The Evening Star THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1928. THE LATE LORD OXFORD.

Evening Star, Issue 19792, 16 February 1928, Page 6

The Evening Star THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1928. THE LATE LORD OXFORD.

With the death of tho Earl of Oxford and Asquith almost the last of the statesmen who had their training in the Victorian age has passed away. Lord Rosebery has not been a statesman for many years. Viscount Grey held his first position under a .Victorian Ministry, but he was, ten years younger, and the position was a subordinate one. Lord Balfour remains, but ho was not a Victorian in the same typical sense. His earlier contemporaries were shocked with him—with his scepticism, with his supposed flippancy, which were assuredly not Victorian. Mr Asquith (to give him the name by which he was longest and most affectionately known) wore the mantle of a great tradition which was naturally his own. He was the protege and disciple of Gladstone, possibly the greatest of Victorian Prime Ministers. Ho had the qualities of a small school of great men who became statesmen with him and departed before him—Lord Morley and Lord Milner, for example—their restraint, their severity of character, their distinction of being obviously leaders, not self-seeking manipulators ot tho throng. And he had those qualities, characteristic of greatness in an earlier period, in a supremo degree.. But he was also a Liberal, one who knew that times must change and tho masses become rulers of the State, and his greatest service—except one—may well have been in directing the course of that development, and ensuring that the transition to an age more popular, and in many respects more blatant, than that in which he was born should be a progress and not a debacle. His beginning was brilliant at Oxford, in law, and in the House, though his scholastic successes were less dazz-

ling than those of his son Raymond, killed in the war. From his first speech in the House of Commons he was a man to be marked. His intellectual calibre was indubitable. His speeches were in the classical manner, without the verbosity or the emotionalism of Gladstone’s, but of incisive reasoning he was a master. The exciting, demagogic oratory of Mr Lloyd George, destined during important years to be his colleague, was yet to come. Mr Asquith’s business was to convince his hearers. To sweep them off their feet into following him, whether they were intellectually convinced or not, was an art which ho would have scorned to usg oven if it had been within his powers. He was intellect personified. There was a strain of Puritan earnestness, w© must believe, in his chaiactei, until, after many years, ho became too tired for zeal. Gladstone knew his man when be chose him for his Home Secretary in the Home Rule Ministry of 181)2. His brilliant, less responsible, wife was his opposite, but she knew, and knew how to admire, her husband's qualities. “What I lack most,” wrote “Margot,” “is what Henry possesses above all men; equanimity, moderation, self-control, and the authority that comes from a perfect sense of proportion.” They wen great properties, and not the least of them was the last, which is apt to bo too little valued in our time.

The combination was not without its deficiencies. Mr Asquith was so much a type, tho pattern, it might be said, of accepted excellencies, that he could not but seem at times to be lacking more than a little in human individuality. Ho lacked temperament, it has been said, and therefore both its blessings and its curses. An enemy might have applied to him tho Tennysonian description: “ Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” A student of his speeches has been struck by tho matter of factness of them; his mind was not of the imaginative ordei* But the matter of factness, backed by his reasoning power and his gift of precise utterance, could have rare effectiveness of its own. Not often, but conspicuously at times, a deep fervor in his speeches showed the strength of his Liberal convictions. His Prime Ministership, with Mr Lloyd Georg© as colleague, produced some notable and most tempestuous measures, and then, through the pressure of circumstances, he became more and more a balancer of parties, the keeper of an unnatural equipoise, a master of parliamentary management. The Labor Party was struggling for its own development and tho Nationalists were the most difficult of allies. The great problems with which his Government had to deal at this stage, following the first . Acts for social amelioration, were nob solved by it. The Parliament Act was passed, reducing the power of the Lords, but that was never meant to be anything more than a preliminary step in constitutional reform. It was a step, however, that will never bo repealed, however the reform may be completed. A Homo Rule Act was in a position to be passed, but it was civil war that was threatening in Ireland when the Great War broke out, and it was not till later that the Irish were given self-govern-ment. It was a later Government, also, that gave votes to women. Tho new age was clamoring at the portals. Mr Asquith may have done better in temporising, as he did largely with its new forces, and ensuring that their victories would come quietly, and not with violence, than if he had been less content to be a balancer. Then the Great War came, and in understanding and accepting as ho dkl that challenge he performed his greatest service to the nation. No one else could have unified it as he did and brought doubting Liberals and Radicals, with few exceptions, by the prestige of his name to meet a common peril. His speeches—“We will not sheathe the sword ” —were the perfect expression at once of the nobility of the Allies’ cause and of their determination. It was not only by his speeches that ho helped. “In the early days of the struggle” (to quote Lord Birkenhead) “ his calmness, his refusal to bo hustled into measures which would have broken the united front of the nation, were a priceless asset. His judgment was the main influence which enabled Conscription, in tho teeth of his special protege, Sir John Simon, to be carried by public acclaim. Had he failed the Empire must have perished. And when tho trend of events marched past him, and ultimately over him, the conflict reached an intensity almost unknown to history. The nation was thoroughly broken to all the works of war. Sacrifice hadi already reached such a poiqt that all that the people demanded was action, action, action, and victory at any cost.” For action, of that swiftness and by fRcH. time. Mr Asauith was unfitted.

The fighting man required by the nation to be its Prime Minister was found in Mr Lloyd George. Mr - squith came back to Parliament, but he was never again the power that ho had been. The whole nation, however, had the highest respect for his character, and the earldom conferred upon him was universally approved. No meanness, no rancor ever suliied his record. Ho was a great gentleman. There are two passages in his speeches in which he describes tho qualities which he most esteemed in a statesman. What was the secret [he asked of Campbell-Bannerman] of tho hold which in these later days he unquestionably had on the admiration and affection of men of all parties and men of all creeds? , . . He was singularly sensitive to human suffering and wrong-doing, delicate and even tender in his sympathies, always disposed to despise victories even in any sphere by mere brute force, an almost passionate lover of peace; and , yet we have not seen in our time a man of greater courage—courage not of a defiant and aggressive type, but patient, persistent, indomitable. . . . He was a strenuous and uncompromising fighter, a strong -party man, but he harbored no resentment. He was generous to a fault in appreciation of the work of others, whether friends or foes. He met both good and evil fortune with the same unclouded brow, the same unruffled temper, the same unshakable confidence in the, justice and righteousness of his cause.

He said almost the same thing of Chamberlain, with the addition that “he was a man of severely practical aims.” The eulogies would apply perfectly to himself. ‘‘The test of the health of a people,” Lord Morley has said, “is to be found in the utterances of those who are its spokesmen, and in the actions of those whom it chooses to bo its chiefs.” The health of the British people, when it admired Lord Oxford, could withstand that test.