1896

LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL

AS AN OFFICIAL

HAMLET, in his most cynical humour, hopes that a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. It almost seems as if Shakespeare, in the person of his hero, foresaw the fickleness of those who live at the close of the present century, when popularity is attained and lost, when fortunes and reputations are made and marred, when men and questions alike fill the public imagination for an hour, it may be a day, and are then hurried off the scene to

make way for new men and new ideas. Those who have held a great position, or who have been brilliantly successful in their lifetime, or even who have achieved some important work, are often soon forgotten; but not so the possessor of an individuality that is unique of its kind. Him the world does not willingly let die. So it seems to me unlikely that Lord Randolph Churchill will ever disappear from the memory of his countrymen; for rarely has English political biography furnished one gifted with a personality of such dazzling brilliancy. For a time-alas, too short-he held a position in the world of politics second only to that of Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Disraeli. He could draw together the largest audiences in London and the provinces, and he always inspired them with his own enthusiasm. Not a newspaper but was full of his speeches as he traversed the country from Woodstock to Belfast, or from London to Edinburgh; not a caricaturist but exercised his talents on his features, his mustachios, and his collars.

Is it possible that

. now the painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foiled,

Is from the boke of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled ?

To some other writer and to a remoter time it must be left to deal with that part of Lord Randolph Churchill's life when, in the face of the overwhelming majority opposed to him in 1881, in spite of the ill-concealed disapproval, and to the dismay of what he somewhat disrespectfully termed the old gang, he charged over the heads of a dejected and dispirited party into the serried and then unbroken

ranks of the Liberal phalanx. Like the youth in the old classical story, he hurled his lance, before the awe-struck worshippers, into the side of the idol they knelt to and adored. My object in this short sketch is to show the impression Lord Randolph Churchill produced on the minds of old and staid officials who had been educated in the school of Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Sir Stafford Northcote. At first they regarded him as an impossible man 'whose breath was agitation and his life a storm on which he rode.' He was to their eyes a visible genius, an intense and unquenchable personality, an embodied tour de force; but as a serious Minister of the Crown he was to them an impossibility. In his fierce assaults on Mr. Gladstone he had attacked the best friend the Civil Service ever had; and it was a moot point which was in greater dread-they of his entrance within the portals of a Government department, or he of having to associate in daily business with men whom he curtly described to a friend as a knot of d-d Gladstonians.' He was a man to whom the words of Hookham Frere in Monks and Giants might as suitably be applied as they were to that kindred spirit, the brave and fiery Peterborough.

His birth, it seems, by Merlin's calculation
Was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars;
His mind with all their attitudes was mixed,
And like those planets wandering and unfixed.
His schemes of war were sudden, unforeseen,
Inexplicable both to friend and foe.

He seemed as if some momentary spleen
Inspired the project and impelled the blow.

Such was the impression we had of him, not unnatural and certainly not wholly wrong. But there were other aspects to his many-sided nature the reckless knight-errant of debate proved at the same time a patient, strenuous, thorough, and far-sighted administrator.

The following is the character he won at the India Office from Sir A. Godley, the Under Secretary of State for India :

He was, as every one knows, exceedingly able, quick, and clear-sighted. Besides this, he was very industrious, very energetic and decided when once his mind was made up, and remarkably skilful in the art of 'devolution,' by which I mean the art of getting the full amount of help out of his subordinates. He knew at once whether to take up a question or to leave it to others. If he took it up, he made himself completely master of it; if he left it alone, he put entire confidence in those to whom he left it, and endorsed their opinion without hesitation. I need not tell you how invaluable this quality was both to himself and to those who worked with him. It should be added that his perfect candour and straightforwardness were not only admirable in themselves, but were a great assistance to business. What he said he meant; and if he did not know a subject, he did not pretend to know it. The duties of the Secretary of State for India are, as you know, somewhat complicated by his relations with the Council, over whose deliberations he has to preside. In this part of his business he showed great skill.

For some time, and until he had learnt the methods of procedure, he took no part whatever in our debates. But as soon as he began to feel at home, his method was to decide beforehand which were the subjects as to which he wished to use his influence, and having done this, to send for the papers and master them thoroughly before the meeting of Council. Then, having his brief, and with the advantage of his parliamentary training and natural readiness, he interfered with decisive effect, and I believe I may say, invariably carried his point. Few high officials can have been his superiors, or indeed his equals, in the art of getting things done. Those who worked under him felt that, if they had once convinced him that a certain step ought to be taken, it infallibly would be taken and 'put through.'. . . He was, as he freely said, extremely sorry to leave this office, and I believe that all who had worked with him, without exception, were sorry to lose

him.

Lord Randolph's brief tenure of the India Office was marked by some achievements of first-class importance. The annexation of Burma, a country with an area of 83,473 square miles and a population of 3,000,000, was his policy for which he was responsible. The conquest of the country was effected with remarkable rapidity. In November 1885 Lord Randolph gave the order to advance; on the 1st of December Lord Dufferin announced that the conquest was completed; and on the 31st of the same month Lord Randolph sent out his despatch detailing what had happened and authorising the annexation. Another important piece of work, the formation of the Indian Midland Railway, which has now a length of line of 700 miles and a capital of 7,000,000l., was carried out by Lord Randolph against considerable opposition. It was he also who finally sanctioned the increase of the British (European) army in India by 10,000 men; and several other important measures were passed during his administration of the India Office.

Lord Randolph, between the fall of the Tory Government and his return to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, made himself the mouthpiece of an attack with a venom not his own on the Chairman and Deputy-Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Those were,' as he said, 'my ignorant days.' When he returned to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1866, notwithstanding the reputation he had made for himself at the India Office, he still appeared to the minds of Treasury officials as a Minister who would in all probability ride roughshod over cherished traditions and habits which were very dear to them. That such a man, with all his faults and glaring indiscretions, whose inclinations became passions, should have attached to himself a body of men like the Civil Service of this country, was little short of a miracle. A Frenchman, in a conversation with Pitt at the end of the last century, expressed his surprise at the influence which Charles Fox, a man of pleasure ruined by the dicebox and the turf, had exercised over the English nation. You have not,' was the reply, 'been under the wand of the magician.' It was not long before those who were brought into close communication with Lord Randolph fell under his magic spell. I confess that I,

at that time Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, was as much dismayed as any man at the prospect of his becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. I was soon reconciled, and I well remember our first interview in the old historical Board Room at the Treasury, the stiff and formal cut of his frock coat-the same that he always wore when he was leader of the House and the somewhat old-world courtesy of manner with which he received me at the door. But it was not long before he produced the new-world cigarette-case and the long mouth-piece, which so soon became familiar. A very few meetings were enough to show me how sincerely anxious he was to learn all the little I had to teach; and from that first hour our acquaintance gradually ripened into a friendship which not all the vicissitudes of his stormy life, nor even his agonising illness, ever interrupted. The last letter he wrote before he left England on his sad journey was to me. In it he spoke of our long years of friendship, of his return, and of years to come; but the handwriting told how impossible that return and those future years were to be.

Our early official meetings at the Treasury were soon superseded by more intimate conversations at Connaught Place. On my first visit there I found him in a room bright with electric light, and the eternal cigarette in his mouth. He was seated in a large armchair having a roomy sofa on one side, which I afterwards learnt was known in the family as the 'Fourth Party sofa,' and on the other, much to my surprise, a large photograph of Mr. Gladstone. Whether the photograph and the sofa were thus placed opposite each other for the convenience of the party in rehearsing their attacks I do not take it upon me to say. Although Lord Randolph certainly had never made a study of finance, he was not, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, so ignorant of it as Charles Fox, if the story be true which reports him to have said that he never could understand what Consols were he knew they were things that went up and down in the City; and he was always pleased when they went down, because it so annoyed Pitt. A story is also told of Lord Randolph, that a Treasury clerk put some figures before him. 'I wish you would put these figures plainly so that I can understand them,' he said. The clerk said he had done his best, and he had, pointing them out, reduced them to decimals. 'Oh!' said Lord Randolph, I never could understand what those d-d dots meant.' But it soon became clear that besides a wonderful intuition, Lord Randolph possessed many of the qualities which had always won for Mr. Gladstone so high a reputation as a departmental chief indefatigable assiduity, that energy which Dr. Arnold said is of more value than even cleverness, a vehement determination to learn his subject ab ovo usque ad mala, a strong intellectual force which, while it in no way interfered with his attention to the opinions of his subordinates, absolutely preserved his own independence of judgment and decision. He possessed the

very rare gift of keeping his mind exclusively devoted to the subject in hand, and impressed on all those with whom he worked the idea that the business on which they were employed was the only one of interest to him. For a man of his rapid thought and excitable temperament he was scrupulously patient and quiet in discussion; and from frequent conversations with him on financial subjects I can safely affirm that no one ever ended an official interview with him without at any rate having arrived at a clear knowledge of his views and intentions. No time spent with him was ever wasted, nor would he suffer any interruption from whatever source it came.

In the autumn preceding the session of 1887 he knew that the duties of leadership would absorb all his time and strength, and, like a wise and prudent statesman, he prepared himself for his financial statement by a performance such as was never equalled, in getting ready and passing through the Cabinet the Budget for the forthcoming year. On the evening of the day on which he carried his Budget through the Cabinet, after describing to me how he had done so, he said, 'There in that box are all the materials of our Budget. They are unpolished gems; put the facets on them as well as you can, but do not speak to me on the subject again till the end of the financial year.' What that Budget was cannot yet be told; but it may be fairly said that it far exceeded in importance any Budget since Mr. Gladstone's great performance in 1860. It was often said that Lord Randolph won his popularity among the permanent officials by his subservience to their views. Nothing could be farther from the truth; and when some day his Budget comes to light, as I trust it will, it will be seen how original were some of its provisions, and how unlike to any plans that would probably have emanated from the ordinary official brain.

He did not bear fools gladly, and was hardly capable of being even civil to people who bored him. On one occasion he went in to a formal luncheon, where the places were arranged. He looked to the right of him and he looked to the left of him-he gathered up his plate and napkin and knife and fork and sat himself down at the other end of the table, which reminds me of a story of a very distinguished statesman, Lord John Russell, who took the Duchess of Inverness in to dinner. When he got to his place he looked behind him and walked round to the other side of the table, and sat down next to the Duchess of St. Albans. Lady John said to him afterwards, 'What on earth made you leave the Duchess of Inverness and go across to the Duchess of St. Albans ?' 'Well,' he replied, ‘I should nave been sick if I had sat where I was put, with my back to the fire.' 'But I hope,' said his wife, 'you explained it to the Duchess of Inverness.' 'No, I didn't,' he said, 'but I did to the Duchess of St. Albans'!

His cynicism was delightful.

When the dreadful subject of