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and by his colleagues he was sincerely liked. If he roused no enthusiasm, he inspired confidence, which perhaps is a better thing. In India, to quote Lord Hartington's eulogistic phrase, he was so popular that there is no knowing what measure he could not carry, and this popularity seems to me to have been earned in the most legitimate manner and entirely by the conviction, which you and your colleagues have been able to bring home to all classes, that you and your Government were devoting your whole energies to measures for improving the condition of the people and developing the resources of the country.'

To have drawn from Hartington, sparing of praise, so warm a benediction was a feather in Lord Ripon's Viceregal cap. If, however, Hartington's words had found an echo in India, they would have met with a different response at home. Lord Ripon was never a popular figure in England beyond the confines of his own West Riding. He belonged to a class of administrators who, from the accession of the House of Hanover down to the end of the Victorian era, served the country uncheered by popular favour, and without any reasonable hope of posthumous fame. As a rule, a statesman who rouses no hatred inspires no enthusiasm. Palmerston, the mountebank, as he was dubbed by the youthful band of Christian Pacifists who hated his swagger, when he died ten years later, was lamented by Tom Hughes in very different terms: Poor old Palmerston ! I can't help feeling as if I have lost a personal friend.' His enemies had ended by loving his shrewdness, daring, insularity, and good-nature. Among his successors, Mr Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, and Mr Lloyd George, because of the hatred or admiration that an electric personality stirs in the hearts of men, are sure of that fame which outside a library is denied to the average Prime Minister. In the long roll of men who climb to high political office, a few only are sure of posthumous fame; the rest are sure of nothing but four pages in a supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography.

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Kingsley's admiration of Palmerston grieved Lord Ripon greatly. I cannot doubt that Viscount to be the most unprincipled man in the House of Commons next to Disraeli,' he wrote to Tom Hughes, adding, 'to

set up Lord Palmerston as the man to be Prime Minister is just about the most wretched error and miserable falling-down before cleverness (genius he has not) I can conceive.' Within five years, as Lord Ripon's biographer observes, he was contentedly serving under this 'selfseeking adventurer' in his second Administration. Lord Ripon was not to blame. In politics there are no irrevocable sensibilities. Lord Ripon, when young and steeped in enthusiasm, was surprised at his own conversion to the view that 'poor old Palmerston' possessed virtues which he failed to discern in Lord John Russell. Thirty years later he expressed no surprise when Lord Rosebery, who, as a Peer and an Imperialist, was anathema to the Radicals in the House of Commons,' found himself embarrassed by the clamour of those unbending stalwarts who offered to serve under him when he was engaged in forming his Government. Ten years later, Lord Ripon, now thoroughly disillusioned, could afford to look with amusement upon the 'relatively easy task' of Sir Henry CampbellBannerman, into whose Cabinet the Liberal Imperialists, headed by Mr Asquith, rushed-with two notable exceptions-with indecent haste.

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Lord Ripon's letters show that high standard of loyalty to party leadership which he adopted early in life and maintained to the end. Mr Gladstone's retirement, after his defeat in 1874, chimed with Lord Ripon's entry into communion with the Church of Rome. During the following years he felt that he had put an end to his chance of a return to office, but, smarting under Mr Gladstone's attack upon the Church of his adoption, he determined not to accept an exclusion which might be interpreted to confirm the imputations cast by Mr Gladstone upon the loyalty of Roman Catholics. He definitely attached himself to Hartington, who had been elected Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, and henceforward became one of the most eager attendants at the party councils which met at Devonshire House. Alternately with Lord Granville, he entertained the Liberal party leaders in Carlton Gardens on the eve of the session, when Hartington read the Queen's Speech which was due to be delivered on the morrow.

During the fateful days in May 1880 when the choice of a Liberal Prime Minister was in doubt, Lord Ripon, although anxious for office, stood firmly by his chosen leader, and watched his old associates pass swiftly over to Mr Gladstone. His biographer makes less clear the events that followed the final retirement of Mr Gladstone in 1894, when once more the loyalty of politicians was smartly tested. Lord Rosebery's temperament, so different from the cheerful resilience of CampbellBannerman, struck a tragic note in the kindly heart of Lord Ripon, when he found his chief deserted by the men who had forced the Premiership upon him. Lord Morley's recollection is that Lord Rosebery was well aware of the difficulties that confronted him when he reluctantly accepted the task imposed upon him by Queen Victoria. If so, his forecast was a true one, for towards the end of the year his Cabinet was in such confusion that, according to a letter of Mr Asquith's to Lord Ripon, written two years later, consultation between the Prime Minister and the leader of the House of Commons had to be carried on by a third party, presumably Mr Asquith himself. When Lord Rosebery's harassed Government fell, and the Liberal Party was crushed at the General Election that followed, the troubles over the leadership of the party were not ended. Amid recriminations and aggravated rivalries, Lord Ripon seems to have been the first to endeavour to bridge a gulf that was unbridgeable. When, after differences and provocations, including the unexpected emergence of Mr Gladstone from his retirement at a moment of unusual tension, Lord Rosebery resigned the leadership of the Liberal party, and at a farewell meeting held in Edinburgh was supposed to have nominated Mr Asquith as his political heir, Ripon never abandoned hope of his leader's return. 'I found Rosebery full of life,' he wrote to Lord Spencer, and evidently beginning to work for a future leadership free from the Harcourt connexion. I hope he will not try to push matters too quickly.'

From Dec. 11, 1896, when this letter was written, to Dec. 12 two years later, when Sir William Harcourt, writing to Lord Ripon from his home at Malwood, described the situation as intolerable,' and declared his

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resolve not to appear in the House of Commons again as leader, rumours and sectional intrigues were rife. 'What Gladstone had been to Hartington and Rosebery himself,' Lord Ripon's biographer writes, Rosebery was now to Harcourt.' It may have been so, and Sir William Harcourt certainly believed that a plot for a Rosebery restoration was actually on foot'; but of these plots and intrigues there is, as yet, very meagre proof. When Campbell-Bannerman was unexpectedly chosen leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons, Ripon was surprised; but his keen sense of discipline and party loyalty led him to accept the party choice and to abide by it. Throughout these difficult years, when CampbellBannerman was so bitterly assailed, Ripon was always there to comfort and support. 'State your policy plainly in your coming speech, he wrote from Studley in November 1900, and then, when we meet before the session to consider the line to be taken, say distinctly in the face of Asquith, Grey, Fowler, H. Gladstone and the rest, that, if you are not supported in that policy by the party as a whole, they will have to find another leader. I am pretty confident that they will shrink from the necessity.' Lord Ripon was not mistaken. They

shrank.

In the summer and autumn of 1901, the 'revolt of our Lib. Imps-the Chartered Company, as I call them,' Campbell-Bannerman wrote to Ripon, had failed; 'the Asquith demonstration squib fizzed off the wrong way, and for the present all things go well.' But, although Sir Henry could write lightly of the 'intrigues,' Ripon was full of indignation at the way in which Asquith and others behaved to you'; and, believing that a break was inevitable, he expressed a strong hope that no patched-up arrangement' would be made. He need have had no apprehension. Although there were 'rival tabernacles,' the great majority of the Liberal Party were with Campbell-Bannerman and Ripon. Liberal Imperialism in its schismatic form counted only a few adherents. When it became evident that Mr Balfour's Administration was near its end, and that CampbellBannerman was the alternative Prime Minister, the rats began to hasten away from the foundering Liberal League. A final stand was made by Sir Edward Grey

and Mr Haldane. Deserted by their friends and companions, they endeavoured to make terms. It was intimated to Sir Henry that, if he would consent to sterilise his influence by going to the House of Lords, leaving Mr Asquith to lead the House of Commons, the last of the Liberal Leaguers would enter his Cabinet. Ripon advised strongly against this solution of a problem whose gravity he questioned; and Sir Henry referred the matter to an arbitrament where decisions for him were final. The story is well known. Lady Campbell-Bannerman was an invalid, but her faculties and judgment were unimpaired. Standing before one

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of his faithful colleagues, Sir Henry pointed with his finger to the ceiling of the room in which they stood, and said, 'She says no.' This settled the matter. The Liberal Leaguers accepted the decision; the Government, under Sir Henry, was formed; and Lord Ripon, in his seventy-eighth year, consented to take the Privy Seal and the leadership of the House of Lords.

From 1900 onwards the two men were knit together by enduring friendship rare in political life. When there came a moment of great sorrow to Lord Ripon and he had passed his eightieth year, he told Campbell-Bannerman, then Prime Minister, that he was old and battered, and good for nothing but the quiet that should precede the grave. But the Prime Minister-himself not far away from the final call-remembered the help and uncomplaining devotion he had always received from his colleague. 'I most earnestly hope that you will remain among us, setting an example, keeping us to principles when we are tempted to stray, and by your wise and kindly spirit winning the affectionate admiration of all around you.'

It was not until another eighteen months had passed, after Mr Asquith's succession to the Premiership, that this tough veteran, the last of the old guard, who had been in Palmerston's Cabinet with the grandfather of Sir Edward Grey, now his colleague, and had as another colleague Loulou' Harcourt, who had often sat on his knee as a child, finally doffed his harness, not on account of age or infirmities, but of a difference of opinion which might have happened at any time.' It is a curious commentary upon the Liberal critics of Mr Lloyd Vol. 237.-No. 471.

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