A Veiled Counsellor.
THE second volume of Lord Esher's Journals and Letters covers the years 19034910 ending with the death of King Edward VII, and thus lying wholly 'within his reign. In the main it is autobiography, but so numerous are the letters from men in prominent positions in public life to him that it has also a biographical aspect. In general tone and temper it is the very antithesis of the Greville Diaries, for the author of the latter emerges as a man of vituperative and not always accurate gossip, a man of what may be called anti-filter mind in that whereas a filter cleanses what is .put through it of extraneous dirt, Greville often sullies what he records and lets his personal maliciousness impair his reliability. Lord Esher on the other hand sets down naught in malice and shows himself a kindly observer of fair and moderate views, while, biographically, the letters of those who were brought into contact with him endorse this impression of his friendly impartiality. Evidently he conducted the business of the numerous committees over which he presided with unique suavity.
One is apt to judge him at first as a man without ambition, anxious to avoid responsibility. He was offered the post of Secretary of State for War by the Unionist Government and two years later was approached by the Liberals as to whether he would accept the same office. Three years after that he might, if he had cared, have been Viceroy of India. But though he declined all these posts, he did not do so from any lack of ambition ; it was because they did not suit the career for which he felt himself fitted. He believed that he could best serve his country by making himself what Baron Stockmar for the first eighteen years of Queen Victoria's reign aimed at being, namely, the Invisible Man whom suc- cessive Ministers of the Crown consulted and who was in the intimate counsels of the. Queen and the Prince Consort. Stockmar, of course, being a German, could never have held any Governmental post in England, but he declined importants posts in Germany, preferring to remain, as he thought, the director of those who directed national affairs in London. Such also was Lord Esher's ambition, and these memoirs, edited by his son, prove how much more effectively he realized it than Stockmar. Perhaps he was right to distrust his own capacity for administration, though the fact that he was offered these posts showed that others did not share his view, and almost certainly' he was right in feeling that there was absent from his equipment the combativeness which every administrator must be able to display when occasion demands. His genius lay in advising rather than in shouldering responsibility or in carrying out those policies which he suggested. As he said of himself : " I do not care for any relics of my sojourn on the earth's surface. A few things I hope will be imperishable. Where I have been able to give a slight impetus which has set bigger stones rolling." King Edward, who was an extremely good judge of men and of their capabilities, seems to have agreed with his own estimate of his powers when he told him that though he held no public office he was the most valuable of his public servants. Indeed on many occasions when decisions on national policies were pending, Lord Esher reported to the King much in the manner that his Prime Minister might have done. Such poiver, which he used with great discretion, would have lost half its force if he had been administering a Governmental Department in which he would have had to meet direct and public op- position. It would have been a waste of energy to fight when he could effect so much more in private conversations.
Most of the book is devoted to detailed histories of this hidden work which at the time never appeared on the surface of current politics : he was giving, as he said, "the slight impetus." He saw, seven years before the Great War broke out that Germany must find expansion somewhere and must seek it through sea-power at the expense of the British Empire, and drew from that the inference that the only safety for England lay in having " two keels_ for one." In order to bring that home to the national con-. sciousness he founded an " Islander " society, which was to devote itself to securing an unrivalled Naval supremacy. But it is somehow odd to find that a man who had again and again showed so much prescience and foresight should have had no perception of how largely the advantage of being an island would be discounted by aerial warfare. Lord Northcliffe in 1909 saw much further than him, but it was in vain that he wrote to Lord Esher from Pau, when he was studying the experiments of the Wrights, on the supreme -importance of aeroplanes in any future war. The United States, France, Germany, Italy and Spain were already deeply interested in them, and had ordered specimens. The War Office alone remained completely apathetic with regard to this new machine which, though still a half-fledged infant, could fly forty miles an hour at the height of a mile, was furnished with wireless,. was practically unhitable and could. scout an enemy's position in a way impossible by any other method. Possibly Lord Northcliffe had appealed to the War Office first, and, finding no encouragement there, had hoped that Lord Esher could induce it to take cognizance of an invention of which the whole of the rest of Europe . saw the illimitable potentialities. But Lord. Esher seems not even to have replied to his letters : no reply, at least, is included in this volume and we are bound to infer that he brushed aside the possibility that aeroplanes could be of use in war. Or, perhaps, his reply was so scathingly contemptuous of the War Office that the Editor thought it more discreet to omit it. But that is not likely : the most probable explan- ation is that he was prejudiced against any suggestion coining from Lord Northcliffe. The two were so antipodal in the whole make-up and functioning of their minds that Lord. Esher was incapable, with all his fairness, of estimating at its true value the imperialistic fervour of the other. He considered him incapable of inspiring an article and of editing a paper.
But the picture as a whole is a rendering, as obviously life-like as a portrait by Rembrandt or Holbein, of one who combined discretion and wisdom and ability with great personal charm and who knew the value of his gifts better than those who tried to push him into the publicity of respons-: ible office. He filled the.-position he had made for himself with singular efficiency and wielded an influence which he did not wish to be recognized. The Editor, we conjecture, has omitted a good deal from the complete papers, but there are few passages we could wish had been added to these omissions. Lord Balfour, hearing that Morley was to write a life of Gladstone, sent him a message bidding him to be in- discreet, but in this book the discretion exercised has been
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