Chapter VIII: Part 8

But, after all, we are here to-night to celebrate friendships which were made in a time such as I have endeavoured to depict, friendships which certainly individually, I believe, in hundreds of cases have only grown stronger with the passage of time. We thought then much of our combined and united influence on the world. Possibly the freshness of that feeling, maybe in both countries, has to some extent evaporated in the strenuous years of peace which have followed. But there is just as much need, if not more need, to-day for that understanding, for that co-operation, and for that mutual help, as ever there was in the time of war. Strangers as many of us were to each other, we rapidly became acquaintances, and acquaintances became friends, and gatherings such as these will keep those friendships alive, if indeed anything be necessary for that purpose, and we hope that through us they may help to keep alive the friendship of the nations.

If I may say one more word to the English here--it is not necessary to you, but it is necessary to our country people, and I look to you to teach our country people--it is this: it is quite true that we and the Americans have much in common, but what most English people who do not know America forget is that the essential thing for mutual understanding is to realise what we have not got in common.

The root of any differences which may occur at any time between our two peoples is the root of most of the trouble in this world--it is the root of ignorance. And it is because it is one of the objects of this society to dispel and eradicate that ignorance that I rejoice in its existence and in its continuance. I think probably many of you taught America something of the nature, the quality, and the character of our people, just as many of those who came from America during the war taught the same lesson to our people. But it rests with you, and I am glad to hear it from Sir Thomas Royden to-night, to carry out the good work and to teach those who have not had our advantages what we ourselves have learned, because friendship at the best of times is fragile; a friendship will not run long of itself; friendship requires care and consideration.

I do not think there is much more on that subject I can say to you, and I think that what I would say has been far better expressed by others than I could express it myself. I will content myself by using some words which were uttered more than sixty years ago, which epitomise all that I would say, and all that I hope, and all that I believe:

"Whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual."

These were the words of Abraham Lincoln. Since those words were uttered we have passed through Armageddon together. May the friendship between the two nations, based on mutual knowledge and understanding, be perpetual for the benefit of the whole world.

FRIENDLY SOCIETIES

AT STOURPORT, AT THE ANNIVERSARY DINNER OF THE
ANCIENT ORDER OF FORESTERS (STOUR VALLEY)

18_th February_, 1924

It is not wasting words to try to realise what the great friendly society movement stands for. Like many other good things, it is of pure English growth, and owes its origin to the common people from whom many of the best things have come. It springs, as it were, from the soil, and has been a great instrument during a period of rapid change in instructing our people in some of the greatest of the principles which should guide their lives, as well as in branches of work and learning in many subjects in which they could have no other teacher.

Immersed as my life has become in political work, I am glad that in the friendly society movement we know no politics. Politics have such powers of penetrating most things that I am thankful that this movement has never been captured by any of the political machines, and I hope its leaders will see to it in the future that it remains a thing apart.

A man entering a court or lodge gets his first insight into the common problem of Government; learns to control himself by working with others; learns to work with others for the benefit of others, and to exercise discrimination and judgment. I have also seen how the savings of the many can be utilised to fertilise the public services and the social activities of the country. The whole spirit of the movement is service for others, a spirit which is more wanted in England and in every country of the world to-day than any other; but because of the great influence and position of our own country there is no other in which that spirit needs to be more manifested, since the greater part of mankind looks to us as to the one country which they hope and believe will set the example to the world in the stability and probity of its finances and in its willingness to be of service to the rest of the distracted world. By teaching our own people the spirit of service which the friendly societies inculcate, we are playing our part in making our democracy fitter and nobler, and by doing that we are not only helping ourselves but the whole world.

HARROW

AT THE DINNER OF THE HARROW ASSOCIATION

19_th July_, 1923

Thanks be to Heaven there is in every English boy an unconscious but impregnable resistance to every form of pressure made by any schoolmaster who works him too hard or tries to put too much inside him. I know that was so in my own case and in that of many who have done far more work in the world than I have. It is to this that Englishmen owe so largely the careful cultivation of their physical growth. They let the body grow, undisturbed by mental storms, until they got into their early twenties, and then they go out into the world able to graft the sane mind on to the sane body. They have not worked out their minds before they come to tackle the problems of the world.

I cannot help going back into the past, seeing so many faces which call up memories of forty years ago. When a small boy at a private school I was taken, wearing a new top hat and an Eton jacket, to Lords, where I watched the Harrow Eleven winning a great victory. I remember that at the tail of the team there walked from the pavilion by far the largest schoolboy I had ever seen. The first ball that boy got he put well into the old pavilion. The boy's name was Ronald M'Neill.

I can single out to-night a man, whom I remember as captain of my house football eleven, who has just returned after a most distinguished period of service in Persia and Mesopotamia. He is known to the whole Empire as Sir Percy Cox. Not far from him is another whose name I hardly dare mention, because in those distant years he was my fag. He combined immaculate cleanliness with an immaculate manner. I am proud to call him my Right Honourable learned and gallant friend Jack Seely. Sprinkled here and there throughout the room, some of them disguised in clerical dress, are a lot of distinguished men whom I remember as ruffians in the football field.

There is no feeling that remains longer in life than the feeling that one has at thirteen or fourteen years of age, and I assure the Captain of the Eleven here to-night that in the breasts of all the small boys at Harrow to-day, that feeling of awe and reverence with which he is personally regarded will be as vivid in their bosoms fifty years hence as it is to-day.

I must pay tribute to the Fourth Form Room. The first time I made its acquaintance was when I sat for an entrance examination, and I remember so well my disappointment at finding I was among the rejected. I got over it, however, in subsequent years, when I learnt that two of the most distinguished men in public life to-day had shared my fate: one is the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the other--it is the first time I have ever been classed with first-class brains--no less a person than the late Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Birkenhead. Happy the school whose outcasts and rejected can yet make good in after life!

When the call came to me to form a Government, one of my first thoughts was that it should be a Government of which Harrow should not be ashamed. I remembered how in previous Governments there had been four or, perhaps, five Harrovians, and I determined to have six. To make a Cabinet is like making a jig-saw puzzle fit, and I managed to make my six fit by keeping the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer for myself. I think we have good reason to be content. I am very proud that it has fallen to my lot to be the next Prime Minister after Palmerston to come from Harrow, and it is a special source of pride and joy to me to know that Mr. Yates Thompson is here to-night, for he was the Head of the School when Palmerston was Prime Minister. I hope with all my heart that the present Head of the School may live to be as old as Mr. Yates Thompson, be as much respected, and be able to look back with as much pleasure at the share he took in our gathering this evening.

I have known no occasion on which it has been more difficult to find the right word to express my feelings. I stand here to-night among men who have made good in this world for their own sakes and for the sake of the School in every walk of life. I think they will agree with me--stern self-critics as all men must be who have made good--that there is only one form of congratulation in this world that is worth anything, and that is the expression of good will and the expression from your own peers--that is, from the men who themselves are working in the hard places of the world and trying to make those rough places smooth--that you have tried to do your duty. I realise as well as anyone here that the kindness you have shown me and the welcome you have given me are not so much a tribute to achievement--that, please God! may come later--but as holding out the hand to one from the same School who is now taking on himself the heaviest burden in the world. You mean by your greeting to assure me that you wish me well, as I know you do, and that whether I succeed or fail you have the belief in me that as a son of the Hill I will run straight; that I will bear my share of the burden; that if I fail I will not whine; and that if success is mine I shall not be puffed up; but that I will try in all things to follow in the footsteps of those who have trodden this same difficult path before me; and that I will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and a difficult career which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I have failed to do my best to live up to the highest ideals of the School.

SOME ANCESTORS

FROM A SPEECH TO THE NONCONFORMIST
UNIONIST LEAGUE

8_th April_, 1924

I owe a great deal of my public and private life to my Nonconformist ancestry. It is curiously crossed with two very strong strains which work sometimes comfortably and sometimes very uncomfortably side by side. I have a Quaker strain that goes back to the earliest days of the Quakers, when one of my ancestors went out in the reign of William III. as a missionary to the American Colonies. He devoted half a century mainly to missionary work there and in the West Indies, where ultimately he died, leaving a name which was perhaps the most prominent and the best known of the Quaker missionaries in those Colonies.

This Quaker blood is peculiarly persistent, and I attribute to it a certain obstinacy which I find co-existing with one of the most placable dispositions that ever a man had. I find sometimes that when I conceive a matter to be one of principle I feel I would rather go to the stake than give way. It sometimes brings me into trouble, and has brought my friends into trouble, but I am afraid that characteristic will remain with me as long as I live.

But all these things have their compensations. The Quakers were by far the most persecuted body of the Nonconformists, and that strain of Quakerism makes one absolutely impervious to the abuse which necessarily occurs in public life.

To come to more modern times, I have a rather remarkable record--no less than half my great-grandfathers were Presidents of Conference. I am immensely proud of this ancestry, because they set an example which it is not easy to live up to, and up to which, in the earlier part of my life, I failed signally to live. I quoted the instance while I was in Scotland of one of my great-grandfathers who was the son of a man who fled from Scotland after the "Forty-five." He was a personal follower of John Wesley, and was, if I remember aright, ordained by him to the Wesleyan ministry. He was a man who never could have had more than a couple of pounds a week, but he was a natural scholar. He taught himself many languages, and, more remarkable still, he educated his own eldest son to take a scholarship at Cambridge, and in the next generation the same performance was repeated by the gaining of a scholarship at Oxford by the son of a father who must have been brought up on something very like that narrow and meagre income. It was, indeed, a time of plain living and high thinking.

If there is one thing more than another of which I feel ashamed to-day, it is to think how I, with the chances I had in youth--and I venture to think with the capacity to take equal advantage of them--wasted so much time when I was at the University and failed to follow in the footsteps of those who had gone before me, with far less advantages. But these things come home to us as we get older. I think, as years go by, we look more and more to those who have gone before us, and we want to feel that when our time comes to pass away we may leave some record behind us to make those who follow less ashamed of us.

A WAR MEMORIAL

AT THE UNVEILING OF THE BOARD OF TRADE WAR
MEMORIAL

19_th December_, 1923

There is no greater honour that can fall to a man than to be asked to unveil a memorial of this kind. I am grateful to those who asked me to perform this ceremony to-day. All over the land, in stone and bronze, have arisen these memorials; memorials to help us in our recollections and to tell the world and the unborn generations of the magnitude of the sacrifice by which we attained our victory. And the unborn generations in some way are happier than we, for to them will be revealed in their true perspective the magnitude and the issues of the contest, and from them will be hidden some of the controversies, the sordid things, the selfishness and the greed which arose among the good deeds like poisonous fungi, the recollection of which will pass away with our generation. But even now, those who are here can see and estimate what the endurance and the courage of our own people were during those years, and it should be an inspiration to us for the rest of our lives.

There never was a war before this, at any rate for our country, in which the whole people was engaged directly or indirectly; a war in which men went forth to fight in the full consciousness of what they did. Not a man, whose name is commemorated on this tablet, but went forth with the full knowledge that he was fighting for what he and his countrymen believed to be right, for the liberties of the world, and those who fell, fell in a belief, perhaps hardly uttered by themselves, that somehow or another their lives might be given to promote the betterment of this world.

Seven millions perished in Europe, and here we commemorate but a tiny fraction of that vast host. Not one of those seven millions in all the countries of Europe and of the New World, but his death broke some tie of friendship, made a vacant place in some home, and the mourning for them will last with our lives. It is no use our asking that question which has so often come to the lips of disconsolate men and women, "Were their lives sacrificed in vain?" "The true sorrow of humanity consists in this, not that the mind of man fails, but that the course and demands of actions and of life so rarely correspond with the dignity and intensity of human desires." So said Wordsworth more than a hundred years ago, and his words are as true now as when he wrote them.

To many the last five years have been a disenchantment. Every cloud has a silver lining, and we take strength from the fact that, through all the difficulties of the time, the strength and moderation of the character of our people has once again shown itself, and in our country, almost alone in Europe, have we had freedom from unconstitutional rebellion. And more than that, I think we may say of our own people that feelings of hatred and vengeance have no permanent root in their hearts.

I think we ought to remember at a gathering like this, that in the Civil Service, different perhaps from many other services, only a limited number could go and fight, and the Civil Service contained many men who, had they been able, would have been in the forefront of the battle, and who, not being able to go, devoted themselves to the work of the country in their various stations in a manner deserving of the highest praise. Many lives were sacrificed in the war, sacrificed under the strain of continuous overwork as truly and in the same spirit as those who gave their lives in battle. Of no department can that be said with greater truth than of this great department to which we are proud to belong or to have belonged.

Of those whose names we commemorate here, "In the sight of the unwise, they seem to die: and their departure is taken for misery, and their going from us to be utter destruction: but they are in peace." Peace is theirs, and we have to remember that, and it is a peace that we cannot share. Lincoln said, and I think his are words we should take from here to-day, "We must show an increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

In many ways our task is the harder, for, after all the sorrows that most of us here have been through, we have to face the world with a high courage and brave heart for the allotted time that may be left, and devote ourselves each in his own vocation to the service of our common humanity, knowing well that it is only by the united efforts of men and women that we can maintain our civilisation at the level to which it has been raised, and that only by super-human effort can we better it. To try to do that is the least we can do for those who gave their lives for us. It is only in proportion as we go out into the world to do what we can for the world, that we can answer that question at the end and say, "They have not died in vain."

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, GLASGOW.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Our thanks are due to the Editors of the _Times_, the _Morning Post_, the _Daily _Telegraph_, the _Yorkshire Post_, the Student_ and the _English Race_, and to Mr. John Murray for the permission they have kindly given us to make use of the texts of the Prime Minister's addresses published by them.