LORD SHAW'S REMINISCENCES.* Loan Snew has made a curious compromise

with the Spirit of the Time who requires men and women to publish auto- biographies. He has yielded to the demand, frankly and fully, but he has salved his conscience, as it were, by telling his story in a series of familiar letters to his youngest daughter. We remember that the great Sully had his memoirs addressed to himself by an imaginary double. Lord Shaw's literary device is less complicated than that, and when the reader has learned to skip the intimate and sentimental passages, he will be rewarded with some interesting pages. Lord Shaw was fortunate enough to be born at Dunfermline, whose citizens have profited mightily from the munificence of the late Andrew Carnegie and from the proximity of Rosyth. He went to Edinburgh University, distinguished himself in philosophy, and became an advocate in 1875. He recalls some curious oases, including the trial of the Lewis land agitators in 1888, which excited much feeling in Scotland. Lord Shaw was called to the Bar two days before R. L. Stevenson, whom he remembers seeing " with his very white wig and his glossy dark hair, his complexion of an ivory pallor and his gleaming dark eyes."

" Friend No. 1, a professor at the University and a practising • Letters to Lobel. Ba' Lord Shaw 01 Dunfermline. London: Ciampi!. [211. net.]

barrister, told me this. A few days after Stevenson went to the Bar he had got a guinea sent to him, with instructions.' His sole duty was to ask the Judge for intimation and service of a Petition on the party against whom it was directed. All he had to do was to stand up at the Bar and utter three words interrogatively, ' Intimation and Service ? ' But he was a mass of nerves, and these three words he could not utter, and he besought his friend to go into Court and make the little motion for him. I never heard of his earning another guinea as an advocate."

Lord Shaw had the honour of seconding Stevenson for the Professorship of Constitutional History, which was in the gift of the Faculty of Advocates, but Stevenson, fortunately for literature, received only seven votes against two hundred for his rival Mr. Kirkpatrick.

Lord Shaw; as a keen lawyer and an ardent Radical, soon went into political life. He was elected for the Border Burghs in 1892, and was lucky enough in 1894 to step into the post of Solicitor-General for Scotland, which Mr. Asher had suddenly resigned. When Lord Rosebery resigned in 1895, and the Liberal Party collapsed at the General Election, Lord Shaw attached himself to the Radical section. He had his reward ten years later when his old friend Sir Henry Campbell-Banner- man took office. He relates with much gusto how Sir Henry

handled the Liberal Imperialists, who thought to impose con- ditions on the Prime Minister and even to require him to go to the House of Lords. Quoting from a letter of December 8th, 1905, he describes a conversation of that day with the Cabinet- maker :-

" My anxiety overnight had been about an alleged intrigue to jockey the Prime Minister out of the House of Commons and into the Lords. The Times confirmed our worst fears by declaring that Grey had declined office except on that condition. C.B. opened by saying, ' Don't believe the Times newspaper ! My word ! ' I said, I am glad. To be frank with you, I may just say that I thought they were hitting you at your weakest point—your good nature ; but—I must say it—if you had yielded, the country would have thought itself betrayed.' After a little, he said with a laugh, Do you know it was the comicality of it that I could hardly get over. They were to serve under me, but on condition that they were not to be with me !'

By this time the bell was going, and he said, Come ! ' and off he and I went to his morning-room and sat down together side by side. Then he opened out :

' You know it's been going on since Monday. The three —Asquith, Grey and Haldane—all indicated that this was the condition. But Asquith was always uneasy : he walked back and forward in this very room here, and he stood up just at that mantelpiece and said : " Here we are, on every conceivable point of policy agreed, and yet somehow something wrong. Suppose I go down to my constituents, and they say to me : Would you tell us, were you not asked to be in the Government ? ' and I reply, I was.' And then they say, Did you not get a good enough oiler f ' and I reply, Well, the fact is, I was offered the Chan- cellorship of the Exchequer ! ' And then they say, What's wrong, then ? ' and I say ' Oh, but my leader was to be in the Commons ! ' How shall I look ? Then Grey goes, and he has to confess that he was given the offer of three great offices and got the one—the Foreign Office—which he chose. And his constituents say, Well, what more could you want ? ' How foolish it all is ! And Haldane too."

Well,' saidthis thing began on Monday ; and I let it go on for three daYs ; and then I said to each and all of them, " Now look here, I have been playing up till now." The comi-

cality of it, as I say, appealed to me. But now let me just say—that-it is I who am the head of this Government : it is I who have the Sing's Command : I am on horseback, and you will be all pleased to understand that I will not go to the House of Lords ; that I will not have any condition of the kind imposed upon me, that you must take your own course, on that footing. Do you understand ? " Grey said, " I cannot face the idea of Lord Rosebery attacking a Government of which I am a mem- ber." ' As C.B. said that he laughed and said, Dear me, you are a man of distinction, and you are going to be swayed by another man to a course which you can't openly explain any sort of way satisfactory to yourself 1 '

So,' says O.B., they all came in—no conditions ; no nothing : there they are.' "

Lord Shaw himself was made Lord Advocate, but, little more than three years later, another unexpected vacancy enabled him to become a Scottish Lord of Appeal. He is careful to say that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in his last days, testified to Mr. Asquith's loyalty. " Asquith," he declared, " has been like a son to me." The old party intrigues had been forgotten.

It is well known that Lord Shaw had much to do with the establishment of the Carnegie Trust for the Scottish Univer- sities, and his very candid account of the affair is worth reading. Re was staying with Mr. Carnegie at Cluny Castle in 1896, and chanced to find that the young ghillie who accompanied him on Loch. Loggan was a clever lad who wanted to be a doctor. The boy's father was a shoemaker with six children, and even the modest fees at Glasgow were beyond his powers. Lord Shaw told the story to Mr. Carnegie and afterwards obtained from a friend the money required for the ghillie's training. Next year he wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century advocating free university education in Scotland. He found no support in Scotland. But four years later Mr. Carnegie, who had read the article, promised to realize the idea. Lord Shaw asked him for a million, and was told to organize a Trust. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman readily agreed to become a Trustee ; Lord Balfour of Burleigh, then Secretary for Scotland, agreed with reluctance, maintaining that it would be bettor to endow the universities themselves. Mr. Carnegie added half a million for scientific research. But he was then persuaded—for he " naturally wanted to be asso- ciated with men of power " and " always had a real weakness towards the aristocrat "—to limit his endowment to students who were too poor to pay fees. Lord Shaw went to meet Mr. Carnegie, who told him that the original scheme was undesirable, as the help was not needed.

" Although I was sure it had been well dinned into him, it is to his credit that he did not personally like—in short, rather revolted against—either the poverty test or the poverty appeal. And you should know also that by this time Lord Elgin had pronounced against the idea, and Mr. Arthur Balfour, at a meeting which the three of us and Ross had at the Scotch Office for revising the deed (I used the term, I remember, of turning the Trust into a sublimated Poor's Board ') expressed himself quite peremptorily in the same sense. But this is a digression.

Suddenly Mr. Carnegie broke in : There is a better use for my money, and I have resolved on it—to equip the Univer- sities.'

The battery was unmasked. To equip the Universities,' I said ; you know that I favour that. Quite a good object ' ; and I began gathering together and folding up my papenAl Shaw,' he said, what does this meant Does it mean that you are not to be a trustee ? '

That is exactly,' said I, what it means. Your scheme is good, but it is not my scheme ; you are building it in the air. I took you for a democrat '—his eyes blazed, but I went on- ' and here you have been consulting with aristocrats and giving away endowments—right enough—but why not build on your democracy, get the people of Scotland on your side by giving them this free charter that I want ? Begin with them ; trust them ; build on that. Otherwise you will build on the air ; closer and oloser will these corporations grow.' Then I stopped, thinking I had lost all by going too far. Carnegie sat in a sort of maze.

Then in the pause, and to his everlasting credit, Ross struck in, putting a point with a quiet and simple foroe. Would it not be possible, gentlemen, to realize both your schemes ? '

Carnegie looked at me ; and I said : I could have no objec- tion to that : I favour both.'

Then he too began gathering up papers. You to get your million,' he said.

' That would make things solid,' I replied.

He continued : The rest half a million for equipment.'

I don't scrimp that,' said I ; not at all ; the colleges will grow, and scientific things make a big item and growing.'

Let it be so,' he said to the dear intervener. He and I stood up and shook hands. And I back to my briefs. He stayed all night in Thinfermlin.' e.

What happened next morning at the railway station was told to me by Dr. Ross. In stepping into his compartment Mr. Carnegie turned and=` Just give Shaw another half- million,' he said ; I mean, a million for him and a million for the others.' So the sum of the Trust endowment became ten millions of dollars."

We are bound to add that there is another side to this question, though Mr. Carnegie and Lord Shaw were actuated by the beet intentions. The rapid multiplication of the numbers of students imposed new responsibilities on the universities, whose incomes did not increase in proportion. Moreover, the existence of an independent and wealthy Trust, influencing the universities but in no way responsible to them or for them, has occasioned serious difficulties for higher education in Scotland.