VETERAN FIGHTERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 676, 30 May 1929, Page 8

VETERAN FIGHTERS

Keen Rivals for Power THE PIPE-SMOKER AND THE POET (Written for THE SVS) DURING the past seven years the main battle in British politics has been waged between the lit. lion. Stanley Baldwin, Leader of the Conservatives, and the Rt. Hon. J. Ramsay MacDonald, Leader of the Labour Party, with the Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George skirmishing on the flank and attacking both. * The two closest rivals for power have succeeded each other in turn as Prime Minister and as Leader of his Majesty’s Opposition. Yesterday a pen-picture of Mr. Lloyd George was given. Today are published similar portraits of the two other protagonists.

LONG SERVICE AND SUCCESS

IF there be any virtue in being all things to all men. then the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin might be called the St. Paul of British politics. He is the leader of a team containing freetraders and protectionists, while at home in his own castle he must, as a staunch Conservative, listen to the ultra-radical arguments of his son. who is a rabid Socialist. These anomalies do not vex him. His hair Is still a warm chestnut hue. This true Englishman is 61 years of age. For 21 years he has been continuously a member of the House of Commons, enjoying the confidence of one and the same constituency all the time. As an inveterate smoker he puts many difficulties with tobacco in his briar pipe and burns them away, or at least allows them to drift out of sight in smoke. If they should occasionally form pretty rings, so much the better. Some people have called him the Simple Simon among famous Prime Ministers, but nobody has yet succeeded in proving him a simpleton. He is a wealthy man, though never mean with his riches. When his country groaned loudest under the heaviest taxation in the world, Mr. Baldwin handed over one-fourth of his wealth to the State to help pay off its colossal sum of indebtedness. And he did that as quietly and modestly as he unobtrusively assumed the high places of Prime Minister and Header of the House of Commons. Yesterday, a plain politician, hewer of wood and carrier of water; the following day a competent statesman. Everybody likes him as a man and puts full trust on his transparent honesty. But many people do not love him as a statesman. He has all the characteristics and attributes of Worcestershire except its sauce. His way in administrative politics is the jog of the easy-going English farmer. Peliaps experience in the country taught him early that one cannot attain speed and direct progress in driving pigs. Mr. Baldwin is a pleasant, rather than a fluent speaker. You might not care much for him and his address in the evening, but in the morning you would discover when reflecting that both the man and his speech were great and good. As a cousin of Rudyard Kipling, he has the family’s flair for literature, and as a student of the best literature the politician is the better cousin of the two. Indeed, his scholarly attainments are more impressive than his political record. It is true that he has been Prime Minister twice already; but what more could anyone say about him as an active statesman? A Harrovian boy, he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge. Now he is a Privy Councillor, an honorary D.C.L., Oxford, and an honorary LL.D. of Cambridge, St. Andrew’s and Birmingham. Also he is a trustee of the British Museum, an Elder Brother of Trinity House, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Edinburgh students have pleasant, stimulating memories of him, as Lord Rector of their great university. The popular Tory leader did not gain entrance to the House of Commons at the first knock. In 1906 he contested Kidderminster and was rejected. Two years later he was accepted for the Bendley Division of Worcestershire. Nine years after he was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury; then, by steady progressive stages, he became President of the Board of Trade, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister. His outstanding financial service, apart from his generous gift, was in arranging Britain’s debt settlement with the United States—a hard bargain from America. In between times Mr. Baldwin published several books, all rich with a scholarly touch. Mrs. Baldwin, who is the mother of two sons and four daughters, has a strong personality. She is a keen feminist, and it is believed that her influence helped largely toward an extension of the franchise to five million young women.

THE LABOUR CHIEFTAIN

WHO could say anything about the * ' Rt. Hon. J. Ramsay MacDonald that would limn the true character of the man? He is something of a contradiction to himself in the hurly-burly of politics. The poet within him must ever be at war with the politician. Take him away from a political environment and go roving with the real man over the heather and westward to Hebridean haunts, and your companion would be the most lovable of men, a quiet, unassuming scholar, quick and sincere in sympathy, with all his fellows, a shy lover of beauty and romance. And yet he is the Leader of the Labour Party, a wise captain over a battalion of political raiders and the wild and woolly Socialists frae Clydeside. About Ramsay MacDonald there is nothing of a David “going out with his pebble and his sling against the hosts of the Philistines.” Rather he is more of a Jonathan. In no sense is he the relentless foe of society as constituted on its present strata of wealth and callous principle of letting the Devil take the poorest. He has compromise in his heart and ■would, if he could, remould a sorry world to the heart’s desire without smashing all its systems, good and bad. If he. stands for revolution at all, it is the quiet revolution of constructive progress with reasonable opportunity for all, even for those who too soon would abuse it. Those who have lived close to him and studied his manner and his moods cannot fail but think that he lives aloof from the party he leads and is lonely. His head is snow-white with an ample shock of hair, and its-white-ness suggests a long career of uphill fighting. But when the smouldering eyes of the brooding man flash with the glow of Highland temper then, beyond a doubt, the heather is on fire. He is an easy speaker, with alluring depth in the steady flow of his oratorical stream. But he is much better, more attractive, more convincing as a writer. If his politics were as clear and pleasant as his imagery, he •would have been Prime Minister for years. As things have been, he was the head of the House of Commons only for some months, and held that position on a precarious tenure and at the will of a party that was more of an enemy than a dependable friend. Mr. MacDonald is 63 years of age. He did not graduate from any university, and lias been little the' worse for lack of that hallmark of intellect. His knowledge was acquired in a hard school of experience. But he at least got the benefit of a general Scottish education than which there is none better, no matter what Mr. Atmore or Mr. Wright might say to the contrary- In 1900 the raw young man from Lossiemouth was appointed secretary to the Labour Party. Then he became chairman of the Independent Labour Party, and finally Leader of the Labour Party. This was not an easy apprenticeship. Labour makes its leading men work hard, ever so much harder than any Capitalist would be permitted to work a labourer. For some time Mr. MacDonald was editor of the Socialist Library and the Socialist Review. In his time he has wooed and lost and won different electorates. He has written and published a dozen books, all good, but some better than others. The tenderness of his memoir on Margaret Ethel MacDonald, his wife, revealed the fine emotions of the man, while his “Wanderings and Excursions” demonstrate his love of walking and the lure of heather and the history-haunted bens of the Highlands. He plays a good mashie shot at golf. R. RILEY.