Lord Cecil of Chelwood
BY AMICUS.
THE name of Viscount Cecil of Chelwood is to-day associated exclusively with the cause of inter- national peace. He is counted among the great philan- thropic propagandists of the world, having completely outsoared the shadow of the night of party politics. It is a strange transformation in one who at one time was reckoned a keen party politician, and a lawyer at that.
He entered Parliament in 1906, at the late age (for a political member of such a house as his) of forty-two. He came as an unknown quantity. His name had appeared in the papers as " Lord Robert Cecil, K.C.," who was conducting cases, but he stepped on the stage as the obscure brother of one of the greatest orators, casuists and religious enthusiasts of the time. But it did not take him long to make his individual impression. The obstinate character of his clan came out in his refusal to be a whole-hogging Tariff Reformer : its donnish subtlety came out in his ability to walk (like his cousin Balfour) along a razor-edge between the extremists ; its sheer forensic ability in the extra- ordinary fight he conducted against Mr. Lloyd George's Insurance Bill. The obituarists of the late Sir Laming Worthington-Evans have singled him out as the stoutest critic of that measure : and on the accountancy side he was certainly a thorn in the flesh—or india-rubber--of Mr. Lloyd George. But those who sat through those debates will remember that Lord Robert was equally prominent, and that his ceaseless worrying of the Liberals largely served to mollify those of his colleagues who had wished him to the deuce for his continuance of the tradition of the Unionist Free Traders. There he sat, night after night, and rose to amendment after amend- ment, tall and lean, with hunched shoulders, vast dominating brow, hooked nose, overhung upper lip, hands that clutched at the air, and high, clear, pleasant, penetrating voice, contriving, whatever the aridity of the question at issue, to avoid dullness by virtue of the sat of his personality and the pungency of his satire. Within a very few years he had, so far as public notice and political prospects were concerned, easily outstripped his brilliant brother.
During the War, after various minor posts, he became Minister of Blockade—an ironical fate for one destined to become, as it were, Minister for Reconciliation. A few more years, during which he became one of the greatest figures at Geneva, and he was out of the Govern- ment because he did not think it was taking the League of Nations seriously enough. His action was possibly precipitate : many saw it as the action of an impatient idealist. But it served the cause he had most at heart, for it left him free to devote his whole energies, as delegate at Geneva, and as Chairman of the League of Nations Union at home, to the cause of international peace, which engages all his reason and all his passion. In that cause he has worked like a practical statesman and preached like an evangelist ; and his idealism has always been tempered by common sense. After all, that might be expected of a Man whose two publications are Principles of Commercial Law and Our National Church.
He married a daughter of the second Lord Durham ; he has no heir ; he looks like a benevolent vulture ; he has neither self-consciousness nor affectation ; and in private he is a man of the most charming courtesy and kindliness. The one incredible thing about him is that he is in his sixty-seventh year.: he is so much more alive than most of them that it is difficult not to think of him as the Coming Young Man.
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