LORD ROBERT CECIL
_"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."_--EMERSON.
If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses
contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to
one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick
of prurient tales, will pronounce this hero to be a prig. In like
manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the
nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and
his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men most in despair of
politics, will declare him to be a fanatic.
This has been the unfortunate fate of Lord Robert Cecil. He is regarded
by his countrymen as unpractical. Men speak well of him, and confess
willingly that he is vastly superior in character and intellect to the
ruck of politicians, but nevertheless wind up their panegyrics with the
regretful judgment that, alas, he is a fanatic.
It is a thousand pities, I think, that he is not a fanatic. It is for
the very reason he is not fanatical that his progress in politics has
been in the suburbs of the second rank. He has every quality for the
first rank, and for the foremost place in that rank, save the one urging
passion of enthusiasm. It is a sense of humour, an engaging sense of
diffidence, a continual deviation towards a mild and gentle cynicism, it
is this spirit--the very antithesis of a fanatical temper--which keeps
him from leadership.
The nation has reason on its side for suspecting Lord Robert Cecil. In
the mind of the British people nothing is more settled than the
conviction that the conquering qualities of a great captain are courage
and confidence. He has given no sign of these qualities. Nature, it
would seem, has fashioned him neither pachydermatous nor pugilistic. He
appears upon the platform as a gentleman makes his entrance into a
drawing-room, not as a toreador leaps into the bull ring. He expresses
his opinions as a gentleman expresses his views at a dinner-table, not
as an ale-house politician airs his dogmatisms in the tap-room. The very
qualities which give such a grace and power to his personality, being
spiritual qualities, prevent him from capturing the loud and grateful
loyalty of a political party.
Now, while a man like Mr. Lloyd George can only affirm his own essence
by the exercise of what we may call brute force, and by making use of
vulgar methods from which a person of Lord Robert Cecil's quality would
naturally shrink, it is nevertheless not at all necessary for a man of
noble character and greater power to employ the same means in order to
earn the confidence of his countrymen.
What is necessary in this case is not brute force but fanaticism, and by
fanaticism I mean that spirit which in Cromwell induced Hume to call him
"this fanatical hypocrite," and which Burke adequately defined in saying
that when men are fanatically fond of an object _they will prefer it to
their own peace_.
Lord Robert Cecil need not adopt the tricks of a mountebank to achieve
leadership of the British nation, but he must contract so entire a faith
in the sacred character of his mission that all the inhibiting
diffidencies of his modest nature will henceforth seem to him like the
whisperings of temptation. He must cease to watch the shifts of public
opinion. He must cease merely to recommend the probable advantage of
rather more idealism in the politics of Europe. He must act. He must
learn to know that a man cannot give a great idea to the world without
giving himself along with it. The cause must consume the person.
Individual peace must be sacrificed for world's peace.
From the very beginning of the War Lord Robert Cecil perceived that the
need of the nation was not for a great political leader, but for a great
moral leader. He told me so with an unforgettable emphasis, well aware
that under the public show of our national life the heart of the British
people was famishing for such guidance. He numbered himself among those
anxiously scanning the horizon for such a leader. He should have been
instead answering the inarticulate cry of the people for that leader.
No good man of my acquaintance is more powerfully convinced of the
goodness of British nature. He watches the British people with an
abiding affection. He believes that they possess, even those of them who
appear most degraded and sordid, the foundational virtues of Christian
character--a love of justice, an instinct for kindness, and faith in
truth. He knows that they are more capable than any other people in
Europe of generous self-sacrifice, and that any absence of grace in
their manner which must distress the superficial observer comes rather
of a passion for honesty than a lack of beauty. And this knowledge of
his goes with the conviction that no man will ever appeal to the British
nation in vain who bases his appeal on justice, fair play, and charity.
What a nation to lead! What an inspiration for a true leader!
He is convinced that no moral appeal has ever been made to the British
people in vain. And yet he has never made that appeal. With grief and
sorrow he watches the stampeding of the nation he so deeply admires into
murderous and indiscriminate hatred of our enemies in the late war. He
saw the majority of the British people's war-like mood degraded and
vulgarized by the propaganda of hate. But he made no move to save the
national honour. The better part, and as I firmly believe the greater
part, of the nation was waiting for moral leadership: particularly were
the young men of the nation who marched to death with the purest flame
of patriotism in their hearts hungering for such leadership; but Lord
Robert Cecil, the one man in Parliament who might have sounded that
note, was silent. The voice that should have made Britain's glory
articulate, the voice that might have brought America into the War in
1914 and rendered Germany from the outset a house divided against
itself, was never heard. Lord Robert Cecil looked on, and Mr. Lloyd
George sprang into the prize-ring with his battle-cry of the knock-out
blow.
I wonder if even the sublimest humility can excuse so fatal a silence.
Great powers have surely great responsibilities.
I remember speaking to Lord Robert on one occasion of the shooting of
Miss Cavell--a brutal act which distressed him very deeply. I said I
thought we weakened our case against Germany by speaking of that
atrocious act as a "murder," since by the rules of war, as she herself
confessed, Miss Cavell incurred the penalty of death. He replied: "What
strikes me as most serious in that act is not so much that the Germans
should think it no crime to shoot a woman, but that they should be
wholly incapable of realizing how such an atrocious deed would shock the
conscience of the world. They were surprised--think of it!--by the
world's indignation!"
In this remark you may see how far deeper his reflections take him than
what passes for reflection among the propagandists of hate. Abuse of
Germany never occupied his mind, which was sorrowfully engaged in
striving to comprehend the spiritual conditions of the German people: he
realized, that is to say, that we were not fighting an enemy who could
be shouted down or made ashamed by abusive epithets, but that we were
opposing a spirit whose anger and temper were entirely different from
our own, and therefore a spirit which must be understood if we were to
conquer it. It was not merely the armies of Germany which must be
defeated, it was the soul of Germany which had to be converted. He saw
this clearly: he never ceased to work to that end; but he failed to take
the nation into his confidence and the public never understood what he
was after. A fanatic would have left the nation in no doubt of his
purpose.
Every now and then he has half let the nation see what was in his mind.
For example, he has taken those illuminating, those surely inspired,
words of Edith Cavell as the text for more than one address--_Patriotism
is not enough_. But beautiful and convincing as these addresses have
been, their spirit has always had the wistful and _piano_ tones of
philosophy, never the consuming fervour of fanaticism. He knows, as few
other men know, that without a League of Nations the future of
civilization is in peril, even the future of the white races; but he has
never made the world feel genuine alarm for this danger or genuine
enthusiasm for the sole means that can avert it. He has not preached
the League of Nations as a way of salvation; he has only recommended it
as a legal tribunal.
It is apparently difficult for a politician, however statesmanlike his
qualities, to realize that politics cannot be even divorced from
morality, much less to comprehend that morality is the very sinew of
politics, being in truth nothing more than the conscience of a nation
striving to express itself in State action. Because of this politics
become degraded and sink to the lowest levels of a mere factional
manoeuvring for place. They engage the attention of the attorney, and
earn nothing but the contempt of the wise. They become like the
perversions of art in the hands of those who assert that art has nothing
to do with morals; they interest only a handful of experts.
But a man like Lord Robert Cecil does surely apprehend that the essence
of politics is morality and, therefore, his unwillingness to use moral
weapons in the political arena is hard to understand. He debates where
he should appeal; he criticizes where he should denounce; and he accepts
a compromise where he should lead a revolt. He is also altogether too
civil for the rogues with whom he has to do.
I remember being in the House of Commons on an afternoon when Mr. Lloyd
George was expected to make an important speech. Lord Robert Cecil sat
in a corner seat on the back benches; his brother, Lord Hugh, occupied
the corner seat on the front bench below the gangway. During the Prime
Minister's speech, which was a succession of small scoring points
against the Labour Party delivered with that spirit of cocksureness
which has grown with him in the last few years, I noticed Lord Robert
make a pencilled note on a slip of paper and pass it across the gangway
with a nod of his head toward Lord Hugh. I watched the journey of this
little paper and watched to see its effect. Lord Hugh unfolded the slip
of paper, read it, smiled very boyishly all over his face, and, folding
it up again, slowly turned his head and looked back towards his brother.
The smile they exchanged was a Cecilian biography. One saw in the light
of that instant and whole-hearted smile the danger of a keen sense of
ironical humour. Both these men have the making of creative fanatics; in
both of them there is an intense moral earnestness and in both great
intellectual power; but nature has mixed up with these gifts, which were
intended for mankind, a drollery of spirit, only amusing in the
confidence of private life which they have allowed to weaken their
sincerities. Humanity may be thankful that St. Paul was without a sense
of humour.
During the war, as Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil rendered
services of the greatest magnitude to his countrymen: he kept Sweden out
of the war when the Russian Foreign Office could hardly breathe for
anxiety on this point, and at a time when many British newspapers were
doing their best to facilitate the great desire of Germany to march an
army through Sweden and Finland to the thus easily reached Russian
capital. His work, too, at the Peace Conference in Paris entitles him to
the gratitude of the nation: he kept the idea of the League of Nations
alive in an atmosphere that was charged with war. He prevented these
conferences from making "a Peace to end Peace." But on the whole I feel
that he is rather the shadow of great statesmanship leaning diffidently
over the shoulder of political brute force than the living spirit of
great statesmanship leading the moral conscience of the world away from
barbarism towards nobler reason and less partial truth.
MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL
MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill (Leonard Spencer) son of Lord
Randolph Churchill. Born, 1874. Educ: Harrow and Sandhurst. Entered
army in 1895; served with Spanish Forces in Cuba, 1895; in
operations in India, 1897-98; on the Nile and at the Battle of
Khartoum, 1899; was given the Khartoum Medal in that year;
Correspondent of the _Morning Post_ in South Africa, 1899-1900;
taken prisoner and escaped, 1900; in long series of actions
including Spion Kop, Pieters, and capture of Pretoria; M.P. Oldham,
1900-06; M.P. for Manchester, 1906-08; commissioned Colonel, 1916;
retired, 1916; Under Colonial Secretary, 1906-08; President Board
of Trade, 1908-10; Home Secretary, 1910-11; First Lord of the
Admiralty, 1911-15; Minister of Munitions, 1917; Rector of Aberdeen
Univ., 1914; Chairman of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1915; Author of a
series of books (campaign records), and also of the _Life of Lord
Randolph Churchill_.
[Illustration: RT. HON. WINSTON CHURCHILL]