268 



The Review of Reviews. 



March iO, 1U06. 



IN MEMORIAM: JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, 



Requiescat in Brwmmagfem. De mortuis nil nisi bonom. 



Alas ! poor Joseph ! How much happier it would 

 have been for him and for the whole world if the 

 political cataclysm which has swept him off the 

 national arena into the Birmingham sepulchre, that 

 tomb of all his ambitions, had delivered him from 

 this world just ten years ago ! How comparatively 

 stainless would then have been the escutcheon above 

 his grave if the Liberal tornado had overtaken him 

 within a month of his acceptance of the Secretary- 

 ship for the Colonies ! Within a month, because 

 in less than three months he had succumbed to the 

 menaces and blandishments of Dr. Rutherfoord 

 Harris, and his fate was fixed. When I hailed him 

 as " Blastus, the King's Chamberlain," in 1895. I 

 pictured him as he hoped to be and I gave him 

 credit for all the good things he hoped to do. To- 

 day how few are the mourners — outside the narrow 

 confines of Birmingham — who weep by his bier. He 

 meant so well ; and he did so badly. And here he 

 lies. 



There is a certain tragical pathos about the career 

 of the late statesman. It was my fate thirty years 

 ago to discern the defects in his character which 

 were destined to limit his usefulness and ultimately 

 to wreck his career. The trust which he inspired 

 first in the Liberals and then in the Unionists was 

 as fatal to him as it was to them. For it exposed 

 him to temptations which he of all men was weak- 

 est to resist, putting him. as it were, in the position 

 of a trustee who was so implicity tnisted that he felt 

 he had a perfect right to apply the trust to his own 

 ends. As a result we now stand with a certain won- 

 dering awe at the shattered ruins of what at one 

 time promised to be a great and useful career. But 

 for twenty years I have borne unhesitating testimony 

 to the fact that, though he might be marvellously 

 ill-informed, he was nevertheless much honester 

 than his opponents were inclised to admit. The 

 rrudeness of his opinions upon the Colonies, the 

 Xavy, the Empire, and Free Trade, astonishing 

 though it might appear, was not inconsistent with 

 absolute good faith. He had a more than Glad- 

 stonian faculty of making himself believe what he 

 wished to believe, and first having deceived himself, 

 he set himself with a good conscience to deceive 

 others. In that enterprise for a time he appeared 

 to have some considerable success. But the polls 

 outside Birmingham show that the deception was 

 not lasting. 



The fact that he began life as a Republican when 

 Mr. Bradlaugh's star was in the ascendant, entered 

 Parliament as a Gladstonian Free Trader, and now 

 disappears into oblivion as a Unionist Protectionist, 



seems to some inconsistent with "' Consistent," his 

 telegraphic address at Birmingham. But he has 

 always been consistent in being inconsistent, as, for 

 instance, when he combined in his own person the 

 incongruous roles of the enthusiastic champion of 

 the Majuba settlement and the excited Jingo who, 

 with the bloodshed at Paardeberg wiped Majuba off 

 the slate. There has ever been a subtle harmony 

 and balance in all his actions. Having wrecked 

 Home Rule, he must needs balance it by wrecking 

 Unionism. Having broken up the Liberal Party, 

 it became necessary for him to round off his career 

 by breaking up the Conservative Party. What bet- 

 ter could show the rare impartiality and singular con- 

 sistency of this remarkable demagogue to whose elo- 

 quence King Demos now turns a deaf ear! 



Let us plead for charity for the dead. Did he not 

 pitifully plead with prescient foreglimpse of his own 

 demise? '' Vex not his ghost" by recalling his past, 

 as if he were the second Mrs. Tanqueray of the 

 political world. It is, however, but natural that 

 those who have been sacrificed as victims to the 

 consistent inconsistency of their late leader should 

 find that the old Adam of the natural man de- 

 manded relief in the forcible expression of their dis- 

 approval. Mr. Gibson Bowles probably gave vent 

 to the opinions of the majority of his fellow-country- 

 men when he addressed the statesman staggering to 

 his doom in terms which most Liberals, and not a 

 few Conservatives, considered as adequate to the 

 occasion. Whether or not they become classic, they 

 deserve to be quoted as the kind of comment that 

 could only be indulged in when its subject was a 

 force in being. Now that he is no more and has 

 ceased to be, the ancient tag about De mortuis for- 

 bids their repetition, although it does not forbid 

 their preservation in our files as an authentic ex- 

 pression of the opinions which at the General Elec- 

 tion of 1906 were shared by the immense majority 

 of his countrymen. Mr. Bowles wrote: — 



Mr. Chamberlain started as a Republican, which, indeed, 

 gave him his opportunity of abandoning his first political 

 associate, Sir Charles Dilke. He was then a Free Trader 

 of the most pronounced type, a Radical of the most violent 

 description, a name of such fear that at the word 

 " Chamberlain " the fine ladies of London hastened to lock 

 up their spoons. He is now a Protectionist and a Conserva- 

 tive, and. though still a revolutionary to some extent, a 

 consort of the aristocracy. 



" A false friend stabbing in the back," he says I am. 

 The statement is so manifestly, so clumsily false, that 

 Ananias himself would have been ashamed to make it. I 

 will tell you my idea of a false friend and a back-stabber. 

 To sweat the workman for personal profit, and fawn on him 

 for political profit; to promise old age pensions for votes, 

 and, having got the votes, to refuse them ; to intrigue 

 against your own leader in his own Cabinet, and because he 

 rejected your insane proposals, to resign at a critical mo- 

 ment; to drive out of the Cabinet by secret intrigue every 

 man of position, capacity and repate, to insist that an ab- 



