As a newspaper proprietor he was a man of restless energy, but narrower in his outlook, at that time, than his great rival, Harmsworth, whose methods he imitated. He was a strong adherent of tariff reform, when Joseph Chamberlain stumped the country in favor of that policy, which divided friend from friend, wrecked the amenities of social life, and started passionate arguments at every dinner table, somewhat in the same manner that the personality and policy of President Wilson caused social uproar in the United States, during the Peace Conference.
Pearson conferred on me the privilege, as I think he considered it, of recording the progress of the Chamberlain campaign, and it was the hardest work, I think, apart from war correspondence, that I have ever done. I do not regret having done it, for it took me into the midst of one of the biggest political conflicts in English history, led by one of the most remarkable men.
My task was to write each night what is called “a descriptive report,” which means that I had to give the gist of each of Chamberlain’s long speeches, with their salient points, and at the same time describe the scenes in and around the hall, besieged everywhere by vast crowds of opponents and supporters who often came into conflict, Chamberlain’s methods with his interrupters, and the incidents of the evening. Pearson often had a place on the platform, near the man for whom he had a real hero worship, and sent down little notes to me when various points of importance occurred to him. Always my article had to be finished within a few minutes of Chamberlain’s peroration, in order to get it on to the wire for London.
It was at Newport, in Wales, I remember, that I nearly blighted my young life by over-sympathy with the sufferings of a fellow mortal. This was a correspondent of The Daily Mail, who had been a most convinced and passionate free trader. He had written, only a few weeks before, a series of powerful and crushing articles against tariff reform, which had duly appeared in The Daily Mail, until Harmsworth announced one morning that he had been talking to his gardener, and had decided that tariff reform would be a good thing for England. It would be, therefore, the policy of The Daily Mail.
By a refinement of cruelty which I am sure he did not realize, his free trade agent was sent down to reveal the glories of tariffs, as expounded by Chamberlain. It went sorely to the conscience of this Scot, who asked me plaintively, “How can I resign—with wife and bairns?” At Newport his distress was acute, owing to the immense reception of Chamberlain by crowds so dense that one could have walked over their mass, which was one solid block along the line of route.
Before the speech that night he stood me a bottle of wine, which we shared, and he wept over this red liquid at the abomination of tariffs, the iniquity of The Daily Mail, and the conscience of a correspondent. What that wine was, I cannot tell. It was certainly some dreadful kind of poison. I had drunk discreetly, but upon entering the hall, I felt a weight on my head like the dome of St. Paul’s, and saw the great audience spinning round like an immense revolving Face. For two hours’ agony I listened to Chamberlain’s speech on tin plates, wrote things I could not read, and at the end of the meeting, having thrust my stuff over the counter of the telegraph office, collapsed, and was very ill. I heard afterward that the free trade Scot was equally prostrate, but he survived, and in course of time became more easy in his conscience, and a Knight of the British Empire.
Toward the end of the campaign I saw that Joseph Chamberlain was breaking. I watched him closely, and saw signs of mental and physical paralysis creeping over him. Other people were watching him, with more anxiety. Mrs. Chamberlain was always on the platform, by his side, in every town, and her face revealed her own nervous strain. Chamberlain, “Our Joe,” as his followers called him, lost the wonderful lucidity of his speech. At times he hesitated, and fumbled over the thread of his thought. When he was heckled, instead of turning round in his old style with a rapid, knock-out retort, he paused, became embarrassed, or stood silent with a strange and tragic air of bewilderment. It was pitiful toward the end. The strongest force in England was spent and done. The knowledge that his campaign had failed, that his political career was broken, as well as the immense fatigue he had undergone, and the intense effort of his persuasive eloquence, snapped his nerve and vitality. He was stricken, like President Wilson, one night, and never recovered.
In that campaign Chamberlain converted me against himself on the subject of tariff reform, but I learned to admire the courage, and hard sledge-hammer oratory of this great Imperialist leader who represented the old jingo strain of Victorian England, in its narrow patriotism and rather brutal intolerance, ennobled, to some extent, by old loyalties and traditions belonging to the sentiment of the British folk. The very name of Joseph Chamberlain seems remote now in English history, and the mentality of the English people has outgrown that time when he was fired by that wave of Imperialism which overtook the country and produced the genius of Kipling, the aggressive idealism of Cecil Rhodes, and the Boer War, with its adventures, its Call of the Wild, its stupidity, its blatant vulgarity, its jolly good fellows, its immense revelation of military incompetence, and its waste of blood and treasure.
After that campaign, I displeased Arthur Pearson by a trivial difference of opinion. He believed firmly that Bacon wrote “Shakespeare.” I believed just as firmly that he didn’t. When he asked me to write up some new aspect of that argument, I flatly refused, and Pearson was very much annoyed. A little later I resigned my position, and for some time he did not forgive me. But years later we met again, and he was generous and kind in the words he spoke about my work. It was out in France, when he visited the war correspondents’ mess and went with us into Peronne after its capture by our troops. He was blind, but more cheerful than when I had known him in his sighted days. At least he had gained a miraculous victory over his tragic loss, and would not let it weaken him. That day in Peronne he walked into the burning ruins, touched the walls of shattered houses, listened to the silence there, broken by the sound of a gun or two, and the whirr of an aëroplane overhead. He saw more than I did, and his description afterward was full of detail and penetrating in its vision.
We met again, after the war, at a dinner in New York, when he spoke of the work of St. Dunstan’s, which he had founded for blinded men. It was one of the most beautiful speeches I have ever heard—I think the most beautiful—and there was not one of us there, in a gathering of American journalists and business men, who did not give all the homage in his heart to this great leader of the blind.