25 NOVEMBER 1899, Page 5

LADY SALISBURY.

IT is not often that the death of a lady spreads dis- may through the political world, but undoubtedly dismay was the first feeling created by the tidings of the death of Lady Salisbury. The public were aware that she had been ill, but imagined her relieved from immediate danger, and the news of the end came on them with a shock of surprise. What, said every one instinctively, would be the effect of the calamity on her husband ? Men recalled the old romance,--how Lord Robert Cecil had fought for his choice ; how the young couple, left for a time without means, set themselves to live by work like any other struggling professionals ; how they succeeded in ke-ping the wolf from the door ; and how, when the blind Lord Cranbortte passed unexpectedly away, Lord Robert and his wife glided into their new position as heirs of Hatfield as if it had always been theirs. The struggling period was amply paid for. Lady Salisbury inherited from her father, a man of rare abilities, partly hidden from the world by his lack of self-assertion, the kind of efficiency always needed in great houses, though not always found, and for the thirty years of her reign at Hatfield she lifted from her husband the burden of domestic cares, becoming the gentle ruler and pivot of the large family which grew up around her, and remained, thanks to her influence, always united and content. There is no loss to any man like that of the house-mother who is also the competent companion, and to the states- man eternally pressed by cares which are also duties, and involve exertion, the loss must be almost prostrating. Had the times been different we should have feared a. great mis- fortune for England,—the withdrawal of Lord Salisbury into the library and the laboratory to wait for the future, active only in his thoughts. Happily there is no danger of that now. Those who have watched Lord Salisbury closely know that there is in him, as in many men who are at once strong and nervous, a quality of patience in the presence of facts he cannot alter, which is, if there can be such a thing, resignation springing from the intellect, and he will tight on in sadness as he has fought on in content. With a great war on hand, and all Europe watching with more or less hostile eyes, he cannot quit the helm, or refuse to lighten the burden on the Queen, and he will go forward as before, never sanguine, never qui'e believing the talk around him, but finding in him- self and his colleagues resource enough to meet each difficulty as it arises, finding, too, that the resource is greatest when the difficulty is great. The enemies of England will have no cause to triumph in the death of Lady Salisbury, unless, indeed, they are malignant enough to rejoice that the successful ruler of another land has lost the greatest source of his happiness and calm.

The history of England has been remarkable for the absence of ruling women,—we can hardly recall one since the death of the terrible Duchess, Sarah Jennings. Our manners, and possibly something too in English feminine nature, have compelled them, even when ambitious, to remain in the shade, or content themselves with a social distinction which, important when the country was governed by about fifty families, has lost much of its meaning now that ultimate power resides with eight millions of electors, of whom seven scarcely know the "great ladies'" names. The queen of " society " is td-clay, for political purposes, queen of a very small country. And yet if secret historywere ever truthful instead of dramatic, how much our politics would be seen to have owed to women. Half our statesmen would have' been different but. for the women about them and their counsel. Men, and especially men of action, are not made by their wives, but they are profoundly modified by them ; and many a man whom the world thinks great has been saved from rashness by his wife's sense, or inspired with firmness by her decision that there must be no change of course. We have .a fancy—it needs the experience of a thousand men to be sure—that women in politics are rather firmer than most men, that they have, in fact, more difficulty in unclosing their wills when they are once shut. They think clearly, but take short views, and are rarely " sicklied o'er" with that "pale cast of thought" which by inducing men to look too far forward indisposes them for action. The political Queens—Isabella of Castile, Mary Tudor, Elizabeth Tudor, Mary of Scots, the Empress Catherine, and Louisa of Prussia, who ruled though she did not reign—have been very resolute women, and there is no reason that we know of why they should be radically different from the re- mainder of their sex. At all events, women are, and must be, the most intimate, the most frequent, and the most interested counsellors of statesmen as well as other men, and to suppose that their influence does not modify action for good or for evil seems to us almost foolish. Happy the statesman whose wife, like Lord Salisbury's, is a complement rather than a repetition of himself, and who considers that her business in life is not to be a great person, but to sweep away the cares and obstacles in the path of the great person she has chosen.