Modern Parliamentary Eloquence
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the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and not wholly human, for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine. Growing as trees grow, while others slept; fed by the faults of others as well as by the character of our fathers; reaching with the ripple of a resistless tide over tracts and islands and continents, until our little Britain woke up to find herself the foster-mother of nations and the source of united empires. Do we not hail in this less the energy and fortune of a race than the supreme direction of the Almighty? Shall we not, while we adore the blessing, acknowledge the responsibility? And while we see, far away in the rich horizons, growing generations fulfilling the promise, do we not own with resolution mingled with awe the honourable duty incumbent on ourselves? Shall we then falter or fail? The answer is not doubtful. We will rather pray that strength may be given us, adequate and abundant, to shrink from no sacrifice in the fulfilment of our mission; that we may be true to the high tradition of our forefathers; and that we may transmit their bequest to our children, aye, and please God, to their remote descendants, enriched and undefiled, this blessed and splendid dominion."
Both these passages were doubtless written; for all I know they may have been read; but whether they were written, or read, or declaimed, they seem to me worthy to be ranked with the greatest masterpieces of British eloquence.
A. J. Balfour.Mr. Balfour would be greatly shocked if any such claim were put forward on his behalf as I have made for some of the statesmen whom I have been discussing. Indeed, I expect that he would disagree with much of what I have written about oratory and eloquence; for there has probably never been a statesman of the first rank in England who was so indifferent to either, or so distrustful of their influence in public life. Not that Mr. Balfour would be slow to recognise the supreme gifts either of Mr. Gladstone or Lord Rosebery he has testified to the one, and I think to both but his own idea of the best speech-making, I expect, would be that the thought is all important, and that the form, which is accidental, temperamental, and secondary, may be left to look after itself. I am confident that he has never consciously cultivated a single rhetorical art, and it can only have been by mistake if he has ever strayed into a peroration.
Mr. Balfour can perhaps afford to take this line, for
