 from extraordinary as could well be. There is not, 
 and never was, a lack of young men combining an 
 average professional knowledge with a apacity of 
 making debating society speeches and impressing 
 their friends as deep thinkers. 
 
 At the beginning of the war Auckland Geddes, like 
 many others, enlisted as a private, and quickly rose 
 to commissioned rank. Then occurred a series of 
 accidents which brought him amazingly rapid pro- 
 motion. In 191 5 he was at General Headquarters 
 " doing casualties." It was a complicated business,
 
 218 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 as the Army then did it, but not inherently more 
 troublesome than the arrangements by which the 
 headquarters of a teashop business keeps in touch 
 with the requirements of its branches. Auckland 
 Geddes, bringing a new mind to the problem, sug- 
 gested simplifications which commended themselves 
 to his superiors. The British military mind knows 
 no half-measures. It either breaks a man for showing 
 intelligence, or reverences him as a prodigy. Geddes 
 had luck. Instead of being snubbed, he was made a 
 Major and put in charge of the casualties department. 
 
 That brought him in direct contact with Lord 
 Derby, who was then in the midst of his recruiting 
 campaign, and desired accurate information regarding 
 the wastage of war. It is easy to understand how 
 greatly the noble Earl was impressed by the clarity 
 of Major Geddes 's intellect. The two men were 
 obviously made for each other. On the one hand was 
 Lord Derby, with sixty thousand acres and a slightly 
 flustered understanding; on the other, Major Geddes, 
 with twopence-halfpenny and an uncanny knowledge 
 of all sorts of mysterious things ; he probably even 
 understood logarithms. Why was such a man wasted 
 in France ? Lord Derby, perhaps with no unselfish 
 view, took immediate steps to secure the paragon, 
 and Auckland Geddes started on the higher plane as 
 Assistant Recruiter-General, and, in unofficial lan- 
 guage, as Lord Derby's headpiece. 
 
 He marched steadily from triumph to triumph. 
 He " did well," as the phrase goes, as Assistant; he 
 " did well " as Director-General; he " did well " when 
 set to reorganize the National Service Department, 
 where poor Mr. Neville Chamberlain had " done " so 
 badly. It is easier to ask than to define in what 
 " doing well " consists. It seems probable, however, 
 that Sir Auckland Geddes does really possess what,
 
 SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES 219 
 
 compared with the organ of the average soldier, 
 politician, and business man, is an orderly mind. He 
 knows how to use his own intelligence and, what is 
 more important, the intelligence of his subordinates. 
 He does not altogether lose himself in an infinity of 
 detail. He has that saving touch of indolence which, 
 in association with brains and a capacity for concen- 
 trated effort on occasion, helps a man of affairs to 
 master his job, instead of becoming its slave. His 
 set speeches, of course, prove nothing. These things 
 do not emerge, in a sort of Minerva-birth, from the 
 brain of a Front Bench Jove, but are the work of a 
 whole department licked into shape by one of the 
 brighter members of the great Barnacle family. But 
 there is a certain quality in all his utterances which 
 suggests that he has the gift of getting to the heart 
 of the matter. One feels instinctively that when he 
 confuses an issue the fault is not with his brain. 
 
 It has been mentioned that Sir Auckland's chief 
 business in the Army was to deal with casualties; in 
 other words, with dead or partly dead men. His 
 business in professional life was anatomy, also con- 
 cerned with things dead or doomed. The habit of 
 years is not easily broken, and the chief reason why 
 Sir Auckland, after many months of constantly 
 ascending reputation, began to accumulate unpopu- 
 larity appears to be that, in his new office, he dealt 
 with living men rather in the spirit in which he totalled 
 up corpses in the Adjutant-General's Department, or 
 dissected " subjects " in Edinburgh and Montreal. 
 In addition to the insensitive imagination of youth 
 and the callousness of the soldier, there is the 
 adamantine hardness of a certain professorial type. 
 His lack of sympathy is rather phenomenal, and, to 
 do him justice, he does not assume the pose of 
 humanity. Under him the National Service Depart-
 
 220 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 ment has worked with the smoothness of a machine, 
 but also with its undiscriminating ruthlessness. He 
 sees no disadvantage in using mahogany for packing- 
 cases, employing razors to chop wood, or upsetting 
 the whole structure of society in order to get a few 
 extra thousands of invalid recruits. He admits no 
 hardship. " Look at me," he says, in effect, when 
 criticized, " I have suffered all for my country; I 
 gave up my comfortable appointment, served as a 
 private, and supported injuries which unfit me for 
 further military service. The case of a father of ten 
 is hard, no doubt, but then war is a hard business." 
 Unfortunately he has not always helped to make it 
 less hard. There is no record, for example, of his 
 interfering to check the unfeeling levity with which 
 National Service representatives have often jeered at 
 unfortunate men before the tribunals. What does 
 it matter about people's feelings ? The main thing 
 is to get the men ; whether a man goes into the Army 
 sadly but with resignation, or whether he goes in 
 embittered by a sense of insult and injustice, is of less 
 moment. 
 
 But the main count against Sir Auckland Geddes is 
 more serious than that of insensibility. "He is a 
 beast, but he is a just beast," said the schoolboy of 
 the master who flogged him. In the case of the 
 higher age men, on which Sir Auckland came in 
 conflict with public opinion, the complaint was not 
 so much of severity as of injustice. The Act was 
 passed on a definite understanding which was after- 
 wards ignored. Sir Auckland Geddes, taxed with 
 the matter, faced his critics with a hauteur to which 
 men of the calibre of some of them were not accus- 
 tomed. It was unfortunate for the Geddes myth 
 that he took this course. No people is so tolerant 
 of incapacity, or even of dishonesty, s the English.
 
 SIR AUCKLAND GEDDES 221 
 
 They bear with astonishing patience the revelation of 
 supreme imbecility in their rulers. They make the 
 most liberal allowance for unredeemed pledges, and 
 are always ready to listen indulgently to a " personal 
 explanation," even though it is merely a confession 
 of what is now called " indelicate " conduct. But 
 they do not like being bullied, and Sir Auckland 
 Geddes, in an evil hour for his repute, decided to 
 bully. 
 
 With that the myth came to an end. It could 
 not survive the apology which Sir Auckland was 
 forced to make to Sir Donald Maclean, or rather to 
 what Sir Donald Maclean courageously and eloquently 
 represented — the outraged sense of justice of the 
 English people. Sir Auckland Geddes may, if he is 
 wise, still occupy a position of influence and public 
 usefulness ; but he is evidently obsolete in the capacity 
 of superman. He will in future have to justify his 
 policy and account for his undertakings in the usual 
 way, instead of relying on the brilliance of a career 
 in regard to which it is still difficult to apportion 
 exactly the elements of merit and good fortune.
 
 MR. H. A. L. FISHER 
 
 When Mr. Lloyd George formed his " Business 
 Government " there was one appointment, and per- 
 haps one only, which offended nobody and pleased all 
 who thought they understood its meaning and inten- 
 tion. It was that of Mr. Herbert Albert Laurens 
 Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, as 
 Minister of Education. 
 
 Undeniably this was the happiest of the " expert " 
 appointments. Mr. Fisher suffered none of the handi- 
 caps of the ordinary " practical " man suddenly 
 called on to save his country. He had no deep- 
 seated anti-social instinct to overcome. He had 
 never known what it was to grind an axe. He could 
 be suspected of no mean personal ambitions. He 
 knew his business very much better than the swollen 
 millionaire generally knows the trade which }delds 
 his wealth, but not the faintest suspicion of selfish 
 interest could attach to him. Besides, it was quite 
 without precedent that an Education Minister should 
 know aught about education. Ever since there had 
 been an Education Department it had been the refuge 
 either of the dullest or the least influential of party 
 men. Sometimes it was the reward of an excessively 
 stupid person with " claims." Occasionally it was 
 given to a rattling platform speaker, not considered 
 worth the higher dignity of five thousand a year. 
 Now and again it was used to provide a place for 
 some silent and diffident man who happened to be a 
 useful intellectual asset to a showy but very unsound 
 team. Mr. Lloyd George, with his instinct for effect, 
 
 222
 
 MR. H. A. L. FISHER 223 
 
 saw the advantage of making a break from tradition 
 in this office of all others. With all his apparent 
 defiance of convention, he was under irresistible com- 
 pulsion to placate the Quirites while tickling the ears 
 of the Plebs. In focussing attention on Mr. Fisher 
 he made people forget Lord Derby. 
 
 Mr. Fisher's comparative youth — he is still only 
 fifty-three — was not his least recommendation. He 
 had escaped the worst effects of the " Teutonic " epi- 
 demic of Victorian days. If he once had spiritual 
 lodgings at Gottingen, he did not, like Lord Haldane, 
 look back on them as his home. His German culture 
 struck no deeper than that which he imbibed in 
 Paris. He returned to England, indeed, with a saner 
 view of European things than that of almost any 
 scholar of his time. There is no trace of German 
 pedantry in his admirable studies of the Napoleonic 
 period and his Republican Tradition in Europe. 
 The triumph of the pickelhaube in 1870 was distant 
 enough not to disturb a judgment which, left to itself, 
 was sound. He did not share the belief, so common 
 among intelligent Englishmen a little before his day, 
 and almost universal among stupid Englishmen till 
 quite lately, that the country of Turenne does not 
 know how to fight or the country of Richelieu how 
 to rule. In a word, fiw British scholars were freer 
 from that intellectual snobbery which allowed the 
 accident of a political and dynastic connection to 
 colour its whole scheme of thought. Mr. Fisher had 
 shown himself a Liberal in the true sense, both in his 
 general outlook on affairs and in his own special 
 province. His own mind enriched with the best that 
 Winchester and Oxford could give him, he had a far 
 livelier sense of modern needs than most representa- 
 tives of the older culture, and had shown an en- 
 thusiasm for general education in pleasing contrast
 
 224 UNCEN80RED CELEBRITIES 
 
 with the grudging and monopolistic spirit that still 
 distinguishes the Universities and public schools, 
 which the rich long ago captured from the poor. 
 
 These positive recommendations, and the important 
 negative one of being free from sectarian bitterness, 
 caused the few disinterested enthusiasts for education 
 in this country to believe that the time had come, and 
 also the man. We might, under the wise rule of Mr. 
 Fisher, actually become an educated people; there 
 was hope even for the upper classes. And, above all, 
 the education might possibly have a real national 
 flavour. We might give up the idea of fighting 
 Germany with her own weapons, and set up an intel- 
 lectual Essen of our own. People who remembered 
 with a blush that, apart from Darwin, a physicist or 
 two, a few economists, and the mechanicians, all 
 British thought during the last hundred and fifty 
 years had been borrowed from Germany began to 
 hope for a revival of the great tradition of the seven- 
 teenth century, when the Continent turned in rever- 
 ence to a brilliant succession of British philosophers. 
 
 One fear mingled with these hopes. It was that 
 Mr. Fisher, with all his knowledge and enthusiasm, 
 might fail through unfamiliarity with the ways of the 
 House of Commons. It is curious that, while quite 
 legitimate expectations have been somewhat dis- 
 appointed, this equally rational misgiving has proved 
 even more illusory. Mr. Fisher proved from the first 
 a natural master of the Parliamentary manner. 
 Aided by a handsome and winning presence, and a 
 style of speech which impresses by its distinction, 
 but does not offend by a too donnish quality, he 
 gained the ear of the House of Commons in his 
 maiden effort, and has never lost it. Further, he 
 has quickly acquired the still more difficult art of 
 " managing " that curious assembly. Mr. Asquith
 
 MR. H. A. L. FISHER 225 
 
 himself must have admired the consistent skill with 
 which the former Oxford tutor has steered his craft, 
 whether on the swelling tide of a Second Reading 
 debate or through the shallows and miseries of 
 Committee. 
 
 fThis might seem the highest praise and the most 
 complete justification for the Prime Minister's choice. 
 So indeed it may be, from a Prime Minister's stand- 
 point. But to the earnest outsider the matter pre- 
 sents itself quite otherwise. So far as he has failed 
 in his great task, Mr. Fisher's failure is due to that 
 Parliamentary tact on which he has been lavishly 
 complimented. He went forth to fight with beasts 
 at Ephesus. He ended by mastering the wild beasts 
 in something the same sense that a Zoo attendant is 
 their lord, as a sort of Hagenbeck who cannot quell 
 his man-eaters, but only confines them behind a 
 Mappin terrace. It might be dexterous; it was 
 hardly heroic. 
 
 Mr. Fisher, it will be remembered, started out with 
 two main ideas. One was that education should be 
 continuous to the age of eighteen, the other that the 
 horrible system of child labour should cease. Lanca- 
 shire, which has been accurately described as the 
 Ulster of the education question, at once mobilized 
 against the abolition of half-time. But Lancashire 
 expressed itself as reasonable. It did recognize some 
 necessity for advance, and put forward a counter- 
 proposal to Mr. Fisher's original plan of 320 hours 
 education a year for boys and girls between the ages 
 of fourteen and eighteen. Instead it suggested half- 
 time between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. 
 
 Mr. Fisher had probably an opportunity of com- 
 promising on somewhat better terms than these. At 
 any rate, he could have closed with a bargain which 
 many will think possessed certain advantages over his 
 
 15
 
 226 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 original idea. Instead he proposed an arrangement 
 which not only reduced the age limit, but reduced the 
 hours of instruction as well. It was not a matter of 
 accepting half a loaf as better than no bread, but of 
 preferring half a loaf to three-quarters. " We will 
 give you half the week up to sixteen," said Lan- 
 cashire. " Certainly not," replied the Minister of 
 Education, with much severity. " For seven years 
 you may have your way as to the age limit, and I will 
 have my way as to the number of hours given to 
 education. They shall not be twenty odd hours a 
 week, as you propose, but only seven." 
 
 This singular proceeding has been represented as 
 dictated by anxiety not to give statutory sanction to 
 the principle of half-time, the said principle being 
 apparently more objectionable than the plain fact of 
 three-quarters or seven-eighths time. Tempting as 
 it is, one need not stop to consider this remarkable 
 argument. For most education enthusiasts the main 
 and very unpleasing fact was that there had been a 
 surrender, and a grave one, to vested interest. The 
 real interest of the nation and its youth had been 
 sacrificed to the fancied interest of a number of rich 
 men. One can pardon in comparison the short- 
 sighted greed of many poor parents who are not 
 sufficiently enlightened to grasp the lesson which the 
 abounding prosperity of the United States should 
 have taught them — that the broadest and surest 
 foundations of a nation's material well-being are the 
 mental and physical vigour of its masses. 
 
 The Bill made its progress to the Statute Book over 
 the wreckage of most of the hopes which Mr. Fisher's 
 appointment had created. He had not mastered 
 Parliament. Parliament had subdued him. On the 
 whole it would have been better to have gone down 
 on the field than to have signed such a capitulation.
 
 MR. H. A. L. FISHER 227 
 
 The moral would seem to be that no true reform 
 can be expected in any direction, however honest and 
 able the reformer, until a wholly different atmosphere 
 reigns at Westminster. The lump is not to be 
 affected by a little leaven of sincere purpose ; leaven 
 is for the good bread, and this lump is mostly of mere 
 sawdust, the debris of all sorts of dead matter. Until 
 the elector insists on representatives who do represent, 
 all our St. Georges will suffer one of two fates — the 
 Dragon of sectional selfishness will breakfast on them 
 if they quit themselves in wholly knightly and saintly 
 fashion, or they will end by breakfasting with the 
 Dragon, who has generally friends in the quarters 
 where breakfasts are given. The sadder of the two 
 fates seems to have befallen that once very perfect 
 knight, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher.
 
 SIR MARK SYKES 
 
 Praed's observation that " the Whigs are wicked 
 knaves, and very like the Tories," can only be ac- 
 cepted with qualification. Certainly there is no very 
 vivid contrast between the rank and file of both 
 great parties. Between the well-born cadet, the push- 
 ing lawyer, the astute company promoter, the honour- 
 hungry tradesman, and the adventurer of doubtful 
 blood, who sit on the Unionist benches, and their 
 counterparts on whom the Liberal Whip may always 
 depend, there is no difference discernible by the 
 unaided senses. But there are still men of whom one 
 can say " This is and always will be a Liberal," and 
 " No power on earth can make this man other than 
 a Tory." 
 
 Sir Mark Sykes is a Tory. His, however, is not 
 just the Toryism that goes naturally with a fairly 
 old baronetcy, a much older gentility, and £80,000 
 or so a year. He would be a Tory equally if he 
 were struggling at the Bar or writing for his bread. 
 Nor is it that narrow and ungenerous obstructiveness 
 which has passed for Toryism since about the time the 
 party dropped its fine old name and began to call itself 
 Conservative. Still less has it affinity with the 
 specific negation implied in the modern " Unionist " 
 label. Sir Mark's Toryism is of an older and healthier 
 school. Quite modern in appurtenances, he belongs 
 to a very ancient company. He would have been at 
 home in the " country party " of Stuart days, among 
 men ready to die for the King, but quite ready also 
 to speak plainly to his Majesty on occasion, equally 
 
 228
 
 SIR MARK SYKES 229 
 
 impatient of Dutch intriguers and French mistresses, 
 and hating impartially courtiers and professional 
 patriots. Macaulay has taught the ordinary English- 
 man to look on old Toryism as a slavish and irrational 
 creed. Yet the Tory more nearly represented the 
 average mind of Stuart England than did Somers or 
 Montagu, and it is not without significance that even 
 to-day the working man, while placing the mere 
 Conservative and the Liberal on much the same level, 
 often betrays a real kindness for the honest " back- 
 woodsman." Lord Willoughby de Broke will get an 
 amused and even sympathetic hearing from audiences 
 which would howl down a more " serious " politician. 
 
 Sir Mark Sykes is, of course, a very different person 
 from Lord Willoughby. Indeed, he is one of the few 
 men on the back benches of whom it can be said that 
 he arrests notice whenever he breaks silence. He 
 combines a very active and acute intelligence with 
 a considerable gift of expression. He has not yet 
 attained in the spoken word that admirable style 
 which makes his books of travel so eminently readable. 
 Perhaps he has not yet taken political speaking seri- 
 ously enough. But he never degenerates into slovenly 
 expression or loose periphrasis, and when a subject 
 moves him he rises to a sober and impressive elo- 
 quence. He has, too, real knowledge of a variety of 
 subjects. His life has been largely spent in travel, 
 and he has far more than the adventurous globe- 
 trotter's familiarity with the Near East. 
 
 Nor is he, like so many travelled Englishmen, 
 merely interested in old savageries and brand-new 
 civilizations. It was a common fault of our young 
 plutocrats that, while they had hunted big game in 
 every wilderness, they knew no more of Europe than 
 its big hotels and gambling houses. Sir Mark Sykes 
 has an advantage which the English Roman Catholic
 
 230 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 often possesses over the ordinary pagan man of 
 family. He has not been allowed to forget that he is 
 a European as well as an Englishman. He had 
 imbibed some of the culture of Latin Europe before 
 he went to Cambridge. What precisely they taught 
 at Monaco and Brussels we need not enquire, but it 
 was obviously something that is not learned at 
 Portadown — or even at Trinity College, Dublin. 
 
 The mention of Portadown brings one to the quarrel 
 of an English Tory with the Ulster-ridden Unionist 
 party. Sir Mark Sykes is no Home Ruler in the 
 ordinary sense; he is of the new Federationist school; 
 But he recognizes two sufficiently obvious facts which 
 the great majority of his party have never had the 
 candour to face. The first is that there is an Irish 
 question: that Ireland is not a collection of English 
 counties, but a nation, and not altogether a small 
 one. The second is that Sir Edward Carson's position 
 is neither logically nor morally to be distinguished 
 from that of the leaders of the Sinn Fein party. He 
 has had the courage, not once, but many times, to call 
 a spade a spade, and Sir Edward Carson an incen- 
 diary. This may not argue any great audacity on 
 the part of a man far beyond the reach of arguments 
 ordinarily powerful enough to stifle independence. 
 But there are some scores of men equally fortunate 
 in their worldly affairs who must have thought the 
 same thing, and have failed to say it. 
 
 Possibly this refusal to bow the knee to the Ulster 
 chieftain may partially explain the fact that the most 
 talented private member on the Unionist benches 
 though, I believe, offered some minor Ministerial 
 post, has never been regarded as eligible for high office. 
 But insubordination is not the only weakness of Sir 
 Mark Sykes. He is afflicted with a sense of humour, 
 and has even been known to lampoon his leaders. He
 
 SIR MARK SYKES 231 
 
 is understood not to regard Mr. Bonar Law with any 
 great reverence, and has never schooled himself to 
 speak with due solemnity of Sir F. E. Smith. Nothing 
 is more fatal to a young member of the House of 
 Commons than a reputation for undisciplined bril- 
 liance, and the habit of caricaturing his seniors may 
 have seriously affected Sir Mark Sykes's prospects. 
 But it is also quite possible that he himself prefers for 
 the present the liberty of a private member. Those 
 who know him best credit him with large ambitions, 
 which, however, he can wait to satisfy. 
 
 However that may be, this healthy, wealthy, and 
 still comparatively young Yorkshireman cannot be 
 left out of account in any estimate of the political 
 future. Nobody can foresee what is to emerge from 
 the present welter. Official Liberal and official Con- 
 servative are about equally discredited. " Business " 
 members have, on the whole, disappointed expecta- 
 tions. They were to be strong, silent men, who 
 would do miracles by stealth and blush to find them 
 fame. Instead they have mostly proved excellent 
 talkers and wretched performers, skilled in making 
 messes and dexterous in explaining them away. 
 Labour has thrown up one or two moderately efficient 
 administrators, but several lamentable failures. 
 Generally speaking, its record is not brilliant ; its 
 " machine " is, moreover, in the hands of men by no 
 means generally trusted . It may be fairly anticipated 
 that there will be a more democratic tendency in the 
 politics of the immediate future. But " democracy " 
 does not necessarily mean the rule of Mr. Henderson 
 and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. It is just possible that 
 " the people," which is not quite the same thing as 
 organized labour, may take a line of its own. 
 
 If it does, there is no real reason why the Toryism 
 represented by Sir Mark Sykes should not regain a
 
 232 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 good deal of the support which Unionism of recent 
 years has lost. After the war England will in all 
 probability exert far greater influence in politics than 
 she has done of late years ; one seems already to smell 
 revolt against Scottish, Irish, and Welsh domination. 
 But England is temperamentally Tory, and never 
 more Tory than when in a Radical mood. Cobbett, 
 always looking backward with satisfaction, round 
 him with anger, and forward with gloom, was the 
 concrete expression of that paradox. Conservatism 
 of the kind the present generation has been accus- 
 tomed to is either doomed to impotence or is destined 
 to tease and worry the country into revolution. But 
 an English Tory who recognizes, as Sir Mark Sykes 
 does, that many a man desires Mr. Outhwaite's land 
 policy who detests Mr. Outhwaite's views on all else, 
 might do much to guide the torrent of innovation 
 into safe channels. Is the member for Central Hull 
 heavy metal enough for such a role ?
 
 LORD BUCKMASTER OF CHEDDINGTON 
 
 Lord Buckmaster, still in what is now counted early 
 middle age, nourishes a competent physique and a 
 sufficient understanding on the pension of an ex-Lord 
 Chancellor of England. How it happened is worth 
 recalling, and perhaps the best way is to begin, 
 Smiles fashion, at the beginning. 
 
 There was nothing in the early circumstances of 
 Stanley Owen Buckmaster to suggest that he would 
 arrive at the highest legal dignity at an age when 
 many able advocates are wondering whether they can 
 afford the luxury of silk. His origin was comfort- 
 able, but not distinguished. The son of a member of 
 the staff of the Science and Art Department at South 
 Kensington, he was given a good education, took his 
 degree at Christ Church, and entered on his studies of 
 the law at the Inner Temple, where he received his 
 call in 1884. The Bar is described as a great lottery, 
 and certainly its chief prizes are rather capriciously 
 distributed. But, after all, it is very much like other 
 professions in being, on the whole, kind to the per- 
 tinacious man of moderate abilities. A genius may 
 quite likely be starved into despair, driven to drink, 
 or diverted into journalism by the weariness of wait- 
 ing and the drudgery of small beginnings. A diffi- 
 dent man, a lazy man, or a man of inconveniently 
 large sympathies is likely to be still complaining after 
 ten years that it is impossible to pay for chambers and 
 laundress out of professional income. But steady 
 work, helped by a prosaic temperament and some 
 faculty of discreet self-advertisement, generally tells. 
 
 233
 
 234 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 It told in the case of Mr. Stanley Buckmaster. 
 Seventeen years of assiduous application placed him 
 in a position to take silk and look round for a seat in 
 Parliament. 
 
 He had long been marked by the Liberal caucus 
 as a promising candidate, and he came in for Cam- 
 bridge on the great tidal wave of 1906. He failed to 
 hold the constituency four years later, but had mean- 
 while established " claims," and was allotted at the 
 first opportunity the safe seat of Keighley. His 
 reputation at the Bar was rather high, but purely 
 professional ; it has never been pretended that he was 
 either a great advocate or a profound lawyer, but he 
 was keen, dependable, and neat in his presentation of 
 an argument. In politics the same character attached 
 to him. He never coined a phrase of note or forsook 
 the safe path of official Liberalism. But he had 
 learned faultlessly the party brief, never g ve him- 
 self away, and made himself agreeable in the right 
 quarters. When, therefore, he was appointed 
 Solicitor-General in 191 5 nobody was very much sur- 
 prised, and certainly nobody was shocked. He was 
 adequate to the duties, and not more than adequate: 
 the sort of man who, in quiet times, climbs step by 
 step to the highest positions without anybody being 
 able to say why he should be there or why not. 
 
 The war, however, brought Sir Stanley Buckmaster 
 duties which demanded a certain human quality 
 which he lacks. The volatile Sir F. E. Smith, after 
 a brief experience of the post of Chief Censor, decided 
 to go to France, and a thankless job was handed 
 over to the Solicitor-General. It is quite possible 
 that the historian will attach a good deal of import- 
 ance to this appointment ; it certainly had much 
 influence on the course of events. It may be doubted 
 whether Sir Stanley Buckmaster went to the Press
 
 LORD BUCKMASTER OF CHEDDINGTON 235 
 
 Bureau with any policy of his own ; more probably 
 he stolidly pursued the policy he found there. That 
 policy was one of quite stupid suppression. The 
 public was kept for six months in almost complete 
 ignorance of facts, and became a prey, first, to a 
 senseless optimism, and, next, to something closely 
 resembling panic. One important result is directly 
 traceable to Sir Stanley Buckmaster's exaggeration 
 of " reticence." A certain kind of newspaper, foiled 
 in all attempts to get itself talked about and sold 
 through its news columns, made the experiment of 
 importing sensation into its hitherto neglected leading 
 article. Since it could not retail news from the 
 front, it would make news at home. The experiment 
 was, from its special point of view, a brilliant success. 
 The country was convulsed ; nothing else w s talked 
 about ; even Lord Kitchener's prestige was shaken ; 
 whole groups of officials and Ministers were displaced m T 
 and the lesson was learned in Fleet Street that it 
 is sometimes better business to make history than 
 to chronicle it. What has since been attacked as 
 " newspaper government " springs from that simple 
 discovery. 
 
 The explosion of public feeling in the spring of 
 191 5 did no immediate injury to the Minister whose 
 concealment of facts largely provoked it. Indeed , 
 it actually led to brilliant promotion. Victims must 
 be found, and who more appropriate than Lord Hal- 
 dane, who had said Germany was his spiritual home ? 
 Lord Haldane, overwhelmed by the storm, left the 
 Woolsack; Baron Buckmaster of Cheddington was 
 called into existence as his successor. He continued 
 to be Lord Chancellor until the next change of 
 Administration, when the proprieties demanded that 
 a " Unionist " should replace him. Hence it arrives 
 that the country is paying thirty thousand a year for
 
 236 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 one giant of the law who is not overworked and for 
 four who are burdened with no duties at all. And 
 yet a Lord Chancellor has no necessary connection 
 with war or party politics ! 
 
 Lord Buckmaster's active career quite possibly 
 ended with his resignation at the end of 1916. For 
 men of his particular stamp the future will probably 
 hold fewer opportunities than the past. But he is 
 not on that account negligible. In his detachment 
 he has developed the malady which seems to attack 
 distinguished lawyers in retreat, and with Lord Lore- 
 burn he is treading the rather slippery path that 
 leads to Lansdowne House. At any rate, he is 
 approaching very closely to that school which accepts 
 President Wilson as idealist and rejects him as realist. 
 Lord Buckmaster is quite sure that there must be a 
 League of Nations ; he is far from sure that the defeat 
 of Imperialist Germany is an essential condition of the 
 success of such a League. 
 
 There was once an " exhorter " on the Western 
 plains who prayed that a notorious sinner might be 
 bitten by a rattlesnake, on the ground that " nothing 
 but rattlesnakes would bring Jake to repentance." 
 Germany's case is much the same. The nation has 
 been so systematically infected with the virus of 
 Prussianism that nothing short of the imminent threat 
 of national death will effect a cure. The German 
 Socialists admitted that Lenin and Trotsky, by their 
 non-resistance, had made the position of the German 
 peace party not less but more difficult. " We can- 
 not," they said in so many words, " place ourselves 
 in the position of critics of so great a German suc- 
 cess." It can be inferred what would be the effect 
 of weak compromise on the part of the other Powers. 
 Anything short of the complete bankruptcy of the 
 Prussian system will leave it all-powerful in Ger-
 
 LORD BUCKMASTER OF CHEDDINGTON 237 
 
 many, and therefore capable of resuming in due 
 course the policy which Prussia has followed con- 
 sistently since the days of the Great Elector. To a 
 still Prussianized German Empire the League of 
 Nations would simply be a greater opportunity for 
 intrigue than its Bismarcks have ever enjoyed; it 
 would be merely an extended Concert of Europe. 
 
 Surrender is an ugly word. But when we have 
 volatilized all the noble sentiment and seeming reason- 
 ableness of Lansdowneism, surrender is the only solid 
 thing left in the test-tube. It may be an injustice 
 to suggest that Lord Buckmaster and Lord Loreburn 
 are taking the Lansdownward course. But these 
 are days in which men must be very careful of the 
 company they keep.
 
 MR. SAMUEL GOMPERS 
 
 *' I am an internationalist, but my doctrine is an 
 addition and not a subtraction. I must be a citizen 
 of America before I can be a citizen of the world." 
 
 These are the words of Mr. Samuel Gompers, 
 President and to a great extent creator of that power- 
 ful organization, the American Federation of Labour. 
 They are the more remarkable when we bear in mind 
 the sort of man Mr. Gompers is. Superficially he 
 should have all the makings of a " citizen of the world , ' ' 
 and it is not so obvious why he should be first and 
 foremost an American patriot. He is of Jewish 
 race. He is of Dutch and French ancestry. He was 
 not even American born. Like Mr. Hughes, of 
 Australia, he first saw the light as it is dulled down by 
 the eternal murk of poorer London. It was in the 
 East End that he lived till he was thirteen — a typical 
 child of the London ghetto, undersized, over-nerved, 
 sharp and avid as the sparrow of the gutters. His 
 father worked in the cigar trade ; there was no better 
 opening for the boy, and when the paternal Gompers 
 went to New York young Samuel followed the family 
 occupation. He was soon expert as a cigar-roller, 
 and even now, after the lapse of more than half a 
 century, his fingers have not forgotten their cunning. 
 
 There is one advantage — if it can be reckoned 
 suoh — in manual work of this type. It makes little 
 demand on the brain. One can think as one works. 
 One's mind is free if one's hand is a slave. In the 
 cigar shop — it was hardly a factory — where young 
 Gompers was employed, the workers whiled away 
 
 238
 
 MR. SAMUEL GOMPERS 239 
 
 the tedious hours by reading to one another. Gom- 
 pers, who had even in those days an emphatic and 
 distinct delivery, was generally employed as reader. 
 It was much such an atmosphere as that which 
 determined the future of Charles Dickens. The 
 boy's literary taste rapidly developed; and the 
 desultory acquirements of the shop were amplified 
 by a more systematic attack on the classics during 
 scanty hours of leisure. Gompers devoured the 
 English novelists. Then, tiring of fiction, he turned 
 his attention to John Stuart Mill and the professors 
 of the dismal science generally. It was perhaps 
 lucky that he started with the individualists; the 
 German Socialists and Henry George had less effect 
 on his mind when he reached them. It may be 
 questioned, however, whether he would in any cir- 
 cumstances have rendered an unquestioning homage 
 to that school. For he was from the first of a wholly 
 practical turn, and far more interested in the world, 
 and especially that part of the world in which he 
 found himself, than in any Utopia. 
 
 It is unnecessary for the present purpose to follow 
 the career of Mr. Gompers in detail, or to trace step 
 by step the process by which he built up, from quite 
 small beginnings, the organization which now wields 
 gigantic power in every part of the United States 
 and bargains with capital in the name of three 
 million men. But it is important to understand what 
 is roughly the basis of his authority. Mr. Gompers 
 has done many things which would be considered 
 " advanced " even by our own Syndicalists. But 
 the Federation is in no sense a revolutionary organi- 
 zation. It does not exist for promoting class 
 war or social unrest; it is a machine contrived 
 to attain most definite and concrete ends. Mr. 
 Gompers himself regards a strike as evidence of
 
 240 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 failure. He believes in negotiation, and in having 
 a case so strong as to compel agreement on the part 
 of the opposing party. He is about as far removed 
 from the usual conception of an agitator as can well 
 be imagined — a man of singularly orderly mind, 
 almost painfully correct in his diction, as cool as 
 Rockefeller or any of the Big Five, pliable as to 
 indifferent matters, inflexible on essentials. In its 
 methods the American Federation of Labour, in fact, 
 strikingly resembles the great financial corporations 
 it has to deal with. It is a thoroughly businesslike 
 institution, and its President is as keen, as cautious, 
 if need be as ruthless, as the president of any trust, 
 but withal as ready to see the opposing point of view 
 and to do a " deal " without reference to any social 
 or political prejudice. 
 
 Such is the man — shrewd, hard-headed, practical. 
 His work has presented special difficulties of a kind 
 not easy to«be grasped on this side of the Atlantic. 
 There is a wide difference between British and 
 American labour conditions. Here, after all, labour 
 is mainly British ; foreign infiltration affects only a 
 few large towns, and even in the capital does not 
 materially modify the character of the population. 
 In America, on the other hand, the " Anglo-Saxon " 
 workman — even if we include the Irishman — is some- 
 thing of a rarity. An enormous amount of the hard 
 work of the great Republic is done by miscellaneous 
 foreigners ; even Germans are a minority among the 
 great crowd recruited from every backward mon- 
 archy in Europe. Among these men general educa- 
 tion is defective, and they speak very poor English. 
 The more intelligent of them bear a grudge against 
 civilization, and have no special reason to be attached 
 to the institutions of the United States. The control 
 of a body which includes great masses of men of this
 
 MR. SAMUEL GOMPERS 241 
 
 class should, one would imagine, be far more difficult 
 than the task of British Labour leaders, and when 
 war came to inflame racial and national differences 
 it seemed a bold thing on Mr. Gompers's part to 
 answer for the solidarity of American organized 
 labour. 
 
 That the claim was no idle one, however, has been 
 proved by events. There have been troubles between 
 employer and employed, but, on the whole, aston- 
 ishingly few, and those which have occurred have 
 been settled with extraordinary facility through 
 machinery of Mr. Gompers's own devising. He has 
 worked with the President as Marshal Haig with 
 Marshal Foch. The debt the United States, and 
 the Allies in general, owe to this remarkable man 
 is beyond doubt enormous. In acknowledging it 
 we may usefully enquire why Mr. Gompers occupies 
 a position so far removed from that of those of our 
 own Labour leaders who specially retain control of 
 the " machine." Why is he " out " to beat Germany, 
 and not, like Mr. Henderson, " out " only to get 
 victory for the " international proletariat "? Mr. 
 Gompers is a lifelong pacifist, just as Mr. Henderson 
 is. He has been much nearer the proletariat than 
 Mr. Henderson ever was. He has fought such fights 
 for Labour as Mr. Henderson's meeker nature would 
 have shunned. He is only an American by adoption. 
 Mr. Henderson's ancestor probably drew a good bow 
 at Hastings. Why, then, does Mr. Gompers, instead 
 of courting the German Socialists like Mr. Henderson, 
 repeat in every speech, a veritable American Cato, 
 " Germany must be beaten; the war must be fought 
 to victory "? 
 
 The question is answered by Mr. Gompers himself 
 in the words quoted above: " I must be a citizen 
 of America before I can be a citizen of the world." 
 
 16
 
 242 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 Perhaps the coarsest of all the mistakes made by- 
 Germany was with regard to the reality of American 
 citizenship. Germany laid stress on the ethnic 
 factor, and it is no doubt a considerable element in 
 American life. It gives all kinds of Americans, for 
 example, a curiously tired feeling when they read 
 our well-meant eulogies on themselves and their 
 institutions. A nation which derives from every 
 race in Europe is not likely to be flattered when we 
 assume that its main duty is to " take its stand by 
 the Mother Country for the preservation of the common 
 interest of Anglo-Saxondom " — which, it seems, in- 
 cludes India, West Africa, and the Hokojoko Islands. 
 America does not happen to be " Anglo-Saxon," even 
 if we are. But though America is not English (except 
 as regards the bases of law and language), America 
 is American. With America neutral, personal and 
 racial preferences assumed extraordinary warmth, 
 and took the most lawless form. But with America 
 belligerent, the ranks have closed marvellously. 
 
 To what are we to attribute a general loyalty 
 hardty equalled in any European country ? Some- 
 thing is due, no doubt, to the peculiar directness of 
 the American intellect, which is as sharply distin- 
 guishable from our own habit of cloudy compromise 
 as the thoroughgoing heat and cold of the American 
 continent are from our trimming climate. Still more, 
 no doubt, is traceable to the school system of the 
 United States, which brings vivid and even crude 
 Americanism into the homes of Italian, Hungarian, 
 Galician, Scandinavian, and German parents. But 
 in the long run the most powerful influence is the 
 democratic and Republican temper which, if it does 
 not kill the spirit of sectionalism, at least scotches 
 it. The immense bulk of the United States does 
 not prevent an intense localism. Every American
 
 MR. SAMUEL GOMPERS 243 
 
 has his " home town," as well as his home State, 
 and it thus results that the most cosmopolitan com- 
 munity on earth is also the least international. Mr. 
 Gompers's citizen formula might be extended thus: 
 "lam first of all a citizen of Big Lick; I am next a 
 citizen of the State of Missouri ; I am next a citizen 
 of the United States; and after that (when I have 
 time) I am a citizen of the world." " What do they 
 know of England," asks Mr. Kipling, " who England 
 only know?" A much more reasonable question 
 is what can they feel for the British Empire who 
 decry either their native Buluwayo or their native 
 Chipping Sodbury ? British Imperialism has made 
 one mistake in seeking to turn Englishmen and 
 Scotchmen into Britishers. British Labour has made 
 another in trying to regard itself as part of the " in- 
 ternational proletariat." Both have begun at the 
 wrong end. One can be a good Englishman first, 
 and all sorts of things afterwards — enthusiastic for 
 the British Commonwealth, and friendly to the League 
 of Nations. One cannot safely reverse the process, 
 and that we exist at all to-day is due to the splendid 
 fact that the average Englishman, Scotsman, and 
 Welshman, despite all exhortations to think imperially 
 and proletarianly, insisted at the critical moment on 
 thinking nationally. 
 
 In this context it is highly significant that, while 
 there is a colossal Labour organization in America, 
 there is no Labour Party in Congress. Mr. Gompers 
 has set his face like flint against all pressure to form 
 one, and has declined all invitations to be nominated 
 himself. He thinks " the welfare of Labour should 
 not be confused with other national interests, but 
 should be the concern of all parties." This pure 
 wisdom does not, of course, prevent the American 
 Labour organization from bringing strong and success-
 
 244 UNCENSORED CELEBRITIES 
 
 ful pressure to bear on all kinds of matters in which 
 the working man is specially interested. In fact, 
 Mr. Gompers has taken an enormous part in State 
 and Federal politics. But, like the millionaires 
 themselves, he recognizes the indecency of open 
 sectionalism under a democratic constitution. It is 
 something altogether repellent to the national temper. 
 Class interests exist in America as elsewhere, and are 
 pursued with equal selfishness. But the point is that 
 the sectionalist is forced by public sentiment to clothe 
 his sordidness with at least the show of public spirit. 
 
 The British Labour Party cannot be blamed be- 
 cause, coming late in the day, and finding nakedly 
 selfish parties in possession, it has fought for its own 
 hand. It could scarcely do otherwise. But when it 
 is beginning to aspire to control national destiny it 
 should seek larger models, and, since there is little 
 indeed to copy at home, it would do better to turn to 
 Mr. Gompers and American Labour than to Trotsky 
 and Russian Bolshevism, or to " our German friends," 
 whether they follow Scheidemann or Haase. 
 
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