1906] Balfour's Metaphysics 145 



" 22nd May. — The Sultan has yielded everything about Akabah. 

 Though Redmond and Dillon promised me to press for papers, they 

 have not done so, and our Foreign Office has explained nothing. I am 

 disgusted with the Irish for playing thus into Grey's hands, politic 

 though they may find it to be for their own purpose of getting a Home 

 Rule Bill out of the Government. Not that I expected much other 

 result, for I have always felt that the Irish, if they once got their 

 own freedom, would join England and the other robber nations of the 

 world in the work of Imperial spoliation. Parnell's declaration in 

 favor of Imperial Federation twenty years ago was an indication of 

 this to me. It was my main reason for retiring from Irish politics, 

 and for the future I shall economize my subscription to their Parlia- 

 mentary Fund. 



" 28th May. — I have been all last week in Chapel Street, seeing my 

 various friends. To-day Betty Balfour came to lunch with me, having 

 first sent me a new batch of her father's letters to read and advise 

 as to publishing. They deal mostly with his Indian Government, and 

 I have advised her to abridge and cut freely, as the volume is to be one 

 of private, not political letters. We discussed the respective intellectual 

 powers of her husband Gerald, and of Arthur. 



" Curiously enough, precisely the same question turned up later in 

 the afternoon, when I had a visit from Margot. She has, of course, 

 known Arthur intimately for the last twenty years before she married. 

 She insisted that Arthur's real mind was metaphysical and religious, 

 that he had a vivid sense of the present life being of very little import- 

 ance, an ante-chamber to another life. On one occasion he had told 

 her that, in his view death, apart from the physical pain of it — ' and I 

 am a coward in regard to pain,' he had said, ' being altogether without 

 that kind of courage' — was an incident no more alarming than the 

 passage ' from this room into that,' the world to come being infinitely 

 more interesting and important. ' It is for that reason,' Margot said, 

 ' that he has no profound convictions about politics, they attract him 

 only as a game which he thinks he plays well, and which amuses 

 him much as a game of chess might do, but he does not really care for 

 the things at stake, or believe that the happiness of mankind depends on 

 events going this way or that.' 



" Dillon was to have come to me to-day, but has had to go suddenly to 

 Ireland to see Davitt, who is in a dying state. Betty Balfour, talking 

 of Dillon, was very severe about his 'lying and insincerity,' but I 

 could not get her to give an instance of either. I told her that for my 

 part I had the highest respect for Dillon, and had always found him 

 perfectly honest and straightforward, a far better patriot than others 

 whom she was praising. 



