ON SOME GREAT MEN

MR. BONAR LAW

IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

13th November, 1923

The House to-day meets under the shadow of a great loss—a public loss and a personal loss; and I am sure it would not be the desire of Hon. Members to proceed to the ordinary business to-day without paying a tribute to the memory of a very great leader. Others will speak with greater eloquence than I can of his rare gifts in Parliament and in Council; I should like, if I may, to speak to the House for a few minutes of some of the more personal aspects of the man. There is no doubt that Mr. Bonar Law gave his life for the country, just as much as if he had fallen in the Great War. The work he did during the War could only have been done by a man of great physical endurance and great intellectual capacity. It is difficult for all of us to realise what is meant by a man having served simultaneously in the War Cabinet—which sometimes used to sit for hours every day—as Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time when the Exchequer problems were more numerous and more difficult than they have ever been, and as Leader of the House of Commons—work which, however easily the business may be going, is always of a most exacting nature. Night after night when we had gone home the lights might have been seen burning in the room which I now occupy, where he would be working into the small hours of the morning on Departmental work, and nothing was more remarkable than the rapidity and accuracy with which he dealt with the difficult problems that came before him there. Mr. Keynes, no mean judge—and this is a great tribute from such a man—told me once that he often disagreed with Mr. Bonar Law, and that often he did not like his arguments, but he said that he was invariably right. I think there is nothing more remarkable than the general accuracy of his decisions at the Exchequer during the time that I had the honour of working so intimately with him, and the way in which, over a great matter such as the War Loan, he took a strong stand against a unanimous expert opinion, and proved himself by the results to have been in the right.

But hard as the work was, he never complained, and he was always full of kindness. He was always willing to let others have the credit for what was done. If the history of the time ever comes to be written, it can be proved that perhaps he did greater service in preventing the doing of things which it was wiser not to do, rather than in initiating things which ought to have been done.

The courage that he showed in his work was equally striking in other aspects. I remember on the 23rd March, 1918, when men's hearts were failing, he remained confident. He told me at the time that nothing could shake his unquenchable faith in the British soldier. It was the same with regard to air raids. I can see him now, with his family around him—and he was never happy at these times unless they were around him—sitting in the middle of them, working away, with the deafening noise outside, paying not the slightest attention to it, and the only time that I remember when he failed to work during an air raid was when one of his children was absent, and was reported to be making her way to Downing Street from some other part of London, and we lost Mr. Bonar Law, and we discovered that he had wandered out in his slippers on to the Horse Guards' Parade, in the middle of a heavy barrage, to look for his own child.

He had few illusions, and he was of a critical temperament, and yet with that I have never heard him say a single bitter, unkind or unfair word about a living soul. He looked for the best side in everybody, and if occasionally I may have said something to him hasty in criticism of this or that individual, he never would acknowledge it, but he immediately countered me by pointing to one of his good points. Like many men, he was changed by the War. He was a man of strong domestic feelings, and I think probably he never recovered from the loss of his wife fifteen years ago. From the loss of the boys during the War he certainly never recovered, and I think what changed him in the War was what changed many people. He lost entirely that personal ambition which was his when he entered the House of Commons, and he lost it in this way. He felt so strongly, as many of us did, that while the youth of the country was being sacrificed on the battlefields it had really ceased to matter what happened at home to the older men, provided they did everything in their power and strength to help their country in any capacity in which they might be called.

It was that work, it was those personal sorrows, which led directly to the breakdown in the spring of 1921, and it was that loss of ambition to which I referred that made him refuse so stubbornly for so long to come forward a little over a year ago to re-enter politics, even with the chance of taking up a position to attain which so many men are supposed to be capable of any sacrifice. It was then, as it had been throughout his career, only the strongest sense of duty which made him resume the heavy task of public life. But it killed him. I remember when I came back from America at the end of January I found him plunged in a state of depression which never left him. Looking back, undoubtedly it was partly—must have been partly—caused by the early stage of the disease from which he suffered. But it was in the early part of January that the breakdown with the Paris Conference had occurred, and I know how that weighed on his spirits, because he told me, as late as July, that he felt that the contemplation of what he regarded as the hopeless situation of Europe weighed upon him day and night. He said he could see no way through it, and he himself attributed his own illness to anxiety caused by that.

He was, indeed, a most lovable, elusive and wistful personality, and when the end came I could not help recalling to mind the passage in the Phaedo which I remember reading in the Sixth Form at school, which left a very deep mark upon me. It is the one where the argument is being urged against the right of a man to take his own life, and it was said that God had placed the soul of each man, as it were, on guard, and he had no right to leave that guard until the trumpet sounded the retreat. He waited expectantly for the sound of that trumpet. When it came he recognised it, and heard it cheerfully and thankfully; and we must be thankful, too, that he was spared further suffering and for the sweet memory and the brave example left to all of us.

LORD CURZON

IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

23rd March, 1925

I hope, Sir, with the permission of the House, to make a few observations on the loss the Government and the country have sustained by the death of one of the greatest men and the most vivid personalities of this generation. I do so before this House in the knowledge that there are few here who can remember him in his earlier years, when, as a young man, he was a distinguished Member of this House, and one to whose future everyone looked forward with hope and with confidence. But I am particularly anxious, in a case like this, to try to give Members of the House some impression of the man himself, what lay behind, and what was the real man, which has been somewhat obscured in more recent years when he had withdrawn more from debates and from appearances in public.

It is difficult for us, who knew Lord Curzon after great honours had come to him, earned during a long life of service, to realise that he started many years ago with few advantages except his natural abilities and such advantages as might have accrued to him from belonging to a noble family. He was, in many senses of the word, a self-made man, because it was his natural ability, his fierce industry and his courage which made him, from an early period of life, map out the scheme of what he would do. He was the architect of his own fortune; he made his own friends; and he qualified himself for the great tasks of his life, not only by ceaseless study from early years, but by travel in what were then comparatively unknown parts of the world, by books, and by consorting with men of all kinds and in all countries.

His interests were exceptionally wide, and he proceeded to make himself a master of every subject in which his keen mind took an interest. So it is that the death of one primarily known to us as a statesman and a politician leaves more gaps in the public life of this country than would be the case with almost any other living man. As a student of the classics, a deep student of history, of pictures and of archaeology, his loss will be felt as much among the Trustees of the British Museum and the Trustees of the National Gallery as in the Cabinet, and his loss will perhaps be greatest in that Oxford that he loved so much. Oxford, as we know, whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, spoke to him as she speaks to all her sons who have ears to hear, and to him perhaps more than most. Especially so, I think, because one of the keys to Lord Curzon's life is to remember that his roots had struck deep into pre-industrial England, and it is from an early England that he drew the sources of his strength. So it was that he had, possibly, less acquaintance with and interest in many of these strange currents of modern life in England, his mind turning naturally more to England in foreign and Imperial politics; and yet—let there be no misunderstanding here—no proposal that could be made for the betterment of our people at home was welcomed more eagerly than by him, in very much the same spirit that it would have been welcomed by young England in the days of Disraeli's youth, of which period, in many ways, he seemed to be, even to-day, a member.

His learning, the learning of years, and the natural aptitude which he had, gave him a power of natural expression, whether in writing or in speech, that would have been remarkable at any time. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of it was that, great as it appeared to us when we heard him speaking in either this House or in another place, his quickness of mind was such that it was no less great when impromptu and without notice. The subject-matter and the humour bubbled up afresh and at a moment's notice.

With that equipment and that training, and with the training he obtained in this House, it is little wonder that he was able to enter upon one of the greatest phases of his life's work in India at so early an age for one occupying a position of such immense authority. There is no doubt that while he has always been a man whose heart and soul were for England and the Empire, yet his best friends would own that it was India and the East that held his imagination from his early youth until the end of his life. He regarded the presence of the Englishman in India as the presence of a man with a mission, and he regarded him as the servant of our country on a sacred mission. He never flinched from those high ideals and earnest endeavours, and, in spite of all, he held the scales of justice even in that great country.

But there, just as in his life afterwards, and in his political life, while he never sought popularity, he was always grateful for appreciation. He was, it is true, exacting towards others, and he demanded a very high standard, but he was not nearly as exacting towards others as he was towards himself. The standard that he demanded from others he demanded in a triple measure from himself.

But these things I have said are well known, and they may be found in biographies, and I want, if I may, for a few minutes to try to look a little more under the surface. Lord Curzon was a man who erected a façade about himself, and a façade which deceived many people and was the product of a natural shyness, an intense and exquisite sensitiveness. It is no uncommon thing, as each of us may know in our own lives and moving amongst the men we know, that human beings in this world who suffer from sensitiveness do put something between themselves and their fellow-men to ward off the shafts which they dread; yet underneath there beats the kindest, warmest human heart.

There was a nature, contrary to what many might believe who did not know him, of the uttermost simplicity—the eternal boy lived in him until the last week of his life. He was the soul of loyalty to his colleagues, he bore no grudges in political life, he pursued a straight course; and all this in the face of daily and constant physical suffering. Of that many knew nothing, because it was a thing of which he never spoke. But I have seen him at the Cabinet, I have seen him at a dinner party, and if he were not able to have the necessary cushions to support his back, his suffering would be as the suffering of a man on the rack, and that he fought against day by day. When we look back upon him, I feel that what Lord Rosebery said of William Pitt is so true of him, that whatever men may feel about his life or his acts, they must be agreed that England had in this generation no more patriotic spirit, none more intrepid, and none more pure.

I want before I sit down to say one or two things that no one but I can say. A Prime Minister sees human nature bared to the bone, and it was my chance to see him twice when he suffered great disappointment—the time when I was preferred to him as Prime Minister, and the time when I had to tell him that he could render greater service to the country as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence than in the Foreign Office. Each of those occasions was a profound and bitter disappointment to him, but never for one moment when he had faced the facts did he show by word, look or innuendo, or by any reference to the subject afterwards, that he was dissatisfied. He bore no grudge, and he pursued no other course than the one I expected of him, of doing his duty where it was decided that he could best render service.

I felt on both those occasions that I had seen in him, in that strange alloy which we call human nature, a vein of the purest gold. He died as he would have desired, and as we should all desire to die, in harness, a harness put on himself in youth and worn triumphantly through a long life, a harness which he never cast off until his feet had entered the river. It may well be when we look back on that life of devoted service to his country, and of a perpetual triumph of the spirit over the flesh, that in some places in this earth, early on that Friday morning, may have been heard the faint echoes of the trumpets that sounded for him on the other side.

LORD MILNER AND ARNOLD TOYNBEE

FROM A SPEECH AT OXFORD

15th May, 1925

I feel to-night that I cannot do better than say something to you about what Lord Milner stood for in this world of ours, what he has meant for his generation, and what the message is that he has for our party and for the whole Empire. It is thirty years since Lord Milner paid a great tribute to another Oxford man, a friend of his own, whose name I hope is not forgotten yet in Oxford. I mean Arnold Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee was a product of his generation, but he was more than that. He lived at a time when the industrial revolution of this country had so far succeeded that those who worked with their hands were being more vocal and more clamant about their position, and what they conceived to be their rights, and the duties of those whose lot in life was more fortunate, and at a time when the consciences of the well-to-do were beginning to be stimulated and to react to the touch of those who in the middle of the last century had been but voices in the desert. Toynbee, by his friendship, by his own ardent nature, and by the social experiment that he made in his short life, in supporting the movement[1] for university settlements put in the poorer quarters of our great towns, and by stimulating interest throughout the educated and the more fortunate classes in what was going on around them in worlds they knew but little, was more than anyone perhaps of his generation the pioneer of much that has happened since and the father of movements begun in but a small way, but which have helped to change the whole outlook of the English people in the matter of social life and social reform. It was that devotion, that unselfish devotion, of Toynbee and his friends to social service that captivated Milner in his youth and that, in spite of all the vicissitudes, political and others, that attended his life, remained with him as an abiding inspiration; and, indeed, it is from that inspiration that we who are here to-night as members of a revivified and triumphant Conservative Party draw our breath and have our being.

It is difficult to realise the change that has come over the thought of our country in the course of one short or two short generations. When Milner came up to Oxford the old laissez-faire school still reigned unchallenged in all matters, social and economic. If I may quote his own words, he said: "All the recognised authorities were orthodox economists of the old school, but within ten years the few men who still held the doctrines in their extreme rigidity had come to be regarded as curiosities." And Milner said himself, in answer to a question that was often asked at that time, "Was Arnold Toynbee a Socialist?"—and his words, I think, are full of wisdom, applicable to the present day even more than they were applicable to the day when he said them: "If by Socialism you mean collectivism, the abolition of individual property, or if you mean social democracy, the paternal government of an omnipotent, all-absorbing State, then Toynbee was certainly no Socialist. But on the other hand, he was convinced of the necessity of social reorganisation. The Industrial Revolution had shattered the old social system. It had left the industrial life of this and the other great civilised countries of the West in a state of profound disorder, and society, left to itself, could not right itself. Salvation would only come through deliberate corporate effort, inspired by moral issues, though guided by the scientific study of economic laws." And I do not think that that is any bad definition of the ideals which we to-day are working for.

Going back once more for a moment to the time of Toynbee and when Milner was a young man, there were published some other books which I daresay are unknown to this generation, but the contents of which and the ideas of which ran through all thoughtful England like a heath fire, and those were the revelations which appeared in General Booth's book on Darkest England, and the scientific investigation or poverty by Mr. Charles Booth, who devoted a remarkable natural ability, great wealth, and tireless industry for the first time to the tabulation of facts regarding the condition of the people under our industrial system in our great towns—books which have been for years after their publication a mine of wealth of knowledge to all who sought to do work, in whatever capacity, in trying to amend the social conditions of our people.

Much has been done since those days. Much has been done to grapple with the problems of unemployment, with the problems of health and of housing, which the reformers of that generation would have rejoiced to see, more perhaps than many of them could have hoped to see. But yet we are not satisfied, and we have to take stock at the present time, and we have to ask ourselves if those great men who preceded us would have been satisfied to rest now in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Now Lord Milner, with his highly trained intellect, waged war against twin evils which always struck his mind perhaps more than any others—inefficiency and waste—and his whole life was a protest against these things. All the efforts that he made in inspiring other public men in the course of their work were directed to combat those evils. He had no patience with what we in England are often only too proud of—our capacity for muddling through. He had no sympathy with muddling, whether you got through or not.

But people who did not know him often failed to realise the profound humanity that lay underneath that shy and reserved exterior, and which accompanied—and profound humanity does not always accompany—great gifts of intellect. No one who worked with Lord Milner could ever forget this—that, in every social problem that he approached, whether at home or abroad, the question he always asked himself was this: "How can we help those who have to carry the burden and heat of the day, and how will what we propose to do affect those who have to work with their hands for their daily bread?" He believed that the right way towards social prosperity and the reorganisation of this country lay through the scientific organisation of our productive power, and it was his belief in the practicability of accomplishing this that made him always turn a deaf ear to those who argued that the first necessity of bringing about capacities for industrial production and competition was a lowering of wages and standards of life. He was always opposed to that. But it is probable that with his great intellectual gifts, and with a certain intellectual detachment, and from not having mixed for long or very freely with all classes of people in this country, he failed perhaps to realise the natural, dare I say obtuseness? of his fellow-countrymen—or, let us say, the difficulties owing to the English temperament of giving effect speedily to what he desired.

I think that in what he desired to do he was very largely right, because, whether you look at home or throughout the Dominions and Colonies, there is no doubt there is an immense amount to do in the way of scientific development and of co-ordination—much as I dislike that word co-ordination—both with regard to improving the productive capacity of the Empire, and no less with regard to co-ordinating, which is equally important, the scientific work which has been done in different parts of the Empire with regard not only to production, but with regard to health and sanitation. We have allowed our Empire for too long to proceed on haphazard lines. He felt that we were handicapped as against the world, compared with what we ought to be, by an unnecessary economic backwardness prevailing in so many parts of the Empire. To use his own words, he said "that such backwardness is a discredit alike to our generosity and to our intelligence."

* * * * * * * *

The word Imperialism still has to many people in this country a rather sinister meaning. They associate with it—wrongly in my view and in your view—the idea of exploitation, of riding roughshod over the world, of jingoism and of selfishness in public policy. It was not that to Lord Milner, and it is not that to us. It is rather this—the spreading throughout such parts of the world as we control, or in which we have influence, of all those ideas of law, order, and justice which we believe to be peculiar to our own race. It is to help people who belong to a backward civilisation, wisely to raise them in the scale of civilisation—an extraordinarily difficult task, and one which needs wisdom for its consummation. There is no country in the world upon whom that task has been imposed to the same degree as our own country, and it is undoubtedly by the way in which we fulfil that task that we shall be judged at the bar of history, not perhaps so much to-day, but by those who come after us of our own blood.

We have made a start, so far as our own Empire is concerned, by setting up an Imperial Economic Committee to try to bring about still closer bonds commercially between the Dominions and the Mother Country. All attempts to-day must be to a certain extent tentative. But I am quite convinced, having regard to the sentiment throughout the Empire, that we are approaching along a line that affords the best chance of our laying the foundation to-day for something upon which a far mightier edifice may be built in years to come. I am convinced, too, we are only at the beginning of what can be done by intelligent co-operation of the Mother Country with the Colonies and the Empire in developing them for the benefit not only of themselves and ourselves, but of the Empire as a whole.

It is upon that point I want to say a few words to you in Oxford. I often used to wonder whether it was possible that this world of ours had existed an unknown period, and mankind had struggled on in its upward course through countless generations of toil and tribulation, so that a few of us might be able to come to Oxford and Cambridge to enjoy ourselves and to pass on, taking the cream of civilisation. It always seemed to me that if all we have to show for what humanity is suffering was a little privileged generation in a corner of the world like this, the whole thing, creation and evolution, became something puny and ridiculous. It seemed to me that for us who have the enormous inestimable privilege of being born into this country in positions where we can come here, and where to a certain extent we choose what we do in the world, that really after all that has been given to us, and after all that we have enjoyed, and with a vivid recollection of what this world has passed through within the last ten years, there is nothing else for this generation to do than to devote itself as no generation has done in the past to the betterment of its millions of people who have not got our advantages.

We have, or we can have if we like, what the whole of this country is crying out for to-day, and that is education. Never was the need for educated men in each country of the Empire greater than it is to-day. The greatest loss that the war has imposed on this country is the loss of a whole generation of men who to-day would be between the ages of thirty and forty-five, able to carry on and take over the big jobs; and they were wiped out. Where many years ago there were men to be reckoned in dozens to take over responsible and arduous duties throughout the Empire and at home, now there are but handfuls, and never was the call to service and the demand for service more clamant than to-day. Now there are many kinds of service for which you can offer yourself; for those who have fitted themselves for it, if there is no immediate call for you into professions at home, think how the Empire needs you to-day to make the rough places smooth in all the corners of the world, to train and educate people lower than we are in the scale of civilisation, to go out to the great Dominions and help them in the problems set before them. And, apart from all those, what a field there is to-day for the best men that we can send to India, for this reason—for this and the next generation, the most difficult work in the Empire must necessarily be in that great country, work demanding sympathy, knowledge, courage, and intelligence of the highest order.

I hope it may never be said that in any part of the Empire when the call comes for workers, the one part where the call is most urgent, where the work is most difficult, and the future is most obscure, could be the one part where the call is not answered. If that should be the case it would be a proof of what I deny, but what some people maintain, that the courage, the initiative, and the spirit of adventure of our people, to which we owe the Empire and all that we are—that that spirit, if not dead, is dormant. I will never believe that.

Let me tell you at this point one story of Lord Milner, which I expect will be new to most of you. I tell it to you, not only to show you, if you have any doubt, what manner of man he was, but to show you what the finest type of Englishman at his best can be; the type that all of us would wish to emulate. Twenty-two years ago Lord Milner had completed about two years of work in the restoration of South Africa, one of the most difficult tasks to which any man had ever been called upon to devote himself, and, by confession on all hands, he had accomplished a work which it is doubtful if anyone else could have accomplished. His praise was in all men's mouths. He was a man who loved his own home in his own country, never so happy as when in England, and there came to him at that moment an offer from Lord Balfour to come home as Secretary of State for the Colonies, a task for which he was peculiarly fitted, and in every way he would have delighted in the work. He declined—and why? He declined it because he knew that, in spite of the success he had achieved, there were coming years of the utmost difficulty in South Africa, years in which probably he would lose all the popularity he had won, years in which possibly his success might be turned into failure, and he said, "No, no, I am not going to go away from here and take the credit of accomplishments up to this point and leave someone else to come out now to face what must be years of difficulty and distress. I am going to see them through myself."

The public did not know that. That shows the finest temper, the finest spirit in which an Englishman could possibly do and face his work, and I would like to take to myself as an exemplar and a pattern that method of looking at my problems and facing my work. I would ask all of you, happy to have your lives before you, to keep a model of that kind ever present in your hearts and minds to be with you if you are ever called upon to face times of hardship and of difficulty. I make no apology to you when his loss is fresh, and I am sure is in all your hearts, and when it is weighing heavily on all of us who knew and loved him, for putting before an Oxford audience the inspiring example of one of her greatest sons, especially as the objects at which he aimed and the spirit in which he worked are the objects at which our party aims to-day, the spirit in which I hope and believe we work at a time like this, when the party to which we all belong is more united in its determination than it has ever been to follow in the steps of those who have set before everything the improvement of the material condition of our people, and of the whole of our Empire. Work to that end is to be achieved only by keeping in ourselves a bright and burning spiritual ideal, which alone can give us strength to perform the task to which we have set our hands.

LORD OXFORD

AT THE GUILDHALL

13th May, 1925

I propose to dwell, not on Lord Oxford the statesman, but on the Mr. Asquith whom we, in the House of Commons, whether we agree with him or not, have always respected and admired for a generation. For many years, as a humble back-bencher, I had my individuality, my hopes and my ambitions trampled under foot by those marching legions of which for so many years Mr. Asquith was the head. But all through that time I recognised, as all of us do, the stability of his character, the serenity of his temper, his freedom from jealousies and enmities, the magnitude of his mind and the plenitude of his utterance. We felt that in him we had a master of our tongue. In his speech he could be not only sonorous, but, what does not always go with it, luminous; not only massive at times, but really humorous. And he never supported his arguments with any extraneous helps, such as Dr. Johnson alluded to when he spoke of orators "who employ laboured gesticulation and think that they can impress themselves on audiences by rolling their eyes, puffing their cheeks, spreading abroad their arms, or stamping on the ground." There was with him always that reticence and reserve that belong essentially to the Roman and the Englishman rather than to the Greek and the Celt.

It is a curious thing that there was a Lord Oxford who preceded him by some two centuries, and if we look back on what was said about him by Swift, particularly, you get a not wholly imperfect picture of the Mr. Asquith whom we knew and respected so much. Listen to these few sentences, which, I think, might with very little change have been written to-day about Lord Oxford:

"Easy and disengaged in private conversation with such a weight of affairs upon his shoulders: of great learning, and as great a favourer and protector of it; intrepid by nature, as well as by consciousness of his own integrity; a despiser of money, a firm friend, and a placable enemy: sacrificing his justest resentment not only to the public good, but to the common intercession and acknowledgment. Yet with all these virtues"—here, I think, the truth will hold—"there is some mixture of human infirmity. His greatest admirers must confess his skill at cards and dice to be very low and superficial. Of horse-racing he is entirely ignorant."

I would like to finish on the note on which I began. My own admiration for Lord Oxford arose primarily from the admiration I have for his speeches, and I can recall three outstanding ones, very different in their kind, but which, I think, every old House of Commons man will agree with me were instances of perfect speech. One was the speech Lord Oxford made on the death of Alfred Lyttelton. The second was the last speech he made in the House of Commons, a speech full of humour and Parliamentary skill, and one which led more than anything else directly to the fall of the late Government. Lastly, there was the great speech he delivered on 6th August, 1914, in which he put before this country and the world the principles of constitutional freedom as opposed to despotism in a manner in which they can never have been stated since the time of Edmund Burke.

He has taught us—those of us in the House of Commons and all students of politics to-day—not only to love our mother tongue more, if possible, than we have loved it in the past, but also the possibilities of that tongue when it is properly used. He has given us an example by which some of us, if we apply ourselves, and if we have the ability to profit by his example, may some day be able ourselves to speak English.