A COUNSEL OF COURAGE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3132, 28 August 1922, Page 7

A COUNSEL OF COURAGE.

(London Daily Telegraph, June 23). It is not often in our public life that there comes from a political leader such a speech as that which the Earl of Balfour made at the banquet given in his honor on Tuesday in the City of London. It had qualities of grace and generosity of spirit which are the speaker's own; and the form which he gave to it, and the circumstances in which it was delivered, were not such a» we frequently meet with in the records of public speaking nowadays. This was the most honored and distinguished of veterans in the leadership of an historic party, the greatest House of Commons man now living, bidding farewell to a gathering of his constituents on quitting that House to take his seat among the Peers. It was very significant of the place which Lord Balfour occupies in the century’s esteem that many of the guests were not of his political following, though the banquet was arranged by his party’s organisation in the City; and in the speech of the evening the same note of detachment from the conventions of party was struck. We are apt nowadays to forget how doughty an antagonist in the political conflict Lord Balfour was throughout hi s Jong career, until the coming of the war put an end to our domestic contentions; hut it is interesting to remember that he was so, when we turn to his speech on this moving occasion. For it was in great part a. review of his forty-eight years’ experience of politics, a recalling of those great dramas which, as he said, had begun, continued, and ended within jus own recollection. First among these ho named the history, which he witnessed from first to last, of “that most marvellous Parliamentary phenomenon, the Irish party under Mr Parnell.” Mis audience knew, but no one could hav« gathered from his words that evening, that through all the most eventful years of that party’s activity, Lord Balfour was among their most constant, their most unsparing, and their most bitterly hated antagonists. Ho fought them year in and year out, until the day when their own people destroyed them; and what does he say of them now ? “I doubt whether in the whole history of our Parliament there has over been a party which for the sternness of its discipline, and for the extraordinary wealth of admirable speakers, it contained, some of them great masters of eloquence, others most excellent debaters, formidable from their knowledge and use of Parliamentary methods —.1 do not believe there has ever been in any Parliament a party so remarkable as that.” This, coining from such a source, is a judgment of which the historian will take note. To observers of Irish politics as they arc at this moment it cannot hut convey a sense of bitterness and loss. Another drama of which Lord Balfour saw the opening and the close was the in on strolls tragedy of the German Empire. He went with Lord Salisbury to Paris within a few weeks of the proclamation of Wilhelm I. at Versailles; he saw that Empire the unquestioned leader of Europe when he attended the Congress of Berlin; and he lived to sign on behalf of his country the Peace imposed njion a Germany from which the Hohonzollern dynasty had vanished like an evil dream. Lord Balfour witnessed the latter days of the long and thrilling Parliamentary duel of Disraeli and Gladstone. He saw and knew all their successors. “Many of them were men of great gifts and great services, occupying places of importance in the State, whose names are scarcely known to the rising generation. Their names were on everyone’s lips; they are now almost forgotten.” It is a reflection in which many a. man has found bitterness; which has 1 , perhaps, discouraged many from attempting a career in which only one or two of a generation achieve a durable fame, and which has certainly clouded the old age of others who have found themselves forgotten while still among the living. In Lord Balfour’s philosophy there is room for no such weakness. “That, after all, is tiro way of the world, and it is not a had way.” How. he asks, would the world get on, how would it live, if it were not for the young and their preoccupation with the things and the reputations of their own time? And Lord Balfour staunchly proclaims himself a believer in the young. He declares himself an optimist. The problems of national life and of the world multiply about ns until we are almost overwhelmed with the number and the magnitude of them. Which of ns has nob felt that awful uncertainty of which Lord Balfour speaks? Never has the veil drawn over the future been so impenetrable. But the counsel he gives us is the only one of any value in those days. “Let ns not lose faith and courage.” He looks forward with unflinching faith to the success of the labors of those who come after him. and who have had before them the example, let it he added, of men like himself. “To he an optimist is to lie a believer in youth. It is, after all, the young people who arc going to do this work. Let ns believe in them I believe in them.” That is the advice offered to the elder generation by one who lias seen more of lifo s studied more deeply the record of the past, and reflected more deeply and fruitfully upon both, than any other man, perhaps, among our political leadership. It is a great, an authoritative, a heartening message for our time, and for any time. The nation will still bo in need of it when the young of today arc “the old gang” of to-morrow; and so long as there are elder statesmen with the wisdom and the faith to utter it, ayd a public mind with the firmness and self-discipline to receive it and act upon it. “the world’s course will not fail.”