Great Men

7 minute read
TIME

COMMONWEALTH

(British Commonwealth of Nations)

Where does Old England stand as the New Year opens? The question is best answered in terms of her great men. As the year closed a volume,* well spiced yet sound and seasoned, was set on the world’s book shelf. Therein that shrewd and keenly discerning British editor emeritus, Alfred G. Gardiner, has sketched the great men of his country, and several others, in a style brilliantly quotable. Quotations:

Stanley Baldivin, Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House of Commons; “There are times when he seems to be a prophet coming with a message hot from Sinai, and there are times when he suggests that Alice has wandered, round-eyed and innocent, into the Wonderland of Westminster. . . . The truth is that Mr. Baldwin is unintelligible to the politician because he is the least politically minded person who has ever reached great office. . . . Like Diocletian, he would be happier among his cabbages than in Parliament. . . .

“He means well, but he is not always clear as to what he means.

“His merits are of the heart rather than the head. . . . You cannot dislike him if you ‘try with both hands,’ as Humpty-Dumpty would say. . . .

“I like to see him taking his week-end tramps among the woods and hills, . . . always alone, except for two stalwart figures that follow at a discreet distance, his hat off, his cherry-wood pipe in full blast—he once confessed that he had never given more than a shilling for a pipe—and his long strides devouring the miles with an air of lusty exhilaration. He is English to the core and loves his country for the right things. . . .

L.C.M.S. Amery, Secretary of State for the Colonies: “If I were asked to name the most influential member of the Government … I should name the most dour, the most drab, the least popularly attractive figure in the Cabinet.

“To the public, Mr. Leopold Charles Maurice Stennett Amery is a name and nothing more. . . .

“Even Mr. Amery’s pugnacity and physical courage have not succeeded in making him a popular character. … At one of his meetings, when someone called him a ‘liar,’ he promptly leapt from the platform and knocked him down. . . . But, somehow, not even this episode succeeded in making Mr. Amery either famous or infamous. . . . The reason is not obscure. His public form, contrary to his private manner, is hard, arid, vitriolic. No humorous legend attaches itself to his name, and no kindliness of spirit or gaiety of expression graces his acts or utterances. . . .

“While the reason for his personal unpopularity is plain, the reason for his influence is no less intelligible. … He has, what few men in public life have, and what no one in the present Government has in anything like the same measure, a constant philosophy of affairs and an undeviating aim. . . . ‘Damn the consequences’ and forge straight ahead is his maxim, and he has learned that by the impetus and driving power of conviction it is possible to ram any gospel down the throats of colleagues who have none. . . .

“The form his fanaticism takes is that of Imperialism. . . . He envisages a world in which the British Empire, armed to the teeth, self-contained, neither buying nor selling with mere foreigners, looms menacing and tremendous over the world. . . .

“No lip service from him to that nonsense about the League of Nations. . . . What do we want with Leagues? Is not the British Empire League enough—’no artificial’ League, but the real thing, founded on reeking tube and iron shard?. . .

Sir Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Leader of the House of Commons: He is not happy with new ideas and realizes them slowly and a little painfully. . . . He has the hauteur of conscious weakness, and works timidly within the limits of departmental sanction. His contribution to public life is that of a conscientious and painstaking rectitude, but he belongs to the past, and has no vision of the future. . . .

Winston Spencer Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer: “The principal difference between Mr. Churchill and a cat, as Mark Twain might say, is that a cat has only nine lives. . . . ‘In war you can be killed but once,’ he [Mr. Churchill] has said, ‘but in politics many times.’ . . .

“At 50, at an age when most public men are only beginning to catch the limelight, when Mr. Baldwin was unknown and Mr. Bonar Law had not held office, he looks back on 30 years of romantic adventure that would provide material for a dozen normal lives which would find a place in the Dictionary of National Biography; on experiences of war in more continents than Napoleon fought in; on a library of books that would not do injustice to a life spent in literature, or journalism, lecturing, painting; on a political career more full of vicissitudes than any since that of Bolingbroke; and on the tenure of more great offices in the State, not merely than any contemporary statesman, but, I believe, than any man in our political history. . . .

“His isolation is unprecedented. He has personal friends, the chief being that other kindred spirit, Lord Birkenhead, and his loyalty to them is notorious; but he is an Ishmael in public life, loathed by the Tories whom he left and has now returned to; distrusted by the Liberals, on whose backs he first mounted to power; hated by Labor, whom he scorns and insults, and who see in him the potential Mussolini of a wave of reaction. . . .

“Today, in the prime of life . . . he is easily the foremost figure in Parliament. . . . He emerges today from No. 11, Downing Street, and such is his buoyancy and tenacity of grip upon the lifeboat of office that I see no reason why he should not one day emerge from No. 10.

Sir William (“Jix”) Joynson-Hicks, Secretary of State for Home Affairs: “When he first appeared upon the stage, as plain Mr. Hicks —the Joynson is an accretion from his marriage—he seems to have had painful tendencies of a Radical order and sat in the Highbury Parliament which met at the Highbury Athenaeum in North London as Radical member for Peterborough. . . . He came first into prominence as a crusading Evangelical. . . .

“I do not speak disrespectfully of these loyalties; but they make Sir William’s Toryism equivocal and they perhaps explain the shrillness of his note. . . . When he went to the Home Office he went with soul aflame to cleanse the social sewers. Drink, gambling, night clubs, all the brood of darkness should know that at last a real St. George was abroad in Merry England. But no blow fell. On each adventure he was quietly and painlessly disarmed, and he learned, what some of us had suspected, that Puritanism is not a strongly marked characteristic of Toryism and that it does not do to quarrel with one’s bread and butter. Drink, after all, is the Gibraltar of Toryism. . . .

The Earl of Birkenhead, Secretary of State for India: “There has been no more spectacular career in our time than his. . . . He is frankly an adventurer, and declares himself so. …

“The note of Lord Birkenhead’s political life is, the note of an easy flippancy. . . . His brains, as Lady Oxford wittily remarked, went to his head.”

*Portraits and Portents—A. G. Gardiner, Editor the London Daily News from 1902 to 1919—Harpers ($3).

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