nst him. With the
exception of Mr. Asquith, and Joseph Chamberlain, all forgave him, and
even sought to find excuses for his inexplicable lapse. But I am
inclined to think that this indicates weakness on the part of the victim
rather than grace on the part of the victimizer.

There are other ways in which his lack of sensibility manifests itself
in an unpleasant fashion. He is so self-absorbed that he appears to be
wholly unaware of those who minister to his comfort. Of his servants he
never knows the least detail, not even their names, and even a devoted
secretary who has served him faithfully for many years may find himself
treated almost as a stranger in a moment of need. I fear it must be said
that in financial matters Mr. Balfour is as close-fisted as any miser,
although I believe that this meanness has its rise, not so much in
avariciousness as in a total incapacity to realize the importance of
money to other people.

It has been said that the whole history of philosophical thought is an
attempt to separate the object and the subject. Mr. Balfour appears to
have made this separation complete. For him there is no object. His mind
has embraced his subjective self, and has not merely refused the
fruitless effort of attempting to stand outside its functions in order
to perceive its own perceptions, but, abandoning the unperceived
perceptions and the inactive activities of ultimate reality, it has
canonized its own functions and deified its own subjective universe. So
complete, indeed, is this separation that he can scarcely be called
selfish, since for him there exists no objective field for the operation
of unselfishness.

I lament this self-absorption of Mr. Balfour as much as I lament in his
cousin Lord Robert Cecil the lack of the fighting qualities of
leadership. To no man of the Unionist Party after the death of Lord
Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury have more hopeful opportunities
presented themselves for creative statesmanship. He might have settled
the Irish Question. He might have avoided the Boer War, in the conduct
of which he behaved with real nobleness at the beginning. He might have
saved Germany from her own war-mongers. In any case he might have led
the Unionist Party towards construction and so have prevented the
slap-dash methods at reform set going by Mr. Lloyd George after a long
and irritating period of Tory pottering. For few men in modern times
have exercised so great a fascination over that c