LORD BALFOUR.

Hokitika Guardian, 30 January 1928, Page 4

LORD BALFOUR.

It would he interesting to know whether Lord Balfour, waking on the morning of his seventy-ninth birthday and looking forward to the prospect of yet another active and useful year, remembered at all the speech he made and the reasons he gave when he resigned the leadership of the Unionist party. Recollection of that event takes us hack into the primeval mists of the pre-war years. Lord liallour was then sixtytliree, and he declared himself as fearing that if he remained any longer at the head of the party, intellectual decline might overtake him before he knew it. He only hoped that he had not run the margin too fine. Apparently lie had not. Four years after that speech he re-entered office, and. hut tor one intermission of three years, he has been in office over since. This suggests various thoughts. One of them is of wonder that a man who in his middle years seemed so frail and (even if deceptively) so lacking in vital energy should not merely have lived so long, but should also have become ever more full of life as tbe years advanced. Mosi men as they grow older abandon tennis and take up golf instead : Lord Balfour did the reverse. Moreover, it cannot lie said that his public work lias grown less lively.—The “ Evening Standard.”