Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 1937. COMMONS AND CLASSICS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 132, 5 June 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 5, 1937. COMMONS AND CLASSICS

The retirement of Mr. Baldwin to a well-earned rest from the rigours of public life rounds off a career which in two important respects at least has followed the line of long Parliamentary tradition in Britain. In the first place he was reared in the public school and university which for over two centuries have been the training ground of British Parliamentarians. In the second place, like many another British statesman before him, he was and is a great lover of the classical languages and literature. These two characteristics, derived from the same source in the system of public school' and university education in Britain, are complementary to each other. Baldwin himself on one occasion, in a speech at his old school, Harrow, when he first became Prime Minister said: "I will, with God's help, do nothing in the course of an arduous and difficult career 'which shall cause any Harrovian to say of me that I have failed to do my best to live up to the highest ideals of the school." On another occasion he described the study of the classics as "a discipline in the proper use of words," and added, "No man who can do good Greek and Latin prose can deceive people, except he sin against the light." Though no predecessor of his in Cabinet or in Parliament ever expressed the faith in the ideals of the old school and the virtues of the classics so simply or so frankty, there is no question of the profound influence of the code and the creed on the actual governance of Britain and, with it, the Empire, ever since the emergence of Britain as a power in the world. In the eighteenth century, when the Empire was building and the wealth of Britain growing fast with the spread of commerce and new industry, the alumni of the public school and university in Parliament regaled one another, in the course of their speeches, with Latin quotations, more or less apt, and quickly corrected, if they were wrong. In the nineteenth century, even despite the extension of the franchise, in 1832 and 1867, the personnel of the House still continued predominantly as it had been, with the frequent use of classical quotation. In the twentieth century, with universal suffrage and more mixed Parliaments, Latin and Greek are seldom now heard, though Mr. Baldwin himself occasionally, let himself be tempted, ■ yet Mr. Chamberlain's new Cabinet is full of scholars "from public school and university. The system—if a natural development, fortified by tradition, can be so called—is peculiar to Britain. Parliaments and, other legislative assemblies elsewhere seem to have little attraction for the student and scholar trained in public school and university. A recent suryey of the principal public schools in the United States— though they have not the traditions of the English public school—showed that they had made ! a practically negligible contribution to politics and public life. It is, perhaps, significant that, the lone great exception is President Roosevelt himself. Nor has Congress ever been notable for classical quotations. Dominion Legislatures are equally lacking in the same respect, both as to personnel and public utterance, because the atmosphere is lacking. Where else but in the British House of Commons could a bet on the correctness of a quotation from Horace have been recorded? Yet in the Medal Room of the British Museum is an ancient guinea piece, with the following memorandum, in the handwriting of William Pulteney, an English politician, who died in 1764:

This guinea I desire may be kept as an heirloom. It was won of Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, he asserting the verse in Horace to be nulli pallescere culpae, whereas I laid the wager of a guinea that it was nulla pallescere culpa. He sent for the book, and, being convinced that he had lost, gave me the guinea. I told him I could take the money without any blush on my side, but believed it was the only money he ever gave in the House, where the giver and receiver ought not equally to blush. This guinea, I hope, will prove to my posterity the use of knowing Latin and encourage them in their learning. i If politics were corrupt enough in Walpole's day and for long afterwards, the standard of oratory in the House of Commons and on public occasions was never higher. This was the age of Chatham and Burke, Pitt, Fox, Sheridan, and the Irish orators, and in nearly every case they had been well schooled in the classics. Their language itself took on certain Latin characteristics which Parliamentary language seems never to have lost. Of Hemy Asquith, Lord Oxford, over a century later, Mr. James Johnston in his "Westminster Voices" says:

Lord Oxford's eloquence was dependent for its effect upon his preference for the long trailing words which English has borrowed from the Latin. There is a pomp of sound in these words, there are about them ancient and stately associations which make them the natural medium for the expression of a dignified mind, at home amidst the great historic ideas which have created and which, maintain society. ... I can imagine without great difficulty Lord Oxford as an old Roman Senator composedly addressing the conscript fathers in terse though resonant Latin.

This trait of his speaking is ascribed by Mr. Johnston as, to some extent,

due to the method pursued by Asquith's headmaster at the City of London School, Dr. Abbott, the distinguished classic, who "sought to produce trained and prudent minds as well as competent students of Greek and Latin literature." It was in the same way that William Pitt the Younger was trained by his father, the Earl of Chatham, and most of the British statesmen of the age passed through a similar school.

It may be a pure coincidence of there may be a profound relation of cause and effect in the fact that this classical tradition in British Parliamentary and political life seems to have been born about the time when England, after settling her internal troubles in the seventeenth century, turned in the eighteenth to the great world outside in a * long struggle for supremacy. There is nothing classical in the plain, homely language of Pym, Hampden, and Cromwell, so far as it stands on record. When Cromwell, in a rage, dismissed the Long Parliament, he is reported to have said:

Come, come! We have had enough of this. I will put an end to your prating. It is not fit that you should sit here any longer! You have sat too long here lor any good you have been doing lately. You shall now give place to better men. Call them in! [The soldiers enter.] You call yourselves a Parliament. I say, you are no Parliament! Corrupt, unjust persons; scandalous to the profession of the Gospel: How can you be a Parliament for God's people? Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God—go!

From this to William Pitt's description of the British Constitution "equally free from the distractions of democracy and the tyranny _of monarchy . .' . the envy and admiration of the world," to Palmerston's j foreign policy of "Civis Romanus sum," attacked by Gladstone;_ to Disraeli's amplification of the British ideal as "Imperium et libertas" to Asquith's "Wait and see," to Baldwin's extrication of the Empire from the late Constitutional crisis and his farewell words on retirement, is a long story. The historian, G. M. Trevelyan, in "British History in the Nineteenth Century," says: "It is significant of much that in the 17th century members of Parliament quoted from the Bible; in the 18th and 19th centuries from the classics; in the 20th century from nothing-at all." Mr. Baldwin himself once said: "I should very much prefer myself, like a famous general, to be silent in seven languages, but I recognised that it is part of my duty to talk." So we^ can be sure, from the example of his career, that if the old quotations from the classics are missing, the traditional spirit of the British Parliament still survives.