I will give a very different instance which came to my knowledge directly. At the time of the great dock strike which disordered and threatened to destroy all the waterside industries of the port of London, Cardinal Manning sided with the strikers. He was a prelate who often mixed politics with his religion or, to put it more charitably, with his ecclesiastical polity. He went to the East End and made a speech at the strikers' meeting, undeterred by the fact that they were threatening violence, and he wound up by giving £25 to the cause of these enemies of public order.
All this came out in next morning's papers. Toward noon I went to see Lord Randolph. He was full of the subject and his sympathies with the men were evident. He had read Cardinal Manning's speech and, with certain reservations, approved of it.
"Do you think he ought to have given money to encourage disorder?"
"What do you mean by encouraging disorder? The men are out of work. They and their wives are starving. I would gladly give £25 myself if I had it."
Nevertheless, I suppose no act of Cardinal Manning, nothing he did in his extremely variegated career, brought upon him more or better deserved censure in the Press than the countenance he gave to this very dangerous industrial rebellion. The censure upon Lord Randolph would surely have been not less severe. But what cared he? Lord Randolph, I ought to add, had been during a great part of his too short political life the friend and champion of the working men. He believed them to be the necessary support of the Conservative Party without which, as the event proved, that party could win no great victory at the polls. He believed them to be, as a body, like the majority of the English people, irrespective of party, essentially Conservative. He was ready to do what he could to lighten and brighten their sometimes dreary lot. It was not only as a politician that he interested himself in their fortunes. He had a man's sympathy with other men less fortunate than himself.
Less fortunate, but perhaps not always much less. For what I said above about Lord Randolph's indifference to money was true during nearly all his life, and was shown in many ways to his own hurt. He had the usual younger son's portion, and in this country of magnificent estates the younger son's portion is of the most modest description. Not otherwise than by reserving the great bulk of the family wealth to eldest sons, one after the other, can these magnificent estates be kept together and kept magnificent. But Lord Randolph's tastes and ambitions were nowise in proportion to the slenderness of his income. The present Mr. Winston Churchill in his most admirable Life of his father has made some reference to two occasions in which questions of money became critical. He has said so much that I think I may say a little more.
The first was in anticipation of his marriage. Mr. Jerome had the ideas of the average American father about settlements. Lord Randolph's ideas on that subject were English. There was a collision between the two. The wooer had already announced to his father, the seventh Duke of Marlborough, his attachment to Miss Jerome and the Duke had agreed provisionally to the engagement. Mr. Jerome had agreed, but his views about money threatened to break off the negotiations. At the end—they had lasted seven months—Lord Randolph "refused utterly to agree to any settlement which contained even technical provisions to which he objected." He delivered to Mr. Jerome what his biographer rightly calls an ultimatum. He was "ready to earn a living in England or out of it" without Mr. Jerome's help, and in this the girl agreed with him. Mr. Jerome capitulated. Perhaps the difference between them was more a matter of form than anything. The terms of the final agreement are not stated in the Life. They have often been stated in London where everything on every subject of human interest is known, and where it was always understood that Mr. Jerome agreed to settle £2000 a year on his daughter and son-in-law, with remainder to the children, duly secured by a mortage on the University Club house in Madison Square. But what I ask you to notice is the readiness of Lord Randolph to fling away an income far larger than he had ever had unless it came to him on such terms as he thought right and unless his English views were accepted by this American father.
The other instance relates to South Africa. When he went to Mashonaland, in 1891, he borrowed £5000 from a good and staunch friend whom I should like to name—well, why should I not? I mean Lord Rothschild, whose kindnesses to men of every degree and of all religions and races have been innumerable. If ever a great fortune paid, in the long-ago phrase of Mr. Chamberlain, a ransom, his has paid it; not compulsory but from true good-will to men. Lord Randolph invested the £5000 in Rand gold mining shares on the advice of that American engineer of genius, Mr. Perkins, who inferred from the dip of the gold-bearing reefs the direction and depth at which they could be overtaken by shafts sunk far south of the actual gold area. The world knows the result and is the richer by hundreds of millions for the vision which pierced the outer crest of the earth and saw the treasures hidden below. Mr. Perkins was, in fact, the engineer whom Lord Rothschild had sent to South Africa with Lord Randolph. They had gone through Mashonaland together vainly, and the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer now invested his £5000 in Rand shares. But values of that nature require time and being in want of money he sold two-fifths of his investment. The remainder he held till his death when it was disposed of for something over £70,000. A comfortable fortune to leave? Yes, comfortable enough to pay the debts of the estate. That was one form which his contempt for money took. He lived on the principal. It is no matter of censure. He was born and built that way. The strain of frugality in the first Duke of Marlborough had worn itself out.
My last meeting with Lord Randolph was at Tring, Lord Rothschild's place in Buckinghamshire. He was already in the grip of the illness which was to destroy him; nervous, irritable, restless in manner, haggard to look at, and his speech uncertain. I don't like to think of it and I mention it only for the sake of the contrast. For now and again the old brilliancy reappeared, and the old charm. He had both in a measure given to few men. Wilful as he was, with a freedom of speech which overpassed the usual social limits, he had also when he chose the graces and gifts which made him beloved of men and of women. No man made more enemies; but in this world—by which I mean this world of England and other worlds where the English people have built new civilizations—it is not enmities which count but friendships.
Whether you saw him in the House of Commons, leading it as no man had ever led it, or at a dinner, or on the platform, or, if you like, on the Turf or in other places which the Puritan thinks of the devil, he had the same ascendancy. He said once to Lord Rosebery that to both of them their titles had been helpful in public life. No doubt, but something besides a title descends or may descend, to him who bears it. Not every son of a duke has upon him the stamp of the patrician. That is what Lord Randolph had. An imperious temper, an intellectual disdain of natures from which intellects had been omitted, moods of black despair late in life, but all through life the set resolve to win his battles without much thought of the cost—all these he had, and no one of them nor all of them broke or impaired the spell he laid upon those about him.