The Days of a Man 



then with seventeen years still to run, Hoover had to 

 promise not to allow his "cows to wander in the lane 

 leading to the High Street," that thoroughfare being 

 a quarter of a mile away and the " lane " being Hornton 

 Street, closely built up on both sides in a densely 

 settled area. 



A few members of the House of Lords I knew quite 

 well and highly appreciated, among them Viscount 

 Bryce, already mentioned several times. Another 

 Liberal of the same intellectual and moral class was 

 Leonard Lord Courtney of Penwith. Dignified, straightforward 

 tney even severe at times with the fine manners of a 

 statesman of the "old school," Leonard Courtney 

 was one of the outstanding figures of England. Always 

 in the minority in his party as usually in the state, 

 he consistently stood for the highest political and 

 personal ideals, and for the belief that every real and 

 imaginary difference between nations can be honor- 

 ably settled without war. After his death in 1920 some 

 one characterized him as "a man of Cornish 

 granite." According to his biographer, G. P. Gooch, 



His self-imposed task was to challenge prejudice, to test 

 tradition, to ventilate ideas, and above all to hold aloft the 

 moral ideal in moments of national passion and national 

 temptation. It was an onerous and lofty mission, and it is the 

 measure of his greatness that it was not unworthily fulfilled. . . . 

 His lifelong conviction was that it was the duty of citizens of 

 a self-governing community to think for themselves. He scorn- 

 fully repudiated the idea that the state could make men happy 

 and prosperous . . . emphasizing the danger to personal 

 independence and responsibility from its well-meant intentions. 

 He was preeminently an individualist, fearing Socialism as 

 enervating, and enforced cooperation as destructive to personal 

 liberty. 



Few men (says B. U. Burke in the New York Nation) have 

 dealt more sledge-hammer blows at the intoxicating policies 



C 480 ] 



