BRITAIN’S NEW PREMIER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 2585, 26 May 1923, Page 4

BRITAIN’S NEW PREMIER.

UNKNOWN POLITICALLY TILL RECENTLY.

Although the Right Hon. Stanley Baldwin has occupied a seat in the House of Commons since 1908, it was only when the Coalition Government eameiinto power that he became prominent. Once he became known to the.public, however, he remained constantly to the fore, and, in fact, he has been one of the many astonishing dramas which have- followed in quick procession the close of the war. He was chief of the Cabinet Ministers who brought about the Unionist demand for independence, and signed the deathknell of the Coalition. “It is strange,” said “The Times,” after the happening, “that so simple and modest a man should have had so important a share in the making of political history.” He is a business man first- of all, but has strong leanings towards art and letters. These he could hardly fail to have, seeing that Mr Rudyard Kipling and Dr. J. \y. Macka.il, a translator of Greek anthology, are his first cousins. Mr; Baldwin is probably the best-liked man in the House of Commons. He is, further, immensely .popular with the Press Gallery, for in a generation of Ministers, who are mostly inaudible, he has learnt to speak out like a man. Simplicity and intellect are, happily, not incompatible, and to the student of politics, Mr Baldwin appears as that almost extinct individual, the cultured politician. In his speeches he will sometimes repeat the more obscure epigrams of antiquity, and he will repeat them correctly. He understands the classics, and yet lie knows French only to read it. “That is a curious fact, but,” says “The Times” again, “it enables us to place him and date him. He belongs to the eighteenth century. We would find him, if we troubled to take it. down from our shelves, in a volume of “The Spectator,” or in a novel by Jane Austen. He is the type of country squire who, but for the increasing demands of high office, would rarely visit London, and would be more at home in- ancient Athens than in Paris. While he delights to travel his heart always turns back to his Worcestershire home, where, in company with his family, his well-bound books, his dogs, and his pigs, he loves to spend r-his leisure hours.”

But, unfortunately for him —and for the present generation as fortunate —Mr Stanley Baldwin lives hi the twentieth century, and he has answered to the call that comes to most men who love their counry. With all his simplicity and his culture and his domesticity, he has a direct and forceful mind, a practical ability which has enabled him to control on,e of the largest engineering firms in the country, the firm which shears his own name. The greater-part of his industrial experience was learnt, not from the remote chair of the directors’ table, but living ■ in sympathetic understanding with working men and women. He is a typical Englishman, quiet, simple in his tastes, direct in his address, possessed of a broad and scintillating wit, and very charming. At most hours of the day he is to be found smoking a cherry-wood pipe, and ready with a humorous quip, which might be thought cynical were it not so obviously tolerant. Beneath his apparently placid exterior there is a highly sensitive personality, receptive of surrounding conditions; a highly trained and equipped mind capable of pursuing the even tenor of its way towards the goal which he believes to be the right one for his country. Mr Baldwin has not had many years of big political experience, and his rapid rise to the forefront of political notoriety has been only since the later days of the Coalition which split during October of last year. His years of office have been few, but what he has handled he has dealt with in masterly fashion. His rise to prominence after the first years of obscurity has been meteoric. At the same time he has been tried in a hard school, and has not been found wanting. His journey to America last year as head of the debt-funding mission was one of the most difficult;propositions asked of any man, but he handled it with consummate tact and ability. Inciden- : tally his promotion to the office of Prime Minister may be considered in the light of a victory for Democracy, in that he was the only com-Aioner-amongst those mentioned as likely to be chosen, and had in the field against him some of the highest titled statesmen of the day. Mr Baldwin -has represented the Bewdle.y Division of Worcestershire

since 1908. As Financial Secretary of the Treasury, a position which he held from 1917 to 1921, he won the esteem of members of all parties in the House, both by his business qualities and his unvarying courtesy. He gained experience in financial affairs-as the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s lieutenant in the debates upon the Finance Bill, and the Estimates. In 1921 he succeeded Sir Robert Horne, as President of the Board of Trades, and,upon the formation of the Bonar Law Cabinet. he became Chancellor of the Exchequer.