PUBLIC MEN UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3402, 28 May 1919, Page 59

PUBLIC MEN UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

"Unccnsored Celebrities," by E. T. Raymond (Fisher Unwin), is a very clever book, and as original in its as Mr Strachey's much criticised " Eminent Victorians." But there is no bitterness in_ Mr Raymond. However smarts he is always Urbane and honest. His book is full of Unexpected and witty sentences—you never know how the paragraph will turn or end. He ends when the beaker is full to the brim and he does not slop over.

He deals with some obvious people like the Prime Minister, Mr Balfour, and Mr Asquith. But some of the most interesting are the lesser-known people—but all are good. "E. T. Raymond" is said to be a mask—but nothing conceals the cleverness of his handiwork.

The Daily Telegraph and Its Owner. — Here is Lord Burnham, the present proprietor of the Telegraph and the son of the man who made it.

'' There is scarcely a limit to the good a thinking man with Lord Burnham's ample means could have effected in half a dozen directions.

" Lord Burnham, however, has been content to carry on. He has not cut the shop. He. is greatly interested in it—as a shop. The advertisement columns of the Daily Telegraph seem to be his special care. . . . "It is becoming increasingly difficult to find what class of man derives stimulus from Lord /Burnham's editorial direction.

. . . Even in these days of paper famine it still has a decided advantage in bulk ; its usefulness for wrapping things in and putting under carpets recommends it to economical households. But what special kind of intellectual hunger it satisfies is less easy to discover."

Lord Beaverbrook.—

" Lord Beaverbrook, a comparatively small man financially, has scaled heights forbidden to the great Randlords, and possesses a control of the press which Rhodes, in the plenitude of his power, never attained. This particular ascent into Olympus may be satisfactorily explained. But the of the thing suggests doubts as to the~quality of the largely increasing population of divinities."

"It is undeniably a little disquieting to ooserve the ease with which an ambitious man, coming as a stranger to this country, can in a few-, years raise himself to a position of great and undefined political influence. Still more disturbing is the extraordinary public indifference to such a phenomenon." The Morning Post and .Its Editor.— " The Morning Post is the most individual of all the London morning papers. It is also the best written. Its chief contributors really are scholars, though, like ladies, when young and fair, they have the gift to know it.

" Mr Gwynne is a fighting rather than a thinking editor. He knows everybody in politics, but strangely little of political questions. . . . In literature he has one idol, Mr Kipling, and several betes noires, of whom Mr H. G. Wells may be taken as a type." " With more balance, and equal distinction in writing, the Morning Post might, under him, be a tremendous power for evil; without the piquant charm of his chief leader-writer's style it would be merely contemptible." Lord Northcliffe and His Genius.—

" Lord Northcliffe was certainly underrated in his vigorous youth; it may be that in middle age the blaze of his prestige is too blinding for a reasonable estimate of. his real qualities. Apart from the artist sort, he is, of all the men I ever met, he who best satisfies my conception of genius." "Lord Northcliffe's genius is like that of certain men for games of skill; it can co-exist with something very like general mediocrity. Lord Northcliffe's genius is perhaps as narrow as that-'of a chessplayer. But nobody who has had the privilege of observing his methods as a newspaper man—he is very much more than a newspaper proprietor—can possibly fail to acknowledge a power quite different in kind as well as in degree from mere business or professional acumen." " Lord Northcliffe in his proper business has the gift of. intuitive perception in extraordinary measure. He possesses a supreme instinct for the right thing in the sense of the expedient thing." A Man and His Heroes.— "There is some .significance in Lord Northcliffe's choice of heroes, Dickens in letters. Napoleon in history. Dickens he admires for the sureness with which he aimed at the heart of the masses, Napoleon for the way in which he controlled men and got things done. The truth is that he is himself a sort of composite parody of the two men. His message to the common man is perhaps not worth delivering, but he gets it delivered. The things he has got done may not have been worth doing, but he has no equal in the ' Art of getting things done.' " " In his office he is surrounded by stipendiary cherubim and seraphim, raising an eternal chorus of ' Brainy, brainy, brainy.' " The Heavens and the Heavies.— Let us leave the journalists and look elsewhere. Mr Raymond is equally happy in putting politicians under the microscope. Mr Sidney Webb is well in the public eye just now, for he is asking vital questions at the Coal Commission. Here is what Mr Raymond says of him and his wife : "These twain the Heavens and the Heavies—the Eternal Blue and the Eternal Blue Book—have joined together; let no man put them asunder. "No man with a sense of the fitness of things is likely to try. For here,

if anywhere, is the perfect marriage; two ■ minds with but a single set of thoughts, two typewriters that click ae one! It is hard to imagine Marshall without Snelgrove, Swan divorced from Edgar; but all that, is nothing to the strain of thinking of Beatrice and Sidney Webb as two distinct and unrelated individuals. " The Webbs might hare been compounded out of half a dozen Dickens's characters. There is a good deal of Gradgrind in them —' acts, facts; give me facts.' " —Mr Harold Cox.— Mr Harold Cox, editor of the Edinburgh Review, once a Fabian, is now one of the most active, opponents of the Webb policv. "ft is easy to understand why nobody speaks ill of Mr Harold Cox. It is not so clear why all men should conspire with exaggeration to speak well of him," says Mr Raymond. "It seems to be everybody's business to give Mr Cox a friendly shove _ forward. But what is everybody's business is also nobody's. ... He rather resembles the village grocer whom the local magnates respect highly, while dealing exclusively with the stores. For him there is always a pleasant ' good morning ' a.nd a courteous raising of the whip hand, but the gentry continue to get their currants from town." Viscount Grey—Englishman.— Now for a great man. " Viscount Grey is an example of the truth that a man may be larger than the sum of his qualities. If he is not a great man he is certainly a great Englishman. " His chief weakness as a Foreign Minister was that he was too English. It is, I think, his chief strength to-day. He stands for English justice, English moderation, English avoidance of extremes. The world knows exactly what he means when he speaks of a League of Nations — that he is neither chasing a sentimental will-o'-the-wisp nor fashioning an instrument of permanent oppression for the defeated. The English people know what he means when he avows himself a democrat while leading the life of an aristocratic recluse."