Lord Lansdowne
IORD LANSDOWNE, whose death at the age of -a eighty-two makes a very sad break with the past, carried on the Whig tradition into a generation which scarcely understood its significance and barely knew how familiar and powerful this tradition had once been. He was born a Whig, and from his boyhood onwards had never any thought but that his position bound him to the duty of service as it had bound his predecessors.
• It was natural for anyone who wanted an argument for the extension of democracy to throw a stone at the "ruling families " ; and to a well-known type of mind the Whig ruling families were even easier game than the Tories, because it was plausible to make them appear as men sinning against the light, sinning against their own professions of liberality. Lord Lansdowne may have yielded with reluctance to complete democracy, but in every one of the many political emergencies through which he passed he held that it was the duty of a statesman to secure that government should be carried on. He would never produce chaos and call it success. He never dreamed of turning his reluctance into obstinacy. When he felt that his cause was the cause of the minority he was always ready to give way. When he felt that wisdom had exhausted its warnings, he held that further resistance would become mere obstruc- tiveness or, worse still, be interpreted as an offensive insistence upon privilege. No doubt he did believe, in the true Whig manner, that a man who was born to position and wealth was by no •means an incubus on the body pulitie ; but he took it for granted—so much for granted that it never would have occurred to • him to argue about it—that the man with great possessions owed in return ungrudging service to the people.
If a true Whig had lost that doctrine he would have lost his pride and would have been in a fair way to demoralization. For the Whigs were always proud— prouder, if that were possible, than the Tories. Beresford Hope, recognizing that Whiggism was as much a matter of family as of political conviction, used to speak of the Whig ruling families as "The -sacred 'circle of the Great Grandrnotherhood." • Thackcray had the same idea running in his mind when he said, "I am not a Whig, but, oh ! how I should like to be one ! "
It seems almost incredible now, but Lord Lansdowne received his first office under Mr. Gladstone when he was only twenty-three years old. There had been little change in methods since the time of Pitt. Whiggism had seen almost its last flaring-up of extreme doctrine under Fox ; and when Mr. Gladstone was a young Prime Minister there were very few Whigs who were prepared to go the whole way with his pious Radicalism. Thus, Lord Lansdowne -found that his services in Canada as Governor-General and in India as Viceroy were a useful bridge across which he could pass gradually from one political party to another.
As Secretary for War under Lord Salisbury he certainly was not happy, and when everything began to go wrong. in the South African War in 1899 he was denounced bitterly even by his own party. No doubt he had lacked foresight, but he had lacked it only in a common measure with the whole country. The lesson of 1881 at Majuba had never really been learned. The fighting skill of the Boers on their familiar veld was absurdly underestimated. When Lord Lansdowne was moved from the War Office to the Foreign Office complaints, were general, but they merely show-that it is wrong to assume that a man who has no special aptitude for being Secretary for War is necessarily without an exceptional talent for foreign affairs.- Lord Lansdowne, in the best sense which can be attributed to the Words, acted like a diplomatist, and thought like a diplomatist, It has been said that diplomacy i§- a French art, and if that be true Lord Lansdowne was Well equipped, for he had learned from his French mother -not only to speak French with perfection, but to move easily in the world of French ideas.
His time at the Foreign Office was remarkable for the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and for the development and achievement of the Entente with France. Botli these policies opened new eras. The • Entente was a definite and considered breaking • with the pro-German inclinations of the Victorian age: It is often forgotten that as recently as 1899 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain had explicitly proposed an Anglo-German Alliance and was only diverted from his project by the offensive rebuff he received from Billow. - The wisdom of Lord Lansdowne in yielding any political position which lie thought it no longer right or fair to maintain 'amounted almost to genius when lie became Unionist leader in 'the House of Lords in 1906. He led a majority, and yet he and his friends formed the official Opposition. Seldom has there been a better opportunity for behaving factiously. Lord Lansdowne of course, never failed to urge his conviction' as Ion as he could—as when at one of the famous Lansdowni! House meetings he advised the Opposition in the House of Lords to throw out the Liberal Licensing Bill of not and when he organized the resistance to Mr. Lloyd George's Budget of 1909. The latter pokey, of course, led straight to a constitutional crisis and Mr. Asquith's Parliament Bill. In the later stages of that Controversy Lord Lansdowne excelled himself in sagacity and what may be Called Parliamentary good manners. When he was convinced that Mr. Asquith would swamp tM House of Lords, if necessary, with a special creation of peers, he gave way, not' in the least because ,he was afraid of the threat as such—indeed, a special creation of peers would have planted fresh roots for the hereditary principle—but because he saw that continued Oppositioit was not in the general interest.
His letter to the Daily Telegraph in November, 1917, in which lie appealed for peace discussions between the Allies and Germany, was, we thought and still think, inopportune. But the suggestion that Lord Lansdowne was trembling for his material possessions was stupidly and grotesquely wide of the mark: It required extr3. ordinary courage for Lord Lansdowne, who was one of the prominent Unionists who in 1914 had - signed s• letter pledging themselves- -to support -Mr. Asquith g he went to war, to invite a British Government to consider whether it could cease making war. He wrote his letter simply because he -thought he ought to write it. lie feared -not for himself, but for civilization. Havi1'8 made up his mind lie stood up to abuse- as bravely hs his great-grandfather Lord Shelburne, had faced Lord North. That was only the most dramatic example 01 his sense of duty. • He had graciousness, charm and friendliness of which everybody was conscious and which :never failed because they were exercised under •the, one condition which ensures success—Lord Lansdowne WAS quite unconscious of them.
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