“Taranaki Central Press” SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1937. MR BALDWIN RETIRES

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 445, 29 May 1937, Page 4

“Taranaki Central Press” SATURDAY, MAY 29, 1937. MR BALDWIN RETIRES

A new Prime Minister has now taken over in Great Britain, but the stage will be monopolised by the one that is retiring. Such occasions are not always dramatic when Gladstone made his last speech in the House it was not even known that he was resigning—but the Conservatives will not allow their leader to slip away on this occasion without making some demonstration. This is not the time for a considered survey of his career or even for an estimate of his services to his country an estimate that this generation, indeed, will find- it difficult to make justly. Mr Baldwin has been a member of the House since 1908 and he formed his first Ministry in 1923, and yet for all his years of service he has never given the impression that his heart was really in politics. In fact, again and again he has said that his deepest desires led him in other directions, to his library, for instance, or into the country. When he was saying farewell to his constituents a few weeks ago he repeated Mr Asquith’s words about the “intolerable burden” of his office; and he went on to speak of European movements since the war in terms that a certain degree of bewilderment. It is not given to many men brought up in the political traditions of the Victorian era to understand what is happening in this age of transition, and in particular to appreciate the immense force of the newer ideas of social justice. Mr Baldwin was once described as a driver who kept his eye glued to the road, and the metaphor seemed to please him, but it carried the obvious implication that he was missing the vast changes in the political scenery and had come at last into a country with which he was e ntirely unfamiliar. His great quality has been his steadiness, his refusal to be stampeded, and historians may well find that he was the type of leader most needed by Britain in a fast changing world.