It is for this reason that we who love him shall ever bear in affectionate memory those who brought his laurels home to him in their celebration of the passing of the Trade Boards Act in 1910—that first instalment of the principle of the minimum wage, on which he united all parties and of which he had been the earliest advocate.
It has been said of his public life that he knew too much and interested himself in too many things; but those coming after who regard his life as a whole will see the connecting link which ran through all. I can speak only of that side of his activities in which I served him. He saw the cause of labour in Great Britain as it is linked with the conditions of labour throughout the globe; his fight against slavery in the Congo, his constant pressure for enlightened government in India, his championship of the native races everywhere, were all part and parcel of the objects to which he had pledged himself from the first. For progress and development it is necessary that a country should be at peace, and his study of military and naval problems was dictated by the consideration of the best means under existing conditions to obtain that end for England.
Yet to imagine that his life was all work would be to wrong the balance of his nature. He turned from letters and papers to his fencing bout, his morning gallop, or his morning scull on the river, with equal enthusiasm, and his great resonant boyish laugh sounded across the reach at Dockett or echoed through the house after a successful "touch." His keenness for athletic exercises, dating from his early Cambridge days, lasted, as his work did, to the end. In spite of the warnings of an overtaxed heart, he sculled each morning of the last summer at Dockett, and in Paris he handed over his foils to his fencing-school only a month before his death, leaving, like Mr. Valiant-for-Truth before he crossed the river, his arms to those who could wield them. It was well for him; he could not have borne long years of failing strength and ebbing mental energy. Anything less than life at its full was death to him.
Released from work, he was intensely gay, and his tastes were sufficiently simple for him to find enjoyment everywhere. He loved all beautiful things, and, though he had seen everything, the gleam of the sinking sun through the pine aisles at his Pyrford cottage would hold him spellbound; and in summer he would spend hours trying to distinguish the bird notes, naming the river flora, or watching the creature life upon the river banks. So in the Forest of Dean, that constituency which he loved well and which well deserved his love, his greatest pleasure was to set himself as guide to all its pleasant places, rehearsing the name of each blue hill on the far horizon, tracing the windings and meeting of the rivers, loving all best, I think, when the ground was like a sea of bluebells and anemones in the early year. He watched eagerly each season for the first signs of spring, and when he was very ill he told me that it must ever be a joy untouched by advancing years. But indeed he had in him the heart of the spring. I think it was largely this simple love of nature which kept him always strong and sweet even after the deep blow of his wife's death in 1904.
Wherever he was, life took on warmth and colour. Travel with him was a revelation, trodden and hackneyed though the road might be. In his vivid narrative the past lived again. Once more troops fought and manoeuvred as we passed through stretches of peaceful country which were the battlefields of France; Provence broke on us out of a mist of legendary lore, the enchantment deepening as we reached the little-traversed highlands near the coast—those Mountains of the Moors where in past days, connu comme le loup blanc among the people, he had wandered on foot with his old Provençal servant before motors and light railways were.
His care for the Athenaeum, inspired by the more than filial love he bore his grandfather, its earlier proprietor, led to continual reading and reviewing, and he would note with interest those few Parliamentarians who, keeping themselves fresh for their work of routine by some touch with the world of Literature, thereby, as he phrased it, "saved their souls."
Of the events which cut his public life asunder it is sufficient to say here that those nearest him never believed in the truth of the charges brought, finding it almost inconceivable that they should have been made; while the letters and records in my hands bear testimony to that great outer circle of friends, known and unknown, who have expressed by spoken or by written word, in public and in private, their share in that absolute belief in him which was a cardinal fact of our work and life.
The fortitude which gave to his country, after the crash of 1886, twenty- five years of tireless work, was inspired, for those who knew him best, by that consciousness of rectitude which holds a man above the clamour of tongues, and finds its reward in the fulfilment of his life's purpose.
"To have an end, a purpose, an object pursued through all vicissitudes of fortune, through heart's anguish and shame, through humiliation and disaster and defeat—that is the great distinction, the supreme justification of a life." So wrote his wife in her preface for The Shrine of Death.
The service of his country was the purpose of his life. Nor was that life justified alone by his unswerving pursuit of its great aim; it was justified also in its fulfilment, for his service was entirely fruitful— he wrested success from failure, gain from loss.