WHAT DID MR. ASQUITH DO?
A famous story tells how a heckler once broke up a Liberal meeting by asking with raucous iteration, "What did Mr. GLADSTONE say in 1878?" or whatever year it was. Nobody knew, and neither did the inquirer himself, but uproar followed and his end was achieved. Now had the question run, "What did Mr. GLADSTONE do?" how different a result! For Mr. GLADSTONE, apart from any trifles of statesmanship or legislation, did two priceless things, as I will show.
Although, writes the Returned Traveller who in our last number was so unhappy about the deterioration that has come upon taxi-drivers, I left England only in October last, I find it a changed place; but no change, not even the iniquitous prices demanded by London's restaurateurs, or the increased darkness, or the queer division of hors d'oeuvres into half-courses and whole-courses (providing an answer at last to the pathetic query, "What is a sardine?" "A whole course, of course")—no change is so striking as the fact that when a paper now refers to the PRIME MINISTER or the PREMIER, it means no longer HERBERT HENRY but DAVID. In a world of flux and mutability I had come to think of Mr. ASQUITH as a rock, a pyramid, a pole-star. But, alas! even he was subject to alteration.
Thinking earnestly upon his career I have realised bow sad it is that he has bequeathed us no ASQUITH legend. Always reserved and intent, he discouraged Press gossip to such a degree as actually to have turned the key on the Tenth Muse. Everybody else might lunch at the hospitable board in Downing Street, but interviewers had no chance. In vain did the Quexes of this frivolous city hope for even a crumb—there was nothing for them. Mr. ASQUITH came into office, held it, and left it without a single concession to Demos's love of personalia. He did not even wear comic collars or white hats or a single eyeglass or any other grotesquely significant thing; and how much poorer are we in consequence and how much poorer will posterity be!
Contrast the case of Mr. GLADSTONE, from whom anyone could draw a postcard and most people a chip of some recently-felled tree, and who is in my mind wonderful and supreme by reason of two inventions which, though no one would ever guess them to be the result of a Prime Minister's cogitations, deserve the widest fame. Of these one was the product of his unaided genius; the other the result of the collaboration with his wife.
Let us begin with the individual triumph.
Everyone who has ever stayed under anyone else's roof, from a dine-and-sleep at Windsor Castle to a week in lovely Lucerne, has been confronted, when packing-up time arrived, with the problem of the sponge. No matter how muscular the fingers that wring this article, no matter how thick and costly the rubbered receptacle that holds it, there is always the chance of dampness communicating itself to other things in the bag. Isn't there?
How so to squeeze the sponge as to drive out the last drop of moisture was the problem before the massive intellect of the Grand Old Man. Need I say that he solved it? His method, as he himself in his unselfish way, told one of the diarists, possibly Sir M.E. GRANT-DUFF, possibly Mr. G.W.E. RUSSELL—I forget whom—was to wrap up the sponge in a bath-towel and jump on it. Here, for the historical painter, is a theme indeed—something worth all the ordinary dull occasions which provoke his talented if somewhat staid brush: the great Liberal statesman, the promoter of Home Rule, the author of The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, leaping upon the bath-towel that held his sponge. But no historical painter could do justice to such a scene. It needs the movies.
Those of us then who dry our sponges in this way—and I am a fervent devotee—owe the inventor a meed of praise. And equally those of us who put into our hot water bottles at night hot tea instead of hot water (as I never have done and never mean to do), so that, waking in the small hours, we may yet not be without refreshment, owe a meed of praise to the same inspired innovator, for, if the chroniclers are correct, it was Mrs. GLADSTONE'S habit to retire to rest with a bottle thus nutritiously filled, which would be ready for her great man on his return from the House weary and athirst.
Here we see the difference between Liberal Premiers. For what has Mr. ASQUITH done towards the solution of domestic problems? Who can name a thing? Has he devised a collar stud that cannot be lost? Has he hit upon a way instantly to stop a shaving cut from bleeding? Has he contrived a taxi window that will open when shut or shut when open? No. In all these years he has spared no time for any inventions.
No wonder then that he was found wanting and forced to resign.