Chapter V: Part 5

I have a peculiar sympathy with adult education, because I have followed it to the best of my ability all my life. I was very much interested to find a peculiar instance recently of that interest which all English people take in education, not always instructed, but always present, because, when I became Prime Minister, a well-known lady in society whose acquaintance I had not had the pleasure of making, asked this question of a friend of mine: "Is the new Prime Minister what you would call an educated man?" I doubt very much whether she knew what was implied by the word "educated"; but it showed, at any rate, that she felt that education was a good thing in itself, and a thing which it was desirable should be possessed by anyone aspiring to the post of Prime Minister. That is all to the good. But I expect all of you have learned, as I have, that education is a process and a thing that is never finished. And it is a wonderful thing that here, in this movement, we find one more instance in our history of that triumph of voluntary effort from which have sprung all the best movements and the best things in our country from the beginning of its history. You take a movement like that of the Boy Scouts; it did not originate with the War Office. You take the Salvation Army; it did not come from Canterbury. The Franciscans did not come from Rome; and in the same way this great movement of education did not take its origin in Whitehall. It sprang--where all these things have sprung from--it sprang from the very heart of the people, and that is what gives it its strength, and that is what is going to continue to give power to the movement.

I was very impressed by a few words that I read in a prospectus of the College, that the aim of the curriculum here is "to furnish instruction which will equip the trade unionist or the co-operator, on the one hand, to take an active and effective interest in the affairs of his or her society, and on the other, a Parliamentarian or a business man to discharge with greater knowledge and insight such duties of citizenship as may devolve upon him."

These words go right down to the root of the matter, because the great task of this generation, in my view, is to save democracy, to preserve it and to inspire it. The ideal of democracy is a very fine one, but no ideals can run of themselves, and if democracy is to be preserved and yield the fruits that those who believe in it would fain see, the only way it can be done is by all the individuals, according to their power, equipping themselves sufficiently to keep the whole mass sweet and true, and to preserve in their plenitude and sanity the ideals that inspire them. I have used this figure of speech before, but I want to use it again. All government of the people can be represented, as it were, on the circumference of a wheel, and government runs in very, varying degree from the most complete and absolute autocracy, step by step, to chaos, and you find instances in history of governments passing through every phase on that circumference; often autocracy will end in chaos, and chaos will, with equal infallibility, lead back once again to autocracy. Now we are at a point in that wheel, and that point is Democracy, with representative government. We have to remember that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and, I may add, eternal knowledge, eternal sympathy, and eternal understanding; and it is our duty in this generation to keep the State steady at the point to which we have attained, knowing full well the risks that lie on either hand by slipping back in the one direction of the wheel or the other, the one direction drawing to a curtailment of our liberty, the other direction being that in which liberty tends to licence.

Now, surely, when we want to educate ourselves for the purpose of citizenship, whatever the immediate course of study may be, whether it be history or economics, whether it be humane letters, whether it be mathematics, the object of such education must always be the same, and to my mind the purpose of such education--a purpose which we try to put in our mind--is always twofold; it is, in the first place, to clear the mind of cant, and in the second place not to rest content with having learnt enough to follow the syllogism, knowing perfectly well that to follow the syllogism alone is a short cut to the bottomless pit, unless you are able to detect the fallacies that lie by the wayside. If you can clear the mind of cant and detect the fallacy, whatever guise it may be wearing, I think you have made a long step forward in the education that every citizen in a democracy that may hope to endure must have. I think that we all of us realise to-day that no civilised community is bound necessarily and by an inscrutable fate to progress, that there are such things in civilisation as checks, that there is such a thing as retrogression, and that the mere existence of a civilised community is no guarantee either for its continuance or for its progress--in other words, that unless we are the faithful guardians of such civilisation as we have already attained to, we run the risk of seeing the whole of the progress that has been made with such infinite labour up to our own time gradually slipping back and back and back.

No one had harder words to say than Lord Morley about teaching carried on in any other spirit than that which I have endeavoured to describe. Teaching, above all things in this world, ought to be absolutely honest and absolutely free. The teacher should never be the servant of the State in this way, that he preaches and teaches what he thinks the Government would like to have him do, whether that Government come from the Right or from the Left or from the Centre. The whole object of the teacher should be to set forth the truth as he conceives it, and the whole object of the pupil should be so to prepare and develop his mind that he may, as occasion arises, when he leaves here, find himself prepared by will and competent by training to exercise a right judgment in all things.

Lord Morley, when he had laid stress on the everlasting importance of sifting the value of evidence and recognising how the bias of human nature so often prevented men from acquiring the necessary ability so to sift evidence, referred to those who taught with bias and for propaganda in this way: "There are limits to our patience with the quackish fungoids," and it is the "quackish fungoids," wherever they may be found, that you have to go out into the world to fight. "Quackish fungoids" are found in all sections of the community and in all schools of thought. They are not inherent in any one class. They are not necessarily inherent in any one party; but they are growths which must be cleared away if progress is to be made in our country, and they are growths which the training you receive here will enable you to do your part in clearing away when you leave these pleasant surroundings for the stress and the struggle of the larger world outside.

We have to learn--and it is no easy lesson--to submit all the passions and prejudices which the best of us find to be component parts of ourselves at times to the stern and acid test of the discipline of truth. That is not an easy lesson to learn, or more people would have learned it; but I think one of the most hopeful signs of the times to-day is that all over the kingdom--north and south and east and west--there are men and women who, in dreaming of a better and higher future for their country, are yet well aware that that future cannot be attained by dreams alone, and they want so to qualify and equip themselves that in that struggle for better things they may be able to play a potent and a worthy part. There is no better and there is no higher ambition, and I am perfectly certain that it is to help that ambition that Sir Philip Stott was moved to do what he has done, a great work for which every one in this room is indeed grateful, a work for which, if I am right, generations yet unborn may arise and call him blessed.

This country of ours has been the birthplace and the home of some of the greatest movements that have yet arisen for human freedom and human progress, and the strength of our race is not yet exhausted. We have confused ourselves in Great Britain of recent years by a curious diffidence, and by a fear of relying upon ourselves. The result has been that many of those who have been eager for the progress of our country have only succeeded in befogging themselves and their fellow-countrymen, by filling their bellies with the east wind of German Socialism and Russian Communism and French Syndicalism. Rather should they have looked deep into the hearts of their own people, relying on that common sense and political sense that has never failed our race, from which sufficient sustenance could be drawn to bring this country once more through all her troubles. There will be found that sense which, far from following at the tail of exploded Continental theorists, is ready once more to lead the way of the world as she was destined to do from the beginning of time, and to show other peoples, many peoples who have not yet learned what real political freedom is, that the mother of political freedom is still capable of guiding the way to her children and her children's children.

Do not let us ever be confused by the advance in material prosperity and material knowledge, and let us never confuse mere acceleration with civilisation. Civilisation is a far deeper and more profound thing than that, and there is a very real danger, in an age when science makes such wonderful advances and can bring so much in the way of material comfort and material knowledge before people without any trouble on their part to acquire it or understand--there is at that time a very great danger that the higher, the more spiritual, the only lasting qualities of civilisation may be submerged in the lower and inferior, so that the last state of that community may be worse than the first.

Then, I think, there is one other great advantage to be derived from the whole-hearted pursuit of knowledge, which has been the impelling force that has brought you from all over the United Kingdom to take advantage of the course which you can obtain here. I think you learn--not by being taught, but by that instinct which comes with wider knowledge--you learn a healthy distrust of rhetoric. If there is any class to be regarded with suspicion in a democracy it is the rhetorician--the man who plays on half-educated people with fallacies which they are incapable of detecting. More than one democracy has been wrecked by that. We do not want to see a democracy like ours, in which we have faith, and which we believe is destined to do such great things for the world, wrecked on any such ignoble rocks. When I was about eighteen years of age, I remember reading a verse of Froude's, in his _Short Studies_, which made a profound impression upon me at that age, because, when I was a boy, as is the case with many other boys, I was rather the slave of fine language and beautiful expression, and I suddenly came with a shock on the words: "Oratory is the harlot of the arts." There is profound truth in that, and I should like very much, if I had time, to give the members that as a text for an essay. It would be very interesting to see the illustrations which historical students might give in proof of the words of that thesis.

There are few things, again, to which, at the present day, we should pay more attention than this--and this again needs education, and the education which you are giving yourselves to enable you to accomplish the end in view--and that is to judge of the value of evidence. I suppose there is no man to whom the cause of the education of the people in this country--and very largely adult education--is nearer the heart than it was to a great Englishman who has just died, I mean Lord Morley. Lord Morley spoke on this subject nearly fifty years ago, and he came back to it again and again; so recently as just before the war, speaking to the Manchester students, he used these words, which I feel I must read to you:

"Generous aspiration, exalted enthusiasm, is made to do duty for renewed scrutiny. The ardent spirits see every fact or circumstance that makes their way and are blind to every other. Inflexible preconceptions holding the helm, they exaggerate. Their sense of proportion is bad."

There can be no greater object of true education than to teach and to preserve a sense of proportion, and it seems to me that the great advantage you have here over what I may call the definitely propagandist schools is that you have every opportunity of learning to exercise a trained sense of proportion, because the teachers here are chosen in exactly the same way as the teachers are chosen in the free and open universities. They are chosen because they are masters of their subjects. They are chosen not to give propaganda; they are chosen to speak the truth, and those who are responsible for the conduct of this college know that it is only by giving students the opportunity of exercising to the full the ability that is in them that they will be able to choose the truth honestly and freely, and will exercise their minds to the solution of the problems to which they have to devote themselves, without bias and without preconceived notions. They will clear their minds of cant, and try to see things as they are.

We all of us want understanding--understanding of ourselves and understanding of our brothers and sisters--and that true understanding is the salt that savours the whole life of the community. It was never more needed than it is to-day, and those who understand will realise that there is no greater need in the world, abroad and at home, than peace, peace from the warfare of arms and peace of spirit. Those are the things I intend to fight for during the time that I am Prime Minister, whether that time be long or short, and it is with that object--the object of peace above and before all things--that I am endeavouring to-day to deal with the situation in Europe.

This is not the place to talk about foreign politics. The Imperial Conference meets next week, and it must be that at one of their early meetings the whole question of the present situation in Europe and in the world must be set forth and debated. I would only say here these few words. When this Government came into office, now some ten or eleven months ago, there was an atmosphere of restraint, almost of distrust, between France and ourselves; and I have no doubt that if Mr. Bonar Law had been spared to us as Prime Minister a little longer, he, with his knowledge, with his instinct, with his transparent honesty, would have dissipated that atmosphere once and for all. But he left us before that task was accomplished, and it was my good fortune in an interview which I had last week with the President of the Council in Paris to help, as I believe, to restore that atmosphere of confidence which had for some time been lost. No more and no less. But I think there is now, both in Paris and in London, a recognition of the importance of the Entente--in this way, that without it a European settlement is far more difficult. Indeed, the events of the last two or three weeks have proved that, to those who have eyes to see, the best hope of settlement lies in intimate relationship between France and this country, and if anything occurred that might keep our two countries apart, then I fear it would make the problems which we have to face incomparably more difficult than they are to-day.

You have been extraordinarily kind to me in the reception you have given me here, a reception which touched my heart, and I just want to tell you before I sit down what a close sympathy I have with you in the work you are doing here. I am a sort of half-educated fellow myself. I worked fairly well at school. I did nothing at the University. I have been trying hard ever since to try to catch it up. You have come here to try to catch it up. I wish you all success and happiness in that task. There is no joy in this world like learning. The great joy of life is that it is a task which is never done. Go on learning all your life. I am learning now, and I mean to go on learning if I live to be a hundred. There is nothing I look forward to so much when I am out of office as to start learning again in real earnest. Until that day comes I am afraid I shall have to leave the learning to you, but I do wish you the best of luck in this high task you have undertaken. Do not let yourselves be dispirited when you get into the world again, but hold fast to what you believe to be true and what you believe to be right wherever it leads you, and whatever difficulties you may encounter. Whatever troubles you may have you will, at all events, always have the comfort of a conscience which will tell you that you have tried to act up to the highest lights that are in you, and you will feel that you are playing your part in helping to bring your country, your fellow-men and women, through one of the most difficult times that she has ever had to face in her history, and that you are laying, or trying to lay, the foundations of a happier, healthier and saner life for those with us now and for those who will come after us.

TEACHERS AND TAUGHT

AT THE ANNUAL DINNER OF THE LONDON TEACHERS'
ASSOCIATION

28_th November_, 1924

Great as your necessities may be, mine are greater. I was invited to be your guest when I was but a private individual, before I became Prime Minister. I would add that forty years ago all the king's horses and all the king's men would have failed to have drawn me into the presence of a company of schoolmasters, and in relation to them I once had every qualification as a passive resister and a practiser of very skilled "ca'canny." But times have altered, and I with them, and I am proud to be your guest to-day, to stand before you, not as an educational expert, nor--God forbid!--as an intellectual, but merely to convey to this representative body of London teachers my own appreciation as head of the Government and that of my colleagues of the work that the whole body of teachers throughout the country are doing for the people of this country. Nor do I propose to do what is so common, and to take a gloomy and pessimistic view of the state of our country and of education. I am not going to tell you that in foreign countries they do these things better, and I would observe in passing that we have had some respite recently from that continuous praise of German systems of education to which we were so accustomed in our younger days, and which ceased with such startling suddenness ten years ago.

The progress of education in our own country has, indeed, been remarkable, having regard to the fact that we have only occupied ourselves seriously with the problem for two generations. I know as well as you that there are still too many, far too many, insanitary schools, and that there are many ill-nourished and defective children; but let us remember that the standard by which we judge these matters to-day has risen immeasurably from the standard adopted by our parents.

You have only to read Sir George Newman's reports of recent years to see the progress that has been made, and, while we can still point to shortcomings, to apathy and negligence on the part of parents here, local authorities there, and possibly even sometimes of a Government or a teacher, yet we have to remember that the average health of the children is, and has been, steadily improving, and you have a steadily diminishing quantity in the number and the danger of the children's ailments. Thanks to the co-operation with you of the medical and nursing agencies, of the devoted services of many voluntary agencies, and thanks, too, to the increasing co-operation between teachers and parents, there has never been so much organised effort in this country on behalf of child welfare as there is to-day. We do not ignore the blemishes and the spots, but let me remind you again that we regard them through a far higher magnifying lens than we used to; but that need not prevent us from advancing all the time. I am credibly informed that the children to-day actually enjoy going to school. That is a revolution for which no historian or sociologist has given you adequate recognition. I do it to-night, but I confess that if I am correctly informed you have succeeded in working a miracle which would have been incredible in my younger days.

I agree with Mr. Samuel in this, that no one who lived through the Great War, and was in a position to observe what was taking place, will ever forget the qualities displayed by the men and women of this country, men and women who had had no other education than the elementary schools had afforded them. There are some words of Mr. H. G. Wells which are well worth remembering in this connection. He says that education is one of the newest of the arts and sciences. The idea of particular exceptional people pursuing learning has been familiar to the whole world for scores of centuries, but the idea of preparing the minds of whole classes or communities for co-operation and common action by a training in common ideas is a comparatively new one. And that is the gigantic task to which you, and, I may add, we, are all committed. We are living in days in which the powers that used to be inherent in birth and privilege are passing rapidly away. You have a franchise vested in millions where it used to be vested in thousands, and we live in an age when the preservation of such civilisation as we have already succeeded in attaining to can only be maintained by the spread and continuance of education of the people. And it has never been more urgent to wage the war of reason against the passion that may be stimulated by mob psychology.

Scientific men--and I am afraid I must confess I am not a scientific man--are rather pessimistic, and one of our leading biologists has recently declared that the more representative Parliament becomes, the more unintelligent, as things are, it is and will be. That was, as a matter of fact, written before the election. But I never allow myself to be depressed by the utterances of theorists, and I mean to go on, in conjunction with Lord Eustace, Mr. Samuel, and all of you, to try to make things better. You have handicaps to fight against, handicaps of the bad environment where your children are raised, handicaps of heredity. We can do something to help you, and we intend to do it.

But I always think that those who speak of us who try to direct affairs of State, and of you, use the wrong analogy when they speak of us as builders and architects. Our task is more homely, and, if I may go to the country for my illustration, our work is more the work of the gardener. We have to do our utmost to secure for the child what the gardener does for his plants--the best soil and the best exposure. We must remove the noxious weeds, we must do root pruning, we must prepare and enrich the soil. But we have to wait in faith for what comes later, and that is the flowers and the fruit, and we must remember that we can never hope to gather grapes from thistles. I said the Government might do something to help. I said in the Albert Hall some months ago that I wished to see secondary and university education brought within reach of all children who were fitted to take advantage of them, and I stand by that.

I hope that before we reach the middle of this century the country will have dealt effectively with the problem of the children between the ages of twelve and eighteen. It is not simply a school problem; it is a school problem and an industrial problem. We must by voluntary agencies and by our own work deal with that problem, or we run the risk of allowing a generation to grow up in the country which can only be a peril to itself, and a peril to the nation.

But all the State can do will be of little avail if you have no regard to the one thing that matters,--as always, the personal equation. That, in this case, is the general body of the teachers who are both in love with their work and properly equipped for it. It is for that reason that I welcome the improvement in the pay of the whole profession which came into force in this country of recent years. The personality of the teacher is the crucial fact of the whole work of education. It is you who have to transmit to the children some appreciation of the growth of the human spirit, some insight into our national traditions of liberty and fair play, into the material achievements of science, and into the wider problems set by racial and national divisions of mankind; and somewhere through those lessons, through you, there must reach the children some of the "murmurs and the scents of the infinite sea."

It is not for you, fortunately, to undertake the political education of the children, but it is for you to see that if they have to hear of these things they hear both sides, and they hear them dispassionately, because you cannot prostitute your position to sectarian ends. The primary concern of those who have such a sacred trust as you have is the unfolding of the child's personality, and not the victory of party.

We all know that industrialism has its ugly side; we all know we cannot maintain our population without strenuous competition, and we have a hard task in harmonising the claims of industry and the claims of an enlightened humanism. The harshest features of poverty we may hope to get rid of, and to provide against the worst crises of life, and perhaps in time to lift the level of our people; but none of those things are of avail unless we can raise their character. Mr. Bertrand Russell wrote truly when he said: "It is true that poverty is a great evil, but it is not true that material prosperity is in itself a great good. If it is to have any real value to society, it must be made the means of advancement of those highest gifts that belong to the life of the mind"--and I would say the life of the soul.

In concluding, I would stress once more what I have said to you of the pre-eminent value in the teacher of character, for, if you look back upon your own childhood--as I look back upon mine--is it not a fact that all unconsciously we were the strongest moral judges of those set in authority over us? It is not the clever teacher that we remember, or the man who taught us most--unless we gave our lives to scholarships; what we remember is the man whose character all unconsciously impressed us, the man who was patient, who was honest, who was fair, and who brought into the performance of his daily task a spirit which, when we look back over the gulf of years, makes us feel even to-day, when we are faced, as we are faced day by day, with problems that test our character, that we should be almost afraid, as it were, to take the part that we know to be the less right one, because we feel somehow that that was the one thing that would not have met with the approval of him whom we knew all those years ago.

I will give you one sentence, if I may, which I read recently with great pleasure in a work by a schoolmaster, which seems to me to embody what I have been trying very feebly to express. He is speaking of the influence in after years of the schoolmaster on the pupil, and he speaks of the pupil, as an elderly man, looking back, in these words:

"Enlightened by the experience of fatherhood, they will see with a clear remembrance firmness in dealing with their moral faults or patience in dealing with their intellectual weakness, and, calling to mind the old schoolroom, they will think it was good for us to be there. For unknown to us therein were three tabernacles--one for us, one for our schoolmaster, and one for Him Who is the friend of all children and the Master of all schoolmasters."

If words like those can be said of us long after we have taught our last lesson or made our last speech, we shall not have done our work or lived our lives in vain, and the generations to come will rise up and call us blessed.

_ON SOME GREAT MEN_

MR. BONAR LAW

IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

13_th November_, 1923

The House to-day meets under the shadow of a great loss--a public loss and a personal loss; and I am sure it would not be the desire of Hon. Members to proceed to the ordinary business to-day without paying a tribute to the memory of a very great leader. Others will speak with greater eloquence than I can of his rare gifts in Parliament and in Council; I should like, if I may, to speak to the House for a few minutes of some of the more personal aspects of the man. There is no doubt that Mr. Bonar Law gave his life for the country, just as much as if he had fallen in the Great War. The work he did during the War could only have been done by a man of great physical endurance and great intellectual capacity. It is difficult for all of us to realise what is meant by a man having served simultaneously in the War Cabinet--which sometimes used to sit for hours every day--as Chancellor of the Exchequer at a time when the Exchequer problems were more numerous and more difficult than they have ever been, and as Leader of the House of Commons--work which, however easily the business may be going, is always of a most exacting nature. Night after night when we had gone home the lights might have been seen burning in the room which I now occupy, where he would be working into the small hours of the morning on Departmental work, and nothing was more remarkable than the rapidity and accuracy with which he dealt with the difficult problems that came before him there. Mr. Keynes, no mean judge--and this is a great tribute from such a man--told me once that he often disagreed with Mr. Bonar Law, and that often he did not like his arguments, but he said that he was invariably right. I think there is nothing more remarkable than the general accuracy of his decisions at the Exchequer during the time that I had the honour of working so intimately with him, and the way in which, over a great matter such as the War Loan, he took a strong stand against a unanimous expert opinion, and proved himself by the results to have been in the right.

But hard as the work was, he never complained, and he was always full of kindness. He was always willing to let others have the credit for what was done. If the history of the time ever comes to be written, it can be proved that perhaps he did greater service in preventing the doing of things which it was wiser not to do, rather than in initiating things which ought to have been done.

The courage that he showed in his work was equally striking in other aspects. I remember on the 23rd March, 1918, when men's hearts were failing, he remained confident. He told me at the time that nothing could shake his unquenchable faith in the British soldier. It was the same with regard to air raids. I can see him now, with his family around him--and he was never happy at these times unless they were around him--sitting in the middle of them, working away, with the deafening noise outside, paying not the slightest attention to it, and the only time that I remember when he failed to work during an air raid was when one of his children was absent, and was reported to be making her way to Downing Street from some other part of London, and we lost Mr. Bonar Law, and we discovered that he had wandered out in his slippers on to the Horse Guards' Parade, in the middle of a heavy barrage, to look for his own child.

He had few illusions, and he was of a critical temperament, and yet with that I have never heard him say a single bitter, unkind or unfair word about a living soul. He looked for the best side in everybody, and if occasionally I may have said something to him hasty in criticism of this or that individual, he never would acknowledge it, but he immediately countered me by pointing to one of his good points. Like many men, he was changed by the War. He was a man of strong domestic feelings, and I think probably he never recovered from the loss of his wife fifteen years ago. From the loss of the boys during the War he certainly never recovered, and I think what changed him in the War was what changed many people. He lost entirely that personal ambition which was his when he entered the House of Commons, and he lost it in this way. He felt so strongly, as many of us did, that while the youth of the country was being sacrificed on the battlefields it had really ceased to matter what happened at home to the older men, provided they did everything in their power and strength to help their country in any capacity in which they might be called.

It was that work, it was those personal sorrows, which led directly to the breakdown in the spring of 1921, and it was that loss of ambition to which I referred that made him refuse so stubbornly for so long to come forward a little over a year ago to re-enter politics, even with the chance of taking up a position to attain which so many men are supposed to be capable of any sacrifice. It was then, as it had been throughout his career, only the strongest sense of duty which made him resume the heavy task of public life. But it killed him. I remember when I came back from America at the end of January I found him plunged in a state of depression which never left him. Looking back, undoubtedly it was partly--must have been partly--caused by the early stage of the disease from which he suffered. But it was in the early part of January that the breakdown with the Paris Conference had occurred, and I know how that weighed on his spirits, because he told me, as late as July, that he felt that the contemplation of what he regarded as the hopeless situation of Europe weighed upon him day and night. He said he could see no way through it, and he himself attributed his own illness to anxiety caused by that.

He was, indeed, a most lovable, elusive and wistful personality, and when the end came I could not help recalling to mind the passage in the _Phaedo_ which I remember reading in the Sixth Form at school, which left a very deep mark upon me. It is the one where the argument is being urged against the right of a man to take his own life, and it was said that God had placed the soul of each man, as it were, on guard, and he had no right to leave that guard until the trumpet sounded the retreat. He waited expectantly for the sound of that trumpet. When it came he recognised it, and heard it cheerfully and thankfully; and we must be thankful, too, that he was spared further suffering and for the sweet memory and the brave example left to all of us.

LORD CURZON

IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

23_rd March_, 1925

I hope, Sir, with the permission of the House, to make a few observations on the loss the Government and the country have sustained by the death of one of the greatest men and the most vivid personalities of this generation. I do so before this House in the knowledge that there are few here who can remember him in his earlier years, when, as a young man, he was a distinguished Member of this House, and one to whose future everyone looked forward with hope and with confidence. But I am particularly anxious, in a case like this, to try to give Members of the House some impression of the man himself, what lay behind, and what was the real man, which has been somewhat obscured in more recent years when he had withdrawn more from debates and from appearances in public.

It is difficult for us, who knew Lord Curzon after great honours had come to him, earned during a long life of service, to realise that he started many years ago with few advantages except his natural abilities and such advantages as might have accrued to him from belonging to a noble family. He was, in many senses of the word, a self-made man, because it was his natural ability, his fierce industry and his courage which made him, from an early period of life, map out the scheme of what he would do. He was the architect of his own fortune; he made his own friends; and he qualified himself for the great tasks of his life, not only by ceaseless study from early years, but by travel in what were then comparatively unknown parts of the world, by books, and by consorting with men of all kinds and in all countries.

His interests were exceptionally wide, and he proceeded to make himself a master of every subject in which his keen mind took an interest. So it is that the death of one primarily known to us as a statesman and a politician leaves more gaps in the public life of this country than would be the case with almost any other living man. As a student of the classics, a deep student of history, of pictures and of archaeology, his loss will be felt as much among the Trustees of the British Museum and the Trustees of the National Gallery as in the Cabinet, and his loss will perhaps be greatest in that Oxford that he loved so much. Oxford, as we know, whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, spoke to him as she speaks to all her sons who have ears to hear, and to him perhaps more than most. Especially so, I think, because one of the keys to Lord Curzon's life is to remember that his roots had struck deep into pre-industrial England, and it is from an early England that he drew the sources of his strength. So it was that he had, possibly, less acquaintance with and interest in many of these strange currents of modern life in England, his mind turning naturally more to England in foreign and Imperial politics; and yet--let there be no misunderstanding here--no proposal that could be made for the betterment of our people at home was welcomed more eagerly than by him, in very much the same spirit that it would have been welcomed by young England in the days of Disraeli's youth, of which period, in many ways, he seemed to be, even to-day, a member.

His learning, the learning of years, and the natural aptitude which he had, gave him a power of natural expression, whether in writing or in speech, that would have been remarkable at any time. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of it was that, great as it appeared to us when we heard him speaking in either this House or in another place, his quickness of mind was such that it was no less great when impromptu and without notice. The subject-matter and the humour bubbled up afresh and at a moment's notice.

With that equipment and that training, and with the training he obtained in this House, it is little wonder that he was able to enter upon one of the greatest phases of his life's work in India at so early an age for one occupying a position of such immense authority. There is no doubt that while he has always been a man whose heart and soul were for England and the Empire, yet his best friends would own that it was India and the East that held his imagination from his early youth until the end of his life. He regarded the presence of the Englishman in India as the presence of a man with a mission, and he regarded him as the servant of our country on a sacred mission. He never flinched from those high ideals and earnest endeavours, and, in spite of all, he held the scales of justice even in that great country.

But there, just as in his life afterwards, and in his political life, while he never sought popularity, he was always grateful for appreciation. He was, it is true, exacting towards others, and he demanded a very high standard, but he was not nearly as exacting towards others as he was towards himself. The standard that he demanded from others he demanded in a triple measure from himself.

But these things I have said are well known, and they may be found in biographies, and I want, if I may, for a few minutes to try to look a little more under the surface. Lord Curzon was a man who erected a façade about himself, and a façade which deceived many people and was the product of a natural shyness, an intense and exquisite sensitiveness. It is no uncommon thing, as each of us may know in our own lives and moving amongst the men we know, that human beings in this world who suffer from sensitiveness do put something between themselves and their fellow-men to ward off the shafts which they dread; yet underneath there beats the kindest, warmest human heart.

There was a nature, contrary to what many might believe who did not know him, of the uttermost simplicity--the eternal boy lived in him until the last week of his life. He was the soul of loyalty to his colleagues, he bore no grudges in political life, he pursued a straight course; and all this in the face of daily and constant physical suffering. Of that many knew nothing, because it was a thing of which he never spoke. But I have seen him at the Cabinet, I have seen him at a dinner party, and if he were not able to have the necessary cushions to support his back, his suffering would be as the suffering of a man on the rack, and that he fought against day by day. When we look back upon him, I feel that what Lord Rosebery said of William Pitt is so true of him, that whatever men may feel about his life or his acts, they must be agreed that England had in this generation no more patriotic spirit, none more intrepid, and none more pure.

I want before I sit down to say one or two things that no one but I can say. A Prime Minister sees human nature bared to the bone, and it was my chance to see him twice when he suffered great disappointment--the time when I was preferred to him as Prime Minister, and the time when I had to tell him that he could render greater service to the country as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence than in the Foreign Office. Each of those occasions was a profound and bitter disappointment to him, but never for one moment when he had faced the facts did he show by word, look or innuendo, or by any reference to the subject afterwards, that he was dissatisfied. He bore no grudge, and he pursued no other course than the one I expected of him, of doing his duty where it was decided that he could best render service.

I felt on both those occasions that I had seen in him, in that strange alloy which we call human nature, a vein of the purest gold. He died as he would have desired, and as we should all desire to die, in harness, a harness put on himself in youth and worn triumphantly through a long life, a harness which he never cast off until his feet had entered the river. It may well be when we look back on that life of devoted service to his country, and of a perpetual triumph of the spirit over the flesh, that in some places in this earth, early on that Friday morning, may have been heard the faint echoes of the trumpets that sounded for him on the other side.

LORD MILNER AND ARNOLD TOYNBEE

FROM A SPEECH AT OXFORD

15_th May_, 1925

I feel to-night that I cannot do better than say something to you about what Lord Milner stood for in this world of ours, what he has meant for his generation, and what the message is that he has for our party and for the whole Empire. It is thirty years since Lord Milner paid a great tribute to another Oxford man, a friend of his own, whose name I hope is not forgotten yet in Oxford. I mean Arnold Toynbee. Arnold Toynbee was a product of his generation, but he was more than that. He lived at a time when the industrial revolution of this country had so far succeeded that those who worked with their hands were being more vocal and more clamant about their position, and what they conceived to be their rights, and the duties of those whose lot in life was more fortunate, and at a time when the consciences of the well-to-do were beginning to be stimulated and to react to the touch of those who in the middle of the last century had been but voices in the desert. Toynbee, by his friendship, by his own ardent nature, and by the social experiment that he made in his short life, in supporting the movement[1] for university settlements put in the poorer quarters of our great towns, and by stimulating interest throughout the educated and the more fortunate classes in what was going on around them in worlds they knew but little, was more than anyone perhaps of his generation the pioneer of much that has happened since and the father of movements begun in but a small way, but which have helped to change the whole outlook of the English people in the matter of social life and social reform. It was that devotion, that unselfish devotion, of Toynbee and his friends to social service that captivated Milner in his youth and that, in spite of all the vicissitudes, political and others, that attended his life, remained with him as an abiding inspiration; and, indeed, it is from that inspiration that we who are here to-night as members of a revivified and triumphant Conservative Party draw our breath and have our being.

[1] The original inspiration of the movement was given by the late Canon Barnett and Mrs. (now Dame Henrietta) Barnett, who founded Toynbee Hall.

It is difficult to realise the change that has come over the thought of our country in the course of one short or two short generations. When Milner came up to Oxford the old _laissez-faire_ school still reigned unchallenged in all matters, social and economic. If I may quote his own words, he said: "All the recognised authorities were orthodox economists of the old school, but within ten years the few men who still held the doctrines in their extreme rigidity had come to be regarded as curiosities." And Milner said himself, in answer to a question that was often asked at that time, "Was Arnold Toynbee a Socialist?"--and his words, I think, are full of wisdom, applicable to the present day even more than they were applicable to the day when he said them: "If by Socialism you mean collectivism, the abolition of individual property, or if you mean social democracy, the paternal government of an omnipotent, all-absorbing State, then Toynbee was certainly no Socialist. But on the other hand, he was convinced of the necessity of social reorganisation. The Industrial Revolution had shattered the old social system. It had left the industrial life of this and the other great civilised countries of the West in a state of profound disorder, and society, left to itself, could not right itself. Salvation would only come through deliberate corporate effort, inspired by moral issues, though guided by the scientific study of economic laws." And I do not think that that is any bad definition of the ideals which we to-day are working for.

Going back once more for a moment to the time of Toynbee and when Milner was a young man, there were published some other books which I daresay are unknown to this generation, but the contents of which and the ideas of which ran through all thoughtful England like a heath fire, and those were the revelations which appeared in General Booth's book on _Darkest England_, and the scientific investigation or poverty by Mr. Charles Booth, who devoted a remarkable natural ability, great wealth, and tireless industry for the first time to the tabulation of facts regarding the condition of the people under our industrial system in our great towns--books which have been for years after their publication a mine of wealth of knowledge to all who sought to do work, in whatever capacity, in trying to amend the social conditions of our people.

Much has been done since those days. Much has been done to grapple with the problems of unemployment, with the problems of health and of housing, which the reformers of that generation would have rejoiced to see, more perhaps than many of them could have hoped to see. But yet we are not satisfied, and we have to take stock at the present time, and we have to ask ourselves if those great men who preceded us would have been satisfied to rest now in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Now Lord Milner, with his highly trained intellect, waged war against twin evils which always struck his mind perhaps more than any others--inefficiency and waste--and his whole life was a protest against these things. All the efforts that he made in inspiring other public men in the course of their work were directed to combat those evils. He had no patience with what we in England are often only too proud of--our capacity for muddling through. He had no sympathy with muddling, whether you got through or not.