It is a nice question whether Lord Rothermere gained fame
from association with his brother, Lord Northcliffe, or lost it through being overshadowed by him. Northcliffe was un- questionably a great journalist. Rothermere was not, and so far as I know never claimed to be. He was a highly efficient and successful business man, whether it was a question of running paper-production in Newfoundland or paper-production of a different kind—he created the " Daily Mail Trust "—in Fleet Street. If he had succeeded in his attempt to acquire The Times after his brother's death in 1922 there might have been a different story to tell about him. But fortunately Major Astor got it instead, after negotiations about which I fancy Mr. Wickham Steed could say a good deal. Rothermere was a great and discriminating philanthropist. In no sense a literary man himself, he gave a large sum for fhe foundation of a Chair of English Literature (still filled by its first occupant, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch) at Cambridge; he saved the Foundling Hospital sire for a children's playground; but the greatest service he did to his country, as it dramatically plain now, was in financing at his own cost the creation of the aeroplane of which the Bristol Blenheim bomber of today is the lineal descendant. That machine itself in its turn has descendants of which little can be said yet.
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