MR. BALDWIN’S FAREWELL

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 255, 24 July 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

MR. BALDWIN’S FAREWELL

Dignified and Impressive The ringing appeal for virtue which Mr. Stanley Baldwin, in his last public speech as Prime Minister, made at the great rally of Empire youth in London worthily upholds on ancient British tradition, said the “Christian Science Monitor” editorially. English statesmen have retired from the fierce spotlight of fame in many different moods —in pride, in the quiet knowledge of good deeds well done, in anger, and sometimes in disappointment, but almost invariably with dignity and impressiveness. This tradition Mr. Baldwin has added to and strengthened. The most famous farewell speech of all is that which the genius of Shakespeare and the magnificent confidence of Thomas Wolsey between them combined to produce, find its disillusionment with the glories of office and the splendours of earthly grandeur has struck an answering chord in millions of hearts. Macaulay, too, having lost his seat through withstanding his constituents on what he considered to be a fundamental point of ethics, touched the same personal note. He would remember with pride, he said, how he had gained the confidence of the electors, and with no less pride how he had risked and how he had forfeited it. These are celebrated examples of personal emotion; but there is another kind of withdrawal from active politics in which the personal is entirely forgotten. The Earl of Chatham, in one of his final appearances in the House of Lords, made with immense difficulty to himself, uttered a tremendous plea fo- humanity in the American War of Independence. This losing of self in a wider and nobler feeling is the grander tradition. It wag this note that Mr. Baldwin struck.