BROKEN HOPES.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 247, 18 October 1926, Page 6

BROKEN HOPES.

■When Lord Asquith reads that his wife's remark to Signor Mussolini that 'there was only one cleverer, greater man in Europe, and that was her husband, has been taken seriously in New Zealand, he may feel afresh that humour is one of the compensations of life. It must strike him as ironic that he, who has served Democracy and Constitutionalism all his life with unswerving devotion, should be compared with a man who, whether or not he has Napoleon's head, certainly wears his hat. However, the comparison is made in the course of a warm appreciation, and stoic though ho is, Lord Asquith is not the man to be ungrateful for praise. It is a measure not only of his own disappointment, but of the sad straits to which the Liberal party is reduced, that he should have broken down at the end of his Greenock speech. No English statesman has had fuller control of his feelings. Neither the terrifying responsibility of the war nor the attacks made [on his own conduct shook his outward calm, and ho had quite an extraordinary capacity for silence in the face of calumny. But at last the state of his beloved party, helped by the infirmity of old age, made him weep in public. His emotion is easily understandable. He inherited from Campbell-Bannerman the leadership of an immense majority, and, though that majority was greatly diminished in necessary conflicts, he held the Liberals together and kept them the strongest party until the war changed everything. To-day he sees his party tragically small, and split by divisions for which he himself can be held responsible only in the smallest degree. For neither Toryism nor Socialism has he any sympathy, yet he knows that the party which is the only alternative to these creeds is, for the present at any rate, almost impotent. It is a sad end to a great career, but he will no longer be a party to a sham unity, and his resignation is in keeping with the honesty which has always been one of his characteristics.