The Days of a Man 



C1913 



Laurence 

 Irving 



Pnnsonby 



Emily 

 Hobhouse 



At "the Grelix" my wife and I became acquainted 

 with a number of interesting people. There Laurence 

 Irving, the gifted son of the famous actor, read to a 

 favored group among whom we were included the 

 unpublished manuscript of "The Mob," which he 

 wished to present in London. But the jingo spirit 

 was still too strong for the censor, and Galsworthy's 

 tremendous indictment of war-intolerance^ never ap- 

 peared on the London stage, although Irving after- 

 ward put it on in the freer air of Manchester. Later 

 in the same year both he and his wife lost their 

 lives in a steamboat collision on the St. Lawrence 

 River. 



Arthur Ponsonby, another champion of peace, 

 was a frequent, I think an intimate, guest in the 

 Moscheles home. Author of the brilliant "Decline 

 of Aristocracy," he seemed to have alienated himself 

 by his pronounced democratic views from the exalted 

 surroundings into which he had been born. 



It was in "the Grelix" also that we first met Miss 

 Hobhouse, who from South Africa during the Boer 

 War sent back accounts of the brutal methods en- 

 joined by the clumsy diplomacy of Downing Street 

 upon the unwilling British officers, "mostly gentle- 

 men" and as such recoiling from wanton atrocities. 

 Among other matters she described the reconcen- 

 tration camps with their horrors parallel to those 

 which stirred up the people of the United States 

 when Weyler established a similar rule of terror in 

 Cuba. That sort of thing was then new to the British 

 people, but the same methods have since been used 



^ See Vol. I, Chapter xxv, pages 658-659. 



C 466 -} 



