LORD LANSDOWNE

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 10, 9 March 1910, Page 2

LORD LANSDOWNE

THE MAN WHO PUT THE BUDGET OUT OF THE

HOUSE OF LORDS.

ZTTX ORE than three thousand hootfl I ■ ing and hissing Londoners I f made up the crowd which / surged from the Nelson monument to Berkeley Square, where a detachment of mounted police alone hindered their invasion of the home of Lord Lansdowne. The extravagant pile stands on the costliest site in the world, being separated by the narrowest of passages between the gardens from the famous mansion in which the Duke of Devonshire resides when in town. His Lordship’s eldest- daughter, as every student of the fashionable intelligence of England is aware, married his Grace the Duke when he was plain Mr Victor Cavendish. It was in Lord Lansdowne, however, and not in the Duke, that this London mob. fresh from a mass meeting of protest against the rejection of the Budget, manifested its personal interest. Lord Lansdowne had instigated, abetted, planned and performed the parliamentary proceeding which plunged his country into turmoil. The men in the street beneath his windows got one good glimpse of his Lordship before the mounted police beat them back through a hail of stones and sticks.

It was "a slim little man with a statesman’s head,” to quote the expres-

sion of the London "Mail,” who thus ap peared and disappeared. There was scarcely one hooter in the mob who coul I have failed to recognise the peer who put the Budget out of the House of Lords, so familiar have his steely, glittering eyes, his long, lean and Leaked nose, his iron-grey moustache and bis uncompromisingly bald held been rendered in the medley of cartoons, portraits and character sketches with which the London papers are replete. Yet so high is th' note of distinction to which his personality is at,uned that, throughout the whole proletarian hubbub, Lord Lansdowne, in the words of the London "Mai.” once more, "gives the impression of a delicately made aristocrat with a reserve of iron strength,” although he wu in January exactly sixty -four.

Lord Lansdowne's character, his career and his personality, comprise the flattest negation of the theory that a British peer must be bibulous, dissolute, and inefficient. His is, indeed, that chastity of honour which makes a gentleman speak always and everywhere the truths Never, as one appreciation in the London "•Standard ’ puts it, would Lord Lansdowne take advantage of a neighbour’s weakness or ignorance, and invariable Lord Lan-downe thinks less of himself than of his cause—the cause of tradition, conservatism and aristocracy. His mother was a.countess, his wife was the daughter of a duke, his daughter is the wife of a duke, his son is an earl and he himself is a marquess, a baron, an earl, and a viseount. He owns one hundred and fifty thousand of those acres uooit which the fiscal weight of the budget is planned to descend so heavily. Lord Lansdowne, as the London "Outlook” studies him. is a type of that British system according to which “men of ancient lineage and great wealth should look upon success as a birthright, should find the path of promotion thrown invitingly open to their footsteps and should gradually have it recognised as something ot a political axiom that they simply caauot

be got rid of.” To Lord Lansdowne, moreover, Mr Sydney Brooks applies in the Loudon "Mtrii” the cruel sarcasm of Lord Rosebery on Lord Bathurst: “He was one of those strange children of our political system who fill the most dazzling offices with the most complete obscurity.”

Dazzling offices Lord Lanwdowne has certainly filled. Forty years have come and gone since, having got somewhat suddenly into his great titles and even greater estates, he was created one of the Ix:rds of the Treasury. Gladstone said of him then, and the characterisation has been repeated in many forms of late, that Lord Lansdowne would avoid, as if it were a stain upon his shield, ull things in

Speech or action low, mean or ungentlemanly. The youthful peer had caught his tone at that nursery of England’s greatness, the famous public school of Eton, where, we may believe, he was birched and educated soundly. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, with that idea of a connection between Christian gentility and aristocratic birth which noticing, seemingly, can eradicate from his mind. He is credited in extremely Radical sheets with a conviction that only the well-born can be gentlemanly in the moral as well as in the technical sense. He is supposed to euspeet that the growth of democracy in our age has eliminated all genuinely Christian significance from the word gentleman. It is a theory, as one labour member complained in the Commons lately, that bases the authority of the hereditary peerage upon the Gospels. That is Lord Lansdowne’s gospel, at eny rate, the London “Outlook ’ says, and he took it in good faith with him into the subordinate ministerial offices he held prior to his appointment as GovernorGeneral of Canada, from which he was raised to the exalted dignity of Viceroy of India, only to come home and be made Secretary of War and at last Minister of Foreign Affairs. The career exemplifies to the somewhat malicious British weekly just cited the good old theory that when an aristocrat fails in one high pest he must be promoted to one of greater dignity. At last Lord Lansdowne found himself what he is •to-day: the supreme political leader in the hereditary branch of the British Parliament. It is passing strange to many a commentator on this record that, for all his official dignities, he should remain so obscure. A clue is afforded in "The Nineteenth Century” (London), which reminds us of the spirit of the Eton boy in his early teens, who, “far away from the glare of publicity,” suddenly takes his place “with quiet modesty, to represent the school at cricket before a crowd numbering fifteen or twenty thousand people,” and then retires to the obscure routine of simple study “as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”-• Lord. Lansdowne had this bracing experience as a lad at Eton, and he has been playing that game these forty years.

To play the game—that’s the thing! as one London contemporary represents Lord Lansdowne saying back in the bays of his under-secretaryship. “No game can be properly played if the players condescend to sharp practice, if they take advantage one of another, if they condescend to underhand tricks, or even if they insist upon the letter as against the spirit of the rules under which the game is played.” Such it, the feature which manifests itself with most conspicuity in the long political life of the noble lord. He played the game when the Boer war burst upon the English, with Lord Lansdowne at the head of the War Office as the one scapegoat in sight. Not a word did he speak in his own defence. "The conduct of the war,” says the London “Review of Reviews,” “was fatally hampered by Lord Lansdowne’s obstinate refusal to believe the urgent warnings of all his military advisers,” although the London “Saturday Review’’ is authority for the statement that had he chosen to clear his skirts by sacrificing the reputation of a colleague or two. Lord Lansdowne might have made himself a popular hero. Popularity, the plaudits of the “mdb,* the tumultuous acclamations of tire politically enthusiastic, are all loathsome to his Lordship. The London “Neww” sarcastically concedes that the noble lord has never been vexed with these things. He has that silent pride of manner and that cold aloofness of conversational tone which denote the instinctive aristocrat. A mere brewer put into the peerage would seem absurd, concedes "The Throne,” did he cultivate that frigid indifference to everybody and everything which makes personal contact with Lord Lansdowne the finest possible object lesson in aristocrat deportment. The impression loses nothing from the detail that this perfect peer is ever Immaculately dressed, his disposition reflecting itself sartorially in a neat, dark tie fastened into a bow. His Lordship's drawl in inimitable, quite the most English drawl since the days of Lord Randolph Churchill. The legend is that more than one cockney actor, listening for hours in the visitors' gallery of the Evuse of Lords, hae gone away in sheer

despair of ever imitating effectively on any stage the intonation with which the monosyllable "Ah-h!’’ falls from the lips of this peer. Issuing out of other mouths, the monosyllable has an excruciatingly ludicrous effect, our gay contemporary concedes: but Lord Lansdowne emits the expletive in modes heightening the gravity of the political situation. "As he sits among his colleagues,” in the words of the London "Mail,” “his back is ereet with the rigidity of the grenadier and he stands to address the House of Lords with the same stiff and unbending pose.” A hush, adds this daily, always steals over the peers whenever Lord Lansdowne rises from his place in the middle of the front opposition bench, and, stepping forward, lays has aristocratic little hand on the despatch box across the table.

“The Houfe knows it is to have real guidance and illuminating arguments.”

Were it not for Lord Lansdowne’s undeniable sense of humour, it might be much more difficult than he now finds it to sustain his contention that the Budget is bad. He fairly revels in “grave sarcasm.” to borrow the phrase of the London “Mail,” from one of whose anecdotes his collision with Lord Crewe may be felicitously cited. Lord Crewe, it seems, once made a speech from a theme he desired to leave to his followers in the Lords, to vote upon as they pleased. Lord Lansdowne coirgratulated his noble friend on his eloquent speech. “I have followed it,” he said, “with earnest attention, not only on account of the importance of the subject, but also on account of the noble lord’s judicial attitude. I admired his earnestness and his eloquence, but what impressed me most was his impartiality.” A pause. “Yes, until the last minute, I did not know on which side of the fence his lordship was coming down.”

Dwelling when at leisure among the art treasures and books in Lansdowne House, where the mob came last month to annoy him. his Lordship can ignore, the London “Post” affirms, all such partisan depreciation of his personality. He takes a fisherman's delight in the plentifully stocked streams purling through his Scottish estates on the Tay. He personally superintends the cultivation of his unique tropical plant .garden at Derreen. He spends nearly every autumn in shooting snipe and, woodcock across his splendid preserves in County Kerry. There can be no doubt of his keenness as a sportsman.