1908] Asquith's Early Life 225 



pied with much serving; when things are cleared away and washed up 

 I will come and sit at your feet and hear your words.' This is giving 

 me a high position as heresiarch, almost that of Antichrist. 



" There is an agreement of importance come to between the Ameri- 

 can and Japanese Governments for the maintenance of the status quo 

 on the Pacific Coast. It is practically a guarantee of the independence 

 of China. This is to the good. 



"nth Dec. — Newbuildings. Mark Napier is here. He has told 

 me an interesting story about his life with Asquith twenty and more 

 years ago. Mark lived for eight years with the present Prime Minister 

 when they were twenty-two and twenty-three and onwards in chambers 

 at the Temple. Asquith did not make more than £500 in the whole 

 of those eight years at the Bar. He was the son of a Nonconformist 

 in business in the north of England, his mother being also from the 

 north, and a very clever woman. From the age of eight Asquith had 

 kept himself and provided his own education at school and at the 

 University. Then he came up to London and read law. He was a 

 very industrious fellow and made £200 a year by writing for the Press, 

 principally in the ' Economist.' When he was twenty-three he married 

 a nice little woman. She had £500 a year, and they lived in a small 

 house at Hampstead, with a garden behind the house where they kept 

 chickens. He went in and out to his chambers daily on the top of an 

 omnibus, and lunched at an eating-house kept by women at A,d. He 

 was a very ready writer, and could write out his articles without 

 erasures, articles of a serious kind. One way and another he and his 

 wife made up £1000 a year. 



" 15M Dec. — Father Tyrrell came to dine and sleep, bringing with 

 him a Modernist friend, Bell, who is lame. We had some good talk 

 about Stonyhurst, the Jesuit system of education, Gifford Palgrave's 

 career, Eastern politics, and poetry. Both he and Bell are good talkers. 

 Bell is an Oxford convert, now a Modernist, but still resident at Hert- 

 ford College. He gives a poor account of the intelligence of the 

 undergraduates, especially in the matter of poetry. Very few of them, 

 he said, read any verse. 



" ijth Dec. — -Cromer has made a speech at the Eighty Club about 

 Egypt. He is certainly the most shameless dealer with facts in our 

 public life. He has the face now to pretend that he has always been 

 an ' Oriental Liberal,' that he has never been a partisan of the Occupa- 

 tion, that he has never been an opponent of Nationalist views, and 

 that if he was ' once shown the prospect of a Constitution ' which 

 should really represent the views and interests of all the inhabitants 

 of the Nile Valley which would inspire the confidence of Europe and 

 maintain the reasonable rights of the Khedive, he would become ' an 

 ardent Egyptian Constitutionalist.' This is indeed a jest. 



