THE LATE LORD CROMER.a
LORD SA-NDERSON'S admirable Memoir of his old friend and colleague, Lord Cromer, is a worthy tribute to that great man. Nothing could be better or truer than the opening sentences :- " Of the many high qualities by which he was distinguished, the most conspicuous was a constant, steady, tireless energy in the performance of any task which he took in hand. With this he combined a singularly calm, sound judgment, founded on wide experience and reading, perfect honesty of purpose and conduct, a high sense of duty, and undaunted courage and tenacity. It is said of him that he was a great Empire-builder, and it is true that his work led the way to the transfer of Egypt from the Turkish to the British Empire. But it was the liberation rather than the acquisition of Egypt that was the primary object of his conscious effort, and it was his privilege and his great reward that through his instrumentality, by his patient and persistent work, the popula- tion of the Nile Valley was freed from the burden of oppression out of which the Pyramids arose, and on which they looked calm and impassive for so many centuries."
Lord Sanderson remarks on the fact that, though Lord Cromer went to Woolwich at fourteen and had neither a Public School nor a
• Nooks, Bart of Cramer. Memoir by Lord Sanderson. London: H. Milford, tot the British Academy. [IL Od. net.]
University training, he was, as our readers know, a devoted lover of the ancient classics :-
" The expression studious ' seems scarcely appropriate to a dis- position so strenuous and robust ; but he devoted much patient and methodical labour to the making of extracts and summaries, and his Commonplace Books contain some 1,500 pages of excerpts, mingled with shrewd, frank, and sometimes very humorous com- ments and anecdotes. He once related to a friend a remark made to him in early days by his cousin, Sir Francis Baring, who had held office as Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Lord of the Ad- miralty, and was eventually created Baron Northbrook. ' You are young and hardworking,' said Sir Francis, and you probably keep a Diary. Now don't waste your time in putting down events as they happen—you can always find those in the Annual Register. Put down what you think is going to happen, and you will be astonished afterwards to see how wrong you were."
Lieutenant Baring, as he then was, profited by his appointment to a battery in the Ionian Islands in 1858 to learn modern Greek. He found favour with the British High Commissioner, whose aide-de-camp he became and whom he followed to Malta. Then he returned to his military duties, entered the Staff College, and afterwards joined in 1870 the nascent Intelligence Department of the War Office. He went to India in 1872 as private secretary to his cousin Lord Northbrook, the Viceroy, and there acquired that intimate know- ledge of Eastern administrative problems which was the basis of his life-work in Egypt. He first went to Cairo in 1877, on the nomination of Mr. Goschen, as one of the two Controllers-General appointed by the Khedive Ismail to satisfy the bondholders. He served on the Commission of Inquiry which in 1878 revealed the financial and administrative chaos prevailing in Egypt, and drew up a programme of reform. He left Egypt in 1880 for India, to become Financial Member of the Viceroy's Council. The Indian Civil Service did not welcome this military intruder. He wrote to his friend Sir Louis Mallet in January, 1881 :-
" My difficulties here are not decreasing ; rather the reverse. The conviction is gradually being forced on me that my honourable colleagues and the departments in general regard me as an incar- nation of the devil and the India Office, and view anything I propose with extreme mistrust."
But his tact and good humour soon disarmed his critics, and his three successive Financial Statements, or Budgets, for 1881-83 proved his exceptional ability. Lord Cromer's Indian experience is sometimes forgotten. The truth is that the high reputation which he gained so rapidly in India caused him to be chosen for the exceptionally difficult post of British Agent in Egypt in the autumn of 1883. Lord Sanderson's summary account of Lord Cromer's work in Egypt is excellent. In regard to General Gordon, the biographer remarks :-
" All that can be said is that so long as communications could be maintained Baring strove indefatigably and whole-heartedly to present the kaleidoscopic suggestions which reached him from Khartoum in such a shape as would secure for them full and, so far as possible, favourable consideration in London, and that when communications were interrupted it was owing to no lack of insistence on his part as to the urgent need of a relief expedition that measures for that purpose were so long delayed."
He adds the pregnant footnote :— " No one whose knowledge is confined to the published correspondence can form any idea of the bewildering rapidity with which fresh and often contradictory projects and proposals were evolved by General Gordon's fertile brain."
The biographer makes it clear that Lord Cromer seriously impaired his health by staying so long at his post of duty at Cairo, and was physically exhausted when he came home in 1907. But he recovered to some extent and plunged into new work, taking an active part in politics, writing his Modern Egypt, and contributing from 1912 the regular signed articles and reviews which readers of the Spectator
have cause to remember :—
" He used to say laughingly that he had a singular facility for taking up unpopular causes, and it was quite true that he was entirely indifferent to popular applause, and was always ready to oppose movements which appeared to him to be based on mere sentiment or abstract principles and to be contrary to the dictates of experience and observation. Thus, while he by no means under- rated the intelligence of women, he took an active part in opposing female suffrage, being convinced that the direct participation of women in Parliamentary politics would be detrimental both to them and to the community. Similarly, although both he and Lady Cromer had placed themselves at the head of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Egypt, he strongly contested the propaganda of the Ani-Vivisection Society as being based on misrepresentation, and calculated to impede scientific progress for the benefit of the human race and the animals themselves."
Lord Cromer "incurred much unreasoning obloquy " by proposing that the old-age pensions scheme should be experimental and liable to review after seven years, though pensions once granted should not be taken away. He tried hard to prevent the House of Lords from rejecting the Budget in 1909, and he helped to persuade his fellow-Peers to pass the Parliament Bill. He had recovered much of his old vigour in 1916 when he was invited to preside over the Dardanelles Commission. It was characteristic of him that " when the Commission after a first meeting in August adjourned for four weeks, he employed his leisure in Scotland in writing a number of articles for the Spectator in order that the paper should suffer au little as possible from his enforced silence while the Commission WAS at work." Lord Cromer worked hard for three months at the Commission, and " then occurred the catastrophe which the present writer had from the first apprehended." He was laid up with influenza, and, in his anxiety not to delay the work of the Com- mission, he called a meeting at his house before he was fully recovered. Ho broke down, and in a few weeks had passed away. " The friends who miss him have at least this consolation that the good which he did lives after him, and that his memory, the memory of the just, blossoms where the grass had withered under the iron heel of Turkish rule."
Previous page
