A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IN the year 1858 two persons of considerable fixity of purpose decided to be born on the same day, and since they duly carried their resolve into effect the eightieth birthdays of both of them fall to be recorded in this issue of The Spectator. One of the two was Mrs. Sidney Webb, known to the editors of reference books, and to no one else, as Lady Passfield. Of her it would beseem me ill to speak at length, for her remarkable career has, I understand, been traced in another column by a pen with which I should never dream of measuring mine. Suffice it to say that at eighty Mrs. Sidney Webb (she is one of the few women who put their precise age in Who's Who) calls up from the crammed em- porium of her astonishing memory the essential and relevant fact with the same swift, unerring accuracy as when she was writing her first book in the later 'eighties. Today she is working on Our Partnership, a title which suggests that an autobiography can be dual, but it is not to be published in her lifetime. One or two provincial universities have given " the Webbs " honorary degrees. Oxford and Cambridge still have time to give fit recognition to the two greatest social students in the country's history. Either of them would honour itself by making the suggestion first. * * * *
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