MAN WHO LOANED £450,000,000.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14566, 31 December 1910, Page 1 (Supplement)

MAN WHO LOANED £450,000,000.

Wort.D- congratulations poured in upon Lord Rothschild, when be celebrated his seventieth anniversary on November 8, v.he event being of the greater-signi-ficance that it came in the centenary year of the famous London office in Newcourt, St. Swithin's Lane.

One might well speculate as to how many reigning monarchs wield even a respectable fraction of the power of this unassuming business man, who is to be found at his office as regularly as any humdrum managing director.

Yet his seventy years of life, to use Lord Rothschild's own characteristically modest words, '' devoted entirely to business," have been fruitful of world-deeds any one of which would have ensured an important place in the history of Europe and of our own Empire. During his reign at NeAvcourt be has brought out loans amounting in all to something like £450,000,000. He it was who saved Egypt from financial ruin in the early days, and t.he amazing story of that adventurous evening when he helped Lord Beaeonsfield to buy up the Suez Canal shares is still one of the true fairy tales of financial statesmanship. In the Baring crisis he came la the rescue of the national credit, and to the present generation there is a special appeal in his ready help to Cecil Rhodes in his first struggling^days; while his invaluable aid in the matter of Government loans during the Boer war will be an ever-remembered national service. From his Cambridge days a trusted _ friend of King Edward, Lord Rothschild is the first professing Jew to take his seat in the House of Lords.

It is characteristic of Lord Rothschild that although he spent his actual birthday at his country home at Tring, he had been in attendance at his office in St. Swithin's Lane every day for the previous week. He is in excellent health and spirits, and in everything save years is himself one of those " young men of the Empire" in whose " individual responsibility for Imperial efficiency" he is-firm and hopeful believer.