ecreation in the modern spirit. After the day's work there has been
nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter
rather than conversation has been as it were prescribed for him, and
when he should have been thinking or sleeping he has been playing cards.

It is possible to argue that this complete change from the worries of
the day's work has been right and proper, and that his health has been
the better for it; but physical well-being can be secured by other
means, and no physical well-being is worth the loss of moral power.
There are some natures to whom easy-going means a descent. There are
some men, and those the strongest sons of nature, for whom the kindest
commandment is, "Uphill all the way."

Mr. Asquith, both by inheritance and temperament, was designed for a
strenuous life, a strenuous moral life. He was never intended for
anything in the nature of a _flaneur_. If he had followed his star, if
he had rigorously pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and
his own earliest propensities, he might have been an unpleasant person
for a young ladies' tea-party and an unsympathetic person to a gathering
of decadent artists; he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell
and as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen from Olympus
with the lightness of thistledown.

LORD NORTHCLIFFE

LORD NORTHCLIFFE, FIRST VISCOUNT (ALFRED CHARLES WILLIAM HARMSWORTH)

Born, 1865, in Dublin. Educ.: in Trade Schools; trained as a
book-seller, and worked in the establishment of George Newnes;
LL.D., Rochester Univ., U.S.A.; Proprietor of the London _Times,
Daily Mail_, and a number of other journals; Cr. Bart. in 1904;
Viscount, 1917; Chairman of the British War Mission to the United
States, 1917; Director of the Aerial Transport Committee, 1917;
Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, 1918.

[Illustration: LORD NORTHCLIFFE]

CHAPTER V

LORD NORTHCLIFFE

_" ... We cannot say that they have a great nature, or strong, or
weak, or light; it is a swift and imperious imagination which
reigns with sovereign power over all their beings, which subjugates
their genius, and which prescribes for them in turn those fine
actions and those faults, those heights and those littlenesses,
those flights of enthusiasm and those fits of disgust, which we are
wrong in charging either with hypocrisy or
madness."