128 



Revieiv of Eeviews, ]li/}3 



W. T. STEAD. 



BY A CO-WORKER WHO 



William Thomas Stead believed in 

 God. Therein lay the cause of his 

 strange lack of harmony with the 

 generality of mankind, and his equally 

 strange charm for all who knew him 

 as a man and not as a set of discon- 

 certing ideas behind cold printers' ink. 

 He had no conscious bias, and judged 

 each individual question on its own in- 

 dividual merits. Hence, strictly speak- 

 ing, he belonged to no party, but con- 

 tained wuthin himself a tinge of every 

 school and owed adherence to none. 

 By virtue of this very freedom of his 

 intellect he was naturally nearer to the 

 Liberals, properly so-called, than to the 

 Conservatives, although his veneration 

 for the truly and intrinsically venerable 

 gave him a sound conservatism in many 

 important respects, while his insistence 

 upon the predominance of right over 

 expediency rendered him a thorn in the 

 side of any opportunist or recalcitrant 

 Liberal legislators. Consequently, he 

 was ever at variance with one party 

 without attempting to conciliate the 

 other. With him it was not the avoid- 

 ance of Scylla and Charybdis, but the 

 deliberate and direct collisicin with 

 both. His reference of every question 

 to its elementary first principles, quite 

 apart from the exigencies of creed or 

 party, gave his attitude that element of 

 the unexpected which almost invariably 

 proved to be founded on pure logic. He 

 owed a responsibility to none but God. 

 To the superficial observer he was a 

 mass of contradictions. He was an 

 Imperialist who hated militarism. He 

 fought for universal peace and two 

 keels to one. He was " a democrat w^ho 

 flouted the democracy." He was a lover 

 of pomp and ceremony who always 

 dressed shabbily. 



OBLIVIOUS OF SELF. 

 The very width of W. T. Stead's 

 tolerance caused his troubles with the 

 creeds. He abandoned his " Civic 

 Church " idea because the Nonconform- 

 ists objected to the inclusion of the 

 Roman Catholics. He expurgated the 

 " Kreutzer Sonata," and defended La 



KNEW HIM INTIMATELY. 



Milo. He quarrelled with the Roman 

 Catholics in his defence of the Mor- 

 mons. He attacked the Mormons for 

 holding idiotic tenets and defended 

 them from their adversaries. He was 

 more jealous of his pen than of his life, 

 and yet " wrote up " undertakings with 

 a commercial basis. And in every single 

 instance there was a sweet reasonable- 

 ness which reconciled each with the 

 other if men were not in too great a 

 hurry to consider. Only his profound 

 but childlike faith m the approbation 

 and guidance of his " Senior Partner," 

 and his rectilinear following of his 

 reading of his "sign-posts," can explain 

 the phenomenal and seemingly super- 

 human strength behind his isolated per- 

 sonality. To say that his life-work was 

 the product of an exaggerated self- 

 importance and an inflated ego is to 

 betray a complete ignorance of the true 

 nature of. the pure and unselfish being, 

 who, when not absorbed by some ab- 

 stract conversational problem or con- 

 crete social evil was one of the most 

 unassuming ' of all men. Instead of 

 having any self-importance he was 

 oblivious of himself, and no one ever 

 paid any attention to the quietly and 

 shabbily dressed, drooping man who 

 sat in tramcar, 'bus or tube, hustled and 

 jostled by his hurrying fellow mortals. 

 To him a taxi w^as an extravagance, 

 and nothing less than an international 

 pilgrimage would justify a new suit. 



DIRECT TO HIS GOAL. 

 Scarcely anything less than a wed- 

 ding would bring a tall hat to his noble 

 head, and his bag was a source of won- 

 der by the very fact of its holding to- 

 gether after so many years of constant 

 use. Methinks I see him now before me, 

 proceeding in his firm, methodical pace, 

 as he did every morning, through the 

 by-streets of W'estminster, through Old 

 Palace Yard, past the Abbey, past the 

 Commons, on to the Embankment, 

 thence to proceed unnoticed, unknown 

 and unobserved, in a penny car to 

 Aldwych, almost to the office door. 

 How vividly I can see his steady for- 



