TiiR WoRi.u Pans lis Iribute. 



493 



Ik- was a Clirisiian. Whenever the dork struck he 

 «a.s alwa>s in the church. May Cod lend a culture 

 like Stead's to the \0un2; men of this country who 

 start in the great career of journalism." 



MK. J. .\. M.VCDON.M.D. 



I. A. MacDonald, editor of the Torontu Globe, said : — 

 " .Mr. Stead was an ordained apostle of universal peace. 

 He pleaded for it with Kings, Tsars, and ministers. 

 He fought with the beasts of greed and plunder and 

 the fire-eating jingoi.sts. When I visited him last 

 Jane he talked especially about his wish to lift the 

 journalists of America and England against the war 



syndicates wliii h menace the world — the financial 

 ' war lords.' Most of ail did he lielieve in the future 

 of the .Vnglo-Saxon race. When I left him for the last 

 tinje la>t June he placed his hand on my shoulder and 

 .said : ' \'ou Americans must remember your English- 

 speakini; fraternity. .\nd [this he said with unusual 

 eni|)hasisj remember that Canada holds the key.' Had 

 he been here to-night he would have undoubtedly 

 made us face the awful facts of war — its inconceivable 

 follv, its intolerable burden. Please God at least 

 that the Anglo-Saxon's sword shall ne\er be drawn 

 against his brother Anglo-Saxon." 



H. W. MASSINGHAM in "THE NATION." 



A SWIFT and violent death has dosed a fighter's 

 career, and a life which moved to great purposes on 

 broad roads has found its end in an enormous catas- 

 trophe. In the remarkable record which iMr. W. T. 

 Stead has left in our history, there is nothing small, 

 or selfi.sh, or hesitating. The death, as we imagine 

 it, was worthy of the life —a moment of intense vitality 

 which brought the occasion for the supreme self- 

 sacrifice. The man who had faced obloquy, persecu- 

 tion, and im|jrisonment in his work for women and 

 girls was privileged to pay the last debt to the ideal 

 of chivalry which had guided his life. 



It is not difficult to predict the place which this 

 vital and original personality will hold in the history 

 of his time. He will live as the man who made of 

 modern journalism in England a powerful personal 

 force. He found it a thing of conventions and re- 

 spectabilities, buried in anonymity, and fettered by 

 party ties. The newspaper was a collective " organ 

 of opinion." He made it the instrument of one 

 intensely individual mind. Stead's main conception 

 of an editor's duty was to be himself. He realisetl as 

 no one before him had done, and as few who have 

 come after him have dared to do, the power which n 

 ncwsp.-iper gave him to record himself with headlines 

 and bolil type, with recitative and chorus, on a 

 pedestal of fact and news once in every four-and- 

 twenly hours. His temperament was that of the 

 great pam|)hleteers. In his boldness and versatility, 

 in his faith in the constructive jxjwer of the pen, in 

 many of his opinions, even in his championship of 

 women, he resembled Defoe. 



Mr. Stead carried the defiant ideal of self-e.xpression 

 not merely to its perfection, but to its extravagance 

 of completeness. It was an almost insolent triumph 

 of a wayward but dominating |)ersonality. One used 

 to wonder wiiether Mr. Stead ever consciously 

 indulged in the pleasures of the mesmerist who never 

 feels certain that his "subject" is completely under 

 his hypnotic power until he has ordered him to 

 perform some supremely ridiculous antic. 



From the Bulgarian atrocities to the Boer War there; 

 was no pen whii'h in England wielded an ascendency 

 comparable with Mr. Stead's. He stopped a Russian 

 war. He forced the conijuest of the Soudan. He 

 helped to destroy I'arnell. He swelled the Navy 



Estimates, and thereby ended the Premiership of 

 (lladstone. He created the Cape-to-Cairo Imperialism 

 which in its turn made the Boer War. Without him 

 the first Hague Conference might well have 

 seemed as meaningless and insincere as the second. 

 But for him Gordon might never have gone 

 to Khartoum, nor Parnell to Coventry. Rhodes 



Mr. Stead, with Oliver Croiiiwe'l's Pistol, and a 

 Statue of Gciicial GordQii. 



