The Adventure of Living Part 29

I remember a luciferous story which was told to me by Colonel John Hay to ill.u.s.trate the frenzy of party. A murderer was supposed to have entered the house of a great Republican politician and, holding a dagger over him, to have told him that his hour was come and that he must die.

The politician tried every appeal he could think of. "Consider," he said, "my poor wife and the misery she will feel at my death." "I am sorry for her, but it cannot be helped. You must die." "But think of my poor innocent children who will be left helpless orphans." "I am sorry for them too, but you must die." "Think of the evil effect on the country at this moment of crisis." "Yes, I know, and I am sorry; but that cannot move me. You must die." And then came the final appeal, "But think of the effect on the Republican Party!" Across the would-be murderer's face came a quiver of irresolution. The dagger dropped from his hands, and with the cry, "Good heavens! I never thought of that," he rushed from the room.

But though this is the danger, there is, happily, no need for us to carry the party system quite so far as that. Party discipline there must be, but it can be kept well within bounds. Nothing is more wholesome than for party leaders to know that if they push things too far and too often ask their followers to condone doubtful acts, their followers will leave them. Clearly, as the Irishman said of the truth, this spirit of independence must not be dragged out on every paltry occasion. It must, however, always remain in the background as a possibility, and, what is more even those who do not themselves revolt would be well advised to prevent extreme penal measures being applied within the party to a man who breaks away on a particular point.

For myself, curiously enough, I never felt any dislike of party, and was, indeed, I fondly believe, designed by Providence for a good and loyal party man, with no inconvenient desire to a.s.sert my own views. A perverse fate, however, has forced me twice in my life to break with my party, or, to put it more correctly, it has twice happened to me that the party to which I belonged adopted the policy that I had always deemed it essential to oppose. To begin with, I left the Liberal Party, to which my family had always belonged ever since the time of the Commonwealth, over Mr. Gladstone's sudden conversion to Home Rule and the abandonment of the Legislative Union. Whether I was right or wrong I am not going to discuss here. At any rate I followed Lord Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. John Bright, the Duke of Argyll, and a host of other good Liberals and Whigs and became, first a Liberal-Unionist, and then an unhyphenated Unionist, and a loyal supporter of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, and their administration.

In the Unionist Party, which has become quite as thoroughly Democratic as its opponent, I had hoped to live and die, but unfortunately, there came the one other question upon which I felt it my duty to take as strong a line as I did in opposing the very injurious and unjust form of Home Rule which first Mr. Gladstone, and then Mr. Asquith, advocated.

People who have forgotten, or who are not aware of the actual conditions, may think it strange that I, who proclaim myself so strongly in favour of obeying the Will of the Majority, should have become so strong a Unionist. A little reflection will show, however, that not only was there nothing contradictory in my att.i.tude, but that it was natural and inevitable from my democratic premises. I held the Union with Ireland to be as much an incorporating union as the union between the several States of the American Republic. I held that the Will of the Majority must prevail within the United Kingdom. The area in which the votes were to be counted was, in a word, to be the whole national area, and not a small portion of it. As I have argued for the last thirty-five years, in public and in private, and as I still feel, the Home Rule Question is and always must be a question of area.

The area which I took for the decision, and which I still think was the right area to give the decision, was the United Kingdom. If any other were adopted, you might very soon fritter away the whole United Kingdom.

Again, if we are to make a great financial present, as the Irish claim we must do, from the taxpayer of the centre to the detached fragments of the circ.u.mference, the process becomes a tragedy. If Ireland may go at the wish of her electors, so, of course, may Scotland, and so may Wales, each with their subsidy from England. Next, outlying portions of England may want to break away. The result would be a veritable apotheosis of political fissiparousness.

In spite of this, I admit that you cannot fight a political battle on the principle of the _reductio ad absurdum_. The people of England might hold that for special reasons Ireland would have a right to separate, but that this must not be a precedent to be applied to the rest of Britain. a.s.suming, however, that Ireland shall have exceptional treatment, I saw, as of course, did many other people, for I am not so foolish as to make any claim to seeing further than my neighbours, that the question of area again controlled the event. Ireland was not a h.o.m.ogeneous country. There were two Irelands--the Ireland of the North and the Ireland of the South, the Ireland of the Celt and of the Teuton, and, above all, the Ireland in which Roman Catholics formed a large majority of the population, and the Ireland in which the Protestants formed the local majority. In a word, the twenty-six counties of the South and the six counties of the North differed in every respect.

Neither could justly be put in control of the other; though both might be united through a Union with England, Scotland, and Wales.

From these premises I drew certain inferences, which I believe to be entirely sound. One was that you could not say that Ireland, as a whole, might claim to break away from the United Kingdom, and then refuse the claim of the Six-County Area to break away from the rest of Ireland.

Arguments against the diversion and disruption of Ireland would be exactly the same as those used by the Unionists to forbid the destruction of the United Kingdom. Feeling this, as I did, when Mr.

Gladstone introduced his second Home Rule Bill, I took an early opportunity of going over to Belfast and ascertaining the facts on the spot. I was confirmed in my view that there could be no solution of the Irish Question which would be either just, or reasonable, or efficient, that did not recognise the existence of the two Irelands--which did not, in effect, say to the Nationalists, "If you insist on your pound of flesh and break up an arrangement which has done so much for Ireland as a whole, that is, the Legislative Union, you must also yield the pound of flesh to the people of North-East Ulster, a community which does not want the United Kingdom to be part.i.tioned, any more than you want Ireland to be part.i.tioned." In this faith I have remained. I believe that the breaking-up of the Legislative Union with Ireland was bad for England, bad for Ireland, and bad for the Empire; but if it should be the Will of the People of the United Kingdom, then that Will could only be equitably applied by a recognition of the existence of the two Irelands. Yet this simple fact Liberal party politicians like Mr.

Gladstone, Mr. Asquith, and their followers either absolutely ignored, or else sapiently admitted that it was a serious difficulty and then pa.s.sed on to the purchase of the Southern Irish vote for other purposes!

Perhaps it will be said, "But you are getting away from your main premise--the Will of the Majority. If it should be the will of the Majority of the United Kingdom not to recognise the existence of the two Irelands, you are bound, according to your theory, to submit to that view." I admit that I may be bound, but I do not believe, and never have believed, that the people of North-East Ulster are bound. You can turn Northern Ireland out of the Union if you will, but you have no moral right to place them under the dominance to which they object--the dominance of a Dublin Parliament. To do that is to call into existence that rare but inalienable, right, "the sacred right of insurrection"

against intolerable injustice.

As far as I know, no State has ever yet seriously claimed the right to deprive any portion of itself of the political status belonging to its inhabitants, except when compelled to do so by foreign conquerors. That is why I, though a Majority Democrat, have always felt that the people of Belfast and of North-East Ulster were loyal, and not disloyal, citizens, when they declared that if they were to be turned out of the United Kingdom they had an inalienable right to declare that they would not be placed under a Dublin Parliament. The Parliament of the United Kingdom, of which their representative formed an integral part, though it had a right to make laws for them, had no right to hand them over to the untender mercies of the Southern Irish. _Delegatus non potest delegare_--the delegate cannot delegate. But the representatives of the United Kingdom are delegates for the people of the United Kingdom.

They have a right to govern it, but they cannot hand over their power of government to some other body. My contention is triumphantly supported by what happened during the attempt, happily unsuccessful, to break up the United States of America. When Virginia seceded from the Union, the people of what might be called the Ulster Virginia, a group of counties in the west of Virginia, declared that the Richmond Legislature had no right to deprive them of their inalienable right of citizenship in the American Republic. Therefore they not only refused to secede, but, as they were physically unable to control Virginia as a whole, they formed themselves into the Loyal State of West Virginia, just as the Ulster people were prepared, if they had been forced out of the Union by Mr.

Asquith's Bill, to set up a State for themselves.

At the end of the Civil War, the legal pedants of Washington were inclined to say that, right or wrong on the merits, the people of West Virginia had not acted legally in setting up their State, and that therefore, when the Peace came, they must be put back into Virginia and under the Richmond Government. The self-made State of West Virginia naturally objected at this intolerable and unjust decision. When the matter came before Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet, that great and wise man acted with a firmness not outdone even in the list of his magnificent achievements. He would hear nothing of the technical pedantries and legal sophistries submitted to him. West Virginia, he declared, must remain detached from Virginia, and it remains to this day a State of the Union. Here are the concluding words of the memorandum which Mr. Lincoln circulated to his Cabinet:--

Can this Government stand, if it indulges const.i.tutional constructions by which men in open rebellion against it are to be accounted, man for man, the equals of those who maintain their loyalty to it?... If so, their treason against the Const.i.tution enhances their const.i.tutional value.... It is said, the devil takes care of his own. Much more should a good spirit--the spirit of the Const.i.tution and the Union--take care of its own. I think it cannot do less and live.... We can scarcely dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle; much less can we afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field. Her brave and good men regard her admission into the Union as a matter of life and death. They have been true to the Union under very severe trials. We have so acted as to justify their hopes, and we cannot fully retain their confidence and co-operation if we seem to break faith with them. The division of a State is dreaded as a precedent. But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Const.i.tution and secession in favour of the Const.i.tution.

I shall never forget the profound impression made upon me when I first read those words. They gave what to me was the support of the highest moral and political authority to the view at which I had arrived instinctively. I had, as was natural, some doubts about my position, for I saw that my theories might lead to encouraging resistance to the apparent Will of the Majority. But after finding a supporter in Lincoln, I had no more doubts or fears.

I have dwelt so long on this matter because I want to show what, rightly or wrongly, was my guiding principle:--I objected to Home Rule as bad for the Empire, bad for the United Kingdom, and bad in an even extremer degree for Ireland herself. If, however, it should be determined that some measure of Home Rule must be pa.s.sed, then the existence of the two Irelands must be recognised in any action which should be determined upon. Therefore, when the support which the Unionist Party determined on giving to Mr. Lloyd George at the end of the War made some form of Home Rule seem almost inevitable, I strongly advocated the division of Ireland as the only way of avoiding a civil war in which the merits would be with Northern Ireland. I would personally have preferred to see the Six-County Area incorporated with England and become one or two English counties. As that seemed for various reasons un.o.btainable, the setting up of the Northern Legislature and the Northern State became the inevitable compromise.

That accomplished, I should have preferred to see Southern Ireland detached from the Empire. I have no desire to be a fellow-citizen with Mr. de Valera, Mr. Michael Collins, or even Mr. Griffiths, or, again, with the hierarchy of the Roman Church in Ireland. They have perfectly different views of the crime of murder from mine. I believe murder to be the greatest of crimes against the community, and, granted that we should give up any attempt to teach Ireland better, I would rather detach her altogether from the Empire. I hold that to be included in the British Empire is one of the highest and greatest privileges obtainable by any community, and I am not going down on my knees to beg an unwilling Southern Ireland to enjoy this privilege.

Further, I hold that if we let the Southern Irish go, we have a duty to the Protestants and Roman Catholic loyalists, of whom, of course, there are a very great many in the South. We have no right to force them to forfeit their citizenship of the British Empire. They must be allowed to come away from the South with full compensation for their disturbance if they so desire. If circ.u.mstances force you to denationalise a certain part of your country, you must give the loyal inhabitants an opportunity to leave, and as far as possible must not allow their material interests to suffer. It would be perfectly easy to have exempted all persons in the South who were loyal to Britain and to have put the burden of their migration where it ought to have fallen--that is, on the Southern enemies of England and Scotland who, by their policy, had made human life for the Protestants and Loyalists a veritable h.e.l.l.

If the South had refused to pay, we should ourselves have taken on the burden, and imposed a duty on agricultural produce coming from the South of Ireland into England sufficient to find the interest on a loan raised to compensate the Southern refugees. That would be a perfectly possible way, a very easy fiscal transaction.

I am not going to argue further whether these views on the Irish problem are _per se_ right or wrong. I can only adopt with variation the party-politician's peroration: "These, gentlemen, are my principles; if they don't suit, they can't be altered."

CHAPTER XXVII

MY POLITICAL OPINIONS (_Continued_)

I have described how the policy of Home Rule adopted by the Liberal Party made me, as it did so many other people in the United Kingdom, first a Liberal-Unionist and then a Unionist without a hyphen.

Unfortunately, however, the Unionist Party did not for very long offer me a quiet and secure political haven. Like the Duke of Devonshire, whom I always regarded during his life as my leader in politics, I had to weigh my anchor during the tempest caused by Mr. Chamberlain's scheme of Tariff Reform, and then seek safety in the ocean of independence. I am not going at length into the merits of the fiscal question, except to say that, though it was the only point on which I differed from the bulk of the Unionist Party, it was, unfortunately, the one other matter of policy in which I could not play the good party man and bow my head to the decision of the Party as a whole. I felt as strongly about the Tariff Reform as I did about the dissolution of the United Kingdom.

Rightly or wrongly again, my opposition was based very much on the same essential grounds. I believed that the policy of Tariff Reform, if carried out, would end by breaking up instead of uniting the British Empire, which I desired above all things to maintain "in health and strength long to live." I held that to give up Free Trade would do immense damage to our economic position here and intensify our social conditions by impoverishing the capitalist as well as the manual worker; and, finally, that there was very great danger of any system of Protection introducing corruption into our public life. If four or five words, or sometimes even a single word and a comma, added to or taken away from the schedule of a Tariff Act can give a man or group of men a monopoly and tax half the nation in order to make them rich, you have given men too personal a reason for the use of their votes.

I can summarise my position in regard to Tariff Reform very easily. I am no pedant about Protection, and if it could be shown that the security of an island kingdom like the United Kingdom could only be made complete by Protection in certain matters, I should be perfectly willing to vote for measures to give that security. In other words, I would have voted for what has been called "a state of siege" tariff. I should have regarded it as an economic loss which must be borne just as must the charges of the Army and Navy, in order to ensure the safety and welfare of the realm.

But Mr. Chamberlain and his followers, though there was an occasional word or two about national security, did not base their appeal to the nation on the ground of national security. They based it on quite different grounds. They told us in effect, "If you want to maintain and develop your industries, if you want to prevent them gradually dying out, if you want to get the greatest amount of employment for workingmen, and also for capital,--in a word, if you want to increase the wealth of the nation, you must go in for Protection, _i.e._, Tariff Reform." Tariff Reform thus became a national "get-rich-quick"

political war-cry. That, to my mind, was an appeal which had to be counter-attacked at once as the most dangerous delusion from which any people could suffer, and a delusion specially perilous to a country like England--a nation living, and bound to live, by trade and barter rather than by agriculture or the satisfaction of her own wants. England is a country to which the encouragement of every form of exchange is vital.

But you cannot encourage exchanges under a system of Protection.

Protection sets out to limit Exchange by forbidding half the exchanges of the world, that is, exchanges between persons of different nationalities and different locations.

If your object is to increase the national wealth, you must be a Free Trader. There is no other way. If, however, your object is national security--if you say, "I would rather see the nation safe than wealthy,"

then I fully admit there is a good case, not merely in theory, but very possibly in practice, for a certain amount of Protection. The existence of a.r.s.enals in which rifles, explosives, and other material of war can be made are obviously necessary, and no nation could safely see such essential industries depart from these sh.o.r.es on the ground that we could more economically make something else to exchange for rifles, guns, ammunition, and armour-plate made elsewhere. Again, since the existence of dye industries is so closely connected with the manufacture of explosives, I am perfectly willing to admit that it may be necessary to give Protection in this special matter. Again, it is possible, though I think it less clear than is generally supposed, that there may be one or two key industries which the experience of the War shows us it is worth while to maintain here, even if a subsidy is required for such maintenance. Finally, I think the experience of the War proved that we must see to it that our ability to feed ourselves, though it may be at short commons, for at least six months of the year, ought to receive due consideration.

I am as much opposed to war and as much in favour of peace as my neighbours, but I do not want my descendants some day when called upon to resist a threatened wrong to have to decide on peace, not on its merits but because they are at the mercy of an international bully; and remember we are not going to get rid of international bullies till we have got educated and reasonable democracies established throughout the world.

The world will be safe only when rid of populations so servile by nature that they are willing to allow themselves to be governed by men like the ex-German Emperor. True education and true democracy are the best anodynes to war.

But, as I have said, Mr. Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform Leaguers, though, of course, they occasionally spoke about security, really made their appeal on the old Protectionist ground that "Day by day we get richer and richer"--provided we limit our exchanges instead of extending them. When the Tariff Reform agitation had made me, as I have said, find safety in sea room with men like the Duke of Devonshire, Lord Cromer, Lord George Hamilton, Mr. Arthur Elliott, Lord Hugh Cecil, Lord Robert Cecil, and a number of very distinguished _Conservative_ Unionists was well as _Liberal_ Unionists, I experienced the full disadvantages, or rather the weakness, of independence in politics. We Unionist Free Traders, as we called ourselves, were not really strong enough to organise a party for ourselves, nor, indeed, did we think it advisable to do so, for, except in the matter of Tariff Reform, we were strongly opposed to the Liberal and Free Trade Party, and strongly in sympathy with the bulk of the Unionist Party. In a word, we Unionist Free Traders could not form a whole-hearted alliance with either of the two old parties. We detested the Irish policy followed by Mr. Asquith, its truckling to the Nationalists and its apparent determination to shed the blood of the people of Ulster, if that was necessary to force them under a Dublin Parliament. Again, we hated, and no man more than I, the socialistic legislation which the Asquith Government were willing to adopt at the bidding of the Labour Party. The mixture of coercion and cajolery which Mr. Lloyd George knew so well how to employ in his Radical days, in order to induce the House of Commons to accept his various measures, was particularly abhorrent to us.

It was not only the bad Irish policy of the Government, their flirtation with Socialism, and the Marconi business, that made me strongly opposed to Mr. Asquith's pre-War administration. I greatly disliked the foreign policy of the Liberal Government. It was a weak and timid compromise between half-hearted pacificism and inadequate preparation. I was confident, as must have been anyone who kept his eyes open, that Germany was preparing for war with this country as part of her world-policy, and I felt it likely that as soon as the widening and deepening of the Kiel Ca.n.a.l was finished, and so the effective strength of the German Fleet doubled, the first excuse would be taken to bring on the "inevitable"

world-war. Therefore, I held that preparation for war was absolutely necessary. Adequate preparation might indeed avert war. The German Emperor wanted not so much war as victory, and the more we were prepared the more we should be able to say that we would not allow the conquest of Europe by arms, though we were quite ready to let Germany conquer by good trading, _if she could_. The British people, as a whole, had no jealousy of her splendid trade organisation and power of manufacture, and nothing could ever have induced them to make an unprovoked attack on Germany.

If we had adopted universal military service here; if we had even, as I wanted and urged in public, kept a couple of million of rifles in store here, ready for the improvisation of great military forces, Germany, however anxious to strike her blow, would probably have held her hand.

We were tempting her to war by our want of preparation.

Unfortunately, Mr. Asquith and his Government, though full of anxiety and trembling at the prospect of what might happen, came to the disastrous decision not to make whole-hearted, but only half-hearted, preparations. They decided that, though they would not do enough in the way of preparation to make war impossible, they would do enough to give an excuse to the Potsdam war-party. For the rest, they would trust to the peace party--or alleged peace party--in Germany. In reality, there was no such peace party, or, if there was, it was an impotent thing. The servility of the German people rendered it quite unimportant! True democracy may be trusted in the matter of peace. Your tyrant whether he speaks with a popular voice, or whether he professes to be a G.o.d-given autocrat, is always a danger.

It was the slavish spirit of the German people and their willingness, though so intelligent and so highly organised, to let themselves be governed by a blatant Emperor of second-cla.s.s intellect, which const.i.tuted the real danger to European peace. If Mr. Asquith had said to the people of this country, or, indeed, to the world, "We are going to be vigilant in our preparations till the German people have freed themselves and so given hostages for the peace of the world," he would, I believe, have had the support of all the best elements in English political life. He would not have used such crude language, but he could have made his meaning clear in courteous phrases. Instead of which, he took a line which, in effect, encouraged France, and so Russia, to stand up against Germany, and not to take her threats lying down, and yet did not insure against the obligations he was, in effect, incurring.

To say that preparation, as is sometimes said, would have precipitated war is a delusion. It might, I well believe, have precipitated it if the preparations had been delayed till 1913, but not if they had been undertaken, as they could have been quite easily, several years earlier, _i.e._, after the Agadir incident and when the trend of events was quite clear. Yet in January, 1914, Mr. Lloyd George thought it advisable to say that we had reached a period when we could safely reduce our Army and Navy. His speech was as provocative of war as any public utterance recorded by history.

Finally, I had a quarrel with the Liberal Government over Mr. Lloyd George's famous first Budget, which I thought, and still think, a thoroughly bad measure. But even here Fate did not allow me to range myself with my old party, the Unionists. I could not, any more than could Lord Cromer and many other of my political Unionist Free Trade a.s.sociates, believe that it was wise from the const.i.tutional or conservative point of view to try and fight the so-called "People's Budget" by invoking action in the House of Lords over a financial matter. I think the action of the Lords was bad from the legal point of view. I am sure it was bad from the point of view of political convenience. The country instinctively recognised that the Lords were indulging in a revolutionary action, and, though the English people are, I am glad to say, not frightened by the mere word "revolution," they have a feeling that, if revolutionary action is to be taken, it ought never to be taken by the representatives of Const.i.tutionalism. That is just the kind of inappropriateness which always annoys English people.

The result, of course, was that at the inevitable General Election the Unionists did not gain enough seats to justify their action, and thereupon Mr. Asquith and his followers undertook in the Parliament Act the abolition of the power of the House of Lords to insist on the people being consulted in matters of great importance. The Lords in recent times never claimed the veto power but only this right to see that the country endorsed the schemes of its representatives.

Then came another break with the Unionists for me and for those who thought like me. Lord Halsbury, Mr. Austen Chamberlain and their followers, chiefly the right, or Tory, wing of the Unionists, were strongly in favour of the Lords throwing out the Parliament Bill. It was known that if the Lords did throw the Bill out, Mr. Asquith would advise the King to create sufficient Peers (four hundred was the number calculated to be required) to pa.s.s the measure. Though it was unpleasant to be a.s.sociated in this matter with the people who were most keen about Mr. Lloyd George's Budget, I had not the slightest hesitation as to what line of action I ought to take, and in The Spectator I urged with all the strength at my command that the Unionist Party had no business to set up as revolutionaries, which they in effect were doing by insisting that the Bill should only be pa.s.sed by the creation of four hundred Peers. They, I urged, would appear before the public as the wreckers of the Const.i.tution. The result of the line I took in _The Spectator_-- a line not supported by the rest of the Unionist Press, or, at any rate, by only a very small section of it--was to call down a vehemence of denunciation on my head more violent than I, accustomed as I was to abuse from both sides, had ever before experienced. Happily, I am one of those people who find a hot fight stimulating and amusing and who, like Attila, love the _certaminis gaudia_, the glories and delights of a rough-and-tumble sc.r.a.p. I and _The Spectator_ were, I remember, denounced by name by Mr. Austen Chamberlain at a banquet of Die-Hards.

Mr. Garvin in _The Observer_ abused _The Spectator_ in perfect good faith, I admit, but with characteristic intensity. I received dire threats from old readers of _The Spectator_, and finally I received gifts of white feathers to show what the country Die-Hards thought of me!

I felt quite certain, however, that not only was I right to speak my mind, but that in the last resort the common sense of what the Anglo- Saxon chronicler called "_miletes agresti_," and the new journalism "the backwoodsman peers," would turn out to be not for but against revolutionary action. And so it happened.

I did not actually go to the House of Lords to hear the debate, as I am one of those people who confess to be easily bored by what Lord Salisbury called "the dreary drip of dilatory declamation." I waited, however, pen in hand, to hear the result of the division, which was not taken till late on a Thursday night. A relative in the House had undertaken to telephone the event to me at the earliest moment, so that I should have plenty of time to chronicle a victory for common sense, or deplore the first step in an ill-judged const.i.tutional revolution. When the telephone-bell rang and the figures of the division were given, they showed a majority against the rejection of the Bill. It was not a large majority, but it was sufficient, and I at once turned with a sense of real relief to write the funeral sermon on a round in the great political game which had been as badly played as possible by the Unionist leaders. I am still proud to think that _The Spectator_ had taken a considerable share in preventing the crowning blunder.

Throughout the crisis I had acted in the utmost intimacy and complete accord with Lord Cromer. He worked as hard with the Unionist chiefs in private as I did with the rank-and-file in public.

There were several curious episodes in this fierce quarrel of which I was cognisant; but these events, and also those connected with the Conferences on the Home Rule Bill, which was in progress when the War broke out, cannot be fully dealt with. In fifteen or twenty years' time either I or my literary executors may be able to disclose that portion of them with which I was specially concerned. Till then the memoranda and letters in which they are set forth must remain sealed books. For fear of misconception I ought perhaps to add that they disclose nothing dishonourable in any sort of way to any of the partic.i.p.ants. Instead, they bear out Lord Melbourne's aphorism. A lady is reported to have addressed him in the following terms: "I suppose, Lord Melbourne, that as Prime Minister you found mankind terribly venal." "No, no, Ma'am; not venal, only d.a.m.ned vain." I might, during my inspection of the Arcana of the Const.i.tution and my first-hand knowledge of our leading politicians, have been inclined to vary it, "Not venal, not self-seeking-only d.a.m.ned foolish, or d.a.m.ned blind."

Before I leave off reviewing my political views and actions, in which there are many things which I am exceedingly sorry not to print at full length, I desire a word or two in regard to my position towards the War.