society movement stands for. Like many other good things, it is of
pure English growth, and owes its origin to the common people from
whom many of the best things have come. It springs, as it were, from
the soil, and has been a great instrument during a period of rapid
change in instructing our people in some of the greatest of the
principles which should guide their lives, as well as in branches of
work and learning in many subjects in which they could have no other
teacher.
Immersed as my life has become in political work, I am glad that in
the friendly society movement we know no politics. Politics have
such powers of penetrating most things that I am thankful that this
movement has never been captured by any of the political machines,
and I hope its leaders will see to it in the future that it remains a
thing apart.
A man entering a court or lodge gets his first insight into the
common problem of Government; learns to control himself by working
with others; learns to work with others for the benefit of others,
and to exercise discrimination and judgment. I have also seen how
the savings of the many can be utilised to fertilise the public
services and the social activities of the country. The whole spirit
of the movement is service for others, a spirit which is more wanted
in England and in every country of the world to-day than any other;
but because of the great influence and position of our own country
there is no other in which that spirit needs to be more manifested,
since the greater part of mankind looks to us as to the one country
which they hope and believe will set the example to the world in the
stability and probity of its finances and in its willingness to be of
service to the rest of the distracted world. By teaching our own
people the spirit of service which the friendly societies inculcate,
we are playing our part in making our democracy fitter and nobler,
and by doing that we are not only helping ourselves but the whole
world.
HARROW
AT THE DINNER OF THE HARROW ASSOCIATION
19_th July_, 1923
Thanks be to Heaven there is in every English boy an unconscious but
impregnable resistance to every form of pressure made by any
schoolmaster who works him too hard or tries to put too much inside
him. I know that was so in my own case and in that of many who have
done far more work in the world than I have. It is to this that
Englishmen owe so largely the careful cultivation of their physical
growth. They let the body grow, undisturbed by mental storms, until
they got into their early twenties, and then they go out into the
world able to graft the sane mind on to the sane body. They have not
worked out their minds before they come to tackle the problems of the
world.
I cannot help going back into the past, seeing so many faces which
call up memories of forty years ago. When a small boy at a private
school I was taken, wearing a new top hat and an Eton jacket, to
Lords, where I watched the Harrow Eleven winning a great victory. I
remember that at the tail of the team there walked from the pavilion
by far the largest schoolboy I had ever seen. The first ball that
boy got he put well into the old pavilion. The boy's name was Ronald
M'Neill.
I can single out to-night a man, whom I remember as captain of my
house football eleven, who has just returned after a most
distinguished period of service in Persia and Mesopotamia. He is
known to the whole Empire as Sir Percy Cox. Not far from him is
another whose name I hardly dare mention, because in those distant
years he was my fag. He combined immaculate cleanliness with an
immaculate manner. I am proud to call him my Right Honourable
learned and gallant friend Jack Seely. Sprinkled here and there
throughout the room, some of them disguised in clerical dress, are a
lot of distinguished men whom I remember as ruffians in the football
field.
There is no feeling that remains longer in life than the feeling that
one has at thirteen or fourteen years of age, and I assure the
Captain of the Eleven here to-night that in the breasts of all the
small boys at Harrow to-day, that feeling of awe and reverence with
which he is personally regarded will be as vivid in their bosoms
fifty years hence as it is to-day.
I must pay tribute to the Fourth Form Room. The first time I made
its acquaintance was when I sat for an entrance examination, and I
remember so well my disappointment at finding I was among the
rejected. I got over it, however, in subsequent years, when I learnt
that two of the most distinguished men in public life to-day had
shared my fate: one is the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the
other--it is the first time I have ever been classed with first-class
brains--no less a person than the late Lord Chancellor, the Earl of
Birkenhead. Happy the school whose outcasts and rejected can yet
make good in after life!
When the call came to me to form a Government, one of my first
thoughts was that it should be a Government of which Harrow should
not be ashamed. I remembered how in previous Governments there had
been four or, perhaps, five Harrovians, and I determined to have six.
To make a Cabinet is like making a jig-saw puzzle fit, and I managed
to make my six fit by keeping the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer
for myself. I think we have good reason to be content. I am very
proud that it has fallen to my lot to be the next Prime Minister
after Palmerston to come from Harrow, and it is a special source of
pride and joy to me to know that Mr. Yates Thompson is here to-night,
for he was the Head of the School when Palmerston was Prime Minister.
I hope with all my heart that the present Head of the School may live
to be as old as Mr. Yates Thompson, be as much respected, and be able
to look back with as much pleasure at the share he took in our
gathering this evening.
I have known no occasion on which it has been more difficult to find
the right word to express my feelings. I stand here to-night among
men who have made good in this world for their own sakes and for the
sake of the School in every walk of life. I think they will agree
with me--stern self-critics as all men must be who have made
good--that there is only one form of congratulation in this world
that is worth anything, and that is the expression of good will and
the expression from your own peers--that is, from the men who
themselves are working in the hard places of the world and trying to
make those rough places smooth--that you have tried to do your duty.
I realise as well as anyone here that the kindness you have shown me
and the welcome you have given me are not so much a tribute to
achievement--that, please God! may come later--but as holding out the
hand to one from the same School who is now taking on himself the
heaviest burden in the world. You mean by your greeting to assure me
that you wish me well, as I know you do, and that whether I succeed
or fail you have the belief in me that as a son of the Hill I will
run straight; that I will bear my share of the burden; that if I fail
I will not whine; and that if success is mine I shall not be puffed
up; but that I will try in all things to follow in the footsteps of
those who have trodden this same difficult path before me; and that I
will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and a
difficult career which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I
have failed to do my best to live up to the highest ideals of the
School.
SOME ANCESTORS
FROM A SPEECH TO THE NONCONFORMIST
UNIONIST LEAGUE
8_th April_, 1924
I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist
ancestry. It is curiously crossed with two very strong strains which
work sometimes comfortably and sometimes very uncomfortably side by
side. I have a Quaker strain that goes back to the earliest days of
the Quakers, when one of my ancestors went out in the reign of
William III. as a missionary to the American Colonies. He devoted
half a century mainly to missionary work there and in the West
Indies, where ultimately he died, leaving a name which was perhaps
the most prominent and the best known of the Quaker missionaries in
those Colonies.
This Quaker blood is peculiarly persistent, and I attribute to it a
certain obstinacy which I find co-existing with one of the most
placable dispositions that ever a man had. I find sometimes that
when I conceive a matter to be one of principle I feel I would rather
go to the stake than give way. It sometimes brings me into trouble,
and has brought my friends into trouble, but I am afraid that
characteristic will remain with me as long as I live.
But all these things have their compensations. The Quakers were by
far the most persecuted body of the Nonconformists, and that strain
of Quakerism makes one absolutely impervious to the abuse which
necessarily occurs in public life.
To come to more modern times, I have a rather remarkable record--no
less than half my great-grandfathers were Presidents of Conference.
I am immensely proud of this ancestry, because they set an example
which it is not easy to live up to, and up to which, in the earlier
part of my life, I failed signally to live. I quoted the instance
while I was in Scotland of one of my great-grandfathers who was the
son of a man who fled from Scotland after the "Forty-five." He was a
personal follower of John Wesley, and was, if I remember aright,
ordained by him to the Wesleyan ministry. He was a man who never
could have had more than a couple of pounds a week, but he was a
natural scholar. He taught himself many languages, and, more
remarkable still, he educated his own eldest son to take a
scholarship at Cambridge, and in the next generation the same
performance was repeated by the gaining of a scholarship at Oxford by
the son of a father who must have been brought up on something very
like that narrow and meagre income. It was, indeed, a time of plain
living and high thinking.
If there is one thing more than another of which I feel ashamed
to-day, it is to think how I, with the chances I had in youth--and I
venture to think with the capacity to take equal advantage of
them--wasted so much time when I was at the University and failed to
follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before me, with far
less advantages. But these things come home to us as we get older.
I think, as years go by, we look more and more to those who have gone
before us, and we want to feel that when our time comes to pass away
we may leave some record behind us to make those who follow less
ashamed of us.
A WAR MEMORIAL
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE BOARD OF TRADE WAR
MEMORIAL
19_th December_, 1923
There is no greater honour that can fall to a man than to be asked to
unveil a memorial of this kind. I am grateful to those who asked me
to perform this ceremony to-day. All over the land, in stone and
bronze, have arisen these memorials; memorials to help us in our
recollections and to tell the world and the unborn generations of the
magnitude of the sacrifice by which we attained our victory. And the
unborn generations in some way are happier than we, for to them will
be revealed in their true perspective the magnitude and the issues of
the contest, and from them will be hidden some of the controversies,
the sordid things, the selfishness and the greed which arose among
the good deeds like poisonous fungi, the recollection of which will
pass away with our generation. But even now, those who are here can
see and estimate what the endurance and the courage of our own people
were during those years, and it should be an inspiration to us for
the rest of our lives.
There never was a war before this, at any rate for our country, in
which the whole people was engaged directly or indirectly; a war in
which men went forth to fight in the full consciousness of what they
did. Not a man, whose name is commemorated on this tablet, but went
forth with the full knowledge that he was fighting for what he and
his countrymen believed to be right, for the liberties of the world,
and those who fell, fell in a belief, perhaps hardly uttered by
themselves, that somehow or another their lives might be given to
promote the betterment of this world.
Seven millions perished in Europe, and here we commemorate but a tiny
fraction of that vast host. Not one of those seven millions in all
the countries of Europe and of the New World, but his death broke
some tie of friendship, made a vacant place in some home, and the
mourning for them will last with our lives. It is no use our asking
that question which has so often come to the lips of disconsolate men
and women, "Were their lives sacrificed in vain?" "The true sorrow
of humanity consists in this, not that the mind of man fails, but
that the course and demands of actions and of life so rarely
correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires." So said
Wordsworth more than a hundred years ago, and his words are as true
now as when he wrote them.
To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud
has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through
all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the
character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our
country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from
unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say
of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no
permanent root in their hearts.
I think we ought to remember at a gathering like this, that in the
Civil Service, different perhaps from many other services, only a
limited number could go and fight, and the Civil Service contained
many men who, had they been able, would have been in the forefront of
the battle, and who, not being able to go, devoted themselves to the
work of the country in their various stations in a manner deserving
of the highest praise. Many lives were sacrificed in the war,
sacrificed under the strain of continuous overwork as truly and in
the same spirit as those who gave their lives in battle. Of no
department can that be said with greater truth than of this great
department to which we are proud to belong or to have belonged.
Of those whose names we commemorate here, "In the sight of the
unwise, they seem to die: and their departure is taken for misery,
and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in
peace." Peace is theirs, and we have to remember that, and it is a
peace that we cannot share. Lincoln said, and I think his are words
we should take from here to-day, "We must show an increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
In many ways our task is the harder, for, after all the sorrows that
most of us here have been through, we have to face the world with a
high courage and brave heart for the allotted time that may be left,
and devote ourselves each in his own vocation to the service of our
common humanity, knowing well that it is only by the united efforts
of men and women that we can maintain our civilisation at the level
to which it has been raised, and that only by super-human effort can
we better it. To try to do that is the least we can do for those who
gave their lives for us. It is only in proportion as we go out into
the world to do what we can for the world, that we can answer that
question at the end and say, "They have not died in vain."
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
Our thanks are due to the Editors of the _Times_, the _Morning Post_,
the _Daily _Telegraph_, the _Yorkshire Post_, the Student_ and the
_English Race_, and to Mr. John Murray for the permission they have
kindly given us to make use of the texts of the Prime Minister's
addresses published by them.