In fine, Lord Cromer, though he kept his rule to govern in the interests of the governed so strictly and was so exact a trustee, was always human—never pedantic, professorial, or academic, in the carrying out of his rule. He was above all things, a just man, and he realised that justice was not true justice unless it were humanised by knowledge and the sympathy of comprehension. Yet he knew and understood the benefits of strong government, though he always tried so to harness his administration that the straps would gall as little as possible. That is why he won to such a strange degree the trust and admiration, I had almost said the love, of the Egyptian people. Peasant men and women who had never seen him, and who had the dimmest and vaguest idea of what he was and what he stood for, yet felt an unbounded belief in his desire that they should be justly treated. There is a well-known story which exactly illustrates the point I am making.
A young English officer engaged in sanitary work in the Delta pointed out to a well-to-do farmer's wife in a cholera year that she was running terrible risks by having her cesspool quite close to the door of her house, and so placed that it was contaminating all the drinking-water used by her and her family. At last after many ineffectual remonstrances he ordered the removal of this sure and certain road to death by cholera. The woman was furious, and ended up a battle royal by telling him that though for the moment he could oppress the poor and triumph over the Godly, it would not be for long. "The man Krahmer" in Cairo would see her righted. She would appeal to him and he would protect her.
Lord Cromer felt, and felt rightly, that this invocation was his best epitaph. Appeals, no matter how strange, were never frowned down by him but encouraged. However ill-founded, they taught something. They were often of an intimate character and couched in the wonderful language of the Babu, for Egypt has its Babus as well as Bengal. One complaint which had to do with an irrigation dispute began as follows: "Oh, hell! Lordship's face grow red with rage when he hears too beastly conduct of Public Works Department."
Macaulay's splendid eulogy of Hampden may, with very little alteration, be applied to Lord Cromer. "The sobriety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rectitude of intention," were as truly the qualities of the Ruler and regenerator of Egypt as they were of the great statesman of the Rebellion—the man who fought so nobly against the sullen tyranny of Charles and Laud.
For Joseph Chamberlain, I felt a very real and very warm affection as a man. Unfortunately for me, however, I was, except in the matter of Home Rule, out of sympathy with most of his later political principles, or, at any rate, his political standpoint. Mr. Chamberlain, though in no sense a man of extreme, wild, or immoderate views, was in no sense a Whig. To tread the narrow, uphill, and rather stony path of the via media, fretted him. He liked large enterprises and large ways of carrying them out, and, though it would be a great mistake to call him imprudent, he was distinctly a man of daring imagination in politics. He liked to prophesy and to help fulfil his prophecies. He was not content to wait and watch things grow. He was, indeed, one of the political gardeners who thoroughly enjoy the forcing-house. If he had been a grower of vegetables instead of Orchids, he would have dealt, I feel sure, almost entirely in "primeurs."
I can think of no man who used the imaginative faculty more in politics than he did, except Disraeli, and here, indeed, Mr. Chamberlain had the advantage. Disraeli was apt to let his imagination run so wild as to become vulgar, pompous, and ostentatious, whereas Mr. Chamberlain always kept his visionary schemes within the due bounds of seriousness and reason. Though I think he placed no limits to the capacity of the English people to meet and to overcome dangers and difficulties in the world of politics, and always held them, as, indeed, do I, capable to be of heroic mould, he never inflated himself or his countrymen on any subject, but spoke always weightily and with good sense. To take a concrete example, he, no more than Lord Cromer, would have intoxicated his mind with a fantastic idea like that of the Cape to Cairo railway as did Mr. Rhodes. That was at its best only a symbol and at worst the caprice of an Imperial egoist. Though Mr. Chamberlain had gained from his training and business success some of the best qualities of the statesman, that is, confidence in himself, and his sound practical sense, he was not, as I think his greatest admirers would agree, a deep political thinker.
He was, however, a great orator and a great parliamentary advocate, and, if properly briefed, there was no man who could state a case better or more persuasively than he did. This gift of advocacy, though an advocacy quite untouched by cynicism, was apt to raise doubts in the public mind as to his sincerity,—doubts which were due to ignorance of the man and to nothing else. It is true that he argued as the most convinced and most happy exponent of Free Trade during the first half of his political life and later as a convinced Protectionist. Yet I am certain that on both occasions he was perfectly sincere. In each case, though he did not realise it, he was speaking from a brief, but from a brief that for the time had thoroughly converted him and made him think of the policy advocated in the spirit of a missionary.
Mr. Chamberlain was a man of whom the nation was proud, and had a right to be proud. He was a good fighter and an unwearied worker, and he spent himself ungrudgingly in the service of his country. Above all things, he had that quality of vigour and daring which endears itself, and always will endear itself, to a virile race. He was not for ever counting the cost of his actions, but would as gaily as any hero of romance throw his cap over the wall and follow it without a thought of the difficulties and dangers that might confront him on the other side.
No one has ever asserted that Mr. Chamberlain left his comrades in the lurch, failed to support a friend in a tight place, or accepted help from others and then was careless about helping them in return or making them acknowledgment for what they had done. Remember that it is very rare in the case of a public man to find so total an absence of the complaint of ingratitude. The accusation of ingratitude, indeed, may be well described as the commonest of all those brought against the great by the small. "He was willing enough to take help from me when he needed it; now he has raised himself, the humble ladder is kicked down or else its existence is utterly ignored."—"While we were unknown men we worked together shoulder to shoulder and helped each other. When he grew big and strong, he forgot the colleagues of his early days, ignored their past services, and humiliated them with the cold eye of forgetfulness."— "I soon saw that, if he had not actually forgotten me, he would very much rather not be asked to remember me."—"It was evidently a bore to him to talk of old days, or to be reminded that even his prowess and strength had once been glad of 'a back up.'"—"He liked to think that he owed it all to himself and to no one else." These are the kind of criticisms that most winners in the Political Stakes have to bear. Such criticisms, very likely unfair in themselves, were, for example, constantly made in regard to Mr. Gladstone. But though my recollection carries me back to very nearly the beginning of Mr. Chamberlain's active career, I cannot recall a single instance of such grumbling, either in private or public, in regard to Mr. Chamberlain. On the contrary, the world of politics is filled with men who gratefully remember that, though their work for Mr. Chamberlain may have been humble in appearance or in fact, he never forgot the helping hand and the loyal service, but repaid them a hundredfold.
That genius for friendship of which Lord Morley once spoke, extended far beyond the ordinary limits of friendship. Mr. Chamberlain not only never forgot a friend, but never forgot any loyal or honest helper, and, what from the helper's point of view is equally important, never forgot also that it is not enough merely to remember the helper. You must try to help him in return.