aspect of his career have not before them the inspiring task of rescuing from obscurity an unknown genius who was crushed and crowded out in the struggle of life by adverse circumstances. We are dealing on the contrary with one who for years seemed to be fortune's spoilt child; whose circumstances and position were, by comparison with many men of genius, splendid; who was a member of the Government at an age when most men have not yet got into Parliament; who was a Cabinet Minister in the front rank in his thirties. Yet it remains true that George Wyndham's true title to greatness can only be measured by taking into account powers and actual work that gave sure promise of greater public successes than he ever attained, and even by computing the elements of tragedy in his life. The test supplied by tangible success is in his case an eminently inadequate test. If it remains unchallenged he will not be to posterity what he really was in life.

Mr Wyndham went to the War Office as UnderSecretary in 1899. And his work there stood out at once, in the eyes of those who came across it, as something quite on a different plane from that of the ordinary official, even of first-class ability. Helped no doubt by his early soldier life, he studied the requirements of our army with the large outlook of a true statesman. To the end of his life his speeches on this subject were most memorable. The impression he made at the very outset on Lord Lansdowne, his chief at the War Office, is thus recorded by him :

'You ask me to give you in a few sentences my impression of George Wyndham's work at the War Office. It was my good fortune to have him for my colleague during the last two years of my service as Secretary of State. The War Office was not then, and I suppose never has been, exactly a bed of roses. Old problems of army organisation were still unsolved, new problems concerning the arms, ammunition and equipment of the forces were constantly arising, and the machinery of the Office itself, recently reconstructed, was not yet working smoothly. On the top of all this came the South African War, with its new responsibilities, its revelations and its disappointments. The stress was severe, and the representative of the Department in the House of Commons had,

so far as the Parliamentary burden was concerned, to bear by far the heaviest share of the load. George Wyndham bore it with infinite patience and good temper, and with untiring resourcefulness. Inside the Office he was a tower of strength, a keen and thorough worker, always intent upon getting at the root of things. He had a rare power of handling difficult and complicated questions, and although he could grasp details and expound them with unrivalled lucidity, he never lost himself in them. I cannot conceive an abler or a more delightful colleague.'

It was while he was at the War Office that Wyndham made perhaps his greatest speech in the House of Commons, in which to a knowledge of his own subject he added a keen realisation of the situation created by the South African War, which was placing so many English homes in mourning. This combination called out the greatest gifts of an orator. After that speech he was freely spoken of as a future Prime Minister. It was thus at the War Office that he won his spurs. Yet, when, nearly four years later, he was offered the post of Secretary for War, his loyalty to the cause of Ireland, to which he had by then devoted his whole heart, made him decline it. Here, then, was one sphere in which he showed his splendid powers and equipped himself for a great work for which he all but found his opportunity. That he just missed that opportunity was in its circumstances almost tragic. For had he then gone to the War Office, he would have escaped the check in Ireland that threw back his political career, and he would have been supreme in a sphere which he had almost completely mastered.

But the tragedy of adverse circumstance was far greater in Ireland itself. Here he had actually found both his field and the position in which he could control it. After a brief space he had the most influential position which exists in that country-he was Chief Secretary and in the Cabinet. He realised one great scheme in the Land Purchase Act. Those who watched things closely saw the extraordinary gifts which this measure displayed. 'I doubt,' writes Lord Lansdowne, 'whether anyone else could have carried the great Land Act which will always be associated with his name, and which will be a monument to him are perennius.' The rest of his programme

remained unfulfilled, and its details were never disclosed to the public. A large section of his party spoke of his Irish failure.' Yet those who worked with him held that what was great in his plans as an Irish statesman was as visible in schemes that were never realised as in the initial success. The world in summing up a man's fame deducts failure from success, but sometimes a truer estimate is gained not by subtraction but by an addition sum in which much that fails is added to what succeeds. Had George Wyndham come to Ireland merely as an able Chief Secretary with a safe programme, as a party politician who meant to climb the ladder, we should, it is true, have never heard of the Devolution Scheme-as it was called, though Wyndham never accepted the phrase. But we should never have had the Land Act. Both the measure which succeeded and the measure which failed told of qualities in themselves great. It needed his immense energy, his enthusiasm, his grasp of detail, his idealism, his concentration on one object, to gain in a brief space such knowledge and insight into the conditions of the country as were necessary to formulate that farreaching land legislation. But these very qualities led him to study the Irish question all round, not as a party man with the predetermined limitations of a party programme, but as an honest student of Irish history and Irish social conditions, and to conceive an ample programme of which the Land Act was but a part.

He bound himself heart and soul to Ireland. 'Ireland,' he wrote to a friend in March 1902, 'is in a more plastic state than at any period in my recollection since 1887. Now is the time for moulding her. But this absorbs me mind, body and soul.' There are many who remember the joyous enthusiasm with which he began his work. The dramatic side of his position in Ireland appealed to him. 'I feel like a Ghibelline Duke in the land of the Guelphs,' he said. When the Land Act was on the eve of passing, he felt the peculiar joy that comes when concentrated labour and inspiring dreams are about to be realised in action. "I"do" believe that a benignant spirit is abroad,' were the words he chose at this time for an autograph album. The picture of him, radiant and even triumphant, turning from one group to another with a

special word for each, as he addressed the House in the debate on the second reading of his Bill, must still dwell in the memory of many.

The Bill became law. Troubles were not at once over. But it was recognised as a great, a very great, and beneficent measure, the greatest contribution towards the settling of the Irish question which that generation had seen. In its author's eyes, however, it was but the beginning of his work. In the months that followed he continued to elaborate his schemes for the country. He refused promotion to other offices which the ordinary Chief Secretary would have grasped at as an escape from difficulties which soon became visible on the horizon. He continued to reduce his plans to practical detail. Such concentration is the way of the greatest rulers, but one must be an autocrat like Napoleon to realise all the designs so conceived. They may be impossible to the party statesman in a democracy. The Devolution scheme was wrecked on the rocks of party politics, but the tragedy lay in something deeper than the defeat of a single scheme. Few men are capable of thinking out a programme which needed so profound a study of the country, and making it practical. Wyndham believed himself to be capable of this. Many of his friends thought the same. The tragedy lay in the hard work and the keen vision of what was possible and of his own capacity to do it, while the inexorable conditions of our democracy defeated his plans, not as it seemed to him by a reasoned opposition, but by that blind and allpowerful party prejudice, which makes democracy so often fatal to the schemes of genius. Wyndham's outlook at starting was simply that of a Unionist by tradition. And to the end he was firmly opposed to Home Rule. But, by force of study and experience of the country, he came to hold that, if men strove to emancipate themselves from party prejudice, a certain limited concession to the Irish desire for self-government was practicable and promised peace to a disturbed land. 'What I preached, in season and out of season,' he wrote two years later,' was that all, no matter to what party they belonged, and what extreme views they might hold, shall endeavour to agree on practical proposals of a

moderate character.' It was the clear vision of what he could do as he stood but one foot below the commanding summit whence he might have actually achieved it that made his enforced descent a veritable tragedy. According to the world's verdict this episode brings a heavy deduction from the figures which stand to the account of his fame. If statesmanship means solely the careful calculation of what party conditions will admit of, such a verdict may pass. If, however, the highest statesmanship means the accurate perception of the needs of a country and insight as to how they are best met, there are those who hold that such a verdict must not only be discounted but reversed. The ideals which caused his overthrow bring, according to this view of the case, an immense accession to the figures which stand to the account of his genius. The failure was in party diplomacy; the success was in formulating those measures which mark a great ruler. So at least many of us think; and the only real test whether or no we are right in so thinking was denied to him—namely, a fair trial.

This was the great tragedy of his public life, and it gave splendour to his failure in the eyes of those who understood. The case of a man of great imagination, who is unpractical is not an uncommon one. But it has not the peculiar element that attaches to Wyndham's failure. On the contrary, where the dreamer is impotent, Wyndham was powerful. He had the rare combination of power of imaginative conception with grasp of detail and the ability to reduce his plans to practice. Vivid as was the life of imagination which he lived, it never made him a dreamer. When the whole instrument was under his own control, he could reduce to practice his own complicated schemes. The programme for his Irish campaign was the result of brooding imagination, of laborious study and penetrating observation, with the one object of discovering what was best for the country. But it is the condition of democratic government that one must often be satisfied with the second best. A man whose insight is ahead of public opinion, and who concentrates his whole attention on discovering the best, therefore fails by his very success. The intense hopefulness of Wyndham's nature prevented his learning effectively this