the pre-eminent value in the teacher of character, for, if you look
back upon your own childhood--as I look back upon mine--is it not a
fact that all unconsciously we were the strongest moral judges of
those set in authority over us? It is not the clever teacher that we
remember, or the man who taught us most--unless we gave our lives to
scholarships; what we remember is the man whose character all
unconsciously impressed us, the man who was patient, who was honest,
who was fair, and who brought into the performance of his daily task
a spirit which, when we look back over the gulf of years, makes us
feel even to-day, when we are faced, as we are faced day by day, with
problems that test our character, that we should be almost afraid, as
it were, to take the part that we know to be the less right one,
because we feel somehow that that was the one thing that would not
have met with the approval of him whom we knew all those years ago.
I will give you one sentence, if I may, which I read recently with
great pleasure in a work by a schoolmaster, which seems to me to
embody what I have been trying very feebly to express. He is
speaking of the influence in after years of the schoolmaster on the
pupil, and he speaks of the pupil, as an elderly man, looking back,
in these words:
"Enlightened by the experience of fatherhood, they will see with a
clear remembrance firmness in dealing with their moral faults or
patience in dealing with their intellectual weakness, and, calling to
mind the old schoolroom, they will think it was good for us to be
there. For unknown to us therein were three tabernacles--one for us,
one for our schoolmaster, and one for Him Who is the friend of all
children and the Master of all schoolmasters."
If words like those can be said of us long after we have taught our
last lesson or made our last speech, we shall not have done our work
or lived our lives in vain, and the generations to come will rise up
and call us blessed.
_ON SOME GREAT MEN_
MR. BONAR LAW
IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS
13_th 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
23_rd 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
15_th 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.
[1] The original inspiration of the movement was given by the late
Canon Barnett and Mrs. (now Dame Henrietta) Barnett, who founded
Toynbee Hall.
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."
* * * * * * * *