Narrow means never stinted his generosity. Uncertain health never stilled his passion for work. I never went into his library that I did not find him busy. I have seen him at dinner turn away from the distinguished woman who passed for the most amusing of talkers to devote himself to a neglected stranger. When he quarrelled with the Prince of Wales (King Edward) and went into a kind of social exile for seven years, while he was quite aware of the price he was paying, he never dreamed of surrender. When Lord Salisbury, not choosing to remember or perhaps not able to remember his services and his capacities, passed him over in 1891 for the last time, and gave the leadership of the House of Commons to his nephew, Mr. Balfour, he writes to his wife: "All confirms me in my decision to have done with politics and try to make a little money for the boys and for ourselves." On his release from party obligations he sought others, and his sister, Lady Tweedmouth, between whom and himself there was on both sides a devoted attachment, persuaded him to see something of men from whom he had held aloof. Mr. Gladstone was among these, and I end with Mr. Gladstone's remark about Lord Randolph:
"He was the courtliest man I ever met."
CHAPTER XXXV
LORD GLENESK AND "THE MORNING POST"
The owning or leasing of several houses is an English habit which is no longer confined to great landowners who have inherited their possessions. Many men whose success in life is their own adopt the custom. Among many instances I will take one, for other reasons than house-owning, the late Lord Glenesk, who had at one time a lease of Invercauld, the fine place belonging to the Farquharson family. There, as later at Glenmuich, he liked to gather friends about him and there was each year a succession of parties. In the beginning Mr. Borthwick, he became successively Sir Algernon Borthwick and Lord Glenesk. His name and his wife's connect themselves with many social memories in Scotland, in London, where the house in Piccadilly was long a brilliant centre, and in Cannes where they occupied in winter the Chateau St. Michel at the Californie end of the town in beautiful grounds touching on the sea. They had also for some years that square red brick house in Hampstead on the edge of the heath, with a little land and a brick wall about it, and there they entertained of a Sunday during part of the season. Both had the art of hospitality and the secret of social life, by which I mean the secret of translating mere hospitality into happiness for others.
Mr. Borthwick acquired The Morning Post in 1876. It was then a threepenny paper—six cents on each of six days of the week. No Englishman had ever then thought of a Sunday edition of a daily paper; nor has since. There are Sunday papers in London, of which one, The Observer, is a supremely able journal, but they are published one and all on Sundays only. When The Morning Post passed into the hands of its late proprietor the penny paper had already made its appearance, though not the halfpenny. The future, it was thought, belonged to the penny, but The Morning Post like The Times was supposed to appeal to a special class. It was the organ of the fashionable world. You went to it for all that fashionable intelligence now supplied, more or less completely by all papers. It was the one newspaper which lay on the table of every drawing-room in Mayfair and Belgravia and in every country house throughout the kingdom. Till Borthwick became editor it was respectable, decorous, conventional, and dull. It had little news except what came to it through Reuter and other news agencies. There were flashes of vivacity when young Borthwick went to Paris, a city he understood, and sent home sparkling letters which were the most readable things in the paper and always seemed a little out of place. It was an organ of Conservatism, but the kind of Conservatism expounded in its editorial columns was more orthodox than inspiring. It had a moderate circulation and its net yearly profits were not far from thirty thousand dollars.
When Mr. Borthwick came into control of this property—not at first, but not very long after—he conceived the notion of turning it into a penny paper. It was he who told me the story. He had originality and he had courage but he was also a man who sought advice in great enterprises and he talked this scheme over with many men of experience far greater than his own. He said to me later:
"One and all they advised me against it. One and all they thought it spelled ruin; or, if not ruin, a great risk to a valuable though not great property and the certainty of loss. They told me I should inevitably forfeit the support of the classes to whom The Post had always appealed and that I should not gain new subscribers from other classes in numbers sufficient to make good these losses. I should lose not only readers but advertisers, for the advertisers in The Post were largely the West End tradespeople who desired to reach their West End patrons. I should lose the political authority which was based on the support of the privileged classes. In short, a penny Morning Post was inconceivable and unthinkable from any point of view whatever."
To all of which Borthwick listened. He considered every argument and objection and protest laid before him. But he was one of those men who regarded the opinions of other men not as authoritative but as the material for forming his own opinion, and he summed the whole story up in a sentence: