r the rogues with whom he has to do.

I remember being in the House of Commons on an afternoon when Mr. Lloyd
George was expected to make an important speech. Lord Robert Cecil sat
in a corner seat on the back benches; his brother, Lord Hugh, occupied
the corner seat on the front bench below the gangway. During the Prime
Minister's speech, which was a succession of small scoring points
against the Labour Party delivered with that spirit of cocksureness
which has grown with him in the last few years, I noticed Lord Robert
make a pencilled note on a slip of paper and pass it across the gangway
with a nod of his head toward Lord Hugh. I watched the journey of this
little paper and watched to see its effect. Lord Hugh unfolded the slip
of paper, read it, smiled very boyishly all over his face, and, folding
it up again, slowly turned his head and looked back towards his brother.
The smile they exchanged was a Cecilian biography. One saw in the light
of that instant and whole-hearted smile the danger of a keen sense of
ironical humour. Both these men have the making of creative fanatics; in
both of them there is an intense moral earnestness and in both great
intellectual power; but nature has mixed up with these gifts, which were
intended for mankind, a drollery of spirit, only amusing in the
confidence of private life which they have allowed to weaken their
sincerities. Humanity may be thankful that St. Paul was without a sense
of humour.

During the war, as Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil rendered
services of the greatest magnitude to his countrymen: he kept Sweden out
of the war when the Russian Foreign Office could hardly breathe for
anxiety on this point, and at a time when many British newspapers were
doing their best to facilitate the great desire of Germany to march an
army through Sweden and Finland to the thus easily reached Russian
capital. His work, too, at the Peace Conference in Paris entitles him to
the gratitude of the nation: he kept the idea of the League of Nations
alive in an atmosphere that was charged with war. He prevented these
conferences from making "a Peace to end Peace." But on the whole I feel
that he is rather the shadow of great statesmanship leaning diffidently
over the shoulder of political brute force than the living spirit of
great statesmanship leading the moral conscience of the world away from
barbarism towards nobler reason and less partial truth.

MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL