Arthur Balfour Chamberlain

“ Balfour his friend even when he was straining every faculty of his subtle nature to defeat Mr. Chamberlain’s most cherished ambitions. Of those associated with Mr. Chamberlain at various times, only three considerable men—Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, and Lord Salisbury—seem to have been able to view him with consistent objectivity. On those who yielded to him their full allegiance his influence was quite extraordinary. No statesman ever enjoyed such absolutely unquestioning devotion as that which was yielded to Mr. Chamberlain by Mr. ”

“ Whilst his resignation gave him complete liberty of action, matters were not made easier for him by the hesitating attitude of some of his old colleagues, and especially of the prime minister, Mr. Balfour. Moreover, the ministry had become unpopular by reason of the Education Act of 1902, of which Chamberlain strongly disapproved, though he was too loyal to express his views openly. The effect of all this was to make him concentrate more and more upon the one object, of bringing the British people round to his views of tariff reform. ”

“ Besides the Liberal opposition, Mr. Chamberlain has to meet the antagonism of a number of influential leaders who would indorse Mr. Balfour if he only proposed retaliation in a particular case where an open and grievous blow had been struck at England, but who are not willing to join Mr. Chamberlain in advocating a return to a protective policy. ”

“ Through his whole life he justified the words of his son: ‘He never rested. To his last day he seemed too young to leave things as they are.’ When party animosities are forgotten, men will probably recognize the truth of the Earl of Balfour’s testimony—‘He was a great statesman, a great friend, a great orator, a great man.’
Chamberlain’s speeches are contained in the following editions: C. W. Boyd, Mr. Chamberlain's Speeches, 2 vols. (1914) ; H. W. Lucy, Speeches, with sketch of Life (1885) ; Speeches on Home Rule and the Irish Question, 1881-1887 (1887) ; Foreign and Colonial Speeches (1897) ”

“ Balfour was also in his place, looking as though the open rivalry of Lord Randolph Churchill had not much affected his spirits. Mr. Chamberlain nearly always looks the same. He has himself informed the world that he does not take exercise in any shape or form whatsoever, and there is never therefore, on his cheek that look of deep-drunk sunshine which marks the cheeks of more active men. But he was ready for the conflict, and as the night went on showed there was no decrease in either the venom or the vehemence with which he means to fight against the Home Rule Bill. ”

“ Balfour made a great mistake. He had listened to the speech of Mr. Chamberlain, and had been one of those who had joined in the cheers at the exposure of Mr. Dillon's accidental mistake. There he should have left it, but, carried away by the hope of driving the point home against a political enemy, he needs must add something to what Mr. Chamberlain had said. Now Mr. Balfour is in many points very superior to Joe. He should leave personal vituperation to him: he is more active, defter, and more willing to do such dirty work. ”

“ Mr. Balfour was still young; he was a bachelor; he was handsome; with the exception, perhaps, of Lord Rosebery, he was the most generally interesting man in politics. There have been very few politicians who have held at the same time such a position in many worlds as that occupied by Lord Salisbury’s nephew at the beginning of the Nineties.
Mr. Chamberlain, on the other hand, was perhaps less a figure than he had been five, or even ten years before. Had he died when Parnell did he would chiefly be remembered now as a politician who, in [124] splitting his party, had ruined his own career. ”

“ And years after, as the struggle still raged—to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour—each perfected to a fine art—surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination of poet, patriot, or historian. ”

“ The free-trade Unionists, with the duke of Devonshire, Lord Goschen, Lord James and Lord Hugh Cecil, as their chief representatives, started a Free Food league in opposition to Mr Chamberlain's Tariff Reform league; and at a great meeting at Queen's Hall, London, on the 24th of November their attitude was made plain. They rejected Mr Chamberlain's food-taxes, discredited his statistics, and, while admitting the theoretical orthodoxy of retaliation, criticized Mr Balfour's attitude and repudiated his assumption that retaliation would be desirable. ”

“ During the spring and summer of 1905 Mr Chamberlain’s more active supporters were in favour of forcing a dissolution by leaving the government in a minority, but he himself preferred to leave matters to take their course, so long as the prime minister was content to be publicly identified with the policy of eventually fighting on tariff reform lines. Speaking at the Albert Hall in July Mr Chamberlain pushed somewhat further than before his “embrace” of Mr Balfour; and in the autumn, when foreign affairs no longer dominated the attention of the government, the crisis rapidly came to a head. ”

“ Amid Liberal protests in favour of immediate dissolution, he resigned on the 4th of December; and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, being entrusted by the king with the formation of a government, filled his cabinet with a view to a general election in January. The Unionists went to the polls with divided counsels, and sustained a crushing defeat, remarkable nevertheless for the comparative success of the tariff reformers. While Mr Chamberlain had a signal personal triumph in all the divisions of Birmingham, Mr Balfour himself was defeated by a large majority in Manchester. ”

“ Mr Balfour had never spoken more brilliantly, nor shone more as a debater, than in these years when he had to confront a House of Commons three-fourths of which was hostile. His speech at Birmingham (November 14, 1907) , fully accepting the principles of Mr Chamberlain’s fiscal policy, proved epoch-making in consolidating the Unionist party—except for a small number of free-traders, like Lord Robert Cecil, who continued to hold out—in favour of tariff reform ”

“ Gladstone were soon to go and a Rosebery-Harcourt combination would come to terms with him about Ulster. On December 2nd I found a little change back from his general attitude, and in face of the probable break-up of the Parnellite party over the O'Shea case, which was beginning to be talked of in detail, Chamberlain was undecided, he said, and no doubt thought, between the two parties. But I noted in my diary: "Labouchere sets him against the Liberals, and Balfour attracts him to the Tories." ”

“ The Dean asked also if Constantyne had any news of the King’s marriage. Replied, he could not tell; he was sorry to see the King so long without a queen, when he might yet have many fair children: his own father was ninety-two years old, and yet, last summer, rode thirty-two miles one day before two o’clock, and said he was not weary; the duchess of Milan and that of Cleif were both spoken of, as the Dean knew. Asked, ‘How call ye the little doctor that is gone to Cleif?’ The Dean said, it was Dr. ”

“ From the middle of May, when Mr Chamberlain began to press the matter, Mr Balfour had a difficult hand to play, so long as it was uncertain how the party would follow the new lead. The Board of Trade was asked to supply full figures, and while its report was awaited the uncertainty of attitude on the part of the government afforded grateful opportunity for opposition mischief-making, since the Liberal party had now the chance of acting as the conservative champions of orthodox economics. ”

“ Towards the end of 1869 he accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh, by Queen Victoria's wish, on his visit to India. He was promoted lieutenant-general on 1 May 1872, G.C.S.I. on 24 May 1873, and G.C.B. on 29 May 1875. Chamberlain returned to India in February 1876, to take command of the Madras army. When it was decided, in August 1878, to send a British mission to Kabul, he consented to go as envoy, being personally known to Shere Ali ”

“ It may be left to future historians to attempt a considered judgment on the English tariff reform movement, and on Mr Chamberlain’s responsibility for the Unionist débâcle of 1906. But while his enemies taunted him with having twice wrecked his party—first the Radical party under Mr Gladstone, and secondly the Unionist party under Mr Balfour—no well-informed critic doubted his sincerity, or failed to recognize that in leaving the cabinet and embarking on his fiscal campaign he showed real devotion to an idea. ”

“ Chamberlain's retirement been announced to Ritchie, the ground for his own resignation at the moment would have been removed. Mr. Balfour replied in later speeches that he and the majority of the cabinet inclined to some kind of change in the fiscal system, and that Ritchie and his free trade colleagues were in opposition on that point to the majority; that Mr. Chamberlain had already threatened resignation if preference were excluded from the official programme of the government, to which it was not admitted ”

“ Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer. He was a self- indulgent man of simple tastes. For the average person he was as puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy for me and many others to love. You may say that no average man can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached without knowledge and without effort ”

“ At the same time, Mont, who was accompanied by Thomas Paynell, took with him private instructions from Cromwell, which included a secret message to Francis Burgartus, [368] the Duke of Saxony’s vice-chancellor, with respect to a marriage between the young Duke of Cleves and the Princess Mary, which he and Cromwell had discussed in London in the previous year. If, the instructions ran, Burgartus desire “the picture of her face,” Mont is to remind him that she is a 173King’s daughter, and that it was not the custom to send the picture of persons of such degree abroad. ”

“ Chamberlain's promulgation of the policy of tariff reform led to a reconstruction of Mr. Balfour's ministry [see Cavendish, Spencer Compton, eighth Duke of Devonshire, Suppl. II; Ritchie, Charles Thomson, first Baron Ritchie of Dundee; Suppl. II] . Arnold-Forster, an ardent supporter of tariff reform, now entered the cabinet as secretary of state for war in succession to Mr. St. John Brodrick, now Viscount Midleton, who became secretary of state for India. ”

“ He enter'd afterwards into the Service of the late King; who being sensible of his Merit, raised him to the greatest Dignities of his Court, and married him to one of the Daughters that he had by the Countess of Cosel. The Great Chamberlain, who has the Looks and Behaviour of a Man of Quality, thinks and acts too like a Nobleman. Few Persons surpass him in Politeness and Learning: He is perfect Master of several Languages, and of every thing that forms the Minister and the General. ”

“ That little speech gave one a clearer sense of what through all these years Arthur Balfour has been doing than anything that ever has before come to me. There is something supremely brave about a man of such 136fine understanding, such humorous and distinguished cynicism, standing by through all of the disillusions, disgust, deceptions, forced evil choices of public life, never quitting whatever the temptation. ”

“ Then he questioned him of what had betided him and he told him, whereat he admired and returned to companionship with him; but the youth ceased to have regard for him and gave him nor solde nor ration as was his wont, neither discovered to him aught of his secrets. When the tutor saw that there was no profit from him he returned to the king, the ravisher of the slave-girl, and recounted to him what the Chamberlain had done and counselled him to slay that official and egged him on to recover the damsel, promising to give his friend a poison-draught and return. ”

“ When he spoke, it was to counsel the Dutch in Cape Colony to warn their kinsmen in the Transvaal against any fatal rashness. Henceforth, though Chamberlain was always ready to interfere if necessary, British policy was mainly directed by the man on the spot. It was the fashion amongst a certain school of radicals to regard Chamberlain as a firebrand, who was only kept in order by the influence of his more moderate colleagues. ”

“ Anyhow, the deputation of distinguished geologists and mineralogists from Paris and Berlin were there in the most magnificent and appropriate dress, for there are no men who like wearing their decorations so much as the men of science—as anybody knows who has ever been to a soiree of the Royal Society. It was a brilliant gathering, but very late, and gradually the Chamberlain—you saw his portrait, too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a meaningless sort of smile underneath—the Chamberlain, I say, discovered there was everything there except the Prince himself. ”

“ Are we to ignore what religion has done for the world because it has been the fruitful excuse for the narrowest bigotries and the most cruel persecutions? Are we to underrate the worth of politics, because politics may mean no more than the mindless clash of factions, or the barren exchange of one set of tyrants or jobbers for another? Is patriotism to be despised because its manifestations have been sometimes vulgar, sometimes selfish, sometimes brutal, sometimes criminal? ”