published in due course, would have saved the country some of the worst hours of the War.

As Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour's reputation is less well-assured, and that in the main for a reason which opens difficult issues. He had held the Admiralty under the all-too-constitutional administration of Mr Asquith; he went to the Foreign Office under the all-too-arbitrary administration of Mr Lloyd George; and, as he had approved the change of government, so he was obliged also to accept its consequences.

At the Cabinet crisis of December 1916 Mr Balfour's action, though not conspicuous, was in fact decisive. It is as certain as such things can be that neither could Mr Asquith have been permanently dethroned nor Mr Lloyd George effectually installed, unless he had countenanced the downfall of the one and consented to serve in the Cabinet of the other. It weighed of necessity with thoughtful men that he-the only exPremier in politics, since Lord Rosebery had long withdrawn from the arena-should have supported so extraordinary a change as the substitution in that hour of peril of a smart and pugnacious solicitor of rather imperfect education for the eloquent, profoundly cultivated, and singularly dispassionate barrister who had guided the counsels of his country for the last eight critical years. But his support did even more than this for Mr Lloyd George. It bridged the yawning gulf between the new Prime Minister's past and that potent world of heredity and fashion-'ce beau monde qui gouverne le monde'-at which in earlier days this onetime Cleon, now excogitating his Sphacteria, had cast stones. No one but Mr Balfour could have played the part of liaison-officer here; and Mr Lloyd George is thought to have been aware of it. Whatever other colleagues the new Prime Minister parted with, and whether or not, as some not always ill-informed people supposed, he had desired to have Mr Balfour retired during the late coalition-ministry, he resolved to separate from Mr Balfour no more. And Mr Balfour on his side could hardly with credit have unmade or deserted one in whose elevation to the first place in the Government he had seemed, if possible, to find a more confident assurance of victory than even in the vaunted tenacity

3

of the British people. There existed thus from the first ties between the two men of considerable strength; and these ties were tightened as well by a certain temperamental attraction of opposites as by the fact that the elder statesman had every reason to feel spent and seek freedom from responsibility whilst the energy of the younger appeared to be practically inexhaustible. Their association, nevertheless, remains extraordinary; and has its incidental curiosities. One who chanced to be alone with them on the morning of the Armistice has told me with what surprise he noted that it was the Foreign Secretary who seemed full of boyish glee, the Prime Minister who was grave and preoccupied. Another has recorded how on the day after the Armistice, when all the representative men of the nation were gathered together at the Guildhall with the Prime Minister in their midst, the Archbishop of Canterbury turned to Mr Balfour and asked him what he would have said ten years earlier if he had seen Mr Lloyd George thus magnificently acclaimed. The answer returned is illuminating. I know it would have been thought incredible, but the little beggar deserves it all.' Certainly the little man had brought off the victory against all the expectation of such as put their trust in a liberal education. Only, as the historian probes the business to its foundations and considers for how long after Mr Lloyd George's premiership began the Allies did little but mark time† and for how much less of a setback than the disasters of March 1918 Mr Asquith fell, he may be tempted to ask himself whether after all the first and greatest of all the arts of government in the 20th century is not the successful handling of the Press.

There was no department of state upon which the institution of a dictator so quickly re-acted as that allotted to Mr Balfour in Mr Lloyd Georges Administration. Foreign affairs, in fact, encourage the confidence of the amateur to nearly the same extent as theology. The Foreign Office was elbowed out of the more important of its functions by the Prime Minister's special

† Lord Oxford's remark in his posthumous 'Memories and Reflections (II, p. 151) that The year 1917 was... the worst in the whole War' appears apposite.

secretariat; and in the concluding phase of the War and throughout the negotiation of the Peace, the Foreign Secretary appeared as a secondary personage. The British Prime Minister,' so the History of the Peace Conference epitomises the matter, 'assumed absolute control of British policy, Mr Balfour acting for him in his absence but remaining completely subordinate during the greater part of the time.'*

This was distasteful enough to those who knew sufficient history to recall the part that Castlereagh had played at Vienna, or Clarendon in Paris, or Salisbury at Berlin; but it was much more distasteful to them when they compared the character and abilities of Mr Balfour with the character and abilities of Mr George. They could not doubt that Mr Balfour was dispassionate and a statesman; they were less and less able to persuade themselves that Mr George was either the one thing or the other. That in the counsels of Europe, at the greatest of all historic assemblies, the seat of international sovereignty should be concentrated in a board of Four of which Mr George was a member and Mr Balfour was not, appeared an intolerable blunder; and they knew not which to blame the more-Mr Balfour's self-effacement or Mr George's self-sufficiency. If the Foreign Secretary might have pleaded some seventy reasons in the category of time for his acceptance of a subordinate part in the re-settlement of Europe, his admirers could have adduced at least seventy-timesseven in the category of place why he should have refused it. For topography was not a subject with which the Prime Minister happened to be familiar.

To what a pass things eventually came under this division of labour has but lately been revealed by the publication of Sir Henry Wilson's Diaries. He discloses the fact that on the eve of the presentation of the Peace Treaty to the Germans no complete copy of it was obtainable; † that the terms had never been reviewed in their entirety by any British representative; and that beneath such a piece of patchwork-pall and swaddling-bands in turn-the Old Europe was buried and the New Europe brought to birth. The General

• History of the Peace Conference.' Edited H. W. Temperley, I, p. 245. † Callwell, 'Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson,' II, p. 189.

liberates his soul with his accustomed energy and bitterly complains of the light-hearted manner in which Mr Balfour joked with ladies about the business. It is a good rule, however, not to play the recording angel in the drawing-room; and in any case, after the country had so lately approved the conduct of its foreign affairs by a quick-change artist, it showed a wise urbanity in the Foreign Secretary, since he had submitted to the plan, to enjoy at least its humours.

There is another angle from which Mr Balfour's Foreign Secretariat may be regarded; and it is one from which a very different impression may be drawn. 'I have now lived a long life,' he wrote to Mr Page in 1918, and most of my energies have been expended in political work, but if I have been fortunate enough to contribute, even in the smallest degree, to drawing closer the bonds that unite our two countries, I shall have done something compared with which all else that I may have attempted counts in my eyes as nothing.'* He obtained his ambition, and on this account, if upon no other, his career as Foreign Secretary will seem great. The success of his mission to the States in 1917 had been worthy of the high courage that inspired him, in his seventieth year and in the teeth of the German submarine campaign, to cross the Atlantic; and the relations between the two countries had never perhaps been better than at the close of his visit. It was common knowledge that the Americans had been deeply impressed by the presence and conversation of one who was not as other politicians are; and this impression of his personality extended to the official head of the State. The President and the British Foreign Secretary 'got on tremendously,' † Wilson taking the unprecedented course of sitting in the gallery when Mr Balfour gave his address to Congress.

There are some things one would rather not think about in politics as in other affairs of life; and one of them is what the association of these two men as principals at the peace-making in Paris might have done for the good of mankind. The American had the genius of great principles and a real eloquence in recommending them; the Briton great experience, critical subtlety, and a dis*Life and Letters of W. H. Page,' II, p. 250. † Ibid, p. 264.

tinction of mind and character that went beyond either. It is hard to suppose that if the leaders of the AngloSaxon peoples had worked in sympathy the world would have seen a treaty scarred by a Welshman's election pledges, by a Frenchman's vengeance, by an Italian's ambition, by wild-cat notions of trying the Kaiser, by the aggrandisement here of one race, there of another, at the expense of the liberties and loyalties of their neighbours. Some settlement, however, is better than none; and we may believe, if we like, that Mr Lloyd George did his best without supposing for a moment that it was the best that could be done.

Among the obstacles that stood in the way of a rapprochement between England and the United States there was none upon which the American Ambassador had laid more stress in talking to Mr Balfour than the Irish Question. It may have been his observations or it may have been Mr Lloyd George's persuasiveness that produced the one signal volte-face in Mr Balfour's career. The ironies of political history lacked something still before Mr Balfour became the member of a government responsible for a Home Rule Bill. Certainly Ulster was excluded from its operation; but what shall be said of the fate of the Irish minority in the other three provinces to whom in 1893* he had given the assurance that they could count with confidence upon the honour of the British people never to desert them? Just perhaps that circumstance is inexorable, for nothing less than inexorable circumstance could ever have made Lord Balfour desert his friends.

To his instinctive constancy, other things being equal, even to a coalition party and a casual chief, the next year (1922) was to bear witness. At the Carlton Club meeting which was to effect the fall of Mr Lloyd George's Government he came forward to recommend the now more or less discredited Prime Minister to the suffrages of his friends; and this not a little to the scandal of those who reflected that peers were, as a class, excluded from the company and that he had lately become a member of the House of Lords. His arguments met with no success; and he followed the singular being whose fortunes had become in so strange a manner entangled Speech, May 7, 1893.