such as were revealed prevail, a breeding-ground is provided alike for diseases of the body and intemperance of the mind. It is at least excusable to those brought up in such surroundings if they should fail to see hope of betterment except through a revolutionary change in a social system that suffers this state of things to continue. That legislative measures should hitherto have availed so little to remedy the evil may be disappointing, but if it is true, and it is true, that the public has power, through widespread individual action, to change the situation beneficially and permanently, the prospect may be regarded as hopeful. There is no reason why the slum landlord of the old harmful type should survive. If the bulk of those with money to invest could be induced to apply some small part of it to his replacement, he would presently be relegated to the records of a humiliating past. It may reasonably be suggested that to do this should even be regarded as a duty. For all who may so regard it there are wide and various opportunities of investment. In no previous social movement has there been so great a chance at such small sacrifice. REGINALD ROWE. NOTE.-The Editor will gladly put in touch with the author of this article any reader who may wish to make inquiries with reference to the housing activities mentioned. ΕΣ 8 Art. 12.-THE EARL OF BALFOUR. 1. A Defence of Philosophic Doubt. Being an essay on the foundations of belief. By Arthur James Balfour, M.A., M.P. Macmillan, 1879. 2. The Foundations of Belief. Being notes introductory 3. Essays and Addresses. By the Rt Hon. Arthur James 5. Essays: Speculative and Political. By the Rt Hon. 6. Theism and Thought. A study in familiar beliefs. Being the second course of Gifford Lectures. Delivered at the University of Glasgow, 1922-1923. By Arthur James Balfour, Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M. Hodder, 1923. 7. Aspects of Home Rule. Selected from the Speeches of the Rt Hon. Arthur James Balfour, M.P. Routledge, 1912. 8. Opinions and Arguments from Speeches and Addresses of the Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., 1910-1927. Edited by Mrs Edgar Dugdale. Hodder, 1927. And other works. AMONG subjects of inquiry deserving the attention of statisticians in an age as devoted to averages as our own the longevity of Prime Ministers, if not on account of its intrinsic interest at least then of its moral issues. is surely one. For, working these high dignitaries as we do progressively harder, paying them proportionately less and pensioning them not at all, we appear bound in common humanity to ask ourselves whether we also wear them out before their time. There appears, however, to be no reason to suppose that we inflict upon them this final inconvenience. Their prospect of life seems to have increased not only in common with that of humbler individuals but actually in advance of it; so that they may even appear to possess some hope of contending successfully against the long-lived race of archbishops with whom a rule, no more ancient than Lord Balfour's Premiership, has at length closely associated them in the mysteries of social precedence towards the pleasures or perils of the table. The State, as the examples of Burghley and Danby discover, was not, in this matter of longevity, incapable of holding its own against the Church in the 17th century. But, doubtless under the influence of the Methuen treaty, its champions lost points in the 18th; and premiers were drowned in bottles of port wine as effectively as Clarence in his butt of malmsey. With Victoria a change of manners which was also a change of morals made itself felt. Four prime ministers in her reign and another of her reign lived to be over eighty; and the tale of the last is happily not yet told. This year the ranks of the octogenarians have gained a new recruit from among the prime ministers of King Edward. There is indeed some room for philosophic doubt as to whether Lord Balfour in any scientific sense of the word is really eighty. Neither upon his own plane of reference nor upon that of an observer would he appear to satisfy the conditions of proof required. He cannot possibly be suspected of feeling eighty, nor can he plausibly be described as looking it. Yet, according to the anachronistic principles of clocktime which still shackle the mind of the historian, he has now entered his eighty-first year; and a periodical, consecrated as this is to Conservative studies, might seem to fail of its duty if the occasion were to pass without a word. Consider to borrow a verb that he uses so often as to make it the most characteristic in his vocabularythat there is no speaker alive in Britain whom a learned audience would more gladly hear; no figure whom a hostess would more eagerly desire to see among her guests; no talker who can give so much point and zest to a conversation. Consider that we boast in these Islands or indeed this Empire-no mind more subtle, no manner with greater charm, no learning more lightly carried than his. Consider, too, that if we imagine some competition in what were once called 'parts' between representative champions of the nations of the world, there is no one of whom we can so certainly affirm that his choice as an example of all they prize most in their inheritance would be approved by the foremost of his countrymen. Acton, indeed, has warned us that 'no public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterances and correspondences.' Yet who will resign himself to the belief that the melancholy aphorism can never meet its match or what man of our time need abandon the hope that even in the very case before us it has been competently challenged? * Great things, anyhow, are to be expected of Scotsmen ; and it is with a Scotsman that we are concerned-a Lowlander, hailing not from the haunted regions of high romance that lie north and west, aye and south too, of Edinburgh, but from that pleasant county of East Lothian stretching eastwards to the sea. The Marian Saga, it is true, touches Whittingehame with an icy hand; here in the garden Morton and Bothwell planned the death of Darnley. But all the soul and aspect of the grey Grecian house speaks of a Scotland cured, if that be the word, of the love of lost causes, or at least content to leave them on the shelf to which Scott has so shrewdly and lovingly relegated them-of a Scotland, that is, prudent and Presbyterian, yet proud of a past that was neither the one thing nor the other. It seems proper to add that some English blood which found its way to Whittingehame in the early days of Victoria has not seemed to the world to have impaired the excellence of the good Scottish stocks of Balfour and Maitland that were there before it. Arthur James Balfour, the eldest son of his father's marriage with Lady Blanche Cecil, was born in the famous year that passes by the name of the Year of Revolution. Pagan historians, doubtless, would have argued from that hour of falling thrones and rising republics, that portents hung about his birth, and Christian parents might well have wondered what sort of voyage a child born under such auspices was likely to have through the waves of an exceedingly troubled and troublesome world. The traveller, in this instance, was at any rate in one respect admirably equipped. * Hist. Essays and Studies,' p. 506. Physically, intellectually, and politically, as his whole career showed, he was fearless. Nature granted him another asset. No precocity marred his development. In due course he proved able to assimilate without rebellion the varied gifts of circumstance-the stern creed of his country, the amiable dilettantism of Eton, the deep questionings of Cambridge. Religious thought, as we might paraphrase these successive influences, lightly carried, logically explored! From each source he drew something; and his mind was to bear the marks of them all. For the rest of his eye fastened quickly, upon the centre of the intellectual target, and he shot from the first for a bull's-eye. 'I went to Cambridge,' he observes in one of those rare but illuminating fragments of autobiography that lie scattered among his writings, with a very small equipment of either philosophy or science but a very keen desire to discover what I ought to think of the world and why. For the history of speculation I cared not a jot. Dead systems seemed to me of no more interest than abandoned fashions. My business was with the groundwork of living beliefs; in particular with the groundwork of that scientific knowledge whose recent developments had so profoundly moved mankind. And surely there was nothing perverse in asking modern philosophers to provide us with a theory of modern science.' * The young student of metaphysics was so much the more deceptive that he read philosophy at Trinity much as Lord Rosebery read history at Christ Church-that is to say, for itself and not for the Schools. Observers were duped, including even one so well situated for observation as his bed-maker. He leaves a great many books about,' that worthy is alleged to have remarked, but he doesn't really read them.' A second in the Moral Science Tripos did little to correct these impressions. He seemed a lesser man intellectually than some of his brothers, though one and probably both of his remarkable brothers-in-law-Lord Rayleigh and Prof. Sidgwickjudged him otherwise. It was of more practical consequence that his uncle who had lately become Lord Salisbury and was soon to be associated with Disraeli in the Conservative revival * Theism and Humanism,' p. 138. |