A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
THE legend of Lord Baldwin's pipe and pigs was carried much too far. Of course he was a countryman and a country-lover among other things, but apart from that, and in addition to his political career, he was a great industrialist, a railway director and in his time president both of the Classical Association and the English Association (notable enough for a man who took a third at Cam- bridge). Varied details of his long career stand out—coinage of the phrase (to which Keynes gave such currency) " a lot of hard-faced men who look as if they had done well out of the war" ; the letter to The Times signed F.S.T. (Financial Secretary to the Treasury, as it afterwards turned out) in which the writer mentioned that he was giving a fifth of his income (or was it capital ?) to the nation ; the Carlton Club speech that brought down the Lloyd George govern- ment in 1922 ; the miscalculated General Election of 1923 , and, of course, the masterly handling of the Abdication crisis in 1936. In that his task must have been made in one sense easier by his un- stinted admiration (to which I once heard him give impressive ex- pression in private) for the present King, and his confidence that what had to be would be no change for the worse. He valued im- mensely his Chancellorship of Cambridge University, but those who saw him conferring honorary degrees last June realised how much he was overtaxing his failing strength. A political career that began in the year of Campbell-Bannerman's death and was ended (by a self-imposed ordinance) at the outbreak of the Second World War offers wide opportunities to a biographer. In Baldwin's case that task has been entrusted to the skilled hands of Mr. G. M. Young. His work, I believe, is well in hand.
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