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lived, changing, enthusiasms. could not conceive of him sitting down to write a letter of compliment to the last new lady novelist, or plunging into public controversy with a Professor of Biology.

His circle of friends was limited and select, and he did not seek to enlarge it; and even from the men who might have been regarded as his political associates he held himself apart. It was said that he did not know all the members of his own Ministry by sight, and sometimes had to ask their names when they saluted him in any public place. In all these traits, and habits, and inclinations, he was strangely out of touch with an age which has a most valet-like inquisitiveness over all the minor doings of "great people," and looks upon its heroes chiefly as material for attractive gossip. But nobody could gossip about Salisbury. You might as well have tried to joke over the Binomial Theorem. This reserve made him respected, and gave him a reputation, perhaps even beyond his deserts, for self-contained force and silent resolution. One was sometimes reminded of Sheridan's irreverent treatment of Lord Salisbury's most famous ancestor. With Mr. Puff in The Critic, the public may have felt that "a minister in his situation with the whole affairs of the nation on his head," could not be expected to find time to mix much with other people. "Burleigh comes forward, shakes his head, and exit." Impressive, undoubtedly, was the occasional emergence of the shrouded figto "shake his head," with ure, trenchant speech on the platform, or in the Senate, only to retire to his State-papers, or behind the guarded gates of Hatfield, where even the society journalist could not follow him. A great Whig noble, in short, who had brought down the reticent eighteenth century traditions to the age of the

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German Emperor, of President Roosevelt, of Mr. Chamberlain.

The truth is that Lord Salisbury was essentially an aristocratic statesman. By this it is not meant that he had any undue preference for his own order, or was imbued with the vulgar pride of rank or birth. From the kind of snobbishness, which is not limited to social aspirants and nouveaux riches, but often goes with the oldest lineage, he was absolutely without a trace. His habits were simple, his dress was careless, his manner, in private life, was unassuming. He showed no consciousness, and very likely he had none, of those differences in "position," which count for so much in our English society, and which were always rather acutely present to the minds of Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone. He treated a marquess in the same fashion as he treated a curate or a clerk in the Treasury, with the same modest reserve, the same absence of hauteur. His aristocracy was that of the intellect and the temper. His mind was constitutionally incapable of standing the prejudices, the passions, the loose opinions, of the common run of men and women. When he approached a great question it was in the spirit with which he encountered some problem of chemical electricity in his laboratory. He made his appeal to instructed reasoning, and to the finished mental processes of penetrating logicians like himself. To the sentiments, the impulses, which sway the masses, he was curiously blind. He came near to being a great orator: at least, he had many of the qualities which belong to that character. He had wit, and readiness, and fluency, a manding presence, an imposing delivery, a keen sense of style, an apt mas-tery of epigram, argument and retort. But he lacked the sympathetic instincts which, for the public speaker, are greater than these. With all his.

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gifts he was less effective on the platform than many a smaller man. Except on some rare occasions, as at the famous Opera House meeting in 1886, when he was roused beyond himself, he seemed out of touch with his audience. He was destitute of the histrionic elasticity which made Mr. Gladstone as much at home with a mob of dockyard laborers on Blackheath as he was with the blasé critics of the House of Commons. The popular orator is "near akin" to the actor; but the temperament of the stage was not given to Lord Salisbury. He lectured a crowd of workmen or small shopkeepers with a professional aloofness and a dignified unconsciousness of their special characteristics. The admirable analysis, the cutting phrases, delighted the judicious reader of the next day's newspapers. But at the moment of delivery they too often fell flat, or were received with a murmur of half-bewildered appreciation.

He had an odd habit of thinking aloud in his speeches. With his facts well arranged in his mind beforehand, he could speak without references or notes. The words came to him as he went on, and often the ideas. And if a sudden thought struck him, he would sometimes pursue it to the conclusion which suggested itself to his trenchant, satirical intellect, as he might have done-and in that case with impunity-in conversation with intimate friends round his dining-table at Hatfield. I think that this trait, much more than any natural impulsiveness of temperament, accounts for those occasional "blazing indiscretions," those "gibes, and flouts, and jeers," of which so much was made. His emotions did not run away with him; but sometimes his sense of logic did, and his artistic enjoyment of remorseless paradox and pungent epigram phrase. It is a perilous talent, and has led men, with more popular

instincts than Lord Salisbury, to dangerous blunders; as when Lord Beaconsfield, in the midst of the Bulgarian atrocities agitation of 1876, allowed himself to slide into that celebrated sentence, which did him as much harm as anything he ever said:—

The Turks do not often resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.

It was the ill-timed flippancy of a caustic man of the world-the affectation of treating serious topics lightly, that is current in "Society." If it had been said in the right milieu and at the right time, it would not have occurred to any one to accuse the speaker of undue levity or a callous disregard of suffering. But Disraeli had forgotten that the audience he addressed was only a fragment of the great British public, which at the moment was passing through an emotional crisis, and was pulsing with religious indignation. To a good half of the nation, to tens of thousands of earnest church-going and chapel-going men and women, the jest so lightly uttered was an unforgivable offence, a vivid proof that its author was a heartless cynic, wanting the common feelings of humanity.

Lord Salisbury, at any rate, was no cynic, if by that term is meant a soured materialist, who believes that human conduct is directed mainly by motives of self-interest and self-indulgence. He was neither misanthropic nor morose, but on the contrary a deeply devout man, who had faith, not only in the moral ordering of the universe, but in the instincts and character of his countrymen. But he surveyed public affairs without illusions. In private life kindly, affectionate, genial, even cheerful, Lord Salisbury was in politics a contented and philosophical pessimist. He acquiesced with a large tolerance in the imperfections of an

imperfect world. He took the view, which is not easily disputed, that the scheme of things is very badly arranged and exhibits numerous inexplicable deficiencies. As most of these cannot be amended, it is best to accept them, and make due allowance for their operation in the management of affairs. If you ignore them, you will certainly go wrong; if you endeavor to remove them altogether, you will probably do more harm than good. In this he was at the opposite pole of feeling from the Radicals and Liberals of his earlier days. The old-fashioned reformers of the great progressive era had before them an ideal of perfection, which could be realized by political and economic changes. The world was out of joint it is true, though chiefly through the errors of sovereigns, ministers, and aristocratic rulers, in the past; but Parliament and a free Press, aided by popular enlightenment and Mechanics' Institutes, could put it right. These sanguine meliorists held that there was no abuse which would not be rooted out, no public evil which might not be abolished. Lord Salisbury, whose hobby was science, had no sympathy with this romance of the future. He thought there were many things that were not susceptible of improvement, and was satisfied with the fabric of institutions, and the balance of powers and interests, which had been arranged by Nature, or slowly evolved through the ages. Society, as constituted in nineteenth-century England had undoubtedly its defects; but it also had its advantages, and a wise man would put up with the one for the sake of the other, instead of worrying himself over the unattainable. It may be that circumstances, as much as temperament, were responsible for this intelligent Toryism in the case of the late Prime Minister. If a man has been born in the innermost circle of a privileged caste, if for the greater part

of his life he has all that the millions of other men hopelessly desire, if he has wealth, high station, splendid estates, a palace to live in, the best of society to choose from, books, pictures, leisure and the other delectable things that money can purchase, and in addition a superior intellect, personal dignity, domestic comfort, and the enjoyment of the family affections-if all these are given unto him, he may be excused for finding the world a very tolerable place in despite of its obvious blemishes. Insensibly a man is conditioned by his "environment." It would be strange indeed if a Cecil or a Cavendish should find himself ravaged by consuming passion for radical change.

With this view of things, Lord Salisbury could hardly be a constructive statesman. He was less a reformer than a critic. The latter rôle suited his analytical tastes, his caustic and penetrating style, and the bent of his intellect, which in its essence was judicial and argumentative, rather than practical and direct. If he had been on the Bench, he would have made a great judge, though it may be that his expositions and his obiter dicta would have gained him more admiration than his decisions. In the old days of the unreformed Court of Chancery there were famous Chancellors, like Eldon, who grew so fond of a tangled case, that they pondered and refined over it for years before they could deliver their judgments. Lord Salisbury had a good deal of this analyzing and casuistical temper, which, when carried to excess, is a disadvantage in the conduct of affairs. saw both sides of a question, and preferred to brood over their weak points, instead of cutting through them with some roughly effective solution. There are many keen and searching passages in his speeches in which defects of existing institutions and practices are ex

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posed. Such, for instance, are his occasional references to our fiscal system. Lord Salisbury always professed to be a Free Trader, but he declined to accept the Peelite legislation as a religion, and maintained that "the Holy Doctrine of Free Trade" had no claim to an infallible orthodoxy. His satire was at its best when he was bantering the economical pontificate, especially when it was regarded as the special heritage of the Liberal Party:

Political economy is an oracle whose utterances we profoundly respect; but which, like a certain oracle of old, is apt to suit its utterances to the wishes of those who have the guardianship of it for the time being. On a certain occasion, when the Delphic oracle was in the power of the Macedonian Army, its utterances were said to be "Philipized," and I am afraid that the utterances of political economy nowadays are only too apt to be "Gladstonized." When I first entered Parliament, it used to be regarded as an axiom that commercial treaties were founded on erroneous and unsound principles, and could not be for the benefit of the countries entering into them. Circumstances, however, have changed; political economy has reviewed its doctrines, and commercial treaties are regarded as the most orthodox things imaginable. Spain, let us say, treats our manufactures very badly, and excludes them, while she admits the manufactures of other countries. If we were able to say to her, "If you continue in that course we shall be obliged to raise the duty on your wines," it is very possible that after a little time a new light might break in upon her reflections. But we cannot do it because retaliation is a mortal sin under this doctrine of Free Trade.

He evidently enjoyed the task of disconcerting unthinking enthusiasts by showing that Free Trade at home had given us no power to secure open markets abroad. He could always supply an "hypothetical illustration" of the manner in which our commercial diplomacy was filtered by the liberality of

our tariff arrangements. "Away with Free Trade," then, might be the hasty deduction of some more impatient statesman. It was an inference Lord Salisbury never drew. He remained a Free Trader to the end, and I have no doubt the common report is correct, which represents him, in the last months of his life, as deeply concerned and alarmed by Mr. Chamberlain's sudden counter-march. Nor, though he sometimes talked Retaliation, did he ever make an attempt to carry that policy into effect. Theoretically, and as a matter of argument, he could see the weak places of our fiscal method. But to remedy it by a kind of economic revolution was the last thing that could commend itself to his cautious and conservative temperament. He knew that there are many things, in the abstract far from perfect, which yet cannot be altered without injury. A wise man amuses himself by explaining their deficiencies; and puts up with them.

He had much the same conception of the British constitution. Here his attitude was essentially Whiggish. I do not think he could ever have held Burke's touching belief in the beauty and symmetry of the odd compromise, which evolved itself out of the historical accidents and the party struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The English Parliamentary system did not excite his reverence. He was conscious that it often worked badly, that it was an extremely cumbrous instrument of administration; and he found a gloomy satisfaction in explaining that under it a Ministry could hardly be expected to maintain our defensive armaments in a condition of genuine efficiency. But such as it was, we had it, and must contrive to manage our business by its agency -not perhaps as well as we should like, but better than we should do if we embarked on violent changes. The

party system was of course quite irrational in substance and logically indefensible. But there it is, and we are so situated that the Cabinet machine will not work without it. So the prudent statesman accepts it, with a clear understanding of the “swing of the pendulum," and a frank recognition of the fact that whatever he does, or leaves undone, the fickle democracy is sure to turn him out of office in due course and put his rivals in. If you take that view, there is undoubtedly a certain temptation to which it seemed sometimes as if Lord Salisbury had succumbed, to pass to the further deduction that real success, either personal or political, is scarcely worth striving for. You are doing necessarily imperfect work, with inadequate tools, and you are bound, sooner or later, to suffer defeat. Under such conditions, a strictly moderate level of achievement is all you can hope to attain. It is a philosophical, and perhaps in essence a scientific, doctrine which protects those who hold it from illusion and disappointment. But it is not so inspiring as that more artistic, and possibly therefore more erroneous, formula, which declares that "not failure but low aim is crime," in the life of men and nations.

To these characteristics and predispositions must, no doubt, be attributed a certain carelessness on Lord Salisbury's part in the selection of his political associates and subordinates, to which the ugly name of nepotism was sometimes given. It cannot be denied that he exhibited an undue indulgence for respectable mediocrity, and that he was far from diligent in his search for talent, nor did he always appear to regard merit and force of character as necessary qualifications for high office, or for public honors. He officered his Ministries much too largely with wellborn place-men, veteran party hacks, and his own relatives. There were

several conspicuously weak places in his Administrations of 1886 and 1895; and matters were not mended when he threw away the opportunity, afforded by the last general election, to give promotion to a further contingent from the "Hotel Cecil." To a country which was beginning to clamor for efficiency, and was indeed badly feeling the need of that quality, this was disappointing. Yet one can hardly suppose that Lord Salisbury's appointments were due to the unworthy motive of providing his family and friends with good posts at the public expense. Nor must it be forgotten that an English Premier must always find it extremely difficult to confine his ministerial appointments to men of exceptional ability. He does not know where to look for those capable men of business, those born administrators whose services would be so valuable. In prac tice his choice is limited to a very restricted circle, composed as it is of the members of his own party, in the two Houses, who have gained a certain reputation in those assemblies. Eliminate a few commanding figures, whose "claims" to office cannot be repudiated, and most of these aspirants are much on a level. As A. is neither much better nor much worse than B., and either would do reasonably well, the harassed Cabinet-maker naturally selects the one who is personally known to himself, or to his sons or brothers, or to the little court of intimate acquaintances who have his private ear. In the case of Lord Salisbury, there was a special temptation to adopt this easy solution of the difficulty, since he lived so much apart from general society, and gave himself few opportunities of gauging the calibre of the younger rising men. Nor, again, must it be overlooked that there is a tradition-a very bad traditionaccording to which a politician who has once held "Cabinet rank" has a

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