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By Root 1306 0

First at Oxford, to which he had won a scholarship, he was the finest product, wrote Gardiner, of the Balliol system, which avoids excessive zeal and “distrusts great thoughts even if it thinks them.” He understood everything and originated nothing. Firm but passionless he might have been a judge and was a perfect chairman of the board. After a successful early career as a barrister, he no sooner became a Cabinet minister under Gladstone in 1892 than he was marked as the coming man even though he was so unaccustomed to Society that he used to give his arm to his own wife to take her in to dinner. That difficulty was rectified when she died and Margot Tennant, with an eye for coming men, decided to marry him. He fitted smoothly into the elite; he “has no egotism, no jealousy, no vanity,” said a woman friend. He dominated by intellect but he did not excite or stir reaction. The public could never form a picture of or pin a label on him and he remains for history a man without a face.

The Government included a number of peers, none of them great landowners, among whom were the aged Marquess of Ripon, who later resigned, Lord Tweedmouth, who became mentally “unhinged” and also eventually resigned, and Lord Crewe, Rosebery’s son-in-law, who “horrified” the current Prince of Wales (later King George V) by his habit of wearing a jacket instead of a morning coat in the House of Lords. The only representative of the great aristocracy was the renegade Tory, Winston Churchill. Not Free Trade alone had brought him over to the Liberals. By 1904 when he changed parties he knew the Tories were on their way out. Craving office, he did not want to wait and besides he could not afford to. Although the grandson of a duke, he had to make a living. Journalism and authorship would pay but not with the kind of opportunity he wanted. In America a man of his energy would have chosen business, but for an Englishman of his inheritance Government was the one career for the exercise of greatness.

Recognizing the challenge of the social problem, he believed the Liberals could meet it and he wanted to play a major share. Apart from ambition he was moved by his deep devotion and love for his old childhood nurse, Mrs. Everest. Through her he felt personally the fate of the old unemployed person, “so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives.” In 1904 he saw opportunity, seized it, made the right choice for the time and won his chance. From then on in all his speeches he preached Liberalism as the “cause of the left-out millions” to which the working class should attach themselves rather than to a destructive Socialism. Once in office he knew that unless the Liberals could win the trade-union vote away from the rising Labour party, they must eventually collapse. He set out to earn it, forming a team with Lloyd George to draft and enact legislation on wages and hours, pensions and social insurance. In a speech at Glasgow in October, 1906, he outlined a program virtually adopting the Fabian idea of a welfare state and far ahead of anything intended by the Government of which he was a minor member. “We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour,” he announced boldly and went on to propose the state as a “reserve employer” of labour, the establishment of minimum standards and state ownership of railways. Beatrice Webb was very gratified: “Winston has mastered the Webb scheme,” she noted in her diary, and having done that he could be classified as “brilliantly able.”

The most outright opportunist called forth to match the new times appeared in Tory ranks. He was F. E. Smith, a new M.P. aged thirty-three, who was one day to become Lord Chancellor under the name Lord Birkenhead. His maiden speech in 1906 was the most sensational parliamentary debut of his time. Like Asquith a barrister and self-made, he too had won a scholarship to Oxford, where, as a star of the Union, he learned every trick, gambit and lunge of debate. An adventurer without connections among the great territorial