IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16493, 7 March 1914, Page 9

IN THE PUBLIC EYE.

PROMINENT PEOPLE OP THE PERIOD. The Earl of Minto, whose death was reported during the week, was a close connection of Earl Grey, whose 6ister ho married in 1883. In his younger days Lord Minto, as a lieutenant in the Scots Guards, saw active service in Afghanistan and Egypt. He was private secretary to Lord Roberts in South Africa in 1881, and was subsequently sent to Canada when trouble was threatening there. But his first close view of war was obtained when the Russians and Turks were at grips in 1877, for he obtained permission to attach himself to the Turkish army. As he had been military secretary to the Governor-General of Canada in the eighties, it was quite in the natural order of things that, when lie succeeded his father, he should go to Canada himself as Governor-General, and when his term there had expired he became Viceroy of India. The first Earl, also, had been in the colonial service and was at one time Governor of Bengal, so that the Elliots can regard themselves as quite an Imperial family. Tlie second Earl was in the diplomatic service and was Ambassador, to Berlin, but afterwards he became a pronounced politician and held office under Lord John Russell. Two of the late Earl’s brothers, by the way, were members of the House of Commons and held minor posts.

The two newspaper editors who are being prosecuted for. criticising, the Crown Prince of Germany have simply put into printed words a thought that must have been in the minds of some millions of .the Kaiser’s subjects of late. Tho Prince is no longer a boy. He is a married man, thirty-two years of ago, and he ought to be learning'discretion by now. The explanation of his startling excursions into ••• politics may lie in the fact that until a few years ago he was kept under strict discipline by his father. He was credited with having rather a sullen disposition, but when lie married and had a substantial income of his own to play .with, he broke out as a leader of fashionable society, living the gayest of lives and criticising anybody ana everybody with quite distressing freedom, His demonstration in the Reichstag on the Morocco question was bv no means his first ..serious breach of good Royal manners, and his behaviour had already moved the Kaiser to banish' him to Dantzig. The tendency to kick over the traces, however, is in the Hobenzollern blood, and the Kaiser himself, not many years since, was creating trouble in Europe by ill-advised declarations on highly controversial subjects. The particular episode that lias provoked the comment of the prosecuted editors, of course, is tho Prince’s open approval of the conduct of Colonel von Reuter at Zabern. The Prince has declared for the supremacy of the military caste, and by so doing has directly skipped in the face all the Socialists and democrats in the Empire.

Personally. tho German Crown Prince is said to be a young man of winning ways. He is fair-haired and blue-eyed, and when he was enjoying himself in Berlin he wore a perpetual smile. As soon as he was “ emancipated” ho set to work to make himself popular, and he succeeded so well that the Kaiser’s action in sending him out of the capital was very generally attrjbuted to jealousy. Ho would give a lift in his motor-car . to a grubby woman or to grubbier children, showed open-handed generosity in his treatment of tradespeople and servants, entered with zest into sports anu pastimes, and was an eager patron of the theatre. Indeed, lie encouraged the presentation in Berlin of plays that were obviously distasteful to bis father. He went to Dantzig in a rebellious mood and has frequently made brief visits to the capital in defiance of liis father's orders. But if he was formerly on the road to becoming the darling of the Empire he is certainly doing his best now to destroy hie popularity. The great democratic majority of tho people will not readily forgive his attitude during the Zabern affair, and he will find that his troubles in life have only begun if he continues to ignore the feelings of the great mass of the German people.

There appears, from the cable messages, to be a prospect of the early solution of the mystery attaching to the disappearance of Cardinal Rampolln’s will. One London correspondent remarks that, in addition to the will, private papers were stolen “ for which one or two Governments in Europe would gladly pay a king's ransom.” This does not, on tho face of it, appear very probable. The Cardinal may have had private papers bearing on great events, but all accounts of bis methods go to show that lie persistently declined to engage in private diplomatic correspondence, and the probability is that documents that could not safely be filed in a regular way were, during his tenure of office as Secretary of State, promptly destroyed.' So far, at any rate, there is no .evidence to suggest, that the abstraction of tlie papers lias any political significance, although there is a temptation to assume that the Cardinal, having been in office during a critical period of European history, would'have an unusualv interesting collection of private papers.

At this stage the theft of the will has the appearance of being a crime of the merely sordid order. Crimes of the kind ‘used to be fairly common in fiction at one time, and of course they have occurred not infrequently in real life. Quite recently, in the course of the hearing of a rather sensational will case in the Old Country, it was suggested that a later will than the one under dispute had been stolen by one of tlie beneficiaries under the earlier document, but the evidencedid not bear out the accusation. A famous ease was the theft of > the wijl of Lord St Leonards, who died in 1875. When the box in which the will had been kept was opened there was no will in it, although various codicils remained. The mystery in this case was never really cleared up, the accepted explanation being that a curious servant had taken the will in order ■ to discover what bequests had been made, and had had no opportunity of restoring it.

The man of the week ought, in the usual order of things, to be Mr Birrell, for the reason that he has reintroduced tho Home Rule Bill-called its banns, so to speak, for the third and last time. But it happens that interest in the introduction of the Bill is quite overshadowed by interest in tne amendments to be announced by the Prime Minister. If the Irish Secretary lives up to his reputation he will find material for jokes even in the present grave situation- Right at the outset of his political career he was responsible for a comment that has been quoted scores of times in other connections, that although “ the scope of the inquiry (concerning the Royal grants) may be restricted, you cannot resrtietthe sphere of men’s reflections.” Sir Henry Lucy declares that the best of Mr Birrell’s apparently extempore speeches are carefully prepared, a course that one would expect a literary man to adopt-, hut there have been occasions, particularly when Mr Chamberlain was active in debate, on which the member for Bristol North, or, rather, for West Fifeshire as he was then, could not have had an opportunity of polishing his pungent criticisms* -and telling epigrams- in'private.

Mi* Birrell is commonly regarded as a Scot, but his father was a Baptist clergyman and he was born in Liverpool. He was thirty-nine years of age when he entered the House of Commons, and he is in his sixty-fourth year now.

There is a pleasant sketch of Mr Birrell as a conversationalist in that fascinating volume of reminiscences and comments, “ Collections and recollections.” “The ranks of our good talkers,” says the author, “have been opportunely reinforced by the discovery or Mr Augustine Birrell. . ... .. His literary knack of chatty criticism had required a new word to convey its preciso effect. To ‘ birrell ’ is now a verb as firmly established as to ‘ boycott,’ and it signifies a style light, easy, playful, pretty, rather discursive, perhaps a little superficial. Its characteristic note is grace. But when the eponymous hero of the new verb entered the. conversation lists it. was seen that his predominant quality was strength. An enthusiastic admirer who sketched him in a novel, nicknamed him the ‘ Harmonious Blacksmith,' and the collocation of -words happily hits off the special quality of his conversation. There is burly strength in his positive opinions, his cogent statement, his remorseless logic, his thorough knowledge of the persons and things he discusses. In his sledgehammer blows against humbug and wickedness, intellectual affectation and moral baseness, he is the ‘ blacksmith ’ all over. In his. geniality, his sociability, his genuine love of fun, his frank readiness to amuse or be amused/ the epithet ‘harmonious’, is abundantly .justified. He is the jolliest of companions and the steadiest.of friends, and perhaps the most genuine bookr lover in London.”

Everyone who has been interested in Australian politics will be glad to see Mr Alfred Deakin figuring once more ill a public or .semi-public capacity. The retirement of the former Prune Minister of the Commonwealth,was a severe loss, to - Australian public life, for he brought into the Commonwealth Parliament a broad and noble culture, all too rare in colonial life. Mr Lloyd George was speaking, the other day of the trials and tribulations of the political life and the abuse, and vituperation to which Ministers had to submit. ' Most people, if they had to endure that sort of • thing, would ■ rather give up business and break stones for a. living, lie said. But he added that in a few years a man got used to the atmosphere, and in time, like the -sea birds in a storm, the most abused politicians came to regard it as their element. They got hardened to even the winteriest experience. Mr Deakin, however, never became really hardened. Probably if the truth were known he retired. because lie was afraid that lie might be hardened and because ho found his finer judgment of yen and morals being blunted. It was die late Mr David Syme who sent Mr Deakin into politics in the first place, selecting. him to contest a seat against, a strong and experienced politician. Mr Deakin won, but in the stress of polHical. life he often wished himself hack at. the quiet life of a leader-writer. Mr Syme had concluded that Mr Deakin would never make a great journalist—probably he regarded the genuine literary temperament as a handicap—but he saw in tile leader-writer the makings of a first-class statesman. As a matter of fact, it was the very quality that Mr Syme disliked in the journalist that handicapped the politician. ‘ ■