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to the public. Everyone knew him by sight.” He was the visible symbol of the English country gentleman. His post was the Local Government Board, which dealt with the poor law, housing, town planning, public health and municipal government. Its functions were best described by Winston Churchill, who, on being offered the post in 1908, said, “I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb.” Chaplin performed its duties and those of M.P. with tremendous gravity. He regarded himself, as did his constituents, as the bulwark of the essential Britain, and used to practice his speeches behind hedges the better to do credit to his role. His jovian thunders, the noble sweep of his arm as he spoke from the Front Bench, said a witness, expressed, not vanity, but “the calm, ineradicable conviction of the ruling class.” Undaunted by the most abstruse problems of government, he would tackle the tariff or the Education Bill in the same spirit as a difficult ditch in the hunting field and even undertook the fervent advocacy of bimetalism as a cure for economic ills. Once after a two-hour discourse on this recondite subject, he mopped his brow and leaning over to Mr. Balfour, asked, “How did I do, Arthur?”

“Splendidly, Harry, splendidly.”

“Did you understand me, Arthur?”

“Not a word, Harry, not a word.”

Arthur Balfour, prince of the Cecil line, nephew of the Prime Minister and his political heir apparent, artist of debate and idol of Society, was the paragon of his party and its official Leader in the House of Commons. He was forty-seven in 1895 and, when his uncle retired in 1902, was to succeed him as Prime Minister. Over six feet tall, he had blue eyes, waving brown hair and moustache, and a soft, bland face that might have seemed vulnerable if it had not been smoothed to an external serenity. His expression was gentle, his figure willowy, his manner nonchalant, but there remained a mystery in his face. No one could tell what banked fires burned behind it or whether they burned or even if they existed.

Rarely seen to sit upright, he reclined in indolent attitudes as close to the horizontal as possible, “as if to discover,” wrote Punch’s parliamentary correspondent, “how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.” In him all the gifts of privilege had combined. He had wealth, blue blood, good looks, great charm and “the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time.” He was a philosopher on a serious level whose second major work, The Foundations of Belief, published in 1895, was read by the American philosopher William James with “immense gusto. There is more real philosophy in such a book,” he wrote to his brother Henry, “than in fifty German ones heaped with subtleties and technicalities.”

Although ultimately aloof and detached, Balfour had a winning manner that encircled him with admiration. His charm was of the kind that left everyone feeling happy who talked with him. “Although he was the best talker I have ever known,” said John Buchan, “he was not a monopolist of the conversation but one who quickened and elevated the whole discussion and brought out the best of other people.” After an evening in his company, wrote Austen Chamberlain, “one left with the feeling that one had been at the top of one’s form and really had talked rather well.” Political opponents were affected no less than allies. He was the only Conservative to whom Gladstone in debate accorded the term usually reserved for members of his own party, “my honourable friend.” Women succumbed equally. “Oh dear,” sighed Constance Lady Battersea after a visit to his home in 1895, “what a gulf between him and most men!” Margot Asquith found his “exquisite attention” and “lovely bend of the head,” when he talked to her, “irresistible”; so much so that earlier, when she was Margot Tennant, and herself a social star of high voltage, she had “moved heaven and earth,” according to Lady Jebb, to marry him. Queried on the rumor of this marriage, Balfour replied, “No, that is not so. I rather think of having a career of my own.”

As the eldest son