191 1 ] Lack of Tory Leadership 339 



has nothing at all the matter with him, and has taken a holiday exactly 

 at the crisis. Walter is ambitious without ability ; Austen plodding and 

 industrious ; neither has any imagination. He, George, is the only one 

 with brains, and he is standing aside, as he does not care to give up his 

 literature and social amusements for the mere chance of being some 

 day Prime Minister. Still, it lies within his reach, he says, if he wishes 

 it, and he wants my advice. If he goes in for it, it will mean ten 

 hours' work daily, taking on three or four Secretaries, spending all his 

 money and abandoning romance and friendship. What is he to do? 

 If it was a question of saving the Empire from ruin, he would, of 

 course, do it. But can the Empire be saved? His plan would be, when 

 Asquith faces them with the Veto Bill to dare him to do his worst, to 

 say ' You threaten us with a revolution, we threaten you with a counter- 

 revolution ; create the five hundred peers if you can, we refuse to have 

 the constitution destroyed.' If Arthur would call a meeting in St. 

 James's Hall and declare war in this way he would carry the country 

 with him, only Arthur won't. Arthur is not sufficiently interested in 

 the issue. He is disgusted with the way things have gone, he does not 

 want to fight. He takes too scientific a view of politics. He knows 

 that there was once an ice age, and that there will some day be an ice age 

 again. This makes him indifferent.' My advice to George was that 

 if he cared about it enough to make a real revolution on these lines it 

 would be worth doing, but that otherwise he had better enjoy himself. 



" igih Feb. (Sunday). — Yesterday I stayed in all day writing. I 

 have done three articles for ' Egypt,' the leading article, ' Secrecy in 

 Foreign Affairs,' and ' The Bagdad Railway,' besides most of the rest 

 of the- first number. I never had such work." [The article on " Sec- 

 recy in Foreign Affairs " was the reproduction of an old protest against 

 the ways of the Foreign Office which I had first made as long ago as 

 1885 at a meeting at Islington Hall presided over by Frederic Harrison, 

 and was at that time a novelty in politics.] 



" To-day Dillon came to luncheon and stayed three hours talking. 

 He approves of all I have written, especially about the Bagdad railway 

 (see ' Egypt,' No. 1), and will get the new labour leader, Ramsay Mac- 

 Donald, to bring our Egyptian questions forward in Parliament. About 

 home politics, he told me the Opposition was all at sixes and sevens ; 

 they had no leader. He did not believe in the Lords throwing out the 

 Veto Bill; the threat of creating the peers would be enough. The 

 King would write a letter to Asquith promising the necessary number, 

 and the Lords would give in. Still it all depends upon the King. I 

 told him what I have often told George — that the obstinacy of the 

 Tory party about Ireland was like the obstinacy of Pharaoh. They 

 had been refusing for the last thirty years to let the Irish go, and had 

 sacrificed first the House of Commons, now the House of Lords, and 



