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THE LIFE OF W. T. STEAD 
 

 
 W. T. STEAD IN 1911 
 
Ares bee BE WT MTEAD 
 Ko OF PRINCES. 
 JAN 12 1926 
 
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 Oe. AN 
 Logica sew 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC WHYTE 
 
 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES 
 
 Vol. II 
 
 LONDON 
 JONATHAN CAPE LIMITED 
 NEW YORK & BOSTON 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXV 
 MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD 
 FROME AND 
 LONDON 
 
 © 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 17. SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS LETTER-BOOKS, 1890-1891 
 
 I ‘ACCOUNTS OF FACT’ 
 Il ‘SIDELIGHTS’ 
 
 18. STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA—HIS BOOK: JF CHRIST 
 CAME TO CHICAGO 
 
 I STEAD INAUGURATES A SOCIAL REFORM CAMPAIGN IN 
 CHICAGO 
 II STEAD’S MESSAGE TO CHICAGO 
 III BAD NEWS 
 IV HOW STEAD CAME TO WRITE HIS BOOK 
 
 IQ. STEAD IN HIS FORTIES — SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 
 
 20. THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE. STEAD’S CAMPAIGN IN FAVOUR OF 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN ARBITRATION 
 
 21. THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 I STEAD AND DR. JAMESON 
 II STEAD AND CHAMBERLAIN 
 III THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMITTEE 
 
 22. STEAD AND THE PRINCE OF WALES IN 1896. HOW LADY 
 WARWICK BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER AT LUNCHEON IN 
 DECEMBER OF THAT YEAR 
 
 23. THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE 
 HAGUE, 1898-1899 
 
 I THE RESCRIPT AND WHAT LED UP TO IT 
 II A TALK WITH MR. BALFOUR AT THE FOREIGN OFFICE 
 III KING LEOPOLD AND THE KAISER HOLD ALOOF. M. CLEM- 
 
 ENCEAU THROWS COLD WATER 
 IV STEAD AND THE TSAR NICHOLAS 
 
 V STEAD, CARDINAL RAMPOLLA, AND THE POPE 
 VI STEAD’S PEACE CRUSADE 
 VII AT THE HAGUE. STEAD’S LETTERS TO THE TSAR 
 
 24. STEAD AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899-1902 
 
 I STEAD’S VIEW OF THE WAR 
 II THE ‘STOP THE WAR’ CAMPAIGN 
 III THE YEAR 1900 —THE KHAKI ELECTION 
 5 
 
 Io! 
 
 122 
 
 122 
 125 
 
 129 
 134 
 140 
 147 
 152 
 167 
 167 
 171 
 179 
 

 
CHAPTER 17 
 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS LETTER-BOOKS, 1890-1891 
 
 ‘ ,.. the credit of using letters as a main constituent of biography 
 . . . has been given, as far as English is concerned, to Mason... . 
 Boswell did Mason honour by acknowledging his example, and much 
 more by following it, . . . the plan has always been followed since: 
 and there can be no question that, with a little favour of circum- 
 stances, it is the best possible. You get, as has been said, your 
 character at first hand; if the letters include epistles to, as well as 
 from, him (or her), you get invaluable sidelights; you get, in cases of 
 wilful deception or great carelessness, the most trustworthy accounts 
 of fact; and you can, or ought to be able to, hear the man talking.’ 
 — Professor GEORGE SAINTSBURY in A Letter Book. 
 
 I 
 ‘ACCOUNTS OF FACT’ 
 
 @)= is safe, probably, in saying that Stead must have been among 
 the most prolific letter-writers ever known. Copies of some 
 seventy or eighty thousand letters which he dictated during the 
 Review of Reviews period of his career, as well as of a good many 
 hundreds written with his own hand, have been preserved, and only 
 a small proportion of them could be dismissed as mere letters of 
 business. Not all of them are legible, indeed, for the old-fashioned 
 copying-books required great care and patience in their manipulation, 
 and Stead’s own restless, eager temperament was not conducive to 
 very careful or patient methods on the part of his assistants; nor did 
 he take any pleasure in re-reading his own words. He was glad to 
 have a record of them for practical purposes, but if accidents 
 happened — if the folios were damped too little or too much, or if 
 insufficient force was applied to the screw of the copying-press — he 
 does not seem to have worried. His freedom from the vanity of 
 authorship is almost painfully apparent in this connection. A large 
 number of the copies are quite beyond deciphering. 
 
 Even two-score thousand letters, however — and the legible letters 
 of a personal nature must number at least that — are an embarras des 
 richesses to a biographer, especially when they touch upon a thousand 
 
 9 
 
10 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 distinct topics and are addressed to more than five thousand different 
 persons. 
 
 I have looked over all the volumes, but I should become bewildered 
 were I to try to follow through their pages all the interwoven threads 
 of Stead’s countless interests. Putting on one side the great bulk of 
 these books for occasional reference, let us be content to examine 
 with some care the first half-dozen or so, covering the years 1890-1. 
 They will enable us to study Stead’s characteristics as a letter-writer. 
 They will portray for us Stead, the man, at a transitional stage of his 
 life. And they will help us to take stock of some of his principal 
 friendships and preoccupations, old and new. 
 
 His outstanding preoccupation, of course, is the Review of Reviews 
 itself — his watch-tower and tribune in one. Then come: the Passion 
 Play at Ober-Ammergau; In Darkest England and the Way Out, the 
 famous book which Stead had helped General Booth to write; a 
 character-sketch of the Prince of Wales; Parnell’s divorce-case and 
 downfall; the Parliamentary candidature of Sir Charles Dilke; the 
 Mattei cures for cancer and other maladies; the personal affairs of his 
 friends and of the unknown correspondents who sought advice and 
 assistance; and, last but not least, those Real Ghost Stories through 
 the compiling of which he was to become, bit by bit, a devotee of 
 Spiritualism and the Occult. 
 
 The first of the copying-books opens with a letter, in Stead’s own 
 handwriting and couched in terms of strenuous reproach, to Mr. 
 John Burns. It is dated March 10, 1890. Mr. Burns, made indignant 
 by stories of the horrors of Siberian convict life, has been reported, 
 it seems, to have used language amounting to an incitement to the 
 assassination of the Tsar—the Tsar Alexander, whom Stead for 
 years past has been extolling as the Peace-Keeper of Europe! Stead’s 
 view of all such Russian troubles will be remembered. The Tsar, in 
 a position of unparalleled difficulty, could be counted upon to do his 
 best. No greater disaster to the world could be conceived than his 
 assassination. In his efforts to remedy the evils of the hour, Alexander 
 III was as honest and sincere as John Burns himself. ‘I do hope,’ 
 the letter to Burns concludes, ‘that you have been misrepresented!’ 
 . .. Is it not a characteristic beginning to the book? It is charac- 
 teristic of the time, indeed, as well as of the man. Twenty years, 
 even ten years, later, there would have been no written remonstrance 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS II 
 
 probably, but a sudden ringing up of a Battersea telephone number 
 and a vehement altercation over the wire! 
 
 The second letter is in answer to Froude, who has been reading The 
 Pope and the New Era-—with ‘wonder and amazement,’ so he has 
 said — and who wants to have a talk with Stead about it. 
 
 We may ‘skip’ the other letters in March, April, and May. 
 
 In June, 1890, Stead had paid his first visit to Ober-Ammergau and 
 seen the Passion Play — the first dramatic performance he had ever 
 witnessed. It had thrilled and moved him profoundly, and he had at 
 once produced a book about it, profusely illustrated, which, while 
 offending the susceptibilities of a good many people, was to infect 
 some hundreds of thousands with his own emotions. It was so useful 
 as a practical guide and text-book that some of those who bought it 
 and valued it in this respect wrote to Stead to urge him in subsequent 
 editions to modify the pages in which he applied the moral of the play 
 to our every-day existence — blasphemous pages in their eyes. To 
 one such critic Stead writes, thanking him heartily for his ‘kind and 
 generous tribute,’ and declaring that he can quite understand the 
 sentiment which prompts his ‘frank and straightforward protest.’ To 
 himself, however, the reflections objected to are absolutely essential 
 to the book and nothing could induce him to leave them out. “They 
 enable the Reader to understand how real the Passion comes to be to 
 those who are living in the midst of the whirl of present politics.’ 
 
 ‘I may have linked it on wrongly (he continues), but the great thing 
 is to link it on. A man wrote to me shortly after the book appeared, 
 saying he had never before realized that the people in the Gospel 
 were actuated by just the same feelings that move us in our daily life. 
 It is worth a good deal to make people feel that. I admit that the 
 effect on many will be to lead them to be more or less irritated with 
 me, but this is as dust in the balance compared with the benefit of 
 compelling them to ask whether or not it is possible that, while doing 
 lip-homage to our Lord who was crucified many years ago, we are 
 not crucifying Him afresh in our daily life and action.’ 
 
 The letter-books for 1890 and 1891 are full of communications 
 bearing upon the Passion Play book, which entailed much unlooked- 
 for worry to Stead, for it resulted in a very troublesome and somewhat 
 alarming law-suit. The first allusion to this is in a brief note to Dr. 
 Walsh, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin - the Archbishop had gone 
 
12 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 to see the Play. ‘I posted a copy of the Passion Play,’ Stead writes 
 him, ‘to Ober-Ammergau, where I hope you will receive it safely, in 
 spite of the Jews, who have broken faith with me very badly and 
 confiscated the book, alleging I produced the photographs so well 
 that it would spoil their sale’ — he means the sale of the originals — 
 ‘if the book were allowed to be sold freely on the spot.’ The litigation 
 eventually ended in Stead’s favour, but the legal expenses were heavy 
 and prevented the enterprise from proving a lucrative one. 
 
 Stead’s exact share in the authorship of Darkest England has always 
 been a matter of curiosity to readers of that unique work.! Here is 
 Stead’s own account, as given to three correspondents on different 
 occasions — the first letter is dated November 1890: 
 
 ‘When General Booth began writing his book, his wife got worse. 
 He wrote to me in despair asking, ‘““Can you get me some literary 
 ‘hack’ who will lick my material into shape and get the book out in 
 time?” I said, ‘The importance of your work is such that I will 
 gladly undertake any ‘hack’ work which you require.” At first he 
 demurred, but as I insisted that it would be a great privilege to help 
 in getting out such a work, he consented, and I did the best I could — 
 that is the simple fact.’ 
 
 The second letter is in contradiction of the rumour that he had 
 received {5,000 for writing the book — this, he says, is ‘a lie.’ In the 
 first place, he had not written the book, he had only helped General 
 Booth with it. ‘In the second place, I have not received a penny-piece 
 from the General for the help which I gladly rendered him.’ 
 
 The third reference is in a long letter to Milner, now in Cairo, at 
 the Ministry of Finance. It is a long and interesting letter, dated 
 October 23, 1890, and begins thus: 
 
 ‘It is quite like old times. Last Saturday I had five hours’ talk with 
 John Morley, and now I have your excellent five minutes’ discourse 
 from Cairo. I am delighted with Morley, and I am delighted with 
 you. I need not state, of course, as you know, I am perennially 
 delighted with myself, the Review of Reviews and the prospect 
 generally!’ 
 
 _' Mr. Harold Begbie in his life of General Booth makes some very 
 interesting remarks on this subject, 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 13 
 
 Then, after allusions to several political problems of the moment, 
 he proceeds: 
 
 ‘Now for another subject: It is like old times, not merely because 
 of coming into friendly communication with you and Mr. Morley, 
 but because of the new start that we are making in the question of 
 Social Reform. You remember, of course, the first great coup which 
 we made in the Pall Mall Gazette—'The Bitter Cry of Outcast 
 London. General Booth’s Book may be regarded as a bigger and a 
 better ‘‘Bitter Cry,”’ and in order to make the apostolic succession 
 quite clear I took care to incorporate in the first page the greater part 
 of that famous Leader which began everything. I send you a copy of 
 the book herewith. You will recognize my fine Roman hand in most 
 of the chapters, and I shall be very curious to know what you think 
 of it. You will be delighted to see that we have got the Salvation 
 Army solid not only for Social Reform but also for Imperial Unity. 
 I have written to Rhodes about it and we stand on the eve of great 
 things.’ 
 
 * % # 
 
 Of all the matters dealt with in the letter-books covering the year 
 1891 the character-sketch of the Prince of Wales is the one about 
 which Stead writes with most zest and animation. An interchange 
 of remarks between him and Milner in the June and July of that year 
 may serve as a pleasant preface to this episode. Stead had sent proofs 
 of the article to personages of importance as well as to some of his 
 close personal friends— among others to Sir F. Knollys, to Mr. 
 Gladstone, to Morley, Brett,? and Milner. Milner, in returning his 
 set with a good many criticisms and suggestions, had added the 
 following PS.: 
 
 ‘A propos of the “me,” you recollect the old saying — ‘Science was 
 his forte, omniscience his failing.”’ I could tamely but truly parody it 
 of W.T.S.-—‘“‘His ego is his forte, his egotism is the devil.” ’ 
 
 Stead, writing on July 8, and sending Milner a revised proof, ‘im- 
 proved by all the alterations which you suggested and more besides,’ 
 answers this criticism —it has helped him, he says, to understand 
 how so many people come to impute ‘egotism’ to him: 
 
 1 Further reference to this character-sketch will be found in Chapter 22. 
 * Afterwards Lord Esher. 
 
14 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 “The remark which you said was “really too awful” was really due 
 to my exceeding humility. I always feel, when I am writing any- 
 thing, that my Reader has a right to say, ““But what the mischief 
 makes you think that there is anything in this?” So I tell him quite 
 frankly, as I would tell you in conversation. If I make a ‘mystery 
 about it and wrap it up I do not treat my Reader with the frankness 
 that is desirable. You see, anyone who takes a pen and writes that 
 which another man reads must do one of two things — he can either 
 treat his Reader exactly as he would a friend to whom he is talking, 
 or he can, more or less, get upon stilts and make phrases. Now, I do 
 not make phrases and I do not see why for the life of me it should be 
 regarded as egoistic for me to write what you admit would not be 
 objectionable if it were a phrase used in conversation. It is not 
 because I think that it is of any great use to anyone, excepting to 
 those who are reading what I am writing, to know why I came to a 
 certain conclusion, or what prompted the writing of this particular 
 article. Those who take the trouble to read what I write may naturally 
 demand from me an explanation as to why I take this, that or the 
 other line. If I tell them, it is because I am anxious not to presume 
 but wish to let them understand exactly what was the value of the 
 suggestion which set me in motion.’ 
 
 He goes on to say that he fears that ‘the desire to explain things in 
 this humble modest manner’ will abide with him, now that he no 
 longer has Milner, as in the old P.M.G. days, by his side to revise 
 his writings and make them ‘presentable.’ 
 
 The first important letter about the character-sketch in question is 
 one addressed by Stead to Sir Francis Knollys on June 29, 1891, in 
 reply to one in which Sir Francis, after reading the proofs sent him 
 of the article, has stigmatized it as ‘most unfair, unjust and inaccurate,’ 
 and has definitely contradicted one remark in it regarding the Prince’s 
 debts. ‘I gladly accept the correction about the debts,’ Stead writes. 
 “Your statement will come with a very pleasant surprise to most 
 people.’ 
 
 As to Sir Francis’s strong condemnation of the tone of the article 
 generally, Stead intimates some surprise, for in the course of an 
 interview with Sir Francis he had spoken more plainly than he had 
 written, and Sir Francis had not then taken so uncompromising a 
 line; he had promised to think the matter over and communicate with 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 15 
 
 Stead presently. Would he not now be so good as to say categorically 
 what passages in the article were incorrect? He (Stead) has made an 
 honest attempt to tell the truth. If Sir Francis can convince him 
 that what has been written is ‘unjust, uncharitable or inaccurate,’ he 
 is prepared to ‘alter it from the beginning to the end.’ He adds that 
 Mr. Hugh Price Hughes, who has seen the proof, has hotly attacked 
 him for what he considers ‘a shameless whitewashing of the Prince.’ 
 
 Sir Francis Knollys acceded to this appeal, as we may see from a 
 letter which Stead wrote to Mr. Brett on July 2, enclosing a revised 
 version of the article. Mr. Brett himself had taken a favourable view 
 of the first draft: 
 
 “Your letter was a great comfort to me, for I was afraid you would 
 think me much too hard. I have taken to heart all that you said about 
 the parallel between H. R. H. and W. T. S.1 I think you will be 
 amused to see the new and amended version. 
 
 ‘I went round to see Knollys, had two hours with him and got on 
 with him very well. I said to him: 
 
 ‘ “How will the Princess regard this?” 
 
 ‘He said, “‘She will be very indignant.” 
 
 ‘T said, “I do not wish one word which the Princess will regard as 
 unjust to be said. I will take my article away and go through it from 
 that point of view.” 
 
 ‘He said, “I must tell you, to be frank with you, that I submitted 
 your article to Sir Dighton Probyn and he does not think that the 
 article is so bad, but I differ from Probyn.” 
 
 ‘Of course Probyn’s approval of the article was a very strong point 
 in my favour, and against toning it down too much, but I turned 
 to and set to work at my curious task, and the net result corresponds 
 much more closely to the aim that I set before myself at the be- 
 ginning. | 
 
 ‘W. E. G. is profoundly troubled about it; he has written me two 
 more letters. Mr. Morley has also written to say that W. E. G. thinks 
 the article may produce a convulsion! I sent him the revised version 
 last night and hope that he will be satisfied. 
 
 ‘Knollys was very pleased with it; said he thought it was much 
 juster than before.’ 
 
 1 Mr. Brett had reminded him that he himself (Stead) was often the victim 
 of calumnious reports. 
 
16 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 Sir Morell Mackenzie, then in close attendance on the Prince, had 
 gone so far as to express ‘delight’ with the article in its amended 
 form, and Mr. Lewis, the Solicitor (not yet Sir George) had also 
 given it his imprimatur. What was more wonderful, however, to 
 Stead was that all his ‘fighting Nonconformists,’ with the exception 
 of Hugh Price Hughes, were ‘in ecstasies’ over it. 
 
 We shall glance at the article itself in a subsequent chapter. ‘Two 
 more allusions to it will suffice here — the first is from another letter 
 to Milner, dated July 27: 
 
 ‘The article on the Prince of Wales has been accepted almost 
 universally as whitewash, pure and simple. Some very funny things 
 have happened in relation to it; among others, an American leader of 
 society, a lady from Chicago, called upon me to ask me to use my 
 influence with my high friend, the Prince of Wales, as she understood 
 that I had conferred a great favour upon him lately! I smiled. On 
 the whole, the impression produced by the article seems to be good 
 and I am encouraged.’ 
 
 The second, dated August 17, is to Mr. Gladstone — one would have 
 liked to hear his comment! 
 
 “You will be glad to know that the net effect of the publication of the 
 article on the Prince of Wales has been the exact opposite of that 
 which was anticipated by almost everyone who read the article before 
 it appeared. The Marlborough House people are delighted, I am 
 informed, and I am abused throughout the Press of the world as a 
 shameless whitewasher of His Royal Highness.’ 
 
 * * - 
 
 The amount of time and energy and feeling which Stead put into 
 his campaign against Parnell after the disastrous divorce-case, and 
 into his half-dozen campaigns against Sir Charles Dilke, is really 
 extraordinary. The unrelenting persistence which marked his 
 attacks on these two men alienated some of his most valued friends 
 and was a source of surprise and regret to many others. ‘How is it 
 that that great heart of yours cannot be a little more merciful to 
 Dilke and Parnell?’ Olive Schreiner wrote him from South Africa in 
 March, 1891, “The glory of your nature is its width. All people seem 
 so narrowly limited in their sympathies, not you: therefore I hate to 
 see a limitation in you anywhere. I believe you to be the most loyal 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 17 
 
 friend I know. I would thou wertest also the most magnanimous 
 enemy.’ 
 
 The onslaughts on Dilke had begun in 1886, and they were revived 
 in 1891 and 1892 on Dilke’s reappearance as a Parliamentary candi- 
 date. Hundreds of pages of these early letter-books are taken up 
 with explanations and defences of Stead’s attitude towards Dilke. 
 The whole matter is of intense interest to the student of human 
 nature, but both Stead and Dilke are dead and the less written about 
 it the better. Readers who hear it declared — as it is often declared — 
 that Stead was actuated by mere spite or jealousy, or some such 
 contemptible personal feeling, may be urged to examine for them- 
 selves the pamphlet entitled Deliverance or Doom, in which he 
 summed up for the last time all that he had had to say on the subject. 
 It is not free from faults of taste, but it is the work of a single-minded 
 man, in deadly earnest. ‘Is there, or is there not, any answer to this 
 indictment?’ he wrote on February 3, 1892, to one of Dilke’s warmest 
 supporters. This summing up against Dilke is at the same time 
 Stead’s own defence. 
 
 The tragedy of Parnell is in quite another category. It belongs both 
 to English and Irish history, and the accounts of it in the official 
 Lives of Parnell and Gladstone are incomplete without some record 
 of Stead’s share in it. This, I think, has been misunderstood by 
 Parnell’s biographer, Barry O’Brien. Lord Morley ignores it almost 
 altogether. 
 
 Let us refresh our memories of the affair. On November 17, 1890, 
 judgment was given against Mrs. O’Shea and Parnell in the divorce 
 suit brought against them by Captain O’Shea, M.P. for Galway, the 
 constituency which had elected him at Parnell’s own bidding, in the 
 face of strong opposition by several leading members of the Irish 
 Nationalist Party. With O’Shea’s negligible personality we need not 
 concern ourselves — he was generally believed to have been a mart 
 complaisant: in any case very little sympathy was wasted on him. 
 Of Mrs. O’Shea herself it is enough to remember that she loved 
 Parnell devotedly to the end and gave him much happiness. 
 
 It was known in Ireland that an English campaign against Parnell’s 
 continued leadership was to be expected, and Irish Members of 
 Parliament, resenting the idea of this, were united at first in pro- 
 claiming their loyalty to him. At a National League meeting in 
 
 L.S.- VOL. B 
 
18 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 18go 
 
 Dublin on November 18, Mr. Swift MacNeill and Mr. Donald 
 Sullivan gave ardent expression to this feeling. ‘Two days later a 
 great assembly of Irish Nationalists and Liberals was held at Leinster 
 Hall, Dublin, when the following resolution was proposed by Mr. 
 Justin M’Carthy and carried with acclamation: 
 
 ‘That this meeting, interpreting the sentiment of the Irish people 
 that no side-issue shall be permitted to obstruct the progress of the 
 great cause of Home Rule for Ireland, declares that in all political 
 matters Mr. Parnell possesses the confidence of the Irish nation, and 
 that this meeting rejoices at the determination of the Irish Parlia- 
 mentary Party to stand by their Leader.’ 
 
 Was there the least reason to suppose that, because he might ‘have 
 gone wrong in some private question,’ Parnell should fail ‘in his duty 
 to lead his people in some great question of national and public 
 importance?’ — these were the words used by Mr. Justin M’Carthy, 
 the tranquil-minded, gentle-voiced historian and novelist, Parnell’s 
 most distinguished associate and perhaps the best loved man in the 
 party. Its most truculent member, Mr. ‘Tim’ Healy, followed vigor- 
 ously in the same sense. Were they to abandon their chief ‘because of 
 a temporary outcry over a case that in London would be forgotten 
 to-morrow if there were a repetition of the Whitechapel murder?’ 
 
 Many leading English Radicals also spoke up for Parnell’s retention: 
 Mr. Jacob Bright, for instance, in the Manchester Guardian on 
 November 22, and Mr. Illingworth in a speech at Bradford on 
 November 24. ‘Mr. Parnell,’ declared the latter, ‘has piloted Home 
 Rule nearly into its haven. Would the passengers on a vessel from 
 America, which had been skilfully navigated through many storms, 
 depose the Captain while yet the ship had to be threaded through 
 the crowded sea and Mersey because they heard on the voyage that 
 the Captain had been guilty of a moral offence?’ 
 
 These utterances, and others of the same kind, are cited in the Life 
 of Parnell by Mr. Barry O’Brien, who proceeds to say: 
 
 ‘Amid this chorus of friendly opinion three jarring notes were struck: 
 ‘1. By the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes in the Methodist Times. 
 
 ‘2. By Mr. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 *3. By Mr. Davitt in the Labour World. 
 
 + As a matter of fact, E. T. Cook was then editor of the Pall Mail and took 
 the same line as Stead. 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 19 
 
 ‘All three took their stand on the moral question and said, in effect, 
 Mr. Parnell must go.’ 
 
 Here Mr. Barry O’Brien (quite unwittingly, I am sure) gave an 
 altogether misleading impression of what really happened. The 
 ‘jarring note’ of Mr. Hugh Price Hughes, with his foolish fling at 
 the Irish generally as ‘an obscene race,’ was not to be thus bracketed 
 with the entirely different tones of Stead and the famous Land 
 Leaguer. Davitt, whose truthfulness and honour were beyond 
 question, maintained that Parnell had solemnly assured him of his 
 innocence. What concerned both Davitt and Stead much more than 
 Parnell’s adultery was all the deceit surrounding it — deceit amount- 
 ing in their eyes to treachery alike to Irish colleagues and English 
 supporters. Stead’s public utterances made his view quite clear, and 
 we find it expressed again repeatedly in his letters to Mr. Gladstone 
 and to scores of other correspondents.! As it happens, Mr. Glad- 
 stone’s own less intelligible attitude throws Stead’s into strong relief. 
 
 In that wonderfully interesting chapter entitled ‘Breach with Mr. 
 Parnell,’ in which he tells the whole story, Lord Morley quotes a 
 significant letter from Mr. Gladstone, dated November 18, wherein 
 agreement is expressed with the view of the Parnell divorce-case 
 taken by the Daily Telegraph on the day before. ‘The Daily Telegraph, 
 in this article, while assuming that the effect of the trial must be to 
 relegate ‘Mr. Parnell for a time, at any rate, to private life,’ implies 
 its regret that ‘a political adversary whose abilities and prowess it was 
 impossible not to respect had been overthrown by an irrelevant acci- 
 dent, wholly unconnected with the struggle in which we are engaged.’ 
 
 Mr. Gladstone’s letter to Morley next day also deserves consider- 
 ation here. He is ill at ease. He says again and again to himself, he 
 tells Morley, — ‘in the interior and silent forum’ — ‘It’ll na dee’.’ But, 
 although ‘it won’t do,’ Mr. Gladstone is of no mind to give a lead. 
 He feels “that we, the Liberal Party as a whole, and especially we, its 
 leaders, have for the moment nothing to say to it, that we must be 
 passive, wait and watch’ — until the Irish, that is, have decided the 
 question. ‘I should not be surprised,’ he proceeds, however, ‘if there 
 were rather painful manifestations in the House on Tuesday. It is 
 yet to be seen what our Nonconformist friends, such a man as — , for 
 instance, or such a man as — , will say.” And he goes on to makeanother 
 
 1 See in this connection Stead’s remarks about General Boulanger, on p. 113. 
 
20 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 remark which helps to reveal his train of thought. ‘If I recollect 
 right, Southey’s Life of Nelson was in my early days published and 
 circulated by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It 
 would be curious to look back upon it and see how the biographer 
 treats his narrative at the tender points.’ 
 
 To Mr. Gladstone, therefore, if we are to judge from these two 
 indications, Parnell’s love-affair with Mrs. O’Shea was ‘an irrelevant 
 accident,’ unconnected with the struggle for Home Rule, and to be 
 classed morally with Nelson’s infatuation for Lady Hamilton. Now 
 this is precisely the view that Stead at once set himself to combat. In a 
 vehement letter written by him to Mr. Gladstone on that same 
 November 19 we find him declaring — if not in very elegant English 
 or in very tactful terms, at least with blunt sincerity —‘I leave the 
 question of adultery out of the matter. Let me regard that, if you 
 please, as venial a fault as taking an extra glass of brandy.’ Not mere 
 adultery, he insists, but adultery cloaked in duplicity, is the real charge 
 against Parnell. 
 
 “The man has proved himself a thorough-paced dissembler,’ Stead 
 warns Mr. Gladstone, and he thus points the moral: ‘Every Liberal 
 Candidate will be asked at the meetings — ‘‘Do you trust Mr. Parnell?” 
 There is not one of us who dare reply that he does. This is not an 
 affair of adultery, but an affair of confidence, and no one henceforth 
 can evermore have confidence in Parnell.’ 
 
 Next day, November 20, in a second letter, he drives this point in: 
 ‘I know my Nonconformists well, and no power on earth will induce 
 them to follow that man to the poll, or you, either, if you are arm-in- 
 arm with him.’ 
 
 He is so sure of this, he repeats, in a third letter five days later, that 
 he has not troubled to send to the Nonconformist Ministers, any 
 more than to the Liberal election agents, the pamphlet about Parnell 
 which he is posting to ‘every Catholic priest in Ireland, to all the 
 Members of the House of Commons, and to all dignitaries of the 
 Church of Rome.’ 
 
 But Mr. Gladstone took little note of Stead’s distinction between 
 the ‘adultery’ and the ‘duplicity.’ What apparently weighed with 
 him was the fact that rationally or irrationally, the great mass of 
 English Liberals were dead against Parnell. On November 24, 
 grieved and harassed, he sat down to pen the famous letter to Mr. 
 Morley which sealed Parnell’s fate. 
 
 2 2 ** 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 21 
 
 The Mattei cures for cancer and other maladies proved one of the 
 blindest of Stead’s blind-alleys; but I imagine that few who were 
 involved in that curious episode remember it with regret. Blind- 
 alleys serve their own purpose, and to explore one in Stead’s cheerful 
 company must always have been an exhilarating experience - much 
 pleasanter and in some ways much more profitable than a dull 
 unchequered progress along the high road of conventional success. 
 
 One of the first allusions to the subject in the letter-books is a note 
 to Miss Bella Stillman, daughter of the distinguished American 
 journalist who was then Times correspondent in Rome, an old friend 
 of Stead’s: ‘I am coming to see Count Mattei and will reach Bologna 
 about the 3rd of November,’ Stead writes to her on October 21, 1890, 
 ‘T shall not, however, be able to come to Rome.’ A letter to Professor 
 Tyndall, dated November 21, shows that Stead has made some 
 progress. Professor Huxley, it seems, has laid down for him the lines 
 on which an experimental Mattei Hospital might be founded, but 
 first it is necessary to create some sort of ‘competent and responsible 
 tribunal’ to which certain test cases could be submitted: 
 
 “You say there are scores of scientific men of ‘‘the profoundest 
 knowledge and the soundest knowledge”’ (he continues) who would 
 willingly give such cases their fullest consideration. I very much 
 wish that you could give me a hint, if it be not too great a liberty to 
 ask, as to where I may lay my hands upon, say, a couple of these 
 gentlemen. At present those whom I have approached take refuge 
 under various pretexts, the favourite being the plea that the remedies 
 are secret and therefore not to be investigated.’ 
 
 Stead preserved several letters written to him by Tyndall, who 
 evidently had a real regard for him, but the Professor’s answer to the 
 above appeal is missing. Whether or not with his help, Stead succeeds 
 presently in enlisting the collaboration of several physicians of note, 
 including Lawson Tait, but it is too long a story for these pages — it 
 can be followed in more detail in the early volumes of the Review of 
 Reviews. Here I am concerned only with the sidelights on it - and 
 on Stead himself —- thrown by our letter-books. They contain any 
 number of letters upon the subject, many of them defending the 
 Count against his critics, sometimes rather sharply: 
 
 ‘With regard to the paragraph which you sent from the British 
 
22 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 Weekly,’ Stead writes to one correspondent, ‘the analysis of Count 
 Mattei’s Cures is perfectly idiotic. You might as well dissect a corpse 
 and, finding no soul under your scalpel, declare that man had not got 
 a soul, as to (sic) argue that, because chemical analysis could discover 
 nothing in Count Mattei’s remedies, therefore there was nothing in 
 them. 
 
 ‘This question is to be settled, not by chemical analysis, but by 
 experience, and if you have a mind to cut two of your fingers and try 
 to staunch the blood of one with pure water and the other with Count 
 Mattei’s “‘Blue Electricity,”’ you would see in a moment the difference 
 between the two. The “‘electricity’’ will stop the bleeding instantly; 
 the water will do nothing.’ 
 
 In a letter written in January 1891, to another doubter, Stead 
 defines his attitude towards the orthodox medical faculty. Few men 
 have a nobler opportunity for doing good, he acknowledges, than a 
 really good doctor, but what he objects to is ‘the arrogant intolerance 
 of the ordinary professional man’ towards the heterodox. Personally, 
 he is always on the side of the heterodox, believing, with Dr. Theodore 
 Parker, that any man not orthodox may be inspired. Above all, he 
 distrusts the Doctor on the Policeman’s back, — that ‘perilous position 
 from which we have dislodged the Priest!’ 
 
 On the 21st of the month following, he has another fling at his pet 
 aversions. ‘I think the orthodox are children of the devil,’ he writes 
 to a Bradford correspondent, ‘especially in medicine — at least when- 
 ever they set up their orthodoxy as if it were an end in itself, making 
 an idol of it . . . I value the Mattei business chiefly because it gives 
 me the opportunity of scourging these gentry, and if it turns up 
 trumps it will do more to break the back of that arrogant pharisaical 
 intolerance of theirs than anything else that has cropped up for a long 
 time.’ 
 
 Unluckily it did mot turn up trumps! 
 
 II 
 
 ‘SIDELIGHTS’ 
 
 That delightful little volume of Professor Saintsbury’s, A Letter 
 Book, has provided me already with a text for this chapter. There 
 are many sayings in it which come back inevitably to the mind as 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 23 
 
 one pursues this examination of Stead’s very different Letter-Books. 
 Hitherto the extracts given from them have been chosen for the most 
 part as records at first hand of noteworthy episodes. Those which I 
 shall proceed to give will serve even better — in Professor Saintsbury’s 
 own words ~as ‘tell-tales of character,’ if not as ‘examples of art.’ 
 
 It may be as well to admit at the outset - what I think will be 
 admitted by all save idolatrous admirers — that there is little or no 
 art in Stead’s letter-writing. He wrote —or dictated - any number 
 of admirable letters, interesting, stimulating, sympathetic, warm- 
 hearted, helpful, brave; they have all kinds of merits, including the 
 one which Professor Saintsbury considers most essential of all; you 
 can hear the ‘spoken word’ in them. But they may be searched in 
 vain for the other characteristics which most appeal to the antho- 
 logist. Whether written or dictated, Stead’s letters give us the spoken 
 word, pure and simple, ‘not subtly differentiated,’ as the Professor 
 would have it; and they lack even those touches of oratorical genius 
 which so often lent force to his printed writings; they are as fluent 
 and copious as his ordinary talk; one feels that he is never at a loss 
 for a word. The letter-writers included in Professor Saintsbury’s 
 selection are self-conscious artists, almost all of them, relishing to the 
 full their own wit and charm and grace and ingenuity — their carefully 
 wrought conceits and premeditated surprises. There is next to no- 
 thing of all this about Stead. His pen is seldom a plaything to him. 
 He enjoys a good phrase when it comes along, but he is so absorbed 
 in the matter of his discourse that mere manner is of no interest to 
 him. His is a natural, simple and unaffected speech of the kind which 
 Montaigne said he loved, ‘so written as it is spoken, and such upon 
 the paper as it is in the mouth: a pithie, sinnovie, full, strong, com- 
 pendious and material speech, not so delicate and affected as vehe- 
 ment and piercing.’! 
 
 Rhodes, of course, bulks largely in these letter-books. Several of 
 the letters written to Rhodes himself are concerned with a protégé of 
 his, named Palk — a young sailor whose intelligence and good manners 
 had attracted the great man’s attention on his latest voyage to the 
 Cape, and whom he had sent to London in 1891 to be educated under 
 Stead’s friendly supervision. Rhodes proposed to employ him as 
 soon as he knew shorthand and was able to write an official letter. 
 
 1 Florio’s translation. 
 
24 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 ‘I always pick my people by instinct,’ Rhodes explained to Stead: 
 ‘I think I am right in this case. I do not want a clever man, I want a 
 loyal one. His face tells me that he will be loyal.’ The experiment 
 proved a complete success, to judge from a bundle of very grateful 
 letters written to Stead later by the youth in question, some of them 
 from Cape Town, where in 1893 he entered Rhodes’s service as a 
 kind of confidential secretary. ‘Accept my most sincere thanks for 
 your book on Mr. Rhodes,’ Mr. Palk writes nine years later, in July, 
 1902, ‘I shall always value it as being compiled by our greatest Editor 
 on our greatest Englishman.’ 
 
 Two other commissions which Stead executed for Rhodes in 1891 
 were: (1) the choosing and buying of one hundred pounds’ worth of 
 books; and (2) the collecting of the best available printed evidence 
 on certain points connected with the Franchise. A passage from 
 Rhodes’s letter asking for this reflects the intimate relations now 
 existing between the two men. I give it as it stands, without any 
 punctuation: 
 
 ‘I can see you saying I like the impudence of the fellow with all my 
 own work not having any consideration but bothering me with his 
 own as well but I have that impudence for you have I believe a soft 
 corner for all my burdens.’ 
 
 There is a very interesting allusion to Rhodes in a letter to Milner, 
 dated March 15, 1891. Stead assumes that, living as he is at Cairo, 
 Milner has not heard much about the Cape Colossus, whose person- 
 ality at this time is only beginning to be known in London. Rhodes 
 is a ‘man of immense power,’ he writes, ‘with immense wealth and 
 with ideas as wide as the world. He reminds me of an Elizabethan 
 statesman born out of time, and my prediction is that he will either 
 make the Empire or mar it, if he lives for ten years more.’ He 
 proceeds: 
 
 ‘He is a man who has a good deal of the character of the men of the 
 Mayflower, without their theological development. . . . He believes 
 to the full in the famous resolution that was said to have been passed 
 by the Pilgrim Fathers, to wit: “It is written, “The earth and the 
 fulness thereof is the Lord’s, and He has given it to His Saints for an 
 inheritance.’ Voted unanimously — We are the Saints; and Decided, 
 that we go in and possess it, . . ,” His aspiration for the painting of 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 25 
 
 the map red is sufficiently fervent to satisfy even you. He sticks by 
 Parnell and dined with Dilke. All the same he continues fast friends 
 with me. He is very fond of Brett and likes Arthur Balfour, thinking 
 the latter the best man we have after Salisbury. He riles Mr. Glad- 
 stone by telling him bluntly that his scheme of Home Rule made 
 Ireland a taxed Republic without representation, that is to say a 
 State every citizen of which would be bound to use the whole of his 
 political influence in favour of complete separation. Mr. Gladstone 
 jumped when Rhodes said this as if he had suddenly sat down on 
 the business end of a tack, but we are all delighted that he should 
 have had the truth so plainly stated to him for once.’ 
 
 Stead was fond of holding up Rhodes as a sort of bogey-man to the 
 so-called Little Englanders, in season and out of season. Here is an 
 example in a letter to Mr. Morley — it comes as a climax to an impas- 
 sioned harangue upon England’s true policy regarding America, 
 which was read, one feels sure, with raised eyebrows: 
 
 ‘Rhodes is a great Englishman, but I am by no means sure that, 
 if we disregard his impassioned entreaties to impose some kind of 
 differential duties on goods coming into the Empire from without, 
 he may not be disposed to contemplate an arrangement with the 
 American Republic. I feel as if the centre of the English-speaking 
 world were shifting westward, and I feel this so strongly that, in 
 discussing the question of the Review of Reviews with Dr. Albert 
 Shaw, I specially reserved to myself the right to transfer the Central 
 Office of the Review of Reviews from London to New York in case 
 it should prove that the whole of the English-speaking race was 
 destined to federate under the Stars and Stripes rather than under 
 the Union Jack.’ 
 
 Rhodes’s character and career are an especially favourite topic in 
 Stead’s correspondence with Olive Schreiner, to whom some of his 
 longest and most gossipy letters are addressed, and whose answers 
 have been preserved. The actual using of a pen was quite a laborious, 
 almost painful, operation for Miss Schreiner, as she then was: so she 
 tells Stead, and her awkward, scrawly handwriting seems to attest as 
 much; but many of her letters are of great length. Some of them are 
 most interesting. Here, for instance, in a letter from Matjesfontein, 
 is an account of a dream about Rhodes: 
 
26 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 ‘I can tell you a story which will tend to prove to you how rotten are 
 your ghost and dream theories! Some time ago (it was the night when 
 the mail train passes here — I knew Rhodes was in it), I woke up in 
 the middle of the night and found myself standing on the floor in the 
 middle of my room, crying and wringing my hands. I’d dreamt that I 
 saw Rhodes walking by with his old big felt hat on, drawn down very 
 low on his head, and an overcoat on with the collar turned up and his 
 head sunk very low between his shoulders. I ran up to him and 
 stood before him. He did not speak a word, but he opened his 
 overcoat and as he turned it back I saw his whole throat and chest 
 covered with blood and his face ghastly pale like a dead person’s; he 
 said nothing, and it was at this point I woke. 
 
 ‘For some moments I walked up and down the room, half-awake, 
 believing it was true. Then I heard the mail train move away, and I 
 awoke fully and realized it was a dream.’ 
 
 Shortly afterwards, with the effect of this still strong on her mind, 
 she was walking in Cape Town: 
 
 ‘My brother Will (she continues) came up to me and asked me if I 
 had heard any news. I said, ‘‘No.”’ He said, “Then, come to my 
 office — I want to tell you something.” I asked him what it was and 
 he said, “Some one you know has met with an accident.” I at once 
 said, ‘““Oh, don’t tell me, I know what it is.” He asked me what I 
 thought it was and I said, ‘““Rhodes has been thrown from his horse 
 and is dead.”’ 
 
 Rhodes, as a matter of fact, had met with an accident that very day, 
 but without any very serious results. Had he died, Olive Schreiner 
 declares, Stead and all his fellow-spiritualists would have exclaimed, 
 ‘How wonderful! How prophetic!’ 
 
 ‘Now write me a letter (she says in conclusion). This is the longest 
 letter I’ve written anyone for a year. Your letters always are to me a 
 refreshing breath from the old outer world. Life in South Africa is 
 very solitary for a woman. It may be good for one’s work, but there 
 are times when one longs to rub one’s brains up against another 
 human’s. There are plenty of women and children and niggers to love 
 here, but sometimes one wants the other side of one’s nature satisfied, 
 that thinks. I am going to spend the winter at a farm in the Karroo 
 where I wrote An African Farm so many years ago. Just now I am 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 27 
 
 busy taking care of a woman who is going to have a child next month. 
 Having a child seems always to me the one compensation the Gods 
 give woman for being woman. The only thing that makes me sad in 
 thinking I shall have to live all my life alone is the thought I shall 
 never have a child.’ 
 
 Stead, in his answer, dated April 25, 1892, begins with a spirited 
 defence of Spiritualism — ‘there is nothing else,’ he declares, ‘of such 
 absorbing fascination.’ He then proceeds: 
 
 ‘I was immensely interested in your story about your vision of 
 Rhodes’s accident, but, my dear illogical friend, cannot you see that 
 your vision was much more remarkable, and a much greater con- 
 firmation of my ghost theories, because Rhodes was not killed than 
 if he had been killed? You foresaw, several days, the accident that 
 actually happened. I asked Rhodes, who was here the other day, 
 whether he was wearing a big slouch hat at the time. He said he was. 
 He does not know how he was picked up, but Merriman said that he 
 was manifestly not dead, but living. When you saw him in the vision 
 your premonitory sight was more exactly accurate than it would have 
 been if he had really died. And yet you produce this as a proof that 
 my ghost theories are absurd! The fact is that you, and the whole of 
 your family, belong to the Clairvoyant race, and I wish instead of 
 scofing at them you would cultivate your powers. However, each 
 one has his own road to ply in the world and as you do not interfere 
 with mine, neither do I interfere with yours.’ 
 
 The following passages from this letter, a very long one, are also 
 worthy of transcription here, I think: 
 
 ‘I shall be very interested in reading your book on the Sex Question. 
 I believe entirely with you as to the duty of dealing lovingly and 
 sympathetically with those who are on a lower plane of development 
 than what we have happily attained. But if we were to carry the same 
 principle out elsewhere, and to regard the Law as an unnecessary 
 ingredient in the affairs of human society, we should have Gladia- 
 torial Shows established in London (as they used to be in Rome) at 
 this moment. There is no kind of brutality that would not be per- 
 mitted, either to inferior animals, or to weaker human beings, if your 
 principle was carried out logically all along the line. What seems to 
 me the weak place in your scheme of the universe is that you do not 
 
28 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 allow Law any part to play; whereas, to very many, probably the 
 majority of human beings, the Law, with its terrors — that is to say, 
 the policeman and the jail, and, in cases of need, the beneficent lash, 
 and the still more beneficent gallows — is the only thing that stands 
 between them and the most unbridled savagery. It ought not to be 
 necessary to teach a mother that she ought not to put her infant on a 
 hot oven, or a father to break his little one’s arm in a drunken passion, 
 but, unfortunately, there are parents whose parental instincts are so 
 rudimentary that they need to be stimulated by hard labour. As it is 
 in relation to children, so it is in relation to the brutality and betrayal 
 of women by men. In a case in which both parties are adults, and 
 neither party violates any obligation to others, I do not say that — and 
 have never said that —- the Law should interfere, but where fraud, 
 treachery, or force are employed in order permanently to impair the 
 economic, social, and moral value of a human being, the Law can 
 intervene, and ought to. I am very much more in favour of making 
 cases of adultery, proved in open court, offences punishable by 
 imprisonment than I used to be. Marriage, after all, is a contract, 
 and a very solemn one, which carries with it the founding of the 
 family, and the creation of new citizens, and a gross violation of the 
 terms of the contract justifies society in affixing a penalty, not neces- 
 sarily a vindictive one, but sufficient to attach a stigma to the evil- 
 doer. 
 
 “The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, men and women always use 
 the jail as a reinforcement of the purely ethical or moral arguments 
 by which they persuade men to do right in all matters to which they 
 attach a real importance. If people thought as seriously about a 
 woman’s life as they do about a £5 note, there would be no 
 hesitation whatever in acting on my principles. Still, this is a 
 question that had better be discussed face to face when we meet than 
 argued about in cold type.... 
 
 ‘For the last ten days, we have been greatly thrilled by what seemed 
 at one time the near prospect of the approach of my Half-penny 
 Morning Newspaper. It is still possible that it may come to pass, but 
 for the moment, it is overclouded. When that paper comes, I want to 
 publish a story from day to day, in which the events of the previous 
 day will serve as incident in the development of the plot. Mrs. 
 Clifford! and I had a long discussion as to how that would be written, 
 
 + The well-known novelist, a great friend of Stead’s. 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 29 
 
 and by whom. I do not see clearly at present, excepting that I shall 
 have to map out the story, and indicate the incidents myself. 
 
 ‘Rhodes was very nice when he was here. He seemed none the 
 worse for his accident, and we had three hours’ talk. He was nice and 
 kind too about poor Garrett, who is in Egypt. Rhodes asked me to 
 tell him that, if his health required a South African residence, he 
 should put himself aboard a steamer, and embark for Cape Town, 
 where Rhodes would find him something to do, either journalistic 
 work, or otherwise. It was very kind and thoughtful of Rhodes, and 
 I am much attached to him. 
 
 ‘I note what you say concerning babies. I have a little Monkey of 
 two years at the present moment in my house, and no one who has 
 not lived with children knows how much they add to the joy and 
 brightness of life. This little Monkey is not very friendly to me, but 
 is idolized by the whole household. You see, I was not present when 
 she was born, being in Rome at the time, and the little lady does not 
 seem to have quite forgiven me for my absence on her advent. 
 
 ‘I have no end of things to say to you if you were here, but this 
 letter is even longer than that which you were good enough to send 
 me, so now I must close with best wishes for your welfare. 
 
 ‘Believe me, 
 ‘Your affectionate friend.’ 
 
 Olive Schreiner’s admiration for Rhodes in those early nineties, 
 before she knew him personally, was one of the many bonds in 
 common between her and Stead. ‘The only big man we have here is 
 Rhodes,’ she had written in July, 1890, ‘and the only big thing the 
 Chartered Company. I feel a nervous, and almost painfully intense, 
 interest in the man and his career. I am so afraid of his making a 
 mistake, as he would do, I think, if he accepted the Prime Minister- 
 ship of this Colony, as there is some talk of his doing. I don’t see 
 how he can play the hand of the Chartered Company and the hand of 
 the Colony at the same time.’ And in a letter dated March 15, 1891, 
 we find her saying: 
 
 ‘I am glad you have made an alliance with Rhodes. I believe your 
 genius is eminently fitted to harmonize with his. What you say of 
 him is true, he seems to enlarge the horizon. How he has enlarged 
 it in South Africa it would be impossible for you to judge unless you 
 had known the South Africa of ten years ago... . Personally, I 
 
30 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 believe Rhodes has the strongest antipathy to myself — his friends 
 have told me so — but it does not in the slightest degree affect my 
 sympathy with him and his work, any more than General Botha’s 
 objections to my work affect my feeling to him. It is the beauty of my 
 standpoint that I am able to sympathize with, and love, so many 
 people who will never be able to sympathize with, or love me. But I 
 always shrink from meeting Rhodes as I would shrink from meeting 
 General Botha.’ 
 
 All this admiration, unfortunately, was to be lost in later years. 
 After the Jameson Raid and during the Boer War Rhodes found one 
 of his most implacable judges in Olive Schreiner. Her regard for 
 Stead, which continued until the end, was intensified during those 
 years of trouble in South Africa. 
 
 Another correspondent at a distance to whom Stead wrote long 
 letters from time to time was Sir Robert Morier, British Ambassador 
 at St. Petersburg. Here are some typical passages from one dated 
 July 16, 1891: 
 
 ‘I am busy with a character-sketch of the German Emperor who has 
 enormously interested all of us here. There is an element about that 
 young man which reminds me of General Gordon, if you can imagine 
 General Gordon born a Hohenzollern. Sir John Gorst finds him 
 somewhat like Randolph Churchill. Mr. Balfour sees in him many 
 points of resemblance to the first Napoleon. There is also, I think, a 
 trace of Tim Healy in him. But I do not think he will last. That 
 feverish excitement is not a good sign, and I do not see why he should 
 keep up his feud with his mother. I have a prejudice in favour of 
 mothers, having myself been born of one, a fact which, I am afraid, 
 you think unduly colours the whole of my thinking. 
 
 ‘Lord Salisbury is doing very well, and has won the praise not merely 
 of impartial and dispassionate observers like myself, but even of those 
 unregenerate children of the Devil commonly known as Provincial 
 Radical newspaper editors. I am in a state of incipient revolt against 
 my party owing to the dire rumours which prevail that Sir William 
 Harcourt intends to be Prime Minister when Mr. Gladstone is 
 gathered to his fathers. As you know, I am a long-suffering creature, 
 capable of standing much from my friends and associates, but 
 Sir William Harcourt, — no, that is too much! Job himself would 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 31 
 
 have cursed God and died if he had seen such a portent on his 
 dunghill.... 
 
 ‘P.P.S. I had an interesting talk with Mr. Bryce the other day, to 
 whom I was expressing a loathing and detestation with which every 
 true Briton regards Sir William Harcourt. Mr. Bryce said, “‘You are 
 really too hard on Harcourt. It is not fair to say that he is entirely 
 insincere. He is really sincere in some things.” ‘‘Name, Name,” I 
 cried. Whereupon Bryce, all unconscious of the grim humour of his 
 remark said, “I am quite sure that Sir William Harcourt is quite 
 sincere in hating the Colonies.” ’? 
 
 Sir William Harcourt was Stead’s ‘pet aversion’ in politics, and 
 almost every reference to him in these letter-books — as in the Review 
 of Reviews —is hostile, or at least censorious: it is a significant fact 
 that Sir William was the one prominent politician whom he did not 
 know personally. To an angry correspondent who has accused him 
 of resorting to insinuations in these attacks and criticisms, Stead 
 expresses himself freely. He regards Harcourt, he declares, as a man 
 without faith, without enthusiasm, to whom politics are a mere game. 
 
 He continues: 
 
 ‘I can understand a person differing from me zm toto upon every one 
 of those points—I cannot understand how anyone can possibly 
 accuse me of not having uttered them myself fully and freely times 
 without number. I entirely deny that I have ever employed any 
 “cowardly innuendos” whatever. I have said about Sir William 
 Harcourt in print exactly what I would say to his face if the oppor- 
 tunity offered, and I think I have a right to ask you what you mean 
 by bringing such charges against me. 
 
 ‘With regard to your last question as to why I do not “revile’’ Sir 
 George Trevelyan and Mr. John Morley, I am not in the habit of 
 “reviling” a person whose earnestness and public spirit are beyond 
 dispute.’ 
 
 1 In a letter to Cecil Rhodes dated May 6, 1892, we find Stead quoting a 
 very similar comment by Mr. Balfour, but more pointedly expressed: ‘I saw 
 Mr. Balfour the other day, who said he did not think the difficulty over 
 Egypt was with Mr. Gladstone, but rather with Sir William Harcourt, who 
 pone in the curtailment of the British Empire if he believed in nothing 
 else!’ 
 
32 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 Of all contemporary politicians Mr. Balfour attracted Stead most — 
 more than anyone on his own side. In a letter to his friend, Mr. 
 Reginald Brett, in October 1891, Stead declares that he has never 
 voted Tory in his life and shudders at the notion of changing his 
 Party, but that if Sir William Harcourt is to become Liberal Leader 
 (as is not unlikely) he would really have to consider whether he could 
 not work with Mr. Balfour. 
 
 ‘I entirely agree (he writes) with what you say about Balfour. If 
 we could choose leaders by affinity I should choose him far and away 
 before anybody else in Politics, but it is awful to contemplate putting 
 out a hand to support the Tories in any shape or form.’ 
 
 Stead’s written communications with Mr. Brett during 1890 and 
 1891 are less frequent than in other years, but there are many 
 allusions to this staunch friend in letters to others. In a hurried note 
 dated August 19, 1891, to Admiral Fisher, who had invited him down 
 to Portsmouth for some big naval function, Stead asks whether he 
 may bring Mr. Brett with him, and reminds Fisher that ‘we should 
 have been utterly smashed in 1884 if it had not been for the help he 
 was able to give us from the inside. He . . . has always been as true 
 as steel in all questions concerning the navy.’ 
 
 Among Mr. Brett’s letters to Stead dating from this period one is 
 very interesting. It is dated October 3, 1891. Stead apparently has 
 claimed to be judged not by his talk but by what he has said in print. 
 Here is Mr. Brett’s comment: 
 
 ‘Well, perhaps I am wrong. But J have never met anyone who 
 judged you from your writings, whose opinion corresponded with 
 that which everyone forms who knows you personally. 
 
 “What does Miss Belloc 1 say to this? I take it that even your con- 
 scientious Nonconformists — were you not personally known to them 
 — would resent many things that you say, attributing to you vices and 
 opinions which are not yours. 
 
 “Why should you desire to be exclusively judged by what you 
 write? 
 
 ‘Speech is a faulty medium at best. Writing even more so. Your 
 
 1 Miss Marie Belloc, afterwards Mrs. Belloc-Lowndes, so well known as a 
 gifted novelist. Miss Belloc had found a very early opening for her talents 
 
 under Stead on the Pall Mall Gazette, and remained one of his most valued 
 friends. 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 33 
 
 writing may be, and is—I doubt not—a “strenuous attempt” to 
 express your convictions. But convictions and character are like shot 
 silk, and cannot be accurately determined from a single point of 
 view.’ 
 
 Throughout the years 1890-3 Stead was day-dreaming continually 
 of the wonderful and unique daily paper which he would presently 
 produce. At moments, however, his self-confidence left him and he 
 became a victim to doubt. We find him in such a mood in a letter, 
 dated October 22, 1891, to a sympathetic friend, the Hon. Rollo 
 Russell: 
 
 ‘I do not think (he writes) that money is the difficulty at all, the 
 difficulty lies not in the Capitalist but in the Editor. Although I 
 think I could carry out many of the duties. . . . I fear I am totally 
 unfitted to undertake the organization and management of so great 
 an undertaking, involving as it does so many personal relations 
 between the Employer and the Employed. I am a very good Master 
 when I have a very good Servant, but I am a very bad Master, indeed 
 the very worst of Masters, when I have a bad Servant, because I am 
 not hard enough to keep him up to his work.’ 
 
 Here are a few other passages (taken from letters written in 1891) 
 which contain interesting touches of autobiography: 
 
 ‘Many aman who has a long memory makes a very poor journalist. 
 I am like yourself in not having a good memory for detail. I cannot, 
 for instance, quote a text correctly; I grasp ideas firmly enough but 
 the ipsissima verba escape me.’ 
 
 ‘I defended Mrs. Besant in 1885. I fought with her, arm in arm, 
 all through the Trafalgar trouble in 1887, and there is nothing in 
 that article that I have not constantly and publicly proclaimed in 
 season and out of season, ever since I held a pen... . If I am bad 
 now I have always been bad.’ 
 
 “There is nothing worse for good people than not to be able to bear 
 a joke at their own expense. I must say that of all the caricatures 
 that have been published about myself I would not willingly have 
 missed seeing one and I am quite sure I have been libelled — if such 
 things are libellous - as much as any man.’ 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II Cc 
 
34 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 “You seem to have an entirely wrong idea as to my attitude in rela- 
 tion to the Jewish question. I think I am one of the most Hebraic of 
 all English journalists, but my indebtedness to the Sacred Writings 
 of your race does not blind me to the fact that many of your com- 
 patriots are men of whom it is well to be very wary when you do 
 business with them.’ 
 
 ‘Pray do me the justice of noting that I am more careful than any 
 other writing man of our time never to use the word “English” if 
 I can possibly use the word “English-speaking” instead. I do not 
 think I ever refer to ‘“Anglo-Saxons” —a word which I have dis- 
 carded for reasons which you will appreciate. As for the Celts, I 
 am so far from despising them that I see Grant Allen declares in the 
 Fortnightly Review that I am an apostle of Celtism in England.’ 
 
 * % % 
 
 There remain for consideration the innumerable letters of help and 
 counsel and comfort in which Stead puts into practice his doctrine 
 “Be a Christ!’ 
 
 These letters, of course, are for the most part of a strictly confi- 
 dential character, many of them dealing with very private matters. 
 From among those, however, which I have read I may, I think, cite 
 a few passages which will serve to illustrate Stead’s attitude towards 
 his confidants known and unknown. He talks to them as frankly as 
 to his most intimate friends. ‘I can understand your position. I 
 cannot share it,’ he writes to a woman who can find no comfort in 
 revealed religion, and who trusts to her own reason for guidance 
 through the difficulties of life. ‘I suppose these things are very much 
 a matter of temperament and training. For my part, I am incapable 
 of this strength which you seem to possess. I am like a child who 
 clings. I have not any strength in myself; I need to be helped 
 and helped all day and always, and a religion or philosophy which 
 says there is no help but in yourself is to me a religion of 
 despair.’ 
 
 To a friend who has sent him some words of commendation he 
 writes: 
 
 ‘I feel constantly that if it were not for the Lord’s standing on my 
 side, supporting me, guiding me and sheltering me, I should be of 
 all men the most utterly undone. This abiding sense of my own 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 35 
 
 unworthiness sometimes weighs me down so much that such an 
 expression as that you were good enough to send comes as dew upon 
 the mown grass.’ 
 
 And here is a typical example of his efforts to remove the doubts 
 of others: 
 
 “The question which you have put has been, in all ages, the great 
 difficulty of believing souls — How can a God permit sin, and the 
 suffering which sin brings in its train? That is a question which 
 many try to answer; and which no one can ever deal with to his entire 
 satisfaction. All we know is that those who have appeared from time 
 to time in the world, from Jesus Christ downwards, who have had 
 the clearest insight into invisible things, and whose spiritual genius 
 is tested by the extent to which their words and teaching have swayed 
 the lives of millions — for generation after generation — all agree in 
 declaring that there is a God, and that that God is good and merciful. 
 Jesus, who had Himself a hard time of it, being born in poverty, 
 spending His life as an outcast, and, ultimately, crucified as a 
 scoundrel unfit even to live, never varied in all His sad experiences 
 in proclaiming that the Great Invisible Power that rules the world 
 was best described by the endearing term of ‘Our Father,” whose 
 nature is love. He knew better than I do what God is, and when I 
 see those sad and terrible things which confront us at every turn in 
 actual life, I can only say that we see but in part-—we can only 
 examine an infinitely small section of the Divine Plan, and I cannot 
 doubt that God, who has all eternity to work in, will prove, before 
 the end comes, that He is at least as good-hearted as you or I, and 
 that would not be so if He could not fix up things ultimately better 
 than they seem to be fixed up now.’ 
 
 * # * 
 
 Spiritualism had long interested Stead, but it was his editorial 
 instinct that impelled him to take the subject up with such zest in 
 the Autumn of 1891. A search for ‘good copy’ was to end in some- 
 thing like a transformation of his entire life! 
 
 One of the earliest references of any importance to spiritualistic 
 matters in the Letter-Books is in a note written to an inquirer 
 towards the end of January 1891. Stead records in this that he has 
 come to certain ‘very definite conclusions,’ though ‘they do not go 
 very far.’ He is convinced, he says : 
 
36 SOME REVIEW OF REVIEWS 1890 
 
 1. That there is more in Spiritualism than the ordinary sceptic will 
 admit. 
 
 2. That very little trust can be placed in any Medium. 
 
 3. That the majority of those who have devoted themselves to the 
 practice have derived little or no benefit from it, while in some cases 
 serious harm has resulted. 
 
 4. That in 99 cases out of 100, communications addressed by 
 spirits quoted to the living are such as would not be worth listening 
 to, even if they were uttered by the Archangel Gabriel. 
 
 But he adds that he has one intimate friend, a journalist and a good 
 man, who declares that Spiritualism has been to him ‘an unspeak- 
 able boon, having enabled him to know . . . as an incontrovertible 
 truth, that his dead are living and in communication with him.’ This 
 friend has said to him repeatedly that Spiritualism has ‘robbed Death 
 of all its terrors.’ 
 
 A letter to that famous student of psychical matters, Mr. F. W. H. 
 Myers, written in September 1891, makes it clear that Stead at this 
 date is well launched on his new departure. In the Proceedings of 
 the Society for Psychical Research, he declares, exultantly, he has 
 found a gold mine of journalistic material — a mine which, if properly 
 worked, should enable him to produce a Christmas Number full of 
 ‘authentic apparitions’ calculated to astonish everyone. He cannot 
 understand how such wonderful stuff should have gone so long 
 ‘entirely waste’ as far as the newspaper world was concerned. He 
 encloses a proof of a tentative chapter on ‘Multiplex Personality,’ 
 based exclusively upon the writings of Mr. Myers, himself, and of his 
 fellow-inquirer, Mr. Gurney, and declares that he will be delighted 
 to avail himself of any help Mr. Myers can give him. ‘To present 
 a Ghost to my public,’ he adds, ‘is a task of difficulty which I must 
 not depute to another, however much abler and more competent he 
 may be than I from the scientific point of view.’ Mr. Myers, a little 
 apprehensive as to Stead’s methods, had perhaps suggested that 
 some member of the Psychical Research Society might be entrusted 
 with the ‘difficult task’ in question. 
 
 However that may have been, Mr. Myers evidently welcomed the 
 chance of attracting general attention to the study to which he had 
 been so long devoting his own acute intelligence, for the correspond- 
 ence continues throughout the following four months. 
 
 ‘I am exceedingly glad to have your letter,’ Stead writes to him on 
 
1891 LETTER-BOOKS 37 
 
 October 26. ‘I gather that you are no longer troubled with the 
 misgivings which you expressed when we met’ —- whether the mis- 
 givings were as to the trustworthiness of a certain medium Madam 
 B., or as to Stead’s scientific competency, does not appear. ‘I am 
 very confident,’ the letter continues, ‘about the Double and have had 
 a long conversation with Mrs. D -, who is this week going to make a 
 determined effort to let me photograph her astral body.’! 
 
 A few days later Stead asks Mr. Myers if he knows about a Haunted 
 House at Bath, in which the strangest noises are heard during the 
 night, while the ‘figure of a man with outstretched arms is visible 
 standing on the window-sill.’ Next day he writes again to make 
 similar inquiries about ‘this so-called Guy Fawkes in Barking 
 Marches’ and the ‘haunted brewery in Anstey.’ .. . And so on and 
 so on. 
 
 There is no further indication of any misgivings on Mr. Myers’s part 
 until after the appearance of the Christmas Number in December, 
 when he again seems to have shown himself just a little uneasy. 
 Remembering the contrast between Mr. Myers’s own meticulous 
 methods and Stead’s flamboyancy, one feels that as collaborators 
 they were more than a trifle ill-yoked! 
 
 Stead entered into correspondence about the same time with that 
 other pioneer of Psychical Research, Professor (later Sir William) 
 Barrett, of Dublin. On October 29, 1891, we find him asking the 
 Professor whether he would be willing to investigate a Haunted 
 Castle near Roscrea, in Co. Tipperary.2 In November he seeks to 
 turn to practical account the supernatural gifts of a lady known to 
 the Professor. A friend ‘who has lost a valuable jewel,’ he says, 
 ‘writes to me to know whether there is any chance of finding her 
 lost treasures by the aid of your Governess at Workington. ‘‘Do you 
 know where the good Governess is and whether I could communicate 
 with her on the subject?” ’ 
 
 But perhaps Stead’s definitive conversion to Spiritualism may be 
 dated from his acquaintance with Miss A. M. Goodrich-Freer (now 
 
 1 ‘Mrs. D. has cut up rough,’ we read on November 28, 1891, ‘and will 
 not experiment any more — has not even replied to my last letter. So her 
 experience is lost.’ 
 
 2 To its owner, a clever and jolly Irishwoman with whom he had already 
 been in correspondence for some time, Stead writes on November 3: ‘Would 
 you object to having your castle disenchanted? ... We might organize a 
 Mission Party to exorcise your Ghosts.’ 
 
38 SOME LETTER-BOOKS 1890-1891 
 
 Mrs. H. H. Spoer),! a psychically gifted lady whose identity was 
 for a long time concealed under the pseudonym ‘Miss X.’ 
 
 An old friend of Stead’s, the Rev. Henry Kendal, of Darlington, 
 had spoken to him of Miss Freer as ‘a depository of endless stores 
 of authentic information as to apparitions’—so Stead writes in his 
 first letter to her on September 7, 1891. A week or two later she 
 has come to London, specially to see him; and he is able to describe 
 her thus to another old friend, a companion of one of his sisters, and 
 — like his sister - inclined to look askance at ‘spooks’: 
 
 ‘I have just lunched with a young lady who has seen five of her 
 relations and friends who have appeared to her at the moment of 
 death. She has also seen an indefinite number of others, and sees in 
 the crystal—in short has a personal practical experience of almost 
 every kind of phenomenal apparition, and is not in the least spoiled 
 by it. She is, I think, about 25, and is devoted to good works; lives 
 in Society, has had a first-class education, and is perfectly self- 
 possessed.’ 
 
 In October and November Stead and Miss Goodrich-Freer are 
 meeting continually in London, and his hurried notes to her indicate 
 something of his swift progress under her tuition. ‘I telepathed 
 madly to you this morning to come at 12 o’clock,’ he writes from his 
 office on November 12; a medium whom she has introduced to him 
 has proved disappointing and he is in a difficulty. On December 15, 
 he sends her a letter from a Father Keating ‘who gives the Catholic 
 Doctrine of the Double.’ . . . Needless to add further illustrations 
 here of this new development — we have already taken note of Stead’s 
 spiritualistic evolution. I shall cite only one more passage —an 
 interesting acknowledgment of Miss Freer’s efficiency. ‘I recognize 
 with great satisfaction,’ he writes to her on December 16, ‘the method- 
 ical neatness with which you do your work, and I heartily wish that 
 you could infuse a little bit of that eminent virtue into my veins.’ 
 
 1 Author of Essays in Psychical Research (1899), and a number of other 
 well-known volumes of great interest. 
 
CHAPTER 18 
 
 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA-HIS BOOK: IF 
 CHRIST CAME TO CHICAGO 
 
 October, 1893 - March, 1894 
 
 ‘It will be most interesting to hear your views about Chicago, which 
 is an extraordinary phenomenon, not less wonderful than Babylon 
 must have seemed to an Envoy from the court of Hezekiah.’ —- From 
 a letter to W. T. Stead from Mr. James Bryce (afterwards Lord 
 Bryce) dated March 17, 1894. 
 
 I 
 STEAD INAUGURATES A SOCIAL REFORM CAMPAIGN IN CHICAGO 
 
 ROM a reading of the very cheerful ‘Open Letter’ written by 
 Stead en route homewards from New York in March, 1894, and 
 printed in the Review of Reviews the following month, no one could 
 suspect that he had been through a period of acute disappointment 
 and deep despondency during the earlier portion of his visit to 
 America. But so it was. For several weeks before his departure he 
 had put his whole soul into a scheme for a new daily paper, and 
 when the news of its complete failure reached him, barely a 
 month later, it was a bitter blow.! He was at that moment in Ottawa, 
 as we shall see, on a visit of a week to Lord and Lady Aberdeen at 
 Government House, having spent a day or two in New York and a 
 fortnight in Chicago. The Chicago fortnight, luckily, was packed 
 full with inspiriting adventures. New York had interested him par- 
 ticularly by some surprising resemblances to St. Petersburg. Chicago, 
 ‘an American Moscow, . . . embowered in trees’ but ‘canopied with 
 a cloud of smoke,’ did more than interest him; it opened out to him 
 an unlooked-for opportunity for strenuous exertion. 
 From the moment of his arrival, Stead threw himself with ardour 
 into the life of the great city, horrified by its present evils, but 
 fascinated by the possibilities of its ultimate destiny. He foresaw in 
 
 1 This scheme was explained and illustrated in a 32-page supplement to 
 the November issue of the Review. Stead’s glowing vision of it, as set forth 
 to an astonished Chicago interviewer, will be found at the end of the book 
 as an appendix. 
 
 39 
 
40 STEADIAS FURS TIVISIT TO AMERICA i803 
 
 it the future centre of the American Republic. The city that stood 
 ‘equidistant between the great lakes system of the North and the 
 immense waterway of the Mississippi and Missouri,’ and which had 
 New York as its only rival, was bound to become the capital of 
 the New World. Unlike New York, which had only an island to 
 live on, and which could not spread beyond its circumscribed 
 area, Chicago promised in time to cover an immense tract of 
 country. It had space enough on the shores of Lake Michigan 
 for the population of ten millions predicted for it when the trans- 
 oceanic canal should be constructed which would enable the steamers 
 of all countries to discharge their cargoes at its wharves. Already 
 Chicago was Queen of the Central and Western States. It seemed 
 to him that if Chicago could mount the crest of the civic revival then 
 rising in America it might be the means of the regeneration of the 
 whole country. 
 
 The moment, he felt, was ripe for action. The hopes born of the 
 World’s Fair, just then brought to a close; the contrasts between the 
 ideals of the ‘White City’ and the hideous realities of the Chicago 
 slums; the increasing labour troubles, illustrated very well by the 
 recent assassination of the Mayor; — everything seemed to point to 
 the need for a new movement of reform. Stead felt he was the man 
 to lead it. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote afterwards, ‘could have been further 
 from my mind than to have undertaken a campaign in Chicago; but 
 I seemed to have plunged into the situation, or to have been led there, 
 with the result that, before I knew where I was, I was appealed to on 
 every side to go forward and preach what came in the end to be a 
 civic crusade against the evils which afflicted the city, and to plead 
 for the union of all honest men against its rogues and boodlers.’ 
 
 The above passage is taken from an article which Stead intended 
 to publish in the Review of Reviews,1 but which was never used. I shall 
 give some more extracts from it. He is dealing with the first of two 
 speeches which he delivered at the Central Music Hall, to a Trades 
 Union Assembly. This was his ‘jumping-off point,’ as he said. He 
 himself called together a second meeting in the Central Music Hall 
 on the same evening: 
 
 ‘I advocated three things: first the establishment of a People’s 
 
 1 An article supplementing the ‘Open Letter’ already mentioned, included 
 in the issue for April 1894. 
 
14 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 41 
 
 Palace and Labour Exchange on the lake front; secondly, an improve- 
 ment in the treatment of the casuals or homeless unemployed; and 
 thirdly, an alliance between labour and religion for the purpose of 
 capturing the political and municipal machine, and creating out of 
 them an instrument of social and civic regeneration. A committee 
 was immediately appointed to take action for the purpose of securing 
 the erection of the People’s Palace on the lake front. At that meeting 
 a scheme was drawn up which met with general approval for the 
 establishment of an institution which would combine all that was 
 most useful in the various institutions of the Old World. Money is 
 scarce in Chicago at present, but there is little doubt that before long 
 some such institute will be established on the vacant site on the lake 
 front. Chicago is singularly deficient from the English standpoint 
 in such institutions. It is almost incredible that such a city, so great 
 and prosperous, should be so miserably devoid of the appliances of 
 civilization as we understand them in the older world. In the whole 
 city there is scarcely a place where you can wash your face excepting 
 a public house. The first public bath was opened shortly before 
 Christmas. No one is permitted to bathe in the lake, there are no 
 coffee palaces, teetotums, or anything of that kind in the whole of 
 the city. There is a public library with four branch reading-rooms 
 and many places of call throughout the city, but as for institutions, 
 such as the People’s Palace and the Polytechnic and the old Mech- 
 anics’ Institutes, there are practically none. The Armour Institute 
 is more of a technical college. ‘The North Western University and 
 the University of Chicago are institutions which in no way meet the 
 needs of the labouring community. The common man in Chicago 
 finds in the Saloon almost the only institution which cares for his 
 material wants. The churches may save his soul, but they take very 
 little account of his body; while they damn the saloon-keeper vigor- 
 ously enough in theory, they allow the saloon-keeper to run the 
 machine pretty much as he pleases, nor do they demean themselves 
 so far as to enter into competition with him on his own ground. The 
 necessity of fighting the saloon by putting something better in its 
 place is beginning to be recognized, however, and one of the most 
 gratifying signs of the times was the launching of the scheme of the 
 People’s Institution in connection with the popular but temporary 
 institution which is carried on on the West Side by Bishop Fallows 
 and the Rev. Dr. Clarke. If such an Institute were established in 
 
42 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 1893 
 
 every one of the thirty-four wards of the city, Chicago would have 
 done something practical towards meeting the great social needs of 
 the labouring population upon whose industry depends so much of 
 her greatness.’ 
 
 Stead proceeds to give a brief account of Hull House, the Toynbee 
 Hall of Chicago, which his brother Herbert had described at some 
 length in the Review of Reviews the year before. He continues: 
 
 ‘The best hope for Chicago is in the multiplication of Hull Houses 
 or branch establishments affiliated with the central institution in 
 all the slum districts of the city. It would be difficult to imagine a 
 greater contrast between the worthless society woman who devotes 
 her days to pleasure and her nights to more or less pleasurable dissi- 
 pation, and the patient, laborious, Christlike work of Miss Jane 
 Addams and her coadjutors in Hull House.’ 
 
 II 
 STEAD’S MESSAGE TO CHICAGO 
 
 We must go to the Chicago Daily Tribune of November 13, 1893, 
 for our account of the first of Stead’s two conferences at the Central 
 Music Hall. The occasion was worthy of a brilliant pen—the pen 
 of a Steevens or a Wells; the Tribune’s report is somewhat bald, but 
 it gives us the main facts. Knowing our Stead, we can imagine how 
 he carried himself upon this unfamiliar scene. His audience, we are 
 told, included preachers and saloon-keepers, gamblers and theo- 
 logical professors and anarchists. 
 
 ‘It was after 3 o’clock when Mr. Stead arrived at the Central Music 
 Hall. The body of the house and the first gallery were crowded 
 already. 
 
 ‘At 3.20 o’clock after the Deasy Sisters had played a couple of 
 selections, Mr. H. Madden, President of the Illinois Federation of 
 Labour, called the meeting to order. Mr. Stead was cheered as he 
 came forward. He clasped his hands, looked upwards, and began to 
 pray: 
 
 *“O Lord, God, our Father, help us this afternoon to understand 
 something of the love that is in the heart of our brother Jesus, and 
 that whosoever does anything to relieve the sorrow of the least of 
 
1894 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 43 
 
 these, His brothers, does it under Him. We ask it for His sake and 
 for their sake. Amen.” 
 
 “Then he said: 
 
 ‘“T am glad to meet you this afternoon and to see that so large a 
 number of representatives of all classes in Chicago have not resented 
 the liberty I have taken in asking them to come together as friends 
 to discuss the question whether, if Christ were to come to Chicago 
 to-day, He would find anything in Chicago that He would wish to 
 have altered.” 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead went on to explain how the Gospel of Humanity in 
 which he believed is outlined by James Russell Lowell, and he 
 quoted from the poem “‘A Parable”’ to illustrate his meaning. Then 
 he continued his address: 
 
 ‘ “Tf you want to study religion in a country you want to study what 
 Christianity has done; do not study it in the cathedrals but in the 
 saloons. We must judge applied Christianity not by splendid cere- 
 monies but by the extent to which it has been able to re-make fallen 
 men and women. Wherever you see the mark of suffering you see 
 the brand of anti-Christ. 
 
 ‘«*Your worst people are the measuring rod by which you measure 
 your Christianity. 
 
 ‘“No, I am not going to rail at Chicago. Chicago is a pretty fair 
 section of mankind. We can match most of your bad points in 
 London. If Christ had come to Chicago this morning He might 
 have said: 
 
 ‘ “Well, in the Old World, swollen hard with centuries of crime, 
 a world grown grey in misery before I was born, there might be 
 some reason for My failure, but here, in a New World, under new 
 social conditions, here with no curse of crooked alley or soil soaked 
 with sewage, with no kings or aristocracy, here I might expect that 
 My work had achieved some measure of success.” ’ 
 
 ‘While you are doing many things nobly,’ Stead went on to tell his 
 listeners, ‘you are doing some things infamously,’ and he proceeded 
 to refer to Chicago ‘scandals and disgraces which even a third-rate 
 town in Europe would be ashamed of.’ 
 
 The Tribune’s report of his speech continues —I give it of course, 
 in a greatly condensed form: 
 
 ‘ “Before anyone can speak with any right to be heard as to the con- 
 
44 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 1893 
 
 dition of human beings, he must do as Christ did and put himself 
 in their place. You cannot live in velvet drawing-rooms and elegant 
 boudoirs and philosophize about the subject. You must go down, 
 down into the depths . 
 
 ‘«JT have been here two weeks. I went to Harrison Street Police 
 Station a week ago and in the underground cells of that disreputable 
 police station —if there is any purpose in you it will not survive 
 another twelvemonth — I found prisoners thrust together in clumps, 
 in cells with but one bed; the rest on the floor. And thus you pig 
 together five, six, eight men to stay all night, the foul to corrupt those 
 who are innocent, the drunken and bestial to make a little hell for 
 their fellows. On the floor outside twenty or thirty men were lying 
 without pillows or covers. They were cheek by jowl with the rakings 
 of the hell of your city. I was told they were tramps. I think it is a 
 disgrace to a civilized country that, because a man is out of work, he 
 should be put to herd with criminals. One of your editors told me 
 that for a tramp the toe of the boot is the proper thing in the day- 
 time and a stone floor the proper thing at night... . 
 
 ‘«‘But I wish to speak of evils in the moral government of the town. 
 Do not think I am here to advocate a general raiding policy on 
 gambling dens, saloons, and other places of bad character. I would 
 rather take my chance at the Day of Judgment with some people 
 who are to be found in such places than with many a man and woman 
 in your churches. I spent this morning talking to a saloon-keeper. 
 (Laughter.) I say I think that saloon-keeper nearer the mark in most 
 things than most of your journalists and preachers. I wish I could 
 quote you the name of this saloon-keeper. He kept his saloon open 
 to-day and last night, and last night he did a big business. Yet I 
 think that man would be a most valuable advisory member of what 
 I should call the practical Church of Christ in Chicago. (Hisses 
 and scattered cheers.) 
 
 ‘“T say the worst enemy of practical work for making the saloon less 
 of a curse are your Temperance people. (Hisses.) There are 6,000 
 odd saloons in Chicago. Perhaps 2,000 of them are run on some 
 pretence of decency. You want to shut them all up. (Voices in the 
 audience: “Yes.’) You will want to until the Day of Judgment at 
 this rate. 
 
 ‘ «Strike hands with the decent saloon-keepers to abolish the worst! 
 You pass laws very slick in Chicago, but you don’t enforce them. 
 
1394 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 45 
 
 You have an ordinance compelling the saloons to close at midnight. 
 I asked my friend, the saloon-keeper, how it happened that some of 
 the saloons remained open all night. He said they were under police 
 protection. (Laughter.) 
 
 *“T do say it is a scandal and a disgrace that the laws are not adminis- 
 tered equally. We should all resolve to remedy this. It is because 
 good people are trying to do too much that they do nothing at all. 
 If I had the commission to try to bring some kind of decency into 
 your saloon system, I should take counsel, not with your temperance 
 people, not with your churches, but with your best saloon-keepers. 
 I should try to get Christian people to realize a saloon man’s ideal, 
 and if I failed I should give up Christianity... . 
 
 ‘ «These are some of the things which I think Christ would object to 
 if He were in Chicago to-day, and in the doing of which you nail Him 
 to the Cross to-night and every night. 
 
 *“T do not know whether the appeal to join forces with other organi- 
 zations has been often made to the churches or not, but it has been 
 made now in your hearing by the President of the State Federation 
 of Labour, and woe, woe, woe be unto you if it meets with no 
 response!” 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead then went on to tell in great detail the story of an un- 
 fortunate woman, and concluded his address with this declaration: 
 
 ‘ “Tf you want to make Chicago a moral place you must get together 
 all the forces which make for righteousness, which make for love.” 
 
 “There was loud applause as Mr. Stead sat down.’ 
 
 A little Welshman named Thomas J. Morgan, well known in 
 Chicago as a Socialist, now delivered a fiery harangue. 
 
 **"The story Mr. Stead tells us (he said) has been used by many 
 thousands in the labour unions of Chicago during the last ten years 
 — the story of the unfortunate working man and working woman, of 
 the underpaid and the unfortunate — the story of the causes that lead 
 to starvation, drunkenness and vice of all kinds. Never before has 
 the story been told with the force and power with which it has been 
 told this afternoon. It is not so much what is said but who says it. 
 We have learned of existing conditions from a man whose honesty 
 and veracity cannot be questioned. The question I ask myself is: 
 How deeply into the hearts and minds of this great city will this 
 blunt, bald, startling exposé of conditions go? Will it receive from 
 
46) STBADISHELRS THVIST TWiOp7A WUE RG Agrso3 
 
 the public press that same ridicule which has followed the many efforts 
 of the labour people of Chicago to bring to the attention of the city 
 the same facts? Will his standing in the journalistic world command 
 their respect or at least their silent acquiescence in the truth of what 
 he says? (Applause.) I am in doubt. I hope with all my heart that 
 his influence and power are so strong that he may reach the eyes 
 and hearts of the people. 
 
 ‘«“What would Christ say if He came here? What crime above all 
 others would He condemn? 
 
 ‘“In my judgment the greatest crime a man can commit is not 
 mentioned in the common law, but exists in our so-called institu- 
 tions. That crime of all crimes is the crime of silence — a silence that 
 has been broken here almost for the first time in the history of our 
 city. 
 
 ‘ “Now the veil has been torn aside, and you members of the G.A.R.., 
 of the Y.M.C.A., of your temperance societies, of your Sons of 
 America, and Daughters of America, have been able to see the 
 skeleton in your closet. (Prolonged applause.) 
 
 ‘“Your labouring men assemble peacefully on the lake front 
 begging for work, and with the strong arm of the law are driven back 
 into their tenement houses, that the visitors who come to see the 
 White City might not see the misery of the Garden City which built 
 it. (Applause.) Here and everywhere the puny voice of those who 
 suffer and have suffered is refused to be heard, is drowned out in 
 one way or another by this awful, hopeless social condition. Shall 
 we hope from this day at least that those who by their work have tried 
 to bring the public mind to a realization of what should be and what 
 is to be done will be heard? After such statements as have been 
 heard from Mr. Stead, will those with whom he now associates have 
 some standing in the community? Will you again lapse into your 
 insecure security? Do you think the upheavals that have forced 
 themselves on your attention from time to time are the last that will 
 come around? Do you believe that under these social conditions 
 here in this free country, in this United States, there are no Anarch- 
 ists, no bombs, no dynamite? Do you not believe some desperate 
 man under the load which you allow to rest upon him will get uneasy 
 and will revolt? Do you not think some man moved by his agony and 
 desperation, will rise and say again: 
 
 ‘“Throttle the law! Kill the law! Stab the law!” ’ 
 
184 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 4 
 
 Morgan was becoming more and more violent. Amid cheers and 
 howls and hisses he ended thus: 
 
 *“Tf you well-to-do people do not listen, will not wake up, you 
 do not know but that, thrown in your midst here, may be, the same 
 as in Barcelona, a desperate man, who, feeling in himself all the 
 injustice that is inflicted on his fellows, will kill, will destroy. This 
 is no fancy picture. ‘The reality exists from day to day everywhere. 
 I only say it to shake you out of your false security. And, if the 
 pleading of Editor Stead in the name of Christ, and for justice, 
 cannot shake you out, may somebody use dynamite to blow you 
 out!’ 
 
 The word ‘dynamite’ created intense excitement, and, as the Chair- 
 man showed himself powerless, Stead had to exert all his authority 
 to control the assembly. It was a mistake, he declared, as soon as he 
 could secure a hearing, to talk of dynamite in Chicago —- the mere 
 mention might act with the force of hypnotism on some man with a 
 homicidal taint in his blood. Let them believe that the way of Jesus 
 Christ was the true way! Let them be content to make known the 
 fact. The fact simply stated would do more than anything else to 
 clear the air and bring about a new social system. 
 
 Of the second Meeting I shall give Stead’s own account from the 
 unpublished document already cited; the Tribune’s report confirms 
 it in every particular. 
 
 ‘At the evening conference I presided myself, and had the great 
 satisfaction of seeing an American audience perfectly willing to be 
 managed by a Chairman who knew his own mind and who was 
 determined to have his own way. It was no easy task keeping in 
 order the great assemblage, crowded and enthusiastic, and consisting 
 of men and women of every description of opinion: for my invitation 
 to the conventional “disreputable” had been somewhat liberally 
 responded to, and I had at least one keeper of a house of ill-fame on 
 the platform !; but I had the great good fortune of carrying the 
 meeting through from first to last without a hitch. Only once, when 
 
 1 Stead had had two or three thousand tickets printed for both meetings, 
 and had entrusted them to a detective agency with instructions to distribute 
 them personally on Saturday night to all the lowest haunts of vice, gaming- 
 halls, saloons and houses of ill-fame in the city. 
 
48 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 1893 
 
 an eloquent speaker, Mr. Jaxon, an Indian half-breed, wished to 
 prolong his remarks beyond the allotted five minutes, did the 
 audience manifest any restiveness. ‘They wanted to hear Jaxon, and 
 I was determined that they should not, as his time was up. They 
 howled at me. I told them that they were perfectly free to vote 
 anyone else into the Chair they pleased, but as long as I was in the 
 Chair I meant to boss that meeting, and thereupon called upon the 
 next speaker. The uproar subsided, and from that time I had no 
 difficulty in putting things through. 
 
 ‘At this evening meeting I expounded the whole doctrine of the 
 Civic Church, setting forth what ought to be done and what might 
 be done in Chicago. I then invited all those who wished to speak to 
 send up their names — I had up on the platform by special invitation 
 one of the Anarchists who had recently been pardoned by Governor 
 Altgeld. Sam Fielden was an old Yorkshire Methodist before he was 
 led away into making violent speeches at the meetings of the Anarch- 
 ists. I was assured by those who knew him that there was no man 
 in Chicago who was more sincerely desirous of promoting the welfare 
 of the community than he was. I had been specially asked by some 
 of his former Methodist companions to give him a breakfast at the 
 hotel, and then had some talk with Governor Altgeld, who had just 
 pardoned him. Fielden was unable to be present at the afternoon 
 meeting owing to the celebration which was taking place that very 
 day at the tombs of the executed Anarchists. But he came in the 
 evening. As soon as I had finished speaking and urging that we were 
 willing to accept all men of every creed and profession, so long as 
 they were honestly desirous of improving the condition of Chicago, 
 I introduced Fielden to the audience, and gave him the right hand 
 of fellowship on the platform. It created no small scandal in the city 
 among those to whom the very name of Anarchist was as a red rag. 
 But I am more than ever convinced that it was the right thing to do, 
 and it served to illustrate my meaning better than anything else 
 that I might have done. Fielden had served his time and been 
 pardoned by the constitutional authorities, he was a good man, 
 zealous for the public welfare, and he had atoned by imprisonment 
 for any mistake into which he might have been led. 
 
 “The conference was prolonged and harmonious, and at its close it 
 was unanimously decided to appoint a nominating committee repre- 
 senting business, labour, the church and philanthropy, with instruc- 
 
94 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA 49 
 
 tions to bring together as speedily as possible the representatives of 
 the best elements in Chicago, with the purpose of ascertaining 
 whether or not a civic federation could or could not be organized 
 which would carry out the ideas which I had set forth in my 
 address. With the appointment of this committee the conference 
 broke up, and the motliest assembly ever got together in the city 
 dispersed.’ 
 
 Next morning Stead left Chicago for Ottawa, via Toronto. 
 
 III 
 BAD NEWS 
 
 By the time Stead reached Ottawa the fate of the daily paper 
 scheme had been decided irrevocably. The chances against it, his 
 manager had written to say, were “1,000 to 1.’ Stead took this terribly 
 to heart just at first. He felt that all his hopes and dreams of useful- 
 ness in London were at an end. The rebuff came at a moment which 
 seemed to him full of menace to Liberalism. England was ‘going to 
 perdition’ and he could not ‘hold the pass’ with a monthly periodical. 
 In an excited letter to Mr. Stout, dated Ottawa, November 16, he 
 declaims a trifle wildly against old associates — against ‘Massingham, 
 Labour and Co.’ in particular; even against his own brother, Herbert, 
 whom he had left in charge of the Review of Reviews, and whom he 
 accuses of ‘savaging Rhodes’ therein. ‘Does Herbert not know,’ he 
 exclaims indignantly, ‘that Rhodes is the ablest and wisest English- 
 speaking man in the whole race?’ 
 
 ‘What would you think,’ he asks Mr. Stout, ‘if I were to decide to 
 start my paper at Chicago instead of in London?’ ‘Might not Chicago 
 be made the centre for the English-speaking race?’ . . . ‘Supposing 
 £200,000 were forthcoming in America?’ ... ‘Would it not be a 
 sign-post?’ 
 
 He ends, however, on the despondent note. ‘I am out of sorts and 
 full of gloom.’ 
 
 Stead’s next letter, dated Government House, Ottawa, November 
 20, is much more optimistic. As the result of too much public speak- 
 ing, indeed, he is physically ‘run down’ and has had to spend his 
 first day at Ottawa in bed, but Lady Aberdeen is taking care of him 
 in every way as though he were ‘a patient in hospital,’ and he and the 
 
 L.S.-— VOL. 1 D 
 
bo SS LEADS OR DRS TWiST ot OFM Bak TE OAsi se 
 
 Review of Reviews are being made much of by everyone from the 
 Governor-General and Prime Minister downwards. 
 
 Two days later he does his best to find in his setback ‘very great 
 reason for gratitude.’ ‘I have,’ he says, ‘had every possible advantage 
 I could have wished to put my ideas fairly before the public, but if 
 the public does not want my ideas, well and good. It is a great thing 
 to get the fact definitely ascertained at a minimum expenditure.’ ‘I 
 have always had a kind of feeling,’ he confesses, however, ‘that I had 
 a certain following in the country and that people did believe in me 
 and did regard it as important that I should have my say. . . . Now 
 we find that that is a mistake, and the discovery, however humiliating 
 to me personally, is not unwelcome. It is at least well to know where 
 you stand.’ ... 
 
 Some people had attributed the failure in some degrees to the bad 
 printing of the specimen number. Stead will not admit this. ‘No, I 
 have no reasons to throw the blame on Byers or anyone else... . 
 The scheme had to sink or swim not upon Byers, but upon me. . 
 
 In other words the National Observer is about right as to my being 
 played out. Imay do some more work elsewhere, but it will not be 
 in Daily Journalism in London.’ 
 
 He then proceeds to reflect sorrowfully and anxiously upon the 
 effects of this failure upon the Reviews of Reviews itself. It is obvious, 
 he says, if there is to be no Daily Paper the elaborate system of 
 indexing and press-cutting which has been carried on hitherto by 
 Miss Hetherington’s Dept. must be dropped, having no longer any 
 raison d’étre1; and there may have to be other reductions in the staff 
 and in expenditure generally. ‘I do not want to shorten sail abruptly 
 so as to throw anyone out of employment. . . . You can discuss the 
 matter with Herbert at leisure, and I hope you will see some way out 
 of it. At present I do not.’ As to his own immediate future he is not 
 troubled, as there seems to be a ‘great demand’ for him in America. 
 ‘I could go on the stump and be welcomed everywhere,’ he declares 
 — ‘in Australia as well as in Canada and the States.’ 
 
 Next day he is in something like his normal spirits again. He is full 
 of the character-sketch which he is doing of the Aberdeens who have 
 been ‘extremely kind’ to him, and he details his future movements: 
 
 4 Miss Hetherington was in control of a department engaged on a very 
 elaborate index to public events, etc., which was intended to become an 
 important feature in the organization of the new paper. 
 
894 STEAD’S FIRST VISIT TO AMERICA ‘51 
 
 Montreal on Saturday night, ‘Toronto on Monday; Niagara, Tuesday; 
 then Chicago once more, ‘to get out my pamphlet,’ Cincinnati, New 
 York and Boston. ‘My love to everybody and tell them not to let 
 their pecker go down because my scheme of a Daily Paper does not 
 commend itself to the public’—this sentence so far, in Willie 
 Stead’s neat, small, upright handwriting: then, in Stead’s own — ‘at 
 the first showing.’ .. . 
 
 ‘It is always good,’ wrote Stead long afterwards, “to expect the best 
 but to prepare for the worst; and when the thing happens which the 
 Destinies have decreed, to make the best of it, but very few are able 
 to say “Hallelujah!” when the will of the Lord has been revealed in 
 the wreck of their hopes.’! 
 
 He had now said ‘Kismet’ —in a week or two he would be saying 
 ‘Hallelujah!’ 
 
 IV 
 HOW STEAD CAME TO WRITE HIS BOOK 
 
 The last week of November found Stead back at Chicago and co- 
 operating with some of its leading men and women to organize a 
 Civic Federation which should cope with all the urgent problems of 
 the moment. A sum of over £40,000 was raised to deal with immed- 
 iate distress. One measure which set the whole town talking was the 
 appointment of a band of 3,000 men, jocularly called Stead’s Brigade, 
 to work on the streets; Stead, borrowing a suit of ragged workman’s 
 clothes and a shovel, worked in a gang of a hundred for three hours. 
 It was bitterly cold, and he exerted himself so violently in his effort 
 to keep warm that afterwards, being kept waiting in a quewe for three- 
 quarters of an hour when the time came for them to deliver up their 
 shovels, he caught a bad chill and was obliged to conclude the 
 experiment that evening. He had intended to sleep, like his mates, 
 in a common lodging-house. ‘It is a curious sensation,’ he reflects, 
 ‘that of walking through the main business streets of a city dressed 
 in rags. I had experienced something of it before when I first went 
 out for exercise with the prisoners in Coalbath-in-the-Fields prison. 
 It is an odd feeling due to the fact that, while you feel that you are 
 not a whit changed in your character, or that you are less worthy of 
 
 1 In the Review of Reviews for April, 1912 in his last ‘Progress of the 
 World.’ 
 
52° STEAD*S (FIRS Tavis ih TOvVAME RT GA its o4 
 
 respect than you were before, at the same time you know that every- 
 one who meets you appraises you, not according to your intrinsic 
 value, but according to the value of the toggery which you have got 
 on.’ 
 
 In due course the Civic Federation came into existence, with Mr. 
 Lyman J. Gage as President, and Mrs. Potter-Palmer, and Mr. J. 
 McGrath, a prominent Labour Leader, as Vice-Presidents. 
 
 Committees were appointed under the heads, Municipal, Philan- 
 thropic, Industrial, Educational and Social, Moral Reform and 
 Political Action; and they all got to work at once. The only definite 
 programme so far — so Stead says — was the almost revolutionary one 
 ‘that no scoundrel need apply for the position of Alderman of the 
 City of Chicago.’ — ‘ ““The Civic Federation of Chicago,” up to the 
 present moment,’ declared Stead in March 1894, ‘is the best and 
 most complete realization of the ideal of the Civic Church for which 
 I have pleaded so often. The conception of that Federation in such 
 a city and at such a period was well worth all the time I spent at 
 Chicago.’ 
 
 We cannot follow Stead in detail through all his Chicago doings — 
 an account of them is embodied in the famous book which he now 
 began to write: how in a ten minutes’ speech at a Ladies’ Club he 
 ‘stated the obvious fact that the idle and worthless rich were in- 
 finitely more disreputable than the lowest prostitutes,’ a remark 
 treated by local pressmen as a sensational attack upon leading 
 members of Chicago Society and telegraphed as such all over the 
 world; how he summoned to a conference held at Willard Hall ‘every 
 minister of religion described as such in the Directory of Chicago,’ 
 in order that all the city’s churches might be formed into one unit; 
 how he then endeavoured, with a success which he says exceeded 
 his hopes, to bring about co-operation between the ministers of 
 religion and the working men; and how he helped to secure the 
 election of an ideal Mayor of Chicago in Mr. John Patrick Hopkins, 
 writing eight separate leaflets on his behalf and circulating 500,000 
 copies of them. 
 
 Here are the two concluding paragraphs of the hitherto unprinted 
 article by Stead from which so many sentences have been cited above: 
 
 ‘Looking back on the whole of my visit, I have every reason to be 
 grateful and pleased with the use I was able to make of my time in 
 
inenieie Pare toto. Vote bOrAM ERT CA. 83 
 
 the city of Chicago. Whether or not Chicago will ever become the 
 ideal city of the world is for the future to say; certainly she, more 
 than any other city, has the opportunity at her feet. She is not laden 
 down by any damnosa hereditas of the blunders and crimes of the 
 past; her citizens are full of a boundless élan, and full of faith in the 
 destiny of their city. They have a position of unique prominence in 
 the heart of the New World. They have the incentive of the aspira- 
 tion of the World’s Fair; they have at their head a young and capable 
 chief magistrate, who has set himself against the worst evils which 
 afflict city life in America. It seems to me that nowhere on the whole 
 of the earth’s surface, for one of my ideas and aspirations, could I 
 have been more profitably employed than I was in Chicago in the 
 winter of 1893-94. 
 
 ‘I have not referred at all in these two papers to the chief literary 
 memorial of my stay in Chicago. Instead of bringing out a pamphlet, 
 as I had contemplated, containing the report of the speeches delivered 
 at the conferences at the Central Music Hall, I wrote a book of 
 nearly 500 pages published at 2s. (50 cents), entitled If Christ came 
 to Chicago. In this book I have stated, with such clearness and 
 emphasis as I am capable of, what it seems to me Christ would think 
 if He came to Chicago, and what He would endeavour to do.’ 
 
 1 English readers who have not visited Chicago or followed the progress of 
 the city of recent years will like to know to what extent Stead’s ardour and 
 energy bore fruit. Here is what Mr. Hal O’Flaherty, European Manager 
 of the Chicago Daily News, has to say on the subject: 
 
 ‘Many of the Chicagoans whom Stead inspired thirty years ago have de- 
 voted their lives to civic improvements and are still working along the lines 
 which he advocated in those Music Hall Meetings. His dream of a great 
 civic centre on the Lake front has been more than fulfilled. On new land, 
 created by filling in the foreshore, have been built a sports ground and open- 
 air theatre of classic beauty, and an institute of art, renowned the world over. 
 The University of Chicago and the Armour Institute of Technology have 
 grown with the city, the University having now nearly 14,000 students and 
 the Institute 1,000. In place of the ill-kept streets of Stead’s time, Chicago 
 now boasts of 32 miles of boulevards and 842 acres of parks, Lincoln Park 
 alone covering over 500 acres. While the city’s population has not yet 
 reached the figure anticipated by Stead, its rate of growth indicates that it 
 will some day be close to ten million. At present there are 2,701,000 people 
 residing in Chicago, an increase of 1,600,000 since 1890, making it the 
 fourth largest city in the world.’ 
 
CHAPTER 19 
 
 STEAD IN HIS FORTIES-SOME IMPRESSIONS AND 
 MEMORIES 
 
 M™ impressions and memories of Stead during those early 
 years of the Review of Reviews are available. I shall string a 
 few of them together. They will enable us to visualize him as he was 
 in his ‘Forties’: his bushy beard with less colour in it now, but not yet 
 grey enough to justify anyone in addressing him as ‘Grandpa Stead’ 
 —a title to be conferred on him, he used to complain laughingly, 
 before he reached fifty-five. 
 
 An American journalist, Mr. Frank Carpenter, in the course of an 
 article in the Washington Evening Star for December 24, 1892, gave 
 as lifelike a picture of Stead in his editorial office at Mowbray House 
 as I have seen anywhere: 
 
 ‘I sent in my letters of introduction (writes Mr. Carpenter) and 
 a moment later I was seated in his workshop. This is a big room 
 which looks out on the River Thames, and every part of which is 
 packed with individuality and ideas. Upon its doors in letters of 
 brass are printed the words, “The Sanctum.” Its walls are covered 
 with photographs, and upon the mantel over the open fire were many 
 portraits of the most famous men and women of the times. Among 
 these were the lean intellectual face of John G. Whittier, the kind 
 fatherly countenance of Walt Whitman, and the cultured features of 
 James Russell Lowell. Over the doors of the office were texts of the 
 Scriptures, and between the windows was a roller-top desk which 
 was littered with manuscripts, and near it a wide divan which was 
 also covered with papers of various kinds. A large bust of Cardinal 
 Manning looked down from the top of the desk and, as I entered, 
 Mr. Stead rose from a chair in front of it and took my hand. He at 
 once plunged into business with me, and in five minutes he told me 
 more about London than I had been able to learn in the week I had 
 spent in trying to find out about things before coming to him. He 
 is more like an electric dynamo in clothes than any man I know. He 
 talks like lightning, and a blaze of intellectual sparks follow his words. 
 He looks more like a practical American Methodist preacher than a 
 London Uittérateur. He is plain in his dress and habits. His soft 
 brown hat is crushed in at the top, and his snuff-coloured suit of 
 
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SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 55 
 
 business clothes looked as though their owner had been on a roughing 
 tour and had just got home. He talks more like an American than an 
 Englishman. He has no cockneyisms or anglicisms in his conversa- 
 tion. He never says “You know,” and the only English slang I 
 noticed in his talk was the word “blooming,” by which he would now 
 and then refer to some people whom he held in contempt as “‘the 
 whole blooming set.” He is, I judge, about five feet seven inches high, 
 and he weighs about 150 pounds. He hasa florid complexion, bright 
 blue eyes and a bushy, reddish-brown beard. His hair is combed up 
 from a high, broad and full forehead, and he stoops a little in his 
 shoulders. He laughs easily, and tells a story as well as he writes it.’ 
 
 Stead took Mr. Carpenter out to lunch at one of his favourite 
 restaurants in the Strand, either the still popular Gatti’s or else 
 Gatti and Rodesano’s (now extinct), and there they continued the con- 
 versation. Stead seems to have been in one of his most exultant moods, 
 We have seen how dissatisfied he was to become with the Review 
 of Reviews — how inadequate and altogether futile he was to find it 
 as a political organ. At this date —- or at all events, on this occasion — 
 he was all for the monthly as against either the daily or the weekly: 
 
 “The daily (he assured his guest) has such a short life that its area 
 of influence must be a limited one. It dies the day it is born, and it 
 can never reach the world at large. The weekly extends further, but 
 its news is also transient in its character. The daily is a revolver. It 
 is good for six shots at a short range, and it does its works admirably. 
 The weekly is like a rifle. Its range is longer, but it is effective for 
 that distance only. The monthly is the modern cannon. It carries 
 500-pound shots for miles, and when they go forth the atmosphere 
 of the whole earth quivers. Our field in the Review of Reviews I 
 conceive to be that of the English-speaking people of the world, and 
 our end and aim is to bring these people close to one another.’ 
 
 And he proceeded to descant on this favourite theme of his — the 
 necessity for bringing the whole English-speaking world into one 
 great union. Mr. Carpenter objected that the governments of the 
 United States and the British Empire were so different that such a 
 union was hardly possible: 
 
 “There is not so much difference as there seems to be (replied 
 Stead); the whole world is coming nearer every year to the level 
 
56 SEA DMIN Wis £EO RE rEs 
 
 of republicanism and self-government. We are rapidly approaching 
 itin England. The fact that we have a Queen and a royal family does 
 not affect the matter. They are of no special influence. They have 
 their place. They are ornamental figures on our governmental tables, 
 but they affect the feast no more than the bouquets with which you 
 ornament your tables at home. They are merely a detail, and they 
 have little to do with the government.! 
 
 We may picture Stead thus occupied at least two or three mornings 
 in every week, with some American or Colonial or Continental 
 visitor, or some colleague on the London or Provincial Press, or some 
 political ally or intimate personal friend, - a woman at least as often 
 as a man: first, a colloquy at the office, interrupted by telephone 
 messages and a hundred other things; then, a walk to one or other of 
 those two Strand restaurants, or to the Criterion perhaps, a leisurely 
 lunch and unlimited disputation. Lunch-time was almost the only 
 time when Stead escaped from hustle. He was neither gourmet nor 
 glutton, but he took his glass of stout and he smoked cigars, and was 
 unfailingly cheerful and convivial. He no longer ruled out wine on 
 principle, but he drank it seldom and sparingly. 
 
 Here is another aspect. It is from a reminiscence contributed in 1912 
 to East and West by Miss M. Burnett, a lady who served under him 
 for nearly twenty years. She has mentioned that when he started the 
 Review of Reviews Stead was a man of forty: 
 
 ‘Even by this time (she writes) the strenuous work he had already 
 gone through on the Pall Mall Gazette, had robbed his looks of 
 much of their freshness. Doing the work daily of three men, though 
 he did not feel it hard work, yet allowed him very often short com- 
 mons of sleep and rest, which early told on his looks and made him 
 look old before his time. Indeed, but for another of Nature’s kind 
 gifts he could not have pulled through such continued fatigues as he 
 gave himself, but when utterly worn out from lack of sleep, he could, 
 when his portion of work was done, lie down on the top of a table, 
 and without pillow or any easement, fall sound asleep for an hour and 
 rise up as fresh as a lark, for any further effort.’ 
 
 To his staff, Miss Burnett declares, Stead was all kindness and 
 
 1 As a rule Stead was disposed rather to magnify the importance of Royalty 
 in the British Empire. 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 57 
 
 consideration, and consequently he was much beloved, but he was by 
 no means a careless task-master: 
 
 “No! far from it. He was such a hard master himself and so thorough 
 in all he did, that the staff were stimulated to do their work in the 
 same effective manner. A good example is worth pounds of rules 
 and regulations and fines for negligence, which so many superficial 
 employers seem to resort to, in order to get what they consider to be 
 the best out of their employees. It is a great mistake —- human nature 
 will never do its best under coercion. Hard work requires cheerful- 
 ness and confidence. Goodwill at the top is responded to by goodwill 
 at the bottom, which keeps the wheel of life turning steadily and well. 
 This Mr. Stead always realized, and he made it his rule of action.’ 
 
 One matter in regard to which he felt very strongly was the import- 
 ance for everybody of keeping well au courant with the public affairs 
 of the day. ‘Not read to-day’s papers!’ he exclaimed once to a member 
 of his staff who had made this admission, ‘No, no, that will never do! 
 Whatever else you may leave undone it must never be the reading of 
 the daily papers.’ He discussed the contents of the papers with all 
 his assistants, Miss Burnett says, in the most liberal-minded manner: 
 
 “He never expected his staff to agree with him because he was their 
 chief, or because he was endowed by nature with unusual ability. 
 An honest opinion was agreeable and interesting to him. These dis- 
 cussions were a great enjoyment to his staff, and a form, no doubt, 
 of education in the practice of reasoning.’ Perhaps Mr. Stead looked 
 on his staff as specimens of the outside public, to whom editors are 
 always ready to lend an ear. 
 
 The genial friendliness which marked the intercourse of the great 
 mind with his staff, pervaded the staff itself and made the office a 
 
 very happy place. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Among Stead’s most intimate associates in the early nineties was 
 Dr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Lunn, the founder of the famous Grindel- 
 wald Conference, who had seen something of him in Dublin at the 
 time of the ‘No Reductions, No Rent!’ campaign in 1886. Since then, 
 Dr. Lunn had been a Medical Missionary in India. In 1890, he had 
 returned home and had written some articles which had provoked an 
 angry controversy in the Wesleyan Missionary world. This led up 
 
58 STEAD SUN AHS TORE S 
 
 to a friendship with Stead which proved life-long, and which was par- 
 ticularly close in 1891 and 1892. Sir Henry Lunn has many stories 
 to tell of Stead’s doings and sayings during this period. ‘The first of 
 these is connected with the Missionary controversy above mentioneds 
 
 ‘In view of the temper of Methodist opinion on the subject (writes 
 Sir Henry) I foresaw that ‘my resignation would be made inevitable. 
 I wrote to Stead, and he replied, ““Don’t trouble about these things; 
 it is God’s way of stirring us up at times when we need it. Never 
 strike sail toa fear. Come and lunch with me at the Criterion.” With 
 that boundless generosity which he always manifested towards 
 anyone who was fighting the battles he cared for, he arranged that 
 we should write a syndicated letter over the signatures W. T’. Stead 
 and H. S. Lunn, and that I should undertake the business manage- 
 ment of the syndicate and write at such times when he was busy, and 
 on such questions as he did not wish to take up, and divide the 
 proceeds equally. It was a most generous arrangement. He was then 
 the most eminent journalist of the day. I was comparatively unknown. 
 Twenty papers accepted our weekly letter, and I was privileged for 
 fifteen months to work in the closest comradeship with him. I suppose 
 that, with him, any fifteen months would have been full of incident, 
 but these months were at the very high-water mark of his career.’ 
 
 Here is another story, dating probably from the summer of 1893, 
 when the Daily Paper project was so much on Stead’s mind: 
 
 ‘Some time during this period, I forget exactly when, he went over 
 to Paris. He was at that time waiting for the millionaire who he felt 
 convinced would come along and provide the necessary half-million 
 for him to start a great daily paper. When he came back he said to 
 me, ‘“‘I went in to Notre Dame to have a talk with God, when an 
 overwhelming sense came over me of the greatness of the task to 
 which I was called with this Review of Reviews (then at the height of 
 its success) and the Daily Paper. I felt so crushed that I said to God, 
 “Is this not putting too many eggs in one basket?” 
 
 ‘In this sense of the nearness of God, Mr. Stead had much in 
 common with those old Puritans of whom Macaulay said that, 
 “Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Almighty through an 
 obscuring veil, they aspired . . . to commune with Him face to face.” ’ 
 
 And here is an example of Stead’s wonderful responsiveness and 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 59 
 
 generosity — I shall follow it up with another which I have also at 
 first hand: 
 
 ‘A characteristic incident of a different kind that occurred during 
 that year was when I introduced him to a young lady novelist 
 at the very beginning of her career. I remember laying the story 
 before him as follows: “This young lady is the sister of a missionary 
 I knew in India. She has come to you to know if you can give her 
 some typewriting, because it is quite impossible for her to work at 
 home in consequence of the distractions of home life, and the fact 
 that there are two or three invalids in the family.” 
 
 ‘He went out and spoke to her, and said, “‘What are the facts?” 
 
 ‘She replied, “I have written one novel which has secured for me 
 an order from Heinemann for another novel, and an order for a third 
 novel from one of the Dundee papers.” 
 
 ‘He looked at her for a minute, and said, “It is like putting a race- 
 horse to a plough to put you to a typewriter.” 
 
 ‘Returning to me, he said, “‘You are quite sure it is a genuine case?”’ 
 and I assured him that it was so. He went out again (and it must be 
 remembered that at that time he was by no means a rich man), and 
 said, ‘‘ How much do you want?” 
 
 ‘She replied, ‘Thirty shillings a week for a year.” 
 
 ‘ “All right,” he said. “That is £80. I will let you have it. Pay me 
 back as soon as you can.” Within two years one of her novels was 
 reviewed by Gladstone, and her success was assured. 
 
 “This is the kind of incident which explains why to-day hundreds 
 of people, if not thousands, all over the world are lamenting the loss 
 of one who, in some crisis of their life’s history, proved a real and 
 true friend to them.’ 
 
 The young novelist was Miss Annie Holdsworth, author of those 
 remarkable books: Foanna Traill, Spinster, and The Years that the 
 Locusts have Eaten.’ 
 
 It was in 1891 that Stead made the acquaintance of Miss Elizabeth 
 Robins, distinguished then as an interpreter of Ibsen’s characters, 
 more widely known now through her own play, ‘Votes for Women,’ 
 and her many brilliant novels. Miss Robins’s friendship with Stead 
 began by his giving her his book about Ober-Ammergau and letters of 
 introduction to some of the performers in the Passion Play. She did 
 more than anybody else to overcome his prejudice against the ordinary 
 
60 STEAD “IN “HDS “PORES 
 
 theatre, as we shall see presently. ‘The few lines which she has been so 
 kind as to write for me refer to a later period, but I include them here 
 as a striking pendant to Sir Henry Lunn’s story of Miss Holdsworth: 
 
 ‘All the world knows that Mr. Stead was the most stimulating of 
 companions. I never knew any being more generous-minded. With 
 all his simplicity there was a touch of magic in the man. In his 
 company the unattainable drew near and beckoned like a friend. I 
 suppose I should hardly have made a journey to Ober-Ammergau but 
 for him, and I should certainly not have gone to the Klondyke. Why 
 was I depressed, he insisted, one day in 1900, and I found myself tell- 
 ing him my sore anxiety about my youngest brother who had gone to 
 the North in the Gold Rush of ’97, and now for nearly a year had made 
 no sign; how I would give everything in the world to try at least to 
 find him and bring him home. ‘‘Why not?” he said, as though I had 
 expressed a wish to cross the Strand. I glanced at the “greater 
 outlay” than I could undertake - But he would make some paper 
 give me a commission to write a series of letters from the new Gold 
 Fields! He did this of course — when did he ever fail anybody? But 
 he himself advanced the necessary funds. The letters were only 
 begun, for I found typhoid fever out there as well as the object of 
 my quest and was ill for so long that by the time I found some 
 strength my “‘news” was news no longer. But I wrote “The Mag- 
 netic North” and I think my friend was content. I can only say that 
 he stands apart in my grateful memory.’ 
 
 * * * 
 
 Yet another very celebrated novelist dates her friendship with Stead 
 from the early ’nineties. The Heavenly Twins was the great literary 
 success of the spring of 1893, thanks in no small measure to Stead’s 
 keen interest in it and its author, Sarah Grand. A brief notice of it 
 appeared in the Review of Reviews before Stead himself had made 
 acquaintance with the first of its three volumes — the three-decker 
 period of publishing was not yet ended. He began to read it aloud to 
 his wife of an evening, and very soon found that he had come upon a 
 writer of quite unusual mark. Many critics of distinction — Stopford 
 Brooke among them —had already made this discovery, and the 
 novel was being widely talked about, but not until Stead came back 
 to it in the Review of Reviews in April, making it the ‘book of the 
 month,’ and discoursing of it with even more than his usual zest, — 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 6:1 
 
 acclaiming it enthusiastically for its singular merits while ‘going for’ 
 what seemed to him its glaring faults,— did the book and author 
 attain their full fame. Not content with this, Stead wrote a vigorous 
 reply to a hostile criticism of the ‘Twins’ in the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 Mr. Cust, who was editing the paper this year in his clever, slap-dash 
 fashion, welcomed this communication from its former’ editor — his 
 first contribution to it since 1889 — and allowed it to become a starting- 
 point for a hot controversy in which Mr. Haldane McFall, Mme 
 Sarah Grand’s stepson, broke a lance very gallantly and creditably 
 on her side. 
 
 By this time, of course, Stead and Mme Sarah Grand were in 
 correspondence. In fact, on April 13, we find Stead claiming that 
 he and she are in supernatural communication also. ‘You have 
 written with my hand very curiously,’ he tells her in a short letter, 
 ‘and by no means so kindly as you have written with your own hand.’ 
 Soon they are close friends — real affinities. ‘Why did you not tell 
 me what the thrill was that you got out of the book?’ he asks her on 
 April 22, alluding to his Christmas Number for 1892, of which she 
 has spoken, ‘and what the idea was which is to serve as a point of 
 union between us?’ Two very interesting letters follow on April 26 
 and April 28. They are full of self-revelation, so illustrative of 
 Stead’s unconventional frankness and active kindness, and eagerness 
 to be of use, that I am particularly glad to have permission to repro- 
 duce passages from them here. Mme Sarah Grand remembers 
 that she had been ‘in the dumps’ just then — an experience which 
 comes at times to most of us and one from which Stead, as we know, 
 was not exempt — and that she had been declaring that life had lost 
 all interest for her: Stead recommends to her the best and most 
 efficacious cure for the malady —forgetfulness of one’s self and 
 absorption in the needs of others. 
 
 With the first of the two letters — beginning ‘My dear Friend,’ as 
 do most of these which follow — he sends her a copy of the little book 
 on Mrs. Josephine Butler, the first half of which he wrote while in 
 Holloway Gaol. Will she read it? There are some pages in it which 
 may be to her a message from the depths or the heights — more helpful 
 to her than anything else he has ever written. ‘So I commend them 
 to you,’ he continues, ‘with the affectionate solicitude with which a 
 father throws a life-belt to his daughter, who is struggling in the 
 trough of the sea. It may be useless to you: I cannot say; I am not 
 
62 STEAD IN HIS FORTIES 
 
 infallible, and you are not frank with me, but it seemed to me, when I 
 first met you, and it seems to me still that these pages will bring you 
 and me into closer sympathy than we have hitherto been, and may be 
 to you a word spoken in season that may be helpful to your soul.’ In 
 the conclusion, he talks of the splendid work which Mrs. Andrews 
 and Dr. Kate Bushnell had been doing in India. If she were to read 
 about their achievements, he tells her, she could not but begin again 
 to take an interest in life. 
 
 The second letter is equally stimulating in a livelier vein. Sarah 
 Grand knows him, he declares, but he does not know Sarah Grand, 
 because she is afraid to confide in him fully. Until she does so he 
 will never be able to be of much real service. ‘You wear a yashmak,’ 
 he says to her, ‘whereas I take my walks abroad without even the 
 thinnest of veils. Your letters always give me a sense of great sad- 
 ness, a kind of hopeless feeling that comes when you see a poor bird 
 with a broken wing trying to fly. The gap between you and Mrs. 
 Butler will have to be bridged before you find yourself and are 
 yourself. Nobody should have more hell-fire under his boiler than 
 is necessary for the generating of the steam with which he does his 
 work in the world. In your case, you keep stoking up the fire, but 
 you provide no outlet for the steam. You will burst your boiler some 
 day if you do not change.’ 
 
 The friendship thus pleasantly begun lasted throughout Stead’s life- 
 time. Some day Mme Sarah\Grand herself may tell us more about it. 
 
 * o * 
 
 There is no one in the literary world of London whose acquaint- 
 ance with the modern history of the English Press can quite compare 
 with that of the late Sir William Robertson Nicoll, LL.D., founder 
 of the British Weekly and the Bookman, and so widely known by his 
 own writings over the two pseudonyms ‘Claudius Clear’ and ‘A Man 
 of Kent.’ Dr. Robertson Nicoll knew Stead well and, in a long 
 obituary sketch printed in the British Weekly after the loss of the 
 Titanic, had many interesting things to say about him. Here I shall 
 
 transcribe only a single passage, with a story in it which is delight- 
 fully Stead-like: 
 
 “There was about him what might be called an apocalyptic element, 
 and he indulged it to the full. Dreams kept chasing dreams in his 
 mind, plans for catastrophic discoveries in medicine, in science, in 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 63 
 
 religion, in cures for cancer, pink and white remedies warranted to 
 do anything, plans for the fertilization of the soil or for extracting 
 gold from sea water. Above all, he surrendered himself absolutely to 
 Spiritualism. On this subject, and on this subject only as far as I 
 know him, he was intolerant. “It is shameful,” he once wrote to me, 
 “that a Christian journalist should refuse to study the only proof of 
 Christianity that can be offered to the human mind.” He himself was 
 a truly religious man. “I am,” he would often say, ‘‘a sinner saved by 
 grace, and that is my creed.’”’ But I think he wanted more tangible 
 evidence. He was “‘sick of believing, sick to see and know.” 
 
 “When the Review of Reviews was at the height of its popularity, Mr. 
 Stead once sent for me, saying he wished to see me on most important 
 business. I went to his office and he began: 
 
 ‘You know the Review of Reviews is booming.” 
 
 Yes,’ T replied. 
 
 ““T have been thinking of commencing a religious Review of 
 Reviews, and I have resolved to do it if you will go halves with me.” 
 
 “Have you thought of a title?” I asked. 
 
 ‘ “Ves, Gesta Christi is the title.” 
 
 *“T don’t like it,” I said. 
 
 *“No,” he replied; “Mrs. Besant doesn’t like it.” 
 
 ““What has Mrs. Besant to do with it?” I asked. 
 
 *““Oh, Mrs. Besant, of course, will do the Labour Department.” 
 
 * “Have you any other ideas?” I asked. 
 
 *“Yes, if you go in for it, I will start immediately for Rome to get 
 the co-operation of the Pope. That is an absolute necessity.”’ 
 
 Was there ever anybody else in the world, one wonders, who managed 
 to have Mrs. Besant and the Pope thus simultaneously on the brain! 
 
 Stead had Mrs. Besant on the brain at most times. His unswerving 
 belief in her and his untiring championship of her are constantly in 
 evidence. A letter to him from Lady Aberdeen, dated December 26, 
 1891, affords a very interesting illustration of this. Lady Aberdeen 
 can at no period of her life have been thought narrow-minded or given 
 over to unreasonable prejudices, but in common with the immense 
 majority of people in those days she had been under a misapprehen- 
 sion as to Mrs. Besant’s antecedents and character. Now she has met 
 this heroine of Stead’s for the first time, returning to England from 
 Canada: 
 
64 STEAD IN HIS FORTIES 
 
 ‘And do you know (Lady Aberdeen writes) who was one of our 
 fellow-passengers? Mrs. Besant! Do you remember once upon a 
 time my venturing to suggest that you should not put her name quite 
 to the forefront of the writers for The Morning Paper? + May I 
 apologize for that suggestion? I did not know Mrs. Besant then. I 
 am glad to think that I know her a little now and I feel as if I knew 
 her a great deal better than many people whom I am supposed to 
 know. I entirely understand the feeling that you have expressed to 
 me about her. 
 
 ‘Several of the passengers, headed by Mr. Atkinson, M.P., asked 
 her to give a lecture one evening in the saloon, which she did. 
 Aberdeen took the chair, and the impression made by her sole and 
 intensely earnest and stirring address was very remarkable. The 
 smoking-room contingent who gathered out of curiosity left awed and 
 solemnized, and indeed I think that all present felt that they had but 
 rarely heard so powerful a sermon, uttered too with so unmistakable 
 and intense a conviction of the message to be delivered being divine. 
 
 ‘What happiness it is to recognize that message coming to divers 
 spirits in divers forms but ever bearing the one stamp of its origin, 
 and how inspiring it is to be brought into contact with one more of 
 the powers which are making for righteousness and the coming of 
 His Kingdom!’ 
 
 * * % 
 
 If this bundle of sketches of Stead in his Forties would have been 
 incomplete without Dr. Robertson Nicoll’s reminder of his fads and 
 hobbies, his will-o’-the-wisps and white elephants, it would be still 
 more seriously at fault without some allusion to what may be called the 
 minor ‘side-shows’ of the Review of Reviews. Miss A. E. Lawrence, 
 who, like Miss Burnett, was for many years a highly valued member 
 of his editorial staff, has been good enough to favour me with the 
 very interesting notes which follow: 
 
 ‘Some of these “‘side-shows” have developed into permanent insti- 
 tutions. Take for instance the “‘Scholar’s International Correspond- 
 ence.” In 1895 a letter reached Mr. Stead from a French school- 
 master, M. Mieille, then of Draguignan, to be wellknown later in 
 connection with touring in the Pyrenees. M. Mieille wrote that those 
 
 1 In 1890 this was the title Stead had in mind. Later he changed it to 
 The Daily Paper. 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 65 
 
 of his scholars who corresponded with English pupils were greatly 
 helped in learning the foreign tongue by this means, and suggested 
 that Mr. Stead should co-operate with a French Magazine in the 
 organization of international correspondence. Mr. Stead, who had 
 interested his readers in the ‘‘Gouin” method, saw at once the utility 
 of the scheme, and entrusted the organization to an English teacher. 
 London teachers scoffed; indeed one Head of a great secondary 
 school went so far as to say that of all the wicked schemes planned 
 by Mr. Stead this of putting virtuous English boys in touch with 
 vicious foreign lads was the worst! Scotch teachers, however, took 
 to the plan at once, and as few French girls were ready to take part 
 at first, allowed Scotch girls to correspond with the superabundant 
 French boys. The scheme rapidly developed, educationalists of other 
 countries joined in, many happy intimacies were formed, visits were 
 exchanged and a little Annual in four languages was carried on for 
 two or three years; the whole of the heavy costs being borne by Mr. 
 Stead. When, after his death, there was no one to finance the organi- 
 zation, the matter had become so important that Government 
 Authorities instituted a Normal School exchanges, and the Modern 
 Language Association took over the Scholars’ Correspondence and 
 the Exchange of Homes. 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead’s “Baby Adoption” scheme originated in similar fashion. 
 A lady wrote of her longing desire for a little one to care for; and soon 
 affairs were in trim for such wants to be supplied. Lists of homeless 
 ones were printed in the Review of Reviews, and Miss Burnett 1 entered 
 into the scheme with enthusiasm. After a time, however, it was 
 found that although the results were often delightful, the difficulties 
 were too great for Mr. Stead’s resources; a home to receive and care 
 for the children whilst waiting was needed, some people wanted to 
 have a child “‘on trial,” now and again a mother found herself in better 
 circumstances and wanted her child back; and so, reluctantly, the plan 
 was given up. But the pioneer work was not useless; some children 
 found happy homes, some husbands and wives a new interest in life, 
 and later workers have profited by Miss Burnett’s experiences. 
 
 “The promotion of Village Libraries was another interest. Mr. 
 Stead established a central depot in London and appointed an 
 organizing secretary. Lists of books were sent out for discussion and 
 approval; strong boxes were made, and in many villages one person 
 
 1 The lady whose memories have been printed on a previous page. 
 Lav Ole LE E 
 
66 STEAD VUNG HTS) FOR TIES 
 
 became responsible for the distribution and return of the books. In 
 one such village the arrival of the new box was eagerly awaited and 
 it proved a great success, many of the villagers paying the tiny sub- 
 scription. But the costs were much heavier than was anticipated, and 
 the subscription could not be raised. It was, by the way, at Mr. 
 Stead’s instigation that boxes had begun to be placed outside railway 
 stations into which the newspapers and other literature could be 
 dropped, volunteer helpers clearing the boxes and conveying the 
 contents to the local hospitals. Of course Wimbledon was the first 
 to be thus supplied and Mr. Stead’s eldest son, Willie, then a boy, 
 was an eager worker. This system, which dated from Pall Mall 
 Gazette days, still survives, but the later Village Library Club had 
 to be discontinued. 
 
 “The English-Speaker’s Correspondence Club had a much longer 
 life. Himself a member of a happy family circle, Mr. Stead always 
 sympathized heartily with the lonely folk of the world, especially 
 those in large towns and far-off lands. Individual readers of the 
 Review of Reviews were put into communication with persons of 
 similar tastes. ‘The usual plan was for each correspondent to be 
 known by a number. 
 
 ‘Envelopes were addressed to the number, not to the name, of the 
 chosen acquaintance: these letters were sent to the London centre, 
 and were then passed on by the Secretary to the proper recipient. 
 Thus letters could be exchanged even for years without the writers 
 becoming acquainted personally. Later the Little Quarterly, the 
 Round About, provided an outlet for many solitary thinkers, the 
 object of the Club being to bridge the gulf which divides so many 
 who might have thought in common. 
 
 “The Cambridge House Garden-Parties — another of Mr. Stead’s 
 benevolent experiments — had a variety of uses. One gathering was 
 utilized in amusing fashion. The people gathered on the Lawn 
 belonged chiefly to Friendly Societies or Brotherhoods. Mr. Stead 
 wanted guidance in the choice of pictures to be presented with his 
 Christmas Annual. So a hundred or more specimen pictures were 
 hung on ropes around the tennis court and each person was given 
 twelve beans and asked to vote on the pictures by dropping a bean 
 into a bag beneath the picture preferred. 
 
 ‘Several young people in the Wimbledon neighbourhood were 
 leaving school, and the question came up “How should interest in 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 67 
 
 their studies be kept up?”’ So, as there were young folks in the Stead 
 household, it was decided to have a fortnightly meeting at which 
 each member should perform a new piece of music, or recite a poem, 
 or relate an experience, etc. etc., Mr. Stead’s only stipulation being 
 that the sexes should be equal. Suburban places are always hotbeds 
 of cliques. When tea should be announced, how should the boys and 
 girls be paired? Mr. Stead had no difficulty: he called for a drawing- 
 board and couples whose height was even went into tea together. 
 The laughter excited by this novel method did away with all the 
 stiffness, and the meeting thus inaugurated with fun and laughing, 
 was the first of many happy gatherings. 
 
 “The use of Mr. Stead’s private rooms in the Review of Reviews 
 offices by workers who could not afford to pay for a meeting-place 
 was yet another boon, as many grateful letters gave proof. For 
 instance, the Head Mistress of a Board School in the North of 
 London desired to keep in touch with her girls when they left at an 
 age at which advice and sympathy were so much needed. This lady 
 was enabled to form a little club, the members of which met one 
 Saturday every month in ‘The Sanctum.” 
 
 ‘It was in “The Sanctum” also that the International Auxiliary 
 Language, “Esperanto,” was introduced to English students. Passing 
 through Leipzig in 1902, Mr. Stead met Professor Hartmann, one 
 of the organizers of the Scholars’ International Correspondence. 
 This gentleman brought Esperanto to his notice. In September, 
 Mr. Stead wrote an article on the subject, in the Morning Leader, and 
 followed it up in the Review of Reviews; and in January of the next 
 year a crowded meeting was held at Mowbray House, where the move- 
 ment had its centre until funds were sufficient for a special office to 
 be taken. Time alone will show the full results of Mr. Stead’s efforts 
 in this direction, but the wonderful progress of the Esperanto move- 
 ment can be realized by those who will inquire at the headquarters 
 of the British Esperanto Association. No less than 2,000 persons 
 attended a recent congress at Prague to which several Governments, 
 as well as the Committee of the League of Nations, sent delegates.’ 
 
 After five years of strenuous work, accompanied by not a little 
 financial anxiety at times, Stead had something like a nervous break- 
 down of health in 1895, and his doctor prescribed for him some 
 
 onths of quiet on the Riviera. This, however, became unnecessary 
 
68 STEAD IN HIS PORDTIES 
 
 as Mrs. Stead discovered a very suitable resting-place for him on 
 Hayling Island, where he soon became the owner of a much-loved 
 country home, Holly Bush — two unpretentious looking little houses 
 turned into one, with a pleasant garden and an uninterrupted out- 
 look towards the sea. It is to Miss Lawrence, who was primarily 
 governess to Stead’s children, though she soon came to ‘lend a hand’ 
 in the work of the office, that I am indebted also for this pleasant 
 picture of the Hayling Island ménage: 
 
 ‘No biography of Mr. Stead would be complete without some 
 account of the life led at the cottage at Hayling Island where he 
 reigned supreme over a happy family circle. I went there first about 
 March, 1896, and my first experience was to lose one of my small 
 charges and to find to my horror that she had put out to sea in a 
 cockle-shell of a boat with a small boy who had put up the sail. How- 
 ever, both came in safely, quite astonished at my fears for them. 
 
 “The gentle Mistress was not always at the cottage, but the kitchen 
 mistress always was -— capital Mrs. Bragg. All day some member 
 of the noisy crew would be rushing in or out. Now it would be to ask 
 insinuatingly, “Is it cake for lunch Baggie?” — for the time between 
 breakfast and one o’clock dinner was too long for sea-air hunger. Or 
 perhaps it was, “I’ve got to do my pump-duty Mrs. Bragg”’ — for 
 happy work and happy play was the order of the household, neither 
 idle hands nor idle minds being encouraged. As the water had to be 
 pumped up, all took turns in pumping, the reward for so many strokes 
 being sugar-plums which Mr. Stead distributed after dinner. Other 
 duties were — fetching the newspapers and letters, weeding the garden, 
 and now and again something special, such as cleaning the boat. Mr. 
 Stead would call for volunteers and usually got too many offers. At 
 one o’clock dinner, each child, beginning with the youngest, had to 
 have a fact to tell— gathered from the daily papers. An elder, of 
 course, helped the tiny ones and this necessitated a small store of facts 
 for them, as no fact might be repeated. After dinner Mr. Stead — or 
 in his absence, a substitute — read for an hour, sometimes a story 
 newly published, or a new “Book for the Bairns” might be read and 
 criticized. Alden’s tales were favourites. The girls worked mean- 
 while and sometimes the boys too, even the little ones could cut the 
 pages of new books. Once, for instance, the older boys had to sew 
 some canvas pillow slips, for the pillow fights had been so vigorous 
 

 
 HoLLy Busy, W. T. STEAD’S HAYLING ISLAND HOME 
 
 From a photograph taken in 1922, by the author, with 
 Master Henry Comyn Whyte, aged 4, at the entrance. 
 

 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 69 
 
 that the Mistress had forbidden them unless a substitute for the 
 frail slips could be found. Bathing went on at all hours, boating was 
 eagerly looked forward to, and picnics were the crowning pleasure. 
 Once in the summer holidays there would be a camp-out in a near- 
 by desert island, and in that centre of varied currents risks were 
 rarely absent. Once a boat-load with children got loose from its 
 moorings and was travelling rapidly up the inlet to the open sea. 
 Mr. Stead was at work on the house-boat, but flew along the shore and 
 swimming out reached the boat just in time to swing himself on 
 board and prevent a tragedy. A less alarming mishap was the strand- 
 ing of the boat on the mud when the party had been picnicking — all 
 had to wade ashore and walk home with bare and muddy feet, getting 
 into the village at the same time as a party of fashionable arrivals! 
 
 ‘With his love for children, Mr. Stead could not have been happy 
 himself without plenty of them around him, so during the holiday 
 season the cottage was filled, not only with his own children, but with 
 many others who needed change and sea air — little people gathered 
 through the stories of sorrow to which his ears were always open. Of 
 course the walls were not elastic, so in overflowing times the house- 
 boat (made out of an old trawler) was utilized by the older visitors. 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead never broke a promise given to the children. Once the 
 “tinies” had been promised that they should camp out the next night 
 with “Father” instead of the big boys. Unfortunately, a cable came 
 that very evening demanding “copy” by the morning mail. What 
 was to be done? Well! Father had to write his copy on the house- 
 boat in the midst of the children, whose chatter until bedtime, and 
 tumbles out of hammocks during the night, would have been too 
 much for any ordinary man. Even Mr. Stead was glad to be relieved 
 at six o’clock in the morning when he was allowed to go home and 
 finish and get a nap! His power to sleep at unusual times was often 
 his salvation. 
 
 ‘Morning prayers were conducted in unique fashion. First a hymn 
 in which Mr. Stead would sing lustily though not always tunefully; 
 next, a prayer from the Common Prayer Book, followed by another 
 hymn; and then a reading which each person chose in turn from 
 something which had interested that person; Mrs. Bragg’s little girl, 
 for instance, once chose ‘““Three little kittens went down the lane.” 
 Then came a prayer bringing in needs and thanksgivings, and the 
 Lord’s Prayer to finish. The choice of the children, of course, was 
 
70 STEAD: INV AUS TF ORD LES 
 
 sometimes laughable, yet the reverence shown throughout the un- 
 conventional proceedings was a revelation to a new-comer. 
 
 ‘The Sundays, too, were exceptional. Breakfast was always por- 
 ridge and eggs. Directly after breakfast drill was called, and all, boys, 
 girls and elders alike, answered the call and went off to make beds, 
 wash up crockery etc.; one particular Sunday Mr. Stead’s younger 
 daughter, aged four, dressed in her new winter frock, was found 
 with black brooms and dustpan cleaning up the fireplace in Mr. 
 Stead’s study! Afterwards, all went to church or chapel — even Mrs. 
 Bragg, who left the meat in the oven to cook itself. After the service 
 all went for a sea-side walk, Mrs. Bragg returning to cook the vege- 
 tables. At dinner each person had to think of some person or thing 
 mentioned in the sermon or reading, and the rest had to question it 
 out after the fashion of the bird or beast game. After dinner Mr. 
 Stead read fora while, the others going off “‘on their own”’ until tea- 
 time — at this meal, by the way, neat dress, shoes and stockings were 
 obligatory, while at dinner bare legs were allowed. 
 
 ‘Bicycles were in the stable, and also a strong tricycle which carried 
 as many as seven on more than one occasion — no wonder the wheels 
 sometimes buckled! The village children would call out for a ride 
 on this tricycle if Mr. Stead were alone and, except when he was 
 hurrying to the station or the post, seldom in vain.’ 
 
 So far, Miss Lawrence. I am sure at least a hundred of Stead’s 
 friends could, from their own experience, bear out what is here said 
 of that hospitable little Liberty Hall. There was an almost unceasing 
 procession to it of London workers — journalists, novelists, artists, 
 typists, all sorts and conditions of men and women needing change 
 and rest. Miss Elizabeth L. Banks, the talented American writer, 
 whose first book, In Cap and Apron, had won Stead’s favour, was one 
 of the many. Her experience was typical of all. “One day I went to 
 Mr. Stead’s office,’ Miss Banks writes me. ‘I was breaking down 
 under a very great mental strain and passing through a tragedy. I 
 was hard up, too, as my worries had prevented my sleeping and 
 working, but nobody in London knew that. Mr. Stead noticed how I 
 looked at once and he said, without asking what was the matter, 
 ‘“‘American girl, you go home and pack your bag and meet me at the 
 station at six o’clock. I’m going to send you off to my place at Hayling 
 to stay a week or so. You’re going to be ill.” I did what he told me - 
 it was no good refusing — and at the station I was surprised to find © 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 71 
 
 that he had decided to accompany me. He took me to Hayling and 
 left me there with his people, returning back to his work in London 
 at once. He had actually taken that trip with me because he thought 
 I was too ill to go to a strange place alone.’ 
 
 = * * 
 
 We began with an American description of Stead in 1892. Another 
 observer from the United States gives us a not less striking impres- 
 sion of him in 1899. This writer, the London correspondent of the 
 Spokane Review, saw in Stead not a great man, not a man of genius, 
 but an extraordinary man -— extraordinary, above all, in being the arch- 
 type of his ordinary compatriots as they were to be found at the close 
 of the nineteenth century. The passage is worth transcribing in full: 
 
 ‘It is a difficult matter to fix the position of a living man — to deter- 
 mine just what particular niche he will fill in the temple of Fame that 
 the Future will prepare. Time makes many changes and it has made 
 so many great men small and so many small men great during the 
 years that have passed that one hesitates to affirm that a contemporary 
 has succeeded in achieving a position from which the years will never 
 remove him. When the Nineteenth Century has been lived, how- 
 ever, and the time has arrived for its historian to prepare its annals, 
 there is one name that will certainly find a place in its pages, and 
 that is the name of W. T. Stead, not that the London journalist has 
 ever done anything sufficiently wonderful to entitle him to that hon- 
 our, but because he is the perfect type of the nineteenth-century man. 
 
 ‘It is a part of the art of the cartoonist to be able to select the most 
 striking features of his subject and to exaggerate them sufficiently 
 to answer his purpose without destroying the likeness; and what the 
 cartoonist is to the politicians of the world William T. Stead is to the 
 English people of this generation. In him may be discovered all the 
 striking characteristics of the race but exaggerated as never before 
 in any one man.’ 
 
 This view of Stead as a pre-eminently typical product of later 
 Victorian England — a view of him which seems never to have occurred 
 to Englishmen — tempts one to compare and contrast him with that 
 unquestionable personification of his own country and his own time, 
 Dr. Johnson. It is, of course, the points of contrast, both physical 
 and mental, that strike one first. If one is looking for a modern 
 counterpoise to Dr. Johnson, it would seem more natural to point — 
 
72 STEAD IN HIS FORTIES 
 
 as a sculptor or portrait-painter would point — to Mr. G. K. Chester- 
 ton; and it would certainly not be difficult to reconstruct out of our 
 ‘G.K.C.’ with the loan of one or two essential ingredients from his 
 friend Mr. Hilaire Belloc, a good deal of Johnson: Johnson the 
 scholar, the wit, the talker for victory, the convivial tavern-frequenter, 
 the roistering boon-companion of the flippant, worldly Beauclerk. 
 In Stead there was very little of all this. He had brilliancy and high 
 spirits and wonderful good-humour, but he was not a wit, still less a 
 scholar; and although his immense circle of associates comprised 
 several Beauclerks he never roistered with them. On the surface, it 
 may be admitted, Johnson and Stead are quite singularly unlike, and 
 yet if we look deeper it is curious to find how strong a resemblance 
 may be traced between them in several respects: as Talkers, for 
 instance, though Stead was not given to ‘tossing and goring’ his 
 antagonists; as good Samaritans — the affinity here is very close; as 
 Christian Moralists; and, above all, as Public Oracles. 
 
 Of Stead as talker we have had several accounts already. ‘A bril- 
 liant and most entertaining talker,’ the Times described him, ‘full 
 of vivacity, spontaneity and picturesque phrasing’; but ‘his conversa- 
 tion was apt to be a monologue,’ it added.1_ He was not, however, the 
 kind of monologuist who resents interruption — he did not insist on 
 finishing a period or even a sentence. There was give and take with 
 him. He was, in fact, the arch-type of the ready-witted debater. A 
 writer in Answers, some time in the nineties, thus described him: 
 
 ‘And I do assure the average man that William Thomas Stead, 
 alias ‘Good old Stead,” the editor of the Review of Reviews, and the 
 friend of kings, princes, and governors, son of a Congregational 
 minister, and sometime editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, is, as human 
 nature goes in these sombre times, a jolly fellow, a merry wag, a 
 cheerful companion, a rollicking soul. 
 
 ‘See him sitting back in his chair after luncheon, his legs out-thrust 
 under the littered table, his head thrown back, the red end of a 
 cigarette singeing his moustache and beard, and hear him talk of the 
 
 1 In the course of an obituary notice, April 18, 1912, the writer proceeds 
 to say: ‘He had a keen sense of fun, he enjoyed nothing more than a laugh 
 against himself, and those who knew the man at closest quarters liked him 
 best.’ It is interesting to note that both the Times and Answers (not often 
 thus placed in juxtaposition) were controlled by Lord Northcliffe, who in 
 
 his younger days was much indebted to Stead for valuable help and counsel. 
 Few people admired Stead more than Lord Northcliffe did. 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 73 
 
 world and its inhabitants with all the geniality of Pickwick, and with 
 all the optimism of Wilkins Micawber. He talks about ghosts and 
 emperors, about Prime Ministers and Salvation Army colonels, 
 about actors and journalists, about automatic writings and peace 
 conferences, about crystal-gazing and Imperial defence. He talks 
 about none of these things furiously, intolerantly, and crankily, but 
 he goes from one to the other easily and cheerfully, in the spirit of a 
 diplomatist recounting reminiscences in every corner of the globe — 
 a born raconteur, an inspired chatterbox.’ 
 
 Here, from the pen of my friend, Miss S. K. Huntsman, is a capital 
 sketch of Stead, not as a talker exactly but as a public speaker. It 
 really made very little difference to him where he spoke or talked. 
 ‘Stage fright’ was a thing absolutely unknown to him. He was equally 
 at his ease whether addressing a single auditor or an assemblage of 
 five thousand people. Miss Huntsman’s memories are of a later date 
 than the ’nineties, but they come appropriately here: 
 
 ‘It was the exuberant vitality of the man that overwhelmed any- 
 one who had not met him before at close quarters. On the platform 
 of a large hall he was always a personality, a force; but in a room he 
 was dominant — if only temporarily. 
 
 “There was one February afternoon when pacifist folk assembled 
 in the house of Felix Moscheles to celebrate International Peace 
 Day. Low-toned pictures, glints of gold on frames and books, the 
 panelled walls and wooden gallery of the studio, with here and there 
 a bronze bust or a rich vase, formed an unusual setting for a political 
 meeting; and perhaps its charm added to the lassitude which the 
 overheated atmosphere induced in the audience. The speeches of 
 Mr. Percy Alden, Mr. Zangwill, Major-General Sir Alfred Turner, 
 and others proceeded in leisurely course. Then ...a footstep, a 
 shifting of crowded chairs, and a whisper ‘‘Stead!’’ He climbed, 
 literally, to the dais, grasped extended hands, and spoke. Men and 
 women, intent, leaned forward, though his strong, clear voice was 
 audible in the remotest corner. Their brains became vibrant with 
 motion: an electric fan was whirling the stagnant air. 
 
 ‘His speech was, as usual, captious, combative, personal, but 
 arresting. He leaped over the face of the globe as though on a pogo- 
 stick, and always in the company of the great. “I have talked with 
 as many sovereigns as would consent to meet me, and as many diplo- 
 
74 STEAD IN HIS FORTIES 
 
 matists as I had time to see,” he said. But in five minutes he had 
 outlined a definite plan, driven it home clearly to his hearers’ minds, 
 and forced them to accept it.’ 
 
 Mr. Arnold White, who knew Stead well, and who agreed with him 
 cordially about naval matters, while disagreeing with him no less 
 cordially about almost everything else, admired him more as a public 
 speaker than as a talker. 
 
 ‘Staying at the Vice-Regal Lodge in Dublin,’ he wrote me, ‘during 
 the first of Lord Aberdeen’s Viceroyalties, I had much conversation 
 about Mr. Stead. The character of his mind was debated by Lord — 
 then Mr. John—Morley, who had been his chief. No satisfactory word 
 occurred to anyone at first, but as we rose to leave the room to go to 
 luncheon, I suggested the word “‘nimble”’ to Mr. Morley as character- 
 izing Mr. Stead’s mind. He accepted it with alacrity and said it was 
 the exact word. The ‘“‘nimble eagerness” with which Stead asserted 
 and supported the exact opposite of views that he had formerly put 
 forth,’ Mr. White goes on to say, ‘left no doubt as to his sincerity.” 
 In Stead’s speeches, however, Mr. White found something more 
 than mere ‘nimbleness’: 
 
 ‘As a public speaker Stead was matchless. Excepting Mrs. Besant 
 I have heard no one of his generation who exerted so deadly a power in 
 capturing the attention and the agreement of an audience. Whether 
 he was wrong or right he was always absolutely certain that what he 
 said was not only right but the will of God, and that he was supported 
 by a host of ministering angels. 
 
 ‘Stead’s oratory was not rhetorical. Its force came from conviction 
 and sincerity — for the time being at all events. Stead’s tongue and 
 pen have dinted his generation as no other journalist has done.’ 
 
 The resemblance between Dr. Johnson and Mr. Stead as ‘Oracles’ 
 in the popular modern sense of the word is particularly worth noting. 
 No less a personage than Lord Morley has used this very expression 
 in regard to Stead; readers of Boswell will recall how the Rev. Dr. 
 Maxwell, ‘of Falkland, in Ireland,’ applied it to Dr. Johnson. ‘He 
 seemed to me,’ wrote Dr. Maxwell, ‘to be considered a kind of 
 publick oracle whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and 
 consult.’ It was the Horace Greeley type of oracle, not the Johnson 
 
 1 See in this connection Stead’s remarks, Vol. I, p. 40, and my own about 
 Stead, Vol. II, pp. 88-92. 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 75 
 
 type, that Lord Morley had in mind. He used, he tells us,! to remind 
 Stead of Greeley’s marvellous hold upon the American public and 
 say to him: ‘It is in your power, with your gifts, to play the same part 
 in this country.’ But Stead, really, was both kinds of oracle. He 
 doubled the réles. 
 
 It is amusing to compare and contrast Dr. Maxwell’s picture of 
 Johnson in this connection with some of the many which have been 
 painted of Stead: 
 
 ‘His general mode of life during my acquaintance (Dr. Maxwell 
 wrote) seemed to be pretty uniform. About twelve o’clock I com- 
 monly visited him and frequently found him in bed, or declaiming 
 over his tea, which he drank very plentifully. He generally had a 
 levee of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters; Hawkesworth, 
 Goldsmith, Murphy, Langton, Steevens, Beauclerk, etc., etc., and 
 sometimes learned ladies; particularly I remember a French lady of 
 wit and fashion doing him the honour of a visit. He seemed to me 
 to be considered a kind of public oracle whom everybody thought 
 they had a right to visit and consult; and doubtless they were well 
 rewarded. I never could discover how he found time for his com- 
 positions. He declaimed all the morning, then went to dinner at a 
 tavern, where he commonly stayed late, and then drank his tea at 
 some friend’s house, over which he loitered a great while but seldom 
 took supper. I fancy he must have read and wrote chiefly in the 
 night, for I can scarcely recollect that he ever refused going out with 
 me to a tavern and he often went to Ranelagh which he deemed a 
 place of innocent recreation.’ 
 
 “The most accessible and the most communicative man alive,’ Dr. 
 Maxwell proceeds to style Dr. Johnson, and the words apply with 
 equal truth to Stead. ‘When I go to London,’ Sir Starr Jameson, the 
 famous ‘Dr. Jim,’ once said to a friend,? ‘I always take the first 
 opportunity to see Stead. He puts me more quickly into touch with 
 current events and English political life than anyone. I sit in his 
 big arm-chair at Mowbray House and tell him to put me up. Stead 
 plunges his hands in his pockets — paces up and down his office, his 
 head eagerly bent forward. I sit an interested listener — in one hour 
 I have learnt more from him than from any man in London.’ 
 
 1 Lord Morley’s speech at the banquet to Sir E. T’. Cook, 1912. 
 * Cited in a letter in the British Weekly, April, 1912. 
 
76 SE ADAr NUL SO ar O Reals Was 
 
 Hundreds of other such visitors could tell the same tale — states- 
 men, diplomatists, soldiers, sailors, travellers, men of science, men 
 of letters, men of all nationalities and almost as many women as 
 men; but that Mowbray House ‘Sanctum’ was, if possible, even more 
 open to the humble and the obscure. Stead’s was ‘the readiest ear 
 in all London in which to pour a tale of injustice or sorrow of any 
 kind,’ says Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe.t ‘Doubtless he was often imposed 
 upon, but it was a beautiful and refreshing feature of his in a pro- 
 fession so notoriously blasé and cynical as journalism. Oppressed 
 races, ill-treated animals, underpaid typists, out-at-heel pressmen, 
 misunderstood women, persecuted parsons, vilified public men, 
 would-be suicides, hot-gospellers of every brand and sort, lonely 
 city souls and, of course, childless parents - how he championed 
 them all and loved them all!’ 
 
 Dr. Johnson held his levees at home and at his favourite tavern, 
 Stead liked to have his friends to lunch with him, but our modern 
 equivalents for the tavern — and for Ranelagh — had very little part in 
 his life. His home, however, opened its doors as widely as his office. 
 
 ‘At Wimbledon, at Mowbray House, and of late years at his home 
 in Smith Square, Westminster (Mr. Ratcliffe continues), you 
 would meet people from the ends of the earth, and you never knew 
 what good fortune might be yours. There was no such thing as 
 formality. The host himself had the high spirits of a boy. Indians 
 were especially welcome. Every public man from India found his 
 way to the house, and nothing was more characteristic of Stead 
 than the way in which, amid unbroken hilarity and the most elaborate 
 fooling, he would cross-examine a visitor in reference to his mission 
 in England, or the condition of things in the country from which he 
 came. You would think it perhaps part of the Sunday afternoon 
 game in the cosmopolitan sitting-room, carried on merely for the 
 entertainment of the group whose members had come together from 
 the seven seas — until you saw in the next number of the Review 
 of Reviews either a character-sketch setting forth the visitor’s record 
 and aims, or else an interview into which all the stuff of the cross- 
 examination had been compressed. His power of extracting and 
 stating a case was probably unsurpassed in our time.’ 
 
 1 In the Modern Review (Calcutta), July, 1912. 
 
SOME IMPRESSIONS AND MEMORIES 7 
 
 I shall conclude with these words from the pen of Mr. J. A. Spender, 
 one of Stead’s closest friends for more than twenty years, who 
 depicts him in very much the same light: 
 
 ‘As you watched him through a normal day (Mr. Spender writes), 
 you wondered when he could find time to put pen to paper, let 
 alone to keep that incessant stream of journalism flowing in the 
 English and American newspapers. But he was a demon for work, 
 with a pen in his hand or a shorthand writer to dictate to, his speed 
 was enormous. Never have I known him so busy as not to find time 
 for patient listening to the story of any human being in distress, and 
 no one so readily gave his sympathy or loosened his purse-strings. 
 
 “The stolid Englishman is puzzled by a man of this temperament, 
 and I have often wondered from what forbears he got his more than 
 Celtic fervour. But with it all, he was a man of extraordinary grasp 
 of detail and precision. Hardly ever have I known him wrong about 
 a fact, and his power of reducing masses of detail to brief and lucid 
 statements was unequalled. Give him the biggest Blue-book, and 
 he would have the heart out of it in half an hour, and a luminous 
 summary omitting nothing of any importance, going to press within 
 the hour. His articles were like hewing a straight path through a 
 tangled forest. There might be woods and bogs to right and left, but 
 he troubled nothing about them, so long as his own path was clear. 
 His talk made much more allowance than his writing for the com- 
 plexity of things, and there was no better critic in London of other 
 people’s views. Pose a question, and he would talk it out from a 
 dozen points of view with the keenest sense of its complications. 
 His remarkable memory and unfailing store of apt illustration gave 
 point and glow to his talk and, fanatic as people counted him to be, 
 he was absolutely free from any rancour about anybody’s opinions. 
 His open-mindedness was almost a perversity. ‘There was no opinion, 
 however fantastic or remote from probability, to which he would not 
 give a charitable hearing, and which might not, in certain circum- 
 stances, effect a lodgement in his own mind. Where his “spooks” 
 were concerned he would believe anything, and no disproof of any 
 reported fact or failure of any prediction made by his familiar spirits 
 to come true seemed to have the slightest effect on the confidence he 
 reposed in them.’ 
 
 1 In the Westminster Gazette, April 17, 1912. 
 
CHA RTE Re26 
 
 THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE. STEAD’S CAMPAIGN IN 
 FAVOUR OF ANGLO-AMERICAN ARBITRATION 
 
 January — March, 1896 
 
 GR seem to have been pretty nearly the only person on this side 
 who marked the rising of the black cloud,’ wrote Mr. Bryce? to 
 Stead with reference to Venezuela on January 8, 1896. 
 
 Hitherto Bryce’s name has occurred only once in this narrative, but 
 he and Stead had been staunch friends and ardent allies since 1878. 
 They had been in close agreement about most things and were to 
 remain so until Stead’s death. Perhaps there was no British statesman 
 of Cabinet rank who, from first to last, sympathized so generally and 
 so thoroughly with Stead’s social and political ideas as Bryce: they 
 saw almost ‘eye to eye’ in regard to Ireland, South Africa, the Near 
 East; and everyone knows how untiringly they both fought in their 
 different ways for the great cause of Arbitration — for International 
 Arbitration as the only possible way of securing the peace of the 
 world, but above all for Arbitration between the British Empire and 
 the United States as a safeguard against that most terrible of wars — 
 a war between brothers. That the Briton and the American must be 
 held to be brothers was almost as much Bryce’s creed as it was 
 Stead’s, | 
 
 I had hoped to be able to enrich this book, and perhaps this very 
 chapter, with some pages from Lord Bryce’s pen. Not very long 
 before he died, he promised to record for me anything of interest 
 that he could recall with regard to Stead; at the moment he was too 
 absorbed with urgent work which he had in hand. I was to have 
 written to him again just about the time when death came to him so 
 suddenly. It had been arranged that I should send him such of his 
 letters to Stead as had been preserved, so that a re-reading of them 
 might refresh his memory. 
 
 Quite a large proportion of these letters date from the early months 
 of 1896. A few sentences from them will serve as a sort of introduc- 
 tion to our chronicle of Stead’s doings in that year—the year of 
 the quarrel over Venezuela and of the Jameson Raid; they contain 
 allusions to the Raid and to Cecil Rhodes, as well as other burning 
 
 1 The Right Hon. James Bryce, M.P., afterwards Lord Bryce. 
 78 
 
 
 
186 STEAD IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION 77 
 
 questions of the hour, such as the tragic plight of the Armenians,? 
 but most of them are concerned chiefly with Venezuela and with 
 Stead’s strenuous attempt to set on foot a permanent Court of 
 Arbitration before which all Anglo-American dissensions in the 
 future should come for settlement. 
 
 Writing on January 10, Bryce welcomes Stead’s proposal, as first 
 sketched out, though he feels that he himself as an ex-Minister may 
 be debarred from giving active help if Lord Salisbury discounten- 
 ances the idea. 
 
 Matters looked really serious already. An intense war feeling 
 existed in many parts of the United States — there was a widespread 
 belief, as some one expressed it, ‘that England could be beaten and 
 needed a beating.’ Large sections of the American public, Mr. 
 Balfour, in tones of rather unwise irony, had remarked in a speech at 
 Manchester,? seemed ‘to regard a war with this country as a thing to 
 be lightly indulged in, an exhilarating exercise, a gentle national 
 stimulus.’ Bryce, like Stead, was in constant touch with Americans 
 of all shades of political thought, and was able to gauge the situation. 
 On February 27 he declares Stead’s scheme to be ‘even more needed 
 than one thought at first,’ and he rejoices to see that ‘it is being 
 warmly taken up in the United States by the right sort of people.’ 
 
 On March 3 a meeting was to be held at the Queen’s Hall in further- 
 ance of the proposal. Bryce wrote a strong letter in its support. As 
 the carefully-worded deliverance of one who was later to occupy 
 so unique a place in the esteem and affections of Americans, this 
 document retains a peculiar interest; I give it in full: 
 
 “To my regret I am prevented by a previous engagement from 
 attending the meeting this evening. I need not tell you how heartily 
 I sympathize with its object. Britain and America are little likely to 
 be embroiled over any matter of material interest alone, so incal- 
 culable are the evils which a war must bring upon both. The danger 
 rather springs from pride and passion driving the nations into a 
 position from which each may think that it cannot with honour 
 recede; and the value of a permanent tribunal of arbitration lies in the 
 fact that by providing a means of settlement, competent to adjust 
 
 1 “Poor Armenia!’ he exclaimed in one letter; ‘she will be forgotten and her 
 people exterminated, while all these questions which are matters of interest, 
 
 and not “merely” of humanity and Christianity, hold the foreground!’ 
 2 January 15, 1896. 
 
80 THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE 1896 
 
 each and every dispute, it may be trusted to keep passion from rising 
 and to appease the sentiment of honour which cannot suffer by 
 following the method of solution agreed to before the dispute arose 
 and obeying the decision it had bound itself in anticipation to respect. 
 Even if a question were occasionally to arise which seemed to fall 
 outside the limits fixed by a general arbitration treaty, the habit of 
 relying upon arbitration which the existence of such a treaty would 
 create, and the existence of an impartial body able to work for con- 
 ciliation, would immensely diminish the risks of a breach. As there 
 could be no heavier blow dealt at civilization than a conflict between 
 the two kindred peoples who have done most to civilize the world, so 
 no example of the substitution of arbitration for war would be so 
 effective as that which those peoples might set by establishing a 
 court standing always ready to deal with differences before they had 
 ripened into quarrels.’ 
 * * * 
 
 In saying that Stead had been ‘pretty nearly the only person’ 
 who had foreseen the trouble over Venezuela, Bryce had in mind 
 probably an outspoken article which his friend had contributed to 
 the Contemporary Review in September 1895 entitled ‘Jingoism in 
 America’; and also a series of similar warnings in the Review of 
 Reviews. 
 
 Some days before the ‘Fourth of July’ of that year, the Times-Herald 
 of Chicago, one of the most influential and enterprising of all the 
 newspapers in the United States, had published replies from a 
 number of ‘distinguished men, qualified to speak on the subject of 
 American foreign policy,’ to a couple of questions, the mere pro- 
 pounding of which was significant: 
 
 ‘1. Should the United States annex Canada, Newfoundland, Cuba 
 and Hawaii? 
 
 ‘2. Will Uncle Sam eventually rule the North American con- 
 tinent?’ 
 
 The Editor of the Times-Herald felt that his questions came oppor- 
 tunely at that moment: the ‘Fourth of July,’ he said, ‘is the date when 
 the American spirit is dominant. It is the time when the devotion of 
 the patriot is most manifest.’ 
 
 Stead, in his Contemporary article, cited two of the replies: that of 
 ex-Senator John J. Ingalls, of Kansas, and that of Senator Lodge, of 
 Massachusetts. 
 
1896 STEAD IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION 8r 
 
 Ex-Senator Ingalls was a sot-disant ‘anti-Jingo.’ He had opposed 
 the contemplated annexation of Hawaii as vehemently as Mr. 
 Labouchere had opposed our own campaign against Lobengula. He 
 had said: ‘the “Jingo,” the aggressive, domineering advocate of a 
 swaggering foreign policy, has never been a favourite in American 
 politics.’ But now, in the course of his answer to the questions, he 
 was able to declare: “The annexation of Canada would not violate the 
 traditions of our history and would be in accordance with the impulse 
 of federation which is the irresistible tendency of the Anglo-American 
 race’; and to maintain that the Panama Canal must be ‘our Southern 
 boundary.’ 
 
 ‘For an anti-Jingo,’ Stead commented, this programme, involving 
 as it did the annexation not only of Canada but of Mexico and Central 
 America as far as the Canal, was ‘pretty strong!’ 
 
 Senator Lodge’s view was very similar to ex-Senator Ingalls’, 
 though more guardedly expressed. ‘Looking at the entire matter in 
 the abstract,’ he said, ‘and as an answer to a hypothetical question, I 
 should say that Cuba should be annexed and also Canada, Newfound- 
 land and Hawaii.’ 
 
 Dr. Albert Shaw, the Editor of the American Review of Reviews 
 (which had become increasingly independent of the parent periodical, 
 although still an organ of Anglo-American friendship), was Stead’s 
 next witness. Dr. Shaw was certainly not a Jingo, Stead explained — 
 not even a politician, ‘excepting so far as all good citizens are politi- 
 cians’; and yet in relation to the two matters upon which the American 
 Jingoes were most wrath he had ‘seriously and earnestly’ supported 
 them: these two matters were (1) the difference of view regarding the 
 Venezuelan frontier and (2) the recent disciplinary action which 
 Great Britain had considered herself forced to take in Nicaragua. Dr. 
 Shaw had expressed himself as follows upon the latter point: 
 
 ‘It is true that we have not thought it wise to declare a formal 
 protectorate over Nicaragua; but it would have been gracious and 
 courteous if John Bull had recognized the relationship that circum- 
 stances have virtually created, and had frankly avowed the policy of 
 doing nothing in Nicaragua which would not be most eminently 
 agreeable to the Government and people of the United States.’ 
 
 Stead’s comment upon Dr. Shaw’s contentions is an indication of the 
 wide breach in political matters now opening between the two men: 
 
 L.S. — VOL, II F 
 
82 THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE 1896 
 
 ‘I don’t propose to discuss here (he says) this extraordinary theory 
 as to the suggested obligation under which we lie, as a matter of 
 grace and courtesy, to do nothing to defend our own interests, or to 
 punish flagrant breaches of international law, whenever the “minute 
 and defenceless” offenders live in ‘‘our American hemisphere.” ‘The 
 more astounding such a claim appears, the more significant it is to 
 find it gravely propounded in such a quarter.’ 
 
 The affair of Nicaragua was a thing of the past, however. The 
 indemnity claimed by Great Britain had been paid and the incident 
 had been closed. It was far otherwise with the question of Venezuela. 
 In regard to this, also, Dr. Shaw, — in common with other represen- 
 tatives of moderate opinion in the States—had spoken strongly. 
 Referring to ‘great and valuable portions’ of Venezuela which seemed 
 to have been ‘encroached upon by Great Britain,’ he had said: 
 
 ‘Beginning with a trading post or two on the coast, the English have 
 extended their claims until they now assert authority over a great 
 region which was formerly regarded by everybody as an integral 
 portion of Venezuela. Far from increasing their territorial claims on 
 the north coast of South America, the British ought by all means to 
 prepare definitely to withdraw altogether. It is wholly contrary to 
 the ethics of modern international relations that a European power 
 like Great Britain should hold by force of arms a region that belongs 
 naturally to the home territory of a friendly nation.’ 
 
 Stead went on to cite some equally forcible language which Senator 
 Lodge had used in the North American Review. England, Senator 
 Lodge complained, had declined arbitration, which was particularly 
 applicable to a boundary dispute, and while declining it, she had 
 continued to seize the lands of a weak power by superior force, on the 
 principle that ‘might makes right.’ “The supremacy of the Monroe 
 doctrine,’ Senator Lodge had gone so far as to declare, ‘should be 
 established and at once, peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must. It 
 will be the duty and the privilege of the next Congress to see that this 
 is done.’ 
 
 To Stead, as to ninety-nine Englishmen in a hundred, these aggres- 
 sive words seemed astonishing, and while they had the good effect of 
 causing him to investigate the whole question with all his wonderful 
 energy and open-mindedness, he could not entirely refrain at first 
 
1896 STEAD IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION 83 
 
 from some hot retorts. He began, in this Contemporary article, merely 
 by summarizing, with much point and vigour, the British case. The 
 Monroe doctrine, he declared, could not apply to this particular 
 dispute, for the Monroe doctrine started from the status quo in 1823. 
 Long before 1823, Great Britain had owned ‘as a matter of treaty- 
 right by international law all the territory up to the watershed of the 
 Orinoco.’ There had never been, and there was not then, ‘any 
 question of extending British authority one single yard beyond the 
 boundary laid down as far back as 1797.’ ‘The only question in dispute 
 was how much of this territory, undeniably British, Great Britain 
 should now agree to cede to Venezuela. The United States Govern- 
 ment, he complained, had suggested more or less formally, that the 
 question as to the frontier should be submitted to arbitration. To 
 this, Great Britain had replied, quite correctly, that she was quite 
 ready to arbitrate regarding the territory which could legitimately be 
 said to be in dispute. All that she had refused to do was to arbitrate 
 ‘upon the claim which, judging from Venezuelan sharp practice, 
 might suddenly be extended to cover the whole of British Guiana.’ 
 Now, Senator Lodge and Dr. Shaw and many other American 
 spokesmen of weight and influence were evidently not satisfied with 
 that; they wanted the arbitration to cover the question ‘whether or not 
 the whole of British Guiana should be handed over to the Republic 
 of Venezuela.’ This, he maintained, was not to be considered for a 
 moment. We could no more arbitrate on that question than we could 
 on the question whether the Isle of Wight belonged to us, or any 
 more than the United States could be asked to arbitrate “whether 
 Florida should continue to belong to the Union or be handed over to 
 Cuba.’ 
 
 But not content with this argumentative vehemence, Stead had 
 enough of the ordinary Englishman in his nature to impel him into 
 some ‘back-chat’ also! It was a familiar trick in the Old World, he 
 observed, to make war abroad in order to retard reform at home, and 
 ‘the corrupter elements in American democracy’ were not above 
 taking the hint from the effete empires and monarchies of Europe. 
 
 : That was a remark which the American spokesmen could not be 
 expected to relish in such a context; and in a character-sketch which 
 followed in the Review of Reviews for January 1896, there were other 
 such reflections not less calculated to hurt their susceptibilities. 
 _ Stead was trying harder than almost any other Englishman to under- 
 
 ——_ or Or 
 
84 THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE 1896 
 
 stand the American point of view, but with how little success as yet 
 a letter preserved among his papers enables us to gauge. It is from a 
 New York friend, a man of whose judgment he thought highly and 
 who had been seeking to keep him au courant with opinion in the 
 States. The writer complains that, when using the facts thus com- 
 municated to him, Stead has given them in a manner ‘so garbled as 
 entirely to distort them’; both in the Contemporary and in the Review 
 of Reviews, he declares, Stead has ‘dodged’ material points and 
 ‘pettifogged most scandalously’; and he gives an account of the whole 
 situation as regards both Venezuela and British Guiana in violent 
 contrast with the conception of it held by Stead in common with 
 Englishmen generally. He admits that President Cleveland’s second 
 Message to Congress had been unfortunate in its mode of expression, 
 but he maintains that Cleveland has the whole of the United States 
 behind him and that while there was ‘no shadow of unrighteousness’ 
 in the American contentions, Lord Salisbury’s reply to the American 
 Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, had had ‘diabolical wickedness in almost — 
 every line of it.’ 
 
 I cannot, of course, find room here for even a summary of President 
 Cleveland’s Message or of that ‘diabolical’ composition of our own 
 Prime Minister — in the eyes of most people in England it had seemed 
 a very mild and reasonably-worded document. Stead’s extracts from 
 them in small type, as embodied in his character-sketch of Cleveland, — 
 filled several pages of the Review of Reviews. Even at this stage—- 
 when he was planning out his campaign in favour of arbitration — his 
 methods remained a bit provocative. He heads one of Cleveland’s © 
 statements derisively, ‘It must be Right, for it suits us!’ and another, 
 ‘If not International Law, it ought to be!’ We need not now consider ~ 
 how far he was justified in his view of Cleveland as an unreasonable 
 chauvinist upon this occasion. What is worth noting is that even this — 
 most ardent preacher of Anglo-American Brotherhood could not — 
 refrain just yet from a vigorous punch or two at his American 
 brother’s head! 
 
 But that mood passed, and in the penny pamphlet of seventy-six 
 pages, entitled Always Arbitrate before you Fight, published in the — 
 following month, Stead not only holds the scales more evenly between — 
 the two antagonists but shows himself prepared to expand the field of 
 arbitration as far as the Americans may desire. The pamphlet opens — 
 thus: 
 
 
 
1896 STEAD IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION 85 
 
 ‘The misunderstanding which has occurred between the two great 
 sections of the English-speaking race summons us all to consider 
 whether the time has not come for perfecting the peace-keeping 
 arrangements between the United States and the United Kingdom. 
 Heretofore we have been content to rub along, taking no thought as 
 to the morrow, but trusting that whenever a difficulty or a hitch arose, 
 the two nations would be able to improvise a way out. Now, however, 
 it seems as if we can no longer afford to trust the permanent peace of 
 two peoples, which are annually increasing at such a rate as to come 
 into closer and closer friction with each other in all parts of the 
 world, to the chance handling of politicians who may, on the spur 
 of the moment, be summoned to deal with the most delicate and 
 dangerous of controversies in the midst of an atmosphere charged 
 with latent thunder by the dynamos of the press. The dispute that 
 in the last six weeks brought us to discussing war as a possible con- 
 tingency is a notable object-lesson on the need of some arrangement 
 or simple device by which these misunderstandings could be promptly 
 and quietly removed.’ 
 
 The two English-speaking nations, he proceeds to say, have been 
 brought to the verge of war through mutual misunderstanding. 
 What is to be done to prevent in future a danger so dreadful? What 
 is to be done and by whom? The House of Commons and both 
 houses of Congress have declared with unanimity in favour of 
 Arbitration, but there matters have remained. It is manifest that 
 practical efforts must at once be made to turn this pious opinion 
 into a practical reality. As a first step he has, with the help of a 
 representative Committee, drafted a Memorial earnestly appealing 
 for the conclusion of a ‘treaty arrangement by which all disputes 
 between Great Britain and the United States could be referred for 
 the adjudication to some permanent tribunal representing both 
 nations,’ and he now appeals to the public for signatures to this 
 Memorial and for every other form of support. 
 
 A page expounding the doctrine which he had condensed into the 
 five words of his little book deserves to be transcribed in full — it was 
 the doctrine which he continued to preach unceasingly, in season and 
 out of season, until the day of his death: 
 
 “The proposal is that before fighting, before even talking of fighting, 
 the English-speaking nations must always arbitrate, If we must fight 
 
86 THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE 1896 
 
 at the end, let us at least arbitrate at the beginning. The time has 
 surely come when we can as a race declare that war is so terrible a 
 thing we shall never resort to it, never even talk of resorting to it, 
 until the casus belli, whatever it may be, has been duly submitted and 
 solemnly adjudicated upon by an impartial arbitration court, which 
 shall hear both sides fully, and place on record its deliberate award. 
 
 “This is not to propose that we should cast away the sword; it is only 
 to insist we shall not unsheathe it until, before some tribunal more 
 judicial and less diabolical than that of war, we have done our utmost 
 to prove our quarrel just. “Always arbitrate before you fight.” We 
 can always fight afterwards if the award is idiotic, or the arbitrators 
 cannot agree, or if we choose to make our own will our sole law; but 
 in that case we must stand the brunt of the odium justly attaching, in 
 the eyes of the world, to a Power that goes to war in a cause upon the 
 justice of which a tribunal of its own choosing has pronounced an 
 adverse verdict. 
 
 “This rule must be universal. All disputes which might lead to 
 war must first go to arbitration, just as all claims between citizens, 
 no matter how preposterous they may be, must always be heard 
 in Court, and not decided by assault and battery. Any man can 
 command at any time a legal inquiry into my right to own even the 
 shirt on my back; for it is the very foundation of civil law that every 
 citizen has a right to compel any other to prove his title to anything 
 he possesses which the other chooses to claim. Only by that means 
 was the right of private war abolished. Only if we reject it we must 
 take the consequences. And as in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred 
 there would be no motive for rejecting it, the immediate result would 
 be that if everything was arbitrated about, our present risk of war 
 would be reduced by gg per cent. 
 
 ‘Without this clear and explicit reservation of the right to appeal 
 from the award of the arbitrator to the sword, in cases where such a 
 course seemed demanded by the national honour and the national 
 safety, no nation will ever refer to arbitration any question vital to its 
 honour and its existence. Yet these are precisely those questions 
 which it is most important to get before an impartial tribunal.’ 
 
 * * * 
 
 Demonstrations in Public Halls, often so exciting at the moment, 
 are generally dull affairs to read about long afterwards. The great 
 meeting at which the Anglo-American Arbitration campaign was 
 
 Te 
 
1896 STEAD IN FAVOUR OF ARBITRATION 8 
 
 launched on March 3, 1896, is no exception to the rule. We need not 
 concern ourselves with its proceedings. Even the letters of sympathy 
 and support, although they made a brave enough muster that 
 month in the Review of Reviews, do not claim much attention now. 
 Most of them were trite and commonplace — tepid approvals from 
 a dozen Bishops and from Members of Parliament preoccupied with 
 a thousand other matters. Lord Rosebery and Mr. Asquith were 
 among the few who wrote with conviction: Herbert Spencer and 
 William Watson among the few who said things worth saying. It was 
 evidently for Stead and his small band of real enthusiasts to carry 
 through the fight by themselves. 
 
 What exactly did their untiring energies count for in the subsequent 
 progress of the dispute and in its settlement in the November of that 
 year? Itis, of course, difficult to say. Lord Salisbury would doubtless 
 have made very little of their intervention —if indeed he did not 
 regard it as inopportune and mischievous. Present-day historians are 
 inclined to ignore the movement as of no account. Will it seem of 
 more importance to posterity? Here is Stead’s own claim, put forward 
 boldly and plainly in that autobiographical retrospect from which I 
 have already quoted more than once: 
 
 ‘By public meetings and memorials we succeeded in producing 
 such an expression of public opinion in favour of arbitration that 
 Lord Salisbury gave way and the question was amicably settled by 
 reference to a Court of Arbitration subsequently held in Paris. Of 
 course I could have done nothing in these things without the loyal 
 and enthusiastic support which was given me by such men as Mr. 
 W. Randal Cremer, of the Inter-Parliamentary Conference, and 
 Dr. Darby, of the Peace Society.’ 
 
CHAP TE Rien 
 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 I 
 STEAD AND DR. JAMESON 
 
 T has often been declared of Stead that he had a wonderful faculty 
 
 for being equally violent in opposition and in defence of the self- 
 same cause within an incredibly short space of time. As a general 
 accusation this does not seem to me to be well founded; certainly I 
 can see but very little evidence to support it in Stead’s record down 
 to the end of 1895. One may, however, confess that the Arch- 
 Pacifist and pro-Boer whom most of us remember so well is not to be 
 recognized at a first glance in the apologist for the Jameson Raid. 
 With admiration for ‘Dr. Jim’s’ fine qualities we can all sympathize, 
 and we may agree that many who condemned the Raid so virtuously 
 would have been among the first to exult had it been successful, but 
 one reads nowadays with just a little astonishment some of the 
 things Stead wrote in this connection in 1896. 
 
 His first feelings over the incident, as expressed in the Review of 
 Reviews for January of that year, had been the same as most people’s 
 — ‘blank amazement and profound regret,’ accompanied by ‘some not 
 unnatural indignation.’ It was inexplicable to him, he declared, that 
 Dr. Jameson, the ‘careful, long-headed, prudent, sagacious adminis- 
 trator,’ the man ‘whom we all liked so much and trusted so fully,’ 
 could have made so fatal a mistake. And readers of the Review had 
 the whole situation put before them very clearly and fairly as Stead 
 saw it; the actual circumstances of the Transvaal, with its oligarchy 
 of 15,000 adult males governing absolutely a country as large as 
 Spain, inhabited by not more than 500,000 persons, of whom 250,000 
 were natives; the admitted hardships and wrongs of the 600,000 
 ‘Uitlanders,’ mostly English, in Johannesburg, which had been a 
 mere mining camp a few years before, but which was now a great 
 industrial centre; the Uitlanders’ constitutionally-expressed demands 
 for citizenship and the stubborn old President’s refusal of it; and 
 finally Cecil Rhodes’s own opinion, as given to Stead two months 
 before, that there need be no revolution, though there might be; that 
 things would right themselves if they were only left alone; that 
 English ideas and education would lead pacifically but irresistibly to 
 
 88 
 
 I a 
 
THE JAMESON RAID 89 
 
 the establishment of a Transvaal Republic upon the regular foun- 
 dation of a modern democratic state. ‘Safely and slow; Let things 
 alone; Time is on our side.’ These, according to Stead, had been 
 Rhodes’s watchwords down to the beginning of December 1895. 
 
 All this was written on January 3 — before we heard in England of 
 the Kaiser’s congratulatory telegram to President Kruger. Stead at 
 this date could only conjecture the motives underlying Jameson’s 
 rash action. ‘What seems clear,’ he said, ‘is that the Chartered 
 Company, with Mr. Rhodes’s approval, and with the knowledge 
 of everyone in South Africa, mustered 800 men on the Transvaal 
 frontier, expecting that when the anticipated revolution took place at 
 Johannesburg, they might be needed to prevent massacre and restore 
 order. While waiting there, unknown to Mr. Rhodes, and contrary 
 to all expectation, Dr. Jameson suddenly invaded the Transvaal, 
 fearing, probably, from private intelligence, that if he did not rush, 
 there and then, the situation might change for the worst so much as 
 to render a pacific solution impossible. ‘Therein he was misinformed. 
 His miscalculation has cost him dear, and not him only.’ 
 
 But when news came of what the Kaiser had been saying and doing, 
 —not merely congratulating the Boers on the way in which they had 
 maintained ‘the independence’ of their country ‘against foreign 
 aggression,’ but actually pressing the Portuguese Government to let 
 him march an armed force into the Transvaal as an anti-British 
 demonstration, — the whole matter took on an entirely new aspect, and 
 the tones in which Stead discusses it are singularly un-pacific. He 
 rejoices in the Kaiser’s indiscretion ‘as a tonic and stimulant to 
 British public opinion,’ and records with pride that it evoked ‘an 
 outburst of unmistakable national passion.’ ‘Jameson’s Raid,’ he 
 says, ‘has passed into the background.’ Jameson had blundered, no 
 doubt, but he had ‘unmasked an ambush the very existence of which 
 we had not suspected.’ 
 
 “We don’t want to fight,’ ran the famous music-hall song, ‘but by 
 Jingo, if we do! ...’ 
 
 Stead’s summing up of this episode reads amusingly like a prose 
 paraphrase. ‘None in Britain wished for war,’ he declared, ‘all of us 
 from the highest to the lowest regarded it with a horror too deep for 
 words’. . . but — 
 
 “There was no flinching, no shrinking, no paltering with our trust, 
 
go THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 If we were attacked, we would defend ourselves, please God! and do 
 what in us lay to defend the right; and if so be as all our quondam 
 allies forsook us and fled, well then we must e’en defend ourselves 
 alone with such help as would come to us from the unseen. Not 
 until empires and men find themselves in a tight place is it possible 
 to ascertain the stuff of which they are made. Last month we were in 
 a tight place, a very tight place, and, even our enemies being judges, 
 we stood the test.’ 
 
 And he remained of the same mind throughout the whole of 1896. 
 Listen to him in his Christmas retrospect of the year’s events: 
 
 ‘Dr. Jameson and his friends in Africa and London builded more 
 wisely than they knew. The moment Dr. Jameson crossed the 
 frontier he forced the hand of the Boers, who by their instant appeal 
 to Germany for assistance unmasked a conspiracy which had been 
 diligently promoted for years past. 
 
 “The German Emperor’s telegram, which in itself might have been 
 ignored, was as the torch thrust into the pile of faggots which in olden 
 times was prepared on every beacon hill to warn the nation of the 
 approach of the foe. Now, as in olden times, the war-flame spread 
 from peak to peak until the alarm reached the capital, when — 
 
 “With one start and with one cry, the royal city woke.” 
 
 So England roused herself in the early days of the New Year, when 
 from Berlin came that unlooked-for challenge of our right to pre- 
 eminent domain in South Africa. War is so hateful, that even the 
 contemplation of its possibility is painful to any humane mind; but 
 nothing for many years in our recent history added so much to our 
 national consciousness, not only of our Imperial strength, but of our 
 unanimous resolve to exert all our strength in defence of challenged 
 rights, than the outburst of indignation which followed the revelation 
 of the German complot in the Transvaal. Once for all it was made 
 manifest throughout the length and breadth, not only of the con- 
 tinent of Africa, but of all the continents, that Britain was Britain still, 
 and that in the defence of her Imperial position she would no longer 
 stand alone. European allies she might have none, but from the East 
 and the West, from the North and the South, wherever men of 
 English speech had founded commonwealths which enjoyed British 
 freedom under British law, there came forth warm-hearted words of 
 
 
 
THE JAMESON RAID gl 
 
 sympathy and unsolicited offers of succour, until the Mother Isle was 
 seen to be surrounded and defended by the stalwart progeny with 
 which she had peopled the waste places of the world. For that great 
 moment of inspiration, for that apocalyptic vision of the new English- 
 speaking world which had been created by our hundred years of 
 colonizing labour, it were well worth while to pay the price of a dozen 
 Jameson Raids. For long years the Genius of England had appeared 
 to many of the most patriotic amongst us to have been somewhat, to 
 borrow Milton’s metaphor, like an eagle in the moult. But no sooner 
 did the call to arms by the ‘“bugle’s note and cannon’s roar” fall upon 
 our ears, than once more, like Milton’s eagle, she renewed her mighty 
 youth, and asserted what every Englishman at heart believes to be her 
 natural and destined place in the community of nations. ‘Thrice is he 
 armed who hath his quarrel just,” and in the attempt to oust us from 
 the suzerainty over the Transvaal —the only thing which we had 
 retained for ourselves when we surrendered all other sovereignty 
 over that State - we were freed from any misgivings if, which God 
 forbid, we had been forced to defend our right hand. There were 
 some bitter moments, no doubt, but as colony after colony sent in its 
 messages of cheer and promises of support, men did not need to have 
 much imagination or feeling to see in the strangely altered scene 
 something like the political realization of Lowell’s magnificent image, 
 when speaking, not of the national embodiment of the cause of 
 Liberty and Right, he said: 
 
 ‘“Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet ’tis Truth alone is 
 strong 
 And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng 
 ‘Troops of beautiful tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.” ’ 
 
 At a first glance, as I have said, the foregoing outburst may surprise 
 one a little, but on reflection we shall see that they are not, after all, 
 so incompatible with Stead’s subsequent pro-Boerism. As to their 
 war-like flavour! — well, Stead was never for ‘Peace at any price.’ 
 Peace was his ultimate aim, to be worked for unceasingly, untiringly; 
 but, until others could be got to listen, the British Empire must be 
 ready and fully equipped to resist all foes, the German Emperor not 
 least among them. 
 
 Pro-Boerism, in the sense in which Stead preached and practised it, 
 was not in his own view justifiable at the time of the Raid — the Raid 
 
92 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 itself did not seem to him to justify it: the Boers had made their own 
 way in South Africa by raiding, and the ‘moral meridian’ of the 
 Transvaal was not that of Europe. I shall have occasion presently to 
 cite a number of passages in which, even when his pro-Boer sym- 
 pathies were most pronounced, he condemned as trenchantly as any 
 believer in Liberalism and the Franchise could desire the Boer 
 Government’s despotic treatment of the Uitlanders. There can 
 scarcely be a doubt that had he himself been living at Johannesburg, 
 he would have given President Kruger more trouble than all the other 
 Uitlanders put together. It was as the result of Mr. Chamberlain’s 
 stupid bullying of the old President that Stead, from being one of the 
 severest censors of the Boers, became presently their warmest sym- 
 pathizer and most strenuous champion. 
 
 II 
 STEAD AND CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 Stead’s acquaintances used to say, especially at this period, that he 
 hated Chamberlain. That hundreds of thousands of people hated 
 Chamberlain there can be no doubt. He had many virtues and many 
 staunch friends; Lord Morley, who knew him so long and so well, was 
 able to say of him with affection: ‘We were like brothers.’ But it 
 is difficult to think of any modern politician who, in public life, 
 aroused such cordial detestation. He himself looked and talked like 
 what we call ‘a good hater.’ One imagines that he must certainly have 
 hated Stead — he had good reason to do so; and yet I am convinced 
 that Stead did not hate him. I am convinced (and those who were 
 best acquainted with him agree with me) that Stead did not really hate 
 anyone, although he could be so violent, so ruthless, in his attacks on 
 individuals of whom he disapproved. His attitude towards Cham- 
 berlain, bitter though it generally was, had often in it an element of 
 humour akin to that of Sir F. C. Gould. Everybody is familiar with 
 Gould’s inimitable series of Chamberlain cartoons and caricatures — 
 Chamberlain’s countenance, while not lacking good points, could 
 look very repulsive and ‘F. C. G.’ exploited its uglinesses unpityingly. 
 So it was, also, with Stead’s onslaughts on Chamberlain’s character 
 as a politician. There was not much more of real downright, 
 personal hatred in them than in the stinging satires which we owed to 
 
 ‘F. C. G.’s’ priceless pencil. 
 
THE JAMESON RAID 93 
 
 The first of the many pamphlets devoted by Stead to Chamberlain 
 during the years 1896-1903 was frankly a lampoon — namely the 
 Review of Reviews Annual for 1896, entitled Blastus, written in the 
 Autumn of 1895. It scarcely bears re-reading now, although in 
 political circles it afforded a good deal of amusement at the time. Its 
 sequel, however, the Annual for 1897, entitled The History of the 
 Mystery, contains much that is still of interest. Moreover, to adopt 
 the words which we shall find Edmund Garrett using, it is ‘gorgeously 
 and gloriously Steadean.’ 
 
 Garrett, it must here be explained, had gone to South Africa in the 
 spring of 1895 as editor of the Cape Times, splendidly heralded, of 
 course, by Stead. ‘If Mr. Garrett had a physique corresponding in 
 vigour to his mental equipment,’ Stead wrote then in the Review of 
 Reviews, ‘there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years he would 
 have been the first journalist in London.’ In the warm climate of 
 South Africa it was to be hoped that his physical weakness, lung 
 trouble, would not handicap him, and Stead prophesied boldly that 
 his friend’s character and genius would leave a more permanent 
 impress upon the country’s history than those of any other man 
 except Cecil Rhodes. ‘Of all my friends,’ Garrett declared in a letter 
 thanking Stead for these generous words, ‘there is none, I think, who 
 could write in such spirit of me before the world, and, absurd as it is, 
 mean so much of it!’ 
 
 The pupil, once arrived at his destination, went to work in a way 
 worthy of the master. On the steamer going out had sailed a disciple 
 of W. E. Henley, Stuart, of the Pall Mall Gazette, bound on a similar 
 mission — the editing of a Cape daily, but on the other side in politics. 
 They arrived in time to take part in a fierce electoral battle. ‘It will 
 be Stead versus Henley at the Cape!’ Garrett wrote some days later: 
 ‘For Stuart puts H’s name on his flag, I yours. My opening blow- 
 off? set all the hounds of S.A. journalism yap-yapping, and your name 
 and mine were blent in a hundred cuttings in volleys of abuse!’ And 
 a week or two later, he writes with a glee which Stead will have shared 
 to the full: ‘They say I am all egotism and side! Quite a ‘““W. T. S.” 
 on a small scale in fact! ! !’ 
 
 1 The ‘blow-off’ had been a characteristically bold declaration of indepen- 
 dence. Rhodes was the chief proprietor of the Cape Times and it was gener- 
 ally supposed that Garrett would be merely Rhodes’s mouthpiece. This 
 wrong impression Garrett completely removed. 
 
94 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 In August 1896, Stead wrote to tell Garrett of the new Chamberlain 
 Annual which he was beginning to think out — a kind of imaginative 
 reconstruction of the whole episode of the abortive revolution in 
 Johannesburg which had culminated in Jameson’s Raid: a mixture of 
 fact and fiction, with a journalist of genius as chief actor in the whole 
 story. Stead’s letter drew a rapturous reply — seventeen pages of 
 close handwriting, dashed off evidently at a breathless rate. ‘I roared 
 with laughter,’ Garrett begins, ‘when I read your letter received 
 yesterday, about Christmas Number. It was so gorgeously and 
 gloriously Steadean!’ At first, it had come as a bit of a shock, how- 
 ever, for he (Garrett) also had a Raid Christmas Number in prepar- 
 ation, but on reflection he had seen that the two ventures need not 
 clash. He will, he says, help Stead with the Cape part of the fiction 
 and Stead can help him with the mere facts, as known in London. 
 “You will see,’ he declares enthusiastically, ‘that all will be well and 
 two tremendous successes will be the result!’ He continues: 
 
 ‘Read — mark — learn! 
 
 ‘(1) A suggestion which will help to keep us distinct, give you a 
 much grander theme, and do something for C. J. R. which no one 
 has yet dared — I went nearer in “‘Cecil Rhodes’s dream”’ but that was 
 a hint only: viz. Make World see what he was driving at and what 
 would have come #f all had come off and if J’bg (Johannesburg) had 
 played up. 
 
 ‘If you won’t do this, I shall introduce it at the end of mine as a 
 Dream, from which C. J. R. wakes up to stern reality of Rinderpest 
 Rebellion and Jameson in Gaol. ... Now you can do this better 
 than anybody, and it is really the thing that most wants doing. Eno’ 
 of argument: either the idea fructifies for you or it don’t. Verb: sap: 
 
 ‘(2) As to making me the hero. No. But I daresay the idea’s good 
 (and Steadean) to make an editor the chorus and peg and to some 
 extent, therefore, the hero. But he must be not only me but you also, 
 and A. Milner and a few more rolled into one; and he must do what 
 I dreamed of doing - but time and space prevented, viz. hear of 
 Raid as soon as C. J. R. does, and, without a word (after dictating 
 leader to rouse and keep straight Cape Colony) rush up to J’bg, 
 arriving just after Doornkop (Sunday —- Wednesday), displace the 
 
 1 An allusion to an article in which he had set forth some of Rhodes’s 
 aspirations. 
 
THE JAMESON RAID 95 
 
 palsied or disunited Reform Committee, harangue Uitlanders, lead an 
 attack on Pretoria, rescue Jameson, arm J’bg from the arsenal at 
 Pretoria, stop High Commissioner at border respectfully but firmly 
 (in the spirit of my wire to the J’bg Star — ‘‘Imperial Govt. can’t do 
 the thing for you, but you must for ’selves’’). 
 
 “Send for C. J. R. who has meanwhile refused to resign and stemmed 
 the storm here and resumed marvellous sway over Africanders, 
 Hofmeyr accepting inevitable, after a futile momentary struggle. 
 C. J. R. enters Pretoria and finds your hero (‘‘Milner Garsted” or 
 ““Milsted’’?) holding in check the swollen, flag-wagging Jingoes (the 
 very men who, when he first turned up, were creeping under beds 
 and saying “‘all’s lost!’’) who want to hoist the Union Jack. C.J. R. 
 says ““No — we’ve won by a fluke, a coup, a surprise. This old Puritan 
 minority of Boers will fight and in the end win or split S. Africa, 
 unless we consult their convictions and cherished faiths. Go for a 
 South African Union, keeping this Republic (and under its own flag) 
 but sending delegates to a Convention forthwith: the nucleus of a 
 future Federal Council of which High Commissioner, as President, 
 accepted by Boer Republic: and so practically unite S. Africa under 
 Great Britain without perfidy to Dutch.” 
 
 “Then C. J. R. must have a struggle between wishing to fix whole 
 thing up at once and save further complications and on the other 
 hand, his past career and glimmering of ethical considerations making 
 him do the fair thing by the Dutch. He enters into the whole plan, 
 carries all S.A. with him, goes to Convention, and fixes up Union on 
 proper Rhodesian lines, coercing Joe by cable — Joe might run off the 
 false scent of the Union Jack and insist that either we climb down or 
 declare the Republic a Colony: C. J. R. playing off the Fleet (which 
 Joe orders to blockade S. Africa) against the Dutch malcontents, and 
 the Dutch malcontents plus the English Home Rule Colonists against 
 Joe, and fixing all up! 
 
 ‘As It Should Have Been!’ 
 
 If done upon these lines — so the long epistle concluded — Stead’s 
 Christmas Number would be — 
 
 THE CRISIS AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, 
 while Garrett’s own would be— 
 
 THE CRISIS AS IT WAS. 
 
96 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 The History of the Mystery, as eventually written and published, 
 embodied a good deal of this vivid sketch, but with characteristic 
 modifications. The Editor-Hero, instead of being a glorified Garrett, 
 as Stead had at first intended, or the mixture of himself and Garrett 
 and Milner here suggested, is a woman! A wonderful woman, made 
 up of all Stead most admired in womanhood ~— a blend of Joan of Arc 
 and Olive Schreiner and Mrs. Besant, with reminiscences of half a 
 dozen other living women whom he knew. Jeanne Leflo, he desig- 
 nated her. Olive Schreiner comes into the story incidentally in her 
 own person and under her name. Rhodes, as large as life, is the Hon. 
 Robert J. Cecil; Chamberlain is ‘Blastus’ — or ‘Joe,’ for short; Lord 
 Harris, Rhodes’s intermediary with the Colonial office, is Mr. 
 Cactus; Dr. Jameson is called Zahlber — though it is not suggested 
 that he is of German extraction.! It is a story with a purpose, as 
 Garrett saw it must be-or rather with two purposes: first, that 
 of expounding and explaining Rhodes; secondly, that of shielding 
 Chamberlain in the interest alike of Rhodes and of the Empire. 
 Chamberlain was already denying all complicity in the revolutionary 
 project which had miscarried in Jameson’s Raid. To Stead, this 
 denial seemed at once a mistake in tactics and an untruth: an untruth 
 because he was convinced that (as was being declared throughout 
 South Africa) ‘Joe was in it up to the neck’: a tactical mistake, because 
 all that had to be confessed was that Chamberlain had been willing 
 to sanction armed intervention in the Transvaal in a certain speci- 
 fied contingency wherein such intervention could not fairly be con- 
 demned.? By revealing, in advance of the House of Commons 
 inquiry, the precise nature of Chamberlain’s complicity and its 
 comparative innocence, Stead claimed to be providing a ‘feather- 
 bed’ for the Colonial Minister to fall on. The ‘Mystery’ to be solved 
 had been as to the kind of skeleton ‘Blastus’ had had in his cupboard: 
 Stead’s ‘History’ of it de.sonstrated that it was ‘Not Such a Bad 
 Skeleton After All!’. 
 
 * Stead was never very felicitous in the naming of his dramatis persone. 
 The ugly “Blastus’ he took from the Acts of the Apostles. King Herod had 
 a chamberlain named Blastus, so Stead remembered while he was at work 
 
 on his Annual for 1896. ‘Joe,’ he contended, might be regarded as King 
 Demos’s chamberlain. And so on. 
 
 * A possible contingency which had been frankly recognized in 1894 by Sir 
 Henry Loch, then High Commissioner at Cape Town: viz. of a revolution 
 breaking out at Johannesburg and of the necessity for the sending of British 
 troops into the country with a view to helping to restore order. 
 
THE JAMESON RAID 97 
 
 Early proofs of the story went to Stead’s Cape Town accomplice in 
 November. Garrett read it with mingled feelings of disturbance and 
 delight. It was the best Christmas Number, he declared, that Stead 
 had ever written and Jeanne was ‘gorgeous.’ It must certainly be 
 ‘boomed,’ but how was Garrett to do this while minimizing Joe’s 
 ‘complicity,’ of which Stead had made so much? That was a problem! 
 Not that Stead had exaggerated the truth —on the whole, Garrett 
 thought he had ‘let Blastus down lightly and might have been much 
 worse,’ but, from the standpoint of South African unity, the less said 
 about any kind of Imperial guilt the better. This letter of Garrett’s 
 is tantalizingly elliptical. A few more words and it might have been 
 a most illuminating document. ‘It’ll all have to come out now, but I 
 know all and am not afraid’ — so we read in one place. This does not 
 seem quite to tally with what follows: “Two trump cards yet remain 
 in the English-Boer game — 
 
 ‘rt. If Leyds can catch Joe over Raid plot. 
 
 ‘2. If Joe can catch Leyds over German plot. 
 
 ‘Please God we'll pull Joe through on No. 1, but why you, of all men, 
 should try to give it away I don’t know. You’ve done wonders in 
 easing it off but better have left (it?)’ - the concluding word of the 
 letter is omitted. 
 
 So much for Stead’s story of the Crisis as it might have been. The 
 reader who is at all interested in the subject should not fail to compare 
 these extracts from Garrett’s letters with what he himself had to say 
 in public, first in that Christmas Number of his own, and later, more 
 completely, in volume form.” It is a most fascinating narrative, 
 written with verve and feeling and courage. There are ten pages in 
 the Introduction to it in which, while treating his former chief with 
 affectionate respect, Garrett seeks to refute and dismiss his chief 
 contentions and imputations. It is a most careful and well-balanced 
 little treatise, this Introduction. It is balanced so carefully, indeed, 
 that as Garrett himself was conscious, an impatient partisan of the 
 
 * Some portions of Stead’s Annual were ‘blotted out’ before publication 
 out of regard for the feelings of one of his informants who feared that too 
 much had been revealed. This added an element of ‘sensation’ to the publi- 
 cation. As a matter of fact, there was nothing of importance in the passages 
 thus erased. Garrett, who read them in the early ‘proofs,’ declared that he 
 could recall nothing in them ‘that was as bad as the blots.’ 
 
 * The Story of an African Crisis: Being the truth about the Jameson Raid 
 and Johannesburg revolt of 1896, told with the assistance of the leading 
 actors in the drama. Constable & Co., 1897. 
 
 ioe VOL. IL G 
 
98 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 Colonial Secretary might well interrupt it with the angry question, 
 ‘why not say at once that Mr. Chamberlain knew nothing and that 
 it’s all a disgraceful lie and that people who “thought” had no 
 business to “‘think,”’ and so on, or else leave it alone?’ And to any 
 such interruption Garrett could, he says, only answer that neither a 
 bold, bald Aye or Nay was possible: ‘It is so with most questions 
 where more than two or three human beings are concerned. It took 
 Browning — how many thousand lines to “whitewash” Pompilia?’ 
 
 The volume was published early in 1897. To ‘leave Joe as many 
 loopholes as possible’ may be taken to have been its chief purpose, 
 for Garrett, writing to Stead on the subject three months later, urges 
 that ‘it was best’ to take this line — ‘though, by the way,’ he adds, ‘I 
 believe I am regarded by him (Joe), and his, as a villain only second 
 to yourself after the Introduction I added to my Crisis book in 
 England. Our ointments, yours and mine, are apt to break our 
 friends’ heads, I find, and our “‘feather-beds”’ their bones!’ And he 
 proceeds: ‘The effect of any really bad implication of Joe just now 
 would be simply ruinous here. True, nothing can now eradicate 
 suspicion, but suspicion is not a form lending itself to diplomatic use.’ 
 
 “Not Proven’ would seem, at this stage, to be Garrett’s verdict upon 
 the case against Chamberlain as argued by Stead. ‘Not Proven,’ 
 with the rider — ‘And for Heaven’s sake stop trying to prove it!’ 
 
 But the proceedings of the South African Committee of the House 
 of Commons, appointed to inquire into the whole matter, were to 
 harden Stead against listening to any such appeal! 
 
 III 
 THE SOUTH AFRICAN COMMITTEE 
 
 Nobody had much good to say of that South African Committee 
 and its methods. ‘In the public interest,’ Milner wrote to Stead on 
 November 16, 1896, ‘an earthquake which should engulf the Com- 
 mittee at its first sitting would clearly be the best thing. But I fear 
 Heaven no longer intervenes in the affairs of men in this early- 
 Semitic fashion.’ Some nine months later, having meanwhile been 
 appointed Governor-General of Cape Colony, he had occasion to 
 refer again to the subject, this time in defence of Chamberlain against 
 Stead’s unceasing attacks: ‘I trust,’ he said, ‘now that the Com- 
 mittee is over, the crusade against “Joe”? may cease. He has his 
 
THE JAMESON RAID 99 
 
 faults, no doubt, and at the Judgment Day ‘‘the Lord who seeth in 
 secret” (or is it “Your Father?” I am not good at Biblical quotations) 
 may have a word to say to him. But he is a good man to serve under, 
 clearheaded and not afraid to support his men. On the whole, I 
 think he is by far the best Col. Sec. we have ever had, and I hope we 
 may keep him.’ 
 
 Stead was further than ever from taking that view of Chamberlain, 
 and his attacks continued. I shall not follow them here. The whole 
 story is still of great interest to those who followed the inquiry at the 
 time, with anxiety or amusement or disgust, but it would not mean 
 much, probably, to the world at large to-day. Stead re-told it in one 
 of his most famous pamphlets, The Scandal of the South African 
 Committee: A Plain Narrative for Plain Men, issued in the winter of 
 1899, shortly after the beginning of the war. Here are three para- 
 graphs from the Preface in which he gave his reasons for doing so: 
 
 “The time has come when it is necessary to set forth in plain words, 
 which the plain man can understand, a narrative of Mr. Chamber- 
 lain’s complicity in the conspiracy to overthrow the Government of 
 the South African Republic in 1895. 
 
 ‘Let me, at the beginning, emphasize the importance of disting- 
 uishing between the conspiracy to bring about a revolution in the 
 Transvaal with a British Force on the Border in support, which was 
 the Jameson Plan, and the Jameson Raid. The two things are almost 
 always confounded by the indiscriminating public. So far from being 
 identical, the Jameson Raid cut the throat of the conspiracy. Dr. 
 Jameson acted, no doubt, with the best intentions in the world, but, 
 as a matter of fact, he not only upset Mr. Rhodes’s applecart, but 
 from excessive zeal caused the miscarriage of an enterprise which, 
 however indefensible it may have been from the point of view of 
 constitutional law, would, if it had succeeded, have delivered us from 
 all our present troubles. If, therefore any person should say that Mr. 
 Chamberlain was privy to the Raid, or that Mr. Chamberlain had 
 anything whatever to do with the Raid, either that he knew about it 
 beforehand, or that he sanctioned it, or that he was in any way what- 
 ever responsible for it, such person would say that which is not true. 
 The Raid was Dr. Jameson’s own act, and it spoiled everything. 
 The Jameson Plan was that to which Mr. Chamberlain was privy. 
 
 ‘I have never made any charge, or accusation, or complaint against 
 
100 THE JAMESON RAID 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain for the support which he gave to the conspiracy 
 against the Government of Paul Kruger. Neither do I at this moment 
 lay any stress upon that side of the question. Others, no doubt, take 
 a very serious view of the matter. They may be right, and I may be 
 wrong. All that I wish to point out is that, so far from being animated, 
 as many ignorantly declare, by a persistent and vindictive animosity 
 against Mr. Chamberlain, I have from first to last endeavoured to 
 make every conceivable excuse for his action in the autumn of 1895. 
 If since I have been driven to criticize his action, it has been due, 
 not to anything that he did in 1895, but to the manner in which he 
 persisted, in the face of all warnings and protests, in adopting a 
 policy of concealing the truth, denying facts and making both parties 
 in the House of Commons unwilling accomplices in a conspiracy to 
 deceive the nation, which is, I believe without parallel in the history 
 of Parliamentary Government. It is this offence which is rank, an 
 offence committed in the full light of day, after careful and long 
 deliberation, and with the distinct purpose and object of concealing 
 the truth and giving official Parliamentary currency to a lie.’ 
 
CHAPTER 22 
 STEAD AND THE PRINCE OF WALES IN 1896 
 
 HOW LADY WARWICK BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER 
 AT LUNCHEON IN DECEMBER OF THAT YEAR 
 
 Beara the nineties Stead was immensely interested not 
 only in the personality and in the behaviour of the Prince of 
 Wales, but even more in the possibilities of the great position to which 
 the Prince was heir and to which at any moment now — for Queen 
 Victoria was growing very old — he might succeed. Some day, some 
 diarist from behind the scenes of our Royal Court will perhaps 
 enlighten us completely as to the future King’s life at this period, 
 his relations with his martinet mother, the nature and effects of 
 his much-discussed friendships, the feelings entertained regarding 
 him by the Queen’s Ministers and other advisers. How Stead would 
 have loved to hear it all! There were not many subjects that 
 engrossed him more than this. Among his unpublished writings 
 there is almost none more characteristic of him than a long memor- 
 andum which he dictated in December 1896, to a confidential 
 secretary and in which he recorded, for use obviously at some distant 
 date, whether by himself or by some one else, the things that seemed 
 to him most significant and important — and amusing! — about the 
 Prince. The time has not yet come for publishing this document in 
 full. There can, however, be no conceivable harm in reproducing a 
 portion: Stead’s account of a ¢téte-d-téte conversation which he had 
 with the Prince of Wales at the house of Lady Warwick, then at the 
 height of her popularity and renown as one of the ‘reigning beauties’ 
 of London society. From the preliminary matter which leads up to 
 this, it will suffice to transcribe a few passages:! 
 
 ‘It may perhaps be well before describing my interview with the 
 Prince of Wales, to explain somewhat of the circumstances under 
 
 * It should perhaps be emphasized that this narrative is taken from notes 
 hastily dictated and that it was not meant for publication just as it stands. 
 But to me and several friends of Stead’s, journalists and writers of note, to 
 whom I have shown these pages, it has seemed beyond question permissible 
 to reproduce, with a few excisions, his exact words. So it has seemed also to 
 Lady Warwick. 
 
 101 
 
102 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 which we met. When Morley was editing the Pall Mall Gazette he 
 met the Prince at Sir Frederick Leighton’s, and he told us next 
 morning that the Prince had been cordial and had said that he always 
 stuck to the Pall Mail — that he took it regularly, but, said he, “You 
 are too strenuous, too uniformly strenuous.” This criticism, which 
 was perfectly just, led to a custom in the office, whenever the 
 ‘Occasional Notes” wanted to be lightened up, for one of us to say, 
 “We must have some Notes for the Prince of Wales!’ Morley heard 
 us once and was very indignant; he was quite offended at the liberty 
 which we took with H.R.H.’s name and forbade us ever to use such 
 a phrase again! 
 
 ‘I did not come across the Prince, even indirectly, until when the 
 “Maiden Tribute” was on. The Maiden Tribute brought me into 
 contact with Sir George Lewis, and through Sir George I often 
 heard of the Prince, who, rumour said, used to see him every Sunday 
 morning. That, I think, is an exaggeration. George Lewis, however, 
 has certainly done a good deal of work for the Prince one way and 
 another. Lewis told me that he had often talked about me with the 
 Prince who seemed to think I had held him up to public obloquy as 
 guilty of no end of crimes, etc. 
 
 ‘In the year of the Jubilee I saw the Prince come down Westminster 
 Abbey beside the late Emperor Frederick, and the contrast between 
 the short, somewhat dumpy figure of H.R.H. and the stately figure of 
 the Emperor led me to put my foot in it next morning. I was writing 
 a leader in the Pall Mail on the Jubilee, and I said that the Monarchy 
 was no doubt safe in our time and as long as the Queen reigned, but 
 afterwards ‘‘when the fat little man in red who cut so poor a figure 
 beside his magnificent brother-in-law in white” came to the throne, 
 how long would it last? I wrote it, feeling I would like to see how it 
 looked in print, and then cut it out, but when I showed it to E. T. 
 Cook, he protested against its going out, urging that it was the best 
 bit in the leader and must remain. Of course I liked it, for it gave 
 colour and point to the whole thing, but I felt it ought not to have 
 gone in; however, in it went, whereupon there was a fearful row. 
 Two friends of the Prince, officers I think, went round to all the 
 clubs in Pall Mall with this passage marked, and represented to the 
 Club Committees that out of loyalty to the Prince they must dis- 
 continue taking in the Pall Mall Gazette. Some of the clubs dropped 
 it when the “Maiden Tribute” was published; all of them with 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 103 
 
 one exception, I think, dropped it after “The fat little man” 
 appeared.! 
 
 ‘When I was in gaol E. T. Cook, then engaged in compiling his Pall 
 Mail Extra, “The Hundred Best Books,” wrote to the Prince among 
 others, and the Prince replied regretting the omission of Dryden 
 from the list. That, I think, was the only contribution we ever had 
 from him in the Pall Mail. I always wrote to him when I wanted to 
 know anything, just the same as if nothing had happened, and when 
 the Review of Reviews was started I wrote to him as well as to others 
 about the project. He sent a very kind letter, which was published 
 among the other autographs. 
 
 ‘It was after the famous baccarat scandal at Tranby Croft that I 
 came into close quarters with the Prince. I was staying down at Mr. 
 Haddon’s place in the country and was much struck at noticing the 
 indignation of the good Baptists in whose house I was about the 
 Prince’s gambling. I had intended to say nothing about it, feeling 
 that the Prince had really done his duty, and that as for the gambling, 
 that was what everybody did in his set and it was absurd making such 
 a fuss about it, but when I came back to town and found a general 
 expectation that I must say something, I determined to doa character- 
 sketch. This character-sketch brought me into close quarters with 
 a good many people. Among others I had two hours’ talk with Sir 
 Francis Knollys. I had many conversations with Lady Henry 
 Somerset, and after it was in type, a very extraordinary correspon- 
 dence with Mr. Gladstone. 
 
 ‘Mr. Gladstone wrote me at great length, almost in the terms of one 
 who believed I was setting a match to a mine that would blow the 
 Constitution heavens-high. He insisted that it was my duty to lay 
 the proofs before Lord Salisbury. I saw Morley, who went to Mr. 
 Gladstone’s at the time when he was staying in the country. He 
 found the old man in a great pother about it. My line was to defend 
 the Prince for his action at Tranby Croft, but generally to express 
 
 1 This phrase had brought him the following sharp but amusingly expressed 
 rebuke from Colonel Brocklehurst (later Lord Ranksborough): ‘If the Prince 
 of Wales, wishing to speak ill of the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, prefaced 
 his remarks by saying “That gaunt wild-looking individual, always badly 
 dressed,” would it not appear to you pointless bad taste, taking away to a 
 great extent the value of any further remarks he had to make on the sub- 
 ject?’ In a friendly note written a week later, Colonel Brocklehurst added: 
 ‘You are not a small man, so don’t do small things.’ 
 
104 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 regret at the kind of life he had led and to indicate how much better 
 use he might have made of it. After I had written the first draft I 
 sent it to Sir Francis Knollys, who returned it to me saying it was so 
 utterly and entirely unjust, it was no use his trying to put anything 
 right and he would not touch it. Whereupon I modified it. Brett’s 
 judgment as to the modifications was that I had made the article much 
 more damaging than it was originally! But Mr. Gladstone was very 
 pleased with the changes and said complacently to Mr. Morley 
 when he was talking it over: ‘“‘I think there we did some good.” 
 
 ‘During the talks that I had when writing the sketch, both Sir 
 Francis Knollys and Lady Henry Somerset, who might be regarded 
 as the two poles on the subject, agreed that since the Prince had 
 taken up with Lady Warwick, he had led a much better life — that 
 she had cleared out “the American gang” and that her influence had 
 been distinctly and visibly for the better, and had terminated all the 
 late hours and generally fast living that had prevailed before. 
 
 ‘It was shortly after the Duke of Clarence’s death, that I met Lady 
 Warwick for the first time at a dinner party at Moreton Frewen’s. 
 After dinner we talked for more than an hour. She talked very simply 
 and frankly about the Prince. She said that when the Review of 
 Reviews character-sketch came out in 1891 he brought his copy to 
 her in its wrapper, saying, “‘I am told that there is an awful article in 
 here about me, I dare not open it, I want you to do so, read it, and 
 tell me what it says.’ She did so, read it, and told him she thought 
 it a very good article, very just, and that it gave him very good advice 
 and was very fair. I don’t remember much else that passed between 
 us on this occasion excepting that I talked as usual about many 
 things, and I should have forgotten everything I said, if it had not 
 been for one remark which apparently impressed her and bore fruit. 
 I was protesting against the notion that I assumed a Pharisaic virtue 
 or professed to be better than anyone else. ‘‘As a matter of fact,”’ I 
 said, ‘I never talk to anybody intimately — so as to know and under- 
 stand their position — without feeling that if I had been in their place, 
 I should probably have been much worse than they were.” It was 
 years afterwards before she told me about this, and that she then felt 
 ever after that, if she ever needed a friend who could understand, I 
 was that person.’ 
 
 Stead proceeds at this point, first to describe the growth of his own 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 105 
 
 close and very cordial relationship to the Countess of Warwick, which 
 was to be life-long, and then to record in detail a long conversation 
 which they had early in 1896 regarding her famous friendship with 
 the Prince of Wales. What follows needs, really, no further words of 
 preface. I shall but remark, borrowing from Lamb, that here we have 
 the great ‘W. T. S.’ in his quiddity: 
 
 ‘Lady Warwick told the Prince about this talk, and he was naturally 
 interested and said he would like to see me. Various things helped 
 to postpone our meeting. Finally the Prince proposed I should meet 
 him at lunch at Lady Warwick’s on a Sunday in November 1896. 
 I refused, said I never went up to Town to lunch on Sundays, and 
 that I would not make a beginning with the Prince. Lady Warwick 
 said the only thing then was to arrange for a Saturday. The Prince 
 assented to this arrangement and it was fixed. Then Lady Warwick 
 was riding her horse downhill, hunting, when the horse put its foot 
 into a hole and fell, threw her and walked over her, with concussion 
 of the brain as the result. This prevented the lunch, so another 
 appointment was made which at last came off at 77 South Audley 
 Street, Lady Algy Lennox’s house, which Lady Warwick had taken 
 for the winter. On Tuesday, December 8, she asked me to come at 
 1.15 to see her before and to have lunch at two. I found her very 
 unwell, she had just got out of bed. The journey up to Town had 
 made her head bad — some congestion in the brain the doctor said — 
 and she had to go to bed directly he left. I asked Lady Warwick to 
 tell me what to talk about. She said “‘Anything.”’ I asked whether 
 we could talk about South African affairs or my proposed character 
 sketch of the Queen, and she said anything I liked. That she had 
 told the Prince I would do him so much good that he was very anxious 
 to see me. I said I was afraid that if she talked to him like that he 
 would think that I was like brimstone and treacle and would regard 
 me with a kind of holy horror. She said no, he had been looking 
 forward to this talk a great deal and I could talk to him about Russia, 
 he was very much interested in Russia and generally about every- 
 thing. 
 
 ‘I asked if I could talk about her. 
 
 “She seemed rather amused, and I said I thought the only impor- 
 tance of this interview would arise from the extent to which I had 
 been able to “hook and eye” the Prince. That is to say, if he took to 
 me as some people did, and felt that I might be useful as a friend, 
 
106 STEAD AND THE, PRINCE 
 
 then anything might come of it, and in future we should share her 
 “Parishioner’’! between us, and therefore I thought it might be 
 rather ‘“‘worldly-wise”’ of me, but as the important thing was to in- 
 terest the Prince, the best thing for me to do was to talk about that 
 in which he was most interested, and as that subject was herself, I 
 would with her permission, if the opportunity offered, sing her 
 praises as soon as she left the room. 
 
 ‘She laughed very much at this and said she had no doubt it would 
 please him as much as anything I could do. “Then,” I said, “I shall 
 do it if opportunity offers,” but as no opportunity offered, I did not 
 mention her name, which I think was perhaps as well. 
 
 ‘She said she was rather out with Lord Rosebery. First because he 
 had snubbed the Prince about Burdett’s Old Age Pensions articles, 
 which were appearing in The Times. She was very enthusiastic about 
 these articles, she said. The scheme was a far better one than Mr. 
 Chamberlain’s, and the Prince, who had taken a sincere interest in 
 Old Age Pensions ever since he had sat on the Royal Commission, 
 had gone to talk about it to Rosebery when he was at Sandringham, 
 but Rosebery refused absolutely to take any interest in it, said there 
 was nothing in Old Age Pensions, that it bored him to death, and, in 
 short, generally vexed the Prince, who wrote that it was deplorable 
 that Rosebery would not take any trouble to keep in touch with 
 things or to keep his friends together — that no party could be kept 
 together if its leader treated people in this fashion, etc. 
 
 ‘Lady Warwick said that before Christmas she would come up from 
 Warwick and I must dine with her alone when we could have a quiet 
 three hours together as less than that was no good. 
 
 “The Prince was going down to Sir Edward Lawson’s to a shooting 
 party that evening, and was expected to go by the 4.30 train. He was 
 about ten minutes late and came in about 2.10. Lady Warwick 
 advanced to meet him and made an extremely pretty curtsey, prettier 
 than any I had seen before, then he came forward and shook hands. 
 Then I made a small bow which I felt contrasted badly from the 
 point of view of grace with Lady Warwick’s! I may say that as it was 
 the first time I was ever with a Prince, I did not know but I might 
 put my foot in it. The Prince shook hands in coming and in going 
 
 * It was a contention of Stead’s, playfully expressed, that Lady Warwick 
 was in duty bound to continue exercising a good influence over the Prince 
 as over ‘a parishioner’ entrusted to her care. 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 107 
 
 out. He does not shake hands nicely, only about half his hand he puts 
 in and there is no grip in it. I don’t remember whether when I went 
 away I turned my back on him or not. 
 
 ‘When we went to lunch, Lady Warwick went first, he next, and I 
 came last. At lunch he sat at the head of the table, Lady Warwick 
 and I sat opposite each other. I rang the bell once for the servant, 
 who left us alone after bringing in each course. I never said “‘Royal 
 Highness” as far as I remember, neither do I remember saying “‘Sir.”’ 
 When he finished I opened the door for him and walked behind him 
 up the stairs just a few steps, talking, which Brett says was right. I 
 was perfectly at my ease all through. 
 
 ‘After he had said a few words to her as to her health he turned to 
 me and asked me if I had seen Burdett’s paper on Old Age Pensions. 
 Fortunately I had heard quite sufficient from Lady Warwick about it 
 to join in the conversation without answering his question. He began 
 to discuss Mr. Burdett. He said Mr. Burdett was a very clever man 
 who was worked to death at the Stock Exchange where he had £5,000 
 a year, but he had several children. But for them he would retire. 
 Both the Prince and Lady Warwick sang Burdett’s praises a bit. I 
 recalled the fact of his offer to go to China which the Prince said first 
 of all he forgot, but afterwards remembered. Burdett led on to 
 nursing, and then we talked about the article by a nurse in the 
 National Review abusing the new nurses, which Lady Warwick had 
 read, but not the Prince. Then luncheon was served and we went 
 downstairs. 
 
 “The Prince ate very rapidly, taking, I think, every course excepting 
 lobster, in which respect we all followed suit. I don’t remember what 
 wine he drank. He struck me when he came into the room as being 
 slightly under the middle height, not so stout as I had expected, very 
 simple in his manners, and had at first a look — I don’t know whether 
 it was his moustache or in his eyes — which made you have a half- 
 impression that he had either a slight squint, or that one of his front 
 teeth was awry. It was only at the beginning, for the impression went 
 off rapidly. 
 
 ‘The conversation turned almost immediately upon Rhodes. The 
 Prince spoke most enthusiastically of Rhodes. “Fine fellow!” he 
 said, ““Wonderful man. He will never tell a lie. I am quite sure he 
 won’t. Don’t you agree with me?” 
 
 ‘I said he would not the last time when there was great pressure 
 
108 STEAD AND THEVPRINCE 
 
 brought to bear upon him, and there would be the same pressure 
 this time. 
 
 ‘ “Fe won’t do it,” said the Prince. “I am quite sure he won’t. He 
 is a truthful man, that.” 
 
 ‘The Prince listened very attentively as I sang Rhodes’s praises, 
 every now and then chiming in. I told him it was Mr. Rhodes’s idea 
 of his duty to his Creator to paint as much of the map of the world 
 British-red as possible. 
 
 ‘ “Well,” said the Prince, ““He is a very remarkable man. I hardly 
 know any man who has impressed me more than he did.” 
 
 ‘“Ves,”’ I said, “and to think that he ought to be arrested the 
 moment he puts his foot on British shores!”’ 
 
 ‘“T suppose that is so?”’ he said. 
 
 ‘ “Yes,” said I, “Under the Lord Chief Justice’s summing up.” 
 
 ‘“T wonder,” said the Prince, “‘why he was so hard on them and 
 strained things so. I am going to see him to-night and I will ask him 
 why he did it. I wonder why he did it. I suppose,” he said, ‘““Rhodes 
 is going to have a wonderful reception at Cape Town.” 
 
 “Yes. I supposed he would, as even the Dutch farmers thought they 
 would not have any rinderpest if Rhodes had only remained in power. 
 Then I got talking about the officers. 
 
 “The Prince said he was very glad Jameson was out. It was a great 
 pity, and he certainly thought if they let the dynamitards out, they 
 should not keep him in. 
 
 ‘I said, yes, but the dynamitards were poor wretches who had a very 
 hard time and were really going mad. 
 
 “He said they had recovered their senses sufficiently to make 
 speeches, some of them, since they had got out. 
 
 ‘I said two of them were mad now, and it was enough to make 
 them so. 
 
 “He said it was very awful, the confinement. 
 
 ‘I said it was very hard lines on the officers to lose their commis- 
 sions. : 
 
 “He said, yes, it was very hard for them to be in jail at all, it was a 
 great pity, he thought they had not made a very good job of it from a 
 military point of view, that Willoughby was not exactly the man of 
 whom a Moltke or a Wellington was made. 
 
 ‘On which I remarked that such men were rare. 
 
 ‘He laughed and said Yes, he was afraid so. “But,” he continued, 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 109 
 
 “it was a very bad business, a very great blunder,” and he was afraid 
 it would have been a worse business if Jameson had got into Johan- 
 nesburg, for if he had, the Orange Free State would have joined in 
 and the Cape Dutch, and there would have been a war with Germany 
 and a frightful mess. 
 
 ‘I said I did not think so, and told him the story about Kruger 
 having resigned on the Monday morning, and I said that I thought 
 they would have been only too glad to have welcomed the High 
 Commissioner to arrange terms of settlement. 
 
 * “Well,” he said, ‘it might be so.” 
 
 ‘He had evidently been well coached by Lord Rosmead as to the 
 consequences of Jameson’s getting into Johannesburg. 
 
 “Then we talked about Lord Rosmead. He asked did I think he 
 was in it. 
 
 ‘I said I thought in justice to Lord Rosmead it ought to be recog- 
 nized that he had been talked to in paraphrases by Jameson, and that 
 though Beit was said to have spoken to him more directly, I believed 
 it was more or less put in a hypothetical way, “‘supposing such and 
 such things happened, what would you do?” 'That Jameson certainly 
 sent his last telegram to Rhodes in order to make sure that Rhodes 
 would tell the High Commissioner and Hofmeyr, which Rhodes 
 had not done, and did not do until after the letters arrived. There- 
 fore I thought Lord Rosmead was not so much to blame as people 
 thought. 
 
 “Then he asked about Chamberlain. As the Prince had seen all the 
 cables, I did not go into any details, but said I supposed he was in it 
 too, but that he would get out of it if he would only speak the truth. 
 
 “The Prince asked if I did not think Chamberlain was a very clever 
 man? 
 
 ‘I said, ““Yes, he is a very clever man.” 
 
 ‘He said, ‘I remember him when I went down to Birmingham, he 
 was then Mayor and a terrific Socialist then, quite the kind of man 
 whom, if you mentioned his name at a dinner table, it was like as if 
 you talked of Tom Mann or someone like that.” “Yes,” continued 
 the Prince, ‘‘but he was very nice and we got on very well, they think 
 no end of him at Birmingham.” 
 
 ‘ “Yes,” said Lady Warwick, “‘ I sat next the Mayor of Birmingham 
 the other day, and although he was a Radical, he would not have a 
 word against Chamberlain. He was quite furious with the Daily 
 
110 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 Chronicle for suggesting that Chamberlain might possibly have known 
 something about it. 
 
 ‘ “FT has married three times,” said the Prince. ‘‘This is his third 
 wife.” 
 
 ‘Then I talked a little of Chamberlain from the point of view of 
 the people in Africa, who certainly believed he knew and approved, 
 although he may not have understood the full extent to which he was 
 committing himself. Then we got back to Rhodes again, and I said 
 he was the only millionaire I knew who regarded all his money as 
 held in trust for the Empire. 
 
 ‘ “Fine thing, fine thing, that. Does he really?” 
 
 ‘The Prince continued to talk pleasantly. Society small talk for the 
 most part. Which reminded me of the type of Society hostess who 
 contrives to give the impression to every one that she is much inter- 
 ested in what he is saying, and five minutes afterwards forgets all 
 about it. Another thing which struck me about him was that he 
 seemed to have a kind of eager pleasure in finding points upon which 
 he could come down upon persons who had not been doing quite the 
 right thing in his opinion. 
 
 ‘For instance, he began talking about Mr. Bayard, the American, 
 and the Daily Telegraph’s proposed subscription. He said “Fine 
 fellow, Bayard, but it was a most unfortunate thing, quite ridiculous 
 thing of the Daily Telegraph to propose to raise a subscription to him, 
 an ambassador.”’ He said, “‘I am going to see Sir Edward Lawson, I 
 am going to his place, and I shall tell him so. It won’t do. I cannot 
 understand what made them make such a mistake.” 
 
 “Then we got to talking about Russia. I asked him when he was 
 going back to Russia. He said he would like to go, there was no 
 country in the world in which he had so many friends. I said I 
 thought he should make it his business to go there once every year 
 as a kind of plenipotentiary extraordinary. That he was very popular 
 there and his visits did a world of good. 
 
 “He said nothing would please him better than to go. He enjoyed 
 going to Russia very much. Then, I think, it was Lady Warwick 
 brought in somehow or other, Madame Novikoff. 
 
 “Then the Prince turned round to me and said, “‘Ah, I don’t like 
 your Madame Novikoff.” 
 
 ‘ “Really!” I said. “Why?” 
 
 **You know,” he said, in a kind of impulsive, schoolboy fashion, 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 III 
 
 “T think she is a great humbug.” Then he burst out laughing. ‘‘She 
 gives herself such airs as if she had a great position and great power, 
 and I know she has none of these things.”’ 
 
 ‘I was rather nettled and said: “I beg your pardon. I think you are 
 quite wrong. I have known Madame Novikoff for twenty years, and 
 she is not a bit of ahumbug. She has always been most simple and 
 I have never known her to pretend to anything she cannot do.” 
 
 ‘ “Well,” he said, “that is what they say. I read a book of hers lately, 
 Russia in England. She talks very largely about our duties. She 
 forgets that a country like England has a continuous policy which 
 cannot be turned round at a moment’s notice.” 
 
 ‘ “Well,” I said, “She has done her part in these twenty years in 
 turning it round. For these twenty years she has been the only 
 person who has attempted to make English people understand 
 Russian policy.” 
 
 *“Tn that she may have done good,” he said. 
 
 ‘“Yes.” I said, “And when you have worked with anyone for 
 twenty years, and during all that time she has never deceived you 
 once in anything she has told you, it is something to say for anyone.” 
 
 *“Tt is indeed. That is true.” 
 
 *“T knew I would draw Mr. Stead,” said.Lady Warwick triumph- 
 antly. “You see he is quite devoted to Madame Novikoff.”’ } 
 
 “Then from Madame Novikoff, we got on to talking about M. de 
 Staal. He said Staal was one of the best men that ever lived. He was 
 very fond of him, a perfectly truthful fellow who never said anything 
 that was not true. 
 
 ‘I said he very seldom could tell you anything. 
 
 ‘“Yes,” he said, “I wonder why it is they don’t tell him more.” 
 
 ‘“They do not tell him because it is only when the time comes to 
 give an ambassador orders that they tell him. When things are in 
 the making they do not.” 
 
 ‘About this time, Lady Warwick said she would go up to the 
 drawing-room and leave us to our coffee and to smoke. “You have 
 
 1 “In conversation with Madame Novikoff afterwards,’ Stead added in a 
 parenthesis, ‘for I went to see her immediately after leaving South Audley 
 Street, I gathered that the source of the Prince’s antipathy is probably the 
 Duchess of Coburg. Of course, Madame Novikoff has no position like a 
 Grand Duchess, and yet, so far as the English public is concerned, Madame 
 Novikoff has more influence in her little finger than the Duchess has in her 
 whole body. And the Duchess may not like it.’ 
 
112 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 cigars?” she said to the Prince. “Oh, yes,” he said, ‘I am all right.” 
 
 ‘I then opened the door for her, and said in a side whisper, “Is it 
 going on all right?” 
 
 ‘“Quite right,” she said, pressing my hand. 
 
 “Then I came back and we sat down. He offered mea cigar which 
 I took and we began to smoke. 
 
 ‘“T like the Russians,” he said. ‘Their women are charming and 
 most accomplished, the men are most interesting, but I don’t like 
 their system of Government. I think their persecution of the Jews 
 is most deplorable and I don’t altogether trust them. But the present 
 Emperor always tells me that the idea of injuring us in India is not 
 in his thoughts at all. He has been in India, was very glad to have 
 seen the country, but as for attacking us there, he has not the thought 
 in his head. He always says so. ‘The late Emperor was a very peace- 
 ful man. I believe,” he continued “his hatred of war was largely 
 physical. You see he was a big man, very heavy, and he hated to have 
 to spend the whole day in the saddle as he must do in case of war, and 
 his intense reluctance to make war was partly based on that. Also 
 he had a great horror of the war he had seen in Bulgaria, when the 
 young Grand Duke was killed close by his side.” 
 
 “Then I told the Prince about my interview with the late Tsar at 
 Gatchina. He had never heard about it, he said, and seemed extremely 
 interested. Asked questions as I went on, wished to know what 
 language I spoke. I said English. 
 
 “He said it was curious, because the Tsar would never speak to him 
 in English. 
 
 ‘I said he had the advantage of knowing several languages, whereas 
 I only knew one, so that the T'sar talked to me in my own language. 
 He wanted to know when the interview took place, and I told him, 
 and then talked about Constantinople and the Dardanelles. 
 
 “The Prince was very much interested. 
 
 “Then I said that I went through France where I had seen General 
 Boulanger. 
 
 “Ah,” he said, ‘“‘a wind-bag that, nothing but a wind-bag.”’ 
 
 ‘I said to him, and this was the only passage in the whole conversa- 
 tion which was at all “‘worldly wise,” but it was absolutely genuine, 
 “T do not think it is quite just to say he is only a wind-bag. Politically 
 perhaps, but when I think about that man there is one point het 
 him which touches me much.” 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 113 
 
 ‘ “*Tndeed!”’ said he, “‘what was that?” 
 
 ‘I said, “From one point of view it was a bad one, but from another 
 it was very good. I was in Paris at the time he was elected deputy 
 and everything was ready for a march upon the Elysée, and if he had 
 been there he would probably have been installed as Dictator of 
 France, but when the moment came, the man was not there, he was 
 away in the north of France with his lady-love, and then, afterwards, 
 you remember, he shot himself upon her grave. No, a man, who 
 with all his faults is capable of a great passion for which he sacrifices 
 his career and then his life is more than a wind-bag.” 
 
 * “Yes, yes, perhaps so.” 
 
 ‘He said very little about France, scarcely anything. Then I 
 continued: “I went on to Berlin and tried to see Bismarck, but he 
 would not see me, because — although I had introductions from Lord 
 Rosebery — Bismarck said I was such a dangerous man.” 
 
 ‘“Ah,” he said, “ That was because of the Colonial policy. But 
 Bismarck, you know, was much against the Colonial policy, it was 
 the best thing about him. He was always opposed to that, but after- 
 wards when it got too strong for him it went on, but he has a great 
 hatred of England. I think that it is deplorable that such miscon- 
 ceptions and evil feelings should be aroused. Just look at this strike. 
 Here is Bismarck doing all he can to make the German people believe 
 that because Tom Mann and these people go over to Hamburg, they 
 are sent over by the English Government for the purpose of crippling 
 German competition with British trade. The Government can do 
 nothing, but I think the Press might do, and ought to do, as much as 
 they can to prevent this wicked nonsense being believed. The Ger- 
 man Emperor has somewhat quietened down and he is not hostile 
 to this country. A great deal more was made of the telegram to the 
 Transvaal than need have been. The two nations, although they 
 would have opposing interests in many parts, are of the same 
 religion, and it would be a world-wide catastrophe if they were to 
 go to war. Ah,” he continued, ‘“‘how different everything would 
 have been if the Emperor Frederick had lived. That man was a true 
 friend, and with my sister,” he said, ‘‘who is so clever, I think we 
 could have done great things. If Germany and England would 
 stand together there would be no danger of anything.” 
 
 *“Yes,” I said, ‘“That was the last thing the Tsar said to me. If 
 Germany, Russia and England stood together, the peace of the world 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II H 
 
114 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 would be saved. We could snap our fingers at everybody else, but 
 here is this Bismarck doing all he can to set the two nations by the 
 ears. It is very deplorable.” 
 
 ‘Then, talking of the German Emperor, I said he ought to have 
 been a newspaper Editor. It would have suited him much better 
 than having to be an Emperor, as he would not have to make a speech 
 every day. 
 
 ‘The Prince said, ‘“You should remember that many of his speeches 
 sound much more absurd in English than they do in German. In 
 German they do not read so absurdly as they do when they are 
 translated.” 
 
 ‘I told him I had been in Charlottenburg when the Emperor 
 Frederick lay dying and the Empress Frederick had gone away to 
 see about the sufferers from the floods, so I just missed her. 
 
 ‘ “Ah, what a pity. It was the only forty-eight hours during the 
 whole reign when she was away from the Emperor’s side. It was a 
 great pity you did not see her.” 
 
 ‘Then we went on talking still about Russia, and the Prince said 
 he had never seen Pobedonotzeff, who, he thought, was a powerful 
 reactionary man of the period of Nicholas I. 
 
 ‘I said ‘Oh, dear me, no! Much farther back, the era of Peter the 
 Great!”’ But I said he should see him, for he was very interesting 
 and had read all the English books. 
 
 ‘He said he thought it was very deplorable, the persecution of the 
 Jews and the Stundists. The Jews, no doubt, were a very bad lot in 
 Russia, but the Russians were themselves to blame for letting them 
 get the upper hand in the villages. The peasants had only just been 
 emancipated from slavery, and the Jew was able, no doubt, to 
 exploit them, but the Russians should have taken measures against 
 that. 
 
 ‘I said it was a very difficult thing to prevent a Jew exploiting the 
 peasantry. That the Jew was extremely clever and generally managed 
 to come to the top. 
 
 ‘ “*Ves,”’ he said, ‘‘it is so.” 
 
 ‘Then we had some talk about the Queen. 
 
 ‘I had introduced the subject when Lady Warwick was there, by 
 the way, by saying that an American Editor had commissioned me 
 to write a sketch of the Queen as Sovereign. He said, “In America 
 Republicans recognize that monarchy has its uses, and we have 
 
OFIWALEST IN: £8.09 6 115 
 
 reason to do this because on one famous occasion the Queen saved 
 the two countries from going to war.”’ That was, he said, at the time 
 of the Trent affair. 
 
 ‘Now I remember how it was the matter came up. We were talking 
 about the officers being in jail and the Prince said he thought it was 
 very hard, it was a great pity nowadays there was no loyalty on the 
 part of Governments to the people whom they employed. The first 
 thought when anyone got into a scrape was to throw him over. “Ah,” 
 he said, “the minister I liked best, far best of them all, was Lord 
 Palmerston. He was thoroughly loyal. He stood by whoever served 
 him and never deserted them, he knew his own mind and put down 
 his foot. He was a true British minister, an ideal minister.”’ 
 
 ‘I said, ““Weli, on one occasion he put down his foot when Her 
 Majesty made him take it up again.” 
 
 *“T remember,” he said. 
 
 Then it was that I introduced the subject of the Character Sketch. 
 
 *“My American Editor,” I proceeded, “‘says there must have been 
 many other times in which the Queen interfered for good.” 
 
 *“Oh, many,” he said. 
 
 ‘ “And what he wants me to do is to find out all about the times in 
 which the Queen has intervened in order that we may set forth to 
 the American Republic the services which a monarch can render.” 
 
 ‘“*That,” he said, “is very interesting. But there have been lots of 
 times. But I have forgotten and it is very difficult to get anybody to 
 tell you about them. Nearly all the old people who knew have died. 
 The young ones who have come up, they know nothing, and they 
 could tell you nothing.” 
 
 ‘I said the Empress Frederick was the depository of all the tradi- 
 tions. 
 
 * “Ah, yes,” he said, “‘she knew.” } 
 
 “He said he really could not say who could tell me much about those 
 things. He said the Queen was a wonderful woman. She had more 
 knowledge of affairs, more experience in dealing with politics 
 than any other living person with the exception, possibly, of Mr. 
 Gladstone. 
 
 * ‘Brett says she knows everything and has forgotten nothing,’ Stead 
 added in a parenthesis here. ‘I did not press, however, for any formal intro- 
 duction or recommendation to the Empress, feeling sure it would be better 
 
 not to press too much at first and to rely upon Lady Warwick for any- 
 thing in that direction that might be required afterwards.’ 
 
116 SLTEADFAN Ds THESE RINCE 
 
 ‘Yes, I said, it was wonderful indeed. It was a wonderful reign. 
 In fact, looking at it as I had to do from the point of view of writing 
 this sketch, I felt there was nothing like it in English history except- 
 ing that of Queen Elizabeth, and I said I could not put it better than 
 by saying I would rather have been his mother’s son and heir- 
 apparent than any king that ever sat on the English throne. 
 
 * “Would you?” he said. 
 
 ‘Yes, certainly —look over them all! I would rather have been 
 the eldest son of Elizabeth and heir-apparent to the English throne 
 through the whole of the Elizabethan era, than I would have been 
 Henry VII, Henry VIII, Charles I, James I or James II, or Charles 
 II. Certainly I would.” 
 
 “The idea seemed rather to strike him, but he only assented and 
 said nothing more. 
 
 *“Then,” I said, “I can hardly realize I am sitting on this chair, and 
 you are sitting on that, and we are actually talking to each other as 
 we are, after all that I have said about you in the past. I hope,” I 
 said, ‘if I have been a bit rough in anything I have written, you 
 will -—” 
 
 *“Oh, dear me,” he said, “I am a liberal-minded man. Don’t 
 mention it.” 
 
 * “Well,” I said, “I am glad to have had an opportunity of talking 
 to you.” 
 
 ‘He spoke pleasantly about its being a great pleasure to meet me 
 and so on. ‘Then without my saying a word, he suddenly landed on 
 the Tranby Croft affair, and said there had been a good deal of fuss 
 about the baccarat case, and he thought he had been rather hardly 
 dealt with; that, after all, he was not given to gambling or playing 
 for heavy stakes. What were the counters for, he said, excepting to 
 prevent the game degenerating into heavy gambling, which is not 
 nice in a country house. “I playa game of whist now and again, but 
 really I very seldom touch cards, sometimes for a pastime I have no 
 objection to a game, but the fuss they made about it was altogether 
 unjust.” 
 
 ‘Then we got on talking about his position. He said it was a very 
 difficult one. 
 
 ‘I said I thought it was difficult, no doubt, but it was a very good 
 position. 
 
 *“You think so?” he said. 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 117 
 
 ‘I think it is about the best position there is in the Empire, I don’t 
 mean for pomp.” 
 
 *“T understand what you mean,” he said. 
 
 ‘“Yes,” I said, “ I think it is the best position anyone could have 
 with all its difficulties. Always,’ I said, “excepting my own. I would 
 not exchange with you for anything.” 
 
 “He laughed and said, “I suppose you like your independence.” 
 
 *“T think I have the best position in the Empire,” I said, “but I 
 think that after me, you come. Oh yes, it is a much better position 
 than that of the Prime Minister, for instance. There is Lord Salis- 
 bury who is in office now. For the next five years he will be kicking 
 his heels, not able to do anything. But you never go out of office 
 whether the Liberals or Tories are in.” 
 
 ‘“But,” he said, “I cannot take any part in politics.” 
 
 ‘““In home politics, certainly not. But there was Mackenzie, the 
 Scotch judge, who used to say, ‘I cannot take part in politics because 
 I am a judge, so that my only policy is to be against the Government 
 of the day. For all Governments commit mistakes and make blunders, 
 so all Governments are wrong, and I am against them all!’ ” 
 
 ‘ “And it is not a bad line, either,” said the Prince. 
 
 ‘By the way, when Lady Warwick was there, we had some talk 
 about party politics, which Lady Warwick said were so deplorable 
 in country villages, for the villagers of opposite politics would not 
 work together for the common good. I said the Church and Chapel 
 were worse than Whigs and Tories. To which she agreed. And 
 when they were deploring these divisions I told them the story of 
 the dissenting minister’s method of reviving the cause by getting 
 up a split. 
 
 “The Prince seemed rather amused, but I doubt whether he quite 
 understood what “getting up a split” meant. But, I asked, did he 
 not think there was much less bitter party feeling than there used 
 to be? 
 
 “Lady Warwick said certainly there was, for she could remember 
 when persons of opposite parties would never meet under the same 
 roof. 
 
 ‘I said it was for the Prince to be at the head of a national party in 
 which people would all be as zealous for England as they were now 
 for their respective parties. “The opportunities for doing good and 
 getting things done,” I said to him, “‘lie all around you. It is not 
 
118 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 by making speeches that you have most power, but by knowing the 
 right men and being able to put them in motion at the right time.” 
 
 ‘ «Ves,” he said, “che supposed it was.” 
 
 ‘ “Yes,” I said, “and you must have known all the best people.” 
 He had known them all, from Wellington right down to the present 
 day. 
 
 ‘ “Ah,” said I, “what reminiscences yours would be if you could 
 only write them! George Lewis, whom you know very well, could 
 write excellent reminiscences, but he says that it is quite impossible, 
 he is the one man in London who must never write his reminis- 
 cences.” 
 
 ‘I told him about Morley’s quoting somebody who said that round 
 the walls of the Royal Audience Chamber there were written these 
 words: “‘Hear, but speak not,” and I said they did keep a silence 
 wonderful. Campbell-Bannerman was the only man who ever talked 
 about the Queen to me. Then I told him the story of Campbell- 
 Bannerman’s account of John Burns being described to the Queen 
 as her Inspector-General of Tommy Atkins. 
 
 ‘“Ah, John Burns,” said the Prince. ‘‘He does not seem to be 
 getting on very well with the County Council. They seem to have 
 got into some trouble there. It may be very bad. It looks bad. The 
 provincial town councils are all right, they are very good, but the 
 London County Council is too big. I have never been in love with 
 the L.C.C. It is too immense. Their people have to handle things 
 they cannot have personal knowledge of, and I am afraid there is a 
 good deal more behind this scandal in the Works Department.” 
 
 ‘I defended the County Council as best I could, and that was what 
 led up to the discussion about Party. He said there was far too much 
 Party in it, and that they were more intent upon attacking each other 
 than looking after the welfare of other people. Then, reverting to 
 the opportunities of his position and what he might do, I said that I 
 personally felt grateful to him, as I had felt during the Penjdeh time 
 that Sandringham was the centre of light and hope, and that he was 
 able to help the Tsar to understand things and make the English 
 people understand Russia. 
 
 ‘I said, “You know I have always been an advocate of the Anglo- 
 Russian alliance.” 
 
 ‘“Yes,” he said. “And I am all for that entirely.” 
 
 ‘“Yes. I understood that you had always rendered good service 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 119 
 
 there, and I regard you with gratitude for services rendered and that 
 at a time when Her Majesty, I am very much afraid, was in the 
 opposite camp.” 
 
 ‘“Ah,” he said, “she is very much better now. In ’78 she was 
 much more under the influence of the memories and the traditions 
 of the Crimean War.” 
 
 “That, I said, was one good thing. I felt that if the Queen had done 
 good service in the American War, he had done good service with 
 regard to Russia. Then, I said, there was one speech of his which 
 I always remembered with pleasure, and he asked me what it was, 
 and I said it was a mere sentence, but it sounded the true note; I had 
 frequently cited it, for nothing had been so truly and timely said. It 
 was that in which he said that we should always act as if every one 
 who lived in Canada or Australia was as much an Englishman and a 
 citizen of our common country, as though he lived in Kent or Sussex. 
 “That,’’ I said, ‘‘is the whole Imperial question in a phrase.” 
 
 ‘ “Ah,” he said. “And what do you think of the Navy League? The 
 Duke of Devonshire made a speech about it the other day.” 
 
 “That, I said, was a question of detail, of machinery for giving 
 effect to a sentiment. The thing was to create the sentiment, and I 
 felt if we could live up to that sentence a great deal would be done. 
 “For instance,” I said, ‘I should be awfully glad if you could help 
 on the movement in favour of Imperial Penny Postage. You see, if 
 we have all to be Englishmen the same as if we lived in Kent or 
 Sussex, we ought to be able to correspond by the penny post.” 
 
 ‘ “Ves,” he said, ‘‘but there are difficulties in the way.” 
 
 ‘ “Yes, but these difficulties have to be overcome. There are diffi- 
 culties in the way of everything.” 
 
 ‘Then I said it was a long time since he had been in America. 
 
 ‘ “Yes,” he said. ‘Not since I was a boy.” 
 
 ‘He would like to go to South Africa very much, he continued. His 
 brother had been to Australia and his two boys had been round the 
 world, but he had only been to Canada and India. “ India,” he said, 
 “‘was my great tour.” 
 
 ‘Then I said: ‘Don’t you think you should go round the Empire? 
 It would do a world of good.” 
 
 ‘ “Yes,” he replied, ‘‘I should like nothing better, but you see Iam 
 tied down by engagements.” 
 
 ‘ “But you broke them to go to India, and it is much more important 
 
120 STEAD AND THE PRINCE 
 
 you should go to Australia and Africa. For India is held by the sword, 
 whereas the Colonies are held by bonds of affection.” 
 
 ‘ “Ves,” he said, ‘I understand, and I should like to go very much.” 
 
 ‘ “Well,” I said, ““You are something like Gulliver in Lilliput, tied 
 down by all the hairs in your head to the ground, but the Doctor is 
 the way out! You must be made out ill! Lord Salisbury made me 
 out ill when I was in jail and had to be made a first-class misdemean- 
 ant. It was he who discovered that my life was in imminent danger! 
 So I was informed by the doctor who came to report, though I 
 myself declared I had never felt better in my life. We must make you 
 ill now so that you may have a long voyage in order to recover your 
 health.” 
 
 ‘ “Well,” he said, “I should like to go to South Africa. That is the 
 place to see.” 
 
 ‘Then he asked: ‘‘You know Lord Salisbury?” 
 
 ‘“No,” I said, “I don’t. He has always been very good to me by 
 correspondence, but he will never meet me.” And I told him about 
 Sir Robert Morier’s brusque way at St. Petersburg, and how he 
 offended the Duchess of Edinburgh, and also about his wishing he 
 had dynamite to blow me and Mr. Gladstone to hell. 
 
 * “Well,” he said, “perhaps when Lord Salisbury is out of office 
 you will meet him.” 
 
 ‘He evidently seemed to think there was something wrong in my 
 not having met him. 
 
 ‘I said, ‘‘No, I did not care to push myself to see people unless it was 
 necessary to get things done, when I would push hard enough.”’ Then 
 I praised Arthur Balfour, saying of him what I always say of him — 
 that he is a good man to have at your back in a fight but that he is a 
 little too indifferent. 
 
 ‘ “Ah,” he said, “he never reads the papers, you know.” 
 
 “Then we talked of Morley, and I told him the story about “‘notes 
 for the Prince of Wales.” 
 
 “This was the only passage in my conversation I felt doubtful about. 
 Brett said afterwards it was quite right. 
 
 ‘He said Morley was better as a literary man than as a politician; 
 that he came into politics too late, and it was a great pity he was not 
 more loyal to Rosebery. 
 
 ‘I said I liked Rosebery very much, but I thought it was’ ‘hardly a 
 case for complaint about lack of loyalty, as Rosebery did not seem 
 
OF WALES IN 1896 121 
 
 able to command the support of his colleagues by force of character 
 or persuasiveness of reasoning. 
 
 ‘By this time he had smoked two cigars. He now got up and we 
 walked upstairs to the drawing-room, where Lady Warwick was 
 lying down with a quilt over her, her head being bad. I said we 
 ought really to bind her over on no account to go hunting again for 
 the rest of the season for fear she should have another accident, but 
 I was so glad she had escaped with her life, I did not feel inclined to 
 do anything but rejoice. He said I was quite right and that we should 
 do that. 
 
 “Then I shook hands with him and departed.’ 
 
 * * * 
 
 Next morning Lady Warwick received a note from the Prince with 
 a friendly allusion in it to his new acquaintance. ‘I am grateful to 
 you,’ he said, ‘for giving me the opportunity of meeting a remark- 
 able man who made a far more favourable impression on me than 
 I ever believed possible. Some day I hope to hear from you the 
 impression I made on him.’ 
 
 The sympathetic hostess passed on these words to Stead at once, 
 adding that she intended the mutual feeling of interest shown by 
 her guests to grow presently into ‘a mutual friendship.’ That, 
 however, was not really to be expected, as Lady Warwick now con- 
 fesses with a smile, — the incompatibility of the two characters was too 
 wide to be bridged. But it was a memorable experiment! 
 
CHAP T Eh Ravze 
 
 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND THE PEACE CONFERENCE 
 AT THE HAGUE, 1898-1899 
 
 I 
 THE RESCRIPT AND WHAT LED UP TO IT 
 
 T is no exaggeration to say that ‘all Europe was amazed’ when 
 Nicholas II of Russia issued his Rescript in August 1898. I quote 
 
 the words from Mr. Howard Evans’s Life of Sir Randal Cremer. 
 W. R. Cremer (as he was styled before his knighthood) and W. T. 
 Stead were probably the two men in the whole world who were most 
 thrilled by the news of the Tsar’s action. History may say that they 
 were the two men, also, who counted for most in prompting it. 
 
 Outside the comparatively small circle of social reformers and 
 Peace enthusiasts Cremer’s name is almost forgotten, and yet he was 
 the incarnation of all that was best and bravest in England. Born in 
 1828 at Farnham, the son of a labourer, at twelve pitch-boy in a ship- 
 yard, by the time he was forty Cremer had come to be looked upon — 
 not in this country alone but throughout the Continent —as the 
 finest type of the intellectual and idealistic working-man. In 1870 
 he founded the International Arbitration League, in 1877 he 
 organized the first Conference (in Paris) of the Inter-Parliamentary 
 Union. It is difficult to say which of the two men, Cremer or Stead, 
 worked the more strenuously for Peace and Arbitration, but their 
 methods were strangely different. We have seen how Stead always 
 scattered his energies. Cremer concentrated. ‘For nearly forty 
 years,’ says his biographer, ‘Cremer set before himself a task which 
 might have daunted the greatest statesmen in Europe. .. . He said, 
 “This one thing I can do’’; and to this one thing every other con- 
 sideration was subordinate.’ 
 
 Perhaps, in truth, there were no greater statesmen in Europe just 
 then than ‘Honest Bill Cremer’ and ‘that good man Stead.’ } 
 
 Many theories have been formulated as to the influences which 
 moved the T’sar. In the Review of Reviews Annual for 1899, entitled 
 “The United States of Europe,’ Stead traced the germ of the Rescript 
 
 1 So Punch called Cremer, and so Carlyle once, in 1877, called Stead. 
 Carlyle had been reading some of Stead’s articles in the Northern Echo and 
 approved of them. 
 
 122 
 
1899 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT 123 
 
 to a confidential State Paper prepared at Lord Salisbury’s instance 
 in 1891, in which the actual cost of militarism in Europe was set 
 forth in detail. Meant originally for the exclusive use of the British 
 Cabinet, this document was later communicated by Lord Salisbury 
 to the German Emperor, who was so much impressed by it that he 
 privately intimated his intention of summoning a European Congress 
 to consider practical measures for assuring universal peace. But 
 Alsace-Lorraine stood in the way and the project was stopped. 
 
 In the Review of Reviews for May 1894, Stead himself + pressed the 
 question ‘whether the time had not come for the people collectively 
 to make a stand against the steady increase of armaments,’ and 
 suggested that the true line to take was to seek an international 
 agreement by which the Powers should bind themselves not to allow 
 their military and naval Budgets to pass beyond their present limits 
 till the end of the century. 
 
 The idea had already been taken up by a Conference of the Free 
 Churches, held in April of that year, and presently a national 
 Memorial was addressed to the British Government, urging it to 
 open negotiations with all the European Powers as ‘a first step’ 
 towards the desired end. ‘While the Memorial was still in course of 
 signature,’ Stead writes, ‘but acting under the inspiration of the 
 movement of which it was the visible outcome, Lord Rosebery 
 communicated with M. de Staal on the subject, suggesting the 
 desirability of the initiative in this matter being taken by the Tsar.’ 
 But the Chino-Japanese war and the death of Alexander III of 
 Russia put a stop to further discussion of the project. 
 
 It was not until 1896 that it could be revived with any prospect of 
 success. In that year the Inter-Parliamentary Conference was held 
 at Buda-Pesth. Russia was not officially represented at the Con- 
 ference, but M. Basili, the Russian Consul-General in the Hungarian 
 capital, attended its meetings, ‘took a deep interest in the proceedings 
 and reported strongly to his Government in favour of action and the 
 stay of armaments. His suggestion was not received with approval 
 by his official superiors and it remained for a long time in abeyance.’ 
 
 Then came a notable utterance by Lord Salisbury on November 9, 
 1897, deprecating the continual increase in armaments, and M. Basili, 
 now established in the Foreign Office at St. Petersburg, again renewed 
 
 1 At the instigation of his brother, Mr. Herbert Stead, who gives his account 
 of the matter in a volume entitled The Unseen Leadership. 
 
124 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 his efforts. Count Lamsdorf, his chief, submitted the proposal to 
 Tsar Nicholas and it was accepted. The Rescript was the result. 
 
 The Rescript began by stating that ‘the maintenance of the general 
 peace, and a possible reduction of the excessive armaments which 
 weigh upon all nations, present themselves in the existing condition 
 of the whole world as the ideal towards which the efforts of all 
 Governments should be directed’; and it ended by inviting all the 
 Governments whose representatives were accredited to the Russian 
 Court to attend a Conference the object of which was to focus the 
 efforts of all the States which were sincerely seeking to make the 
 great conception of Universal Peace triumph over the elements of 
 trouble and discord. 
 
 Europe was, indeed, amazed to see these proposals coming from 
 the Tsar of Russia - amazed and bewildered. Were they the out- 
 come of some crafty political design, or were they meant sincerely? 
 The situation was still unpropitious in the extreme. War had been 
 threatening between France and England over Fashoda — perhaps 
 it would have come but for the internal discussion over the Dreyfus 
 cause by which France was lacerated. New sources of strife had 
 opened in China. Talk of peace measures at such a moment seemed 
 Quixotic and unpractical in the extreme. Before many weeks had 
 passed it really looked as though the Rescript might come to nothing. 
 Those who sympathized with it and believed in it were for the most 
 part too much disheartened or too torpid to move. It was everybody’s 
 business, they recognized, to back up the Tsar, but everybody’s 
 business was nobody’s business. Nobody’s except Stead’s! That old 
 adage never applied to him! What was everybody’s business was in 
 a pre-eminent degree his business, and we shall see now how he went 
 about it. We shall smile sometimes at his way of doing things: often 
 undignified; unscrupulous in a quite harmless fashion, occasionally; 
 but incredibly energetic and indomitable and in the end wonderfully 
 successful. We shall smile, but our chief feelings will scarcely be of 
 amusement, especially if we ourselves, while giving him our good-will 
 throughout his campaignings and crusadings, gave him little else. 
 To the out-and-out sceptic or cynic or pessimist to whom Stead’s 
 efforts seemed a mere absurdity they will seem absurd still - perhaps, 
 in the light of the great world war, more absurd than ever. But in 
 the hearts of many of us who merely looked on lethargically they 
 will evoke respect and admiration tinged with envy and with regrets, 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 125 
 II 
 A TALK WITH MR. BALFOUR AT THE FOREIGN OFFICE 
 
 How to infect other people with his own ardour, how to convince 
 them that the Tsar was sincere — these were Stead’s problems. He 
 was not long about deciding what to do. He must at once see Nicholas 
 II personally, as well as everyone else on the Continent whose sup- 
 port would be worth having. By the end of September he had made 
 his plans for a tour of all the chief Capitals of Europe. 
 
 Among the many personages of note whom he consulted before 
 leaving London were M. Lessar, of the Russian Embassy, and Mr. 
 Balfour; Lord Salisbury being abroad at the time, Mr. Balfour was 
 in charge at the Foreign Office. Stead’s talk with him was delight- 
 fully characteristic. 
 
 M. Lessar, who in the absence of M. de Staal was acting Ambas- 
 sador, proved to be much more preoccupied with what he called 
 Great Britain’s manifest hostility against Russia than with the 
 Rescript. He himself recognized, he said, that at some far distant 
 date the two countries might be driven into war, but surely, he urged, 
 nothing could be more wanton than the forcing of an immediate 
 quarrel by England upon the Power which of all others was ‘least 
 formidable and most backward in the rivalry of the nations.’ 
 
 M. Lessar proceeded to deliver a very interesting discourse upon 
 the actual condition of Russia, politically and commercially, and, 
 in particular, upon the Russian attitude in regard to China, as 
 compared with that of the United States. It was against the Ameri- 
 cans, he declared, that Great Britain would first be fighting — the 
 Americans would presently want elbow room and would strike for 
 the supremacy of the seas. From Russia, on the other hand, the 
 British had nothing whatsoever to fear —all that Russia asked was 
 that no European Power should have any political control of the 
 province of Manchuria through which, by the Trans-Siberian rail- 
 way, she had secured access to the Pacific. And yet, although the 
 door was open to British trade and although Russia really needed 
 British manufactures, Great Britain, by the action of Sir Claude 
 MacDonald, then British Ambassador at Peking, was threatening her 
 with the introduction of British political influence into Manchuria, 
 thus provoking anxiety and irritation. 
 
 In this mood of resentment against England, M. Lessar was inclined 
 
126 THE -TSAR’S: RESCRIP Di AND 1898 
 
 at first to view with disfavour Stead’s project of a visit to Russia to 
 see the Tsar, but on reflection he agreed that it might be useful. 
 
 Next day Stead called by appointment to see Mr. Balfour. Strangely 
 enough it was the first time he had ever penetrated into the Foreign 
 Secretary’s stately offices, and he was struck by ‘the gorgeousness of 
 the tapestry, ceilings, etc.’ ‘I remarked upon it,’ he records, ‘to Mr. 
 Balfour, who shrugged his shoulders and said he thought it was all 
 “very vulgar.” ’ 
 
 Ireland, not the Rescript, was the first topic the two men discussed 
 — Stead tremendously in earnest and downright and strenuous, Mr. 
 Balfour nonchalant and ironical. He was ‘always willing to talk about 
 Ireland,’ the latter presently declared, he ‘liked no subject better.’ 
 But if they did not get away from it soon not a word would be said 
 about anything else. ‘In another moment,’ he threatened, ‘I shall 
 fire off a speech at you on Ireland that will leave no time for any other 
 subject!’ 
 
 Thus warned, Stead came to the question of his Russian visit, 
 beginning with a summary of M. Lessar’s complaints concerning 
 the British action in Manchuria — above all, ‘the perfidy and trickery’ 
 of Sir Claude MacDonald’s attempt to make a Treaty Port. He 
 himself entirely agreed with the Russian view of this matter. ‘I do 
 not want you to be under any mistake,’ he continued, ‘as to what I 
 shall say when I go to Russia. It is my intention, if I see the Emperor 
 or Muravieff ! or any of them, to give you away with both hands in 
 this matter. There is nothing too bad they can say about this ice- 
 free port and Claude MacDonald. I feel that it is a national humilia- 
 tion that we should have been guilty of such bad faith.’ 
 
 There followed an exchange of views upon Anglo-Russian relations 
 generally which deserve, I think, to be given here in full. It is a very 
 typical example of Stead’s talk. 
 
 ‘What I cannot understand,’ remarked Mr. Balfour, ‘is how, with 
 your ideas, you can contemplate with such an apparently light heart 
 the increasing growth of the power of Russia. For our time it is 
 nothing to me. But what of our children? —I shall never have any, 
 but our nephews and nieces, and those who will come after us? What 
 kind of world will it be when Russia, which has already a hundred 
 and twenty million inhabitants, exercises an enormously dominating 
 influence over the whole of the south-east of Europe? What kind of 
 
 1 The Russian Prime Minister. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 1% 
 
 Europe will it be, dominated by the Slavs—with a Hungary barely able 
 to hold her own, with a strong Germany, I suppose, but what else?’ 
 
 “Well,” said Stead, ‘to that there are several replies. First I think the 
 Russian is a very good fellow, I think that the Russian race possess 
 many great fundamental virtues with which it will be very good to 
 inoculate the human race at large. Secondly, I do not think that I 
 have any responsibility whatever as to the greatness of Russia in the 
 future and the future strength of the Slavonic race. That is a matter 
 for which I am no more responsible than I am for the fact that there 
 are four hundred million Chinese in the world. Looking at the 
 matter from the point of view of Martha in Concerning Isabel Carnaby 
 — you have read Miss Fowler’s novel?’ 
 
 ‘Oh yes,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘I have read it.’ 
 
 ‘Well,’ continued Stead, ‘it is as Martha would say, a case for doing 
 our duty and leaving Providence to take the consequences. Now, 
 we have not done our duty to Russia — we have failed in our duty.’ 
 
 ‘I don’t agree with you,’ said Mr. Balfour. 
 
 ‘I am only setting forth my point of view,’ replied Stead. ‘What I 
 feel is that during the whole of the last century we have played the 
 evil part in the East of Europe and Russia has played the good part.’ 
 
 ‘Oh!’ exclaimed Mr. Balfour, ‘that is all very well, but just think of 
 their thwarting us about Armenia, for their own interests and ends, 
 when we were willing to do something for the Armenians.’ 
 
 “That,’ said Stead, ‘is a single case and does not count for anything 
 compared with the history of a century. For a hundred years the 
 whole of the idealism of the Russian race, so far as it found any 
 object round which to twine in political affairs, was directed to the 
 liberation of their co-religionists from the yoke of the infidel. It was 
 their religion, their passion, and all this hundred years they saw their 
 ideas thwarted and threatened by England as the ally of the Turk. 
 Hence I feel that I owe a duty personally to the Russians. I felt, 
 before I knew Madame Novikoff, and merely from the circumstances 
 of her brother’s death, as if my hands were stained with her brother’s 
 blood and I have a great deal to do before I can wipe off the arrears.’ 
 
 ‘Yes,’ said Mr. Balfour, ‘I know you hold that view, but how does 
 that affect this matter?’ 
 
 ‘In this way,’ I said. ‘If I have done wrong to the Russians, my 
 first question is, how can I do right to the Russians, and the question 
 whether or not the Russians will be stronger or weaker is not a 
 
128 THE TSAR’ SWRES@C REPAY AND 1898 
 
 question that can be considered until first I have done my duty. We 
 are only responsible for our duty. There is a third consideration 
 that comes in and causes me to feel that to act on righteous principles 
 in this matter is also sound policy from the point of view to which you 
 allude. The alternative before us is not whether Russia shall be 
 great or whether she shall be weak, but whether she shall be in- 
 fluenced in the direction of what we consider to be sound English 
 principles or whether she shall be driven into antagonism to her. 
 Agreed, that the Slav will dominate the whole of Eastern Europe. 
 That is a matter which we cannot prevent. But if we are friends with 
 the Slav he may sympathetically imbibe all that is best in our civiliza- 
 tion, and the Slav domination will thereby come to be less menacing, 
 than would be the case if, by adopting a policy of antagonism, we 
 were to hermetically seal the Slavonic mind against any ideas pro- 
 ceeding from the enemy. ‘There is a fourth point also which always 
 weighs with me a good deal. I do not believe in long looks ahead. For 
 at this moment some obscure chemist may be making a discovery in 
 his laboratory which will revolutionize the relations of human beings.’ 
 
 “You mean,’ Mr. Balfour said, ‘by some explosive that may render 
 war impossible?’ 
 
 ‘Either that or some invention which may enormously increase the 
 power of the small unit against the great political aggregation in some 
 way —no one can say what. Depend upon it, God Almighty has 
 many tricks up His sleeve of which we know nothing. What we have 
 got to do is to do the right.’ 
 
 “There is a great deal to be said for that,’ said Mr. Balfour. ‘Of 
 course,’ he added, ‘I am pro-Russian, and I am all for having an 
 understanding with Russia, and for being on the best possible terms 
 with her that we can be. But she ought not to make it too difficult 
 for us.’ 
 
 ‘Well,’ rejoined Stead, ‘the practical question I want to put to you 
 is this. I have told you what I am going to say to the Russians. I 
 have told you what I am going to say to the Tsar, or whoever is 
 behind the Tsar. I have told you that I do not ask you to say whether 
 you approve of my going to Russia, because that would be to assume 
 a responsibility which I ought not to ask you to assume. What I do 
 ask is this. Knowing what I have told you, do you feel, from the 
 knowledge in your possession that you would be justified in saying to 
 me “Don’t go?”’ 
 
189 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 129 
 
 ‘No,’ Mr. Balfour said; ‘but you will go upon your own respon- 
 sibility absolutely. I entirely disclaim any responsibility for your 
 action in any case. But if I were to forbid your going, I should take 
 upon myself a very great responsibility, and that I refuse. I am going 
 to have no responsibility in this matter at all.’ 
 
 “Thank you,’ Stead replied, ‘that is just what I wanted, and in order 
 to relieve you from any shadow of responsibility, I may tell you that 
 if you had felt yourself bound to forbid my going to Russia I should 
 have felt that that was the very strongest reason why I should pack 
 up my traps and be off at once. So you see by the answer you have 
 given you have absolutely relieved yourself of any responsibility one 
 way or the other.’ 
 
 Ill 
 
 KING LEOPOLD AND THE KAISER HOLD ALOOF. M. CLEMENCEAU 
 THROW SCOLD WATER 
 
 Of all his Continental tours the one on which Stead now embarked 
 was, I think, the most noteworthy, and, despite disappointments, it 
 was the one which he himself seems to have most enjoyed. There 
 had been a touch of the gambler’s throw about the visit to Tsar 
 Alexander in 1888; it proved an exhilarating experience but it was 
 attended by many misgivings and anxieties. Now he was his own 
 master — there was no Mr. Yates Thompson to dazzle into sub- 
 mission! With no personal considerations to preoccupy him, he 
 could give his mind almost entirely to his great purpose, while, of 
 course, not neglecting the Review of Reviews or the requirements of 
 the various newspapers for which he was to correspond. Of these, 
 the most important were the Daily News and the New York Journal. 
 For the latter he was to write not solely about the Rescript, but 
 also about European politics in general in so far as they related to 
 America. 
 
 The tour was to have its disappointments, as I have said. The first 
 setback came at Brussels. A couple of pages of typewritten notes 
 which Stead prepared in advance for the benefit of the Belgian news- 
 paper interviewers, show us how artfully he had baited his hook to 
 catch King Leopold. The King at this time, it must be remembered, 
 was one of the most highly respected figures in Europe: the horrors 
 of the Congo were as yet unrevealed. 
 
 Cissy Ob LL I 
 
130 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 The purposes of the tour? Stead imagined his interviewers asking: 
 Well, in the first place, to ascertain the attitude of the leaders of 
 thought and action throughout Europe in regard to the T’sar’s pro- 
 posal; in the second place, to obtain for the American public the views 
 of the Old World upon the recent development of the New World 
 as a competitor in commerce, in ships and in colonies. 
 
 Had he any practical suggestions to make to Belgium in connection 
 with these matters? Yes, in connection with both. The forthcoming 
 conference at The Hague would offer to the minor States of Europe 
 an unprecedented opportunity. In the European Concert, hitherto, 
 Belgium, like all other small countries, had had no voice. In the new 
 Areopagus, why should the small countries not combine, and why 
 should not Belgium be the leader of them all? For such a réle, was 
 there any state so peculiarly well qualified as Belgium? There was 
 certainly no ruler so capable of conceiving the grandeur of the idea 
 as the Belgian King, none so capable of executing the conception 
 splendidly! 
 
 And as regarded America, just about to found a tropical colonial 
 empire in the Philippines, who could give a more valuable opinion 
 upon her problems than King Leopold, with all his Central African 
 possessions, ‘eighty times more expansive than the whole of Belgium 
 itself’? 
 
 But no! Stead was not to land this particular big fish! His failure 
 is attested by a batch of typewritten copies of his correspondence 
 with King Leopold. The King was at Ostend at the moment and 
 had met with a slight accident which precluded him from granting 
 interviews — that was the first official reply. In a long argumentative 
 rejoinder, Stead worked up to this climax: 
 
 ‘My whole soul recoils from the idea that at the very outset of such 
 a mission as this on which I am charged, I should fail to have the 
 inestimable advantage of the counsel of the most experienced mon- 
 arch and original genius in Europe. Do not inflict on me, I beseech 
 you, this cruel blow, but graciously accord to me the privilege for 
 which I pray. I await your telegraphic commands. 
 
 ‘I have the honour to be, 
 ‘Your Majesty’s humble servant.’ 
 
 How King Leopold was affected by this appeal we must guess for 
 ourselves. At least it moved him to reply in his own hand as follows: 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 131 
 
 ‘PAVILLON D’OSTENDE. 
 ‘September 18, 1898. 
 ‘Private. 
 
 ‘MONSIEUR, 
 
 ‘In the note which you have just written me you flatter me far too 
 much, which is not right. Here nevertheless is a frank reply to your 
 note. 
 
 “You wish to speak to me of disarmament, I desire with all my heart 
 that it may take place, but I could not in any case usefully say any- 
 thing to you on the noble aspiration which it is better to leave in the 
 interests of its success to the care of the generous and powerful 
 Emperor who has conceived it. 
 
 “You desire a conversation on the Congo, but what could I teach an 
 Englishman concerning an unknown country. No people in the 
 world know it better than the English. As to the Americans they will 
 certainly find (specially) in the Congo elements of (word illegible) 
 for their administrative task if such was their intention. 
 
 ‘Excuse me for not seeing you. I have had to decline several inter- 
 views, and I cannot have two weights and two measures, 
 
 ‘Yours, etc.; 
 ‘LEOPOLD.’ 
 
 A lively note written to E. T. Cook a few days later from Paris 
 shows us that Stead, if disappointed, was not disheartened: 
 
 ‘I have had an amusing correspondence (he says) with the King, 
 who has written me an autograph letter and whom I hope to see 
 before I come back. ... On Monday I shall probably go on to 
 Berlin. My hopes of seeing the Pope are reviving, for I am told that 
 he is as spry as a four-year-old and talks for an hour on end without 
 being tired.’ 
 
 In Paris, Stead’s most interesting experience was a talk with M. 
 Clemenceau, who was then living in the Rue Franklin, No. 8. Here 
 in a ground floor room, opening upon a delightful garden inhabited 
 by a tame partridge and half a dozen other kinds of birds, they dis- 
 cussed the Rescript. ‘Nothing can come of it,’ M. Clemenceau 
 declared emphatically. ‘Even suppose it were possible to keep 
 expenditure on armament stationary for four years, who could 
 
132 THE TSAR SORES GRIP TAN D 1898 
 
 prevent war happening if the Emperor Francis Joseph died? A 
 general scramble for Austria would ensue, and what would become 
 of the engagement then?’ It was, he admitted, a remarkable thing 
 that a ‘Parliament of Man’ should meet at the summons of a Russian 
 Tsar, but even though all the nations should go to it with all good 
 wishes, nothing would come of it. 
 
 Stead appealed to him to give the Tsar’s proposals a warmer 
 response — not to throw cold water on such a generous enthusiasm. 
 
 M. Clemenceau doubted whether it was really so very gener- 
 ous. For himself, he disliked and distrusted Muravieff and thought 
 the Tsar weak, governing by fits and starts. There was much that 
 was wrong in the T'sar’s own country — let him do justice there first! 
 
 This was poor comfort, and as the Dreyfus case was absorbing 
 everyone’s attention just then, Stead fared little better elsewhere in 
 Paris. ‘Whether it is Blowitz or Monson (the British Ambassador) 
 or Clemenceau,’ he wrote to Mr. John Morley, ‘there is only one 
 opinion here, namely, that the Conference can do absolutely nothing 
 and that it may precipitate war.’ 
 
 In Berlin, also, Stead was to draw a blank. He had counted upon 
 securing an interview with the Kaiser through the good offices of 
 Lord Lonsdale, a persona gratissima at Potsdam, to whom he had 
 addressed a carefully-worded letter, and to whom Lady Warwick, 
 always eager to help, had also written on the subject. But after a long 
 delay, owing to Lord Lonsdale’s absence from home, the answer 
 came — ‘impossible!’ The Kaiser, Lord Lonsdale explained, had made 
 it a hard and fast rule to decline all interviews. ‘I feel sure,’ he said, 
 in concluding a fuil and explicit letter, very courteously expressed, 
 ‘that you will quite realize that owing to His Majesty’s extreme kind- 
 ness to myself it would be impossible and inadvisable to make any 
 request which I knew to be absolutely contrary to His Majesty’s 
 feelings in such matters.’ 
 
 Now, Stead had meant his letter to Lord Lonsdale to come before 
 the Kaiser’s own eyes! It was phrased in somewhat extravagant 
 terms of admiration and contained a sentence or two which, in his 
 sanguine way, he had felt quite certain would gain him his point. 
 ‘I regard him as a natural born editor in the purple, the first the 
 world has as yet seen, interested in all things, with ideas and ideals, 
 who feels his responsibility and does his duty’ — that was a passage, 
 so Stead flattered himself, which William II would scarcely be able 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 1333 
 
 to withstand. It was really too maddening, that the normally bold 
 Lord Lonsdale should have shrunk from employing this ‘Open 
 Sesame’! 
 
 But does anyone suppose that W. T. Stead gave in at this point? 
 No one who really knows his W. T. Stead! Still hopefully, and in 
 blind refusal to accept defeat, he now proceeded to trample upon the 
 conventions of polite society — to say nothing of Imperial etiquette - 
 with the following unique composition: 
 
 ‘HOTEL CONTINENTAL, PARIS. 
 ‘September 27, 1808. 
 
 ‘Private. 
 
 ‘His Imperial Majesty, 
 ‘the German Emperor. 
 ‘SIRE, 
 
 ‘I am on my way to Russia where I expect to have the honour of 
 being received by His Imperial Majesty the Tsar for a private con- 
 versation on matters of interest between Russia and England. 
 
 ‘I beg respectfully to request that Your Imperial Majesty will 
 graciously allow me a similar privilege for reasons which are fully 
 set out in the enclosed copy of a letter which I addressed to Lord 
 Lonsdale on September 3. 
 
 ‘Lord Lonsdale has just written me saying that Your Majesty has 
 always made a hard and fast rule to decline all interviews and that 
 it would be impossible and inadvisable for him to make any request 
 which he knew to be contrary to Your Majesty’s feelings in such 
 matters. 
 
 ‘Therefore I write to Your Majesty direct. I do not recognize any 
 authority but your own as qualified to pronounce on an application 
 of this kind. I do not seek a journalistic interview. I am well aware 
 that monarchs are never interviewed. Further, the rule of the 
 Russian Emperors is as absolute on this point as that of your Imperial 
 Majesty can possibly be. But I have been received by the late ‘Tsar, 
 and in a fortnight I expect to be received by his successor. 
 
 ‘It is true that I am a journalist. But I am also a man and a faithful 
 and loyal subject of Her Majesty the Queen. I cannot believe that 
 Your Majesty would subject me to any disability merely on account 
 
 1 He had discussed it with Mr. Balfour before putting it on paper, and Mr. 
 Balfour, we are told, had smilingly agreed that it should prove irresistible. 
 
134 THE TT SARISTRESOCR IP TCA ND 1898 
 
 of my profession any more than you would refuse to receive me on 
 account of my English birth or of my religious beliefs. 
 
 ‘In any case I claim the privilege of appealing direct to Your Majesty 
 to decide my appeal yourself on its own merits. I have had too much 
 experience of the way in which persons who stand near the Sovereign, 
 often with the best will in the world, misinterpret what would prob- 
 ably be his decision, to acquiesce in any decision but your own. 
 
 ‘I expect to arrive in Berlin on Thursday morning, and sincerely 
 hope that I may find a gracious reply from Your Majesty complying 
 with my request. If possible, I should of course prefer to see your 
 Majesty before going to Russia, but if that is impossible, as I shall 
 return from Livadia by Constantinople, it might be possible to meet 
 in the East. [szc] 
 
 ‘The only address I can give in Berlin is c/o The British Embassy. 
 Sir F. Lascelles is not aware of this application, which, however, 
 I discussed with Mr. Balfour at the Foreign Office before leaving 
 London. 
 
 ‘I have the honour to subscribe myself, 
 ‘Your Majesty’s humble and obedient servant, 
 ‘WILLIAM T. STEAD.’ 
 Apparently it had no result! 
 
 IV 
 STEAD AND THE TSAR NICHOLAS 
 
 Stead’s letters to the Daily News from Paris and Berlin reflected quite 
 candidly the unfavourable attitude of most of the people with whom 
 he had conversed; the Belgians, indeed, he had found more expansive 
 than their King. Many of them were enthusiastic, and a Belgian 
 ex-Prime Minister, just returned to Brussels from Rome, had cheered 
 him by the assurance that Leo XIII and Cardinal Rampolla were 
 strongly in favour of the proposed Conference. Of the French and 
 the Germans, however, this is what he had to report: 
 
 ‘Men of the world, men of experience, men of affairs, above all, 
 men who are deeply versed in the tortuous wiles of diplomacy, agree 
 in expecting nothing from the Conference of Disarmament and in 
 fearing much. If the hard-pressed toilers of the world are to obtain 
 any appreciable relief from the crushing load of Militarism, they 
 will have to extend to the generous initiative of the Tsar a much more 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 135 
 
 hearty reception. .. . The Democracy may help the Autocracy to 
 achieve this boon for the English race. It will certainly not reach them 
 at the hands of Bureaucracy.’ 
 
 His first letter from St. Petersburg was in a very different strain. It 
 is headed, ‘Glad Tidings of Great Joy: The Opportunity of the 
 Century!’ and begins thus: 
 
 ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like 
 them that dream, then was our mouth filled with laughter and our 
 tongue with singing. Then said they among the heathen, “The Lord 
 hath done great things for them. The Lord hath done great things 
 for us, whereof we are glad.” ’ 
 
 ‘In these familiar words alone do I find adequate expression to the 
 lift of heart which I have experienced on coming to St. Petersburg. 
 From Brussels to Paris, from Paris to Berlin, my pilgrimage of peace 
 had been but a dolorous way, growing ever darker and more dark 
 until it seemed as if there was no hope. 
 
 ‘But it is ever the darkest hour before the dawn. Here where I have 
 now spent several days in ascertaining the central fact of the situation 
 it is glad confident morning again. The snow is beginning to fall in 
 the streets of St. Petersburg, but in my heart ‘‘The winter is past, the 
 rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth and the time of 
 the singing of birds is come.” ’ 
 
 He had quickly satisfied himself, he went on to say, that all the 
 gloomy suggestions of pessimism were without foundation. The 
 Tsar meant business, if most of his Ministers did not; and it was the 
 Tsar that mattered. But it is evident from his private notes to Mr. 
 John Morley and to Mr. Bryce, as well as from a typewritten record 
 of an interview which he had with Dr. Dillon, then in St. Petersburg, 
 that his mood was not always so buoyant. ‘A weak man,’ Dr. Dillon 
 had described the Tsar, ‘and very impressionable.’ Nicholas II had 
 just reversed the entire Polish policy of his father at the instigation 
 of Mlle. Jacousky, a Polish dancer at the Opera. Stead, Dr. Dillon 
 declared, could not count on exercising any permanent influence 
 through the Tsar — no reliance could be placed on his continuing in 
 any one line of thought. His father, Alexander III, was a veritable 
 Bayard who, having once given his word, kept it at all hazards. 
 Muravieff, Dr. Dillon said, was a man of strength and energy 
 
136 THE. TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 rather than of intellect, prepared to fall in with any policy the Tsar 
 suggested but grimly humorous over the Rescript. Moreover, feeling 
 in Russia at that moment was almost entirely anti-English — a con- 
 flict with England seemed inevitable. 
 
 ‘I am satisfied as to his sincerity,’ Stead wrote to Bryce on Oc- 
 tober 11, referring to the Tsar. ‘The point on which I wish to satisfy 
 myself is as to his strength, for it will require a nerve of iron to con- 
 duct a campaign of peace against so many hostile influences. I have, 
 however, great hopes that, if he is not absolutely chilled to death 
 by the mocking scepticism of his Ministers and Diplomats, he may 
 develop, as his father and grandfather did, a resolution which no 
 opposition can daunt.’ To Morley he spoke in the same strain. ‘I 
 believe M. Witte,’ he said, ‘is the only Minister who cares for the 
 proposal.’ 
 
 But his St. Petersburg experiences, beyond a doubt, did in the long 
 run cheer him up. His fortnight there was well spent. It may be 
 confidently surmised that no foreign journalist ever interviewed so 
 many ‘notabilities’ in the Russian capital within so short a space of 
 time. The most important talk was with M. Witte. In his next 
 Daily News letter Stead wrote: 
 
 ‘I put to the Minister the frequently stated difficulty about the 
 contrast between the £10,000,000 allocated for extra naval purposes in 
 spring and the Peace Rescript of late midsummer. He replied at once: 
 
 ‘“Tf the Peace Rescript had been issued seven months earlier we 
 should have saved all these millions. We cannot get them back, but 
 we shall now be delivered from the fear of seeing other millions take 
 the same road.” 
 
 ‘M. Witte was most jubilant over the Peace Rescript. He explained 
 to me that the famous invitation to the Powers. . . . immensely 
 relieved M. Witte himself. For it need not be stated that in Russia, 
 as in other countries, the army and navy are veritable daughters of 
 the horse-leech, perpetually crying “‘Give! Give!” The new quick- 
 firing guns for the field artillery are to be put in hand without delay. 
 Universal military service is to be enforced in Finland, the new ships 
 ordered and now in course of construction have to be paid for. Alto- 
 gether, the assault on the Treasury is not likely to be lacking in 
 vigour and persistence. But M. Witte is no longer afraid. “‘Hence- 
 forth,” he said, “if my colleagues should clamour for more millions 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 137 
 
 for the army and the navy I shall have no more trouble in rebut- 
 ting their demands. I shall simply hold up the Emperor’s Rescript 
 and they will not be able to say a word.”’’ 
 
 October 26 was the date of Stead’s arrival at Sebastopol, and of the 
 first of his three interviews with the Tsar at Livadia. What struck 
 him most was the contrast between the homely surroundings of 
 Nicholas II, and the solemn state in which he had found Alex- 
 ander III at Gatschina nine years before. On that occasion he had 
 been unable ‘to escape from a certain all-pervading sentiment of awe.’ 
 He now wrote: 
 
 ‘How different it was at Livadia! There was no mystery, no distance, 
 no solitude, no sense of undefinable danger. There are few more 
 beautiful spots in Europe than the neighbourhood of Yalta. The 
 drive to Livadia up hill and down dale, which we took at breakneck 
 speed, between the mountains and the sea, is magnificent. The 
 Euxine, not a black but an azure sea, stretches out far below, an 
 immense expanse of sunlit water, across which flit interminable 
 strings of birds, migrating southward from the approach of winter. 
 The Mediterranean, seen from the Riviera, never looked more 
 radiantly beautiful than did the Black Sea on the day when I visited 
 Livadia. On the way you come at every turn upon something quaint 
 and strange. Now it is a string of creaking country carts drawn by 
 diminutive oxen, then it is the curious stage wagon of the Crimea, 
 like a long double bench, on which the passengers sit back to back 
 with their legs dangling in the air. Suddenly you hear a trampling 
 of hoofs, and a gay cavalcade of ladies and gentlemen, splendidly 
 mounted and escorted by picturesque Tartars, gallop by, calling up 
 I know not by what strange association of ideas a flood of mingled 
 memories of “The Bride of Abydos” and of the hawking parties of 
 the Middle Ages. A gilded landmark indicates the point where the 
 road to Livadia turns to the left from the high road. The driver 
 removes the bells from the horse’s neck, we show our Jatsser passer 
 to the officer in command at the entrance, and then we dash along a 
 road good enough to be made in France, through the undulating 
 vineyards in the midst of which Livadia stands. The vineyards are 
 studded with prettily-designed watch-towers from which soldiers, 
 standing on sentry, keep a vigilant eye upon all possible marauders 
 or interlopers. A sailor paces backward and forward under the 
 
138 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 Russian flag which floats high above the trees. A Circassian, appar- 
 ently on duty, glances at you as you drive by, but other traces of 
 vigilance there are none, any more than in the grounds at Balmoral, 
 or in the Park at Windsor.’ 
 
 It was perhaps inevitable that Stead on this occasion should form 
 too favourable an estimate of the personality of the ill-fated Nicholas. 
 The Tsar was typically Russian in his responsiveness and anxiety to 
 please 1 and Stead’s enthusiasm over the Rescript could not but be 
 gratifying to him. His visitor evidently saw him at his best. In the 
 light of his tragic end Stead’s glowing account of him reads dismally 
 enough: 
 
 ‘When I set out on my quest, I was told that the Emperor was weak 
 physically and mentally. He was said to be the mere tool of the “‘wily 
 Mouravieff” or the obedient puppet now of the Empress-Dowager, 
 and then of the present Empress. He was a good-hearted young man, 
 no doubt, but possessing neither the physical nor intellectual qualities 
 to make a great Sovereign. Even those who spoke kindly of him said 
 that although he was well-meaning, he had no decision of character, 
 and that he constantly allowed his own convictions and inclinations 
 to be overshadowed by the authority of the Ministers whom he 
 inherited from his father. And, finally, I was always told not to think 
 too much of the Rescript, for the Emperor was not strong enough to 
 bear up against the forces brought to bear against him. 
 
 ‘Nicholas II in stature does not resemble his father, who was a son 
 of Anak. It is a mistake, however, to speak of him as if he were 
 exceptionally slight. He is about the same height as General Gordon, 
 whom he resembles in other things besides the number of his inches. 
 ... The Tsar is full of vitality, quick and active in his movements, 
 fond of outdoor exercise. Certainly no one meeting him for the first 
 time would put him down among the weakly. 
 
 The first and most conspicuous characteristic of Alexander III was 
 
 1 Almost all visitors to Russia have remarked on this aspect of the national 
 character. In his very interesting book, Nicholas II as I Knew Him, General 
 Sir John Hanbury-Williams, chief of the British Military Mission at Petro- 
 grad in 1915, writes: ‘Hospitality, kindness, sympathy are found everywhere, 
 and it sometimes strikes me that it is this intense desire to please, to make 
 you happy and at home, which makes for weakness and want of stability.’ 
 
 The Tsar was pleased with Sir John’s way of looking at him. ‘I do like 
 people,’ he said once, ‘who look you straight in the face.’ Stead also will have 
 won the T'sar’s liking in this respect. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 139 
 
 the solidity — it would be wrong to call it the stolidity — of his mental 
 temperament. He was by no means dull. But he was slow. He put 
 his foot down like an elephant, and when he put it down he was not 
 quick to take it up again. The characteristic of his son and successor 
 is quite different. The note of his intellectual temperament is that 
 of extreme alertness. As he is also extremely sympathetic, this makes 
 him one of the most charming persons to talk to I have ever met. The 
 two qualities were also united in General Gordon, whose nimbleness 
 of mind was so excessive that it was somewhat difficult to keep up 
 with him. If, in talking to the late Tsar, you were at a loss for a word 
 or an illustration, he patiently waited until you found it. His son, on 
 the other hand, would divine your meaning and help you out. He is 
 as quick as a needle, and quite as bright... . I have seldom met 
 anyone so quick to seize a point. Whatever he may fail in, it will not 
 be in lack of capacity to see and understand. 
 
 “This exceptional rapidity of perception is united with a remarkable 
 memory and a very wide grasp of an immense range of facts. I know 
 at least some eminent English politicians holding high office who, 
 in this respect, are a mournful contrast to the Emperor. When 
 questioned even about the affairs of their own department, their 
 fingers seem to be all thumbs. They have not got their dates right, 
 or they are vague and misty about the exact drift of important negotia- 
 tions. ‘There are plenty of such woolly-minded men in high places, 
 and it is a real pleasure to meet anyone who has his facts at his finger 
 ends, who tells you in a flash what was done or what was not done, 
 and whose ideas, be they right or wrong, are lucidly expressed in a 
 very definite form. Alertness, exactness, lucidity, and definiteness are 
 four excellent qualities in a man, and the Emperor has them all... . 
 Many years ago Mr. Gladstone described the present Emperor as a 
 charming type of the best of our public schoolboys. He was frank, 
 fearless, perfectly natural, and simplicity itself. Nicholas II is no 
 longer a boy. He has borne for several trying years the burden of one 
 of the greatest Empires in the world. But he is still as absolutely 
 simple and unaffected as he was when Mr. Gladstone met him in 
 Copenhagen fifteen years ago. There is still in him all the delightful 
 schoolboy abandon of manner, a keen sense of humour, and a hearty, 
 outspoken frankness in expressing his opinions which makes you feel 
 that you are dealing with a man whose character is as transparent as 
 crystal. 
 
140 THE: TSAR’S RESCRIPT) AND 1898 
 
 ‘Add to all this a modesty as admirable as it is rare, and it must be 
 admitted that even if the net human product should fall short of 
 being a great ruler, he has at least all the qualities which make men 
 beloved by their fellows. The bright, clear, blue eye, the quick, 
 sympathetic change of feature, the merry laugh, succeeded in a 
 moment by an expression of noble gravity and of high resolve, the 
 rapidity and grace of his movements, even his curious little shrug 
 of the shoulders, are all glimpses of a character not often found 
 unspoiled by power.’ 
 
 Stead’s appreciation of the Tsar was, one feels, absolutely real, not 
 merely ‘worked up’ in the interest of the Peace movement. A hurried 
 note, posted from Yalta to Mr. Stout immediately after his first 
 interview, confirms one in this belief, 
 
 ‘I saw the Tsar yesterday,’ he writes, ‘that is why I telegraphed 
 *“Succeeded.”” He is much better than I expected. If only we back 
 him up, we get the best chance we ever had of saving millions. It is 
 a perfect godsend to have such a man in such a place with such ideas. 
 
 ‘Fortunately he is young and strong and full of vigour and go. I 
 have to see him again to-morrow. I like him and think I see great 
 prospects.’ 
 
 Vv 
 STEAD, CARDINAL RAMPOLLA, AND THE POPE 
 
 Stead, travelling by Constantinople, Sofia, and Vienna, reached 
 Rome on November 11. He remained there about a fortnight, busy- 
 ing himself as actively as ever. Among his papers are entertaining 
 records of his encounters with the British and Russian Ambassadors 
 and other prominent personages. Some pages of suggestions in manu- 
 script for the benefit of Princess Bariatinsky, a valued friend, show us 
 how he was wont to set his helpers to work. The first page runs as 
 follows: 
 
 ‘Ideal. So to make use of every day that by the first of March when 
 the Conference meets you will know the sentiment of every per- 
 son who is of any influence in Rome on the subject and that the 
 utmost force of your heart and mind to win for the cause of 
 Peace every such person. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE a1 
 
 ‘Motto. Once to every man or nation 
 Comes the moment to decide. 
 In the strife for truth or falsehood 
 For the good or evil side. 
 Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, 
 Offering each the bloom or blight 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, 
 And the sheep upon the right, 
 And the choice goes by for ever, ’twixt that darkness and that 
 light. LOWELL. 
 
 ‘Methods. See the enclosed French and English prospectuses. See 
 also the Countess de Ressi who got up the signatures of 40,000 
 women for peace. Let your first object be to ascertain in a book 
 with brief description ‘‘Friendly,” “Unfriendly,” ‘“‘Apathetic,” or 
 “Enthusiastic.” Having ascertained — and possibly at the same 
 time — try to convert them and make them as enthusiastic as 
 yourself. For organization, have it as simple as possible. The 
 first thing is to get up a roll-call and muster all who are in sym- 
 pathy and from these you will be able to select workers and to 
 each of these you might entrust the formation of a circle for whose 
 inspiration and guidance and holding together, she might be 
 answerable.’ 
 
 But more interesting than any other of his Roman mementoes is 
 an account of his thoughts and sayings and doings on the day of his 
 visit to the Vatican, November 14. It begins with these reflections 
 in his own handwriting: 
 
 “November 14, 1898. Zechariah i. 15. “And I am very sore dis- 
 pleased with the heathen that are at ease: for I was but a little dis- 
 pleased, and they helped forward the affliction” (Read also from 14 
 to 17 ending ‘‘the Lord shall yet comfort Zion, and shall yet choose 
 Jerusalem.””) Woke at 5 and meditated and prayed for guidance. 
 The ideas herein expressed were borne in upon me. I put them 
 down. Hoping I may be helped. It is difficult. I want to enlist as 
 assisting force in a holy war, a power whose instinct is to refuse all 
 if not conceded all. I cannot believe in the claims of the Pope to 
 be sole director of moral forces of the world. His infallibility 
 is almost unthinkable. The prejudice he excites almost counter- 
 
142 DICE. TSAR'S]RESCRIP De AN'D 1898 
 
 balances — in some places more than counterbalances — the support 
 he might bring. But on the whole he is not a force to be 
 neglected or ignored. To get him into line without compromising 
 our rejection of his pretensions, that is dificult. But fear not, neither 
 be dismayed! He who delivered me from the lion and the bear will 
 surely enable me to cope with this Philistine. May God guide my 
 pen and instruct my tongue. Amen.’ 
 
 Having thus relieved his mind, Stead proceeded to draft the con- 
 ditions on which he understood the interview with the Pope would 
 take place, ‘the object desired, and then the statement of my own point 
 of view.’ Here, in full, is the latter section of it—as Stead-like a 
 page as Stead ever penned: 
 
 ‘1. I accept as starting point the Imperial Rescript of August 24, 
 which emphasizes warnings often uttered by the Pope. 
 
 ‘2. I have just visited all the capitals of Europe in order to ascertain 
 the opinion of the Continent on the subject. 
 
 ‘3. Ihave had two long conversations with the Emperor of Russia 
 on the subject, and can speak, at first hand, but unofficially, as to his 
 views and wishes. 
 
 ‘4. My general conclusion is that the Emperor is in serious earnest, 
 and that if he is energetically supported a definite advance may be 
 made in the direction of Peace. Otherwise the Conference will come 
 to nothing. 
 
 ‘5. Everywhere statesmen are despondent, the Church apathetic or 
 indifferent, the common people distrustful or ill-informed, and the 
 journalists more sceptical than their own journals. But all over the 
 Continent there are those who rejoice with exceeding great joy over 
 the Rescript and are ready to rally to the support of the Emperor. 
 
 ‘6. ‘The success of the great Popes of the Middle Ages in imposing 
 the Truce of God on behalf of civilized Europe, suggests the possi- 
 bility that their talented successor may be not less successful if he 
 energetically supported the initiative of the Emperor in establishing 
 a new ‘l'ruce of God at the beginning of the New Century. 
 
 ‘7, 'The ultimate outcome of the Conference will depend upon the 
 extent to which the heart and conscience of the masses of the people 
 can be roused to respond to the truth so often insisted upon by the 
 Holy Father that the time has at last come when any appeal to arms 
 should be forbidden until after the dispute has been submitted to 
 some arbitral authority as impartial as His Holiness Leo XIII. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 143 
 
 ‘8. ‘To rouse the nations to a sense of great opportunities of inter- 
 national action was once the sole responsibility of the Pontiffs, who 
 alone directed the moral forces of Europe. To-day that responsibility 
 is shared. But the union of all who love in the service of all who 
 suffer cannot be secured in the cause of peace unless the Pope once 
 more revives the splendid traditions of his greatest predecessors by 
 summoning Christendom to respond to the Emperor’s appeal. 
 
 ‘g. This being the case, although I was born and I remain outside 
 the Roman fold, I cannot resist the impulse to throw myself at the 
 feet of the Holy Father and implore him to come to the help of a 
 weary and war-worn world, by proclaiming to all men of goodwill 
 in all lands and of all creeds, that the hour has come in the last year 
 of the expiring century, for a new Crusade, the Crusade of peace. 
 The voice of the Holy Father is heard over land and sea, to the utter- 
 most ends of the earth, and even by those who do not bow to the 
 authority of the Papal throne, his words would command the respect 
 due to the most aged, the most saintly, and the most loving-hearted 
 of all the rulers of men.’ 
 
 His son, Harry, having made a clean copy from the original draft, 
 Stead went with it to Father Whitmee, Rector of San Silvester i Capiti, 
 in whom Cardinal Rampolla had intimated to him he would find a 
 competent interpreter. Father Whitmee read it, and at his instigation 
 Stead modified the seventh paragraph. Father Whitmee suggested 
 that it should end: ‘some arbitral authority as impartial as the Holy 
 See,’ but Stead would not go as far as that. ‘Never!’ he exclaimed. ‘I 
 will never admit that the Holy See is impartial. I will admit what 
 you like about the present Pope personally, but for any future Pope I 
 will wait till I see him!’ Father Whitmee acquiesced and arranged for 
 the translation of the document. Soon after 6 p.m., the translation 
 having been carefully examined by Stead and Father Whitmee, the 
 two drove together to the Vatican to interview Cardinal Rampolla. 
 
 It is a great temptation to linger over the MS. chronicle of this 
 interview, as dictated that same evening by Stead to his son, but it 
 is very long, and a quite brief condensation of it must suffice. 
 
 Rampolla, Stead tells us, seemed to him to look taller, and to have 
 a more commanding figure than on the occasion of their previous 
 meeting, nine years before. He was attired in exactly the same way, 
 ‘scarlet stockings, black robe, scarlet cincture, and little red hat at 
 
144 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 the back of his head.’ When he extended his hand, Stead, by the 
 advice previously given to him by Father Whitmee, ‘made believe to 
 kiss it,’ a noteworthy example of the practice of doing at Rome what 
 the Romans do. The Cardinal and Stead then took their seats at 
 opposite ends of a crimson sofa against the wall, Father Whitmee 
 placing himself opposite on a chair. 
 
 After some preliminary conversation about Russia and the Tsar, 
 Father Whitmee, who had been interpreting, remarked to Stead that 
 he would do well to present the memorandum. Here I give Stead’s 
 own words: 
 
 ‘Father Whitmee explained that it had been translated into Italian so 
 that his Eminence could read it, which he proceeded to do. He read 
 it carefully from the first to the last line. Father Whitmee sat like a 
 statue with his eyes on the ground. [ also sat mute, apparently looking 
 at the window near the door, but keeping one corner of my eye fixed 
 on the Cardinal’s face. He nodded his head with manifest approval 
 four times. His features showed no sign of displeasure at any time.’ 
 
 One of the passages of which Cardinal Rampolla signified his 
 approval was, Stead could see, the amended conclusion to the seventh 
 paragraph. Having read the whole document right through, the 
 Cardinal folded it up and said: 
 
 ‘This is, of course, a matter upon which the Holy Father alone can 
 speak; I will submit your application to him, and will place the paper 
 in his hands. I cannot say anything about his decision.”’ He would, 
 however, do all he could to secure Stead the desired interview with 
 the Pope, and as speedily as possible.’ 
 
 But it was not to be! Six days passed without any further communi- 
 cation. ‘Two letters to the Cardinal, dated November 20 and Novem- 
 ber 21 —the Cardinal’s replies are missing — show that all Stead’s 
 energies bore no fruit. Both letters seem to me worth reproduction 
 
 here: ? 
 ALBERGO DI MILANO, 
 
 ; M ‘ROME, November 20, 1808. 
 ‘His Eminence ; eee 
 
 “The Cardinal Secretary of State, 
 “The Vatican. 
 ‘YOUR EMINENCE, 
 ‘Of Rome it has been well said Patiens quia Aeterna. But I am but 
 an ephemeral creature of time and my patience necessarily limited. 
 
189) PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 45 
 
 ‘Last Monday I submitted to the Holy Father a request for an 
 audience which your Eminence was good enough to promise to 
 support. 
 
 ‘I have now waited a week for an answer. I cannot wait another. 
 The very business on which I came to the Vatican demands my 
 return to London. If the Holy Father is unable or unwilling to 
 comply with my request and your Eminence will permit me, I 
 propose to call upon you on Monday evening to take my leave, 
 present my thanks and express my profound regret that the effort 
 you were so kind as to encourage, should have failed. 
 
 ‘I have the honour to be 
 ‘Your Eminence’s obedient servant, 
 ‘Ww. T. STEAD.’ 
 
 ‘HOTEL MILAN, 
 ‘ROME, November 21, 1898. 
 “The Cardinal Secretary of State, 
 ‘Cardinal Rampolla. 
 ‘YOUR EMINENCE, 
 
 ‘I am afraid I have failed in conveying to the mind of your Eminence 
 and of the Holy Father, the importance of the matter before you and 
 its bearing upon the question as to whether or not the Holy See will 
 be represented at the Peace Conference? 
 
 ‘I have heard much since I came to Rome that has occasioned me 
 much misgiving as to whether the presence of the representative of 
 the Holy Father would conduce to the success of the Conference. 
 If I have no opportunity of hearing from your Eminence and the Holy 
 Father how to answer these difficulties and objections, I am afraid 
 that the result will be that the conference will assemble without the 
 presence of any representative of the Pope. This has not hitherto 
 been manifest to your Eminence and I would therefore as a last 
 resource earnestly appeal to you not to allow me to leave Rome with- 
 out an opportunity of hearing authoritatively the truth concerning 
 the attitude of the Holy See in relation to this matter. 
 
 ‘I have the honour to be 
 ‘Your Eminence’s obedient servant, 
 ‘Ww. T. STEAD.’ 
 
 Alas! it was useless. Even this second epistle failed of its purpose, 
 and Stead left Rome disconsolately without his Papal interview. But, 
 L.S.—- VOL. II K 
 
146 HE uESARCS RES CORIP DT: AND 1898 
 
 as usual, he made the best of things. The following extracts from the 
 issue of War against War for January 27, 1899, will complete the 
 story for us. Together with the printed text of his ‘memorandum,’ 
 and a facsimile of the Cardinal’s autograph letter, they fill a very 
 impressive, almost triumphant, page: 
 
 ‘I left Rome before the Pope’s answer could be secured and returned 
 to England. 
 
 “The International Crusade of Peace was proclaimed in London on 
 December 18, 1898. I reported to Cardinal Rampolla what had been 
 done, and transmitted to the Holy See the report of the St. James’s 
 Hall Conference, and the prospectus of War against War, again 
 soliciting the approval of the Pope.’ 
 
 THE RESPONSE OF THE HOLY SEE 
 
 In response to this appeal I had the honour to receive from the 
 Cardinal Secretary of State an autograph letter, of which the 
 following is a translation: 
 
 ‘LETTER FROM CARDINAL RAMPOLLA. TRANSLATION 
 
 ‘The Crusade in favour of Peace which you are carrying on is cer- 
 tainly worthy of all praise, for Conservation of Peace is the highest 
 aim to which humanity can aspire. 
 
 “There can, therefore, be no doubt that the Holy See, in accordance 
 with its ancient traditions, has no better wish than to see all nations 
 fraternally united by the bonds of Peace, and to see the dominion of 
 justice re-established over international relations. Towards this 
 aim you are effectively co-operating. Meanwhile, every man of 
 honest mind and every true lover of progress cannot but formulate 
 the ardent wish that our Century, which has been so prolific in the 
 multiplication and improvement of weapons of war, should at its 
 close bequeath some noble memorial of itself which may earn for it 
 the gratitude of humanity, by discovering a method by which, in the 
 inevitable conflicts of nations, the voice of reason may make itself 
 most easily heard. 
 
 ‘With this wish, pray accept the expression of my special regard. 
 
 ‘M. CARDINAL RAMPOLLA.’ 
 ‘Rome, 
 ‘Fanuary 12. 
 
189 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 147 
 VI 
 STEAD’S PEACE CRUSADE 
 
 Returned to London, Stead began at once to set on foot an Inter- 
 national Peace Crusade. This new movement may be said to have 
 been definitely launched at a great public meeting held on De- 
 cember 10 at the St. James’s Hall. Stead himself scored the oratorical 
 success of the evening. ‘Your speech was as impressive as any I ever 
 read,’ Mr. Bryce, who was prevented from attending, wrote to him 
 next day, ‘and the T’sar’s words as you gave them ought to sink deep 
 into all hearts.’ Mr. Balfour was among those present and a weighty 
 letter from Mr. John Morley, dated December 17, shows how 
 strongly he, also, sympathized with the demonstrators. 
 
 “There has been a great show lately of strengthening the hands of 
 the British Government,’ wrote Morley, ‘in quarters where the 
 clouds of war hover. It is time that something should be done to 
 strengthen their hands in resolute and zealous co-operation with other 
 rulers and statesmen in the ever-blessed cause of peace. Never was 
 the moment more opportune for rousing the judgment and feelings 
 of civilized men against those competitive and ever-swelling arma- 
 ments which load the taxpayer, dislocate industry, waste capital, and 
 in Continental Europe scourge the family and the home. Economic 
 policy commands reduction, for militarism impoverishes States. 
 Social order commands it, for militarism, in swallowing up resources 
 that ought to go to the elevation and contentment of the people, 
 engenders the whole dark progeny of Continental anarchism. 
 Humanity commands it. 
 
 “These things are well known to all the rulers and nations of the 
 world. They stand numbed. What is wanted is will to act upon the 
 knowledge and statesmanship to find a better way. I expect your 
 meeting will effectively stir the minds and hearts of multitudes of 
 our countrymen in the loftiest of all human causes.’ 
 
 A Provisional Committee was constituted to organize the campaign, 
 and offices were taken in Arundel Street, Strand. A million copies 
 of a broadsheet explaining the objects of the movement having been 
 distributed, efforts were made to enlist the goodwill of the whole 
 English Press. The next step was the founding by Stead of his new 
 weekly journal, War against War. It was a very ‘live’ 16-page pro- 
 
148 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 duction, similar in format to the Westminster Gazette of those days. 
 Here is Stead’s ‘Appeal for Volunteers’ in its second issue — these 
 few lines will suffice to show the spirit in which the paper was 
 edited: 
 
 ‘We want a million Volunteers for this Crusade. One million 
 persons who will seriously, earnestly, and resolutely determine to 
 do what in them lies to use the present moment for dealing a great 
 stroke at a giant wrong. There are nearly forty millions of subjects 
 of Her Majesty in these islands. Out of every forty can we not 
 recruit one as a volunteer in the service of Peace? 
 
 ‘The Tsar of Russia, and all the crowned heads of the Continent, 
 may wish for Peace, may desire to arrest the growth of their arma- 
 ments, but they will be as powerless to achieve this end as to make 
 roses bloom on icebergs until the nations of Europe, beginning with 
 our own, feel and express a sincere desire to be delivered from this 
 incubus of the Armed Peace — that baleful shadow of ever-impending 
 War. 
 
 ‘The Sovereigns may propose, but it is their subjects who dispose. 
 The Rescript of the Autocrat is mere waste-paper unless counter- 
 signed by the Democracy. Herein lies the real, veritable, palpable, 
 terrible Sovereignty of the People. 
 
 “To that Sovereign People we now appeal for the exercise of their 
 sovereignty in the cause of Peace. And to you, Reader, whose eyes 
 may idly wander over these printed lines, the appeal is made as 
 personally, and as directly, as if the whole paper were written for 
 you alone. Will you Volunteer now?’ 
 
 Among the hundreds of messages of sympathy and support which 
 poured in at once from men and women of mark, few can have 
 pleased Stead more than those from his friends General Booth and 
 Earl Grey. ‘Will gladly join your Peace Crusade, enlist as a volun- 
 teer and accept offered seat on General Committee,’ Grey tele- 
 graphed. General Booth’s reply was as follows: 
 
 “The Salvation Army is in deep sympathy with the noble, beneficent, 
 and Christ-like proposals of the Tsar of Russia, believing in the 
 sincerity of his motives and the practicability of his plans, and by 
 God’s help we shall not be found wanting in the conflict on behalf 
 of righteousness and Peace among the nations.’ 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 149 
 
 Some of the letters which Stead received enable us to realize his 
 difficulties. Two very different poets were among the many serious- 
 minded men who conscientiously held aloof. Mr. Kipling placed his 
 faith in the discovery of some new engine of death so devastating 
 that war must end and peace ‘arrive by herself.” Mr. William 
 Watson! could not sympathize with a war against wars. 
 
 ‘I hate the idea of war (he wrote) as waged for mere dynastic or 
 other more or less disguised personal interests; or as inspired by the 
 race hatreds or other animal instincts which keep men on a level not 
 much above wolves or tigers; or as dictated by desire of national 
 revenge or any such paltry motive; or as the expression of any of the 
 things called “patriotism” — that pseudo-sacred word for almost 
 every anti-human crime. But I hold with the most spiritual of all 
 modern poets that there are times when — 
 
 ‘God’s most perfect instrument, 
 
 For working out a pure intent 
 
 Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter: 
 Yea, Carnage is His daughter.’ 
 
 ‘T hold, for instance, that the Turk should be erased out of existence 
 as a Power having dominion over peoples foreign to himself; and if 
 this erasure can only be effected by act of war, then I am for act of 
 war. So was Gladstone; and as you wield a great influence in the 
 country, mostly I believe for good, I was sorry to see a while ago 
 that you were against him in his proposals for destroying a loath- 
 some tyranny. Your Tsar seems sincere in his so-called Disarma- 
 ment proposals, yet my confidence in him is shaken by the recollec- 
 tion that he saw all those atrocities being perpetrated at his doors? 
 and never lifted a finger (which was all he needed have done) to 
 stay the horror. It seems to me that what we want is not so much to 
 stir people up against war qua war as to teach them that although 
 war has mostly been made to serve ignoble or contemptible ends it 
 is yet sometimes capable of striking a blow for the Progress of the 
 World such as in the present imperfect stage of social development 
 can by nothing else be struck. 
 
 ‘Pray do not mistake this for an unfriendly letter, which, in intention 
 
 1 Now Sir William Watson. 
 2 The Armenian massacres of 1896. 
 
150 THE TSAR’S'’RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 at all events, it certainly is not. The manifold activities which your 
 passion for human weal impel you to engage in have in the majority 
 of cases my hearty sympathy and admiration.’ 
 
 Lord Wolseley and John Burns were among those who were 
 checked in their sympathy with Stead’s aims by distrust of the 
 Russians. ‘May all your righteous hopes be realized,’ wrote Wolseley, 
 ‘and if you can succeed in inducing the Tsar of Russia to disband his 
 enormous army and give up augmenting his fleet, you will have 
 earned the sincere thanks of every Christian man and woman in the 
 world. He stands in need of no army or navy, for no one threatens 
 his frontiers or wants anything he possesses.’ 
 
 Mr. Burns was ‘all for disarmament, but let the Autocrat begin!’ 
 
 It is, of course, quite impossible to follow in any detail here the 
 course of the Crusade. The reader will have no difficulty in pictur- 
 ing Stead as prime-mover in it, now in the midst of his helpers at the 
 Arundel Street offices, now rushing north, south, east and west (at 
 an average, in some weeks, of about 200 miles a day), to address the 
 innumerable ‘Towns’ Meetings’ which were convened to every part 
 of the country. “You, at least, payez de personne in your work for 
 peace,’ a friend wrote to him later. ‘Twice across Europe and up and 
 down England in six months is not a bad record for a man who is not 
 a mere Queen’s Messenger but a hard-working and over-worked 
 journalistic apostle.’+ 
 
 The movement came in for much criticism and ridicule, of course. 
 Stead’s methods, then as at other times, were unpalatable in half a 
 dozen ways to the great bulk of his countrymen. Jingoes were angry 
 because they were in a mood to give a good thrashing to either France 
 or Russia. The average man was incensed by praise of Russia at the 
 expense of England. ‘The conventionally religious were shocked by 
 daring applications of Holy Writ. Superior persons winced at Stead’s 
 ‘vulgarity.’ Excited Russians and their English allies resented the 
 sight of a so-called Liberal ‘backing up the Tsar.’ If space allowed, 
 one could transcribe here many noteworthy examples of the mockery 
 and abuse to which he was subjected by fastidious wits and incensed 
 opponents. I shall give one, partly as a typical illustration, partly as 
 a testimony to the really extraordinary success which crowned Stead’s 
 efforts. In October, 1898, before the Crusade had started, the tone 
 
 1 Mr. Wickham Steed, The Times correspondent in Rome. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 151 
 
 of English comment had been, we must remember, ironical and 
 contemptuous. Writing in the Fortnightly Review for April 1899, 
 Mr. M. V. Tchertkoff, a Russian domiciled in England, expresed 
 himself as follows: 
 
 ‘Russia, with a savage Government corrupted to the very marrow 
 of its bones, oppressing to the utmost the meek working people, and 
 systematically trampling down any slightest shoots of independent 
 thought and effort; Russia ruled by a lawless band of mercenary 
 officials, screened behind the back of a dummy sovereign, who, bound 
 hand and foot, occupies the falsest and most helpless position imagin- 
 able. What attitude might one reasonably expect so-called “enlight- 
 ened” England to assume towards this tyrant, often well-meaning I 
 admit, but so utterly deceived and so full of illusions? .. . 
 
 ‘England finds nothing better to do than to express, in the most 
 extravagant terms, its enthusiastic admiration of him, on account of a 
 few words uttered, in his name, in favour of peace; words which have 
 long become commonplace in the speeches of all the crowned repre- 
 sentatives of the most warlike Powers. These stereotyped phrases, 
 in this instance grouped together in a slightly new combination, 
 which for some reason has particularly taken the fancy of the public, 
 express the proposal of an utterly impracticable plan for the attain- 
 ment of more peaceful international relations —a plan which only 
 serves to illustrate its author’s entire ignorance of actual life, and of 
 the real causes that lead to war. This insignificant incident has, 
 nevertheless, given an impetus to one of those unrestrainable and 
 infectious crazes which periodically take possession of the idle classes, 
 assuming the most varied forms, such as the bulb mania in Holland 
 of former times, down to the Franco-Russian frenzy of a few years 
 ago. In this particular case the paroxysm has found its issue in 
 unlimited ecstasy over the proposal and the person of the Russian 
 Emperor, and in the repetition, to all tunes, of the error that uni- 
 versal peace may be promoted by a few eloquent words, prettily 
 expressed by a sympathetic monarch, independently of a radical 
 revolution in men’s relations to life and to one another.’ 
 
 Having thus vented his feelings in regard to the Peace Crusade, 
 M. Tchertkoff proceeded to deal with its originator: 
 
 ‘An English journalist, conspicuous for his ability in falling in with 
 
152 DHE ATSARSERESCRIPTOAND 1898 
 
 the public mood of the moment, who has apparently made the 
 glorification of crowned heads his speciality, and who lately, on the 
 occasion of her jubilee, extolled the Queen in terms so exaggerated 
 that they would have been regarded as indecent even by Russian 
 Conservatives in relation to their sovereign — this English journalist 
 rushed off to Russia, calling on the way on all the kings and presi- 
 dents who consented to receive him. Having obtained an interview 
 with the Russian Emperor, he hurried back to England, and through 
 the Press, and at large public meetings, informed his countrymen 
 that the Tsar, notwithstanding his sublime mission as the greatest 
 Autocrat in the world, having deigned to accept the humble form of 
 a human being, speaks, moves, and even smiles exactly like a mere 
 man; yet that at the same time he has conserved in all its purity the 
 ideal nobleness, the unfathomable intellect, and unattainable virtue 
 inherent in a being from a higher world. . . 
 
 ‘And thus, in the person of its official head, one of the most demoral- 
 ized and vicious governments in the world receives from without that 
 moral, or rather immoral, support of which it has long been deprived 
 amongst all enlightened Russians... . 
 
 ‘Such are some of the considerations that uphold me in my con- 
 viction that the present brilliant peace demonstration, far from 
 attaining any good result, will, on the contrary, be productive of 
 great harm, not only to the person of the Tsar, and to Russia in 
 particular, but also to the cause of peace in general and to the welfare 
 of all humanity, by postponing, for a more or less prolonged period, 
 the definite recognition by mankind of the truth, now ripening in 
 their consciousness, of the absolute and unconditional unlawfulness 
 of military service.’ 
 
 VII 
 AT THE HAGUE. STEAD’S LETTERS TO THE TSAR 
 
 ‘No dramatist could have devised a more picturesque and striking 
 conclusion to our progressive nineteenth century than the coming 
 conference initiated by the Tsar of All the Russias. Armed to the 
 teeth with all the most destructive appliances that modern science 
 could invent, the nations of the world are about to discuss the means 
 of arriving at a universal and lasting peace! The House in the Wood, 
 which Her Majesty has placed at their disposal for the Conference, 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 153 
 
 seems expressly made for the purpose. The large “Orange Hall,”’ 
 with its magnificent paintings commemorating the Peace of Munster, 
 will be the theatre of the debates. Under the eye of Pallas Athene 
 the delegates will frame their resolutions, while the inspiring device 
 is held up before them, “Ultimus ante omnes de parta pace trium- 
 phus.” ’!— Mrs. Lecky in the Nineteenth Century, May, 1899. 
 
 Those weeks at The Hague were among the happiest and most 
 successful in Stead’s whole life. A new and brighter epoch had been 
 opened in the world’s history, he felt, and he was conscious of being 
 one of the few who had made this possible. But if he sometimes 
 shocked and startled the slower-going diplomatists he gave himself 
 no airs of importance in the little Dutch city and we may be certain 
 he laughed approvingly when, in Mr. G. H. Perris’s History of the 
 Peace Conference, issued some months later, he read these philo- 
 sophic words written by his old friend and fellow-worker, Felix 
 Moscheles. Mr. Moscheles has alluded to the presence at The Hague 
 of some of the oldest workers in the Peace Movement: 
 
 ‘It is characteristic of the unselfish nature of these well-intentioned, 
 but soft-headed, people, that they are in no way aggrieved at being 
 overshadowed and superseded by the high and mighty council which 
 is taking the work out of their hands. Speaking as one of the soft 
 ones, I can only say that Emperors and statesmen are quite wel- 
 come to make free with anything and everything we may have 
 been able to prepare for them and that we are happy to hand 
 over our responsibilities to the master minds who are taking our 
 places.’ 
 
 ‘Matters had come to such a pass, Mr. Moscheles went on to remark 
 in his whimsical way, that ‘more than once” he had found himself 
 actually treated with respect! 
 
 Stead, for his part, had to have recourse to a bold move in order to 
 win for the Press in general the respect he considered its due from 
 that ‘high and mighty Council’ at which Mr. Moscheles poked his 
 fun. The Conference, he found to his indignation, was to hold its 
 sittings in private and its members were pledged to secrecy. Most of 
 the other newspaper correspondents took umbrage-and_ flight! 
 Stead was not to be foiled, however. Having first established very 
 close relations with several of the delegates — more especially with the 
 
 1“The greatest Victory is that by which Peace is won.’ 
 
154 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 Servian, M. Mijatovitch — and having convinced them that publicity 
 was absolutely essential to the success of the meeting, he arranged to 
 compile for the Dutch newspaper, Dagblad, a regular chronicle, 
 translated into both Dutch and French, of all the proceedings in the 
 House in the Wood. The controllers of the Conference were, of 
 course, astonished and scandalized, and there was a disposition to try 
 to make Stead’s plan impossible, but wiser councils prevailed. ‘Only 
 those who have seen Mr. Stead’s Dagblad “chronique” regularly and 
 on the spot,’ wrote Mr. Perris, ‘can appreciate the influence it exerted 
 on the Conference. The Delegates could not help reading it, and, 
 feeling the eyes of King Demos upon them and his voice in their ears, 
 could not help being influenced. The capture of the leading paper of 
 the little city was at once the simplest and the most far-reaching of all 
 its author’s propagandist efforts. The general public have not heard 
 of it . . . but this broadsheet, addressed simply to the delegates and 
 the special correspondents (many of whom were largely dependent 
 upon it), was the stroke of genius. By the force of its novelty, bold- 
 ness, resource, and eloquence, it dominated the situation; and we 
 shall never know how much of the result we owe to Mr. Stead.’ 
 
 Serious students of the subject will find the story of this first Peace 
 Conference fully recorded in various books available in any big 
 Reference Library, and there are many pages on it in the Review of 
 Reviews for the year of 1899. Of much greater interest for us, how- 
 ever, are a series of weekly letters which Stead addressed from The 
 Hague to Nicholas II. These letters constitute, doubtless, the only 
 instance in history of an Englishman acting as ‘special correspondent’ 
 and political adviser to a Tsar of Russia. 
 
 They are full of trivial details of no interest in themselves but 
 combining to make the whole series one of the most curious in the 
 history of letter-writing. 
 
 Typewritten copies remain of all of them except the first. 
 
 I shall give the first epistle verbatim. All begin in the same way 
 with the quaint formula, ‘As in duty bound.’ 
 
 Stead had arrived at ‘The Hague on May 17 and had taken up his 
 residence at a little villa known as ‘Pax Intrantibus’ on the outskirts 
 of the town. He had made the acquaintance of all the leading 
 delegates and had been busy compiling a‘Who’s Who’ of the Con- 
 ference. Nothing of importance had occurred during the first few 
 days: 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 155 
 
 Second Letter. 
 
 As in duty bound, I resume my pen. May 28, 1899. 
 
 “This week I have the best of news to report. Would that you had 
 been at The Hague to see the gradual unfoldment of your great 
 design. Here be great diplomatists, experienced statesmen, famous 
 admirals and valiant soldiers, all harnessed to the plough, and each 
 one feels that it will be an ugly blot on his own record if the furrow is 
 not driven straight and true. The amour-propre of the old men who 
 are hoping to crown a long career by a great achievement in the cause 
 of international peace, and the ambition of the young men who count 
 upon using the success of the Conference as the starting-point of 
 their ascent to high places, are working mightily for the realization 
 of the peace ideal. Add to these, the fact that delegates are beginning 
 to know each other better, to understand the essential sympathy that 
 unites them, and you have sufficient explanation of the improvement 
 that has taken place in the tone and temper of the Conference. But 
 there are other reasons. Among these I put foremost the fact that 
 M. de Staal has been able to escape from the corvée of tiresome 
 ceremonial visits of etiquette and to bring his great personal influence 
 directly to bear on the leading members of the Conference. We all 
 love M. de Staal and it has been a real grief to all of us that he should 
 have suffered so severely from toothache the last few days. He 
 obtained some relief on Friday, but yesterday he was again at the 
 dentist’s. Madame and Mdlle Staal have now arrived, which may 
 also be counted as a distinct gain. Another element which has helped 
 has been the complete breakdown of the attempt to preserve secrecy 
 as to the proceedings of the Conference. The publication of M. de 
 Staal’s speech was delayed for some days to everyone’s disadvantage, 
 but since then we have had less difficulty in obtaining news. I had in 
 my possession at five o’clock on Friday all the essential facts con- 
 cerning the great sitting at which your Arbitration proposals were 
 brought forward, and published them in a long dispatch of two and a 
 half columns in the Manchester Guardian, a paper to which I am 
 sending correspondence, as it was the best paper in England to 
 support the peace crusade. Yet immediately before I sent off my 
 telegram, when I asked M. de Staal for information, he said he could 
 not possibly give me any, as the proceedings were strictly secret! It 
 was very amusing, but all’s well that ends well, and in future I hope 
 we shall have better arrangements. 
 
156 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 ‘Everyone with whom I have spoken, especially the English and 
 American delegates, professes to be delighted with the Russian 
 proposals. Sir Julian Pauncefote was loud in the praise of Mr. 
 Martens’ handiwork, and said that he thought it would require but 
 very slight and immaterial alterations to make the whole scheme 
 acceptable to everybody. He and the Americans are very strong in 
 support of a permanent international tribunal, and I am glad for the 
 sake of my country that the curious way in which the Russian 
 proposals were presented enabled the British delegates to be the first 
 to propose the establishment of a permanent international tribunal. 
 Russia has so many glories to boast of in these initiatives of peace 
 that I hope you will not grudge England her one solitary laurel 
 leaf. 
 
 ‘I had a very interesting conversation with Mr. Holls, the most 
 powerful and active of the American delegates here. He said that 
 being an American who was free from European prejudices he had 
 been both startled and pained to find how general and deep-seated 
 was the distrust of Russia. This universal distrust, he said, was the 
 chief obstacle in the way of the success of the Conference. I said 
 that its origin was not difficult to trace in the propaganda of hatred 
 which had been kept up for generations by interested parties, but 
 that no one could doubt that its existence was most baneful. There- 
 fore I said, ‘‘Will you help me in dispelling it, and let us share the task 
 in this way? Wherever and whenever you come upon anything, be it 
 rumour, fact or act, which appears to you to justify this distrust of 
 Russia, will you bring it to me, and I will undertake to ascertain, in 
 every case, what is the truth, and I hope also to dispel distrust.’’ He 
 said he would, and by way of a beginning he said that the Americans 
 were bitterly aggrieved because of the despotic way in which the 
 Russians were bossing the Conference. They felt that the Tsar was 
 “running this show,” and that no one but a Russian was allowed even 
 to have an opinion as to what was the true interpretation of Moura- 
 vieff’s circular. This was due to the strong opinion expressed by 
 Mr. Martens that the question of private property in naval warfare 
 lay outside the scope of the Conference. I am glad to be able to say 
 that I was able yesterday completely to reassure Mr. Holls on this 
 point, by the assurances of M. de Staal and Mr. Martens, reinforced 
 by the strong expressions of Sir Julian Pauncefote. ... So that is a 
 good beginning. 
 
189) PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 157 
 
 ‘And here may I interpolate a remark that no echoes of the angry 
 snarling of the Times concerning the Pekin railway concession disturb 
 the tranquillity of our leafy shades. I read with sincere shame what 
 the Times prints. The agreement was perfectly clear. North of the 
 Great Wall to you, the basin of the Yang-tse-Kiang to us. All 
 between to be a happy hunting ground for the concessionaires of both 
 nations. I do not know how far Lord Salisbury has stooped to echo 
 the outcry of the Times, but if he were to make any objection, I 
 should be strongly tempted to say with all good nature, but with un- 
 mistakable clearness, that if in addition to conceding the basin of the 
 Yang-tse-Kiang to English concessionaires you were also expected 
 by the English Government to extend the basin of the Yang-tse- 
 Kiang to the North Wall of China, the agreement would become 
 impossible, as it was concluded on the assumption that geographical 
 facts could not be manipulated to suit the convenience of English 
 policy. But I hope Lord Salisbury will have more sense than to 
 expose himself to so obvious a retort, if only because, in the relations 
 of Empires it is never well to be exposed to the temptation to score 
 too heavily over your opponent. Patience and good humour will 
 solve more difficulties than severe retorts and triumphant refuta- 
 tion. 
 
 ‘Lord Aberdeen has spent some days at The Hague. He was 
 exceedingly pleased to hear my report of my visit to T'sarkoe Selo and 
 he left full of renewed hope. He is one of the kindliest and the best 
 of men. I was very glad to hear that Madame Selenka had received 
 your kind reply to her telegram. She has had her interview with 
 Madame de Staal and is extremely happy.’ 
 
 ‘Baron d’Estournelles de Constant, one of the French delegates, 
 told me that he had never attended a congress that was more human 
 and less diplomatic, all the members being seriously concerned about 
 attaining some real good for all mankind. 
 
 ‘I propose on Saturday next to begin publishing daily in the Dagblad 
 two columns in French on the Conference, news and comments, 
 copies of which will be forwarded daily to Tsarskod. 
 
 ‘Last week the Queen came and charmed everyone. Our Queen 
 celebrated her eightieth birthday. And your Empress — how many 
 times our thoughts have turned to her in love and gratitude. May 
 God bless you both.’ 
 
 From subsequent letters I shall give extracts merely — passages 
 
158 DHE WTSA' RIS SRESC RIP TO OAND 1898 
 
 particularly characteristic of Stead and illustrative of the frankness 
 and naturalness with which he talked to the Tsar. Incidentally we 
 shall learn from them as much of the proceedings and achievements 
 of the Conferences as we need to know. 
 
 Third Letter. 
 
 As in duty bound, June 4. 
 
 ‘I resume my weekly chronicle of the doings of The Hague. It is 
 glorious weather and most of the delegates have gone to Haarlem on 
 a special excursion. M. de Staal has not gone for I met him and 
 Madame de Staal at lunch. “These things” he said, “are for younger 
 people.” But the President is young at heart, and was quite annoyed 
 when his barber whom he asked to guess his age answered “‘ eighty, 
 possibly more.” He tells me that all goes well, and that there is no 
 menacing development visible either in Germany or elsewhere. 
 
 “The good work goes well. I ran over to London the other day to 
 put the Review to press, and saw Arthur Balfour. He was very 
 pleased to hear that there was a prospect of your visiting England 
 this year. Should you be able to carry out that intention, I sincerely 
 hope that sometime during your sojourn, you may make an oppor- 
 tunity for meeting Mr. Balfour. He is not only leader of the House 
 of Commons, nephew of Lord Salisbury, and future Prime Minister, 
 but he is one of the best men in the world, the strongest friend the 
 Cabinet has towards the Peace Conference, and one in whose sincerity 
 and goodness you can completely trust. Such men are rare. But they 
 exist, and I can wish you nothing better than that they should all be 
 your personal friends. I reported to him at length concerning the 
 Conference, and he is very pleased to be quite confident that this 
 time something practical is going to be done.’ 
 
 Fourth Letter. 
 June 11. 
 
 “The Bishop of Hereford preached an eloquent sermon to-day in 
 the English Church on the Conference, which, he said, was not as 
 Mommsen had said a misprint of the book of history, but rather the 
 Golden Title of a new page in a chapter of history infinitely brighter 
 than any that had yet been written. He spoke very warmly about the 
 immense service you had rendered to humanity by summoning the 
 Conference which he hoped would enthrone the international con- 
 science as sovereign among the children of men.’ 
 
189 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 159 
 Fifth Letter. Sune 18. 
 
 ‘The chief topic all this week has been the attitude of the German 
 Emperor —a subject upon which you are probably much better 
 informed at St. Petersburg than we are at The Hague. On Friday it 
 is said a courier arrived for Count Miinster, but we have as yet only 
 contradictory rumours, as to his new instructions. The story most 
 positively repeated declares that the Kaiser objects to the obligatory 
 clauses in the Arbitration project, regarding it as derogatory to his 
 Divine Right to submit the adjudication of any question to arbitration 
 other than that of the God of Battles. This morning on leaving church 
 an American told me that a German delegate had said that they, the 
 Germans, did not trust the Russians, and would have nothing to 
 do with their Arbitrations. The facts which are notorious are that 
 Count Welserheim, the Austrian, is doing everything he can to induce 
 the Kaiser not to take any action which would expose the hollowness 
 of the Triple Alliance. Italy cannot oppose arbitration. The American 
 delegates who are closely connected with the Germans are doing 
 their best to convince the Kaiser that Germany would be execrated 
 throughout the world if they were to cause the Arbitration proposal 
 to fail. Further, a great emphasis has been laid upon the fact that any 
 failure on the part of the Conference would immensely increase the 
 strength of the forces of revolutionary Socialism. Jaurés, the French 
 Socialist leader, said to d’Estournelles, when he left Paris: ““You are 
 going to The Hague. Do your best; you will fail. Not until you have 
 tried and failed will our opportunity come.” On the part of the 
 British delegates, the attitude is one of indifference to what Germany 
 may do or not do. We are now numerous enough and strong enough 
 to establish a system of Arbitration by ourselves. If Germany chooses 
 to stand out, that is her affair. Germany is not the Dictator of the 
 Universe. 
 
 ‘I am sorely grieved at the nature of the news which reaches us from 
 Southern Russia. The failure of the crops with the prospect of 
 severe famine is appalling. But out of evil good may come. The 
 necessity for making a great state campaign against the famine, after 
 the example of our Indian Famine Relief Department. may give you 
 power and grace sufficient to face the risk and difficulty of a bold 
 initiative in the diversion of funds from military and naval expendi- 
 ture to the work of relief. 
 
160 DHEVESAR'SRESORIPTVAND 1898 
 
 ‘If you have not recently read of the work of famine relief in India, 
 you might find some of the recent books well worth your attention. 
 
 ‘May God give you grace and wisdom to discern His will in this and 
 in all other matters. 
 
 ‘With gratitude and affection to you and the Empress.’ 
 
 Sixth Letter. 
 Fune 25. 
 
 ‘Nothing will be done about the standstill of armaments at the 
 Conference. All that anyone hopes for is that the proposal may be 
 accepted in principle, and an earnest hope expressed that by subse- 
 quent communications between the Great Powers an agreement may 
 be arrived at. This will leave the door open for agitation and 
 propaganda after the Conference has closed. The small Powers are 
 de trop in such a discussion. The Dual, the Triple, the Anglo- 
 American, and the Japanese alone count in such matters. And if the 
 standstill proposal is to be taken seriously, it will have to be dealt 
 with by these eight Powers. 
 
 ‘I had a conference here the other night. Very good meeting. You 
 will find it fully reported in the Dagblad. At the close questions were 
 asked about Finland and Transvaal. It is astonishing what prejudice 
 has been created against Russia by the Ukase about Finland. In 
 Holland and Belgium the Finnish question seems to have blotted out 
 with numbers of people all sense of the wider question. Russia to 
 them is not the Peace Conference maker, but solely the despoiler of 
 the liberty of Finland.’! 
 
 Seventh Letter. 
 July 2. 
 
 “We have all heard with profound thankfulness that the Empress 
 has safely passed through the ordeal which brings near to the portals 
 of Death all who are privileged to bring a new soul into the land of 
 the living. This morning when I attended with my wife the thanks- 
 giving service in the Russian Church here, I noticed that of the 
 twenty sacred pictures exhibited on the walls about twelve illustrated 
 the sacred divine relation of mother and child. 
 
 “We sincerely trust that both mother and child are doing well, and 
 
 1 Stead was continually championing the Finns against Russian oppression. 
 An ‘open letter’ which he wrote in 1902 to M. de Plehve calling attention to 
 their grievances won him intense gratitude throughout Finland. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 161 
 
 that the little girl may be so great a blessing to both of you that you 
 will bless God and praise Him all your life long that He has given you 
 once more a daughter instead of a son. 
 
 ‘Here at The Hague we are beginning to see the end of the labours 
 of the Conference. The end — that is to say the beginning. For the 
 glory of this Assembly is that it has begun a good work which will 
 prosper more and more unto the perfect day. 
 
 ‘The standstill proposition has temporarily failed. The vote of 
 Germany, expressed with unexpected vigour by Colonel Schwarzhoff, 
 effectively thwarted any hope of realizing any practical results in 
 this direction. 
 
 ‘As to any immediate prospect of effecting any tangible reduction 
 by cessation of the present competition in armaments, I am more than 
 ever disposed to rely more upon a direct negotiation between Russia 
 and England than upon anything else. I have discussed this matter 
 at length with the British naval delegate, Admiral Fisher, who is 
 entirely in accord with me in this matter. What we hope for is that 
 when you come to England in the Autumn you may be able in 
 personal conversation with Lord Salisbury and Mr. Goschen to 
 arrive at a general understanding as to the stabilization of the 
 present naval strength of Russia and England. Of course other 
 Powers will have to be taken into account, but the first step is to 
 avert the competition between Russia and England. Mr. Goschen is 
 well posted on the question, and if you could see him when you come 
 I think something practical might be done. 
 
 “The Arbitration scheme progresses steadily. At Saturday’s meeting 
 the Comité d’Examen was much pleased to find that Germany was 
 willing to co-operate in establishing a permanent Court of Inter- 
 national Arbitration on condition that it was not called a permanent 
 Tribunal. 
 
 ‘I met Count Miinster at M. de Staal’s brilliant party last night. 
 The whole Conference he said “‘is a farce.” I replied: “It is very 
 wicked to say so. And you would not say so if you had not outgrown 
 all your hopes and aspirations.” But I have been getting into the 
 black books of the Germans of late. Both M. de Staal and M. Basili 
 have begged me not to write as I have been doing in the Dagblad on 
 Germany’s conduct. Zorn, to whom I also spoke on Saturday night, 
 
 L.S. — VOL. II L 
 
162 THE: TSAR'S RES CRIP; AND 1898 
 
 was very hot about my articles. They chiefly resent my saying that 
 Colonel Schwarzhoff had not the courage of his opinions, an innocent 
 phrase surely. But they take it as a personal insult, and if we had 
 been in Germany no one knows what might have happened. 
 
 ‘Madame de Staal’s party on Saturday night was a brilliant success. 
 I am no judge in such matters, as it was the first ball which I ever 
 attended. I have written my impressions in Monday’s Dagblad which 
 may possibly amuse you. It is not often that a man lives to be fifty 
 before being present at a ball.’ 
 
 Eighth Letter. 
 july 9. 
 “There are various foolish stories current in the Press about your 
 being dissatisfied with the work of the Conference, which I take leave 
 entirely to disbelieve. Other foolish newspapers describe me as the 
 enemy of Russia disguised as a friend. If so the disguise is so thick 
 that I have never penetrated it myself.’ 
 
 Ninth Letter. 
 July 16. 
 
 ‘I begin my ninth letter with an expression of sincere sympathy. 
 Death levels all distinctions of caste or of class, and before the open 
 grave Emperor and serfs are the same. I read with deep feeling the 
 touching and simple words in which you announced your brother’s 
 death, words which reminded all who, like you, have mourned such 
 a loss, of the unity of our common humanity. 
 
 ‘But we sorrow not as those who are without hope. I am taking the 
 liberty of forwarding you this week in addition to the file of the 
 Dagblad, which I have posted you regularly and which I hope you 
 have received in due course, a copy of a little book which under the 
 circumstances, I venture to think you will read with peculiar 
 interest.1 
 
 “Yang Yu, the Chinese delegate, has at last expressed an opinion, 
 and a grimly humorous one it is. He proposes to add to the Article 
 on Mediation, which ends by declaring that the offer of mediation 
 shall not be regarded as an act “peu amical” the further proviso that 
 
 1 Letters from Julia. Stead proceeds to give the Tsar an outline of his 
 psychic experiences. 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 163 
 
 Mediation shall neither be held to justify the mediating Powers in 
 making excessive demands for compensation for their services. Poor 
 Yang Yu ruefully remembers the price China had to pay for the 
 mediation of Russia, Germany and France at the close of the 
 Japanese War. 
 
 ‘His amendment will not be proposed, but it is much talked of. I 
 am busy preparing a book which will give an account of the work of 
 the Conference. It will be in French, and will contain the material of 
 the ‘‘Parliament of Peace” and the protocols of the Conference and 
 its commissions. 
 
 ‘D’Estournelles made an excellent speech in the Comité d’Examen 
 which you will be glad to read. I enclose a copy.’ 
 
 Tenth Letter. 
 July 23. 
 
 “The work of the Conference is now virtually finished. There but 
 remains one full meeting more and then the signing of the Final 
 Protocol and the Four Conventions. 
 
 ‘It is a record of work of which you may well be proud and grateful, 
 inasmuch as, but for your initiative, nothing would have been done. 
 Let us glance at the harvest that has been reaped. 
 
 ‘(1) Unanimous declaration by representatives of all Governments 
 of the world that arrest of increase in armaments is to be desired for 
 the moral and material welfare of humanity. Question therefore 
 remitted to each Government how best to effect this much-to-be- 
 desired object. 
 
 ‘(2) Convention No. 1 forbidding (i) use of balloons to drop 
 explosives from the sky to injure combatants on earth; (ii) forbidding 
 the use of asphyxiating shells; and (iii) forbidding use of bullets 
 which expand or flatten. Convention signed by all Powers, England 
 and America making reserves on last two points. 
 
 ‘(3) Convention No. 2 applying provisions of Geneva Red Cross 
 Society to Naval Warfare. This was recommended in 1868, but 
 never carried out until to-day. 
 
 ‘(4) Convention No. 3 embodying the perfected code of Rules of 
 War based upon the Brussels rules. Russia pressed for this in 1874, 
 but never succeeded in carrying it out until now. 
 
 ‘(5) Convention No. 4 on Mediation and Arbitration, the greatest 
 achievement of the Conference. It consists of precise and clear 
 
164 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT AND 1898 
 
 arrangements for (i) good offices and mediation when desired by 
 disputants; (ii) the acceptance of obligation to offer mediation when 
 it is not sought; (iii) special mediation by which neutral powers 
 become charged with duty of mediation as the second of the belliger- 
 ents; (iv) the appointment of International Commissions d’Enquete 
 for clearing up disputed questions by local investigation; (v) the 
 establishment of a permanent Court of Arbitration with Permanent 
 Bureau at The Hague; (vi) the acceptance by all Governments of the 
 duty of representing to Governments in dispute the importance of 
 referring their quarrel to the Court; and (vii) the elaboration of a 
 complete code of Arbitration procedure. 
 
 ‘(6) The Powers “‘se reservant de conclure” new treaties extending 
 obligatory arbitration to all cases which they deem it suitable. 
 
 ‘(7) Definite resolutions have been passed declaring that new 
 Conferences should be held on the following subjects: (i) the revision 
 of the Geneva Convention, (ii) the Rights and Duties of Neutrals, 
 (iii) the Right of Capture of Private Property at sea, and (iv) the 
 question of bombarding coast towns. 
 
 ‘Such are some of the gains garnered for humanity as the direct 
 result of the beneficent initiative of the Rescript. What a conclusive 
 answer is this to all those fears and misgivings which filled the air all 
 last autumn. 
 
 “The indirect results have been hardly less important. The Con- 
 ference has brought together men of all nations from the uttermost 
 ends of the earth, and set them to work together to devise methods to 
 promote peace and to humanize war. Never before have men of such 
 diverse nationalities been brought into such close companionship for 
 so noble an end, and never have the members of any Conference 
 been so fraternal, so friendly and so heartily at one among themselves. 
 The Conference itself as a fact in the evolution of human society is 
 greater than all its works. 
 
 “There are three questions upon which I hope you will already have 
 been thinking. 
 
 ‘(1) What can Russia do to extend still further the scope of (Art. 18) 
 obligatory arbitration? I have suggested for England that we should 
 propose to every Power that is in favour of obligatory arbitration on 
 certain subjects to conclude a direct treaty binding both to refer such 
 subjects to arbitration. But why should not you who have taken such 
 
1899 PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 165 
 
 a lead so far not keep the lead by yourself proposing such treaties to 
 all the states with whom Russia is in relation? 
 
 ‘(2) What can Russia do to make known to all the world the real 
 and immense work done by the Conference? An official communiqué 
 in the Official Messenger summarizing the harvest that has been 
 gathered would be telegraphed to every paper in the world. By no 
 other means can so authoritative a declaration be so widely diffused. 
 
 ‘(3) What should be done in the way of publishing and circulating 
 a proper narrative of the proceedings of the Conference? I hope next 
 month to have ready to issue a chronique of the Conference in 
 French. It will be published at The Hague at about 3 francs 50 c. 
 But a latter edition ought to appear for public libraries and for the 
 delegates. If you have any ideas on this subject, I shall be much 
 obliged if you would communicate them to me. If an edition de luxe 
 is brought out would any considerable number be wanted in Russia?’ 
 
 Last Letter from The Hague. Aucustic, 
 
 “The Conference is over. I was present at the final sitting, and now 
 it is my pleasant duty to write you my last letter on the result of the 
 Conference at The Hague. No, not the last letter on its results, not by 
 a long, long way. For the results of the Conference will affect all 
 future history and will constantly and continuously influence my life. 
 But after this letter my chronique from week to week ends. 
 
 ‘First and foremost, let me begin by expressing my profound 
 gratitude to Almighty God who put it into your heart to do that seed 
 sowing work for Him, which has already borne such excellent fruit. 
 To Him, the Lord of Peace and Giver of all good things and thoughts 
 which are good things in the making, let us ascribe all praise for His 
 wonderful loving-kindness towards us all in this Conference. 
 
 ‘Secondly, let me give you the watchword which your excellent 
 Minister, M. Basili, has given to me as the word which more than 
 anything else expressed the spirit in which we all should regard the 
 Conference and its work. He asked me what I would suggest. I 
 answered “Hope.” ‘‘No,” he replied, “Hope is good but Hope is not 
 good enough. The true word is Confiance! Confiance in the work of 
 the Conference. Confiance in the future, above all Confiance en 
 Dieu.” It is a good word. Better than our English confidence, or 
 than our English faith. In English I suppose we should translate it 
 confident faith or strong trust. 
 
166 THE TSAR’S RESCRIPT 1898-1899 
 
 ‘Grateful praise for the work accomplished in the past; Confiance in 
 the work which is about to be achieved in the future; these two 
 sentiments, better than anything else, express what we all more or 
 less feel at The Hague. 
 
 “What the people feel and hope outside is expressed better than I 
 can express it in the printed copy of verses which I inserted in the 
 Dagblad. The authoress is a girl of about nineteen, consumptive, 
 very poor, who is helping to maintain her family by working as a 
 telephone girl in the North of England. I enclose the verses not 
 merely because of their merit, which I venture to think is consider- 
 able, but in order to give you an apt illustration of how the light 
 shines far down into the buried strata of humanity and kindles 
 fresh hope in the hearts of the people. 
 
 ‘I am sorry that M. de Staal and M. Basili could not have been 
 packed off to Russia immediately the Conference was over to report 
 personally to you when they are flushed with the first glow of the 
 golden glory of success which has been achieved at The Hague. 
 M. de Staal looks ten years younger and laughs and sings like a merry- 
 hearted boy. And well he may. For if ever man had good justification 
 to rejoice and be merry it is M. de Staal. As for M. Basili he was in 
 these last days almost transfigured with joy and confidence. And 
 what these two were, so were we all, more or less. Even Count 
 Miinster abated somewhat of his snarling cynicism. It was a sight not 
 to be seen often in a century, this assemblage of grey-headed diplo- 
 mats who came believing that they could do nothing, and who have 
 dispersed feeling that they have done a very great deal indeed. And 
 the best of it all is that instead of regarding what they have done as an 
 end, they all declare it is only a beginning of better things to come. 
 ‘ “So, forgetting those things that are passed, let us reach forward 
 to those which are to come.’’ What is to be done next? 
 
 ‘I will close this last letter from The Hague, as I began it, by 
 expressing once more my humble and hearty thanks to our loving 
 Father who having put this impulse in your heart, has prospered it 
 in His own way better than we ever ventured to hope or dream. 
 
 ‘May He continue to impart to you and to your wife something of 
 the joy and confiance which you have helped so mightily to diffuse 
 throughout the world.’ 
 
CHAPTER. 24 
 STEAD AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN WAR, 1899-1902 
 
 ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?’ 
 
 ‘STOP THE WAR!’ 
 
 ‘WHEN?’ 
 
 ‘IMMEDIATELY.’ 
 
 ‘WHY?’ 
 
 ‘BECAUSE WE ARE IN THE WRONG!’ 
 
 ‘HOW?’ 
 
 ‘BY CONFESSING OUR SINS AND DOING RIGHT.’ 
 
 ‘Such are the headings which appear every week in War agaist 
 War, the little periodical which Mr. Stead has been editing since the 
 month of October, and what a war it is! Sometimes sparkling with 
 humour, full of go, but savage in its methods, fantastic in its strategy; 
 not an official lie which escapes furious denial; not an inconsequential 
 statement which is not underlined; not a fault which is not shown up. 
 Everything may become a weapon, from Biblical texts to the most 
 biting caricatures. And not only by writing, but by speaking, does 
 Mr. Stead wage his war of protest and vociferation. From end to end 
 of England he travels weariless. 
 
 ‘Reading the pages of his paper I have wondered whether this 
 extraordinary man in seeking duty did not pass it by, whether in 
 desiring honour he did not miss it. Is it allowable thus to treat one’s 
 own country when the blood of her sons is flowing far away even for 
 a dubious cause? ... Well, this impression does not last. I defy 
 anyone who reads War against War to say that Mr. Stead does not 
 love his country.’ 
 
 BARON PIERRE DE COUBERTIN in L’Indépendance Belge, 
 Fanuary 24, 1900. 
 I 
 STEAD’S VIEW OF THE WAR 
 
 T is strange to reflect — as Cecil Rhodes reflected so often — that 
 Tae of the men most responsible for the war in South Africa 
 were, in a sense, Stead’s disciples: Rhodes himself, Milner and 
 Edmund Garrett. Rhodes, in his big, simple-minded way was 
 frankly bewildered by what seemed to him Stead’s amazing per- 
 
 167 
 
168 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 versity in the matter. Dr. Jameson seems to have regarded his case 
 as pathological. ‘Stead is mad sometimes, and in some measure,’ he 
 is reported to have declared,! ‘and he is such a charming fellow that 
 you can tell him so without his being offended or caring a jot. He 
 loses the perspective of things and, not only that, he sees them with 
 distorted vision. When it became a question of war in South Africa 
 he couldn’t judge the situation because he was fresh from the Peace 
 Congress and was possessed — obsessed in fact — by the idea of Peace 
 to such an extent that his judgment was perverted.’ 
 
 That is the case against Stead as put by an affectionate friend. In 
 the eyes of the bulk of the War Party he was, of course, a liar and a 
 traitor; and the War Party constituted at least two-thirds, if not 
 three-fourths, of the nation. ‘It will be a hundred years,’ an American 
 admirer wrote at the time, ‘before the English realize Stead’s services 
 to their country.’ Two decades only have passed as yet, but already 
 most people are able at least to discuss the matter without undue heat 
 or acrimony. 
 
 Stead understood the war fever which he loathed and strove against, 
 and he took very little notice - except in so far as they could be 
 utilized in public controversy — of even the most violent attacks upon 
 his good faith and character. He faced hostile audiences unflinch- 
 ingly all over England. When a band of young village patriots 
 smashed the windows and wicket-gate of his little house at Hayling 
 Island, he invited the ringleaders to supper and lectured them good- 
 humouredly over the coffee and ham-and-eggs. 
 
 I shall try to condense into the smallest possible amount of space 
 Stead’s share in the long and bitter controversy. Not many of his 
 opponents had patience to listen to him, and his utterances were so 
 numerous and copious that very few of his sympathizers, speaking 
 from memory, would be able to describe precisely the line he took. 
 
 Here is a short passage from The Truth about the War (p. 54) in 
 which he sums up his main contention: 
 
 “The Boers have their own sins to answer for. Nor do I fora moment 
 pretend that their system of government is ideal or their adminis- 
 tration pure. The Outlanders had plenty of grievances which it was 
 our duty to try and redress so far as it was possible to do it without 
 going to war, or without breaking our pledged word not to interfere 
 
 1 In a conversation recorded by Mr. G. E. Startup. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 169 
 
 in the internal affairs of the South African Republic. That may be 
 admitted, and if anyone likes to throw hard words at President 
 Kruger, and abuse him for not having the wit to see that he could 
 have circumvented the war party by accepting the five years’ fran- 
 chise, I shall not say them nay. We have no responsibility for the 
 mistakes and shortcomings of President Kruger. What we have to do 
 is to ask whether our own policy has been free from reproach, whether 
 we have acted throughout in a straightforward honourable manner, 
 and whether we, being the superior and more civilized Power, have 
 used every available means of allaying the very distrustful Old 
 Peasant with whom we had to deal.’ 
 
 Unfortunately, Stead proceeds to say, that was just what we had 
 not done. It was true that in the House of Commons in May, 1896, 
 Mr. Chamberlain had spoken as follows: “To go to war with President 
 Kruger in order to force upon him reforms in the internal affairs of 
 his State, with which successive Secretaries of State standing in this 
 place have repudiated all right of interference — that would have been 
 a course of action as immoral as it would have been unwise’; and 
 that in February, 1897, he had expressed himself in the same sense 
 with equal precision, admitting that the British Government’s rights 
 of action were ‘limited to the offering of friendly counsel, in the 
 rejection of which, if it is not accepted, we must be quite willing to 
 acquiesce’; but his actions had so belied these sentiments that 
 President Kruger could not but feel convinced that the British 
 Government was determined by hook or by crook to destroy the 
 Transvaal Republic and reduce it to the status of a British Colony. 
 
 To understand Kruger’s frame of mind, it was essential to go back 
 to the Jameson Raid and to look at it and what preceded and followed 
 it with Kruger’s eyes. What did the old man see? He saw that before 
 the Raid, in order to facilitate the armed intervention of British 
 troops, Mr. Chamberlain had made over to Mr. Rhodes a strip of 
 land convenient as a jumping-off place for an invasion of the 
 Transvaal. ‘He saw also that Mr. Chamberlain had expedited the 
 arrangement by which the mounted police could be placed at the 
 disposition of Dr. Jameson for use on emergencies. Finally, when 
 the conspiracy hung fire among the Outlanders, he saw Dr. Jameson, 
 at the head of the troops taken over from Mr. Chamberlain, use the 
 jumping-off place as the base from which he invaded the Republic.’ 
 
170 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 These were things which Kruger saw for himself. In addition he 
 would have heard: 
 
 1. That Dr. Jameson had communicated his intentions to Sir 
 Graham Bower, who was virtually Acting High Commissioner at the 
 Cape — if not also to the High Commissioner himself, Lord Rosmead, 
 who was just then ill. 
 
 2. That Rhodes had been in very close and confidential communi- 
 cation with the Colonial Office for many weeks before the Raid. 
 
 3. That what were believed to be the most incriminating items of 
 this correspondence were withheld from the South African Com- 
 mittee which was appointed by the House of Commons in 1897 to 
 investigate the whole matter. 
 
 4. And that, finally, according to Mr. Chamberlain, the chief 
 spokesman of the British Government, Cecil Rhodes, although 
 Premier of Cape Colony when abetting the plan for the Outlanders’ 
 rebellion (though he was not in Jameson’s confidence as to the in- 
 opportune Raid which so upset his apple-cart!’), had acted through- 
 out as a ‘man of honour’! 
 
 Stead continues: ‘All this Mr. Kruger knows. What possible con- 
 clusion could he draw from it except that in dealing with Mr. 
 Chamberlain, he is dealing with a man who was privy to the con- 
 spiracy to overthrow his Government and annex the Transvaal and 
 who did not hesitate at any amount of false statement and suppression 
 of evidence in order to save his skin. Nay, it is even worse than this. 
 For the proceedings of the Committee convinced him that both 
 parties in England are willing to join in a conspiracy to conceal the 
 truth whenever it suits the interest of England in South Africa to do 
 so. As Lord George Hamilton ingenuously said when praising Sir 
 W. Harcourt and the Liberal members of the Committee for hushing 
 up the scandal: ‘They behaved as Englishmen always behave in 
 positions of responsibility. They declined to push the inquiry to a 
 point which would endanger the supremacy of British rule in South 
 Africa.’ 
 
 That was the view held by most of our ‘Island Pharisees.’ The 
 Temps, in an article upon Mr. Chamberlain’s position, voiced the 
 opinion which prevailed throughout the rest of the world: 
 
 “The Committee sacrifices everything, including the honour of 
 England, to its desire to preserve the reputation of that meddlesome 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 171 
 
 and imperious statesman. The evil is wrought and irreparable. It is 
 now proved that the Queen’s Government has plotted in time of 
 peace the invasion of a friendly country, and that there is no majority 
 in Great Britain to condemn the crime. It is the apotheosis of the 
 Birmingham statesman; it is also the abdication of the conscience of 
 Great Britain.’ 
 
 Quite inevitably this was the view taken also by the Boer Govern- 
 ment; and when, in September 1899, British troops having been 
 already moved forward along the Natal frontier of the Transvaal, 
 Mr. Chamberlain refused to ratify the terms which he himself 
 had originally proposed and which they, however reluctantly, had 
 accepted, there could no longer be any doubt in Kruger’s mind as to 
 what had become inevitable. 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain’s fine sentiments of 1896 and 1897 were now 
 forgotten by the British Government. “Do what we tell you or it will 
 be worse for you! If you don’t give in we shall send thousands and 
 ever more thousands of soldiers to surround you, to throttle you and 
 to compel you to submit!’ That, says Stead, was now our policy. 
 And when the Boers after first remonstrating in vain, at last declared 
 that the dispatch of any more troops must be regarded as a declara- 
 tion of war, behold! they had issued an ‘ultimatum’ and the British 
 Empire was fighting in self-defence! 
 
 II 
 THE ‘STOP THE WAR’ CAMPAIGN 
 
 By the beginning of December 1899, the pro-Boers were left with 
 only two London newspapers to express their views, the Morning 
 Leader and the Star: Mr. H. W. Massingham, of the Daily Chronicle, 
 and Mr. W. M. Crook, of the Echo, had been forced to resign their 
 posts as editors, the proprietors of both journals vetoing any further 
 opposition to the war. In the country, the Manchester Guardian 
 continued to support the unpopular cause, its position being almost 
 unassailable by reason of its service of commercial news, essential to 
 the cotton trade. ‘The morning trains and trams in Lancashire,’ Mr. 
 R. H. Gretton tells us, ‘were full of men who expressed their attitude 
 by crumpling the paper into a ball and throwing it away ostentatiously 
 
172 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 when they had read the telegrams from New York, Galveston and 
 New Orleans.’ 
 
 It was at this juncture that Stead took the initiative in forming the 
 famous ‘Stop the War Committee,’ with Mr. Crook as one of his most 
 stalwart supporters. ‘I protested strongly against the name,’ Mr. 
 Crook writes me, ‘as I considered it unnecessarily provocative and 
 irritating, but Stead insisted that it was the name most descriptive of 
 what we were out to accomplish and, as the majority of our associates 
 agreed with him, I bowed to their decision. Stead was Treasurer and 
 found most of the money for carrying out our operations. I believe 
 he would have bankrupted himself but for Mr. Stout, his manager, 
 who with friendly guile concealed from him some of the profits of the 
 Review of Reviews (already beginning to dwindle) and banked them 
 separately for the benefit of the Stead household!’ 
 
 Only a few Members of Parliament cared to throw in their lot with 
 so ‘extreme’ an institution as the Committee. Among them were Mr. 
 Lloyd George, Mr. Labouchere, Sir Wilfred Lawson, the Hon. 
 Philip Stanhope (later Lord Weardale), Mr. Keir Hardie, and Mr. 
 Cremer. All of these, and some of the Irish Nationalist Members as 
 well, took active part in the agitation which followed. Scores of public 
 meetings were organized throughout the country, and some of them 
 may almost be called historic in view of the extraordinary scenes of 
 violence they called forth. Mr. Crook was in the thick of the melée 
 at a great meeting which was held at Exeter Hall, and it was with 
 some difficulty that, with the help of Mrs. Sheldon Amos, a woman 
 of strong muscles no less than of stout heart, he contrived to get 
 Sir Wilfred Lawson, an easily recognized figure, safely out of the 
 building. In the free fight which took place inside the Hall, a num- 
 ber of young Quakers were among the most gallant defenders of the 
 platform, and notably Mr. Roger Clark, a grandson of John Bright. 
 
 At a subsequent meeting in the Queen’s Hall, at which Stead and 
 Dr. Clifford were among the principal speakers, the police were in 
 strong force and kept at bay a huge howling mob outside. On this 
 occasion some twelve hundred lusty young men from Battersea, 
 described as ‘John Burns’s Lambs,’ were engaged to act as ‘stewards’ 
 in case their services should be wanted to protect the speakers and 
 the audience. There were, of course, interruptions and signs of 
 trouble, and it was no very easy matter to hold the said ‘lambs’ 
 
 1 A Modern History of the English People, Vol. II. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 173 
 
 in leash, but the meeting was held without any serious disorder. 
 
 Later a new channel for pro-Boer energies was suggested by an 
 American friend of Stead’s, Mr. John E. Milholland, like Stead 
 himself a man of big ideas, a believer in peace through arbitration 
 and a consistent champion of the oppressed. At his house in Ken- 
 sington, already then and for many years afterwards ‘a hot-bed of 
 humanitarianism,’ as a genial cynic once remarked, Mr. Milholland 
 gave a dinner to start ‘The Intervention Club’ — the *“Tic’ as it was 
 called for short—for the purpose of promoting a movement very 
 similar to that which is now embodied in the League of Nations. ‘The 
 time was not ripe for ‘The Intervention Club,’ but it served as a 
 stepping-stone to a new institution which, with the help of Mr. 
 Milholland, Mr. Crook, Mr. Hodgson Pratt and others, Stead now 
 founded, ‘The International Union.’ Among other men and women 
 of note whose support Stead obtained were Professor Alfred Russel 
 Wallace, William Watson, the poet, Madame Sarah Grand, Mr. J.M. 
 Robertson, Mr. J. A. Hobson, Mr. H. W. Massingham, and Mr. 
 Ernest Parke. ‘The International Union’ continued in existence 
 until striving ceaselessly in its efforts to arouse the national con- 
 science: with what success we must leave it to Posterity to say — 
 contemporary historians make little or no account of it. Stead 
 expounded its aims in the following words: 
 
 ‘We must resolutely face the fact that unless we bestir ourselves and 
 set to work to create, each in our own locality, centres of resistance to 
 the frenzy of the hour, there is nothing before us but a terrible 
 looking forward to judgment to come. National bankruptcy and 
 Imperial ruin will overtake us, and it will be in vain to pray to God 
 to help us if we have not done all that we can to help ourselves. What 
 is needed is the organization of all those in every constituency in the 
 land who care for peace, progress and reform. An earnest secretary, 
 who is in touch with a dozen men and women in all parts of the 
 constituency who hate war as they hate the devil, and who are 
 prepared to agitate, speak, work and vote for peace, with say 10 per 
 cent. of the same zeal with which publicans fight for their licences or 
 the Jingoes shout for bloodshed, would do more than anything else 
 to restore sanity to the nation, and enable us to cast out this demon 
 which, at the present moment, is hurrying us like the Gadarene 
 swine down to the abyss. 
 
174 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 ‘With this end in view, many of the leading peace-workers of the 
 world have come together and formed an INTERNATIONAL UNION with 
 the object of securing the co-operation of all men and women who 
 are in earnest about peace. The Union does not seek to supersede 
 the operations of any of the existing peace societies. It acknowledges 
 them all and includes among its members representatives of the most 
 important Peace Associations in England and the Continent; but it 
 recognizes that Peace Associations by themselves are powerless. It 
 is necessary to form a good working alliance with the Socialists, with 
 the Independent Labour Party, and with such remnant of the 
 Christians as have not apostasized from the faith of their Founder. 
 It will not be content until in every constituency in the land there is 
 a local centre which will charge itself, in the first instance, with 
 compiling a muster-roll of all those citizens who are heart and soul in 
 sympathy with this war against war. The propaganda for peace needs 
 to be put upon a broad national and international foundation. 
 
 ‘I have undertaken to act as secretary for the British branch of the 
 Union, and shall be very glad to forward to any reader on application 
 particulars as to its organization and objects, together with sugges- 
 tions as to how the work of organization can best be carried out. ‘This 
 is a practical suggestion which I throw out by way of personal appeal 
 to everyone who reads this page. One thing is quite certain — bad 
 times are coming upon us, and the resources with which we might 
 have protected ourselves against the increasing pressure of foreign 
 and American competition are being wasted in building block-houses 
 on the veldt and furnishing material for Lord Kitchener’s weekly 
 “bag” of butchered Boers. Our only consolation is that when the 
 time of tribulation comes there will also come a time of retribution, 
 and that in the uprising of a betrayed people many institutions which 
 are now regarded as bulwarks of our present social system will go by 
 the board.’ 
 
 # * * 
 
 The story of Stead’s ‘Stop the War’ campaign is the story of a 
 failure, as we all know, but it was a splendid failure. ‘The bravest 
 man in the British Empire is not in South Africa fighting the Boers,’ 
 wrote an American correspondent, Mr. Walter Wellman, in August 
 1go1.! ‘He is right here in London fighting English public opinion. 
 Though wellnigh single-handed, though opposed by a nearly 
 
 1 In the Chicago Record Herald. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 175 
 
 unanimous Press and people, he has started a current of thought 
 which bids fair to run wider and deeper before many weeks shall have 
 passed. The Government is obviously worried. It would like to 
 close this man’s mouth, but does not dare.’ As long as Mr. Stead 
 abused the politicians and lampooned the generals, Mr. Wellman 
 went on to say, as long as he confined himself to shouts that Britain 
 was in the wrong and did not deserve to win, the authorities cared 
 little about him — 
 
 ‘But now he is pointing out how to stop the war. He is telling the 
 Government how it may get peace with honour. To-day the people 
 barely listen. They will not heed or follow him. 'The war is no longer 
 popular, but English tenacity bids holding on. Everyone is tired of 
 the war, but as yet not actually disgusted. What the Ministers fear 
 is that ere long that stage of disgust will be reached; that the people 
 will say: ‘Stop the farce; we are tired of it; take Stead’s way. We 
 forgive him for abusing the soldiers — he has shown us the way to 
 peace. Let us have peace at any cost!” ’ 
 
 ‘Peace at any cost’? was never Stead’s watchword, but he was 
 preaching Peace with Apology— Peace with Restitution; and he 
 preached in vain. Lord Rosebery’s view prevailed — the Boers had 
 begun the war and it must be fought to a finish. Even Mr. Leonard 
 (afterwards Lord) Courtney, who had equalled Stead in his con- 
 demnation of the war’s injustice, yet hoped for victory, a swift victory 
 to be followed by a generous peace. A passage from a speech by Mr. 
 Courtney in January 1900, and Stead’s reply, will show us how the 
 moderate pro-Boers, so to call them, and the extremists differed in 
 their attitude at that date. To his constituents at Liskeard, Mr. 
 Courtney spoke as follows: 
 
 ‘We had not, up to a recent time, had military successes. Some 
 vindication of our strength was necessary before we could have 
 Peace, but the first opportunity should be seized when that had been 
 done of seeing whether Peace could not be re-established. He did 
 
 1 A letter from Lord Rosebery to Stead, written a month later, December 
 18, 1899, emphasizes the divergence of their views. Lord Rosebery says he 
 does not know how Stead, as Prime Minister, would have dealt with the Boer 
 ultimatum, but he has no doubt whatever as to the reception Stead’s hero, 
 Cromwell, would have given it. For his own part, he adhered to the view 
 that the war began with the ultimatum, and he was more than ever bent on 
 seeing it through. 
 
176 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 not want the Government to proclaim at once with what they would 
 be content. That must depend on the progress of events. But, 
 whatever the settlement, it would be full of difficulty and danger for 
 the future. If we carried this War on to the point of a complete 
 subjugation, and desired to keep an army of 50,000 men, there would 
 be an agitation at home against it, and at the next change of Govern- 
 ment the restoration of some kind of independence would be the cry. 
 If we could get that demonstration of military power which was now 
 the first necessity of Peace, if we could get the forts demolished, and 
 the armaments of the Boers reduced to the natural scale, with a 
 repetition of the offer of the five years’ franchise, it would be wise in 
 us not to attempt to upset the existing political independence of the 
 States, but to let them recover their position. We must either grant 
 independence with these limitations, and perhaps the rearrangement 
 of the frontier to make a separate province out of the portion of 
 country inhabited by the Outlanders, or we must face the experiment 
 of keeping these people down by force -—a system which England 
 would never endure.’ 
 
 Stead deplored this attitude. He could understand its adoption by 
 those Liberals who felt with Lord Rosebery; but, he asked, what was 
 to be thought of its being taken up by one who condemned the war 
 as a crime? 
 
 ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘Mr. Courtney may reply that he is not 
 discussing what ought to be done, but confining himself to a dis- 
 cussion of what might possibly be done, in the present state of public 
 opinion. But we shall confirm the public in its worst delusions and 
 prejudices, if we do not make it quite clear that in our opinion it is 
 utterly mistaken, and that if right were done the question which we 
 should be discussing is not what terms we should extract from the 
 Boers, but rather what compensation we can offer them for the 
 piratical outrage of which they have been the victims. Surely that 
 ought to be postulated before we consent to discuss anything that may 
 have to be done under the violence of popular passion, or under the 
 stress of imperial pride.’ 
 
 He concludes his article thus: 
 
 “What we want is not to prosecute an unjust war more vigorously, 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 177 
 
 but to arrest its prosecution altogether. As for Lord Rosebery, he 
 spoke after his wont. There is much jubilation over his declaration 
 that in a contest with two small communities as numerous as the 
 population of West Ham ‘‘we have not touched the bottom of the 
 resources of Old England yet.’ To such extremities is the Liberal 
 Imperialist reduced to-day! 
 
 ‘The indomitable Dutchmen of South Africa have, indeed, reason 
 to feel proud that their stern decision to die rather than surrender 
 their independence has reduced Lord Rosebery to such a condition 
 that he feels it quite heroic to declare that a struggle with such 
 diminutive antagonists has not as yet exhausted the resources of the 
 richest and mightiest empire in the world!’ 
 
 * S * 
 
 Perhaps Stead’s most effective stroke was the addressing of an ‘open 
 letter’ to the House of Commons on the occasion of Parliament’s 
 reassembling on Tuesday, January 30, 1900. A copy of this two-page 
 communication, boldly printed on good paper, was posted to the 
 private address of every member of the House. In a covering letter 
 to the Speaker, with which a copy of it was enclosed, Stead wrote: 
 
 ‘I have repeatedly made efforts in other directions to bring the 
 matter dealt with in the open letter before the attention of Her 
 Majesty’s Ministers and Members of the House of Commons. The 
 accumulating disasters which result naturally and inevitably from 
 the fraud that has been practised upon the House of Commons leave 
 me no option but to make this solemn and formal appeal to you in 
 your official capacity as Speaker of the House. — I have the honour to 
 remain your obedient servant, 
 
 ‘( Signed) WILLIAM T. STEAD.’ 
 
 ‘January 29, 1900. 
 
 I need not give the ‘open letter’ in full. The opening and closing 
 passages will suffice: 
 
 “GENTLEMEN, — The consequence of going to war with a Lie in our 
 right hand is now manifest even to the dullest understanding. 
 
 “The responsibility for the Lie which is now working out its natural 
 consequences in South Africa originally lay upon the Colonial 
 Secretary alone. But by a conspiracy of falsehood the Select Com- 
 mittee of 1897 was hocussed into returning a false verdict, which, 
 
 L.S. — VOL. II M 
 
178 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 being afterwards accepted by the House of Commons, involved, 
 Parliament itself in responsibility for a fatal fraud.’ 
 * * * 
 
 “The honour of your honourable House is at stake in this matter. 
 Outside this country everyone believes that a deliberate fraud. has 
 been practised upon you for the purpose of shielding the Colonial 
 Secretary. This universal suspicion is based upon the suppression of 
 material evidence, the silencing of the most important witness, and 
 the subsequent conduct of the Colonial Secretary in dealing with Mr. 
 Rhodes and his fellow-conspirators. 
 
 ‘If, after the “‘new facts” recently brought to light, your honourable 
 House takes no steps to ascertain the truth or to punish the guilty, it 
 will no longer be possible to maintain that you are unwitting and 
 unwilling accomplices in this conspiracy to conceal the truth and 
 to palm off a false finding upon the world.—I am, your obedient 
 servant, 
 
 “WILLIAM T. STEAD.’ 
 
 ‘Mowbray House, Norfolk-street, W.C. 
 
 January 29, 1900.’ 
 
 Stead did not flatter himself that his words would achieve anything. 
 They needed saying and he made quite sure of their being read: that 
 was all he could do. How Mr. Chamberlain read them we are told 
 by an eye-witness: 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead (wrote the London correspondent of the Sussex Daily 
 News) will be gratified to learn that his Open Letter to Members of 
 the House of Commons impugning the honour and veracity of Mr. 
 Chamberlain has had at least one attentive reader in the person of 
 Mr. Chamberlain himself. During the debate on the Address a gaily 
 irresponsible gentleman from Ireland is understood to have sent his 
 copy of the letter enclosed in an envelope addressed to the Colonial 
 Secretary, and marked “urgent.” The important-looking document 
 was carefully handed along the Treasury Bench until it reached Mr. 
 Chamberlain, who immediately put up his monocle and began to 
 peruse its contents. If the humorist who dispatched it hoped to 
 witness any change in the cold impassivity of the Colonial Secretary’s 
 face he must have been sorely disappointed. The statesman did not 
 even wipe his eyeglass with surprise as he slowly read Mr. Stead’s 
 imprecatory epistle. When he got to the end he made as if to pencil 
 
1902 SO Un HoiaAL REO AN? WAR 179 
 
 a caustic comment on the margin, but then, looking as though it was 
 not worth the trouble, he crushed the missive into a ball and tossed 
 it into the waste-paper basket.’ 
 
 Mr. Chamberlain’s harshest critics had to admire his ‘cold impas- 
 sivity’ at such moments as this! 
 
 Ill 
 THE YEAR 1900 — THE KHAKI ELECTION 
 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Stead’s pro-Boer deliverances 
 —his long series of pamphlets, his articles in the Review of Reviews 
 and in the newspapers, notably in his own new weekly organ, War 
 against War in South Africa, and his innumerable public speeches — 
 would fill an entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And 
 these deliverances were really his life during the period of the war. 
 He did not — he never could — close his mind to other interests. His 
 spiritualistic experiences still occupied him. He sailed and bathed at 
 Hayling in the summer. He was continually making new acquaint- 
 ances and friends — scores of them, hundreds of them. He read and 
 reviewed books of all sorts. He lunched and dined with Lord Esher 
 and Colonel Brocklehurst and Miss Elizabeth Robins and Mr. J. A. 
 Spender and other friends. He paid his second visit to Ober- 
 Ammergau. He had a thousand other distractions and diversions. 
 But three-fourths of his time and energy were absorbed by the war. 
 
 The year 1900, it will be remembered, opened well for the British 
 with Cronje’s surrender at Paardeberg and the relief of Ladysmith 
 in February, followed by the relief of Mafeking in May. De Wet’s 
 raids began in June, and by August he had gone far towards realizing 
 the threat attributed to him, that, whereas his home, which had been 
 destroyed, had cost only £2,000 to build, it would cost England 
 £2,000,000 to reconstruct. In September came the ‘Khaki Election,’ 
 the Government appealing to the country for a mandate to prosecute 
 the war to the successful issue now thought to be in sight, and their 
 supporters adopting the battle cry invented by Mr. Wanklyn, a 
 candidate, ‘A Vote given to the Liberals is a Vote given to the Boers.’ 
 The Liberal Party as a whole was indignant, but there was no device 
 under which Stead and his intransigeants would more gladly have 
 won the day. 
 
180 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 Stead had just paid his second visit to Ober-Ammergau and was at 
 Berne on September 19, 1900, discussing with Mr. Ducommun, the 
 head of the Berne International Peace Bureau, a Peace Congress 
 which was to be held shortly in Paris, when he heard that Parliament 
 was to be dissolved on the 25th. Within the following six days he 
 wrote 70,000 words of The Candidates of Cain, and on the 27th the 
 first printed copies of the pamphlet were ready — a very Stead-like 
 tour de force. Returning at once to Paris for the Congress, he found 
 further vent for his feelings in the composition of one of his most 
 characteristic onslaughts upon the war. Though it should lose him 
 tens of thousands of his readers, he had to speak out his heart. 
 
 Beginning with an outline of the week of constant strain and vivid 
 contrast which he had been through in order that his readers may see 
 exactly how he comes to be in the mood to say the things which he 
 feels ‘must be said,’ he proceeds: 
 
 ‘For all the time I was travelling to and fro in the classic land of 
 European freedom, all the time I was among the Bavarian peasant 
 players of the Sacred Mystery, all the time that I was discussing 
 peace programmes in Berne and in Paris, all the time I was busy 
 writing The Candidates of Cain, one sound was ever surging in my 
 ears. The cry of a nation in the death agony rang out loud and shrill 
 across land and sea, heard plainly above the roar of cannon, the 
 tramp of armed men, the yells of the drivers, the confused and 
 maddening stampede of the defeated towards the frontier. And ever 
 above the streaming clamour of maddened men and frenzied women 
 was heard the hoarse laughter as of fiends from the nether pit, 
 exulting in the all too articulate placard and editorial over the 
 “‘glorious”’ exploits of the British arms. Day by day came the tele- 
 grams describing the widespread devastation that had been wrought 
 by the advance of our victorious troops. A quarter of a million 
 trained soldiers having at last, after twelve months’ effort, succeeded 
 in breaking down the resistance of 40,000 undisciplined men and 
 boys, the work of avenging the long-drawn-out humiliation of the 
 last year was being accomplished with horrible completeness. The 
 sky flared red with the burning homesteads of the country folk, the 
 veldt was dotted with the figures, frozen and starved, of the women 
 and children upon whom we are waging war. What twelve months 
 ago was regarded as but an exaggerated phrase is now seen and 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 181 
 
 recognized by all men to be a prosaic definition of what has actually 
 taken place. Hell is let loose in South Africa and millions of moral, 
 religious and Christian Englishmen are warming their hands at the 
 flames — really believing that they are fulfilling the law of Love and 
 promoting the establishment of the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace.’ 
 
 It was with his mind full of such thoughts, he says, that he sat out 
 the Passion Play, contrasting its poignant beauty with the ‘unreal 
 theatricalities’ of the English churches, impotent or complacent or 
 frankly Jingo, as they were showing themselves in the face of the 
 South African tragedy: 
 
 ‘These ministers of Christ (he wrote) exult in combining Christ 
 and Carnage . . . they say their prayers and sing their hymns and 
 preach their sermons, and imagine that this is religion! ‘The Passion 
 Play may be a blasphemous farce, as some pious critics who have not 
 seen it aver; but it is a thousand times less of an unreality and an 
 abomination than the “‘Divine worship” that is offered in churches 
 by men whose hands are dripping red with their brothers’ blood.’ 
 
 From Ober-Ammergau, Stead had gone to the regions of ‘Tell and 
 of Hofer. At Innsbriick he visited the tomb of the Tyrolese patriot: 
 
 ‘I found his statue standing in a place of high honour in the midst 
 of effigies of mighty monarchs whose very names are strange and 
 unfamiliar. But the memory of the peasant leader, the son of the 
 village publican, is as fresh to-day as it was when first his ashes were 
 laid to rest in the Hof Kirche. 
 
 ‘And as I looked at his statue, and then, coming out of the church, 
 looked up at the snow-capped mountains, the eternal monument of 
 the patriot chief, my thoughts reverted to another continent where, 
 against even greater odds, the Hofer of our own times was still 
 keeping up a desperate struggle against the overwhelming forces of 
 the British Empire.’ 
 
 ‘We reverence Hofer,’ Stead exclaims, ‘we hunt De Wet.’ Yet the 
 Boers, judged by any and every test, were heroes more superb even 
 than Hofer and his Tyrolese: 
 
 ‘The men of the Tyrol in 1807 always outnumbered the most 
 powerful armies that could be spared to operate against them. They 
 were far more numerous than the Boers. They occupied a much more 
 
182 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 difficult country, and the whole forces of a great military empire 
 could never be massed for their destruction. The Boers, men and 
 boys together numbering only 40,000, had to withstand the onslaught 
 of the whole military strength of the British Empire. They had not 
 a leader in their midst of scientific military training. They were 
 opposed to the picked generals of an Empire which practically always 
 was at war. Yet against odds which at least were six to one they kept 
 up the desperate struggle for a whole twelvemonth. They were in 
 the end as unable to save their fatherland as Leonidas and his 300 
 men were unable to check the advance of Xerxes’ million. They did 
 not succumb until they had inflicted on their arrogant foe the loss of 
 10,000 dead and 50,000 sick and wounded. But that was a bagatelle 
 to the blow which their determined valour dealt to the military 
 prestige of the victor. The Boers, although defeated, have won for 
 themselves imperishable glory, while the much-vaunted prestige of 
 the victor hangs shrivelled like a bladder exposed to the derision of 
 the world.’ 
 
 Finally, Stead applies, more suo, the Parable of the Passion. 
 
 Even at the Paris Peace Congress, actually in session while he was 
 writing, a not dissimilar homily had been looked at askance —a 
 picture of Christ gazing down in sorrow from the cloud of Heaven 
 on the carnage of a battle-field. The introduction of any allusion to 
 the Nazarene was resented by many. Stead wishes they could have 
 been at Ober-Ammergau: 
 
 ‘For the peasants of the Tyrol have preserved the true tradition of 
 the Christ. When that pathetic but sublime figure appears on the 
 stage the obscuring mists of ecclesiasticism and the prejudices of 
 centuries of intolerant orthodoxy fade away. We are face to face with 
 the carpenter’s son, the Man of Sorrows, the proscribed Revolu- 
 tionist, the hated Heretic, to compass whose destruction the most 
 powerful forces of Church and State, of Clericalism and Nationalism, 
 banded themselves together. But that which gives so startlingly 
 modern a note to the Passion Play is the bold relief into which it 
 throws the most salient feature of modern politics — the domination 
 of the money power. The war in South Africa was not more certainly 
 brought about by the action of the financiers than the Crucifixion of 
 Christ was the result of the agitation of the moneyed traders in the 
 Temple. The Crucifixion, like the destruction of the South African 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 183 
 
 Republic, was the work of the capitalist. The very first act in the 
 Passion Play brings this out with utmost clearness. The Sacerdo- 
 talists, the High Priests, and the Jingoes of Jerusalem gnashed their 
 teeth in savage but impotent wrath as they noted the continually 
 increasing enthusiasm of the people for the Prophet from Nazareth. 
 This popular movement culminated in the triumphal entry into 
 Jerusalem, when Jesus, arming himself with a scourge of small cords, 
 drove the traders and the money-changers from the ‘Temple. Until 
 Jesus struck at the servants of Mammon, and cleansed the ‘Temple 
 of the tumult of the usurers, His enemies had been powerless. But 
 the moment He laid His hand upon the chartered rights of the 
 moneyed class, His doom was sealed. It was the alliance between the 
 Ganhedrim and the traders of the Temple that was fatal to the 
 Galilean, just as in our time it was an alliance between the clerics, the 
 journalists, and the capitalists that brought on this war. No one can 
 see the play without feeling that the pivot upon which everything 
 turns in the great tragedy of the Passion was not the offended pride 
 of the rulers, or the sacerdotal intolerance of the priests, but the 
 simple, everyday, sordid spirit of the traders who, to avenge the loss 
 of their usurious gains, slew the Son of God and hanged Him on a 
 tree. As the chorus sing: 
 
 ‘“Tn this that’s set before our eyes 
 A picture true of this world lies. 
 How often through your deeds have you 
 Betrayed and sold your God anew?” 
 
 ‘The mind, once turned in this direction, becomes absorbed with 
 the parallel. Soon all thought of the historical significance of the 
 story on the stage faded away. I saw no longer Jerusalem and the 
 Temple of 1900 years agone. The whole scene took place in London 
 —in Parliament and in the Stock Exchange. Mary’s Son became to 
 me but the symbol of the Dutch nationality in South Africa. Pray do 
 not let any reader imagine from this that I regard the Afrikanders as 
 impeccable or divine. They are neither. But they are sons of men 
 who assuredly may rank at least with the outcast and the slave as the 
 least of these His brethren, akin to Him in their suffering humanity, 
 being at this moment, indeed, men of sorrows and acquainted with 
 grief. Gradually, one by one, all the characters became transformed. 
 They still wore their Oriental or Roman costume, but their features 
 
184 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 were familiar to me, I seemed to recognize their voices. I lived over 
 again the year of strife and strain and struggle now drawing to a 
 bloody close.’ 
 
 The article ends with a message of hope to the Boers. For England 
 and the English there was no prospect but of judgment to come. 
 The victim of our vengeance, however, might take comfort from the 
 thought that the Passion Play did not end with the Crucifixion — the 
 last scene of it portrayed the Resurrection and the Ascension: 
 
 ‘Sursum Corda! O children of tribulation! The birthday of the free 
 Afrikander nation of the future may not be further removed from the 
 death-day of the Republic than the three days which divided the 
 Resurrection from the Crucifixion!’ 
 
 IV 
 STEAD AND THE BOER REPRESENTATIVES IN EUROPE 
 
 “The one and solitary cause of the prolongation of the war, so far 
 as I know, is the belief the Boers have that they have, not in 
 Europe, or America, or South Africa, but in this country, a body of 
 opinion which, if the time does come, will control the destinies of 
 this country and carry out a policy consonant to their view.’ — Mr. 
 A, J. BALFOUR in the House of Commons, July 5, 1901. 
 
 During 1900 and the first half of 1901, Stead had been in constant 
 communication with several of the Boer leaders who were visiting 
 Europe, and these remarks of Mr. Balfour’s gave him a good oppor- 
 tunity for making public in a letter to the Press the substance of what 
 he had said to them and they to him. In answer to Mr. Balfour he 
 wrote as follows: 
 
 ‘I am glad to note Mr. Balfour’s qualifying phrase “‘so far as I 
 know,” because it is evident his knowledge extends a very little way. 
 But as the delusion under which he is labouring appears to be some- 
 what general, may I ask your permission to state my grounds for 
 knowing that so far from Mr. Balfour’s assertion being true, it is 
 exactly opposite to the truth. 
 
 1 His first interview with President Kruger at The Hague just before Christ- 
 mas in 1900 had been something of a journalistic sensation. His account of 
 it, written for the Associated Press of America, was translated into most of 
 the European languages. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 185 
 
 ‘I think I may venture to claim some right to know what I am 
 writing about. As a journalist and as an advocate of international 
 arbitration, it has been my privilege to have met on several occasions 
 since the war broke out the leading representatives of the two 
 republics now in Europe: President Kruger, Mr. Fischer, Dr. Leyds, 
 Mr. Wessels, Mr. Wolmarans, Mrs. Reitz, and others. I have seen 
 them all, and have had ample opportunity of ascertaining their views, 
 and to learn the motives which impel them to persist in their present 
 uncompromising policy. It may be a surprise to some people, but 
 it is, I believe, a simple statement of a literal fact that, as there would 
 have been no ultimatum and no war if there had been a strong 
 opposition resolute to prevent any attack upon the independence of 
 the South African Republics, so the war might have been ended upon 
 Canadian terms six months ago if the Boers could have seen behind 
 the sinister figure of Mr. Chamberlain any party strong and resolute 
 enough to prevent him from going back upon his word, as he had 
 so often done before. . . . In short, the action of the Boers from the 
 day of the ultimatum until now has been dominated, not by their 
 belief in the existence of a strong body of sympathizers in this country 
 ready to help them at some early date, but to their own deeply-rooted 
 conviction that their friends in this country are a mere handful — 
 well-meaning, but absolutely impotent — and that they cannot pos- 
 sibly count with any confidence upon help from any English party 
 strong enough to influence British policy. Mr. Balfour seems to think 
 the Boers have a simple and childlike faith in the devotion of the 
 Liberal party to their cause. They have no such confidence, and in 
 the nature of things it is impossible that they could have.’ 
 
 Stead himself had been charged with encouraging the Boers in the 
 belief that they could count on the sympathies of the Liberal Party. 
 He proceeds to declare that he had done nothing of the kind. On 
 the contrary: 
 
 ‘When the peace delegates were sent from South Africa to Europe 
 they consulted as to the possibility of negotiating a peace. I told 
 them at once that they could have peace at any moment if they 
 would consent to unconditional surrender; but if they shrank from 
 that sacrifice the war would go on, and there was no party, or visible 
 fraction of a party, in England or Scotland who could for a single 
 moment prevent the Government from carrying out the policy of 
 
186 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 conquest and subjugation. Nothing could possibly have been plainer 
 than the assurances which I gave them as to the utter impotence of 
 the friends of peace to interfere in any way whatever on their behalf. 
 And this testimony has never varied. So far from holding out hopes 
 that public opinion is changing, or that the Liberal party will help 
 them to an honourable peace, I have always told them that, except 
 God, they had no one to depend upon, and that not even Mr. 
 Labouchere was ready to speak or vote in favour of their independ- 
 ence. The platonic sympathies of the Liberals who oppose the war 
 as unjust and unnecessary, and at the same time express a passionate 
 desire for the early and complete victory of the British arms, is 
 appraised by them at its proper value. As a factor in the problem of 
 the framing of Boer policy the English Opposition does not exist.’ 
 
 Correspondence and conversation with the Boer representatives 
 continued to take up much of Stead’s time throughout the rest of 
 1go1 and the whole of 1902. A single illustration will indicate some- 
 thing of their nature and something also of the difficulties and dangers 
 inseparable from the kind of intervention which he attempted. A 
 letter to Lord Salisbury and two letters from Mr. Fischer will serve 
 this purpose. One of the most noteworthy of the meetings had taken 
 place at The Hague just before the debate in the House of Commons 
 in which Mr. Balfour spoke the words cited above. Stead had had 
 an opportunity of discussing the whole situation with Mr. Fischer, 
 Mr. Wessels, Dr. Leyds, and Mrs. Reitz, wife of the Boer General. 
 Returned to London, he proceeded to report to Lord Salisbury in 
 writing the substance of what he had heard: he understood that he 
 was free to do this — that, in fact, the Boer representatives whom he 
 had been seeing intended him to act thus as a channel of communica- 
 tion between them and the British Government. He told the Prime 
 Minister accordingly how, in reply to the question whether opinion 
 was changing in England, he had replied: that it was not changing 
 in the least; that while even Mr. Chamberlain would no longer feel 
 it was a feather in his cap to have made the war, there was not the 
 least hope of any abandonment of the campaign; how the Boers had 
 asked him if Milner was going back, and how he had replied: ‘Certain 
 sure. ‘The Government dare not do otherwise. Milner holds them 
 in the hollow of his hand’; and how Mr. Reitz had exclaimed: ‘It is 
 the best news that has come from England for a long time. Nothing 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 187 
 
 will help so well to keep our commandos full.’ The Boer leaders were 
 quite indifferent, Stead went on to say, over the collapse of the Liberal 
 Party, having placed no reliance on it; and, realizing that the com- 
 paratively small section of out-and-out pro-Boers wielded no in- 
 fluence, they would not listen to his (Stead’s) representations to them 
 in favour of a more conciliatory attitude on their own part. ‘They saw 
 that they were face to face with Mr. Chamberlain, and they were 
 prepared to fight until their last man had fired his last cartridge. 
 An attempt was being made to bring pressure upon the burghers to 
 lay down their arms by burning down their homes and destroying 
 their means of subsistence, and then herding their women and chil- 
 dren in huge pestilential camps where the children perished for lack 
 of milk. But they had cartridges for at least twelve months longer 
 and their confidence in ultimate success had increased since Stead’s 
 last visit. The letter to the Prime Minister concludes dryly: 
 
 ‘Hoping that these notes may be useful to you, 
 ‘Your obedient Servant, 
 ‘w. T. STEAD.’ 
 
 Dr. Leyds seems to have been disturbed when, in due course, 
 Stead reported to him that he had reported their communication to 
 Lord Salisbury, for, some months afterwards, we find Mr. Fischer 
 writing to Stead on the subject somewhat anxiously. He has full 
 trust in Stead himself and in his good intentions, but he has no trust 
 in Lord Salisbury and less than none in certain other members of the 
 British Government. ‘Believing as I do,’ he continues, ‘that all we say 
 would be wilfully distorted, or anyway used against us, and certainly 
 not in the interests of our poor people and country, I thought it best 
 not to write to you again, because I would thereby be placing you in 
 the dilemma of having to hide from others what your communications 
 with “the enemy” amounted to, or otherwise of disclosing what was 
 intended by us to be confidential communications for your informa- 
 tion but not for repetition — at least not to our unscrupulous enemies.’ 
 
 Stead, in his turn, became disturbed, fearing that he was being 
 thought guilty of a betrayal of confidence, but Mr. Fischer hastened 
 to disabuse him of this idea. There had been a misunderstanding — 
 that was all. ‘I never, in thought even,’ he declares, ‘imputed to you 
 anything that could bear the construction of a betrayal of confidence.’ 
 And he insists emphatically, ‘When I say I trust you, I mean it.’ 
 
188 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 Vv 
 STEAD AND COLONEL BROCKLEHURST ON THE WAR 
 
 It would have been a matter of astonishment for the people who 
 during these war years regarded Stead as a pestilent traitor if they 
 had known the terms of close and cordial friendship he was able to 
 preserve unbroken with Colonel Brocklehurst, Equerry to Queen 
 Victoria from 1899 until her death, and afterwards to Queen Alex- 
 andra. Although Brocklehurst’s name has recurred in this narrative 
 only once or twice since the date of the Gordon interview in 1884, 
 he and Stead had remained in constant touch ever since. Such of his 
 letters to Stead as are available are very good reading — it is a pity 
 that the earlier ones are missing. Jt is, above all, to be regretted that 
 Brocklehurst himself — Lord Ranksborough, to use the title by which 
 he was known from 1914 — is not alive to give us his impressions of 
 Stead as he knew him. Few people knew Stead so intimately.t 
 
 Among the most interesting of the letters which have been pre- 
 served are those which touch upon the years 1900-2, and they often 
 throw some light upon Stead’s attitude and actions at the period. 
 
 Early in 1900, Stead was full of a very Stead-like notion: Rhodes, 
 with the approval, of course, of the British Government, was to 
 approach the Boer leaders in person, hold a palaver with them and 
 bring the war forthwith to an end! 
 
 Brocklehurst, it is clear, was fascinated by this daring conception. 
 Not only did he discuss it with Dr. Jameson, who was a bit shocked, 
 and with some very distinguished personages in the political world, 
 but he actually cabled of his own accord to Rhodes the significant 
 message: 
 
 ‘Don’t be afraid remember the Matabele settlement.’ 
 
 ‘Don’t let on,’ Brocklehurst wrote laughingly to Stead that same 
 day, December 6, ‘as the Doctor will kill me if he finds it out.’ 
 
 Less than three weeks later, Dr. ‘Jim’ himself seems to have been 
 won over, for on December 23 we find Brocklehurst writing: 
 
 ‘Hawkesley, the Doctor and I decided in solemn conclave on Friday 
 night that Rosebery was the man to give Lord Salisbury a lead on 
 your scheme. I went down to Mentmore yesterday where he was 
 
 1 Lord Ranksborough sent me early in 1921 all that he had kept of his 
 correspondence with Stead. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR ; 189 
 
 supposed to be but was not. It seems to me good to play up to 
 this — we can’t get at it too soon. Send for Hawkesley to talk it 
 over.’ 
 
 On January 5, being just then at Osborne, Brocklehurst refers again 
 to the subject incidentally. He had occasion, he says, to reassure 
 Earl Grey as to Stead’s doings — Grey had got the impression some- 
 how that Stead ‘was going for Rhodes.’ ‘I explained,’ writes Brockle- 
 hurst, ‘that you were Arbitration-mad but had lucid intervals during 
 one of which you had started the most practical cure for the present 
 state of things. I am pushing your proposal for all I am worth here, 
 so don’t go and upset your own child in visionary flights with St. 
 Paul Kruger.’ 
 
 And he adds a cheerful postscript: 
 
 ‘Things are really moving a bit in the right direction, I do believe, 
 on the lines that some one draws Lord Salisbury — Lord S. issues a 
 Ukase (nice word) — Rhodes comes out of his tent - Chorus of Peace 
 — The Millennium.’ 
 
 ‘Joe Chamberlain comes to-morrow,’ he writes four days later. 
 ‘Wire me if there is anything I can tackle him about. . . . Rhodes 
 is now playing doggo to Milner, I take it, as he cannot see his way — 
 I don’t wonder, for I cannot meet anyone who can see his way.’ 
 
 A letter from Brooks’s dated January 24, shows that Brocklehurst is 
 back in London and still exerting himself in the same direction. He 
 has seen Lord Rosebery and told him that Stead ‘thought he (R.) was 
 the only hope of waking up the Government’; he has also interested 
 ‘C.B.’ in the matter, and ‘Dr. Jim’ apparently has been introducing 
 ‘the child’ at the Cape. 
 
 A note from Ranksborough dated February 6 recalls the fact that 
 Queen Victoria had died in January. Brocklehurst was doubtless 
 familiar with some of the many articles which Stead had written 
 about the late Sovereign and knew something of his very real admira- 
 tion for her. ‘I have got a bunch of violets for you from the Queen’s 
 grave,’ he writes. 
 
 On February 13, writing from his London quarters, 2 Down Street, 
 Piccadilly, Brocklehurst is less sanguine about Stead’s scheme than 
 in the previous month. ‘There is a strong idea that the war is coming 
 to an end,’ he says, ‘and hearts are hardening in consequence.’ But 
 
190 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 he has impressed on Sir Dighton Probyn that the King should know 
 that ‘the Dutch, who want peace, are looking to his accession to bring 
 it about.’ He adds a very interesting remark: ‘A propos the Queen’s 
 death I should say the dominant note was that she meant to die 
 QUEEN without a shadow of Regency.’ 
 
 In March 1901, the spokesmen of the Dutch of Cape Colony, Sauer 
 and Merriman, were in London, holding consultations, not very 
 amicably, with Mr. Chamberlain and the Government. Brocklehurst, 
 writing on March 19, fears that their advent ‘has hardened wavering 
 hearts and upset our little cart.’ 
 
 Upset, in any case, their little cart was! The war continued and 
 within a few weeks Rhodes was dead. 
 
 One other allusion to Rhodes, dated April 27, deserves transcrip- 
 tion: how he himself would have enjoyed it! Brocklehurst had just 
 returned from a visit to the King and Queen of Denmark: ‘Yes, I 
 read the Review of Reviews 1 at Copenhagen and also used it freely 
 in my attack on the anti-Rhodes division out there, a strong one. 
 Thanks to my violence, your Paper and his Will, I left them all on 
 their backs.’ 
 
 Even when Colonel Brocklehurst is obliged to oppose Stead, and 
 to condemn his actions and writings, the letters remain extraordin- 
 arily good-humoured. There was perhaps nothing that evoked more 
 bitterness during the war than certain accusations of barbarity 
 made against Lord Kitchener by ‘a British Officer’ whom Stead knew 
 personally and believed in, but whose identity was concealed. This 
 was one of the matters which drew rebukes from Brocklehurst, who 
 writes (January 18, 1901), condemning the officer in question for 
 stabbing in the dark. ‘It is not your way of doing business,’ he goes 
 on: “Tell your “unblemished one” to come into the open if he wants 
 honest men to follow him.’ 
 
 Brocklehurst loses patience frequently enough with Stead’s stories 
 of British misdeeds contrasted with Boer magnanimity, but he never 
 loses his temper. He admits in one letter (Sept. 27, 1902), that 
 doubtless some of the things Stead has learnt from Mr. Hofmeyr in 
 this connection may have been true, but Stead should hear old Mrs. 
 de Souza also on the subject. This old lady, a great friend of Brockle- 
 hurst, has her fund of stories also, and they all tell the other way. 
 
 1 'The provisions of Rhodes’s wonderful Will had just been made public, 
 and the Review of Reviews for April was full of the subject. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR IgI 
 
 ‘Mrs. de Souza could give Hofmeyr a stone and a beating over the 
 same course.’ The fact is, he moralizes, ‘war is war, and a very nasty, 
 beastly, dirty, undignified business at the best.’ 
 
 He differs from Stead in his estimate of the Boer Generals who have 
 been touring Europe in 1902, interviewing the Kaiser, etc. Stead, 
 as we have seen, had been holding converse with them and trying in 
 every way to help them. Brocklehurst distrusts them. ‘In my 
 opinion,’ he writes on October 14, 1902, ‘this tour has for its sole 
 object the raising of hatred against England.’ He thinks Dr. Leyds is 
 at the bottom of it all, and he declares that he does not see how peace 
 negotiations can be satisfactorily proceeded with as long as men 
 like Stead lend such proceedings their countenance. “This is awful 
 cheek,’ he ends, ‘but I know you don’t mind what I say. Remember 
 I am a pro-Boer, and so I am, but not of the Dr. Leyds type.’ 
 
 Several letters are with reference to unfortunate private soldiers 
 who have appealed to Stead for help regarding their personal griev- 
 ances or ill-luck — some of them genuine sufferers, others humbugs. 
 Brocklehurst inquires into each case conscientiously and reports 
 to Stead in full, never weary of thus serving his friend, in fact 
 encouraging him in his sometimes misdirected good-nature. ‘Please 
 don’t mind writing to me about things like this,’ he says a propos 
 of a Colonial trooper whose complaints had been shown to be quite 
 ill-founded, ‘and I will always help you if I can.’ 
 
 So the letters continue, month by month — full of sympathy, active 
 friendship and good fellowship, enlivened by high spirits and chaff. 
 ‘You haven’t by chance got a Spook who knows what is going to 
 win to-morrow?’ he asks on the eve of a race-meeting. The last letter 
 for 1902, dated December 31, ends thus: ‘Well, good-bye and Bless 
 you, and may you be, like the Empire, a Blessing to the Human Race 
 for many years to come!’ 
 
 VI 
 STEAD, MILNER AND GARRETT 
 
 Although imperilled frequently, Stead’s friendship with Milner 
 and Garrett was to survive the war. A few extracts from some of 
 Garrett’s letters to him at the end of 1899, and in the early part of 
 1902, will be of interest here. 
 
 Readers of Sir E. T. Cook’s memoir of Edmund Garrett will recall 
 
192 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 the chapter entitled ‘Broken Threads,’ descriptive of his life at 
 Nordrach, the famous sanatorium. It was Garrett’s second visit 
 there. He had overtaxed his strength when his personal fortunes 
 were at their highest and when South Africa, so he felt, most needed 
 the services he had hoped to render in ‘that strangely fascinating 
 problem-country.’ 
 
 Writing from Nordrach in December 1899, he exchanged a number 
 of argumentative letters with Stead. They had had a really angry dis- 
 pute already in print. Stead’s declaration that he would back Milner 
 ‘up to ultimatum point’ had been misinterpreted by Garrett, and 
 Stead had hotly resented alike the misinterpretation and the some- 
 what acrid criticism which Garrett had proceeded to base upon it. 
 That quarrel was now over and the two friends were able once again 
 to continue their disputation upon terms of genial candour, but even 
 now they were sensitive. 
 
 On December 12, Garrett, in answer to some remarks of Stead’s 
 regarding the origin of the war, writes: 
 
 ‘I went by Hofmeyr, who wanted Kruger to give Milner’s five years 
 with no conditions, and was very sick when they added those which 
 for the time wrecked it, and still more sick when they later withdrew 
 and headed for war. Hoffy certainly didn’t want war, and, but for 
 Steyn and Reitz. .. . I doubt if old K. would have deliberately made 
 war either. We have at worst bungled — history must decide whether 
 the action of the other side is a folly or a crime. It looks less like the 
 former as time passes — and more like the latter.’ 
 
 Proceeding to reiterate his disavowal of notions attributed to him 
 on the strength of ‘yarns from our visionary Olive’ (Olive Schreiner, 
 to whom he alludes always in terms of affection or admiration, even 
 when most widely differing from her), he remonstrates with Stead 
 for imputing untruth to him in the matter: 
 
 ‘But on my side, though I do nothing comparable to accusing my 
 friend of a lie (only of favouring a policy which to me seems a lying 
 one), yet I own I do bitterly feel, on grounds mainly impersonal, your 
 present divagations, matter, manner, method and all about it; I 
 cannot frame words consistent with friendship about any part of 
 your present S.A. campaign. I therefore cannot blame you much for 
 any excesses on your side. If I blurted out how it all strikes me, I 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 193 
 
 should say things as bad — you will reply: ‘“You did — in the Contem- 
 porary.” 1 I tell myself a hundred times that these differences don’t 
 affect my feeling to a real friend. Nor shall they ultimately. But the 
 moment is too insistent, S. Africa is too close to me, we must wait 
 till the storm is less. Till then we can’t discuss as of old — only, as 
 here, touch a fringe. But even as I write, stranded here by a break- 
 down, there comes back to me the memory of my first breakdown 
 years and years ago — ten years ago: and of the hearty words of cheer 
 and human help I had from you in those days, and the first S.A. 
 trip — your own idea-—which ultimately led up to all our present 
 difference, but to some of the best years also of my life. And I, 
 remembering all this, and more, feel return a wave of the old affec- 
 tionate feeling towards the most tangential yet the most human- 
 hearted of men — and I wish you, despite all, my dear Stead, you and 
 yours, a thousand Christmas and New Year wishes and feel con- 
 vinced I am still on that quaint “Rosary” of your devising.’ 
 
 In the spring of 1902 Garrett was back in England, still in precarious 
 health. He writes to Stead on April 12 of this year from the East 
 Anglian Sanatorium, Nayland, Suffolk, expressing the hope that 
 they may meet ere long: 
 
 “You will have understood,’ he says, ‘that I didn’t answer your last 
 letter, not because I sulked or hadn’t got good answers about the 
 points raised — I had clinking answers on all, as you shall know some 
 day if I live — and, by the by, always remember if I am silent or die, 
 or you die either, without our having it out square about S.A., that 
 I love the inner man, Stead, in spite of all differences, and should 
 love him if he damned me and my policy and acts ten times more. 
 So does Milner — in the inner court — we agreed when he was over — 
 only there are temporary limitations and avoidances.’ 
 
 And, reflecting upon some words which Stead had written to him, 
 indicative of soreness, he adds a P.S. 
 
 “Don’t take Milner that way. He told me why he thought on the 
 whole he’d better not see you this time. I quite understood, though 
 I’m not sure whether you would; but I’m sure you would have liked 
 the way in which, without any prompting at all, he spoke of his 
 personal feelings for you being unaffected by all this. 
 
 1 Contemporary Review for 1899. 
 L.s.—VOL. I N 
 
194 STEAD AND THE 1899 
 
 ‘Some day, let us hope, all this tyranny will be overpast, and we 
 shall be able to agree again, you and Milner, Cook and I.’ 
 
 And so it was to prove eventually, although, as we shall see, Stead’s 
 relations with Milner were still to undergo at least one other severe 
 ordeal. 
 
 VII 
 STEAD AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN DUTCH 
 
 A passage in one of those letters received from Garrett in December, 
 1899, will help us to gauge the conflict of opinion between him and 
 Stead as to the problem of South Africa. ‘As for me,’ Garrett wrote, 
 ‘if S.A. is to be united only on a Dutch basis, it shall never, so far as 
 I can help, be united at all. It means Johannesburg in thrall to a 
 Pretoria on a large scale. Squalid, anti-industrial militarism — con- 
 scientious Anglophobia and negrophobia — these must not have the 
 plant of government again! In the near future we should be able to 
 set the whole show up on equal lines with a narrow non-Dutch 
 majority in both Federal Chambers.’ 
 
 It was almost incredible to Garrett that anyone loving England 
 could hold a view contrary to this. And yet a few weeks previous 
 Olive Schreiner, the noble-minded woman of genius whom in 
 South Africa Garrett himself had learnt to love, was writing to 
 Stead as follows: } 
 
 ‘MY DEAR, DEAR FRIEND, 
 
 ‘Stand by justice and freedom in this matter to the end. You will 
 be glad to think of it when you are dying. 
 
 ‘Oh, the people of England have not understood, they have not 
 understood. ‘There is a time coming of terrible awakening when they 
 understand what they have done. 
 
 ‘Our gallant, heroic Transvaalers are dying, and brave English 
 soldiers are falling, and the miserable hordes of blood-suckers and 
 money-makers are quietly in hiding, to come out when the war is 
 over to dig their claws into our hearts. 
 
 ‘If England could but see that Chamberlain is undermining the 
 foundations of the Empire, the true Empire of which South Africans 
 have dreamed, and which shall be a great confederacy of the nations 
 
 1 War against War in South Africa, November 24, 1899. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 195 
 
 not crushed beneath her heel, but bound to her by indissoluble ties 
 of love and sympathy. 
 ‘Chamberlain is stabbing the heart of the British Empire. 
 ‘Good-by, 
 ‘OLIVE SCHREINER.’ 
 
 Olive Schreiner’s ideal of Empire had been Rhodes’s ideal in earlier 
 days, the days before the Raid, the days when Stead could extol him 
 as ‘the ally of the Dutch and the Irish, the great Colonist working 
 for Federation through Home Rule.’ It was Stead’s own ideal still. 
 For him the ‘Dutch basis’ in South Africa was not only inevitable 
 but every bit as acceptable as the French basis in Eastern Canada. 
 An ardent Radical, he was all for progress and reform, but there were 
 progressives and reformers among the Boers, and Kruger was very 
 old. War, in all the circumstances, was in Stead’s eyes at once a 
 blunder and a crime. 
 
 Had Stead been a dweller in South Africa himself throughout the 
 second half of the "Nineties, editing the Cape Times in place of Garrett, 
 or, like his own heroine, Jeanne Leflo,? taking the lead among the 
 Outlanders of Johannesburg, it would, of course, have been difficult 
 for him, with his eager temperament, to practise the doctrine of 
 Patience which he preached, and which he had learned from Olive 
 Schreiner. So much may be admitted. 
 
 But the doctrine, however difficult, was surely full of wisdom. The 
 reader will find it set forth at length, and with moving eloquence, in 
 Olive Schreiner’s Words in Season, published in the autumn of 1899. 
 Stead cited several passages from the book in the Review of Reviews 
 for October of that year, remarking, rather quaintly but very truly, 
 that they contained reflections which bachelor politicians like Milner 
 and Garrett were sometimes in danger of underestimating. I shall 
 transcribe one or two of these passages here. Even among Stead’s 
 greatest admirers there are many people who are still mystified over 
 his hostility to the South African War. Friends of my own, knowing 
 of my interest in Stead, have asked me, wonderingly, to explain this 
 ‘aberration’ of his, assuming that I myself must regard it as all but 
 inexplicable. These Words in Season may be enlightening. To Stead 
 they semed to contain the essential truth of the matter. 
 
 ‘In the Cape Colony, and increasingly in the two Republics, are 
 1 See p. 96. 
 
196 STEAD) AND THE 1899 
 
 found enormous numbers of cultured and polished Dutch-descended 
 South Africans using English as their daily form of speech, and in 
 no way distinguishable from the rest of the nineteenth century 
 Europeans. Our most noted judges, our most eloquent lawyers, 
 our most skilful physicians, are frequently men of this blood; the 
 lists of the yearly examinations of our Cape University are largely 
 filled with Dutch names, and women as well as men rank high in the 
 order of merit. It would sometimes almost seem as if the long repose 
 the people have had from the heated life of cities, with the large tax 
 upon the nervous system, had sent them back to the world of intel- 
 lectual occupations with more than the ordinary grasp of power. In 
 many cases they go home to Europe to study, and doubtless their 
 college life and English friendships bind Britain close to their hearts 
 as to ours who are English born. The present State Attorney of the 
 Transvaal is a man who has taken some of the highest honours 
 Cambridge can bestow. Besides, there exist still our old simple 
 farmers or Boers, found in the greatest perfection in the midland 
 districts of the Colony, in the Transvaal and Free State, who consti- 
 tute a large part of the virile backbone of South Africa. Clinging to 
 their old seventeenth century faiths and manners, and speaking their 
 African taal, they are yet tending to pass rapidly away, displaced by 
 their own cultured modern children; but they still form a large and 
 powerful body. Year by year the lines dividing the South Africans 
 from their more lately arrived English-descent brothers are passing 
 away.’ 
 * # # 
 
 “There is peace to-day in the land; the two great white races, day 
 by day, hour by hour, are blending their blood, and both are mixing 
 with the stranger. No day passes but from the veins of some Dutch 
 South African woman, the English South African man’s child is 
 teing fed; not a week passes but the birth-cry of the English South 
 African woman’s child gives voice to the Dutchman’s offspring; not 
 an hour passes but on farm, and in town and village, Dutch hearts 
 are winding about English, and English about Dutch. If the Angel 
 of Death should spread his wings across the land and strike dead in 
 one night every man and woman and child of either the Dutch or the 
 English blood, leaving the other alive, the land would be a land of 
 mourning. ‘There would be not one household, nor the heart of an 
 African-born man or woman that would not be weary with grief. 
 
1902 SOUTH AFRICAN WAR 197 
 
 We should weep the friends of our childhood, the companions of our 
 early life, our grandchildren, our kindred, the souls who have loved 
 us and whom we have loved. In destroying the one race we would 
 have isolated the other. Time, the great healer of all differences, is 
 blending us into a great mutual people, and love is moving faster than 
 time. It is no growing hatred between Dutch and English South 
 African born men and women that calls for war. On the lips of babes 
 we salute both races daily.’ 
 * * 
 
 ‘I know of no more graphic image in the history of the world than 
 the figure of Franklin when he stood before the Lords of Council in 
 England, giving evidence, striving, fighting, to save America for 
 England. Browbeaten, flouted, jeered at by the courtiers, his words 
 hurled back at him as lies, he stood there fighting for England. 
 England recognizes now that it was he who tried to save an empire 
 for her; and that the men who flouted and browbeat him, lost it. 
 There is nothing more pathetic than the way in which Americans 
 who loved England, Washington and Franklin, strove to keep the 
 maiden vessel moored close to her mother’s side, bound by bonds of 
 love and sympathy, that alone could bind them. Their hands were 
 beaten down, bruised and bleeding, wounded by the very men they 
 came to save, till they let go the mother ship and drifted away on 
 their own great imperial course across the seas of time. 
 
 ‘England knows now what those men strove to do for her, and the 
 names of Washington and Franklin will ever stand high in honour 
 where the English tongue is spoken; the names of Hutchinson, and 
 North, and Grafton are not forgotten also; it might be well for them 
 if they were! 
 
 ‘Do not say to us: ““You Englishmen, when the war is over, you can 
 wrap the mantle of our imperial glory around you and walk about 
 boasting that the victory is yours.” 
 
 ‘We could never wrap that mantle round us again. We have worn 
 it with pride. We could never wear it then. There would be blood 
 upon it, and the blood would be our brothers’.’ 
 
 Assuming that Stead was right in condemning the war, how far was 
 he justified in his unwavering, untiring, uncompromising opposition 
 to it, once his countrymen were in arms? Many people, in different 
 degrees, will be inclined to condemn him still, as he was condemned 
 
198 STEAD AND SOUTH AFRICAN) WAR 
 
 then. Speaking for myself, I would say he was justified up to the 
 hilt.1 And as one evidence of this I would point to the effect of his 
 words and actions on the leaders of the Dutch race in South Africa. 
 No two men were better qualified to speak for their compatriots than 
 Mr. A. Fischer and Mr. Steyn, ex-President of the Orange Free 
 State. After some congratulatory words regarding the completion 
 of the twenty-first year of the existence of the Review of Reviews, Mr. 
 Fischer, in a letter dated March 22, 1911, said: 
 
 ‘My object in writing is more particularly to express the gratitude 
 we feel for the noble stand you and your Review took up in the 
 cause of truth and justice in those dark days when prejudice and 
 misrepresentation were doing their worst to poison the minds of your 
 countrymen against South Africans, and succeeded but too well for 
 a time. To-day they must be prejudiced indeed who would not 
 acknowledge that by your courage in declaring and waging war 
 against war, you helped as much as any public writer to make 
 honourable peace possible and to weld lasting bonds of friendship 
 between those who ought — had the truth been known and believed 
 as you knew and believed it—never to have been enemies at all. 
 Your justification has come and you may well be proud of the way 
 your facts and forecasts have been verified as proclaimed in the 
 Review.’ 
 
 Ex-President Steyn, writing on the same occasion (March 19, 1911), 
 expressed himself as follows: 
 
 “We in South Africa feel that we owe you a deep debt of gratitude 
 not only for the fearless manner you stood by us during the war, but 
 also for your great assistance to secure us self-government after the 
 war. You, and other good men and women, made it possible for us 
 to accept self-government and to work whole-heartedly for the better 
 understanding between former foes, for with Sir H. Campbell- 
 Bannerman, you showed us that England w was great enough to keep 
 her word with a small nation.’ 
 
 1 On the understanding, of course, that he was prepared to be imprisoned 
 or executed for rebelling against his country’s Government. Every one who 
 knew Stead knew that he would go gladly either to gaol or to the scaffold in 
 such a cause. 
 
CHAPTER 25 
 
 STEAD’S FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES - THEIR 
 TALKS TOGETHER, 1891-1901 
 
 I 
 
 I the eyes of many of his Radical associates, Stead’s friendship 
 with Cecil Rhodes seemed almost as inexplicable as his tolerance 
 for —not to say, his sympathy with - Russian autocracy. “To me,’ 
 declared Mr. Labouchere in Truth, March 29, 1900, ‘this Empire 
 jerry-builder has always been a mere vulgar promoter masquerading 
 as a patriot, and the figure-head of a gang of astute Hebrew financiers 
 with whom he divided profits.’ After Rhodes’s death this estimate 
 was to be revised a little. ‘I do not suppose he cared for money 
 except for the power it gave,’ Mr. Labouchere wrote then, ‘and 
 though, in the making of it, he had to associate himself with a crew 
 of financial adventurers, he was head and shoulders above them all.’ 
 That was about as far as most Radicals would go in Rhodes’s praise; 
 and that Stead could revere him as the greatest Englishman of our 
 time seemed to them a matter alike for astonishment and for regret. 
 People who habitually decried Stead, or laughed at him, pointed to 
 it as one additional and perhaps crowning illustration of his incor- 
 rigible wrong-headedness. To know Stead properly, I feel, it is 
 essential to try to know also his beloved ‘Colossus.’ 
 
 ‘Revere’ and ‘beloved’ are strong words, but not extravagant, really, 
 :n this connection. Stead was not blind to the less admirable side of 
 Rhodes’s nature — his eyes were being continually opened to it by 
 revelations from the great man’s intimates: we shall see just now the 
 reluctant testimony of Edmund Garrett. But, with all his weaknesses 
 and shortcomings, Rhodes remained for him to the end something 
 very like an idol. Garrett, also, admired Rhodes immensely, but he 
 could not, he confesses, ‘revere’ him. His admiration was a long way 
 ‘on this side idolatry.’ 
 
 Before we come to the talks with Rhodes with which I shall be 
 dealing in this chapter, it may be well to try to see him more clearly as 
 Stead and Garrett saw him. I shall give first some extracts froma char- 
 acter-sketch by Stead in the Review of Reviews for December, 1899. 
 
 A very timely article this must have seemed to Rhodes. Ever since 
 the Jameson Raid he had been in the Doldrums — or, we might almost 
 
 199 
 
zoo FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES 1891 
 
 say, in the Dock. And he was still painfully conscious of having made 
 a dreadful mess of things. In such circumstances, and in such a 
 frame of mind, he must have welcomed gratefully Stead’s vigorous 
 ‘speech for the defence.’ That is what the character-sketch was 
 meant to be and what it amounts to. It is no mere high-flown 
 panegyric but a skilfully conceived presentation of Rhodes’s case —- 
 an appeal to the British public to understand him and place their 
 trust in him. 
 
 Having recalled how, during the long and blundering negotiations 
 which led up to the war, Rhodes had kept religiously in the back- 
 ground, maintaining the strictest reserve, and how, when hostilities 
 at last became inevitable, he set out for Kimberley on the very eve of 
 its investment by the Boers, Stead proceeds: 
 
 “There he is, and there he is likely to remain. He has equipped a 
 force of 400 men at a cost of £15,000, and cheerfully awaits develop- 
 ment of events. Of the wisdom of placing himself in such an exposed 
 position, almost within grasp of the enemy, it is unnecessary to speak. 
 Mr. Rhodes is not a man who acts upon calculation in such a case, 
 but upon instinct. The same instinct which carried him into the 
 Matoppos when it was necessary to induce the Matabele to lay down 
 their arms, led him to throw in his lot with the beleaguered town 
 which has sprung up round the diamond mines of De Beers. ‘The 
 fate of Kimberley is as nothing in popular estimation compared with 
 the fate of Mr. Rhodes. Kimberley might be taken and retaken. The 
 valuable machinery of De Beers might be destroyed and the town 
 razed to the ground. These incidents of warfare would be regarded 
 as mere trivialities compared with the sensation that would be 
 produced if Mr. Rhodes were a captive in the hands of President 
 Kruger. It is doubtful whether he would ever be taken alive, and 
 throughout the Empire the disappearance of Mr. Rhodes would be 
 counted a loss that would be dearly purchased by the annexation of 
 both the Dutch Republics of South Africa.’ 
 
 Then comes an effective illustration of Rhodes’s ‘bigness.’ He had 
 told Stead at their last meeting in London that he was going to follow 
 Sir Alfred Milner blindfold — even into war. Here Rhodes and Stead 
 parted company. The article continues: 
 
 ‘I drew the line at war. Mr. Rhodes drew no line, and, now that Mr. 
 
IgOI THEIR TALKS TOGETHER 201 
 
 Chamberlain’s war has begun, Mr. Rhodes supports it without 
 reserve. That he disapproves of my opposition to the war I know, 
 but my relations with Mr. Rhodes have never been based on the 
 principle that I had to subordinate my judgment or govern my action 
 according to his wishes. After a tolerably long experience of working 
 with statesmen, both at home and abroad, whose policy I have had 
 alternately to support and oppose, I may say I know none who is so 
 tolerant of difference of opinion, and who recognizes so fully the 
 right of private judgment and of independent action on the part of 
 his friends. I have repeatedly opposed Mr. Rhodes on matters on 
 which he felt very strongly, but it has never affected the cordiality of 
 our friendship or the sincerity of our alliance for the attainment of 
 those objects on which we were agreed. It is true that I have never 
 put it to quite so great a strain as at present, and it may be that Mr. 
 Rhodes may consider that I have gone too far in opposing this war 
 ever to resume the old confidential relations which have now lasted 
 for nearly a dozen years. If so, I should regret it extremely, but of 
 course that would not in the least affect the question of the right 
 course to pursue in the present circumstances. I can hardly give a 
 stronger proof of my inherent confidence in the broadminded toler- 
 ance of the man than to say that I do not anticipate any such result. 
 I know the real Mr. Rhodes so well, and appreciate the greatness of 
 his ideals. This war, important as it is and momentous as are likely 
 to be the issues which it will raise, is but anincident. Mr. Rhodes’s 
 ideas, his aspirations, if you like, his ambitions, are too vast for him 
 to allow difference of opinion upon detail, even such a detail as this, 
 to affect his relations with those whom he knows to be thoroughly at 
 one with him in his ultimate aim.... 
 
 ‘As I write these lines I remember a curious instance which illus- 
 trates the point that I am driving at. When Mr. Rhodes came home 
 in 1896, I was very anxious to have him sent to prison, and made no 
 secret of my desire, to him or to Ministers. Mr. Rhodes had no 
 hankering after gaol, but although he knew that I wanted him locked 
 up (believing that it would have been much better for him, for the 
 cause of the Empire, and for the future of South Africa), he recog- 
 nized that that was one of the questions upon which I had a right to 
 my own opinion, and that my desire to clap him in Holloway was 
 prompted by the same motive which led me to help him to his Charter 
 and to support his African policy... . 
 
202 FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES 181 
 
 ‘I have always treated Mr. Rhodes, both publicly and privately, as 
 a man who regarded his own personal interests and his own personal 
 aims as dust in the balance compared with his great ideal. When you 
 have had twelve years of experience of acting on this principle, it is 
 impossible not to know whether your working hypothesis has or has 
 not been verified by results. After that test I shall ‘“‘believe in 
 Rhodes.” ’ 
 
 Stead goes on to portray his hero in aspects which since then have 
 been made familiar by Sir T. E. Fuller! and other biographers, but 
 which at that time were little known and to many people almost 
 incredible: as the man whom Gordon wanted to have with him at 
 Khartoum; as the single-minded idealist, wholly indifferent to wealth 
 save in so far as it might further his patriotic projects — the Million- 
 aire with Imagination -the Thinker in Continents; as the almost 
 ideal employer, just and thoughtful and generous, of whom it had 
 been testified that, after the missionaries, no person had done so much 
 for the natives of South Africa;? as the only white man in whom the 
 Matabele would place their trust; and, finally, as that ‘Loyola of the 
 Empire’ with whose early dreams and hopes we have in a previous 
 chapter made acquaintance. This passage, also, I shall give in full: 
 
 ‘I used a phrase about Mr. Rhodes many years ago, the truth of 
 which seems to me to be illustrated and confirmed by his support of 
 the present war policy in South Africa. I said he was a great man 
 whose ethical development had been somewhat neglected. Consider- 
 ing how many small men there are taking part in journalism and 
 politics whose ethical development has never even begun, that fact 
 is no reason why I should refuse to recognize the grandeur and 
 sublimity of Mr. Rhodes’s political ideas. But this neglected develop- 
 ment of the ethical side of the man exposes him to the same temptation 
 before which Ignatius Loyola and his followers succumbed. Loyola 
 believed with intense and passionate earnestness in the theory that 
 the Roman Church was the divinely appointed agency for saving the 
 world. To strengthen that church, to extend its dominion, and to 
 suppress all those who rebelled against it, became his supreme 
 morality; and in the attaining of that end the question of means 
 
 1 Sir T. E. Fuller’s Cecil Rhodes: A Monograph, 1910. A fascinating book. 
 ? By the Rev. Donald Macleod in an article in Good Words. Dr. Macleod 
 had made a personal investigation into the labour conditions at Kimberley. 
 
1901 THEIR TALES ‘TOGETHER 203 
 
 became a mere detail. Hence Jesuitism, with its doctrine that the end 
 justifies the means,! brought the Society into disrepute, and enor- 
 mously weakened the influence which it exerted in realizing its 
 ideals. It is just the same with Mr. Rhodes. He is the Loyola of 
 politics. To him the extension of the influence and authority of the 
 English-speaking race and the maintenance of its unity are things 
 which overshadow all other objects. And in attaining that end he is 
 apt to be regardless of the scruples which would weigh with other 
 men. 
 
 ‘Nevertheless, while admitting this sorrowfully and even mournfully, 
 it is well to remember that the extent to which he overstepped the 
 strict rules of right in the case of the Jameson Raid has been 
 enormously exaggerated. That he labours under an undeserved 
 opprobrium, is entirely due to the fact that he was so magnanimous 
 and patriotic that he preferred deliberately to bear the burden of 
 other people’s sins, preferring to suffer rather than vindicate himself 
 by letting the whole truth be known. There are few finer spectacles 
 in contemporary politics than the way in which Mr. Rhodes shielded 
 Mr. Chamberlain before the South African Committee. It is true 
 that while he was in Africa he had in unguarded moments blurted out 
 the truth as to the support which he had received from the Colonial 
 Office; but when it came to the point, and he had to choose between 
 giving away a department of the Empire or enduring silently the 
 unjust censure for which his enemies were thirsting, he chose the 
 latter without a murmur.’ 
 
 * * * 
 It was from Nordrach — although he talks as though he were still at 
 
 the Cape — that Garrett, early in December, 1899, wrote as follows to 
 Stead: | 
 
 ‘The Rhodes in the R. of R.’s was, of course, extremely powerful and 
 original and it’s quite possible you, from further away, see him truer 
 on the big lines of truth. For us who see him very close in S.A., your 
 atmosphere of moral grandeur, elevation as well as bigness, is very 
 hard to associate with our hero. We see too close, like the valet. He 
 is always surrounded by contemptibles, and they pander; and he 
 insists on taking all men on their lower side. It often revolts me, and, 
 
 1 The Jesuits themselves consistently deny that this is their doctrine. See 
 The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XIV, p. 104. 
 
2044 FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES 1801 
 
 when it does, his word is always ‘“‘unctuous rectitude.” I feel the 
 greatness always better when I’m not in personal contact — for just 
 these reasons . . . of course, I know rectitude is easier on the smaller 
 scale but I can’t revere a man, though I may admire him, unless I 
 feel that besides being a greater he is a better man than myself; and I 
 don’t feel that about Rhodes. You do feel that at bottom he is really 
 good: that he loves “‘righteousness,”’ as the Dutch call it. They will 
 never feel or believe that of him again. We thought they would come 
 round. They never will to him. The réle you cast him for is im- 
 possible.’ 
 
 This had been Garrett’s view of Rhodes throughout his five years’ 
 editorship of the Cape Times — his view of him, that is to say, from 
 close at hand. ‘Close to, at the Cape,’ he had written to Stead in July, 
 1896, ‘one can’t quite pitch him so high as a man; or show his politics 
 as so little drossy in essence. But it is worth anything, I believe, to 
 all of us to have somebody who will publicly say — “I believe in So- 
 and-so’s moral nature.” I don’t quite believe in C. J. R.’s moral 
 nature, but then that prevents me from helping to make it what I 
 should like. I do, of course, believe in some things about him, with 
 all my heart.’ 
 
 And in January 1898, he had come back to the subject in a some- 
 what similar strain — Rhodes’s health had been causing anxiety. 
 
 “We are staking a good bit on Rhodes’s cardiac valves, but if I had 
 been in a funk you would have heard long ago. I am far more afraid 
 (in your ear), and so is Milner, of a sort of Kaiser-like manie des 
 grandeurs, a sort of fanatical hyperzesthesia of the Ego cuticle, the sort 
 of thing the Greeks said preceded and brought Nemesis, which grows 
 on him — and may impair his judgment again as it did in ’95-6. Poor 
 old C.J. R.! A big man, among some terribly small ones, and with a 
 petty side, like Napoleon — like all big men apparently. ‘This country 
 would be dull without him shoving.’ 
 
 But Garrett, also, came to see the ‘big man’ more favourably ‘from 
 farther away’—and perhaps to ‘see him truer on the big lines of 
 truth.’ In the brilliant memoir of Rhodes which he contributed to 
 the Contemporary Review for June, 1902, he has much more to say for 
 him. This is generally regarded as the best portrait of Rhodes ever 
 painted and, although it does not hide his faults, the man it shows us 
 
IQOI THEIR TALKS -TOGETHER 205 
 
 is good as well as great: ‘no angel, but a big, rough-grained, strong- 
 headed, great-hearted man.’ It bears out almost everything that 
 Stead, in his less carefully chosen words, used to claim for Rhodes: 
 that he was kind and magnanimous and splendidly brave; that his 
 life-work was ‘a devouring passion to him,’ and that, while he was no 
 ascetic, he was almost like ‘one dedicated to an order of working 
 friars’ in the intensity of his idealism. Incidentally, the article puts 
 the living man before us with wonderful vividness — ‘the leonine head, 
 always looking large even on the large loose-knit body; the light, crisp 
 hair, grizzling fast at the temples, tumbled impatiently on end above 
 the wide and massive forehead .. . the face red, tanned, weather- 
 beaten — an outdoor face; the chin and jaw formidable, except when 
 lit by an attractive, almost boyish, smile; the prominent, light-grey, 
 absent-minded eyes... .’ We see him and hear him — ‘talking, 
 listening; speaking often not to the moment but as one elliptically 
 following worn grooves of solitary thought: conceding “you object 
 very fairly” . . . pouncing, “but I meet you there; the real crux is” 
 so-and-so; appealing, ‘‘you catch my thought?”’; seeming not to argue 
 but to think aloud; without eloquence, without dialectics, without 
 charm, as commonly understood; making admissions, making 
 confidences; insisting, recapitulating, riding a phrase to death, 
 breaking from deep notes into a queer falsetto; but always going to 
 the root of the matter — and often making a conquest by sheer frank 
 force of personality... . ‘‘It’s all right about B.”’ comes the next 
 report in council. ‘““He will come in with me-no, not squared, 
 you’re quite wrong — just on the personal!” Yes, that was the really 
 formidable Rhodes — the Rhodes who won men not on the purse, but, 
 in his own phrase, “‘on the personal.” ’ 
 
 II 
 
 Among Stead’s papers have been preserved typewritten records, 
 dictated in his rapid, unstudied way, of a number of talks with Cecil 
 Rhodes. They were, for the most part, long, discursive, intimate 
 talks, not to be turned to account as ‘interviews.’ Stead drew upon 
 them, of course, from time to time, when discussing Rhodes’s 
 achievements and opinions, but a good deal of what follows will be 
 quite new, I think, even to his most constant readers and most 
 intimate friends. 
 
206 FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES 18or 
 
 A wide variety of subjects were touched upon in these conversations, 
 and they will furnish, here and there, valuable ‘Footnotes to History’ 
 to some future chronicler of our times. I shall restrict myself, how- 
 ever, to the passages which bear directly on the friendship between 
 the two men and on the hopes which formed so close a bond between 
 them. 
 
 Nearly all their plans and hopes had root in that grandiose idea of a 
 world-wide English-speaking Confederation which pre-occupied 
 them from almost the first hours of their acquaintance in April 1889. 
 The fateful pig-headedness of George III was often the starting- 
 point for their debates. “To think of the insensate folly of that man!’ 
 Rhodes began once at dinner at the Burlington Hotel, his favourite 
 London home, almost as soon as he and his guests — Stead, Sir John 
 Willoughby, Mr. Abe Bailey and two others — had taken their seats 
 at table. ‘To think of the insensate folly of that man! And two or 
 three of his advisers were worse than he. But for George III war 
 would have been unknown throughout the world to-day. The 
 English-speaking race would have been reorganized as a unit, with 
 its central Parliament meeting alternately in New York and London, 
 and it would have given peace to the world. There would have been 
 nothing more for Krupp to do or any of your cannon-makers. And 
 to think of all that lost because of the insensate folly of that man!’ 
 
 A beginning after Stead’s own heart! ‘Excellent!’ he exclaimed, 
 ‘All political discussions concerning the Empire ought to begin with 
 a formal anathema upon George III!’ 
 
 On this particular occasion the talk drifted quickly into a quite 
 different channel. The date was July 19, 1901. The war in South 
 Africa was the burning topic of the moment, and Rhodes’s next 
 anathema was for Kruger and Krugerism. After the Transvaal came 
 Rhodesia, and Stead learnt how the problem of religious education 
 had been solved at Bulawayo —a Jew teaching in one schoolroom, a 
 Protestant in another, a Salvationist in a third, the time for instruction 
 being from 8 a.m. to 8.30, and children without a creed of any kind 
 being given an extra lesson in geography. ‘It would never do,’ 
 explained Rhodes, ‘to allow a lad to run wild from 8 to 8.30, throwing 
 up his cap and thanking God he was an atheist!’ Whether the Jews 
 believed in a future life, how South Africa could be federated, how 
 soon Canada would become part and parcel of the United States, 
 these and half a dozen other questions then came up in turn for 
 
I9OI THEIR TALKS TOGETHER 207 
 
 consideration. On the whole, it was not one of the most memorable, 
 apparently, of the Rhodes dinner-parties, except for the presence of 
 Mr. Abe Bailey, thenceforth a firm friend of Stead’s. “A very straight 
 man,’ was Stead’s impression of him, ‘Straight in face and straight, 
 I should say, in character. His conversation was more interesting 
 than that of anybody else, not even excepting Mr. Rhodes who had 
 not so much new to say.’ 
 
 The theme of Anglo-American world-predominance is treated of 
 most fully in the first of the conversations, held in Stead’s office at 
 Mowbray House in February, 1891. We have seen in Chapter 18 
 how Stead came to convince himself that the centre of the English- 
 speaking world must presently shift to the United States. He now 
 broaches this bold theory to Rhodes. 
 
 ‘What do you think?’ he asks. ‘Should we not join the American 
 Republic, the whole of the British Empire being reorganized on the 
 basis of the American Constitution?’ 
 
 Rhodes — Stead tells us — became rather excited for the moment, 
 then replied: 
 
 ‘How our ideas grow! I take it—I take it! Our two minds are 
 moving exactly alike. I understand you mean to say that if you 
 secured the union of the English-speaking peoples, you would be 
 willing to be annexed to the American Republic. So would I. Dear 
 me, how ideas expand! I thought my ideas were tolerably large, but 
 yours have outgrown them. Yes, yes, you are quite right. For the 
 sake of that great need let us all join the Republic!’ 
 
 One would have liked to ask Stead what his old father, by this time 
 in Heaven, was disposed to think about the necessity for the proposed 
 amplification of Pax Britannica! One cannot read about it without 
 remembering the wise old gentleman’s remark to his son, in the early 
 ’seventies, about not encroaching too much on the province of God 
 Almighty! ; 
 
 We need not follow this discourse of Rhodes’ any further — it was 
 merely an elaboration in detail of the doctrine implied in these 
 opening sentences and summarized for us by Stead in the passages 
 cited in Chapter 14. From the standpoint of what the two idealists 
 held to be (undeniably) the ‘elect race’ it was a most inspiring 
 doctrine. 
 
 Among the inferior races actually specified by Rhodes in this 
 connection were the French, the Germans, and the Portuguese. 
 
2088 FRIENDSHIP WITH CECIL RHODES 1891 
 
 Thinking chiefly of the latter, whose presence in Africa was a per- 
 petual vexation to him, he broke out: ‘Do you mean to tell me that 
 any part was left in perpetuity for the pigmies? ‘That these regions 
 have to be peopled by pigmies while a superior race stands multi- 
 plying outside? I do not believe it. Our people will never adopt the 
 doctrines of Malthus. They will go on multiplying and probably in 
 200 years they will fill the whole world. That is what we have to look 
 forward to.’ 
 
 The Spanish were not mentioned, but one may assume that Rhodes 
 held them in not much higher esteem than the Portuguese, certainly 
 not higher than the French and Germans. And yet, as we have 
 already learnt, it was to a Spaniard he went for inspiration in his 
 chief project for bringing his dream into being — to Loyola. Indeed, 
 even in his everyday life as a practical statesman at the Cape, he tells 
 Stead that he had modelled himself on the Society of Loyola and 
 Francis Xavier. ‘In South Africa, I am a Dutchman, remember,’ he 
 declares; ‘I am all things to all men, I am a Jesuit. As the Jesuits 
 were Chinese in China, so Iam a Dutchman in South Africa,’ and he 
 proceeds to tell of the University which he is anxious to create in 
 Cape Town. ‘Hofmeyr distrusts this,’ he says, with a smile. ‘He sees 
 possibilities in it. I see possibilities in it also — certainties! I shall 
 have my own rectors and professors, men who will be imbued with 
 the true ideas, men who will widen the outlook of their students.’ 
 One can imagine the glow of humorous triumph upon Rhodes’s face 
 as he gave out these words. Rhodes’s friends describe how, when he 
 was particularly pleased with himself, he used to sit upon his hands 
 and rock his body about like a great schoolboy. Cannot one picture 
 him so now, exulting over his benevolent, but guileful, day-dream — 
 his Jesuitical outwitting of the very estimable but exasperatingly 
 hide-bound Dutch? 
 
 The talk concentrated presently upon the Secret Society — the 
 Society of the Elect (Rhodes liked that word) who were to bind 
 themselves to work for the British Empire in the way in which the 
 Jesuits worked for the Church of Rome. 
 
 Hitherto, apart from Stead, Rhodes had confided his scheme only 
 to Lord Rothschild and to ‘little Johnston.’! He had actually made 
 his will, bequeathing his wealth in trust to the former for use in 
 
 1 The term almost always used by Rhodes (as mentioned before) in talking 
 of Mr. H. H. Johnston, not yet Sir Harry. 
 
1901 THEIR TALKS TOGETHER 209 
 
 connection with it. But he had grave misgivings in this connection. 
 Lord Rothschild, he felt, was an excellent man, but entirely lacking 
 in imagination. Rich men of the Rothschild type were to him an 
 object of contemptuous pity. ‘Look at the criminal in his cell,’ he 
 exclaimed to Stead, ‘and at Lord Rothschild! It is hard to say which 
 has the harder lot. The prisoner has some fun, at least, with the 
 spiders and the mice, but look at Rothschild! Out of the 365 days, 
 he spends 300 in turning over bits of paper and marking them. Look 
 at the two men far enough off, so as not to see any difference in 
 clothing, and it will be hard to see any difference between them. 
 Think of that man and his millions - what could he not do with 
 them!’ 
 
 This by way of preface to what he was now coming to. Stead’s 
 Review of Reviews and ‘Association of Helpers,’ he went on, had 
 made a good beginning for the work he had in mind: ‘You have got 
 all the ideas, but you require the funds.’ In a year or two, the funds 
 should be forthcoming — enough even to buy The Times, if necessary. 
 But Lord Rothschild must not be left in sole control of the money. 
 There must be a General of the Society, with powers like those of the 
 General of the Jesuits, and there must be a Committee of three or so. 
 ‘You have the ideas, you understand, and little Johnston, he knows 
 — what would you say to you and Johnston being associated with 
 Rothschild in this Trust?’ Stead feared that Johnston — the right 
 man in other respects — would not be available, being generally away 
 in Africa. Rhodes agreed. Very well, then, let the Trust be vested 
 in Rothschild and Stead alone. Rothschild would not like that, 
 Stead objected laughingly. ‘When he reads the will and finds that I 
 am in it also, there will be ructions!’ 
 
 ‘Well,’ said Rhodes, ‘I don’t mind. I shall be gone!’ 
 
 And so it was left. Here, verbatim, is Stead’s concluding paragraph: 
 
 ‘I telegraphed for Brett, who came two hours later and we had a long 
 talk. The net upshot of which was that the ideal arrangement would 
 be, so far as we could see at present: Rhodes, General of the Society; 
 Stead, Brett, Milner, to be the Junta of three. After Rhodes, Stead 
 to be General, with a third, who might be Rothschild in succession; 
 behind them, Manning, the Booths, little Johnston, Albert Grey, 
 Arthur Balfour, to constitute a circle of Initiates. The Association of 
 Helpers to be developed. A College, say under Professor Seeley, to be 
 
 L.S.— VOL, II O 
 
21I0o° FRIENDSHIP) WITHYCECTL YR AG Dikisimser 
 
 established to train people in the English-speaking idea. Brett 
 thought that some money should be in at once — not much, but some.’ 
 
 The sequel is told on May 5, 1891, Stead having had meanwhile a 
 second talk with Rhodes and one with Milner, recently home from 
 Egypt, who is ‘filled with admiration’ and full of enthusiasm for the 
 scheme: Milner himself, it seems, had cherished a somewhat similar 
 project for a band of Companions of St. George. Rhodes, before 
 leaving for Cape Town, had looked in one evening at Mowbray 
 House, whence, he said, he was going direct to his lawyer, Mr. 
 Hawkesley, having altered his will, as he had said he would, and left 
 the whole of his fortune to Lord Rothschild and Stead together — 
 Stead to be considered by Lord Rothschild as the representative of 
 his ideas, and the money to be utilized in accordance with Stead’s 
 views. But while thus providing for the possibility of his death, 
 Rhodes declared he was ‘very strong’ and quite hoped and expected 
 to be able to control his fortune himself. “He seemed very well 
 pleased with himself,’ Stead records in conclusion; ‘said he had seen 
 everybody and had worked like a galley-slave.’ 
 
 There we may leave the matter. All that there remains to tell about 
 it has been told fully in Stead’s book, The Last Will and Testament of 
 Cecil Rhodes. From that last will Rhodes removed Stead’s name 
 because, as he said, of his ‘extraordinary eccentricity,’ a phrase 
 covering Stead’s two besetting sins in his friend’s eyes — his pro- 
 Boer partisanship, chiefly, but also, in some degree, his obsession 
 with spooks. 
 
 The Secret Society was still-born. The Rhodes Scholarships idea, 
 conceived at about the same time, shows every sign of immortality. 
 Rhodes and Stead had often discussed it in the ’nineties, but it was 
 not until April 10, 1900, that the provisions to be incorporated in the 
 trust deed were finally decided on. Rhodes invited Stead to dinner 
 — again at the Burlington — to discuss the matter with himself and his 
 solicitor, Mr. Hawkesley. But Stead’s account of that evening’s 
 conversation contains little that has not been told already a score of 
 times, by himself or by Rhodes’s biographers or by the actual terms 
 of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust. We all remember how Rhodes 
 approached the subject — his determination not to let the scholarships 
 go to mere bookworms. The ‘smug’ element, as he called it (including 
 Greek and Latin scholarship), might stand for four-tenths in the 
 
IOI THEEROTACK S 7 TOGETHER 211 
 
 selection of his scholars, but ‘brutality’ (by which he meant only 
 manliness, with perhaps horse-sense) should stand for two-tenths. 
 “Then there is tact and leadership, again two-tenths. ‘That makes up 
 the whole. You see how it works?’ 
 
 Stead urged that tact and leadership should count for more and 
 scholarship for less, but both Rhodes and Hawkesley were against 
 him. Eventually a compromise was agreed to, these two elements 
 being made to stand each for three-tenths. It may be noted that when 
 he was thus bequeathing his millions Rhodes had practically no ready 
 money. Stead had called him ‘the Millionaire without a sixpence.’ 
 ‘Quite true!’ Rhodes replied, ‘I never have a bob. At this present 
 moment my account at the bank is overdrawn £70,000. Never a bob! 
 But my money is all right. Don’t be afraid; it won’t fail.’ 
 
 While concerned mostly with problems and projects and big ideas, 
 these talks turned of course upon persons now and again. Lord 
 Milner’s name recurs repeatedly, Stead condemning his South 
 African policy, Rhodes defending and praising him. ‘I have the 
 greatest possible regard for Milner, but I have seen very little of him,’ 
 he declared that same evening. ‘He said to me, “The less you and I 
 are seen together the better.’’ Hence I never invited him to Groote 
 Schuur.’ The war had been Milner’s war, he added, not Chamber- 
 lain’s - Chamberlain had been strong against it. This led to the usual 
 wrangle, Stead deploring the war, Rhodes justifying it and accusing 
 Stead of insubordination —the kind of insubordination, he com- 
 plained, which he had always seen in the way of their Secret Society. 
 “Yes, insubordination,’ he insisted. ‘Now here we are, your three 
 boys, Garrett, Milner and myself. We are all your boys and we are 
 on the spot, and we all agree that a certain course is necessary and 
 instead of your accepting our authority, we being on the spot, being 
 your boys, nothing will satisfy you but to go off on your own line and 
 oppose us!’ If it had been a social question at home in which Stead 
 had been interested, he, Rhodes, even if he had thought Stead quite 
 wrong, would have said to himself, ‘No, that’s no business of mine — 
 he says it zs so,’ and would have backed Stead up. 
 
 Here Stead tried to get a word in. 
 
 ‘Let me have my say!’ Rhodes went on, ‘I am going to get my talk 
 in before you!’ — but (so Stead describes him) quite genial and jolly 
 and smiling and without a trace of bitterness. ‘Take, for instance, 
 America. I read your book on Chicago. That tells me what America 
 
212 FRIENDSHIP WITH RHODES 1891-1901 
 
 is. I would not set myself against you, because you have been there. 
 Now in Africa we have been there. Why should you set yourself 
 against us?’ 
 
 ‘You see,’ Stead replied, ‘it is my misfortune to have been brought 
 up in African politics by a certain Cecil John Rhodes and he taught 
 me certain principles in relation to Africa which I cannot abandon 
 even if Mr. Rhodes now tells me to do so!’ 
 
 *That’s all right,’ said Rhodes, ‘but you must remember, things 
 have changed.’ 
 
 ‘Yes,’ persisted Stead, ‘but you have always taught me that the 
 fundamental principle of British policy in South Africa was to rely 
 upon the Dutch and now you are making war on the Dutch and I 
 cannot have it.’ 
 
 And so the friendly dispute would continue. 
 
 Stead was to have two later meetings with Rhodes; but, in subse- 
 quent years, when recalling his friend, his mind will have gone back 
 oftenest, I imagine, to that evening at the Burlington Hotel in April 
 1900. Few things in his life can have touched him more than Rhodes’s 
 magnanimous farewell to him, as he and his fellow-guest were 
 leaving. He records the incident very simply: 
 
 “Then he took me with both hands, more like the way Canon Liddon 
 used to do —- Mr. Hawkesley declared afterwards that he thought we 
 were going to kiss each other. And he said: ““Now, my dear Stead, 
 remember that even if you should feel that it was your duty to attack 
 me, no matter what you might say, it will make no difference to our 
 friendship. We are much too good friends, and I owe you so much 
 for what you have taught me that I never could allow anything like 
 that to come between us.” 
 
 *“’Thank you,” I said. ‘““Mr. Rhodes, I sincerely hope I shall never 
 have to attack you. Good-bye. God bless you!” ’ 
 
GHA LP DER *2:6 
 THE YEAR 1903 
 
 I 
 
 MR. MOREL’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST CONGO SLAVERY: STEAD TAKES 
 A HAND 
 
 Hee in 1903 Stead’s active co-operation was secured for a cru- 
 sade which soon riveted the attention of the whole world - Mr. 
 E. D. Morel’s crusade against slavery in the so-called Congo Free 
 State. 
 
 Before the Arab penetrated into the Congo region from the east, 
 and the European from the west, the condition of the inhabitants 
 had been one of absolute savagery, and it was still appalling when, in 
 1876, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, took the initiative in con- 
 vening a conference of the Powers at Brussels to consider the subject 
 from the standpoint of philanthropy and of civilization. The Arabs, 
 according to Sir Harry Johnston, an accepted authority on African 
 affairs, had wrought great improvements, doing ‘much to suppress 
 cannibalism and to introduce a far higher standard of comfort.} 
 But they had prosecuted a ruthless slave-trade and the country stood 
 in dire need of administration by an enlightened and benevolent ruler. 
 
 By one of life’s bitterest ironies, such a ruler was thought to have 
 been found in King Leopold. In England especially was this the 
 feeling. ‘Every one who was anyone in the Missionary world,’ Sir 
 Harry Johnston reminds us, ‘or in that section of London society 
 devoted to philanthropic ideals (such as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, 
 Albert, Earl Grey, Cardinal Manning, Sir Harry Verney, Sir William 
 MacKinnon) decried any attempt on the part of Great Britain to 
 import base commercial considerations into the political settlement 
 of Equatorial Africa and hailed King Leopold as the man who would 
 gradually raise the millions of Central African negroes to a con- 
 dition of peaceable self-government, free, on the one hand, from the 
 curse of the Arab, and on the other from the alcoholizing English- 
 man.’ The King of the Belgians stood forward as the champion of 
 what was best in European civilization ‘and of all that was to regene- 
 rate this vast region of potential wealth.’ 
 
 1 Introduction to E. D. Morel’s Red Rubber. 
 213 
 
214 CHE SY EA Re 1903 
 
 The Congo Free State, entrusted to King Leopold’s hands in 1885, 
 became very soon a great field for Christian Missionaries, especially 
 English, and throughout the ’nineties — despite occasional disturb- 
 ing rumours — the impression prevailed generally that King Leopold’s 
 promises were being fulfilled. Thus in 1897 Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid, 
 the founder and first President of the Institute of Journalists, an 
 ardent supporter of the Baptist Missionary Society, was able, in a 
 character-sketch of Baron Van Etvelde, Chief Secretary of the Congo 
 Free State, to write: 
 
 ‘It would not be fitting to comment here on all the controversies 
 that have arisen with reference to the Congo Free State. Suffice to 
 say that the King and his colleagues have ever striven to carry out 
 the conditions of free labour, fair wages, equal justice to all sections, 
 and constitutional Government, on which it was established: that 
 over nearly two-thirds of the nine hundred thousand square miles 
 multitudes of natives have been brought under the influence of 
 Christian teaching, inhuman customs abolished, and that the ‘‘fall”’ 
 has been well-nigh completed of the Arab raiders who for centuries 
 invaded the territory, killing the men, making slaves of the women 
 and children, and stealing the fruits of native industry. It will take 
 time to accomplish all; but the civilizing work goes forward with 
 steadily increasing impetus and facility: and it may be confidently 
 predicted that within a short period Belgium will possess a vast and 
 prosperous Colony in Africa.’ 
 
 Stead, who was an old friend of Sir Hugh Gilzean Reid’s, and who 
 knew him to be a man of high repute, was glad to print the character- 
 sketch in question in the Review of Reviews, and did so without 
 questioning these claims. 
 
 It was Mr. E. D. Morel who opened Stead’s eyes to the real truth 
 of the matter. 
 
 I need not describe how, in the early ’nineties, Mr. Morel, then a 
 young clerk in the service of Elder Dempster & Co., working 
 alternately at Liverpool, Antwerp and Brussels, came to acquire bit 
 by bit a mass of convincing evidence as to the abuses in the Congo 
 State, vague reports of which had previously been coming to England, 
 and how in 1898 he resigned his appointment in order to have a free 
 hand in coping with the tremendous scandal which he had already 
 begun to expose. ‘The whole story is very effectively told in his bio- 
 
THEA YEAR atgo3 215 
 
 graphy by Mr. Seymour Cocks, published in 1920. Suffice it here 
 to say that in a series of articles in the Speaker he revealed some of 
 his discoveries, and that this brought him into touch with Mr. Fox 
 Bourne, Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society, and Sir 
 Charles Dilke, who had begun two years previously to urge upon the 
 British Government the need of inquiries into the whole question of 
 King Leopold’s rule. It was in April 1903 that Morel founded the 
 weekly journal, the African Mail, which henceforward was the princi- 
 pal organ of the movement. 
 
 Stead preserved an immense mass of letters bearing upon the Congo 
 —they bear witness to the astounding energy with which he threw 
 himself into anything of the kind. Morel and Gilzean Reid were 
 among his chief correspondents and it is very interesting to see how 
 these two wrestled for Stead’s support. 
 
 Gilzean Reid and Stead had been in correspondence on the 
 Congo problem since 1896 —Stead suspicious and anxious, 
 Gilzean Reid confident and dogmatic, and overflowing always with 
 admiration for King Leopold. ‘He is a man of strong faith and lofty 
 ideals,’ Stead is told in September of that year, ‘and will live to 
 vindicate his aims and administration.’ Gilzean Reid has ‘a charming 
 portrait’ of the King, presented to him personally, which he would 
 like Stead to reproduce in the Review of Reviews. Stead consents, and 
 the portrait duly appears with highly laudatory letterpress from 
 
 -Gilzean Reid’s own pen. Not until October 1902 do the correspon- 
 dents really come to grips. Stead by this time has begun to hear from 
 Morel and he has written to Gilzean Reid ‘a characteristically frank 
 but rather surprising letter,’ as that gentleman describes it in his 
 somewhat agitated reply: a long communication, this reply of sixteen 
 pages, for the most part a fresh panegyric upon Leopold. If he held a 
 brief from the sovereign of the Congo, he declares, he would follow 
 up, expose and exterminate ‘the hired slanderers’ whom Stead has 
 cited. He (Gilzean Reid) is proud to reflect that he has been so long 
 permitted to share modestly in vindicating what would presently be 
 recognized as ‘one of the most daring, well-directed and successful 
 civilizing and industrial efforts’ the world had ever seen. 
 
 This is Gilzean Reid’s tone throughout, and Stead long retains 
 sceptical of Morel’s statements, but gradually the endless stream of 
 ascertained facts and irrefutable arguments have their effect, and at 
 last, in an article entitled ‘Cannibal Christendom in South Africa,’ 
 
216 TULLE OY EGA Roti os8 
 
 in the Review of Reviews for March 1893, he proclaims himself a 
 convert. 
 
 Taking as his text two works upon the subject which had just been 
 published, Morel’s Affairs of West Africa and Fox Bourne’s Civili- 
 zation in Congoland, Stead sets himself to awaken the conscience of 
 the country. Perhaps a thousand or two persons had as yet bought 
 the volumes — hundreds of thousands of startled men and women 
 throughout the British Empire were now to read these arresting 
 sentences: 
 
 ‘Mr. Fox Bourne’s book Civilization in Congoland, is sickening 
 reading. Its proper title is The Cannibal State on the Congo. Its 
 contents, taken together with those in which Mr. Morel attacks the 
 system of chartered monopolies, are enough to make one despair of 
 humanity. Sir H. Gilzean Reid and Mr. Demetrius Boulger would 
 have us believe that King Leopold has converted the Congo Valley 
 into a terrestrial paradise. Mr. Morel and Mr. Fox Bourne maintain 
 that he has converted it into a Hell; and after making all allowances 
 it is difficult to resist the conviction that they have proved their case.’ 
 
 Stead goes on to retell the dreadful story. Many of us have forgotten 
 even its essential features and it may be well to recall them as here 
 summarized. He has cited a detailed description of the chicotte, the 
 terrible whip of raw hippo-hide ‘used to persuade the miserable 
 native that it is to his interest to work for the white men.’ Stead 
 proceeds: 
 
 “The chicotte, however, is only brought into requisition after the 
 natives have been broken in. The process of breaking them in is 
 more summary, and involves the employment of the soldier. 
 
 ‘Before explaining the modus operandi it may be well to state how 
 the Belgians obtain the force necessary to enable them to eat up whole 
 populations. For in the Congo State in 1902 the total 1,465 were 
 Belgians, who held all the important military and civil positions. As 
 the native population of Congoland numbers some twenty or thirty 
 millions, it is curious to discover how such a handful of whites can 
 reduce the black millions to virtual slavery. The trick is not very 
 difficult. A white officer with a few armed men at his back summons 
 the chiefs in a district to a palaver. Each chief is asked, in return for 
 so many pocket-handkerchiefs, to furnish a certain number of slaves. 
 
THE YEAR 1903 217 
 
 If he agrees the slaves of the black chief become the slaves of the 
 white officer, who subjects them to military discipline, arms them 
 with rifles, and uses them to punish any chief who is slow in supply- 
 ing his quantum of slaves. Refusal to furnish the stipulated con- 
 tingent is treated as an act of war. The villages of the recalcitrants 
 are burnt down, their stores looted, their gardens destroyed, and the 
 natives themselves shot down until they have had enough of it and 
 submit to escape extermination. Their submission is accepted on the 
 condition they supply double the contingents of slaves first asked for. 
 The slaves thus handed over are first called Liberes, then put in arms 
 until their bondage can be riveted with military discipline in the 
 nearest camp. As every district officer receives two pounds head 
 money for every slave thus enrolled in the force publique, the state 
 found little difficulty in organizing a standing army of slaves, nomin- 
 ally free, but absolutely at the disposal of the State, which now 
 numbers 15,000 men. To a native African this force publique is the 
 irresistible power which renders impossible any resistance to the 
 Belgian vampire which is draining the life blood of Congoland. 
 Having obtained this force publique and supplemented it by enrolling 
 thousands of cannibal tribes as an irregular militia, the State and the 
 monopolist companies are ready for action. What takes place has 
 been minutely described by many witnesses, among whom Mr. 
 Sjéblom, a Swedish missionary, is one of the best. When the appar- 
 atus of coercion is ready for action the natives are summoned to the 
 headquarters and ordered to bring a certain minimum quantity of 
 indiarubber every Sunday. If they refuse, some of them are shot, to 
 encourage the others, and the rest are driven into the bush to collect 
 the rubber. If they do not return, or if the tale of rubber baskets fall 
 short, war is declared. Says Mr. Sjoblom: 
 
 ‘The soldiers are sent in different directions. The people in the 
 towns are attacked, and when they are running away into the forest, 
 and try to hide themselves and save their lives, they are found out 
 by the soldiers. Then their gardens of rice are destroyed, and their 
 supplies taken. Their plantains are cut down while they are young 
 and not in fruit, and often their huts are burnt, and, of course, every- 
 thing of value is taken. Within my own knowledge forty-five villages 
 were altogether burnt down.’ — Civilization in Congoland, p. 211. 
 
 ‘Where the natives submit in despair, every male native is driven 
 
218 DHE Y EARS 9.0 3 
 
 into the marshes every morning by savages armed with rifles, who are 
 established as absolute despots in the town. If any native man stays 
 behind he is shot at sight. During the day the sentinel does as he 
 pleases with the women and the property of the poor wretches who 
 are toiling to collect the rubber. If at week-end the full quantity of 
 rubber is not forthcoming, the defaulters are in some cases chicotted, 
 in others they are killed, and their right hands are hacked off, smoke- 
 dried, and sent down with the rubber baskets to explain why the 
 weekly output was short. ‘““‘We counted,” said Mr. Sjéblom on one 
 occasion, “‘eighteen hands smoked, and from the size of the hands 
 we could judge that they belonged to men, women and children.” 
 On another occasion, 160 hands were brought in. Sometimes the 
 hands were hewn from living bodies. 
 
 ‘This horrible picture of civilization in Congoland would not be 
 complete without some reference to the veritable cannibalism which 
 the Congo State is spreading all over the country which the king was 
 to reclaim for civilization and humanity. The camp followers and 
 friendlies, the irregular levies, who are armed and employed by the 
 state to supplement the force publique, have introduced cannibalism 
 into regions where it was before unknown. ‘“‘Races who until lately 
 do not seem to have been cannibals have learned to eat human flesh.” 
 Cannibalism in West Africa is no mere ceremonial. It is part of the 
 commissariat of the Congo forces. Dr. Hinds, in his book on The 
 Fall of the Congo Arabs, states that after the burning down of the 
 town of Nyanwe in 1893, 
 
 ‘Every one of the cannibals had at least one body to eat. All the 
 meat was cooked and smoke-dried and formed provisions for the 
 whole of his force and for all the camp-followers for many days after- 
 wards. ... Inthe night following a battle or the storming of a town 
 these human wolves disposed of all the dead, leaving nothing even 
 for the jackals, and thus saved us, no doubt, from many an epidemic.’ 
 — The Fall of the Congo Arabs, pp. 156-7. 
 
 ‘After this description of Christian cannibalism by proxy, it is hardly 
 necessary to fill in pitiful details of the cruel slavery enforced upon 
 old women and women with children, beaten and ill-used by their 
 savage guards, under the eyes of white officers.’ 
 
 This article was Stead’s first blow in the great fight. He followed 
 
THE YEAR -1903 219 
 
 it up with many others and enlisted the co-operation of many of his 
 friends. In May he issued a pamphlet on the Congo in support of a 
 motion on the subject introduced in the House of Commons by Mr. 
 Herbert Samuel,! and supported by Mr. Alfred Emmott, M.P.,? 
 Sir John Gorst and others: ‘the pamphlet was of the greatest possible 
 service,’ Mr. Samuel wrote to him the day after, ‘it was in evidence 
 constantly during the debate.’ In June, Stead returned to the charge 
 with an unsparing ‘character-sketch’ of King Leopold. We can under- 
 stand how welcome were his efforts to the protagonists in the fray. 
 ‘When I felt I had won you over,’ Morel wrote to him on May 22, 
 the day after the carrying of Mr. Samuel’s motion in Parliament, ‘I 
 felt I had done the best day’s work since starting the palaver —- some 
 four or five years ago. It was a great triumph for me and a hard task. 
 I do take credit for that! But I shan’t forget, and I am sure no one will 
 forget, how you flung yourself into the fray - once you were con- 
 vinced — and what a powerful lever that has been. You have taken 
 up a lot of things in your day. I don’t think you have ever taken 
 up anything out of which greater ultimate good will come than 
 this. And I do sincerely hope you will go on helping: hotly and 
 strongly. The first victory has been won, but we are a long way off 
 the goal yet.’ 
 
 II 
 STEAD AND INDIA 
 
 Stead’s active interest in the affairs of India may be dated from 
 the beginning of 1891, when an urgent appeal to him was made by 
 Mr. William Digby, an Anglo-Indian publicist, well known for his 
 sympathy with the native races. ‘You have been directing your at- 
 tention to the submerged tenth of England,’ Mr. Digby wrote to 
 Stead on January 10 of that year, shortly after the appearance of 
 General Booth’s famous book. ‘May I, with all the force I possess, 
 beg you to give a little of your attention to the submerged nine- 
 tenths of India? The three millions submerged in England, thanks 
 to you as much as to anybody, are receiving attention from many 
 people. The submerged tens of millions in India are receiving no 
 adequate attention or consideration.’ It was in Stead’s power, he 
 
 1 Later the Right Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel. 
 2 Later Lord Emmott. 
 
220 DHE (YERARY 1.903 
 
 went on to urge, ‘more perhaps than the power of any other 
 man connected with journalism, to do the Indian people effectual 
 service.’ 
 
 A fortnight later, Mr. Digby returns to the charge with the follow- 
 ing letter — it is typical of the way in which advocates of unpopular 
 causes used constantly to invoke Stead’s championship : 
 
 ‘Sunday afternoon, 
 Zhen Ole 
 ‘DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 ‘I have just finished reading your article on Dean Church in the 
 current No. of the R. of R. I rise from its perusal with the unspoken 
 question on my lips: ‘‘Why is it Stead treats the Indian problem with 
 such scorn and contempt?” I have asked myself that question twenty 
 times. Iam as far from the answer now as I ever was. ‘‘Fifty thousand 
 men are lying dead in the East at this hour,” was a spectacle which, 
 in 1877, moved you to the quick. In that same year, and a part of the 
 next, five millions of your fellow-subjects were lying dead in India — 
 men, women, and children, slain by a worse than bashi-bazouk or 
 Tartar, slain by slow starvation! ‘The year before last 20,000 of your 
 fellow-subjects died in a district not so large as East Anglia, slain by 
 slow starvation! During the past eight years there have been four 
 millions and a half of excess deaths from fever (euphemism for in- 
 sufficient food and clothing): these four millions and a half were your 
 fellow-subjects. The condition of things which brought this about 
 is going on unremedied. You have paid no heed to any of these 
 things. You do not even acknowledge communications addressed 
 to you. God forgive you! I can’t. 
 
 ‘Here, in the Indian problem, are the conditions which should power- 
 fully appeal to you. All that Lowell writes in his inspired poems finds 
 realization in the Indian difficulties. You are very busy. That might 
 be an excuse for some men. It is none for you. 
 
 ‘Unlike other enterprises, however, in which you have been engaged, 
 there are no Cardinals, or Bishops or Deans; no Earls and Peeresses, 
 in the Indian Reform interest. Everyone of those is arrayed on the 
 other side. All the more reason why you should do what you can on 
 behalf of the humble and few reformers. Your British ‘submerged 
 tenth’ is paralleled by many tenths among British India’s two hundred 
 millions. In Britain the few suffer; in India the many, while Britain 
 
THE YEAR 1903 221 
 
 prospers on the suffering of that many. Where are your ‘“‘God’s 
 Englishmen” that Christian England should have brought about in 
 India the state of things which exists there? 
 ‘Sincerely yours, 
 ‘WM. DIGBY.’ 
 
 These two communications were, of course, bound to have their 
 effect, and, as it happened, there was in progress that year a movement 
 which in any case would have had swift response from Stead — Mr. 
 B. M. Malabari’s agitation against infant marriage in India. Stead 
 supported it with all his heart and both in public utterances and 
 private letters to the Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, and from this 
 moment he may fairly be counted among India’s most vigilant friends 
 in England. Already in December 1891, we find Mr. Malabari 
 exerting himself to make the Review of Reviews known among his 
 countrymen. 
 
 In every subsequent volume of the Review throughout the ’nineties, 
 India was kept well to the fore, but it was not until ten years later 
 that Stead came into really close relations with the Indian Nationalists. 
 In December 1901, at the request of Mr. Malabari, he contributed 
 to East and West a very striking article entitled, ‘What is my duty to 
 the People of India?’ The article begins thus: 
 
 ‘I am an Englishman. Before I was born, a series of actions, diplo- 
 matic, political and commercial, for which I had no responsibility, 
 resulted in the establishment of the British sovereignty over Hindu- 
 stan. When I was a small child, this sovereignty was definitely 
 acquired by the British Empire. Since I have attained to manhood, 
 no step has been taken which materially affected the status quo which 
 was established before my birth. I have therefore been born into a 
 condition in which without my consent I find myself a director in an 
 Imperial Part which is the supreme authority over a country I have 
 never visited, whose populations are of different civilization, religion 
 and social organization from those in which I live. What then is my 
 duty to these vast millions of my brothers and sisters? It is an im- 
 portant question, the full discussion of which would occupy much 
 more space than you can afford me, and therefore I can but indicate 
 in the vaguest outline certain considerations which will I hope enable 
 your readers to understand something of the point of view of an 
 English Liberal at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 
222 EL ELLE at Xp ui ev ty ek 210). 013 
 
 “The first consideration, dominating all others, is the duty of recog- 
 nizing that these immense masses of humanity are composed of our 
 own brothers and sisters, each of whom is our equal in the eye of 
 the Almighty. Not only so, but the differences which divide and 
 cause us to be in a position of political ascendancy are trivial com- 
 pared with the points upon which we are at one. Hence our first 
 duty is to oppose all those suggestions of race and pride and arrogance 
 which are so potent in building impassable barriers to the quick and 
 constant flow of human sympathy between the white-skinned Lords 
 of India and those millions who bear upon their features the impres- 
 sion of a fiercer sun than that which beats upon our temperate isle. 
 
 ‘The second consideration is that, although we were born in a 
 position of political superiority, we have neither the knowledge nor 
 the local acquaintance with circumstances which alone can justify 
 men in forming a definite judgment as to what is right and just. It 
 behoves us, therefore, to be very humble and cautious, and to recog- 
 nize that we are tolerably certain to make blunders at every step. Our 
 duty, therefore, towards our Indian fellow-subjects, should be that 
 of respectful learners, who require to be taught by the people whom 
 they govern as to the methods by which their needs can be best 
 satisfied. Before venturing to form a judgment of our own we ought 
 to be very careful to learn the facts. 
 
 “The third great principle is that our ultimate idea ought to be to 
 make ourselves unnecessary. As a father endeavours to make his 
 son an independent man, so English dominion in India ought to have 
 as its ultimate aim the establishment of the principle of self-govern- 
 ment among the millions who inhabit Hindustan. ‘The realization 
 of that ideal may be a long way off, but it is the ultimate goal which 
 must never be lost sight of; and we shall be judged in history by the 
 success with which we have trained, educated, and accustomed our 
 Indian fellow-subjects to take upon their own shoulders the burden 
 and responsibility of government.’ 
 
 Having formulated these three principles as governing our respon- 
 sibilities, Stead asks the further question: How can we best help 
 India? The great curse of India is excessive expenditure, he declares, 
 especially military expenditure, which is largely due to Russophobia. 
 Hence the most practical manner in which we can work towards 
 relieving the pressure upon the Indian taxpayer is to combat with 
 
THE YEAR 1903 223 
 
 all our energy the doctrine of the Russophobists, and to promote 
 good relations between Russia and Great Britain. ‘The second method 
 of helping India is to combat, as if it were the very incarnation of 
 Satan, the spread of race pride, which disgraces so many Anglo- 
 Indians of the baser sort. We see a great deal of the same pestilent 
 class-spirit in our own country, where poisonous social relationships 
 continually impede co-operation in good works. ‘The third way in 
 which it is possible for us to help is by constantly thinking, saying 
 and writing what is the truth concerning the debt which we owe to 
 the great sages and poets and philosophers of India who have done so 
 much to spiritualize the existence of the Indian peoples. To one who 
 is buried deep in the dense imperialism of the West there is a certain 
 majesty in the spectacle which we see in the Far East of whole races 
 to whom the world of thought is the only real world and the world 
 in which we live is regarded as a passing shadow. 
 The article concludes as follows: 
 
 ‘As a journalist I have too often failed in my duty to India. Out of 
 sight is often out of mind. The pressing demands of an importunate 
 beggar at the door will often prevent your listening to the great 
 chorus of myriad voices in the far distance. But with all shortcomings 
 which I do frankly and sorrowfully confess, I do feel that Ican make 
 an honest confession and say that according to my light, so far as I 
 have had opportunity, I have endeavoured to minimize what seemed 
 to me the inevitable evils of such a position as that which we occupy 
 in India, and have endeavoured also to promote, so far as I could in 
 my small way, the feeling of mutual self-respect, sympathy and frater- 
 nity between my own countrymen and my fellow-subjects in India.’ 
 
 In February, 1902, Stead brought Indian affairs into the limelight 
 with a thoroughness and effectiveness all his own. Mr. William 
 Digby had just issued a large volume entitled ‘Prosperous’ British 
 India, altogether too bulky and cumbrous to reach a wide public, but 
 sensational in some of its descriptions of Indian misery, and in the 
 challenging terms in which the author dedicated it to the Secretary of 
 State for India, Lord George Hamilton. It had attracted compara- 
 tively little notice in the Daily Press, but Stead was determined that it 
 should not be left ignored, and bracketed it ingeniously with Kipling’s 
 poem, ‘The Islanders,’ as “The Topic of the Month’ in his Review. 
 
 Stead describes ‘The Islanders’ as mere ‘vigorous doggerel,’ worthy 
 
224. THIBY YEARS 19.073 
 
 of ‘the Banjo Bard of the Empire,’ but he welcomes it as helping to 
 emphasize the dangers of Chamberlainism. ‘Kipling, from his point 
 of view, is right,’ he declares. “His message in “The Islanders”’ is a 
 savage warning that unless the nation adopts conscription it is doomed 
 to perish.’ Kipling is right, because conscription is the logical corol- 
 lary of Chamberlainism. ‘If this nation is to place its destinies in the 
 hands of a Colonial Secretary who never opens his mouth without 
 insulting the great military nations of the Continent, and if the whole 
 of the resources of the Empire are to be consumed in the prosecution 
 of a war of extermination in South Africa, then the sooner we adopt 
 conscription the better.” And, with immense gusto, Stead employs 
 the Banjo Bard of the Empire to belabour Mr. Hugh Price Hughes 
 and the perverted Radicals who have supported the War! 
 
 Having thus captured the attention of his readers, Stead proceeds 
 to discourse to them on the sombre and unpalatable subject of Mr. 
 Digby’s book. Recalling first that very different utterance of Kipling, 
 “The White Man’s Burden,’ with its noble exposition of a really 
 worthy Imperialism, the kind of Imperialism which he himself has 
 been preaching all his life, he comes to the case of India. Hitherto 
 he has felt that in India, at least, British rule has been a blessing, yet 
 here comes Mr. William Digby with his portentous indictment. Is 
 Mr. Digby right? ‘If he is right,’ Stead continues, ‘instead of filling 
 full the mouth of famine and bidding the plague to cease, instead of 
 acting as a terrestrial providence, saving the people from the conse- 
 quences of their own ignorance and sloth, we stand accused of being 
 little short of an infernal vampire, the net effect of whose rule has 
 been to multiply the frequency of famine and to reduce the resources 
 of the whole or a very large part of India by fifty per cent. Clearly, 
 if Mr. Digby is right, then we have no right to continue in control 
 of the destinies of Hindustan and the bottom is knocked out of our 
 Imperialism.’ : 
 
 Recoiling from such a conclusion, Stead had addressed a circular 
 letter to some three-score of the foremost Anglo-Indians in the 
 country, asking them for their views on the subject. The replies were 
 numerous and most interesting — the House of Commons, one reflects, 
 had seldom, if ever, the benefit of so informing a debate on India. 
 According to Sir George Birdwood, Sir Auckland Colvin, Sir Lepel 
 Griffin, Sir Richard Temple and all the other official Anglo-Indians 
 with the sole exception of Sir William Wedderburn, Mr. Digby’s 
 
THE YEAR 1903 225 
 
 statements were exaggerated and untrustworthy. So they seemed 
 also to Mr. A. P. Sinnett, the Theosophist, an ex-editor of the great 
 Indian newspaper, the Pioneer, of Allahabad. Mr. ‘Thomas Burt, 
 M.P., on the other hand, agreed with Sir William Wedderburn in 
 taking the opposite view. Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji wrote: 
 
 ‘You ask me ‘Whether there is any justification whatever for his 
 (Mr. Digby’s) assertion that the net effect of British rule has been 
 to impoverish India?”’ 
 
 ‘I am very sorry to say Mr. Digby is justified in his assertion that 
 the net effect of British rule has been to impoverish our subjects, and 
 to render famine chronic.’ 
 
 It is an immense theme, this question of the governance of India — 
 Stead could not hope to do more than draw attention to it for a 
 moment. But the bold and open-minded spirit in which he took it 
 up and insisted upon its discussion won him the intense gratitude of 
 all Indian nationalists, and in June 1903, they gave expression to this 
 gratitude by inviting him to preside at the assembly of the Indian 
 National Congress to be held at Madras in the following December. 
 ‘Although Congress Presidents are usually Indians,’ Sir William 
 Wedderburn explained in a letter urging the acceptance of this 
 invitation, ‘exceptions are occasionally made, as in the case of Mr. 
 Bradlaugh.’ It was a tempting proposal for one of Stead’s sympathies 
 and temperament, but Mrs. Stead was ill and the affairs of the 
 Review of Reviews were still suffering from the War. There were 
 political considerations also to be weighed carefully. Having become 
 convinced against his will that the British Empire in India was little 
 better than a vampire, instead of being the ‘beneficent Providence’ 
 he had formerly proclaimed it to be, he would have, he felt, to appear 
 before the Congress in ‘sackcloth and ashes.’ He might be moved 
 to express himself with passion, and his words might be firebrands, 
 kindling dissatisfaction which might lead to an increase rather than 
 an alleviation of the sufferings of the people. He did not like to incur 
 any such risk unless he were prepared to stay in India and take his 
 chances with the unfortunate people who might be incited by his 
 words. He explained all this to Mr. Romesh Dutt and Mr. Naoroji, 
 who had placed the proposition before him. They tried to overrule 
 his objections, but in vain. Nor was he able to decide otherwise 
 when, in 1907, the invitation was renewed. 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II P 
 
226 LTE aot a tg Org 
 
 Natives of India will feel that these two pages do but scant justice 
 to what Stead’s efforts on their behalf achieved for them. ‘The limits 
 of my space will debar allusion to his many bold incursions into 
 Indian politics during the years that followed. I shall conclude this 
 section by citing some evidently heartfelt words written to Stead by 
 Mr. Bipin Chandara Pal in January 1911, the month in which the 
 ‘coming of age’ of the Review of Reviews was celebrated. After 
 declaring that he remembers the day on which the Review came into 
 existence, Mr. Bipin Chandara Pal proceeds: 
 
 ‘We journalists in India welcomed it, perhaps, more heartily than 
 anyone else. The editorial sanctum in India means, oftentimes, a 
 dingy room, a deal-wood packing-case doing duty for a table, and 
 for a library an ordinary English dictionary. We are too poor to 
 subscribe to newspapers and magazines. To us, therefore, your 
 Review of Reviews, placing us in direct touch with the moving thought 
 of the modern world, came as a godsend. ‘The number of your sub- 
 scribers may not be very large, but I can assure you that the influence 
 of your paper is very considerable among my English-educated 
 countrymen, who have always appreciated your generous sympathies 
 with Indian aspirations, and I may well take the liberty of offering 
 you, on their behalf as well as mine, our heartiest congratulations and 
 good wishes on this occasion. I hope and trust that it may be given 
 to you and to your paper to help the cause of peaceful progress 
 towards national autonomy in India in the same way as you did in 
 regard to South Africa.’ 
 
 III 
 RETROSPECTIVE 
 
 In the Review of Reviews for December 1903, Stead indulged in a 
 brief retrospect over his record for the previous fourteen years. 
 On the whole he was well satisfied with it. Above all, he took credit 
 to himself for having done his best for the cause of Peace. He con- 
 fessed to the loss of one great illusion —he felt he had placed too 
 much reliance upon the English-speaking peoples: his visits to the 
 Continent had enlarged his vision and had convinced him that there 
 was no one race marked out unmistakably for the leadership of the 
 world; and we have seen how he lost faith in England’s mission as 
 ruler of India. In his other judgments he saw little to recant. 
 
THE YEAR 1903 227 
 
 Peace and the hope of universal brotherhood were the themes upper- 
 most in his mind just then, and he made no allusion to many of the 
 matters which had called forth his greatest energies, nor shall I 
 attempt even to catalogue them here. And yet some of the struggles 
 in which he took so prominent a part, and some of the projects he 
 tried to launch, counted for a good deal in his life — his unceasing 
 efforts, for instance, on behalf of Henniker Heaton’s postal reform, 
 his support of the Progressives in London’s municipal politics, his 
 frustrated endeavours to create a ‘Civic Church,’ + his ‘Wake Up, 
 England,’ articles, etc., etc. Many of Stead’s appearances as bio- 
 grapher and critic during this period were also of interest. A book 
 which he produced on Queen Victoria and her reign in 1897 gave 
 intense pleasure to an extraordinarily large audience. An interview 
 with Boss Croker, of Tammany disrepute, also in that year, was a 
 journalistic masterpiece; the portion of it containing Mr. Croker’s 
 memorable confession that, looking back upon his whole life, he 
 could not think of any single action of his that he had any reason to 
 regret, was copied into, and discussed by, almost every newspaper in 
 the British Empire and America. There were some half-dozen book 
 reviews which became the talk of the town. Who that read them 
 does not remember Stead’s onslaught on The Christian of Hall Caine 
 and his analysis of Miss Marie Corelli’s Barabbas? A curious little 
 collection of letters to Stead from famous authors whose books he 
 praised or blamed will one day be at the disposal of some literary 
 historian. Among those who have most reason to be grateful to him 
 
 1 Stead wrote scores of articles and delivered scores of addresses on the 
 subject of what he called the ‘Civic Church.’ In the Review of Reviews for 
 September 1896, he thus summarized his idea: 
 
 “The principle of the Civic Church, I need hardly remind our readers, is in 
 its essence nothing more than this, viz.: Get the best men on both sides to- 
 gether, and let them draw up a programme which may be regarded as the 
 irreducible minimum of what ought to be done. That there is such a con- 
 sensus of opinion upon all questions that agitate the nations is a faith that 
 has nowhere been preached more sedulously than in these pages. It is the 
 only true way in which we can arrive at the Catholic faith, it is the modern 
 variant of the old ecclesiastical saying which was held everywhere in all time 
 by all believers.’ This passage came in an extremely appreciative account of 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir) Horace Plunkett’s ‘Recess Committee,’ in which repre- 
 sentatives of all shades of Irish opinion had met together to discuss plans for 
 improving the industrial and agricultural condition of the country; one of the 
 happiest events in the modern history of Ireland, and, as Stead held, a 
 practical illustration of his ‘Civic Church’ in being. 
 
228 TE ey AUR r9''3 
 
 for quick appreciation and warm encouragement were writers so dis- 
 similar as Madame Sarah Grand and Mr. H. G. Wells and Miss 
 Elizabeth Robins. In his attitude towards books Stead was as 
 courageous as he was in regard to other matters, and he was frequently 
 up in arms on behalf of venturesome women condemned by Pharis- 
 aical male critics. ‘Victoria Cross’ owed largely to him the success 
 of her first novel, Anna Lombard ; and Mrs. Maud Churton Braby’s 
 Downward, although admired by critics so discriminating as Mr. 
 Galsworthy and Mr. Charles Marriott, would probably have 
 succumbed to stupid condemnation but for Stead’s warm words in 
 
 its defence. 
 * * * 
 
 One very important development of the Review of Reviews may 
 perhaps be dealt with here, although it was in an earlier retrospect, 
 entitled ‘After Seven Years,’ and printed in the issue for January 
 1897, that Stead himself had most to say about it: namely the 
 publication of his ‘Masterpiece Library.’ Here is his own record of 
 the starting of this venture: 
 
 “The great idea of the Review of Reviews has been to democratize 
 the best thought of the world. Carlyle long ago said that anyone who 
 had a sixpence was sovereign lord and emperor over all that that 
 sixpence will purchase. The Review of Reviews extended the sover- 
 eignty of the sixpence in the realm of literature farther than it had 
 ever been extended before. But the Review of Reviews of necessity 
 confined itself to periodical literature, and the movement of the 
 world from day to day. In the last two years I have been able to 
 extend the range of this principle of literary democratization by 
 bringing within its sweep a literature not of to-day, but of all the 
 yesterdays, so as to render available for the poorest English-speaking 
 man the best thoughts which the greatest thinkers expressed in the 
 purest style since our language first was fashioned. The publication 
 of the Masterpiece Library may be regarded as an offshoot from the 
 Review of Reviews, which for range and utility almost rivals the 
 growth of the parent tree. I began the publication of the Penny 
 Classics for the People with the publication of Lord Macaulay’s 
 “Lays of Ancient Rome” as the first number of an edition of Penny 
 Poets. The success that attended this venture was signal and imme- 
 diate. I followed up the publication of the ‘Lays’ by aseries of weekly 
 
10 hay Renee. Raypovnnne ound Recrecfites 
 Yfue mans fm eh See hece wee ahicdy mere 
 
 berteyncr frrohieat, Kat any me cau fad Gone bead, That 
 hh J have Gtry athed endl, Glia Krk. thr lie ben tomer G 
 
 hth @ ternt lus take bu uchey aud gucde & ace More alicaty 1 
 Gukicce, $¢6 fas frm at © dawn Cacul Em at Ke tort, of Meds 
 Me och Of hes ht beatae Will Le G adnectae att Ke cléw 
 
 hvth hee 100 & fromche Keer an 4 ay Gtttatew & ue 
 
 leche with Wheck Key ate filted the meght mane of Motern 
 Leia fia Cur mai wucedeis Confused, Woh 
 Rucwing uct, where G find Me fuccere arctete Hak he tegeceres 
 ROG if hen ony shen Lepolhen ate ban Venialy trae te Me 
 Larch | he defi iuratrfed. Men he otjeck of Hho 
 
 Ueyherviry b upp a Lae Hak mare, i: aa 
 epee te Gy ts he hae ff to eadrhee Conefiecctecer) 
 Fall lie beh Abele, a he magagencs bud lenses. Fawener- 
 thon, of lhe deat ke fer farrwucee may Crne, Ree Kaotieredte— 
 
 My deme br deeachle, ietet eee a 
 tech bak be att he he frcosrcats of ka) nent. aud Sage OG 
 © fine Wim beer wx: tbh Mey hea dtr, fone Yeuecal thea ber— 
 ae ee See, 
 ee: Band, Lice ta) loner 
 
 24 
 
 AN EXAMPLE OF W. T. STEAD’Ss HANDWRITING 
 Facsimile of the first page of the MS. of his ‘‘ Address” to 
 readers of the Leview of Reviews, Number 1. 
 
 Reproduced in facsimile by kind permission of 
 Mr. Clement K. Shorter. 
 
<_ 
 a vant 
 
 ; y 
 ir a 
 haga . 
 
 Ss 
 
 ie fo os 
 
 
 
Pies. in RAT O03 229 
 
 numbers until I had placed all the masterpieces of English Poetry in 
 the possession of the penny public. I think that I may say without 
 boasting, that I circulated more poetry of the first class in the twelve 
 months during which the Penny Poets were running than had ever 
 been circulated by any publisher in the English language. I cannot 
 but believe that the injection of so vast a body of the best English 
 poetry into the mind of the English-speaking people will bear good 
 results in the years that are to come. After the first forty-eight 
 numbers were published in the weekly issue, I confined the publica- 
 tion of the poets to one per month. Of the Penny Poets there have 
 been printed up to date no fewer than 5,000,000 in round numbers; 
 the exact figures at the moment of writing are 4,955,932.’ 
 
 Among these booklets there was one ‘double number,’ No. 51, 
 devoted to ‘Hymns that have Helped,’ a selection made from five 
 languages, and including the Marseillaise! It was an immense 
 success. 
 
 When the weekly issue of the Penny Poets came to an end, Stead 
 followed it up with an edition of condensed novels at the same price, 
 beginning with Rider Haggard’s She, of which nearly half a million 
 copies were very quickly sold. Thus was founded a publishing busi- 
 ness of first-rate importance in its way — one which still lives and 
 thrives under the control of Miss Estelle Stead. Perhaps the most 
 famous feature on its list is the series of volumes for children taken 
 from all the literatures of the world, known as ‘Books for the Bairns’ 
 — wonderful pennyworths, each with sixty-four pages of text and 
 pictures on every page. 
 
 These ‘Penny Steadfuls,’ as Punch was the first to call them, were 
 beyond a doubt the best antidote to the poison of our British ‘Penny 
 Dreadfuls’ that anyone had ever devised; and, although fastidious 
 critics were shocked by Stead’s temerity in cutting five-sixths or so 
 out of the chefs d’auvre of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and 
 Dickens and in providing fresh titles for poems which he felt their 
 authors had misnamed,! this new departure had on the whole a 
 
 1 For instance, he gave to Clough’s poem, “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuo- 
 lich,’ the title ‘The Love Story of a Young Man,’ in the confident belief “that 
 at least twenty persons would now read the poem for one who read it under 
 its old name.’ This led someone to remark in the World: ‘I wonder whether 
 the circulation of The Epic of Hades would be increased twenty-fold if it were 
 re-christened High Life Below Stairs? 
 
230 THE VY EAR 1903 
 
 remarkably good reception from the Press. I shall give a couple of 
 specimens from early reviews : the first from the pen of Stead’s old 
 acquaintance, Andrew Lang, gaily frivolous, as was his wont. It is 
 from an article in the Morning (a short-lived daily newspaper) for 
 December 30, 1895 —an article entitled ‘Mr. Stead’s Scissors’: 
 
 ‘Collaboration is usually a failure, but it would not be so if one 
 labourer were confined to the use of the abhorred shears. For a 
 moiety of the profits I will assist any really successful and popular 
 novelist (whom I can read at all) by cutting him down. Authors 
 cannot do it for themselves. I have written a novel (“Advt.”’) myself, 
 and tried to cut it down and compress it. I failed. I yawned over the 
 Conquerors, but my scissors refused to do their office. Had I only 
 known that Mr. Stead had his instrument ready I would have applied 
 to him with perfect confidence in his fortitude and goodwill. But it 
 is too late and he is, perhaps, at this moment shedding the life-blood 
 of Tom Fones. Indeed, he may have sent Thomas to the hulks, and 
 married Sofia to Blifil. I tremble as I think of what Mr. Stead, with 
 his passion for purity, may be doing to the foundling! I hear the 
 shrieks of Mr. Jones. I am a witness of his agony and despair! Out 
 of the virtuous life of Joseph Andrews, Lady Booby, I fear, must 
 depart, and it is to Mr. Stead that I look for a chaste family version 
 of Don Fuan.’ 
 
 My second extract also begins in jocular vein, but in its warm 
 appreciation it is characteristic of the great majority of the news- 
 papers. It is from the Dundee Advertiser of December 19, 1896: 
 
 “This is a wonderful age and not the least remarkable of its men is 
 Mr. W. T. Stead, past editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in its golden 
 days, present editor of one of the most remarkable of the magazines, 
 an author of half a dozen schemes that if put in practice would almost 
 revolutionize the world. He has just done crowning Joseph of 
 Birmingham King of Israel, and turning from that edifying diversion 
 — readers of his Review of Reviews Christmas Number will find it so — 
 he claims public attention with the issue of two dozen numbers of 
 his Penny Poets, in two neat cases, each containing twelve numbers, 
 and so fashioned as to grace any library shelf, no matter how patrician 
 may be the tastes of its owner. Perhaps, of all Mr. Stead’s life-work 
 this popularization of the master poets will remain his greatest and 
 
THE YEAR 1903 231 
 
 most useful achievement. To the firesides of the people he has by 
 this method brought the aerial roseate fancies of Keats, the sublime 
 pictures of Milton, the heathery braes and murmuring streams of 
 Burns, the idyllic pageants of Tennyson, the haunting echoes of 
 Moore, and the homely numbers of Whittier. What more need he 
 do! It is for the reading public to fitly recompense so far as it can one 
 of the foremost literary ventures of the age. (London: Review of 
 Reviews Office, 3s. per two sets.)’ 
 
 Of all Stead’s life-work, this was undoubtedly the achievement that 
 won him most universal applause. 
 
 IV 
 ON THE EVE OF THE NEW DEPARTURE 
 
 Stead’s Letter-book for the closing months of 1903 is worth glancing 
 through rapidly. ‘I am at the present moment in one of my high 
 moods,’ he wrote on October 25 to Mme. Selenka, a clever German 
 lady who had been a prominent member of the Stead-Moscheles- 
 Mijatovitch group at The Hague, ‘and am likely to remain so until 
 the beginning of the New Year, when I suppose I shall have to face 
 the realities and disillusions which come to all attempts to carry out 
 a great project, but I expect I shall start my long-talked of daily paper 
 in London at the beginning of January.’ 
 
 He remained in that ‘high mood’ — the right mood for a gamble! 
 Stead, in his frequent examinations of conscience, was not given to 
 calling himself a gambler, but a gambler he often was in business 
 matters, and this Daily Paper was the biggest gamble of all. ‘I have 
 not yet got the money,’ he writes on November 6 to his son Harry, 
 at that date en route to Melbourne, there to take over from Dr. 
 Fitchett the control of the Australian Review of Reviews, ‘but it 
 seems to me so absolutely certain that the paper will be a success that 
 I have ventured to go ahead. I do not really need more than £5,000 
 to start the paper, over and above the sum of £10,000 necessary to 
 pay the cost of the pictures.’ The ‘pictures,’ a selection of colour- 
 prints, were an expensive supplementary venture, intended to 
 
 1 Dr. Fitchett had been taking his own line over the war, and he and Stead 
 now agreed to part company. 
 
232 THE YEAR 1903 
 
 advertise and ‘boom’ the newspaper, whilst bringing in a large 
 revenue themselves. ‘They were to be issued simultaneously in port- 
 folios. 
 
 A week later he writes to Harry again to tell him about the ‘gorgeous 
 advertising dodges’ which he has in view — he wishes Harry were in 
 London to share in the fun! ‘At present,’ he says, ‘I am elaborating 
 an idea for sprinkling £100 over London in shillings, half-crowns, 
 five-shillings, ten shillings and {1 cheques, to be dropped from above 
 by means of a balloon — the great difficulty is to be sure that the balloon 
 will sail across London. My idea is to lower these cheques each in a 
 neat little envelope advertising the paper and letting them loose from 
 the balloon in small parachutes which would descend gracefully all 
 over London. It will cause the most almighty scramble that has ever 
 been known in history. I wanted to let off pilot balloons with slow 
 burning stars, but they say it is rather dangerous as it might set fire 
 to a warehouse. I think of having decorated steamers to go up and 
 down the river playing lovely music and displaying pictures. Also 
 firework displays in various parts of London. ... I have bespoken 
 Queen’s Hall for New Year’s Day’ — that was for a great inaugural 
 meeting of his helpers and sympathizers. ‘The New Year’s Day 
 meeting was to come off successfully enough, but the steamers had 
 to be dispensed with on grounds of expense and the local fireworks 
 were vetoed by the municipal authorities! 
 
 Stead’s American ally, Mr. John E. Milholland, is normally of as 
 sanguine a temperament as Stead’s own. As to this new project, 
 however, he evidently had his doubts. The Daily Paper ‘is going to 
 be a real slap-up success,’ Stead assures him, ‘although I know you 
 do not think so.’ 
 
 Another American friend who had no belief in the scheme was Mr. 
 Carnegie. In one of his earliest Christmas Annuals, ‘Mr. Carnegie’s 
 Conundrum,’ Stead had given his own solution to the problem how 
 that gentleman’s millions might best be spent. Now he wants the 
 Daily Paper to be used as ‘a very useful kind of Missionary Supple- 
 ment’ to the Carnegie Libraries. He explains just what could be 
 achieved for a subvention of £5,000 a year: what he contemplates is 
 a kind of literary ‘Revival’ movement, crying, as with the voice of the 
 Muezzin from his Minaret, ‘To your Books, to your Books!’ But 
 this, he intimates, would be merely a side-show, a by-product. He 
 wants from Mr. Carnegie no capital for the paper — the paper itself 
 
THE YEAR 1903 233 
 
 is his own concern. ‘I am putting into it all that I have made: - 
 burning my ships and mortgaging all I possess.’ 
 
 The circulation he is ‘aiming at’ or ‘counting upon’ — he sometimes 
 uses the one expression, sometimes the other—is, he informs 
 several correspondents, 200,000. Writing formally to his eldest son, 
 Willy, on November 2, to offer him the assistant editorship at {500 
 a year, he explains with absolute candour that the enterprise is a 
 speculative one. If at the end of the first month he has not secured 
 a circulation of 200,000 the paper will be dropped. ‘To other 
 prospective assistants he is equally explicit. 
 
 About half of the Letter-book is concerned with the Daily Paper, 
 the rest with Stead’s other interests of the moment, as multifarious 
 as ever: a brand new Cancer Cure; an estimable young Chinaman 
 who is investigating the English educational system; that letter to M. 
 de Plehve concerning Finland, of which we have heard already; a 
 discussion with Mr. Havelock Ellis concerning sexual abnormality; 
 lunch engagements with Lord Esher and Mr. Alfred Beit, and a 
 dozen: other friends, male and female; and political recriminations, 
 caustic but good-humoured, with Dr. Jameson, Dr. Rutherford 
 Harris and Earl Grey. And a hundred other matters. Nearly all the 
 letters are written in that sanguine frame of mind to which Stead 
 confessed in addressing Mme. Selenka. Our next chapter will have 
 to tell of the ‘realities and disillusions.’ 
 
 1 In a letter to his son Harry, written in March, 1904, after the failure of the 
 Daily Paper, Stead estimates the total net loss involved at £35,000. He 
 calculates that, with the help of the money forthcoming regularly from the 
 American Review of Reviews, which for some time previously had exceeded 
 £5,000 a year, but which might decrease to £3,000, and by means of drastic 
 economies at home and at Mowbray House (including the reduction of his 
 own salary as editor of the Review of Reviews by £500 a year) he would be 
 
 able in time to meet his liabilities. Eventually a very rich South African 
 friend came handsomely to his relief. 
 
CHAPTER 27 
 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 I 
 THE DAILY PAPER 
 
 TEAD’S first Daily Paper was still-born — his second died within 
 
 five weeks. This second set-back threatened to prove a tragedy. 
 To use a phrase of his own,! Stead seemed to have ‘gone under’ for 
 good. But within a very few months of his discomfiture he was 
 ‘bobbing up’ again. 
 
 In the history of the English Press the Daily Paper of 1904 will be 
 allotted at most a page or two — perhaps it will be dismissed in less 
 than a dozen lines. But its birth, brief existence, and sudden death, 
 formed a unique episode in Stead’s career and gave it a new direction, 
 first sending him to South Africa and subsequently turning him into 
 a student of the stage. 
 
 It was risky always to foretell failure for Stead, because the leading 
 of difficult enterprises and forlorn hopes was his métier, and his 
 unlooked-for successes more than once made pessimists look foolish; 
 but among ‘expert’ observers there was probably only the one view, 
 whether made public or kept private, about this new journalistic 
 enterprise of his: it was doomed from the start. A letter which Stead 
 received from the well-known newspaper-proprietor, Sir John Leng, 
 from Dundee, dated January 6, 1904, expresses this almost universal 
 opinion. ‘I am watching with interest what you are doing,’ Sir John 
 Leng wrote: ‘at the same time, Iam very doubtful whether in view 
 of the halfpenny papers in London, your present venture will be 
 successful. Your motives and intentions are excellent and have my 
 cordial sympathy, but I doubt whether there will be a sufficient 
 demand for a new paper issued midway between the morning and 
 evening papers’ (this was one essential item of Stead’s plan) ‘at a 
 time when men are at work, children at school, and women engaged 
 in their domestic affairs.’ 
 
 It seems certain that Sir John Leng was right in this, and that even 
 if the actual contents of the Daily Paper had been all Stead intended 
 them to be, there was no real chance for it. As things turned out, the 
 paper did not come up to its founder’s ideal in any respect, and the 
 
 1 See p. 21. 
 234 
 
Paes Wha Reet. 4 235 
 
 arrangements which had been made for its production and distri- 
 bution were faulty in the extreme. It was a fiasco from the start, its 
 first issue not being ready ‘on time’ and its contents being, on the 
 whole, a great disappointment. Its failure was immediate and 
 irretrievable. Poor Stead broke down completely next day. The 
 Daily Paper’s last issue, that for February 9, contained the following 
 ‘Address to my Readers’: 
 
 “The whole scheme of this newspaper was so novel and so complex 
 that it entailed far more than the ordinary amount of work in its 
 production. For, as it was stated from the first, my aim was not 
 merely to create a paper for the Home and all its inmates, but to 
 build up, upon the circulation of that paper, an organization which 
 would in time be able to be useful to its subscribers as a means of 
 mutual co-operation for all kinds of social service. The conception 
 of the Daily Paper as a living link, binding all its readers into one 
 great comradeship — with local depots as so many nerve-centres, and 
 a messenger brigade as a daily renewed symbol of service — was 
 sound in its essence; and some day will be carried out with far greater 
 effect than I have ventured to dream of. 
 
 ‘But the attempt to improvise everything all out of one’s own head, 
 as the children say, is ever a perilous undertaking, and in this case 
 it proved too much for the head. After seeing the second issue of the 
 Daily Paper through the press I was prostrated for the first time in 
 my life by a severe nervous collapse, which rendered it impossible 
 for me to continue attendance at the office. My doctor looked grave, 
 ordered me away instantly to the South of France, prescribed 
 absolute cessation of all work, and predicted that if I did not obey his 
 mandate I might wake up some morning and find my memory a total 
 blank. I did not dare give up without a struggle. I continued to edit 
 the paper after a fashion — at first from Wimbledon, and then, when 
 the perpetual clang of the telephone drove me further afield, from 
 my sea-side cottage. The task of bringing out the paper from day to 
 day was undertaken by my staff, to whose loyalty, zeal, and affection 
 I cannot pay too high a tribute. My share in the work was, perforce, 
 limited to writing the leader and some of the occasional notes, and 
 compiling the daily “Matins.”’ I hoped against hope that I should 
 recover my health and nervous energy sufficiently to resume the place 
 allotted to me in the production of the paper, 
 
236 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 ‘Alas! It was not to be. Despite the unwearying devotion of my 
 wife and family, my health did not improve, and the prospect of being 
 able to undertake the effective direction of the paper faded into the 
 dim distance. A long sea voyage and complete abstention from 
 journalistic work are prescribed as essential for my recovery. So I 
 am off to South Africa on Thursday.’ 
 
 #t # # 
 
 The debut of any new journal has its interest for those of us who 
 have been connected with the Press, and as immense numbers of 
 Stead’s friends and admirers may be included in this category, I am 
 tempted to devote some space to that ill-fated first issue. It is full of 
 vivid memories for myself because for the first fortnight I acted as 
 Stead’s ‘literary editor’ — that is to say, I looked after the columns 
 which were allotted to book-reviews: it was my first opportunity of 
 working under him and I had looked forward to it eagerly. For me, 
 in obscurity ‘behind the wings,’ as for him in the limelight in the 
 centre of the stage, that year, 1904, was to be fateful. 
 
 The first page of all was, from the standpoint of a very large section 
 of Stead’s sympathizers, almost above criticism. Mr. Henry Holiday 
 had put all his heart and craftsmanship into a large decorative cartoon, 
 suggested by Wordsworth’s line, “True to the kindred points of 
 Heaven and Home,’ and this was very well reproduced. There was a 
 column of cheery and vigorous notes signed by Stead himself under 
 the headline, “To my Readers: Greeting!’ The arrangement of the 
 whole page was symmetrical and quite effective. On page 2, filling 
 six half-columns, came an enthusiastic outline of a grandiose scheme 
 for a great never-ending contemporaneous Romance of the World, 
 told by England’s cleverest story-tellers.1 Page 3 was, if possible, 
 more Stead-like still: in its centre a large ‘Public House Map of 
 Paddington’; above and below this, and to either side, sensationally 
 displayed particulars of a Census of Visitors to the Public Houses in 
 question on Sunday, December 27.2 
 
 1 See Appendix II. 
 
 2 Mr. Albert H. Wilkerson, of the National Liberal Club, was responsible 
 for the Census. He opened an office for it in Paddington and employed 550 
 ‘enumerators.’ He proposed to put as a headline to his Report, ‘Worshippers 
 at the Shrine of Bacchus,’ but Stead disapproved. ‘He smiled,’ Mr. Wilker- 
 son writes me, ‘but said that the problem was so grave that he did not wish 
 to treat it sensationally. He wished the facts presented merely to draw the 
 attention of thoughtful reformers.’ 
 
THE YEAR 1r904 237 
 
 The principal feature of page 4 was a so-called ‘Eye Witness’s’ 
 account, dated January 4, 1642, of King Charles’s Coup d’Etat; while 
 in neighbouring columns Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., expressed his 
 approval of the ‘Portfolio of Pictures’ which accompanied the issue, 
 and Lady Aberdeen, another unfailing well-wisher, extolled Stead’s 
 idea for a Daily Paper ‘Girls’ Messenger Brigade.’ Page 5 was ‘For 
 the Bairns — Old and Young.’ Next came, on page 6, ‘Our Aims,’ 
 followed by an interview with Pius X, specially secured by Mr. 
 George Lynch — trust Stead not to leave out the Pope! And then, on 
 page 7, News of the Day, Home and Foreign. Page 8 was mine - 
 two columns of the Daily Paper’s Literary Programme, and four 
 columns of publishers’ advertisements. An elaborate scheme for 
 local depots which were to establish the paper securely in every 
 district of London filled half of page 10. Page 9, page 11 (with 
 anecdotes and an insurance coupon) and page 12 were filled with 
 advertisements. 
 
 A delightful, refreshing, uplifting paper: so it seemed to Stead’s 
 thick-and-thin supporters — people who, with good enough reason, 
 deplored the character of our average London daily, with its divorce- 
 court revelations, its betting news and its sordid and conscienceless 
 catering to the lowest tastes. 
 
 Even among men of the world there were a few to applaud. ‘I 
 consider that a most masterly piece of journalism,’ wrote Mr. 
 Henniker Heaton, M.P., from the Carlton Club, on January 14, with 
 reference to the Public House page, ‘and I am, as you know, an old 
 newspaper hand.’ He had subscribed to the paper from its first issue, 
 he went on to declare, ‘because I think, and have always said, you are 
 the IDEAL journalist.’ 
 
 Other friends were less encouraging. ‘Not in Stead’s usual form,’ 
 they said among themselves, dubiously: ‘will he be able to pull it 
 through?’ 
 
 ‘A crank production of the most hopeless kind’-—such was the 
 verdict alike of the Expert Newspaper Man and the Man in the 
 Street. 
 
 With what zest and with what high hopes I compiled those two 
 book-columns of my own! I was making, I felt, a fresh start in life. 
 For years I had been just ‘jogging along’ happy-go-luckily on the 
 editorial staff of Cassell and Co., interested enough in my work and 
 keenly appreciative of the pleasant society into which it brought me 
 
238 THE YEAR T904 
 
 — that of authors and artists, for the most part — but not altogether 
 contented with my lot and extremely critical of the elderly gentlemen 
 who controlled the fortunes of the firm. Here, on this new venture 
 of the wonderful Stead, I saw my chance of success! 
 
 And what a difference there was between Stead’s reception of my 
 ideas and the apathy or alarm of Cassell and Co.’s Directors when- 
 ever I had submitted to them some — as IJ thought — promising new 
 project! I had met Stead several times previously, but he knew 
 nothing of me. All the more gratifying was his swift and warm 
 responsiveness. Pacing up and down the room — his Mowbray House 
 sanctum — he listened with keen attention to what I had to propose. 
 A two-column signed review, under the heading, ‘The Book of the 
 Day,’ was one item in my scheme — the term was to be justified by 
 the ‘unprecedented promptness’ with which these particular books 
 should be noticed. These signed reviews were to be contributed not 
 by professional journalists exclusively, but by brilliant writers of all 
 kinds.2 I was very full of all my notions and Stead took to them 
 instantaneously, engaging me there and then on my own terms. 
 Never, it seemed to me, could such an interview have gone off so 
 auspiciously. 
 
 Stead made one remark, however, which took my breath away. 
 ‘Lord Wolseley,’ he said, ‘will be ready to do one of those signed 
 reviews for us. He is doing an article of another kind for me already 
 —an article advocating universal military service.’ So far, so well: 
 I knew that Stead, though so strong for Peace, believed in keeping 
 up, provisionally, our national defences. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘I’ve 
 warned Wolseley that it must be universal military service for women 
 as well as men.’ 
 
 Universal Military Service for women as well as men! — How 
 utterly preposterous it sounded in 1904! I retailed it everywhere as 
 a good story. But how differently it sounds now in this new England 
 
 1 A year or two later the general managership passed into the hands of Mr. 
 (now Sir) Arthur Spurgeon, who soon improved immensely the prospects 
 of the business. 
 
 2 My team of reviewers during that first fortnight was really a rather good 
 one, be it I that say it! It included Mrs. Meynell and Max Beerbohm and 
 G. K. Chesterton, all at their best; Harold Begbie and Edgar Jepson, both 
 in very good form; and the late Mr. Arthur Diosy, the brilliant lecturer, who 
 had never previously appeared in this r6le. The uniform payment for the 
 articles was five guineas, a very reasonable fee, but soon found too high for 
 the Daily Paper’s resources. 
 
DHE YEAR 1904 239 
 
 of the W.A.A.C.’s and the W.R.E.N.’s! It was an uncanny example 
 of Stead’s prescience. 
 
 Among the friends to whom I told the story at the time was G. K. 
 Chesterton, who capped it with one from his own experience — an 
 illustration, this, of Stead’s appetite for new ideas of any kind pro- 
 vided they seemed to aim at the welfare of humanity. Chesterton had 
 broached in some weekly review the suggestion that the English 
 Circulating Library system ought to be extended and improved by 
 application to human beings. Might not the happiness of the sub- 
 scribers be immensely increased by circulating among them, by the 
 week or fortnight, the cheerful Mr. This, the stimulating Mr. That 
 or the sympathetic Miss So-and-so. The necessary ‘Rules’ and 
 suitable “Subscription Terms’ Chesterton indicated merely in rough 
 outline and, having filled his column, he forgot all about the matter. 
 Within twenty-four hours, however, he was to find that his seed had 
 taken root in the most fertile soil for such seed in the whole world — 
 the brain of the Editor of the Review ef Reviews. An urgent letter 
 came to him by express post: could he lunch with Mr. W. T. Stead 
 to-morrow? He could and did, and in the course of a couple of hours 
 of intensive cultivation at Gatti and Rodesano’s (used habitually by 
 Stead as a forcing house no less than as a feeding place) the bene- 
 volent project came miraculously to flower — or very nearly. 
 
 It is a dismal business to look through the little bundle of letters — 
 the great bulk of them seem to have been destroyed long ago — which 
 still survive as relics of that journalistic shipwreck. A couple of 
 sentences will suffice to show how everything seemed to go wrong. 
 “There is a villainous blunder in it,’ writes Mr. R. Crozier Long on 
 January 7, about an article on naval defence — an article to which 
 Stead, as a foremost authority on the subject himself, had attached 
 special importance. ‘The passage in question reads’ Mr. Long says: 
 ‘as for Britain, we have submarines and plenty of them.’ And 
 Stead’s whole point was that Britain ought to have plenty of them! 
 By February 8 the paper was at its last gasp, almost, and by some 
 mischance for which neither Stead himself nor any of his close 
 associates was responsible a curt letter of dismissal had been sent to 
 every member of the staff. Young Willie Stead in a letter to his 
 father, full of deep feeling, writes that he would gladly give £100 for 
 that letter not to have been written. ‘I know I shall have your 
 
240 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 support,’ he adds, ‘in insisting that a civil note at least shall be sent 
 round to the staff which has worked splendidly.’ 
 
 At last, on Monday, February 14, Stead obeyed his doctor’s orders, 
 starting not for the South of France, however, but for the Cape, 
 accompanied by his elder daughter. They travelled by the Shaw- 
 Saville steamship, Athenie. On the previous Saturday, he had ad- 
 dressed the following letter to all the members of his staff: 
 
 ‘MOWBRAY HOUSE, 
 ‘NORFOLK STREET, STRAND. 
 
 ( ‘February 11, 1904. 
 MY DEAR FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES, 
 
 ‘I had expected at this moment to be on the sea. But business 
 detained me, and I shall not join the ship until Saturday at Plymouth. 
 
 ‘Iam glad to have an opportunity of once more expressing to you, 
 each and all, my deep sense of gratitude to you all for your zealous, 
 loyal and most capable service in the month during which the Daily 
 Paper was published in London. 
 
 ‘I have to explain to you all how it is that the settlement of my 
 liabilities to you must be arranged. My friends have very kindly 
 undertaken to relieve me of all strictly legal liabilities to employés 
 and creditors, but they have refused to go one step beyond the strict 
 legalities of existing contracts and obligations. 
 
 ‘But I fully recognize that in some cases there is a difference between 
 legal and moral liabilities, and I have to ask you in consideration of the 
 extreme difficulties of the present situation to be so kind and generous 
 to your late chief as to defer the question of moral liabilities until such 
 time as I return from South Africa, when I promise you that I will 
 undertake to discharge to the best of my power the moral obligation 
 incurred by me to you. 
 
 ‘As to the nature and extent of these obligations I of course can say 
 nothing. Each of you knows how far in your own judgment I am 
 indebted to you in a financial sense over and above the legal liabilities 
 which will be promptly met. 
 
 ‘Neither can I say anything positive about my future capacity to 
 discharge liabilities of any kind. All that is in the future. But the 
 future is in the hands of God and He has helped me so often and so 
 wonderfully in the past, I venture with all humility to hope that He 
 will see me even through this difficulty. 
 
 ‘I greet you lovingly and gratefully. ’Tis not in mortals to command 
 
THE YEAR trogo04 241 
 
 success, but you at least have deserved it. I wish you had not had to 
 lament that your chief was not equally deserving. 
 ‘May God bless you and bring us all together again some day, 
 somehow, somewhen, somewhere, 
 ‘Is the hearty prayer of 
 ‘Yours gratefully, 
 ‘(Signed) W. T. STEAD.’ 
 
 II 
 SOUTH AFRICA: STEAD AND MILNER 
 
 “The severe disappointments of later years have not left you 
 unaffected. The Peace Crusade was not quite a success. When 
 d’Estournelles was over here, you were forgotten. The Nobel Prize 
 went to England, but not to you. Rhodes died and you found your- 
 self out of the Will. The great Rhodes scheme has dwindled down to 
 mere scholarships. Then came your paper. You staked everything 
 on it; it was to be your great hit. You had not the capital, but that 
 did not prevent you from starting in grand style.. No doubt you 
 thought that necessary in our age; but cautious development was 
 imperative. Continuous worry unnerved you, and the great crash 
 came. You went to S.A. where you had friends on all sides — all the 
 more reason for being cautious. That is what I meant to tell you at 
 Hayling; but you were all buoyant, or anxious to appear so.’ — DR. 
 BORNS, of Wimbledon, to Stead, April 22, 1904. 
 
 A Pessimist, some one has said, is a person who has lived with an 
 Optimist. The writer of a very long communication from which the 
 above sentences are taken had not precisely lived with Stead, but he 
 had been for a good many years associated with him as tutor to his 
 children, especially to his sons. It was not a very cheerful missive to 
 receive on returning from a rest cure, but it did not do Stead’s spirits 
 any harm. Cape Town had proved a vigorous stimulant to him 
 during his stay there: his troubles had receded at once into the dim 
 distance, and he had made an entirely new ‘sensation.’ On Monday, 
 March 14, in the drawing-room of a well-known Dutch lady, Mrs. 
 Koopmans-De Wet, he had delivered a speech, the echoes of which 
 were still reverberating throughout South Africa! 
 
 The occasion was a gathering called together in honour of two men 
 of note whose attitude during the war had brought them into conflict 
 
 L.S. — VOL. II Q 
 
242 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 with the British Government, Mr. F. S. Malan, a leading lawyer and 
 politician, and Mr. Albert Cartwright, a prominent journalist. Both 
 had been sent to prison for publishing articles reflecting upon the 
 British method of conducting the war. Stead, suddenly called upon 
 to address the company, let himself go! He began with a warm 
 panegyric on Dutch bravery and, speaking as an Englishman who 
 loved his country, he thanked his hearers and all those whom they 
 represented ‘for the splendid service they had done in battling for all 
 the principles which had made England great, in defence of those 
 principles which alone made the Empire possible,’ and for contend- 
 ing, even to death, against those who were as false as George III had 
 been to the true English ideal. This was the keynote of the main 
 portion of the speech, listened to with deep emotion, we may be sure, 
 by men and women who for years past had not heard such language 
 from English lips; but Stead was never satisfied with mere senti- 
 ments, he was always for action, and what he was leading up to was a 
 practical suggestion. Ought not the story of South African heroism 
 to be enshrined in a full, complete, authentic history? He developed 
 the proposal thus in his concluding words: 
 
 ‘What he thought was wanted was not so much a history in the 
 ordinary sense of the word, as materials which would supply the 
 future historian with authentic and adequately attested evidence 
 taken at first hand of what South Africans had suffered for South 
 Africa. The immense balance of suffering was on their side, but the 
 record should be impartial, scientific, comprehensive, and should 
 include the personal narrative of every South African man and every 
 South African woman on either side who had suffered in the war for 
 what they believed to be the welfare of South Africa. 
 
 ‘His friend, Mrs. Olive Cronwright-Schreiner, with a poet’s in- 
 stinct, preferred that the memory of the sacrifices of those times 
 should have no other prompter than the sacred legend which South 
 African mothers would whisper to their children, which they in turn 
 would submit to future generations. He thought that legendary 
 tradition might well be supplemented by written materials for the 
 future historian. In England they had the Roll of Battle Abbey, which 
 recorded the names of the Norman William’s captains and knights 
 whom he led nine centuries ago to assert his claim to the throne of 
 England. To this day it was the proudest boast of English nobles 
 
THE YEAR 1904 | 243 
 
 that the names of their ancestors were inscribed in that list. The 
 record which he was pressing upon their attention would be the 
 Golden Book of South African Heroism, and nine hundred years 
 hence South Africans would take an honest pride in pointing their 
 children to the well-attested record which told how their ancestors 
 had counted not their lives dear to them, but gladly laid them down 
 in the service of South Africa. 
 
 “Now was the time to begin the collection of this evidence. In every 
 district, in every farm where were to be found those who had suffered, 
 and those who had mourned their dead, the statements of those 
 sorrows of the war should be carefully collected, sifted and recorded 
 in some permanent form. In that Golden Book of South African 
 Heroism should be found the full name and address of every man, 
 woman or child who had died for South Africa on either side, and it 
 should be a full and final account of the sufferings and losses borne 
 by South Africa as a result of the war. 
 
 “You owe it (he said) to your own people to make this record before 
 the witnesses may pass away or their memory becomes dim, and you 
 owe it also to the world at large, in order that it may at last know on 
 authority which cannot be gainsaid how little progress has been made 
 in the civilizing and humanizing of war. Those who dread such a 
 great national inquest will denounce this proposition on the plea that 
 it will revive old and bitter memories of the war, and so mar the 
 coming era of peace and conciliation. As if the memories of the war 
 ever slumbered in the minds of those who have buried their dead! 
 No. Believe me, the era of peace and conciliation will not really have 
 begun in South Africa until all South Africans have learned to take 
 an honest pride in the memory of the heroism displayed by South 
 African men and still more by South African women during the war, 
 and nothing will help more than the compilation of such a record as 
 I have suggested. The day of peace and conciliation will have really 
 dawned when South Africans have learned to say of each other, not 
 with scorn or aversion, ‘“‘he was a rebel” or “he was a loyalist,” but 
 only “he was one of the heroes of South Africa who was true to what 
 he believed to be the duty which he owed to his country and his 
 God.” Then and not till then!’ (Loud applause). 
 
 The speech was reported in the South African News for March 14, 
 and Stead immediately distributed a four-leaf reprint of it headed 
 
244 TIE OY EAR 904 
 
 “The Golden Book of South African Heroism,’ throughout the whole 
 country. It was a characteristically rash thing to do, considering the 
 intense bitterness which still existed between the two white races. 
 Its first and most dramatic result was a message from Lord Milner, 
 then at Johannesburg. Four days previously Lord Milner had tele- 
 graphed in answer to an inquiry from Stead as to whether they could 
 meet, the one word ‘Yes.’ Stead now received this second telegram, 
 also from Johannesburg: 
 
 ‘t5th March. In view of your speech at Cape ‘Town reported in 
 yesterday’s papers please regard my telegram of 1oth March as 
 cancelled.’ 
 
 Lord Milner’s feeling of resentment and indignation over Stead’s 
 behaviour was, of course, shared by the immense majority of the 
 British in South Africa; and even among the Dutch and the British 
 who sympathized with the Dutch the ‘Golden Book’ suggestion was 
 widely regretted. Olive Schreiner’s feeling, to which Stead alluded, . 
 prevailed generally. ‘I had read your speech before I got your letter,’ 
 wrote to Stead a distinguished spokesman of the Cape pro-Boers, 
 ‘and I am bound to add with feelings of infinite pain.’ Having 
 reminded Stead somewhat acrimoniously that, by his encouragement 
 of Rhodes, he himself had been to a great degree responsible for the 
 war, the writer proceeds: ‘Now, when we are trying, God knows with 
 what sore hearts, to bind up the wounds and to repair the shattered 
 fabric of society, you come out and, to make an afternoon holiday, 
 you tear all the old wounds open, and teach, if I understand you 
 aright, the doctrine of unforgetfulness—the same doctrine that 
 Hamilcar taught Hannib'l.... If the two races are to be always 
 reminding each other of their injuries, and if the relations are to be 
 those of English and Irish in Ireland, then there is no hope for South 
 Africa. . . . Memories there will be of course, but to dwell on them 
 more than we can help seems to me to be a damnable policy.’ 
 
 In a very interesting but somewhat fo mless | ttle volume, entitled 
 The Best or the Worst of Empires, consisting in part of his reflections 
 upon the great Liberal victory of 1906 and in part of the letters which 
 he sent to an American journal! from South Africa in 1904, Stead 
 describes his astonishment at the commotion made by this Cape 
 Town speech. 
 
 1 The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia. 
 
DHE YEAR 1904 245 
 
 He is a little uncandid in implying that only the ‘Loyalists’ con- 
 demned it, but he reveals the fact that it did not bring him much 
 approval from the pro-Boers or Dutch. He tells how, ‘in order to 
 dispel the nonsensical notion that I had endeavoured to stir up strife, 
 when I was in reality endeavouring to unite the two races in a mutual 
 act of patriotic piety,’ he had the leaflet addressed to every man of 
 influence and position in the country, with circular letters which he 
 proceeds to transcribe. That he did not receive many replies, he 
 adds, “did not surprise me. My chief object was attained by the issue 
 of the circular.’ 
 
 If the speech was an indiscretion, it had no very serious conse- 
 quences. It certainly did not spoil Stead’s visit to South Africa, for 
 both he and his daughter seem to have enjoyed themselves to the 
 utmost; they went everywhere and saw everything, and were en- 
 thusiastically féted. A visit to Dr. Jameson at Groote Schuur was 
 the experience which meant most to Stead himself. We can imagine 
 his joy and excitement on finding himself in the home of Cecil 
 Rhodes! 
 
 The one misfortune which threatened was the loss of Milner’s 
 friendship — that would have been a misfortune indeed. But Milner’s 
 feeling for Stead, like Edmund Garrett’s, was deep rooted, and the 
 two were to meet again upon terms of warm regard. These lines from 
 a letter written on January 1, 1907, in somewhat belated reply to a 
 note from Stead, made a singularly welcome New Year’s greeting: 
 
 “There has been nothing personal in the causes of the separa- 
 tion between us — just a profound difference in our own attitude to 
 national affairs, which unfortunately is what we both care most about. 
 And this, I fear, continues, and is likely to continue. But, as I have 
 not the least doubt that you are quite as sincere and disinterested as 
 Iam myself, I can only regard this as a misfortune, not an injury done 
 by you to me any more than it is the converse. 
 
 “There was a special reason why I thought it better we should not 
 meet in South Africa. I was captain of a ship which you were — no 
 doubt from the highest motives — doing your best to sink. I am no 
 longer captain of that, or any, ship, but just a private citizen, no doubt 
 with strong views on public affairs but with nothing in my charge — 
 a position more congenial to me than public office. That being the 
 case, there is no reason why we should not meet on private ground 
 
246 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 or even on neutral public ground. And whether we do or not please 
 be assured that I have always retained, towards you and Mrs. Stead, 
 the affection springing from our old intimacy and your kindness to 
 me in former days, and that it is in no mere perfunctory or conven- 
 tional sense that I wish you both all future happiness, and sign myself, 
 ‘Yours ever, 
 ‘MILNER.’ 
 
 III 
 STEAD BECOMES A PLAYGOER 
 
 A cutting from one of the weekly illustrated papers — the Bystander 
 for October 26, 1904 — recalls to mind something of the excitement 
 aroused that autumn by Stead’s debut as a playgoer. The Bystander 
 is quite annoyed. ‘All the Press of the United Kingdom,’ it com- 
 plains, ‘has been commenting on Mr. Stead’s first visit to the theatre 
 as though it were a matter of nationalimportance.’ And it proceeds to 
 scoff at his ‘genius for self-advertisement,’ declaring that ‘no one can 
 compete with him in the ability to obtain general notoriety without 
 payment.’ 
 
 The desire for advertisement, I suspect, did count for more in this 
 exploit than in almost any other in Stead’s whole career. His motives, 
 at all events, must have been more than usually mixed. For years 
 past Miss Elizabeth Robins had been urging him to help towards the 
 regeneration of the stage in England, and he had begun to feel that 
 perhaps she was right: that was one motive. Natural curiosity must 
 have been another. But the not less natural anxiety to score once 
 again a big, popular success, make the whole town talk, and revive 
 the diminished fortunes of the Review of Reviews — thus showing that, 
 despite his Daily Paper disaster, there was life in the old dog yet! - 
 will, perhaps, have been the factor which really prevailed. 
 
 From the strictly business point of view it was a risky speculation. 
 The sales of the Review would go up in some quarters — especially in 
 London; but they might drop heavily elsewhere. The Advertising 
 Manager, apprehensive of protests, and possible boycotting, from the 
 Nonconformists, was strongly against the experiment. Stead had 
 taken his decision, however, and was not to be dissuaded. 
 
 He owed the idea in the first place to Sir Henry Irving, who had 
 broached it as far back as 1886. The London playgoing world, like 
 
THE YEAR 1904 247 
 
 cod in the trawler’s tank, had become torpid and lethargic: a catfish 
 in the tank would wake them up.! But in the ’eighties Stead was still 
 too much of a Puritan. It was in 1891 that Miss Robins had begun 
 to talk to him and in time he had begun to listen to her. To her 
 persuasions had been added those of many others, among them the 
 most influential of our critics, Mr. William Archer, who now rejoiced 
 over Stead’s conversion. It was by far the most important piece of 
 theatrical news of the day, Mr. Archer declared in the Morning 
 Leader. ‘The theatre is too strong, too deep-rooted in human nature,’ 
 he continued, ‘to be crushed by neglect or denunciation. Its animal 
 vitality, so to speak, is not impaired by the discountenance of the 
 sober-minded and intelligent classes. It laughs at the Puritan boy- 
 cott and goes on its wanton way, with all its baser instincts strength- 
 ened and its higher impulses proportionately enfeebled. That Mr. 
 Stead should have realized this, and should have determined to face 
 a responsibility which he has hitherto shirked, is, I repeat, the best of 
 good news. It will be extremely interesting to see what impression 
 the theatre makes upon his vivid imagination and his keen intelligence, 
 unwarped by tradition, unblunted by familiarity.’ 
 # # * 
 
 Stead’s introductory article appeared in the Review of Reviews for 
 July under the heading ‘First Impressions of the Theatre.’ — I. 
 ‘From the Outside.’ He began autobiographically thus: 
 
 ‘How comes it that I should have reached my fifty-fifth year without 
 ever having been to the theatre? To answer that question in the 
 simplest, frankest fashion is the first duty I owe to my readers. 
 
 ‘STARTING POINT 
 
 ‘I was born and brought up in a home where life was regarded ever 
 as the vestibule of Eternity, and where everything that tended to 
 waste time, which is life in instalments, was regarded as an evil thing. 
 In nothing is there a greater contrast than between the ordinary 
 conception of time of the man in the street and that which prevails in 
 the Puritan household. To one, time is often a bore, a thing to be 
 killed, and one of the chief arts of life is how to pass it as quickly as 
 possible. To the other, time is the most precious of things, graciously 
 
 1See Mr. H. W. Nevinson’s parable in that admirable book, Essays in 
 Freedom and Rebellion, from which I have borrowed the simile. 
 
248 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 given to mortal man as an invaluable trust for all manner of uses, on 
 the right employment of which from day to day and from hour to 
 hour depends our eternal welfare. We lived our early days in the 
 spirit of the opening lines of the familiar hymn: 
 
 ‘Time is earnest, passing by, 
 Death is earnest, drawing nigh; 
 Sinner, wilt thou trifling be? 
 Time and death appeal to thee.” 
 
 ‘Cecil Rhodes’s bitter cry in the hour and article of death — “‘So 
 much to do, so little done’’ — was a sentiment which found more or 
 less articulate expression at the close of every day as the family 
 assembled for evening prayers. 
 
 ‘THE STEWARDSHIP OF TIME 
 
 ‘Each of us was born into a world full of duties and responsibilities 
 which we could only discharge by the strenuous and unremitting use 
 of every available waking hour. To mention only one thing, there 
 were so many books to be read, there was so much to be learned of 
 the world in which we lived, so much to be mastered before we could 
 gain even a glimmering vision of the majesty and glory of past ages, 
 that life was all too short. Instead of finding time hang heavy on our 
 hands, we never had time enough to get through what ought to have 
 been done. Being thus trained from earliest childhood to the 
 strenuous life, the starting-point from which we looked at all ques- 
 tions differed toto celo from that of those to whom ennui was a reality. 
 To the latter leisure was given for amusement. To us it was lent for 
 use, and woe be to the unprofitable servant who wasted the talent thus 
 entrusted to his stewardship. 
 
 ‘SUICIDE BY INSTALMENTS 
 
 ‘If life was spent as ever in the Taskmaster’s eye, if upon our 
 utilization of the fleeting moment might depend the very salvation of 
 souls — our own and those of our brethren — through the endless ages 
 of eternity, it is obvious that amusement of all kinds would be sternly 
 relegated to a subordinate position. We might amuse ourselves, but 
 only in order to recuperate our energies for the diligent performance 
 of the work of life. ‘To make amusement the preoccupation of all our 
 spare time, to regard it in any other light than as a means of the 
 
THE YEAR* 1904 249 
 
 recreation of mental and physical strength necessary to fit us 
 adequately for the discharge of the daily duties, for the due perform- 
 ance of which we each of us had to answer hereafter before the 
 judgment seat of the Eternal, was a monstrous perversion, a grievous 
 sin. To kill time was to commit suicide by instalments. 
 
 ‘THE DIABOLIC TRINITY 
 
 ‘Hence in our North Country manse a severe interdict was laid upon 
 all time-wasting amusements which did not directly minister to the 
 restoration of moral, or physical energy, and especially was the 
 interdict severe upon those methods of dissipation which were so 
 fascinating as to make them dangerous rivals to the claims of duty. 
 “Do you ever go to the Derby?” I asked a lad on Derby Day. “No, 
 sir,” he replied stoutly, “it is a temptation.”’ He was right. But there 
 were many other temptations than the racecourse. Among them in 
 my youth three stood conspicuous from the subtlety of their allure- 
 ment, and the deadly results which followed yielding to their seduc- 
 tions. The first was the Theatre, which was the Devil’s Chapel; the 
 second was Cards, which were the Devil’s Prayer Book; and the third 
 was the Novel, which was regarded as a kind of Devil’s Bible, whose 
 meretricious attractions waged an unholy competition against the 
 reading of God’s Word. Where novel-reading comes in Bible-reading 
 goes out, was a belief which, after all, has much to justify it in the 
 experience of mankind. 
 
 ‘NOVELS AND CARDS 
 
 ‘All three were on our Index Expurgatorius. I was in my teens 
 before I was allowed to read Scott’s novels, a concession granted on 
 the ground that they were a species of literature apart from the 
 ordinary romance. As for cards, to this day I cannot tell their names. 
 Whist is to me as Chinese; and as for Bridge, it is an unfathomed 
 mystery. I can well remember the sentiment of horror, not unmixed 
 with dread, when, in our next-door neighbour’s house was discovered 
 a pack of playing cards. It was as if the wedge of gold and the 
 Babylonish garment had been found in the baggage of Achan. I 
 comforted myself in my childish mind by reflecting that there was a 
 solid wall between our home and the place where the Devil’s Prayer 
 Book lay, but the contact was too close to be pleasant. Even now | 
 am not sure whether, in view of the havoc which Bridge has made, 
 
250 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 and the innumerable hours which are sacrificed to card-playing, the 
 prejudice against cards was not well justified. As time-wasters it 
 would be hard to find their equal. 
 
 ‘OBJECTIONS TO THE THEATRE 
 
 ‘It was, however, the Theatre which lay under a special ban. It 
 combined in itself all the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the 
 devil. It wasted time, it wasted money, it compelled late hours, it 
 dissipated instead of re-creating energy, it was as fascinating as the 
 cup of Circe, and it was often in its results as disastrous to the moral 
 sense of its votaries. 
 
 “To those who were in close contact with extremes of poverty and 
 misery, who had to scrape and save and economize every penny in 
 order to keep going the various pious works entrusted to their care, 
 there seemed something positively wicked in scattering away in a 
 single night’s pleasuring as many pennies as would have kept the 
 collection going for half a year. The late hours which theatre going 
 entailed also prejudiced it in the eyes of those who were brought up 
 in the faith that to be early to bed and early to rise was the beginning 
 not of godliness but of health and prosperity. Those who went to 
 the theatre at night were never so fresh and fit for work next day. 
 Worse still, instead of the play giving them a heartier zest for the 
 plain, everyday duties of “the daily round, the common life,” their 
 minds were preoccupied with the memories of the mimic world in 
 which they had passed so many delightful hours. It fevered and en- 
 flamed the mind. The prosaic task of next day seemed intolerably dull 
 when contrasted with the fascination of the fairy realm of the stage. 
 
 ‘THE STAGE AND MORALITY 
 
 ‘But all these objections to the theatre faded into insignificance 
 before that which was, which is, and perhaps will ever be the one 
 great outstanding objection to the stage. This objection is that it is 
 hard enough to obey the Seventh Commandment, even if you don’t 
 go to the theatre, but that it is a great deal more difficult to keep 
 straight if you do. That is often laughed at as a Puritanical objection. 
 But there is only too much truth in it. That the stage appeals to the 
 passions is undeniable. Half the best plays turn upon the committal 
 or the avoidance of adultery. 'To say that it is possible for the most 
 exciting of all subjects to be discussed, not only without reserve, but 
 
THE YEAR 1904 251 
 
 with all the freedom and force of expression which the combined 
 genius of author and actor can devise, without exposing the spec- 
 tators, in whose veins boils the hot blood of youth, to considerable 
 temptation, is nonsense. 
 
 ‘A WORD FOR ‘“‘CLOISTERED VIRTUE”’ 
 
 ‘It may be an ordeal to which it may be right to expose our young 
 men and maidens; there is a good deal to be said against a cloistered 
 virtue. But the logical carrying out of Milton’s principle of exposing 
 the youngling to a knowledge of the utmost that Vice promises to her 
 followers would take them to worse places, from which all parents 
 would exclude their children. The prayer “Lead us not into tempta- 
 tion,” seemed to us in those days inconsistent with theatre going. 
 For the inflaming of the senses, the spectacle of passionate love- 
 making by beautiful women before a crowded audience, is an added 
 risk from which I must honestly confess I am grateful that I was 
 shielded by the traditions of a Puritan home.’ 
 
 Stead proceeds to recall how thrilled and excited he was at the age 
 of twenty by hearing ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ read aloud at the 
 Literary and Philosophical Society’s Lecture Rooms in Newcastle- 
 on-Tyne. Cleopatra, he reflects, was only a stout lady in evening 
 dress sitting in a chair, reading in turn all the parts of the play — 
 ‘what would it have been if she had been the Cleopatra of the stage?’ 
 Having learned from this, and one or two other such experiences, 
 ‘the particular kind of fool’ he was, Stead declares that, however it 
 may be with other young men, he is convinced that he himself did 
 well to hold aloof in those days from the stage. 
 
 As a matter of actual fact, however, he proceeds to ask, is not the 
 temptation to go demented over actresses one from which few 
 enthusiastic young men are immune? What, after all, could be more 
 natural? The actress is the first woman from whose lips they hear 
 the vibrating accents of passion. And he transcribes some glowing 
 sentences from D’Annunzio’s account of ‘la Foscarina.’ From 
 D’Annunzio’s poetry he passes on to the plain prose of Mr. Clement 
 Scott, then the most popular of dramatic critics, with his sensational 
 statement (which he had recanted, though Stead was at the time 
 unaware of this) that: ‘it is nearly impossible for a woman to remain 
 pure who adopts the stage as a profession.’ If this be true, if all 
 
252 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 actresses are immoral, surely, Stead urges, the interdict on the stage 
 is justifiable. 
 And he concludes his first article thus: 
 
 ‘In the small world in which I lived as a boy no one who regarded 
 life as a serious thing ever went to the theatre. A religious playgoer 
 seemed almost as absurd a collocation of terms as a Christian 
 drunkard. The theatre was emphatically of the world, worldly. Of 
 those of my acquaintances who went to the theatre, I do not remember 
 ever having seen one who seemed to have got any moral or intellectual 
 impulse towards higher things by his theatre-going, while not a few 
 showed only too palpable signs of moral deterioration. It may be 
 otherwise to-day. Judging the modern stage as the rankest of out- 
 siders, it does not seem to me from the notices I read in the news- 
 papers that the majority of pieces which attract the patronage of the 
 public make any pretence of being more than midriff-tickling time- 
 wasters, while some of them are admittedly not calculated to foster 
 either a strenuous or even a moral life. 
 
 ‘THE GREAT STUMBLING BLOCK 
 
 ‘As to the personal character of the actors and actresses, I know 
 nothing except by common report, which is often a common liar. 
 But to my poor thinking, the character of the actors and actresses 
 cannot be left out of account. A notoriously immoral actress does 
 more to deprave the public conscience by her life than she can 
 possibly redeem it by the most admirable representation of heroines 
 of the most immaculate virtue. For every immoral actress who has 
 an opportunity of commanding the admiration and exciting the 
 devotion of men by her genius on the stage inevitably impairs their 
 antipathy to vice. When the sinner is so adorable her sin appears 
 venial — a negligible quantity — and no one can regard licentiousness 
 with indifference without to some extent lowering his moral standard. 
 And the greater her genius, the more irresistible becomes the 
 temptation to tolerate her adulteries. Not until the standard of 
 morality is as high on the stage as it is, say, among the members of a 
 church choir — not a very impossible standard this — do I see how it 
 will be possible to overcome the reluctance of a very great number 
 of very good people to recognize the theatre as an indispensable 
 agency for the moral and intellectual elevation of the community. 
 
THE YEAR 1904 253 
 
 “NEVERTHELESS 
 
 ‘But as I grew older and saw more of life, and realized how often the 
 struggle for an unattainably lofty ideal stands in the way of securing 
 benefits which might have been ours if we would but have been 
 content with second best, I began to doubt whether the policy of 
 abstention does not purchase the safety of the abstainer by per- 
 manently increasing the perils and the mischief to which the non- 
 abstainers are exposed. Am I justified in saving my own soul alive 
 by refusing to encounter a risk which, if I faced it, might make 
 temptation less for others? If by abstention you could efface the 
 theatre from the world there might be something said for adopting 
 such a course — on the assumption that the influence of the stage as 
 it now exists is on the whole demoralizing. But as no amount of 
 abstention will have any other effect beyond that of throwing the 
 whole control of the theatre into the hands of those who do not look 
 at life from our standpoint, persistence in such a policy is not 
 obviously justifiable. 
 
 ‘THE TWOFOLD QUESTION 
 
 ‘After much consideration of the matter, I came to see that the 
 problem resolves itself into two, both questions of fact on which it 
 may be possible to contribute some first-hand information. The first 
 is, how far does the modern stage deserve to be regarded as — to 
 paraphrase Matthew Arnold’s definition of the Deity — “a stream of 
 tendency not ourselves making for righteousness?”’ The second is, 
 whether there are sufficient numbers of persons holding the Puritan 
 view of the theatre for their abstention or their attendance to make 
 any difference, one way or the other, to the character of the stage. 
 
 ‘Is the theatre a power making for righteousness? My definition of 
 righteousness is exceeding broad. I am willing to regard it as a 
 tendency operating in the direction of righteousness if it contributes 
 to the innocent recreation and general mirth of mankind. I do not 
 insist that it shall always ‘“‘purify the passions through pity and 
 fear’’; I shall be well content if, after careful observation of the plays 
 which are being acted on the London stage, it seems to me they 
 tend to increase the happiness and elevate thought of the audience 
 more than they contribute to inflame their passions or waste their 
 time. 
 
254 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 ‘THE THEATRE IN THE PAST 
 
 ‘Without going into any long historical retrospect, we may take it as 
 common ground that there have been periods when the theatres were 
 so pestilential from a moral point of view that the only thing decent 
 people could do was to keep away from them. In ancient Rome the 
 whole authority of the Christian Church was used in opposition to 
 the theatre, whose unspeakable corruption had compelled the inter- 
 ference of pagans like Domitian and Trajan. Professor Ward admits 
 that when Constantine suppressed the theatre, “‘the art of acting had 
 become the pander of the lewd, or frivolous itch of eye or ear, and the 
 theatre had contributed its utmost to the demoralization of the 
 world.” 
 
 ‘It was much the same in England at the beginning and the end 
 of the seventeenth century. Mr. Green says of the later period 
 of the Elizabethan drama: ‘‘The grossness of the later comedy is 
 incredible. Almost as incredible is the taste of the later tragedies for 
 horrors of incest and blood.” Again, speaking of the drama of the 
 Restoration period, he says: “Seduction, intrigue, brutality, cynicism, 
 debauchery, found fitting expression in dialogue of studied and 
 deliberate foulness.”’ 
 
 ‘Macaulay says: “From the day on which the theatres were re- 
 opened they became seminaries of vice, and the evil propagated 
 itself. ‘The profligacy of the representations drove away sober 
 people. The frivolous and dissolute who remained required every 
 year stronger and stronger stimulants.” 
 
 ‘It will, I think, be admitted that if the theatre were in such a state 
 to-day we had better give it a wide berth. But it is not seriously 
 asserted that our stage is in any such condition. What is the truth on 
 the matter? How good is it? How bad is it? What is the truth about 
 it? 
 
 ‘MY PILGRIMAGE OF INQUIRY 
 
 “To answer that question I propose this year to undertake the 
 pilgrimage of investigation suggested to me long ago by Sir Henry 
 Irving and Miss Robins, the results of which I will place before my 
 readers in due course month by month. My first impressions may or 
 may not be worth reading; they will at least be the first impressions 
 of a mature mind brought for the first time in contact with the latest 
 developments of the British stage.’ 
 
THE YEAR (1904 255 
 
 Stead’s manifesto—so to call it—drew forth comments from 
 theatrical celebrities of all sorts, from Miss Gertie Millar and Miss 
 Marie Studholme to F. R. Benson! and Mr. Sydney Grundy and Mr. 
 Bernard Shaw. Mr. Benson twitted him with his temerity in ven- 
 turing at fifty-five to discuss an art of which he admitted that he knew 
 nothing. Mr. Sydney Grundy and ‘G. B. S.’ treated him to some 
 delightful chaff. Here is the conclusion of the latter’s long epistle: 
 
 ‘Finally don’t talk about immoral actresses. What do you mean, you 
 foolish William Stead, by an immoral actress? I will take you into 
 any church you like, and show you gross women who are visibly 
 gorged with every kind of excess, with coarse voices and bloated 
 features, to whom money means unrestrained gluttony and mar- 
 riage unrestrained sensuality; but against whose characters — whose 
 “purity” as you call it—neither you nor their pastors dare level a 
 rebuke. And I will take you to the theatre, and show you women 
 whose work requires a constant physical training, an unblunted 
 nervous sensibility, and a fastidious refinement and self-control which 
 one week of ordinary plutocratic fat-feeding and self-indulgence 
 would wreck, and who anxiously fulfil these requirements; and yet, 
 when you learn that they do not allow their personal relations to be 
 regulated by your gratuitously unnatural and vicious English marriage 
 laws, you will not hesitate to call them “‘immoral.” The truth is that 
 if the average British matron could be made half as delicate about her 
 sexual relations, or half as abstemious in her habits as the average 
 stage heroine, there would be an enormous improvement in our 
 national manners and morals. When you sit in the stalls, think of 
 this, and, as the curtain rises and your eyes turn from the stifling 
 grove of fat, naked shoulders round you to the decent and refined 
 lady on the stage, humble your bumptious spirit with a new sense of 
 the extreme perversity and wickedness of that uncharitable Philistine 
 bringing-up of yours. 
 
 ‘Hoping that your mission will end in your own speedy and happy 
 conversion, — I am, as ever, your paticnt Mentor, 
 
 ‘G. BERNARD SHAW.’ 
 * # % 
 
 ‘The Tempest’ as produced by Mr. Beerbohm Tree (not yet Sir 
 
 Herbert) at His Majesty’s Theatre on September 23, 1904, was 
 
 1 Afterwards Sir Frank Benson. 
 
256 DLE WEB A RY 19.08 
 
 Stead’s first play. Miss Elizabeth Robins and another friend accom- 
 panied him and having engaged Boy Messengers to take the places in 
 advance, they found themselves in the first row of the Pit. Should 
 anyone ever compile an anthology of English theatrical criticisms 
 Stead’s comments on that performance of ‘The Tempest’ ought 
 certainly to find a place in it. They are delightfully free from the 
 ordinary critic’s clichés. He begins: 
 
 ‘It was a misty night of mid-autumn. The long spell of summer 
 weather had broken. There was a nipping chill in the air, a slight 
 mist hung over the streets, and it rained a little. As I drove across the 
 town from St. Clement Danes to Paddington to meet Miss Elizabeth 
 Robins, who was to accompany me to the theatre, I surrendered 
 myself to a delicious reverie on the marvel and the mystery of it all. 
 
 ‘Forty years had passed since first Prospero and his magic isle came 
 into my life, bringing with them the delicate Ariel, the monster 
 Caliban, and the lovers Ferdinand and Miranda. For forty years 
 they had peopled the chambers of my imagination, invisible as Ariel, 
 but far more real to me and contributory to my soul’s life than all 
 but some half-dozen of the princes and politicians, merchants and 
 citizens, who for nearly three hundred years have seen the “Tempest.” 
 I had never seen it save in my mind’s eye, and to-night for the first 
 time these airy, unsubstantial companions of my pilgrimage were to 
 take bodily shape and tangible substance before my eyes.’ 
 
 Then come reflections on Shakespeare’s London and on that first 
 performance of the play at the Court at Whitehall in 1613 when it was 
 witnessed by ‘Prince Charles, then a sickly boy of thirteen, who had 
 but for twelve months been heir-apparent and Elizabeth, his elder 
 sister, a radiant beauty with a lion heart, who followed the idyll of 
 Miranda’s love sitting hand in hand with her own Ferdinand, the 
 Elector Palatine Frederic V, who was to marry her before the year 
 was out. Little they dreamed, as they admired the latest product of 
 Master Shakespeare’s genius, or laughed at his quaint conceits, that 
 all three would share the misfortunes of the Duke of Milan, and that 
 one of them, within gunshot of the place where they were then sitting, 
 would, as the central actor in a far grimmer drama, have his head 
 shorn off his shoulders by the headsman’s axe. His sister Elizabeth, 
 six years later, was to be Queen of Bohemia for one brief twelve- 
 month, and then for the rest of her life a fugitive and an exile, 
 
THE YEAR 1904 257 
 
 deprived of her throne and dominion, but ever, as the Queen of 
 hearts, the rallying-point of Protestant chivalry in Northern Europe. 
 Mother she was to be in time to come, of Prince Rupert — Prince 
 Rupert of the Rhine, who was destined to shatter himself to ruin at 
 Naseby against the Ironsides of a man who did not believe in stage 
 plays, but who, nevertheless, played no inconsiderable part on the 
 stage of history.’ 
 
 These things fresh in his memory — for Stead’s memory from boy- 
 hood days had been saturated with knowledge of that period — he 
 and Miss Robins, while waiting for the curtain to rise, studied and 
 discussed the people around them. Anything more unlike the old pit 
 of which he used to read — the pit of Shakespeare, of Garrick, and even 
 of Kean — would have been difficult to imagine. ‘Row after row of 
 smooth, decorous, reserved, well-dressed, conventional creatures, in 
 conventional dress, doing the conventional thing in the conventional 
 way’ — that was the audience he saw at His Majesty’s. And when the 
 performance began, he noted that there was‘no display of enthusiasm, 
 none of emotion and absolutely no manifestation of disapproval.’ 
 
 Then comes his description of the opening scene — the shipwreck. 
 He did not care for it. Clever, ingenious, unsatisfying mechanical 
 work merely. Not Shakespeare and nothing like a real wreck. 
 Nobody who had seen the wrecks ‘which used to strew the mouth of 
 the Tyne with dead in the old days before the piers were built’ would 
 take much stock in this. ‘The cruel choking sense of agony that 
 comes to you when you see the final tragedy of the ship and the 
 storm’ — that was absent. And in all the ingenuity of carpentry and 
 scene shifting was lost the splendid phrase of the Boatswain — ‘What 
 care these roarers for the name of king?’ 
 
 Miranda realized Stead’s ideal — ‘beautiful exceedingly, tender, 
 innocent and graceful, a very maid who save her father ne’er had 
 seen a man.’ But alas! her utterance was indistinct. He could catch 
 only three words in ten. Prospero, on the other hand, articulated 
 every syllable but — was not Prospero. ‘There was nothing psychic 
 about him.’ It was to the coming of Ariel, however, that Stead the 
 spiritualist, the dweller in Borderland, looked forward with most 
 eager expectation. The mystic world in which, as his last word to 
 mankind, Shakespeare had laid the scene of ‘The Tempest,’ had for 
 many years past been Stead’s real world. To him Ariel was no 
 ‘creature of a disordered imagination.’ 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II R 
 
258 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 ‘The air is full of Ariels,’ he proceeds, ‘nor is the enchanted isle the 
 only place where sweet music is discoursed by invisible songsters. 
 So far as that goes, England is as enchanted as Prospero’s isle, and I 
 know at least one man now living amongst us who has heard, and may 
 even now, for aught I know, be hearing, sweet mystic music dis- 
 coursed by unseen orchestras and invisible singers. When you dream 
 or when you look into a crystal, if you have the gift, you pass the 
 portals which divide the world of sense and matter from the psychic 
 realm which encompasses us all. Those who are so dungeoned up in 
 the grosser forms of matter as to ignore the existence of all the myriad 
 intelligences which surround us may treat “The Tempest” as a mere 
 fantasy. Shakespeare thought otherwise.’ 
 
 What would be Ariel’s sex? In the text Ariel is referred to twice as 
 male. Stead would have Ariel a woman. It was with relief he saw her 
 come, ‘woman every inch of her; the fairy-like grace of her move- 
 ments, the very folds of her garments, the sweetness of her beautiful 
 features, and the cadences of her voice, all proclaimed her unmis- » 
 takable woman.’ But her absurdly small wings troubled him. If she 
 had been a little sprite they might have been some use to her. ‘But 
 for this “lang-leggit lassie” they were as preposterous as the fin-like 
 pinions of the penguin.’ 
 
 Stead had prefaced his article by saying that the Play was a very 
 challenging thing-the Play in general. He now elaborated this 
 point, insisting upon the conflict between the stage performance and 
 his own mind’s imaginings. Reading ‘The Tempest’ he had grieved 
 over the misfortunes of Prospero, but for the Prospero of His 
 Majesty’s he felt no pity. As for Caliban — 
 
 ‘Nowhere is the challenging nature of the play more strongly 
 displayed. And at the risk of exposing myself to the charge of 
 egotism — a charge which is absurd when the whole value, great or 
 small, of the dissertation depends solely upon that very quality of 
 frank confession of the actual impression produced upon the mind of 
 the writer — I venture to set forth some of the challenging thoughts 
 which Caliban produced. The first, I confess, was a sense of irrita- 
 tion at Prospero. Here, I thought, is your handiwork, this brutalized 
 creature, degraded by your tortures and your slavery out of the 
 semblance of humanity. And then, however absurd it may seem to 
 those who have not had the remorseful faculty of self-application 
 
DB EME AR) 3904 259 
 
 cultivated since childhood, there came to me the challenge, Thou art 
 the man! The severity of the implacable moralist works out — so. 
 And I felt strange searchings of heart for two things. 
 
 “WHO CALIBANIZED THE THEATRE? 
 
 ‘The first was about the Theatre itself. We complain of its short- 
 comings, of its evil influence, of its corruption; but how much of all 
 these things is but the direct result of our own stern, unrelenting 
 severity, maintained as ruthlessly as Prospero kept up the punishment 
 of Caliban, without mercy and without ruth? Puritan sentiment 
 having caught the theatre in the Restoration times, attempting with 
 obscene violence to outrage the purity of the English home, has 
 subjected it ever since to pains and penalties which were equivalent 
 to a sentence of major excommunication by the Puritans and their 
 descendants down even to the present day. Is not the fact that I, this 
 night, am witnessing my first play, in itself sufficient witness to the 
 severity of the interdict? And if the theatre is Calibanized so far as 
 being shut out from the encouragement, patronage, and support of 
 the more serious portion of the nation, who is to blame for the result? 
 
 ‘But this was not the only challenging question which Caliban 
 pressed home. At this present moment, when I sit watching the 
 result of the merciless enslavement inflicted upon Caliban for 
 attempting the virtue of a maid, and condemning Prospero in my 
 heart, there are sitting doleful in felons’ cells all over the land, and 
 not this land only, but throughout the English-speaking world, men 
 serving out sentences of imprisonment with hard labour for offences 
 against the virtue of maids, who but for my action nineteen years ago 
 would have been free from prison bars. The Criminal Law Amend- 
 ment Act of 1885, which begot many similar measures in the Colonies 
 and the United States, made it an offence punishable with two years’ 
 hard labour to commit or attempt to commit the offence of which 
 Caliban was guilty, under the plea of the consent of the victim, so long 
 as she had not attained the age of sixteen. In these last nineteen 
 years, thousands of years of imprisonment, in the ageregate, have 
 been inflicted upon such offenders. I think the change in the law was 
 justified. The punishment was certainly not excessive. But this 
 spectacle of Caliban, brutalized by punishment, is, I confess, a dis- 
 agreeable reminder of the other side of the question. Who can say 
 how many of those men convicted under my Act have sunk into the 
 
260 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 hopeless criminal class, from which they may have found it as vain 
 to escape as Caliban from the spells of Prospero?’ 
 
 This is followed first by an ingenious parallel between the case of 
 Caliban and that of the Matabele, and later, by a still more remarkable 
 application of the play to politics. I really think the story of Stead’s 
 life would be incomplete without these passages: 
 
 ‘It is my fate to be blessed or cursed with a mind which however 
 weak it may be in other respects, is exceptionally endowered with the 
 faculty of seeing analogies where others see none, and in discovering 
 resemblances which to others are non-existent. An almost abnormal 
 development of the brain cells responsible for the association of ideas, 
 led me to discern in the Passion Play at Ober Ammergau I know not 
 how many situations exactly reproducing phases of our own political 
 struggle at home. It was inevitable, therefore, that with such a play 
 as “The Tempest” and such a symbolic character as Caliban, I 
 should find myself overwhelmed with resemblances, awful and 
 grotesque, or otherwise. But I never anticipated so apposite an 
 apologue as that which was afforded me by a scene treated by the 
 audience, for the most part, in the spirit of broad farce, but which is 
 one of the most pitiful in the whole play: I refer to that in which 
 Caliban falls in with the drunken sailors, Trinculo and Stephano, 
 who make him drunk. It was as if I saw represented on the stage, in 
 dramatic form, the history of the last few years. 
 
 “TRINCULO — ROSEBERY 
 
 ‘Caliban stands in this scene, as elsewhere, as the representative o! 
 the democracy, robbed of its rightful inheritance, punished without 
 end for an attempted crime, endowed with just enough educatior 
 to curse its master, and abandoned by him to a condition of brutist 
 ignorance and hopeless slavery. Such a strong brute in human shape - 
 it is His Majesty’s Caliban, not Shakespeare’s I am speaking of- when 
 wearied with endless burdens, sees approaching another creaturt 
 whose shape at least recalls his master. Instantly he anticipate 
 nothing but a renewal of torture, a fact sufficiently significant of hoy 
 Prospero had tormented him all those years, and, hoping to escap 
 unseen, falls flat on the earth and covers himself with his spaciou 
 gabardine. The man in question is no emissary of Prospero but | 
 witty, good-natured, intoxicated sailor, who bears a most strikir/ 
 
 
 
THE YEAR 1904 261 
 
 resemblance in his size and facial expression to the caricatures of 
 Lord Rosebery. Trinculo is his name, and he fancies himself all alone 
 on an uninhabited island, having lost all his comrades in the ship- 
 wreck. A storm is coming on overhead, and Trinculo-Rosebery, to 
 escape the wrath of the elements and excusing himself with the adage, 
 “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,”’ creeps under the 
 gabardine of Caliban-Demos; there is no other shelter thereabouts. 
 And there for a time they lie, Trinculo-Rosebery with Caliban- 
 Democracy, head to feet — even as it was. 
 
 “STEPHANO — CHAMBERLAIN 
 
 ‘But then to him, or rather to them, enters Stephano, the incarnate 
 representative of Jingo Toryism. His face is vinous red as befits the 
 party of Boniface; he talks about long spoons even as Mr. Chamber- 
 lain himself, and he carries in his hand the bark-made flagon - I 
 looked to see if it was labelled the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph - 
 full of the heady wine of Jingoism. At first Caliban, distrustful and 
 restless, kicks the new-comer who marvels at the body with the two 
 voices, “His forward voice now, is to speak well of his friend; his 
 backward voice is to utter foul speeches and to detract,” a subtle 
 allusion, in the style of Birmingham, to the different note of the 
 Liberal League and the Liberal Party. But Stephano-Chamberlain 
 bears no malice. He knows he has that with him which will enable 
 him to recover control of the monster and keep him tame. So he plies 
 the monster with fiery wine of the true Jingo brand until his poor 
 wits go wool-gathering, and he mistakes his tempter for a god. After 
 a while Trinculo-Rosebery recognizes the voice of his former 
 comrade, and is hauled out unceremoniously by his legs. “How 
 camest thou to be the siege of this moon-calf? Can he vent 
 Trinculos?”’ 
 
 ‘MAFEKING NIGHT 
 
 ‘Then we see the pitiful tragedy of the Jingo fever and the South 
 African War. Both political parties combine to pass the bottle to the 
 poor monster, but even while assisting at the process Trinculo, after 
 Lord Rosebery’s fashion, cannot resist a sneer at the shallow wits of 
 the half-witted monster who swallows with trusting simplicity the 
 absurd stories and the heady liquor of his “Brave god.” Nevertheless, 
 despite the Roseberian gibes and sneers, the poor scurvy monster 
 
262 THE WEAR” 1909 
 
 kisses the foot of the Jingo Party, and finally the scene ends with a 
 deliriously drunken dance, in which Caliban-Democracy, supported 
 by Trinculo-Rosebery and Stephano-Chamberlain, howl in maudlin 
 chorus: 
 ‘Ban, ’Ban, Ca — Caliban, 
 Has a new master — get a new man.” 
 
 ‘As the curtain fell amidst the roars of laughter I remembered I had 
 seen it all before on a much larger scale. It was Mafeking night over 
 again. 
 
 ‘THE KHAKI ELECTION OF 1900 
 
 ‘After Mafeking we have a still further development of the close 
 parallel. Caliban-Demos, being now well drunk with Jingo wine, 
 takes the lead. Just as Mr. Chamberlain himself shrank with reluct- 
 ance from the policy of farm burning and concentration camps which 
 was nevertheless pressed on ruthlessly by a populace maddened by 
 its daily drench of Jingo journalism, so Caliban incites his drunken 
 god Stephano to murderous exploits. “Monster,” says the sailor 
 sententiously, ‘I will kill this man; his daughter and I will be king 
 and queen —” and in that saying I seemed to hear the decision pro- 
 claimed to annex the Boer Republics! 
 
 ‘In the next scene, in which the worthy trio appear, we have the true 
 and faithful presentment of the Khaki Election of 1900, in which the 
 drunken Caliban, despite the scoffing of Trinculo, in humbly abject 
 fashion licks the shoe of Stephano. 
 
 ‘THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1905 
 
 ‘But the play does not end here. For in the last scene of the last 
 act we have a prophetic forecast of the General Election of 1905, when 
 poor Caliban, after having suffered many things in his drunken 
 delirium, suddenly comes to his senses, and seeing the majestic 
 presence of his master, exclaims: 
 
 ‘“T’ll be wise hereafter. 
 And seek for grace. What a thrice double-ass 
 Was I to take this drunkard for a god, 
 And worship this dull fool!’ 
 
 ‘That prefigures a three-figure Liberal majority next year, at the 
 very least.’ 
 
EB RY AIR SY 9'0'4 263 
 
 After this long digression Stead comes back to the play —to the 
 Harpies interlude, to the Masque, and to the last scene of all: 
 
 ‘Ariel is liberated and Caliban — poor Caliban — forgiven. Awe-struck 
 and penitent, the monster humbly prostrates himself before the feet 
 of Miranda and with the lips which had kissed the foul shoe of his 
 drunken sailor-god, he reverently touches the hem of her garment. 
 It redeemed much, although Miranda gave no sign of any emotion 
 but that of shuddering horror. When amid sweet music the good ship 
 sails away, Caliban runs to the shore, and climbing a hill watches its 
 departure. The white sails recede towards the far horizon, and 
 Caliban climbs to a still higher peak, and the last we see of him is that 
 vast solitary figure on the mountain top stretching out unavailing 
 arms to the sky. 
 
 ‘It is an admirable scene, bringing a long-continued series of beau- 
 tiful spectacles to a solemn and majestic close, and leaving to us who 
 witnessed it abundant matter for speculation as to the thoughts of 
 that sombre form of him who was indeed a thing of sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief.’ 
 
 And the article finishes on a note of enthusiasm. The production 
 of ‘The Tempest’ by Mr. Tree and his company in such a fashion “is 
 a national service and well deserves national recognition. If all plays 
 are like this play, then the prejudice against the theatre is absurd.’ 
 
 But, as he was, of course, prepared to find, all plays were not like 
 ‘The Tempest.’ His second experience was with ‘a mere historical 
 harlequinade.’ His third, as he himself expressed it, landed him ‘in 
 the Abyss of Lost Souls.’ The piece was ‘A Wife Without a Smile,’ 
 by Pinero,! and what astonished Stead was that he found himself 
 laughing at its improprieties: 
 
 ‘Yes, I laughed — laughed heartily, as I suppose men laughed at the 
 plays of Wycherley and Congreve and other comedies of the 
 Restoration, and it was none the less a moral degradation to have been 
 made to laugh at the effacement of the Divine Image of God in man, 
 and worse still in woman. There is a comic side to everything, no 
 doubt. Unclean humorists have before now made side-splitting jokes 
 about the mystery of the Annunciation, and men and women once 
 
 2 One of Sir Arthur Pinero’s least fortunate plays. It met with wide dis- 
 approval and had only a short run. 
 
264 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 roared with laughter at the antics of fellow-creatures who were 
 bereft of reason. But to be made to laugh at such a spectacle as that 
 which Mr. Pinero presents at Wyndham’s Theatre is humiliating to 
 one’s self-respect. You feel you have been made an accomplice to an 
 insufferable affront to your higher nature. 
 
 ‘Such a play explains and goes far to justify the attitude of the 
 Puritan to stage plays. If all plays were like Mr. Pinero’s play, then 
 the Puritans would be right. It is as inhuman a performance as was 
 the old practice of turning out some poor natural to display his witless 
 inanity and naked obscenity for the amusement of carousers after 
 dinner. At first I was inclined to regard it as a mere Punch and Judy 
 show of extravagant and farcical nonsense. It is called a comedy in 
 disguise. It would be better described as a tragedy disguised as a 
 roaring farce. For the characters in the piece, with the exception of 
 John Pullinger, the biscuit manufacturer, and the servants who wait 
 at table, are, one and all, creatures who have not even so much 
 semblance of decent humanity or morality or soul left in them as 
 remained in poor Caliban. They are well dressed, vulgar, banal 
 unrealities, puppets in the outward semblance and apparel of human 
 beings, but who are, one and all, miserable frivols, the smartness of 
 whose conversation only emphasizes the absence of anything that can 
 be described as a heart, a mind, or asoul. The glitter of the dialogue 
 is but like the phosphorescent shimmer over the putrefying body of 
 the dead.’ 
 
 I shall not catalogue the plays which followed during that winter, 
 nor shall I attempt to trace Stead’s progress as a playgoer during the 
 subsequent years. Suffice it to record that the catfish continued to 
 keep things lively in the tank! 
 
 IV 
 STEAD AT FIFTY-FIVE: A WOMAN’S PORTRAIT 
 
 There was probably not a week in Stead’s life between 1885 and 
 1912 in the course of which he was not ‘interviewed’ at least once for 
 some newspaper or periodical. Being the most ‘accessible of editors’ 
 (a phrase applied to him times without number), and being, also, the 
 kindest of men, he was always delighted in his way to help his 
 brothers — and sisters — of the Press. In many weeks he would give a 
 dozen ‘interviews’ for publication in England, on the Continent, and 
 
THE YEAR 1904 265 
 
 in America. A haphazard but, I imagine, fairly representative col- 
 lection of some scores of these has been preserved among Stead’s 
 papers — I have cited passages already from four or five of them. One 
 other example deserves our attention now -—an interview in 1904 
 from the pen of Mrs. Maud Churton Braby, a brilliant young 
 journalist 1 who had long delighted in the Review of Reviews, but had 
 not previously made the acquaintance of its editor. It was written 
 for a now extinct weekly, entitled The World of Dress, edited by Mrs. 
 Aria, a lady well-known for her wit.? 
 
 I shall reproduce Mrs. Braby’s article almost in full. Nowhere else 
 have I seen so well summed up Stead’s lifelong attitude towards 
 women in everyday social intercourse, and the article gives us a 
 really admirable picture of him as he was now, at fifty-five, younger 
 at heart than most men of half that age but almost a patriarch in 
 appearance — a blend, shall we say, of Moses and Santa Claus. Stead 
 himself recognized that Mrs. Braby in these lively paragraphs por- 
 trayed him ‘to the life,’ and he sent her afterwards one of his photo- 
 graphs inscribed — ‘To the best interviewer I have ever met!’ 
 
 The article begins: 
 
 ‘I had rather dreaded interviewing Mr. W. T. Stead. A chill 
 remembrance of a téte-d-téte years ago with a prominent Salvation 
 Army leader still lingered in my mind, and I feared the interview 
 with Mr. Stead might resemble it. My imagination depicted a stern, 
 rugged, elderly individual who, metaphorically speaking, would 
 breathe hell-fire upon me and rage against the wicked follies of the 
 world in general, and of my unregenerate sex in particular. The 
 prospect of broaching so frivolous a subject as Dress to him was 
 terrifying in the extreme. Any topic of conversation more mundane 
 than spirit draperies, say, at the very worst, would seem an insult 
 to the strenuous atmosphere of Mowbray House. 
 
 ‘Judge of my astonishment when — arriving several hours after the 
 appointed time — I encountered, on the steps of that august building, 
 a joyous gentleman whose white beard alone hinted at advancing 
 years, whose cheerful, healthy countenance glowed with the joy of 
 living, in whose bright blue eyes there shone a fire that would not 
 
 1 Author also of Downward, the novel alluded to on p. 228. 
 
 * There are some pleasant remarks about Stead — ‘that Jehovah among 
 
 Journalists,’ as she calls him-in Mrs. Aria’s very entertaining volume of 
 Memoirs published in 1922. 
 
266 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 have disgraced Endymion, and whose whole mien was one of over- 
 flowing, irresponsible gaiety and innocent gladness. 
 
 ‘“Ts this what you call the morning?” he asked smilingly, as his 
 portmanteau was hoisted into the waiting hansom. “I’m just off to 
 Stratford-on-Avon, to the Shakespeare festival. You shall come too 
 —as far as the station. And on the way you shall tell me your views 
 on THE subject of which among all others I know least — Dress. 
 That’s the whole secret of successful interviewing — for the inter- 
 viewer to talk all the time.” 
 
 ‘Having delivered himself of this dictum, Mr. Stead proceeded, to 
 my great relief and delight, to talk steadily for the next twenty-five 
 minutes. 
 
 ‘«’This Kodak,” he began, taking his seat in the hansom, and 
 indicating an extremely battered leather object which he carried, 
 “this Kodak might be said to be typical of my views on Dress. I 
 have had it so many years that they no longer make the films to fit 
 it. I like old things — old books, old friends, old clothes. I wear my 
 clothes until they are literally unwearable — until my wife forces new 
 ones upon me, which I accept in groaning and lamentation of spirit. 
 ... Yes, my wife always buys my clothes; she sends for materials 
 and drives me to the tailor’s. When they are made, I try them on 
 with reluctance. ‘They’re always cut on the same pattern, of course, 
 and as it’s a good many years since that pattern was taken, why, the 
 tailor has to let them out accordingly!” And he beamed upon me 
 like a young Apollo! 
 
 *“Surely you wouldn’t wish women to choose their costumes in 
 the same way?” I interposed hurriedly, taking advantage of the 
 temporary breathing space caused by the beaming process. 
 
 ‘Ah, women’s clothes! That’s a saddening thought. Meredith 
 was right when he said that woman was the last animal to be civilized 
 by man! How selfish you are, how deficient in the instinct of social 
 altruism! Now, take women’s hats. For the last six months I’ve been 
 going to the theatre, you know.” 
 
 Mrs. Braby knew —- who did not? 
 Stead proceeded to hold forth on ‘those dreadful matinée hats’ and 
 the discomfort they had given him. 
 
 ‘“T think it terribly sad,” he continued, “that woman, the loveliest 
 object we have in the world — the most beautiful thing that God has 
 
THE YEAR 1904 267 
 
 created, should go about tricked out and disfigured by all the bar- 
 baric arts of the milliner.” 
 
 “Here I anxiously scanned the narrow strip of mirror at the side of 
 the hansom, and then noted with relief that the Endymion-like blue 
 eyes were twinkling. The Mentor of Mowbray House evidently 
 realizes the importance of the “great task of happiness.” 
 
 ‘“How would you wish women to dress, then?” I asked. 
 
 * “Well, my two pet aversions are the wasp-waist and the trained 
 walking-skirt. The Greek draperies might be too cold for this 
 climate, but they would be no more inconvenient than those insane 
 long skirts which offend my sense of cleanliness. The modern woman 
 walking in a long skirt has either to act as a street sweeper or else 
 practically amputate her left arm — for all the use it is to her.” 
 
 ‘““And have you any opinion on the increasing extravagance of 
 modern fashion?” 
 
 ‘“Extravagance is purely relative. If you only have 12s. 6d., and 
 you pay 13s. for a dress, it is extravagance, though the gown itself 
 might be wholly vile. If you have £30,000a year, and you spend a 
 thousand of it on your clothes, you are not so extravagant as you 
 would be in the other case. Now, my whole idea of the Dress 
 Question in a nutshell is, firstly, that it should be healthy, warm, 
 and comfortable; and, secondly, that it should be capable of being 
 put on and off in the minimum of time. For instance, from the bath 
 to the doorstep I can dress from top to toe in four minutes. What 
 do you think of that?” 
 
 * “Brilliant,” I murmured, “how do you manage it?” 
 
 ‘“Well, I strive to realize my ideal! To continue: thirdly, that it 
 should last. It should last a very long time. Now, I have worn a 
 pair of trousers at my country place for seven years.” 
 
 * “Marvellous!” I commented. 
 
 *“Wasn’t it? I didn’t wear them all the time, you understand, not 
 quite all, but off and on very nearly the whole seven years.” 
 
 ‘I was suitably impressed by this record of trousers-endurance. 
 
 ‘ “All trousers should be capable of being patched,” continued Mr. 
 Stead, solemnly, but still with that air of overflowing gaiety. “They 
 should have leather seats. Now, you know my whole views of Dress — 
 warm and comfortable, easy to assume, capable of great endurance, 
 and after that to be as nice-looking as you can afford — don’t you 
 think that an excellent ideal?” 
 
268 THE YEAR 1904 
 
 ‘“For you, perhaps —— ” 
 
 ‘ “Well, apropos of that point of view, a lot of men were once talking 
 about me at a literary club, and some thought I was somebody, and 
 some that I was nobody, and then a friend of mine settled my claims 
 to distinction by saying: ‘Well, when all’s said and done, Stead’s the 
 only man in London who dares dress as he does!’ You see, I wear 
 exactly what I choose, a privilege peculiar to beggars and to dukes.” 
 
 ‘“T see. Morally, you’re a duke?” 
 
 ‘ “No, I wouldn’t say that, because dukes are often very immoral, 
 but I’m a sartorial kind of duke!” Here Mr. Stead positively roared 
 with laughter. 
 
 ‘ “And as for women’s clothes,” he continued, ‘“‘having fulfilled the 
 above requirements in their attire, they should try in addition to 
 look as charming as possible. Now, at this point, J ought to inter- 
 view you, because I know nothing about being charming, whereas 
 you, obviously... .”’ Modesty here dictates the omission of Mr. 
 Stead’s remarks. Then he suddenly asked: “‘Am I not a flirtatious 
 person?” — so astounding me by this unexpected ebullition of joy- 
 ousness that I nearly fell out of the cab. “It’s one of my theories,” 
 he continued, “that nothing so adds to the innocent gaiety of the 
 world as harmless flirtatiousness.... Yes, and I always get on 
 splendidly with women. Shall I tell you why? The whole secret of 
 getting on well with women is to be absolutely faithful to one’s 
 wife. Yes, and to be so entirely innocent in your relations with 
 women all your life that you can meet them on terms of absolute 
 equality and friendship — just as one can another man.” 
 
 ‘ “Are you always as young as this, Mr. Stead?” 
 
 * “How old do you think I am? Seventy-five, I hope, for the reputa- 
 tion of my beard.” 
 
 ‘ “About twelve,” I answered. 
 
 * “Twelve? Much too old, except by an almanac. A man once said 
 of me, ‘Why, Stead’s a mere child’ — to which another friend replied, 
 ‘Stead a child, why, he’s an infant, he’s not weaned yet!’ ” 
 
 ‘And Stead enlarged a little on the value to him of his white beard 
 — it had won him the deference he had never been able to get before. 
 
 ‘“But despite my white beard and five-and-fifty years, I grow 
 younger and younger every decade, although now I’m a grandfather. 
 I’ve six children and two grandchildren; and, I say,” he went on 
 eagerly, “do you know the reason why new-born babies wear long 
 
DH EY YEAR? -1.9 04 269 
 
 clothes? Once I imagined it was to allow room for the baby’s growth. 
 I soon discovered, however, that by the time the length was right, 
 the garment was too small at the top. Then at last I found out the 
 true purpose of those long skirts. They were invented to enable the 
 young father — or the younger grandfather — to swing the baby head 
 downwards. Yes, I’ve done that to all my children, and consequently 
 they learnt early to look at life from two points of view.” 
 
 ‘ “Do be serious, Mr. Stead, what do you suppose Mrs. Aria will 
 say to all this? We’re nearly at the station; now do say something 
 about Dress for my interview.” 
 
 ‘“Dress? But, good gracious, we’ve discussed the dress-topic 
 threadbare; I’ve told you everything I think and know, and all I 
 feel about Dress — what more can I do?” 
 
 ‘I gave it up in despair, and wondered for the fiftieth time during 
 the last twenty minutes why I had ever imagined Mr. Stead to be a 
 stern, pious person. 
 
 ‘ “But I am pious — very pious,” he assured me, when I had confided 
 this thought to him. “Why should piety be incompatible with 
 flirtatiousness,which, as I’ve already explained to you, is the secret of 
 true, innocent gaiety, and an inexhaustible spring of the joy of lifer” 
 
 ‘“T don’t know why it should be, but it certainly is, as a rule.” 
 
 ‘ «Then that’s not true piety. All nice people are pious. To be nicc 
 is to be a Christian on the surface. . . . Here we are at the station; 
 I am sorry. Don’t go yet, my wife and daughter are here somewhere. 
 ... Well, I’m delighted to have had this cheery talk, we must meet 
 again. Come to lunch — I shall never forget you. Ah, there’s Mother, 
 how surprised she’ll be to see you. ... Mother, here’s a young 
 lady I never saw in my life till half an hour ago, and she’s been inter- 
 viewing me about — er — Dress.””’ 
 
 V 
 ‘HERE AM I, SEND ME’ 
 
 The year which had begun so miserably for Stead ended quite 
 triumphantly with the success of the Review of Reviews Annual, ‘Here 
 am I, send me!’ - one of his many efforts to expound and illustrate 
 in fiction his ideals as a social reformer. Although crude in conception 
 and written too hastily, like all Stead’s books, it found many admirers 
 among readers whose appreciation was worth having. A letter from 
 
270 THE avi AR ii 9.00 
 
 General Smuts was one of the most interesting. He had found the 
 Annual, he said, a most absorbing piece of work and he was inclined 
 to believe that ‘the primitive Christian Gospel’ which inspired it was 
 more likely ‘to work a cure’ for the ills of the modern world ‘than any 
 other palliation.’ But if a great prophet ‘nurtured not in Hebrew 
 lore but in all the wealth of knowledge such as we have acquired’ 
 should appear to-day, he would probably find things ripe for even 
 greater change than Christianity ever wrought. 
 
 The most enthusiastic reader of all was Dr. Clifford—I give his 
 words in full: 
 
 ‘25 SUNDERLAND TERRACE, 
 ‘BAYSWATER, W. 
 ‘Nov. 24, 1904. 
 ‘W. T. Stead, Esq. 
 ‘MY DEAR FRIEND, 
 
 ‘I have just finished, ‘“‘Here am I, send me.”’ It is the best thing you 
 have yet done. It is your autobiography: the picture of your ideals, 
 beliefs, spirit, and purposes: it has your vivid perception that the 
 value of life is in its use to others: it supplies the modern interpreta- 
 tion of the Christianity of Jesus Christ in a most arresting and im- 
 pressive setting. Itshows that whilst Christianity may bea philosophy 
 for a few, an exclusive ‘Church’ for others, and a way to personal 
 peace and comfort for the majority; its present-day business is the 
 creation of a social institute for the service of man in all the depth and 
 width of his needs. It will offend some; probably many, by its blunt 
 directness of speech, and its freshness of thought. It will wound 
 those who cannot think of Christianity except in the conventionally 
 reverent moulds of the past. ‘The tone here and there is hard and 
 harsh. But it is based on the true Christian idea, and expresses the 
 deepest meaning of the Incarnation. 
 
 ‘One thing is lacking in the picture. You have followed too com- 
 pletely the idea of Emerson, that ‘‘Action is Education,” and so given 
 too scant a place to the forces of the intellect. 
 
 “The story will have a wide circulation and do great good. 
 
 ‘But when the first issue is exhausted, you should print it as a cheap 
 book, say a sixpenny, and give it wings throughout the world. 
 
 ‘I am sincerely yours, 
 ‘(Signed) JOHN CLIFFORD.’ 
 
CHAPTER 28 
 THE LAST YEARS. 1905-1912 
 
 TEAD’S activities throughout the concluding seven years of his 
 
 life were as varied as ever; no previous seven years saw him more 
 full of faith and ardour and energy; but in this ‘last phase,’ if he 
 won many new friends and admirers, he added little to his renown. 
 He revisited Russia and was the witness there of memorable events: 
 he took a foremost place in the exchange of visits between German 
 and English editors in 1906 and 1907; he resumed his project of a 
 great international ‘Peace Pilgrimage’ and attended a Peace Congress 
 in New York as well as a second Peace Conference at The Hague: 
 all this without relaxing his life-long efforts on behalf of the British 
 Navy. In 1911 he put his whole soul into an attempt to prevent war 
 between Italy and the Turks. And from first to last he remained 
 more than ever absorbed in the Spooks. That was his record in a 
 nutshell. It need not, I think, be expanded here beyond the limits 
 of a single chapter. The mass of unpublished documents available 
 which bear upon this period will be turned to better account some 
 years hence, perhaps, in a volume or two of memories and letters. 
 They would not tell us much about Stead himself that we do not 
 know already, but they would make a very curious and entertaining 
 and valuable book. 
 
 I 
 STEAD’S RUSSIAN ADVENTURE OF 1905 
 
 Stead’s interest in Russian affairs was never more intense than in 
 1905, that crucial year for the Tsardom. Week after week, month 
 after month, in the Press generally, and in his own Review, he 
 championed the Tsar and the Russian people alike against their 
 hostile critics, and he seldom exhibited more courage and originality 
 than in the way in which in August, September, and October he 
 plunged about in the whirlpool of Russia’s dangerous politics on 
 the very eve of Revolution. Nor did he ever regret the efforts he 
 put forth that Autumn, although they ended in failure, the Russian 
 Liberals ridiculing and resenting his methods as ill-conceived and 
 misguided. 
 
 While everyone else in England was holding up his hands in horror 
 
 271 
 
272 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 at the dreadful scene on the Neva in January, 1905, Stead in the 
 Review of Reviews set out to demonstrate that it was merely our 
 own ‘Bloody Sunday’ writ large — that the Russia of the moment was 
 but a kind of Brocken spectre, wherein the English Tory might see 
 ‘the faithful, if hideous, reflection of his own features.’ What was 
 it that sent 60,000 strikers on their mad pilgrimage of despair to the 
 Winter Palace and that strewed the streets of so many manufacturing 
 towns in Russia with the corpses of working men shot down in 
 the restoration of order? Hunger! And to what was their hunger 
 due? To Protection, to war a la Chamberlain (the Russo-Japanese 
 war was then in full progress), and to all the other concomitants of 
 Toryism, with its natural progeny of starvation and despair. 
 
 Our ‘Bloody Sunday,’ Stead goes on to maintain in the article which 
 I am citing, was a greater blot upon civilization than the tragedy 
 of the Russian capital. It might sound incredible to the Englishmen 
 who had been ‘screaming themselves hoarse over the monstrous 
 barbarity of the Russian Government,’ but it was the fact that the 
 English police in 1887 ‘did not even give the unfortunate pro- 
 cessionalists an opportunity to disperse peaceably.’ And he recalls 
 some of the ugly details of that occasion. ‘Nothing’ he continues, 
 ‘but the forbearance of our workmen saved London from a massacre 
 as bloody as that which took place at St. Petersburg. The Govern- 
 ment was determined to hold the Square against the people at all 
 costs. If the London processionalists had been as resolute as those 
 of St. Petersburg the streets of London would have run with blood. 
 Our Tories did not intend to hestitate to shoot in case of need. But 
 our workmen recoiled before the fixed bayonets of the Guards, and 
 the Tories got their way with only a couple of victims killed and 
 several hundred injured.’ 
 
 Having elaborated and enforced this comparison with the help of 
 many details, Stead draws an equally effective parallel between the 
 character and circumstances of the Tsar and those of the British 
 Prime Minister, showing first, that the alleged ‘mystery’ of the 
 Tsar’s absence from St. Petersburg was entirely an absurd invention 
 (Nicholas II. being habitually at Tsarkoé Selo, the Russian Windsor, 
 at that period of the year), and proceeding to point to the resemblance 
 between the Muscovite sovereign and the English statesman. Both 
 
 1 Review of Reviews, February, 1905. 
 
IgI2 THE LAST YEARS 273 
 
 men might have been too ready with the word of command, ‘Do not 
 hesitate to shoot,’ 1 but both were by nature humane and sensitive, 
 and both impressed you ‘as philosopher rather than a ruler’; and 
 just as Mr. Balfour held office only by avoiding an open breach with 
 Mr. Chamberlain, so the Tsar could wield his sceptre only if sup- 
 ported by people with whom he had no kind of sympathy. Transfer 
 Mr. Balfour’s situation to St. Petersburg and ‘you have the Tsar’s 
 position made as clear as noonday,’ Stead concludes: 
 
 “The ‘Tsar is a modern man. He hates war, detests intolerance, 
 and is at least as much devoted to Liberal ideas as Mr. Balfour is 
 devoted to Free Trade. But the Tsar, like Mr. Balfour, has to take 
 into account other forces than his own personal convictions. Russia 
 is a vast bureaucracy. Besides the bureaucracy, there are the Grand 
 Dukes, and the Church. Consider the Grand Duke Vladimir as the 
 Mr. Chamberlain of the situation, with M. Pobodonostsoff as the 
 representative of the Church, and you may begin to form some 
 conception of how it is the Tsar does not make sweeping reforms. 
 He does not do it for the self-same reason that Mr. Balfour does 
 not do it. No one in this world, least of all the Autocrat of All 
 the Russias, lives in a vacuum. On him, even more than on other 
 men, weighs the constant pressure of old, rugged, and massive forces, 
 against which that Russian Titan, Peter the Great, dashed himself in 
 unavailing despair. Nicholas II is not a Peter the Great. But Peter 
 himself, in the present circumstances, would find it no easy task 
 to maintain his position except bya series of Balfourian balancings. 
 The Tsar stands to the Zemstvoes very much as Mr. Balfour stands 
 to the Duke of Devonshire and the Unionist Free Fooders. Nothing 
 would give him greater pleasure than to see much of their programme 
 carried out, but if he were to say so — still more, if he were to do any- 
 thing to give effect to their views — he would have a bad quarter of 
 an hour with Mr. Chamberlain, or, in the case of the Tsar, with the 
 Grand Dukes. If the Russian Army had been victorious, the Tsar 
 would have been in a stronger position. But, unfortunately for him, 
 it has not been victorious, and his Grand Dukes are not above 
 reminding him that it was his infatuated devotion to peace which 
 is responsible for all Russia’s disasters. 
 
 1 Words used by Mr. Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland at the time of 
 the Mitchelstown riot, 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II S 
 
274. DPA EVIL ASI YE ASRS 1905 
 
 ‘Thus in Russia to-day we can see, as in a magic mirror, not only 
 the principles of 'Toryism, but even the Tory Prime Minister. ‘Those 
 of us who have spent our lives in combating ‘Toryism at home may, 
 if we see fit and have nothing more profitable to do, with clear con- 
 science, denounce the way in which Tory principles translate them- 
 selves into practice abroad. But that the London newspapers which 
 exulted in the “Bloody Sunday” of ‘Trafalgar Square, who are 
 clamouring for the adoption of Protection, and who are the sworn 
 champions of Mr. Balfour —for these organs of public opinion to 
 assume airs of pharisaic virtue and preach Liberalism day by day 
 to the Tories of St. Petersburg-—that I must confess would be 
 revolting if it were not so irresistibly humorous. After all, it is only 
 a repetition for the thousandth time of the old farce of Satan 
 reproving sin.’ 
 
 That was Stead’s tone throughout the months that followed, always 
 eager to establish the best case for Russia, to silence her maligners, 
 to herald her successes and to foretell good things for her. None 
 rejoiced more whole-heartedly than he when, on August 19, the edict 
 went forth constituting the Duma, a representative Assembly for the 
 whole of Russia, excluding Finland. And when, ten days later, Russia 
 and Japan concluded peace, upon terms humiliating for the Russians 
 although generally held creditable to the victorious nation, Stead was 
 swift to lay stress on the brighter side of the picture. 
 
 * “Sweet are the uses of adversity,”’ he declared, “‘to nations as well 
 as to individuals. Defeats have often ministered more than victories 
 to the permanent well-being of States. Joan of Arc, in driving 
 England out of France, was one of our greatest national benefactors. 
 And George Washington, in defeating the purblind Toryism of 
 George III and his advisers, practically founded the British Empire 
 as we know it to-day. From an impossible despotism he transformed 
 it, thenceforth, more and more into a fraternal federation of self- 
 governed States. In the same way Russia may hereafter be grateful 
 for her reverses in the Far East. The Duma is worth more than a 
 dozen Manchurias.” ’ 
 
 Stead, accompanied by his friend Colonel Brocklehurst (a persona 
 grata at the Russian Court), had arrived at St. Petersburg on’ the 
 eve of the declaration of peace, and, jubilant himself, was surprised 
 
1912 THE LAST YEARS 278 
 
 to find most of his Russian friends in a state of gloom. In order to 
 console and cheer them he elaborated this thesis as to the ‘uses 
 of adversity,’ and he was delighted to see his words printed in full, 
 first in Russian in Prince Ouktomsky’s paper, Razwiet (The Dawn), 
 afterwards in the Fournal de St. Pétersbourg, in French. 
 
 But the Russian Liberals would not listen to him. ‘It wasa stupidity, 
 this war, nay, a crime,’ said one of them, ‘but we have come out of 
 it even more foolishly than we went into it.’ And the Duma! What 
 would be the use of a Duma under such a despotism as still existed 
 in Russia? At that very moment one of their leaders, Professor 
 Miliukoff,1 was confined in the Wyborskaia Prison, ‘on suspicion 
 of contemplating political crime.’ 
 
 It was on Tuesday, September 9g, that Stead got to business, so to 
 speak. He had had two long talks with the Tsar, who had encouraged 
 him to address conferences on the subject of the Duma, but he had 
 been assured on all sides that the T'sar’s permission was worth 
 nothing unless it were countersigned by his omnipotent Minister 
 of Police General Trepoff, the Dictator de facto over the Empire - 
 ‘the man of the iron hand and the stony heart . . . the coarse, vulgar, 
 illiterate boor, the only instrument at once brutal enough and strong 
 enough to serve the turn of an autocrat in despair’: so Trepoff was 
 described to him. 
 
 To his surprise and relief he found General Trepoff not merely 
 ‘courtesy itself’ but a man of thought and some eloquence. ‘Perhaps 
 Mr. Stead would like to hear my political ideas?’ the ‘illiterate boor’ 
 began, and for nearly an hour Stead listened to what seemed to him 
 a most enlightened and broad-minded disquisition upon the state 
 of the country — he could hardly believe his ears. A longer interview 
 followed next day and now Stead did the talking. Was Russia to have 
 a Habeas Corpus Act, or was she not? That was the all-important 
 question. The Duma was like a horse with only three legs to stand 
 upon — Liberty of Association, Liberty of Meeting, Liberty of the 
 Press; without the fourth leg, Security of the Individual, it was 
 worthless. And he taxed the Minister of Police with the case of 
 Miliukoff. How could the professor’s imprisonment be justified? 
 It was as though the Tsar had painted a beautiful picture on a wall 
 and called it the Duma and Trepoff had come along and smudged it 
 all over black with a sweep’s brush. 
 
 * So conspicuous again, eleven years later, in the Revolution of 1916. 
 
276 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 Trepoff smiled, Stead tells us, and said he hoped very shortly to 
 liberate Miliukoff on bail, pending his trial; in the meantime, if Stead 
 wished, as he said, to hold meetings in St. Petersburg for the purpose 
 of discussing the Duma and of explaining why, in the eyes of an 
 English Radical, it should be welcomed — despite all its shortcomings 
 —as a Parliament rich with promise for the future, General Trepoft 
 intimated that he was quite free to do so. Stead replied that he could 
 not say a word in favour of the Duma until Miliukoff was actually 
 released. “To-day is Wednesday,’ he went on, ‘on Sunday I intend 
 to have my next lunch party at the Hotel de l’Europe. I hope I shall 
 have good news before then.’ 
 
 On the Saturday evening, Comte Nicolas Sievers called at the 
 Hotel de l’Europe and sent in his card to Stead. He was shown 
 in. 
 
 ‘Mr. Stead, I believe,’ said the Comte, bowing. 
 
 ‘Iam Mr. Stead, and you?’ 
 
 ‘I am the aide-de-camp of the Governor-General of St. Petersburg. 
 General Trepoff presents you his compliments and has sent me to 
 tell you that Miliukoff is free.’ 
 
 We can imagine Stead’s feelings! It was splendid, magnificent, to 
 have Miliukoff out of prison. His release justified Stead’s confidence 
 in the progressiveness and wisdom of the Russian authorities. The 
 Tsar and his officials were evidently going to behave like sensible 
 men. All that, of course. But, in addition, what an absolutely 
 unparalleled score for Stead himself! Alas! that there should be no 
 Daily Paper in which to turn it to full account. 
 
 Even as things were, of course, the whole civilized world learnt next 
 day of the triumph. 
 
 The prospects of Stead’s mission were at their brightest during that 
 week. ‘The Times correspondent,’ he wrote to his sister, Miss Mary 
 Stead, ‘who works for me as if he were on my staff, was at first very 
 sceptical, but is now simply amazed at the good which he sees I am 
 doing. ““You’ve roped them all in,”’ he exclaimed, “I do believe that 
 you are really going to do great things for this poor country.”’’ 
 One of the leading members of the Zemstvo Congress had remarked 
 to the Times correspondent only that morning — ‘They talk about the 
 
 1 Professor Miliukoff, while acknowledging with gratitude Stead’s ‘persever- 
 ance and energy’ in previously securing an interview with him in prison, 
 deprecated the idea that he was indebted to a foreigner for his actual release. 
 
IQi2 THE LAS TOY BARS 277 
 
 Tsar and General 'Trepoff, but the real Autocrat in Russia to-day — is 
 Stead!’ 
 
 But this state of things did not continue. The Russian Liberals 
 became impatient and angry, and even those newspapers which were 
 most favourably inclined to Stead grew critical and sarcastic. ‘We, 
 of course, do not take our stand on such a formal and narrowly patri- 
 otic point of view as that Mr. Stead is interfering in other people’s 
 business,’ one of them began. ‘On the contrary, come and welcome! 
 Why should he not speak? In the first place he is a well-known 
 publicist, a person to whom honour is due, who has done undoubted 
 service not only to his own country, but also to Russia. During the 
 darkest hour of Von Plehve’s regime, Mr. Stead addressed an open 
 letter to him, which went the round of the whole European (but not 
 Russian) Press, proving the cruelty and folly of his repressive policy 
 and of the actions of the Governor-General Bobrikoff.’ 
 
 But Mr. Stead, the journal went on to say, was too ‘English’ to 
 understand Russian internal politics, and the task of reconciling 
 Russian progressives and Russian reactionaries was quite beyond his 
 power. Even Franklin had had no such over-ambitious designs in 
 Paris, but had gone there merely as the spokesman of the forward 
 Party in America, which was allied to the forward party in France, 
 
 ~ “and Mr. Stead is not a Franklin!’ 
 
 The rest was failure. Dr. E. J. Dillon, who was in Russia at the 
 time, gives the following summary of what ensued: 
 
 ‘Nothing daunted, he (Stead) courageously went about the country 
 preaching patriotic co-operation and the necessity of laying down a 
 foundation before attempting to build up a huge fabric. The diffi- 
 culties he met with were formidable, the criticisms which his 
 addresses provoked were sharp and often unjust. But, none-the- 
 less, Russians were favourably impressed by the spectacle of this 
 apostolic reformer, come from the distant shores of Britain to preach 
 the gospel of modernism to the Russian moujik, and they shut their 
 eyes to the fact that, dominated by his ethical ideals, he overlooked 
 many of the realities of the Slav world. Some of the men who would 
 have silenced him if they could, because he was a force in the enemy’s 
 camp, assured me that they were struck by his mysterious power of 
 arousing sympathy and grasping the heart and the conscience of his 
 hearers, 
 
278 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 ‘During the progress of the “Revolution” he delivered a remark- 
 able speech in Moscow in the house of Prince Dolgorouky, after 
 which he repaired to Saratoff, where Stolypin was Governor. His 
 activity was the object of enthusiastic comment. Menshikoff, the 
 Prince of Russian journalists, devoted an article of two columns to 
 Stead, holding him up as an example to Russian publicists and 
 patriots. The extremists attacked him bitterly for not taking their 
 side in a cause which they maintained he did not understand. Stead 
 replied in a number of vigorous letters, of which the most telling 
 appeared in the Slovo (September 27) under the heading, “Apologia 
 pro vita mea.” ’ 
 
 Stead’s intervention was a failure beyond a doubt. Could it con- 
 ceivably have proved a success? According to the late M. Finot, the 
 well-known French journalist and author, several of those Russian 
 Liberals who made mock of their English well-wisher in 1905 as a 
 presumptuous busybody admitted afterwards that his arguments 
 had been sound and wise. That Dr. Dillon also remained of this 
 opinion is shown by a brief note which he addressed in 1916 to 
 Stead’s friend and travelling companion, General Brocklehurst, who 
 in 1914 had been raised to the peerage as Lord Ranksborough. It 
 was in reply to the question whether he thought the Mission had 
 been too late. ‘No,’ Dr. Dillon replied, ‘not too late. If only the 
 suggestions then made had been hearkened to, all that has since 
 happened would have been averted.’ 
 
 II 
 STEAD AND ‘C.-B.’S’ MINISTRY: AND A TALK WITH JOHN BURNS 
 
 There is a lady in Daniel Deronda—the book we found Stead 
 reading so self-consciously in 1879 — who is always making Alman- 
 acks for the Millennium. That was Stead’s foible, too. In 1906, 
 when the Millennium apparently arrived in England with the biggest 
 Liberal majority ever known, he produced, if not exactly Almanacks, 
 at least a number of kindred publications, packed full of glow- 
 ing possibilities and plans for the immediate future. Among the 
 publications was a hundred-page pamphlet, profusely illustrated, in 
 which he described and analysed ‘Our New Rulers.’! It was an 
 
 1 “The Liberal Ministry of 1906: Our New Rulers.’ 
 
IgI2 THE: LAST - YEARS 279 
 
 extremely entertaining brochure—a gossipy enlargement of the 
 ‘character-sketch’ of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Ministry 
 which appeared in the January issue of the Review of Reviews. 
 
 Everyone in the slightest degree interested in politics must have 
 read with amusement -—or else with annoyance —that lively and 
 trenchant article. A rapid glance through it will recall to us some of 
 Stead’s political likes and dislikes as well as his attitude towards some 
 of the chief problems of the time. For Lord Rosebery as a man he 
 had always felt affection and admiration, but Lord Rosebery’s states- 
 manship he held in low esteem. He rejoiced, therefore, at the Liberal 
 ex-Leader’s ‘self-elimination,’ and he hailed ‘C.-B.’s’! Premiership 
 with all the greater delight in that it signified triumph not over Lord 
 Rosebery alone, but over the three other most prominent Liberals 
 who had lent their countenance to the war: Sir Edward Grey, Mr. 
 Haldane, and Mr. Asquith. It was true that these three were to be 
 members of the New Government, as Foreign Secretary, Minister 
 of War, and Chancellor of the Exchequer respectively; but he found 
 comfort in the reflection that ‘in each of these three offices’ the 
 ‘three Liberal Leaguers’ would be compelled to confront, ‘day after 
 day, week in, week out, the disastrous results of the policy which 
 they were weak and foolish enough to support.’ 
 
 Mr. Winston Churchill’s appointment as Under-Secretary for the 
 Colonies Stead welcomed warmly. ‘It is an admirable arrangement,’ 
 he wrote, ‘which suits everybody except Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. 
 Lyttelton, who would have preferred any other antagonist.’ He 
 applauded also the choice of Mr. Lloyd George as President of the 
 Board of Trade, and Mr. John Burns as President of the Local 
 Government Board. Mr. Burns he declared to be the most outstand- 
 ing man in the Ministry after ‘C.-B.’ himself, besides being its ‘only 
 gaol-bird.’ John Burns’s ‘progress from Pentonville prison? to a 
 seat in the Cabinet’ had been ‘a prose-epic.’ ‘He is not yet fifty,’ 
 Stead continued, ‘but he has done more for his class than any other 
 workman of our time and more for London than the whole bench of 
 Bishops and all the ground landlords put together.’ And the reader 
 was reminded how, in the second year of the Boer War, Burns, 
 
 1 In a speech at Bodmin, Lord Rosebery had taken a line which made his 
 retirement from public life inevitable. 
 
 2 On account of the part he played in the Trafalgar Square Meeting of 
 November 13, 1887, ‘Bloody Sunday.’ See p. 248. 
 
280 THE LAST YEARS ' 1905 
 
 ‘cricket-bat in hand, stood guard, from ten o’clock at night till two 
 in the morning, at the door of his own house, ready to defend his 
 wife and child against the howling mob of infuriated Jingoes who had 
 smashed the windows and were threatening to loot his home in the 
 good patriotic fashion so much admired in those days.’ 
 
 After Campbell-Bannerman and John Burns, the most noteworthy 
 Minister in Stead’s eyes was Mr. Asquith, ‘a handy fighting-man in 
 the mélée of parliamentary debate,’ if lacking ‘the stuff of which 
 martyrs were made. . .. It would be grossly unjust to say that Mr. 
 Asquith always shouts with the biggest crowd, but it is not his 
 instinct to advertise his agreement with an unpopular minority.’ 
 In Sir Edward Grey — whom he was to hold up to pity and scorn a 
 year later as the victim of ‘the Tchinovniks of the Foreign Office’ — 
 Stead saw many merits, for ‘despite the Jingo-strain in him,’ his 
 Imperialism (apart from the Boer War) had ‘usually been well 
 tempered by common-sense and the Ten Commandments.’ In 
 foreign politics, Grey could be trusted merely to say ditto to his 
 predecessor, Lord Lansdowne, alike ‘in coercing the ‘Turk, sweet- 
 hearting France and keeping step with Japan’; nor would he pander 
 to the Germanophobes. 
 
 Proceeding to deal with the rest of the Cabinet in groups, Stead 
 bestowed his blessing upon Mr. Bryce as Chief Secretary for Ireland, 
 with Lord and Lady Aberdeen at Dublin Castle; Sir Anthony 
 McDonnell’s administrative genius, Stead thought, would now have 
 full scope, no longer handicapped as it had been under Conservative 
 rule. He would have a free hand to prepare the way gradually ‘for 
 the transfer of the whole control of Irish affairs to the Irish people.’ 
 
 In the Colonial group, it was Mr. Churchill who would really count, 
 his titular chief Lord Elgin was a respectable nonentity. With Lord 
 Carrington and Mr. Sydney Buxton also in the Cabinet, the Colonies 
 could rely upon sympathy, almost upon deference. South Africa, 
 above all, had reason for relief. Her affairs would have precedence 
 before all others. 
 
 The Indian group consisted of Mr. John Morley, who was Secretary 
 of State, Sir Henry Fowler, who had previously held that office, and 
 Lord Elgin and Lord Ripon, both of whom had been Viceroys. Mr. 
 Morley would have a new India to face — an India whose inhabitants 
 had been flushed with pride over the victories of Japan, besides being 
 awakened to those two great resources of the weak against armed 
 
IgI2 THE LAST YEARS 281 
 
 force, the Boycott and the Strike. He would have to cope with a 
 heritage of grave difficulties, bound up with the partition of Bengal. 
 The educated natives of India would look to him for radical reforms. 
 He would not have a bed of roses. 
 
 Mr. Birrell was Minister of Education. What would be his policy? 
 The Educational group included Mr. Lloyd George, ‘the most 
 conspicuous spokesman of the Nonconformists’; Mr. Haldane, 
 German in his outlook, a lawyer, a metaphysician, a theologian, ‘a 
 kind of Calvinistic Jesuit or Jesuitical Calvinist, who had steeped his 
 brains in transcendental philosophy and exercised his wits in back- 
 stairs intrigue’; Sir Henry Fowler, the Methodist, and Lord Ripon, 
 the Roman Catholic. How they would reconcile their differences 
 Stead could not foretell. “The only logical solution of the religious 
 difficulty —that of confining State education strictly to secular 
 education, leaving the Churches free to supply religious teaching — 
 although advocated by Sir Alfred Thomas,! the chairman of the 
 Welsh party,’ had no chance of being adopted, as it was repudiated 
 by Mr. Lloyd George. 
 
 A strong Cabinet on the whole, Stead summed up, and a good 
 Cabinet — above all a ‘C.-B.’ Cabinet. ‘C.-B.’ was its hub —all the 
 spokes centred in him. And he was the hub, because he was ‘the 
 solidest, most seasoned, best balanced of all the Liberals, a plain, 
 honest, respectable, good-humoured Scot, wary and canny beyond 
 most of his countrymen’; a man, ‘standing firm upon his feet, with a 
 cool head and a warm heart,’ above all a man who had always ‘played 
 the game.’ ‘C.-B.,’ most human of mortals, will have been pleased by 
 Stead’s commendation. They had known each other for more than 
 thirty years of public life, and had generally been fighters on the same 
 side. Whenever they had crossed swords, it had always been sans 
 rancune: the private letters in which ‘C.-B.’ occasionally defended him- 
 self against Stead’s rebukes in the Press are models of suavity and 
 tolerance and kindly feeling. More frequently it was to thank Stead 
 or to applaud him, that he wrote. 
 
 In those thirty years, the political status of the two men had been 
 changed indeed. In the middle eighties, Stead’s hey-day, Campbell- 
 Bannerman was just a Liberal ‘stalwart,’ scarcely known outside 
 Whitehall and Westminster and his Scotch constituency. Behold 
 him, now, Commander-in-Chief, and Stead beginning to be regarded 
 
 1 Afterwards Lord Rhondda. 
 
282 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 — for all his undiminished vigour - as a mere gallant old veteran of 
 small account! 
 
 In the fortunes of John Burns the change was more striking still. 
 Witness this delightful dialogue, recorded in one of Stead’s note- 
 books, and dating from only ten months later— November 15, 
 1906: 
 
 ‘I carry my corn well,’ said John Burns, ‘none of these things affect 
 me in the least.’ He had been telling me about his experience the 
 previous night at the State Banquet at Windsor, where he had 
 been present to meet the King of Norway. He said, ‘it is very remark- 
 able. King Edward and the Queen and King Haakon talked more 
 to me than to all the rest of the Cabinet put together. I talked to the 
 King of Norway nearly twenty minutes, and both King Edward and 
 Queen Alexandra were extremely kind to me. I went up the great 
 staircase in my levee dress, saluted by the Guardsman. I reflected 
 that the cost of my coat alone amounted to as much as fifteen months 
 of the wages which I was earning twenty years ago. Monstrous 
 crime, that is, to make you wear such a dress! Nineteen years ago, 
 that very day, I was knocked down and arrested in Trafalgar Square 
 on “‘Bloody Sunday,” nineteen years ago exactly, that Guardsman 
 came near thrusting me through with his bayonet. And now the 
 wheel has come round in full circle, it was the very identical day, 
 “Bloody Sunday!’ There I was nineteen years later hobnobbing 
 with kings!’ 
 
 I asked, ‘What do you think of King Haakon?’ 
 
 ‘Not much in him,’ Burns replied, ‘not worth seeing again, but I 
 will see him, of course, if he wishes to see me. I tell you there is 
 more shrewd sense in our King’s little finger than there is in King 
 Haakon’s whole body. He is a wonderful man is our King. He seems 
 to grow shrewder every time I see him, and he keeps himself strictly 
 within the limit of the constitutional position.’ 
 
 ‘Will he make five hundred Peers in order to enable us to get rid 
 of the House of Lords?’ 
 
 ‘No,’ Burns said, ‘he won’t do that — but he is a good fellow.’ 
 
 ‘It was very amusing,’ Burns went on, ‘people remarked about my 
 dress with my big military chest, and my slender waist. Did you 
 ever hear what the King said about my dress to Lord Acton?’ 
 
 ‘No,’ I replied. 
 
IgI2 THE LAST YEARS 283 
 
 ‘When Lord Acton went to see him the King took hold of his collar 
 and said to him: ‘‘Where did you get this dress? I have never seen 
 a worse-fitting dress. Now, if you like, I will give you a word of 
 advice. You go and ask John Burns who his tailor is, for there has 
 never been a man at my levee whose dress fitted him so well as John 
 Burns’s.” ’ 
 
 “These things,’ said Burns again, ‘don’t have any effect upon me — 
 these trifles.’ 
 
 III 
 STEAD AND THE GERMAN EDITORS. 1906-7 
 
 To the optimists who believe in Peace (there are optimists who still 
 believe in War) there is always something to inspirit and encourage 
 in the exchange of such amenities as marked the visit of the German 
 Editors to England in 1906, and that of the English Editors to 
 Germany in 1907. In the light of the years 1914-18 it is impossible 
 to wax enthusiastic over these visits now. Most of the Editors who 
 took part in them-— German Editors and English Editors alike — 
 must recall them with mingled feelings. Mr. Clement Shorter, 
 Editor of the Sphere, who entered thoroughly into the spirit of the 
 hospitalities at the time, is now convinced that the excursion of 1907 
 was one of the most hypocritical enterprises ever known. There is 
 bound, of course, to be a certain measure of make-believe and 
 humbug in all such functions, but this does not mean there can be 
 nothing in them except hypocrisy. Stead, who was the most active 
 organizer of that Anglo-German demonstration of good-fellowship, 
 was sincerity incarnate.t Who shall say that his infectious friendliness 
 went to waste? In England as in Germany we may have had our 
 cynics, but the cynics were in a minority, I suspect, in both countries. 
 Both in London and in Berlin the convivialities were, for the most 
 part, genuine. Hosts and guests really enjoyed themselves and, on 
 
 1 Mr. Shorter, who had a great regard for Stead, agrees that he was one of 
 the exceptions, in fact, the chief exception in this respect. Stead’s whole 
 bearing on that visit to Germany was in Mr. Shorter’s eyes admirable. 
 “There were many newspaper men there of no importance who were always 
 in the front row,’ he wrote in the Sphere for April 17, 1912, ‘but Mr. Stead 
 was not one of these. Although I had plenty of evidence that his was the only 
 name in the whole party known in Germany, he kept quietly in the back- 
 
 ground and won the deep regard of all the quieter and less ambitious spirits 
 of the band.’ 
 
284 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 the whole, liked each other. Amicable relations were formed which 
 in some cases still exist. An exchange of courtesies will not avert a 
 world-war, but there must surely be some seed of good always in an 
 honest effort towards international understanding. 
 
 Stead preserved a big pile of documents of all sorts connected with 
 the various ceremonies and festivities, banquets and addresses which 
 attended the German Editors’ visit. Perhaps the most noteworthy 
 item in the collection is an article about himself from the pen of Herr 
 Friedrich Dernburg, whose son was to become so famous as German 
 Colonial Minister. An extract from this, as translated into rather 
 engagingly quaint English by some German penman, deserves tran- 
 scription here: 
 
 ‘While circulating on an unknown shallow water it is very consoling 
 there is a pilot on board. Fancy 50 German Journalists on the open 
 sea of social and political life during London’s high season, and you 
 will set a value to the leader who had escorted us in safety! This 
 leader was W. 'T. Stead, England’s greatest journalist. It was a 
 marvellous deed and the more I look back the more the difficulties 
 we have got over surprises me. How many rocks may we have passed 
 over without observing them? And if we, as I hope, got decently out 
 of it, it was only thanks to him. I do not believe there is another man 
 like Stead (as least I have never met him) who commands as a 
 General and works as a Courier. I call him the Napoleon of the 
 Journalist’s campaign, and there is no exaggeration. Mr. Stead was 
 the first to salute us in Bremen, and arriving in Southampton every- 
 body was already acquainted and on familiar terms with him. He 
 was the last to take farewell of us in Plymouth, and to find even after 
 those saturated-of-impression-days a cordial word to tell us at 
 parting. It was with his aid we were introduced to all dignitaries 
 and men-of-State-and-letters we wanted. To him still we owe the 
 acquaintance with journalistic people of every kind and speciality. 
 His great reputation everywhere was as wonderful as his dexterity 
 in discovering the right word to join people of opposite opinions. 
 He always keeps a simple dignity with a gentle tint of humour. 
 Broad-shouldered, rather small, a strong head with a short-cut grey 
 beard, elastic gait, in spite he may be sixty, by appearance you would 
 not guess the journalist — rather a Sea-Captain. It was in London as 
 if one from 9g o’clock in the morning was riding in a carousal and only 
 
1912 Dnke GAS Ty YEARS 285 
 
 at midnight came down having moved round the whole day. Only 
 Stead was always the same. “You are not of flesh and blood, you 
 are a machinery of steel and iron!’ I said to him. He smiled kindly 
 and shook hands — his shaking is also physically not so soon to be 
 forgotten!’ 
 
 Mr. Dernburg has told us as much as we need to know of the 
 German Editors’ visit. We may disregard all the junketings and 
 speechifyings. Anybody curious to see a full contemporary record 
 of what happened will find one in the enterprising little weekly journal 
 conducted by Mr. Leo Weinthal, entitled The Anglo-German Courier, 
 which had begun its existence in the previous January. Mr. Weinthal 
 and Mr. Thomas Rhodes (of the Norddeutscher-Lloyd Company) — 
 the latter a close friend of Stead’s from this period onward ~ were 
 among the prime movers in the whole affair. 
 
 From the English Editors’ tour in Germany in the following year, 
 Stead brought back an even greater abundance of souvenirs — notes 
 for his own speeches in what he called ‘English-German’; autograph 
 letters from ‘Celebrities’ and State-Officials; magniloquent Municipal 
 ‘Addresses’; facetious and sentimental ‘Toasts’; elaborately made- 
 out programmes, etc., etc. He enjoyed it all thoroughly. Here are a 
 few lines from the long article in the Review of Reviews in which he 
 dealt with his experiences: 
 
 ‘Whatever we did in England last year the Germans did this year 
 and did it better. And they did other things of which we had not 
 thought. We did not provide them with three special opera per- 
 formances. We did not improvise village festivals or have fair 
 maidens pelt them with roses as they sat at lunch. They gave us 
 portfolios in which to store our newspaper cuttings, and heaped 
 souvenirs upon us wherever we went. Steamers and buildings were 
 beflagged in our honour, cannon thundered salutes. Choral societies, 
 hundreds strong, sang to us as we went down the Rhine. A picked 
 quartette sang us songs of the Lorelei. Military bands played by the 
 hour, brazen trumpets sounded martial fanfares in our honour, and 
 at Hamburg the square in front of the Rathaus where we dined, was 
 illuminated with coloured fire. The King of Saxony received us, and 
 lunched us in his Castle at Pillnitz; the Prince Regent of Bavaria 
 received us in the Schloss at Munich. The Imperial Chancellor 
 devoted two hours to receiving us at a garden party. Courtiers and 
 
286 BHESUAS D AGE ARS 1905 
 
 Ministers, Burgomasters and Chambers of Commerce vied with each 
 other in doing us honour. But nothing touched us more than the _ 
 rustic welcome we received from the villages at Prien and at Stock on 
 Lake Chiemsee. It was so simple, so hearty, so delightfully uncon- 
 ventional and sincere.’ 
 
 Although, as Mr. Shorter and others have attested, he did not put 
 himself forward in any way, Stead was, of course, in German eyes 
 the one outstanding figure among the visitors — the one man whose 
 name was everywhere known. His were the speeches to be reported 
 and talked about, his the features to be good-humouredly caricatured. 
 The best of the caricatures was inspired by the best of the speeches, 
 one which Stead delivered at the Berlin Chamber of Commerce — a 
 Pacifist’s panegyric on the German Army. Here is the peroration: 
 
 ‘Steps towards the Federation of the World. I end as I began, by 
 paying my respects to the German Army. I admire it because it has 
 rendered unnecessary the maintenance of any other army within the 
 limits of the German Empire. Nothing gives me more delight than 
 to see how the old fortifications necessary at a time when one German 
 State fought against another, have been replaced by beautiful parks 
 and pleasure gardens, wherein your children play in peace and glad- 
 ness. ‘To me it is a prophecy of what is coming when the armed 
 anarchy of a world split up into forty-six sovereign and independent 
 States becomes a single great federation with but one army and one 
 navy to maintain order and enforce the law. Nothing impressed me 
 more during this visit than the sight of the Bismarck monument at 
 Hamburg. There stands the giant keeping eternal watch and ward 
 over the sea-gate of the great Empire which he helped to found. He 
 was no Peace hero, but a man of war from his youth up. But he 
 was the instrument chosen to fulfil the prayer of your national 
 song — 
 
 Dear Fatherland, sweet Peace be thine. 
 
 By his statesmanship the frontier fringed with cannon disappeared 
 from within the limits of the Fatherland. No longer now German 
 seeks to take the life of his brother German. What Bismarck did 
 for Germany some still greater Bismarck has yet to do for the entire 
 human family.’ 
 
1912 THE LAST YEARS 287 
 IV 
 THE SECOND PEACE CONFERENCE AT THE HAGUE 
 
 “The Second Hague Conference of 1907 was nearly twice as large, 
 lasted twice as long, did more than twice as much work, and is not 
 half as much appreciated as its predecessor.’ 
 
 So Stead declared in a Preface to a history which he compiled of its 
 labours, but he was writing argumentatively. It annoyed him to see 
 the Second Conference generally belittled by the newspapers, and he 
 was ‘out’ to defend it. It was not really more important (as he might 
 be taken to imply) than the First Conference, and it was certainly less 
 interesting, inasmuch as it lacked the element of novelty. A detailed 
 account of it in these pages would have the savour of a twice-told tale. 
 
 The one serious failure in the Peace Crusade of 1899 had been in 
 regard to the International Pilgrimage. Undeterred by that experi- 
 ence, Stead revived his pet project in March 1907, after a preliminary 
 European tour of his own. In 1899 he had agreed that the state of the 
 world was unpropitious, but now: 
 
 ‘Glance for a moment at the transformation that has been wrought 
 in the world since 1898! France and England, instead of arming for 
 instant wars, are now locked in a fraternal embrace. America and 
 England have established a friendship so close that it is emphasized, 
 instead of being endangered, by the folly of distraught individuals 
 who have earthquakes on their nerves. Russia and England are 
 establishing the entente for which I have been working these thirty 
 years. Japan has fought out her quarrel with Russia, and is done with 
 it. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty, guaranteeing the status quo of Asia, 
 has freed the world from the vast and incalculable peril of Chinese 
 partition. In the Western Continent, from the North Pole to Cape 
 Horn, there exists no dispute pregnant with the possibility of an 
 appeal to war. In Africa all the possessions and spheres of influence 
 have been surveyed and delimited. In South Africa the establishment 
 of a Botha Ministry in Pretoria puts a public seal to the reconciliation 
 of Boer and British consequent upon our national confession of our 
 national crime. The trouble that was brewing in 1899 between 
 Sweden and Norway has come to a head and burst without the firing 
 of a single gun.’ 
 
 And so the incorrigible optimist proceeds, pointing in turn to 
 
288 THEVIOAS TaAYEARS 1905 
 
 Northern Italy with its Irredentist agitation ‘damped down,’ to the 
 Moroccan question adjusted by an International Conference, to the 
 solved problem of North Schleswig, even to Alsace-Lorraine, 
 tranquil and prosperous under German rule, and to France philo- 
 sophically acquiescing in the decree of Fate! 
 
 Apart from this complete misconception of French feeling (which, of 
 course, he shared with many other leaders of opinion in England), 
 Stead was able, undeniably, to make out a fairly good case for his 
 principal proposition: that Europe was in general ready to be con- 
 verted to peace principles, but that some really energetic movement 
 was essential to her conversion. Four points, he contended, should 
 constitute the objective of any such movement: 
 
 (1) An arrest of the increase of armaments. 
 
 (2) The Government to undertake the work of Peace Societies and 
 appropriate to peace propaganda and international hospitality {1 for 
 every {1,000 spent per year. 
 
 (3) Refusal to call in a second, or special mediator, before making 
 war to be punished by refusing war loans and making imports con- 
 traband of war. 
 
 (4) Arbitration to be made obligatory on all questions of secondary 
 importance which do not affect honour or vital interests. 
 
 The Conference was to meet on June 1. In the meantime, the 
 peoples of all countries, by means of an International Pilgrimage, 
 should bring home to their respective governments the need for 
 effective action at The Hague. And Stead proceeded to elaborate the 
 plan in detail, naming the suitable representatives for the United 
 States and Great Britain and France, and outlining the various 
 stages of the Pilgrim’s Progress through the Capitals of Europe. 
 Perhaps it was the most grandiose idea of the kind even his brain ever 
 conceived! 
 
 His enthusiasm was catching, and among those who responded 
 to his appeal for co-operation were many brilliant and distinguished 
 men and women. ‘Typical of these was the eminent French scientist, 
 Dr. Charles Richet, who replied in two emphatic sentences: 
 
 “Fe serais toujours avec vous. Par conséquent, sans autre phrase, je vous 
 accompagnerat quand vous ferez ce pieux pélérinage.’ 
 
 But in some cases in which the spirit was most willing, the flesh was 
 most weak. Sir Alfred Russel Wallace approved wholly of the pilgrim- 
 
1gI2 ee A SD OY EARS 289 
 
 age, but he was in his eighty-fourth year and could not possibly take 
 part init. “The round of excitement, feasting, talking, visiting’ would 
 put him hors de combat in a few days. Sir Hiram Maxim, of machine- 
 gun fame, was “decidedly in favour’ of any measure for the promotion 
 of peace among the nations of the world. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ 
 he quoted, ‘makes countless millions mourn.’ If nations, like indi- 
 viduals, could be taught to do unto others as they would that others 
 should do unto them, it would save an infinite amount of suffering 
 in the world. As a bad sailor, however, Sir Hiram feared he would 
 be correspondingly bad as a pilgrim. 
 
 There were, inevitably, many other reasons for refusals, Nansen 
 sympathized, but as a Member of the Norwegian diplomatic service 
 (he was at the moment Norwegian Minister in London) could not 
 participate, and M. Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer, 
 was enthusiastic, but he was tied to his observatory by urgent work. 
 
 M. Millerand recognized ‘Ja noblesse de l’inspiration de Vidée mais ~’ 
 etc., etc. M. Briand thought the suggestion a very good one, but he 
 had only recently returned from a year’s trip and could not spare the 
 time for another trip so soon. 
 
 So it was with many well-wishers to the scheme. But the critics and 
 doubters and disapprovers were in a majority. 
 
 Mr. Keir Hardie, Leader of the Labour Party, felt that, while the 
 pilgrimage ‘might easily be an imposing and impressive demon- 
 stration in the cause of peace,’ it might just as easily become an object 
 of ridicule. ‘If at the outset, for instance,’ he wrote, ‘some of your 
 pilgrims were men who had aroused the bitter antagonism of the 
 working-classes by their treatment of their workpeople or by the 
 methods in which their fortunes were made, the inevitable result of 
 their presence would be to lead to exposures in the Labour and 
 Socialist Press of the countries visited and thus destroy the effect of 
 the pilgrimage. Further, if in the midst of this pilgrimage some one 
 was to quote the Review of Reviews as blessing Mr. Haldane’s scheme 
 for introducing militarism into our schools and universities, and 
 encouraging it in connection with our churches, that would not make 
 for seriousness.’ 
 
 Mrs. Fawcett regretted that she could not take part. Until Woman’s 
 Suffrage was carried she could work for no other public object. 
 
 Mr. H. G. Wells thought that the project was a very interesting one, 
 but that it would have to succeed brilliantly, and it might not so 
 
 ese Ol. LL Al 
 
290 DHEWVAS T ty EARS 1905 
 
 succeed. For his own part he hesitated to join, only because he 
 doubted his adding any weight whatever to the mission. 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw had never heard of a more unreasonable proposal. 
 Here on the one hand was a small body of persons of international 
 importance, whose time was the most valuable time in the world, and 
 whose energies were already overtaxed with the work that lay to their 
 hands at home. There on the other hand was a handful of merely 
 local people: Kings, 'Tsars, Kaisers and the like, whose time was of no 
 value at all, and whose profession it was to take part in local pageants 
 and international demonstrations. Surely it was for the latter, not the 
 former, body, to undertake the pilgrimage. If Stead would readjust 
 his project in that obvious way, Mr. Shaw would be most happy to 
 receive any monarchs at No. 10 Adelphi Terrace. He would do his 
 best to put them at their ease, and would ungrudgingly give them as 
 much good advice on the Peace question (or any other) as they might 
 feel disposed to receive. 
 
 Lord Hugh Cecil’s reply is particularly interesting, especially in this 
 context! He had found some of Stead’s suggestions attractive, but he 
 feared the pilgrimage would not be of much use. 'To the present age, 
 with its over-developed sense of humour, it would appear more 
 comical than impressive. Nor had he much belief in that sort of 
 method of carrying out what was really an ethical campaign. To put 
 an end to wars would be a miracle, and miracles came from prayer 
 and fasting, not from feasting and speechifying. There was too much 
 of the hollow resonance of a big drum in the plan. In Carlyle’s 
 French Revolution (at the part about the ‘feast of pikes’), Mr. Stead 
 would see some excellent observations in that sense. 
 
 Apart from the proofs it furnished of Stead’s unconquerable hope- 
 fulness and pertinacity, the Second Conference at The Hague has 
 little biographical interest. In one respect Stead was even more 
 conspicuous than during the First Conference, for on this occasion 
 he published and edited a newspaper of his own, a four-page daily 
 entitled Le Courrier de la Conférence, in the columns of which may be 
 found a wonderfully ‘live’ and complete record of everything that 
 happened. He had been in warm sympathy with all the British 
 representatives in 1899, but with the Delegates in 1907 he had no 
 patience. Alike in public and in private he ridiculed and reviled them 
 unmercifully. Sir Edward Grey was moved to remonstrate with him 
 very seriously for his attitude towards one of them, Sir E. Fry, but 
 
IgI2 THE LAST YEARS 291 
 
 with no good result. Indeed, Stead was as much dissatisfied with the 
 Foreign Secretary himself as with his emissaries. ‘Everything that 
 Sir Edward Grey said to me he would do, he would appear to have 
 told them (the delegates) not to do,’ he wrote some years afterwards, 
 ‘and instead of leading the van of progress in the cause of peace, the 
 British Delegates hung behind, leaving the front place to be scrambled 
 for by Germany and the United States of America. A more miserable 
 and scandalous débdcle I have seldom seen.’ 
 
 But if Great Britain cut a very sorry figure, the Conference as a whole 
 did a good deal of valuable work, as may be seen either from Stead’s 
 daily record in the Courrier or from the formal history of it which he 
 compiled and to which allusion has been made. 
 
 Vv 
 WILLIE STEAD’S DEATH 
 
 The end of the year was to bring Stead his greatest sorrow, the 
 death of his eldest son. It came on the night of December 14, a 
 Saturday, after only three days’ illness—‘a bad case of blood- 
 poisoning, affecting the heart.’ Willie Stead had been Acting Editor 
 of the Review of Reviews throughout 1907 and his father had had it in 
 mind that very day to make the appointment a permanent one; the 
 two were to have met in the evening — it was to be a great occasion. 
 Not until a quarter past eleven in the morning did Stead learn of his 
 son’s illness — he himself had been at Hayling Island during the week. 
 “Down to a quarter to eleven at night,’ he tells us, ‘I was absolutely 
 incredulous that his life was in danger. At a quarter past eleven I saw 
 him die.’ 
 
 Disregarding ‘the taunt of egotism’ which he knew could be flung at 
 him by misjudging strangers, Stead gave full vent to his grief in the 
 January issue of the Review of Reviews. His son’s death had recalled 
 to him his father’s death twenty-four years before, and he devoted his 
 ‘character-sketch’ that month to ‘My Father and my Son.’ In this 
 frank, outspoken, heart-felt composition — the first half of it written 
 in 1884 and now reprinted—we have the Stead whom to know 
 intimately was to love. Throughout his existence Stead made enemies 
 by the score — by the hundred, by the thousand! Countless men and 
 women who knew him only by his provocative writings and his 
 ubiquitous photographs detested the very sight and thought of him. 
 
292 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 Everything he said and did grated on them, got on their nerves, 
 offended them, repelled them. Even among personal acquaintances 
 who recognized his great qualities many could not abide him. To 
 such people this unique ‘character-sketch,’ if only it were possible 
 for them to read it without prejudice, might make intelligible the 
 devotion which Stead won from his own family and from all those 
 near to him. There is no literary art in it — no attempt at literary art. 
 It is the writing merely of a practised journalist to whom words come 
 easily. But it is all unmistakably genuine and the deep feeling in it is 
 infectious. Such lines as the following must have been read with 
 tears of sympathy by other fathers the whole world over: 
 
 ‘I remember when he was in his fifteenth year I parted from him. 
 ... When I lost sight of his dear, loving, eager, proud face, I lay 
 back in the railway carriage and cried like a child. He was so much to 
 me even then.’ 
 
 All Stead’s sons inherited something of his own independent spirit 
 and were quite capable of opposing him in public with regard to 
 matters on which he felt deeply. Alfred Stead startled his father once 
 with a signed article in the Daily Mail full of anti-Russian animus, 
 and one of Willie’s earliest appearances in print was with a severe 
 condemnation of Cecil Rhodes. But Willie, fortunately, was on his 
 father’s side nine times out of ten, and they worked together most 
 happily from first to last. ‘He was the nearest approach to a perfect 
 character that I have ever known,’ Stead was able to say of this eldest 
 son of his; and Mr. Herbert Stead, the Warden of Browning Hall, 
 Walworth, who knew Willie as an inspiring influence among the 
 working men of that district, confirms the verdict. ‘This is not the 
 hyperbolic language of passionate bereavement.’ Mr. Herbert Stead 
 declared in an appreciation of his nephew, included in that January 
 issue of the Review of Reviews, ‘I said the same thing nearly a dozen 
 years ago.’ 
 
 This is Stead’s own summing up of his son’s career: 
 
 ‘His was a noble life, brief in span, but full of service from his boy- 
 hood up. Of all those who knew him as boy or man no one ever heard 
 him say an unkind word or do an ungentle action. As one said who 
 had worked with him, he was the ideal of a gentleman. Lovable he 
 was and loyal, chivalrous and true in every phase of human life. “He 
 
IQI2 itr DAS YEARS 293 
 
 was the one man,” said his widow to me, “who perfectly lived out all 
 the ideals of which you have ever written.” 
 
 ‘Mazzini was a great inspiration to him, and he owed much to 
 Russell Lowell and Thomas Carlyle. When he was eighteen years old 
 he wrote in a small family Christmas souvenir as the saying which 
 had most influenced him after Prov. iii. 5, 6, these words from 
 Carlyle’s Past and Present: ‘To make some nook of God’s creation a 
 little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human 
 hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier, more blessed, less accursed.” 
 
 ‘In the spirit of that aspiration he lived to his last days on earth, and 
 in that spirit he is living still.’ 
 
 VI 
 ‘TWO KEELS TO ONE’: STEAD AND LORD FISHER 
 
 Everybody who cares anything about the Navy — as well as most 
 people who read ‘the books of the day’ — will have made acquaintance 
 with the two big volumes in which Lord Fisher of Kilverstone poured 
 out, so racily and exuberantly, his opinions and ideas, reflections and 
 recollections. In them he told most of what there was to tell about his 
 co-operation with Stead, backed by Mr. J. L. Garvin and others, on 
 behalf of British Naval Defences during the years 1908-11. 
 
 Upon nine political questions out of ten, Stead and Mr. Garvin 
 were strongly opposed, but in regard to the ideal which was embodied 
 in Stead’s famous watchword, ‘Two keels to one,’ they were entirely 
 in accord, and both of them saw in Lord Fisher the man to put that 
 ideal into practice. They hailed in him a new and more scientific 
 Nelson, great alike in strategy, in administration, and in inventive- 
 ness; and they delighted at the same time in his social qualities, his fun 
 and ‘divilmint’ and good fellowship, merely smiling at the recklessness 
 and violence and other shortcomings and defects which made him so 
 many enemies. Readers of those memoirs of his will recall Fisher’s 
 onslaughts upon Lord ‘Charles Beresford, ‘The Circus Admiral,’ as 
 Stead, in his partisanship, once called him. ‘It has always been a 
 puzzle to me,’ one of Beresford’s backers once wrote to Stead, ‘that, 
 with your keen insight into character, and your knowledge of the 
 world, you have not yet found out Sir John Fisher.’ 
 
 The conflict between the Fisher party and the Beresford party was 
 at its height in 1909. Fisher believed, with Stead and Garvin, in 
 
294 TARGA Ste YihAks 1905 
 
 applying the ‘T'wo Power Standard’ — the “Two keels to one’ — to the 
 big battleships: the class of ships which, so Stead used to declare, 
 could decide our next Trafalgar. 
 
 Beresford’s point of view was thus set forth in a letter to Stead from 
 Admiral C. C. Penrose-Fitzgerald in July of that year: 
 
 “The case presents itself to me somewhat as follows: Lord Charles, 
 with his recent experience in command of battle fleets, wants to 
 provide for the immediate future. He knows that battleships alone — 
 however large and powerful they may be — do not constitute a fighting 
 fleet, without their auxiliaries; and he has used the apt simile, that a 
 park of heavy artillery does not constitute an army. He hears a good 
 deal of tall talk about the “‘two keels to one” (excellent in theory), but 
 he does not see that any practical steps are being taken to carry it out; 
 and in the meantime he wants to turn what we have got, or may have 
 in the immediate future, into a real fleet prepared for war, by pro- 
 viding it with the requisite auxiliaries: without which, he tells us 
 plainly that it is not ready for war. 
 
 ‘He knows that if all the money is spent on “‘Dreadnoughts”’ (which 
 of course make the greatest show) it cannot also be spent upon the 
 other things which he considers of even more importance for the 
 immediate efficiency of the fleet. He knows that many of our “‘pre- 
 Dreadnought”’ ships are still of great fighting value, zf they are 
 supplemented by their light cavalry, mounted infantry, etc., but not 
 without: and his programme appears to me to be reasonable, definite, 
 necessary and eminently practicable. I do not think it was at all 
 necessary for Lord Charles to jump on the ‘“‘two keels to one” 
 proposition in the way that he did; and it was certainly indiscreet of 
 him to tread on the tail of your coat by doing so. But as he is a 
 countryman of mine I do not feel that I can quite condemn him; for 
 even in these days of piping peace and arbitration, without a cloud in 
 the sky, it may be well for us that we still have some fighting men 
 amongst us. We may want them.’ 
 
 It is unnecessary here to go into the details of the discussion or to — 
 follow its subsequent course. Eventually, the Fisher view prevailed. — 
 To recall Stead’s ideas on the main question, the necessity of Great — 
 Britain having a Navy twice as strong as Germany’s, it will suffice to — 
 cite a letter which he addressed to the Daily Chronicle on November 8, — 
 1910, and in which he expressed himself very clearly and succinctly: 
 
1912 THE LAST YEARS 295 
 
 ‘Sir, -I have read your special correspondent’s letter from Berlin 
 with the attention which it deserves. I need hardly say that I am 
 entirely at one with him in desiring that we should, as a nation, do 
 everything to Germany that we should wish Germany to do to us 
 were our places changed. The golden rule is not only good morals, 
 but good business. 
 
 ‘It is because I wish to do this that I have always been frank and 
 outspoken on the question of armaments. We have been playing the 
 beggar-my-neighbour game for several years now, and, to judge from 
 your correspondent’s letter, must continue to go on playing it until 
 an agreement is arrived at on all possible political and commercial 
 questions which may arise in the future between us and Germany. I 
 want to stop that game in our interest as much as in the interest of 
 Germany. But how can it be stopped? 
 
 ‘It has always seemed to me that the responsibility for continuing 
 the beggar-my-neighbour game rests upon the nation that endeavours 
 to alter the naval status quo to its own advantage and to the detriment 
 of its neighbour. Letting bygones be bygones, how do we stand 
 to-day? 
 
 ‘As the result of the policy in which each nation has done its utmost 
 to protect its own interests without regard to its neighbour, we spend 
 £40,000,000 a year on our Navy, and Germany spends £20,000,000. 
 That is the naval status guo measured by a financial standard. 
 
 ‘Speaking for my country, I say I am ready to accept this as the 
 normal and proper proportion of naval preponderance between the 
 two powers. We have arrived at it by the rough and ready test of each 
 doing the best we can for ourselves. It corresponds fairly with the 
 comparative seaboard, oversea commerce, Colonies, etc., of Britain 
 and Germany. If the Germans will agree to reduce it by 10, 20, or 
 50 per cent, I would gladly do the same. But if they increase their 
 naval estimates we must maintain the status quo. ‘That is to say, 
 for every fresh pound they spend we are bound to spend two or 
 abandon the status quo by allowing Germany to improve her position 
 at our expense. 
 
 ‘This seems to me a fair basis for a working agreement whether 
 carried out downwards by a friendly arrangement or carried out 
 upwards by a continuance of the beggar-my-neighbour policy. 
 
 “We are for the status quo. If we cannot secure it by agreement we 
 have no option but to maintain it by competition. That is the 
 
296 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 pacificist’s basis for the policy of two keels to one, or, if you prefer it, 
 of two pounds to one.’ 
 
 More interesting, to-day, than Stead’s and Fisher’s arguments are 
 the relations between the two men. A most enthusiastic character- 
 sketch of the famous Admiral written by Stead earlier in that year 
 came as a kind of culmination to their friendship of a quarter of a 
 century. Besides giving an admirable portrait of Fisher, the man, it 
 comprised a most telling defence of his whole career, and tabulated 
 more than thirty important naval reforms which he had introduced. 
 Fisher was intensely gratified by this skilful and very outspoken 
 glorification. On his first reading of it in proof, he was even a little 
 alarmed. ‘It is appalling, what you have written!’ he exclaimed in a 
 short note, dated February 1. ‘How the old women will sit up and 
 Beresford & Co. will curse!’ The article will be found in the Review 
 of Reviews for February, 1910.4 
 
 VII 
 THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. COOK 
 
 The comedy of Dr. Cook’s triumphant reception at Copenhagen in 
 1909 as discoverer of the North Pole, and of his ultimate unmasking 
 and complete discomfiture, made one of the most amusing episodes 
 in Stead’s life. Let us recall it, scene by scene. 
 
 First we have Stead all agog to meet the Great Man: 
 
 ‘I am telegraphing,’ he cables to the New York American, ‘just as I 
 am leaving London for Copenhagen to meet Dr. Cook. . . . London 
 is talking of nothing else.... There is no jealousy, no envy — 
 nothing but an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction that, if the 
 
 1 A story which Fisher told of Stead, although most people know it already, 
 ought, perhaps, to be included here. The following is a concise version of 
 it given by Mr. A. G. Gardiner in the Daily News for April 17, 1912: ‘‘‘Stead 
 may be a little mad,” said Lord Fisher to me once, ‘‘but he is the first of jour- 
 nalists. I know, because he beat me so hollow in a match in which I had all 
 the cards. It was when the Prince of Wales returned from Canada. I took 
 every precaution to keep the Press at bay. Stead hired a little dinghy, came 
 up to the warship in the twilight, scrambled up the ladder —a daring feat for an 
 elderly landsman — got on deck, marched along with his own superb assurance, 
 talked to officers who never dreamed that such an air could belong to an 
 intruder, returned, tumbled down the ladder, and gave his paper the only 
 great story that appeared in the Press next day.”’ 
 
IgI2 Tipe LAS ily yY EARS 297 
 
 greatest prize left in the lucky bag of the planet was not to fall to a 
 Britisher, it should have fallen to an American. For in all that 
 Americans do of good or of evil the British feel their share.’ 
 
 Next we have the doubts and the anxieties of the Danish Govern- 
 ment and of Dr. Maurice Egan, the distinguished American Minister 
 at Copenhagen. Had Dr. Cook really discovered the Pole? Stead in 
 the Review of Reviews for September 1909, tells us how the members 
 of the Danish Cabinet discussed the matter: 
 
 ‘Reports received from their representatives in Greenland,’ he says, 
 ‘seemed to them to justify their according to Dr. Cook an official 
 welcome. He was no adventurer. He was certified as a reputable 
 American. He had formally and publicly stated that he had dis- 
 covered the Pole. His letter describing his journey did not seem, 
 except for one or two obvious misprints, otherwise than a trustworthy 
 narrative of how the Pole was discovered. Some day or other the Pole 
 must have been discovered very much in the way that Dr. Cook said 
 he found it. Old Arctic explorers— who abound in Denmark — 
 thought his narrative prima facie worthy of credence. So it was 
 decided that a reception committee should be formed; that the 
 Government, the Geographical Society, the City Council and the 
 Chamber of Commerce, should take part in his welcome; that the 
 Crown Prince should be the first to welcome Dr. Cook to Denmark. 
 
 And he explains how this decision, when notified to Dr. Egan, 
 necessarily modified the attitude of aloofness he (Dr. Egan) had at 
 first intended to take up. If the Danish Government, to which he was 
 accredited, decided that there was prima facie evidence to justify them 
 in according an official welcome to an American citizen, it was obvious 
 that he, an American Minister, must avoid any action which might 
 be quoted in after years to prejudice the claim of the United States to 
 the North Pole. 
 
 Then comes the great scene of the hero’s arrival, as described by 
 Stead: 
 
 ‘A roar of cheering went up as Dr. Cook, taking off his cap, stood 
 for a moment and bowed his acknowledgments of the welcome. 
 There was no mistake as to his identity. The whole interest of the 
 thousands of eyes centred on his brown and weather-beaten face. 
 The Man from the North Pole, whose hand we grasped with words of 
 
298 THE EAST YEARS 1905 
 
 welcome, had a well set-up figure about five feet eight inches in 
 height. His hair was sandy-brown, rather coarse in texture. He wore 
 a moustache, but no beard. If the points of his moustache were 
 turned upward, he might, as his portrait shows, be mistaken for the 
 German Emperor — if that war lord could ever be conceived in a loose 
 dark grey slouch morning coat, a sailor’s cap, and moccasined feet. 
 His blue eyes seemed at first a little dazed at the sight of the cheering 
 multitude. A lady thrust a bouquet of roses into one hand. In the 
 other he carried his cap. Then slowly, as he began to advance up the 
 few steps that led from the landing, the Crown Prince bade him 
 au revoir, and stepped with some difficulty through the crowd. 
 Another moment and it would have been too late. 
 
 ‘For the eager multitude, no longer restrained by the police who 
 mysteriously vanished — all save one short but gallant unit — surged 
 down upon Dr. Cook, cheering and crowding him backwards. I was 
 immediately behind him when the crowd burst, and seeing that he 
 was ill-prepared for a scrimmage, I flung my arms round him under 
 the armpits, and pressing backwards with all my weight, I somewhat 
 eased the pressure from behind. In front the solitary constable fought 
 his way like a Trojan, followed closely by Minister Egan; behind him 
 came Dr.Cook. Another journalist, Mr. Weil, of Berlin, the American 
 representative of an English paper, came to our help, and the four of 
 us, surrounding the human centre of the press, struggled, staggering, 
 swaying hither and thither amid the cheering, excited throng. Dr. 
 Cook had to give up his flowers; one of his cuffs was torn off and 
 carried away as a trophy; once or twice it seemed as if we should be 
 carried off our feet, but although one man fell he was not trampled on.’ 
 
 And, as Scene IV, we have the dauntless explorer, this new peril 
 past, in safe anchorage at the American Legation: 
 
 “When Dr. Egan saw Dr. Cook face to face he liked him. And when 
 he got to know him he liked him still more —- an experience by no 
 means confined to Dr. Egan. He felt that Dr. Cook was an honest 
 man and a good American. Believing that, he treated him with the 
 lavish hospitality which no one knows better how to dispense than a 
 warm-hearted American whose father hails from Tipperary. 
 
 ‘As a Start, finding that the returning explorer literally possessed no 
 more clothes than those in which he stood on his moccasined feet, his 
 first service was to rig him out in a complete suit of the mournful 
 
1912 THE LAST YEARS 299 
 
 uniform of civilization—top-hat included. His next step was to 
 invite him to lunch. After lunch he presented him to the King and 
 from that time until he left Copenhagen Dr. Cook had no friend, 
 philosopher and guide so staunch and true.’ 
 
 Meanwhile, Captain Peary, who had made good, beyond any 
 questioning, his title to having reached the North Pole just twelve 
 months after Dr. Cook’s alleged discovery of it, was branding his 
 rival explorer publicly as a humbug and a liar. Scene V shows us 
 Stead puzzled and more than a little anxious. ‘What kind of man is 
 this Dr. Cook?’ he imagines his readers asking him. Here is his 
 reply — headlines and all: 
 
 ‘NAIVE 
 
 ‘To which I answer —and J think almost all of us who went to 
 Copenhagen would agree with me in replying —that he does not 
 strike us as a man, but rather as a child — a naive, inexperienced child, 
 who sorely needed some one to look after him, and tell him what he 
 ought to do in his own interest. It was really most pathetic to see his 
 efforts to readjust himself to the busy, bustling, new environment of 
 modern civilization. 
 
 ‘NUMB 
 
 ‘When we were struggling through the crowd at the landing I asked 
 him to let me arrange for him a general interview, at which all the 
 press-men could be present. ‘“Yes,” he said, “‘but put it off till to- 
 morrow.” As if the ravenous maw of the world’s press, with its 
 teeming special editions, could wait complacently for twenty-four 
 hours before hearing what he had to say. ‘““Why this hurry?”’ he was 
 always asking, with the absent air of a man who has lived six months 
 at a time in the timeless solitude of the Arctic night. As for his 
 inability to protect his own interests, even in matters of pounds, 
 shillings and pence, it was almost pitiful. 
 
 ‘NEITHER SMART — 
 
 ‘When he made a present to the New York Herald of the exclusive 
 story of his discovery he was asked to name his own terms. What did 
 he know of its value? One New York journal sent its representative 
 to meet him before it was known the Herald had his letter, with 
 instructions to offer Dr. Cook £3,000, with a possible extra thousand 
 
300 THE LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 thrown in, for the first exclusive interview. When Nansen started 
 for the North Pole he was promised £5,000 by the London Daily 
 Chronicle if he reached the Pole, and so many pounds less for every 
 degree he fell short of it. As he only got past the eighty-sixth degree 
 he only received £4,000. Cook for the exclusive story of how he 
 actually reached the Pole only asked £600! It is enough to make one 
 weep! But, as he used to say plaintively, “I am not out for money!” 
 He certainly is about the last man whom any business firm would 
 send out for money. Any American newsboy could give him points 
 in the art of looking after himself. 
 
 ‘NOR “‘SLIM”’ 
 
 ‘And as he allowed himself to be exploited in money matters, so he 
 displayed an almost infantile inability to see the obvious precautions 
 which he ought to take for his own defence. I think it was this 
 naiveté, this often most exasperating inability on his part to forestall 
 hostile criticism, to pacify ignorant but clamorous interviewers avid 
 for “proofs,” the nature of which they do not understand, that did as 
 much as anything else to convince everybody of his honesty. He 
 either neglected it or threw away the most obvious chances. He had 
 at his absolute disposition the most expert pens in Europe, and he 
 rather snubbed than welcomed offers to help him. Everything that a 
 clever rogue would do instinctively if he wished to hoax the public 
 Dr. Cook did not do. When he was asked questions, he answered 
 them simply, without flinching or dodging, or beating about the bush. 
 Where he made a mistake he confessed it. But as for making out a 
 good case for himself, or of adopting any ad captandum method of 
 appeal, he could no more do it than a child.’ 
 
 : And yet this was the man who, if they were to listen to Captain 
 Peary, had been outdoing Ananias! Was this conceivable? Surely 
 not! So felt Stead and almost everyone at Copenhagen. 
 
 Almost everyone but not everyone! Not—and now we reach our 
 climax — not a certain formidable young investigator named Philip 
 Gibbs! 
 
 Philip Gibbs (the very famous Sir Philip of to-day), who was repre- 
 senting the Daily Chronicle, had been the first of all the newspaper 
 correspondents to tackle Dr. Cook face to face and alone. He had 
 gone out on a tender to the Hans Egede and had, in his suave and 
 
IQI2 Lib LASTAY LARS 301 
 
 gentle but very direct fashion, asked some penetrating questions to 
 which the Doctor had made surprisingly vague and contradictory 
 replies: the most damning fact of all was that this sot-disant discoverer 
 had no diary or scientific log-book with him to show in support of his 
 claims. Having formed a most unfavourable first impression, Philip 
 Gibbs was proof thereafter against the ‘naiveté’ and the‘numbness’ and 
 all the other negative qualities which, as it seemed to him, were 
 blinding the eyes of his credulous colleagues; so he ‘went for’ Dr. 
 Cook with an absolute and unwavering assurance which startled all 
 onlookers. ‘My dear boy,’ Stead exclaimed to him, ‘you are ruining 
 yourself and your paper too.’ Many of us in London felt the same. 
 Our friend Philip, it seemed to us, was trusting to his instinct rather 
 than forming a judgment on evidence, and we awaited almost 
 tremblingly his collapse. 
 
 It was Dr. Cook, however, who collapsed. The case against him 
 turned out to be all too strong, and the unhappy Doctor went back to 
 his home in the United States completely discredited — by general 
 ., agreement ‘a proved impostor.’ 
 
 An impostor, certainly, to all appearances, but how was his im- 
 posture to be explained? It was a psychological conundrum. Stead 
 persisted in his belief in the man’s simplicity and sincerity. ‘Whether 
 Dr. Cook ever reached the North Pole or not,’ he declared, ‘of one 
 thing I am certain — he is honestly convinced that he did. He may be 
 suffering from a hallucination; he may have dreamed the whole thing. 
 But he was, and is, incapable of conceiving so colossal a fraud as that 
 of deceiving the whole human race by a made-up tale.’ That was Dr. 
 Egan’s view also; indeed, it was very widely held. Philip Gibbs, 
 himself, inclined to it later. Here, in full, is a letter which he wrote to 
 Stead some months afterwards — it will serve as an epilogue to our 
 play: 
 
 ‘36 HOLLAND STREET, W. 
 ‘DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 ‘Many thanks indeed for your very kind letter. Of course it was a 
 good thing for me personally that my attack on poor Cook was 
 justified, and I took a big risk in Copenhagen. But all the same I feel 
 really compassionate towards the poor devil now that he is done to 
 the world. ‘The human brain is such a queer thing that we can never 
 tell when a man is a deliberate fraud or has got a kink somewhere. I 
 think it is quite likely that Cook was acting under a delusion. Where 
 
302 THEULAST  YERARS 1905 
 
 is he, I wonder? It would be quite a good News-story to go off in 
 search of him! 
 ‘With all good wishes for a happy New Year to you and your family. 
 ‘Believe me, dear Mr. Stead, 
 ‘Yours very sincerely, 
 ‘PHILIP GIBBS.’ 
 
 VIII 
 THE YEAR IQIO 
 
 Throughout this book, but especially in the second half of it, I have 
 had to bear constantly in mind the familiar adages about ‘a part being 
 greater than the whole’ and about ‘not being able to see the wood for 
 the trees.’ A glance over any single volume of the Review of Reviews 
 suffices to impress upon one the utter impossibility of keeping step 
 with Stead. To recur to Auberon Herbert’s happy metaphor, Stead, 
 even at sixty, had not learnt to run ‘cunning’ — he would still be round 
 every corner after every conceivable hare. The Index to the volume 
 of the Review for January-June 1910, contains at least a score of 
 entries, every one of which stands for some characteristic aspect of its 
 editor’s life. Let us glance at a few of them. 
 
 Under ‘Belgium’ comes the death of Leopold II. on December 16, 
 1909. We have seen Stead’s dealings with King Leopold in 1899 and 
 1903, but in the Chapter on Gordon there was no occasion to speak 
 of Stead’s one and only personal encounter with that remarkable 
 personage in 1884. Stead recalls the story now: his impetuous dash 
 to Brussels; his startling proposal (which had been considered and 
 approved by people in high places in London) that Leopold should 
 take the Soudan as a gift from the British Government and, in return, 
 make himself responsible for Gordon’s safety; the vehement dis- 
 cussion that followed — the tall, angry monarch ‘with the long nose 
 and the sinister eye’ towering over his pertinacious visitor ‘as a 
 Cochin China rooster might tower over a little Bantam cock’; the 
 emphatic and angry refusal; and finally, some months later, the 
 King’s exclamation to M. Emile de Laveleye, ‘Oh, Stead? It was 
 terrible! How that man made me sweat!’ 
 
 The deaths of Mr. Frederick Greenwood, the Pall Mall Gazette’s 
 first editor, and of Sir George Lewis, served also to revive old 
 memories upon which one might dwell; the publication of a fragment — 
 
IgI2 THE LAST YEARS 303 
 
 of George Meredith’s posthumous romance, Celt and Saxon, reminds 
 us that the great novelist began with immense gusto a fantastic work 
 with Stead in the réle of hero as a sort of moral Hercules — he once 
 told Stead the gist of it with roars of laughter; the General Election 
 of 1909 — Stead, the Pamphleteer, with his “Why the Lords must go’ 
 and a dozen other ‘Papers for the Crisis’ had been at his most active 
 throughout the struggle; Mr. Lloyd George’s ‘Old Age Pensions’ 
 scheme — W. T. Stead, and still more his brother, Herbert, had done 
 something to prepare the ground — for that. And so on, and so on 
 -—‘The Naval Programme,’ ‘The Peace Movement,’ ‘Psychical 
 Research,’ ‘Votes for Women.’ Each of these subjects seems to call 
 for a new chapter at the present stage of Stead’s life. In addition, we 
 have his second visit to Ireland; his intensified preoccupation with 
 the Near East; his new enthusiasm for Pageants;! and finally — but 
 this belongs rather to the close of the year — his championship of that 
 surgeon of genius, Mr. H. A. Barker.? Stead’s advocacy of Mr. 
 Barker’s claims to professional recognition was one of his finest 
 achievements as a journalistic knight-errant. Even now this 
 unanswerable vindication, ‘The Hinterland of Surgery,’ may be re- 
 read with a thrill of pleasure. ‘You have pleaded my cause,’ Mr. 
 Barker wrote to him afterwards, ‘as no one else in England could 
 have done: I am deeply grateful.’ The battle was yet to win, as we 
 know, but, as on so many other occasions, the forces of prejudice and 
 pedantry suffered at Stead’s hands their first defeat. 
 
 Stead’s efforts in 1908-10 at mediation in Near Eastern turmoils 
 were characteristically bold and unconventional, but none of them 
 counted for a great deal. He knew more about the Young Turks and 
 their movement than almost any other Englishman, and he had many 
 personal friends in their ranks, but his efforts to help and guide them 
 will find no place in history. 
 
 The visit to Ireland in March, 1910, was of no importance, but it 
 was a very pleasant experience. He stayed in Dublin as the guest of 
 Mrs. Tickell, who, previously to her marriage, had been for many 
 years his confidential secretary. 
 
 ‘It was on this visit,’ Mrs. Tickell writes me, ‘that Mr. Stead met 
 
 1 Stead’s helpful zest for pageants brought him into very cordial friendship 
 both with Sir Frank Benson, in whose Shakespearean productions he had 
 come to delight, and with that most brilliant of Pageant-Masters, Sir Frank 
 Lascelles. 
 
 2 Afterwards Sir Herbert Barker. 
 
304 DBR OLAS Tey EARS 1905 
 
 “7E.”1 T went with him to ‘“‘/Z’s” office in Plunkett House and they 
 had a great heart-to-heart talk. Mr. Stead afterwards was wildly 
 enthusiastic and declared that if he had seen no one else and done 
 nothing else in Ireland he would have been quite content to have got 
 to know “‘/E.”’ One evening we dined at the house of Mr. T. W. 
 Russell, Secretary to the Department of Agriculture and Technical 
 Instruction. Mr. T. P. Gill and the late Commissioner Baily were 
 also guests. Mr. Stead made me promise that I would stop him if 
 the conversation drifted to “spooks,” and I made myself very un- 
 popular as everyone wanted to talk about them!’ 
 
 Mrs. Tickell ends her letter to me thus: ‘You are writing the life of 
 one of the most lovable men that ever lived. I know that when the 
 Titanic went down I lost my best friend.’ 
 
 IX 
 ONE MORE PORTRAIT: STEAD IN IQIO—-IQI2 
 
 None among Stead’s associates has had more interesting and 
 amusing and arresting memories of him to record than Mr. E. S. Hole, 
 whose sympathetic comment on his chief’s experiences as a Spirit- 
 ualist I cited as a text to Chapter 16. Mr. Hole worked with Stead in 
 1910, 1911, and 1912, first as a kind of confidential secretary, after- 
 wards as Advertising Manager of the Review of Reviews. It is in 
 connection with the latter appointment that he tells his best story. 
 Stead, I may explain, was still the philanthropic spendthrift in 1911 
 whom we saw in the Review of Reviews’ first year, and with Mr. 
 Stout, as Business Manager, still saving him periodically, by the skin 
 of his teeth, from the Bankruptcy Court. 
 
 Mr. Hole, in his own way as strenuous a worker as Stead himself, 
 resolved to ‘make good’ in his new post. He did ‘make good,’ and 
 within three months he was able to point to a very considerable 
 increase in the revenue from advertisements. What surprised and 
 hurt him was that Mr. Stout, his office superior, although not lacking 
 in zeal for the Review’s welfare and although manifestly the best of 
 good fellows — entirely free from envy or jealousy — showed little 
 appreciation of his industry, ingenuity, and success. At last, being by 
 nature frank and impetuous, Mr. Hole gave expression to his feelings. 
 
 1 Mr. George Russell, Agriculturist, Journalist, Statesman, Mystic, Poet, 
 Painter and Conversationalist! 
 
Igi2 THE LAST YEARS 305 
 
 “Look here, Mr. Stout,’ he said, ‘here have I been slaving away for 
 the Review and increased its “ads.” to the extent of £1,000 a quarter, 
 and you don’t seem a bit pleased. I don’t understand it, I tell you.’ 
 
 ‘Oh, what’s the good of getting in another £1,000 a quarter?’ 
 exclaimed Mr. Stout wearily, preoccupied perhaps at the moment 
 over some new financial complication that had been sprung on him. 
 “What’s the good of getting in another £1,000? It only means that 
 the dear old chief will spend another £1,100!’ 
 
 Apart from that weighty consideration, it was probably impossible 
 for Mr. Stout, with his twenty years’ experience of Stead’s editorial 
 methods, to wax enthusiastic or sanguine over the Advertising 
 Department. He could recall how one class of advertisers after 
 another had been alienated by dangerous enthusiasms and unpopular 
 campaigns, beginning with the Mattei cure for Cancer and coming 
 to a climax with ‘Our Brother Boers.’ The average newspaper man 
 is a cynic, and in Fleet Street even now you will hear such remarks as 
 ‘Old Stead was wonderful with his “stunts” — he always knew what 
 would fetch the public,’ or ‘He was a shrewd old fellow — he must 
 have done pretty well out of that last “scoop” of his.’ Mr. Stout 
 and Mr. Hole know better. ‘Stead,’ declares Mr. Hole, ‘could have 
 amassed riches beyond the wildest dreams of those idle scribblers 
 whose minds associated the use of his pen with the same hack prin- 
 ciples as their own. Many of the articles from which he is supposed 
 to have derived financial benefit cost him thousands of pounds — and 
 he deliberately weighed the consequences before writing them.’ 
 
 The following appreciation of Stead from Mr. Hole’s pen is so 
 excellent that I reproduce it in full—it was printed by Mr. Henry 
 Stead in the Australian Review of Reviews for April 1913: 
 
 Worsly STEAD 
 ‘BY A CO-WORKER WHO KNEW HIM INTIMATELY 
 
 ‘William Thomas Stead believed in God. Therein lay the cause of 
 his strange lack of harmony with the generality of mankind, and his 
 equally strange charm for all who knew him as a man and not as a set 
 of disconcerting ideas behind cold printers’ ink. He had no conscious 
 bias and judged each individual question on its own individual merits. 
 Hence, strictly speaking, he belonged to no party, but contained 
 within himself a tinge of every school and owed adherence to none. 
 
 L.S.— VOL. II U 
 
306 THE®LAST YEARS 1905 
 
 By virtue of this very freedom of his intellect he was naturally nearer 
 to the Liberals, properly so-called, than to the Conservatives, 
 although his veneration for the truly and intrinsically venerable gave 
 him a sound conservatism in many important respects, while his 
 insistence upon the predominance of right over expediency rendered 
 him a thorn in the side of any opportunist or recalcitrant Liberal 
 legislators. Consequently, he was ever at variance with one party 
 without attempting to conciliate the other. With him it was not the 
 avoidance of Scylla and Charybdis, but the deliberate and direct 
 collision with both. His reference of every question to its elementary 
 first principles, quite apart from the exigencies of creed or party, gave 
 his attitude that element of the unexpected which almost invariably 
 proved to be founded on pure logic. He owed a responsibility to none 
 but God. To the superficial observer he was a mass of contradic- _ 
 tions. He was an Imperialist who hated militarism. He fought for 
 universal peace and two keels to one. He was ‘‘a democrat who 
 flouted the democracy.” He was a lover of pomp and ceremony who 
 always dressed shabbily. 
 
 “The very width of W. T. Stead’s tolerance caused his troubles with 
 the creeds. He abandoned his “Civic Church” idea because the 
 Nonconformists objected to the inclusion of the Roman Catholics. 
 He expurgated the Kreutzer Sonata, and defended La Milo. He 
 quarrelled with the Roman Catholics in his defence of the Mormons. 
 He attacked the Mormons for holding idiotic tenets and defended 
 them from their adversaries. He was more jealous of his pen than of 
 his life, and yet “wrote up” undertakings with a commercial basis. 
 And in every single instance there was a sweet reasonableness which 
 reconciled each with the other if men were not in too great a hurry 
 to consider. Only his profound but childlike faith in the approbation © 
 and guidance of his “Senior Partner,” and his rectilinear following of — 
 his reading of his “sign-posts,’’ can explain the phenomenal and — 
 seemingly superhuman strength behind his isolated personality. 
 To say that his life-work was the product of an exaggerated self-_ 
 importance and an inflated ego is to betray a complete ignorance of — 
 the true nature of the pure and unselfish being, who, when not — 
 absorbed by some abstract conversational problem or concrete social — 
 evil was one of the most unassuming of all men. Instead of having R 
 any self-importance he was oblivious of himself, and no one ever paid | 
 any attention to the quietly and shabbily dressed, drooping man who | 
 
 y 
 _ 
 " 
 
1912 THE LAST YEARS 307 
 
 sat in tramcar, ’bus or tube, hustled and jostled by his hurrying fellow 
 mortals. ‘To him a taxi was an extravagance, and nothing less than an 
 international pilgrimage would justify a new suit. 
 
 ‘Scarcely anything less than a wedding would bring a tall hat to his 
 noble head, and his bag was a source of wonder by the very fact of its 
 holding together after so many years of constant use. Methinks I see 
 him now before me, proceeding in his firm, methodical pace, as he 
 did every morning, through the by-streets of Westminster, through 
 Old Palace Yard, past the Abbey, past the Commons, on to the 
 Embankment, thence to proceed unnoticed, unknown, and un- 
 observed, in a penny car to Aldwych, almost to the office door. How 
 vividly I can see his steady forward tread, his head bent slightly, its 
 massive broadness striking all who took a second look, his bag 
 swinging gently by his side, his form and motions full of a quiet, 
 natural dignity, and his every movement indicating forward force and 
 wonderful energy. His life was even as his walk — direct to the goal, 
 and he moved through his years like ‘‘a grand machine.” Pride was 
 absent from his every act, but behind his unpretentious externals was 
 that consciousness of intellect which rendered an unsurpassed and 
 unquestioned leader of men. Acts which have been imputed to his 
 pride are directly traceable to the childlike simplicity of his whole 
 nature. The leviathan among political, economical, theological, or 
 social questions was as a gudgeon among the goldfish in the fine- 
 drawn niceties of social intercourse. Yet, as a host, he was unsur- 
 passed, and the manner in which he somehow seemed to give his 
 special individual attention to a salon crowded with guests was a 
 point which always baffled me to understand. Like the god in the old 
 Persian legends, he seemed to be in several places at once, with a 
 contagious affability which endeared him to all. 
 
 ‘I once said to him, “Either society keeps straight on, and you zig- 
 zag, or you keep straight on and society zigzags.”’ I have no hesitation 
 in accusing society of the unrectilinear course. His was the seeing 
 intellect of a child wielding the force of a Vulcan. He shocked and 
 startled society as it shocked and startled him, as it shocks and 
 startles us poor pigmies who are content to sit tight and acquiesce 
 solely because we value comfort, conventionality and convenience. 
 Not all great, but all successful, teachers have used the same direct 
 methods. Shaw shocks none the less fundamentally, but in a different 
 way, and with different objects. But the questions attacked by Mr. 
 
308 DHE AAS LAYER ARs 1905 
 
 Stead were seldom, if ever, abstract and academic; they were practical, 
 present, urgent and vital, and, the glory be given unto him, he seldom 
 failed in his object. He was ever the one to suffer. Not only did he 
 blow down the iniquity, but he had also to pay the cost of the gun- 
 powder and bear the scars of his own victory. To talk to him of 
 *‘consequences”’ was to attack his belief in God. His faith was such 
 that it entered into every phase and crevice of his activities, and 
 permeated every fibre of his being. “If you publish that you will 
 sacrifice fifty thousand readers of the Review!’ “So much the worse 
 for the fifty thousand readers,” would be his steady, calm and 
 unaffected response. ‘‘Do the public edit me, or do I edit for the 
 public?” represented his attitude. 
 
 ‘One thing only could perturb him, and perturb him to an incredible — 
 depth. It was the absence of any “‘sign-post” in a time of stress or 
 even in a small emergency. Then he waited, and the change was 
 marked. He was even as the unhorsed, swordless knight, but so soon 
 as the course was clear and the sign deciphered, though the path 
 might lead through gaol or mob or palace or wild, tempestuous ocean, 
 he went his way as placid and unruffled as the veriest maid to her 
 village school. I have seen him seeking his lacking sign-post like an 
 Alpine guide ’midst the treacherous snows. I have seen him burst 
 into my office upon me, his visage bright with that intense happiness 
 which it alone could portray, his whole being vibrating with the 
 expression of pent-up, vigorous energy, his strangely, sadly-laughing 
 soft blue eyes large with untold joy, and on his lips the news of “‘what 
 had happened,” and of the sign he had therefrom interpreted. Every 
 step I made in his employ succeeded its definite and appropriate 
 sign-post, and my very entry there was delayed for more than a year — 
 pending the same indispensable preliminary. Let no man laugh, for — 
 we who were around him have been far too often staggered by the 
 unexpected vindication of his deductions to find ‘‘coincidence” a ; 
 fitting word, and his greatest achievements were accomplished with — 
 no further capital than his own implicit belief in their needfulness. — 
 I refer to his successful, or rather to his most obviously successful, — 
 undertakings, for I believe that his greatest achievements have yet to — 
 be enumerated, he having paid the cost, the true benefits being yet to — 
 come. | 
 
 ‘I have referred to the confident manner in which he looked for 
 guidance. His last was one of his most explicit sign-posts. He had 
 
 a 
 
 “<7 
 
IgI2 PE er Avo tin oy ARS 309 
 
 finally settled all outstanding matters connected with the develop- 
 ment of his Review which, to his delight, was making steady forward 
 progress, and was awaiting his next call to arms. At that time he 
 became spontaneously and keenly interested in a comprehensive, 
 original and highly successful movement in America for national 
 evangelization on the card-index system. Such a movement, free 
 from shibboleths and cant, secured his full and entire sympathy. He 
 spoke to others and myself about it several times, and when he 
 received a direct invitation to address it in conference, it was to him 
 the most obvious call to action for some great purpose. On the 
 evening before he set sail we rode together to his home. On the way 
 he was more deeply earnest than was his wont. “Well,” he said, “and 
 what shall I do out there?” “You will make a big splash!’ I replied 
 with a smile, but sadly. “‘Yes,” he said, “I shall do that.” He paused. 
 “But there is something behind it all which I don’t clearly understand 
 just yet. Believe me, Hole, the Senior Partner does not fling me 
 across three thousand miles of land and sea with no great purpose.” 
 He remained somewhat pensive. He then described to me a strange 
 instance of guidance vouchsafed to a devout man, and we were both 
 deeply moved. We gripped hands at parting. ‘“‘Good-bye, my lad,” 
 he said. ‘Do your best. Write me, Hotel Manhattan, New York. 
 God bless you!” ““God bless you, Mr. Stead,” I answered, with a 
 full throat, and went into the darkness with the big tears starting, 
 leaving him to follow that clear sign-post which was to lead him 
 direct to Heaven.’ 
 
CHAPTER 29 
 THE END 
 \ i 7 have now reached the close of Stead’s career. He himself, 
 
 in the autobiographical sketch from which so many citations 
 have been made, thus summarizes the last great effort of his life to 
 which he attached importance. 
 
 ‘My next sphere of international activity was in Turkey in the year 
 1g11. I twice visited Constantinople, the first time before the war,? 
 and I seized the opportunity of pressing as vigorously as I could upon 
 the attention of the Sultan and the Grand Vizier the absolute neces- 
 sity for following the policy of peace and reform, and avoiding any 
 collision with the Balkan States. My second visit was after the Italian 
 War had broken out, when I went to see what could be done towards 
 demanding that the Powers should refuse to recognize any change 
 in the status quo before an International ‘Tribunal. My visit was an 
 active propaganda for arbitration in Constantinople, which met with 
 great support; and when I left, everything was arranged for the 
 departure of a band of Ottoman pilgrims representing all the races 
 and religions of the Empire, which would go round Europe protesting 
 against violated Treaties, demanding the establishment of an Inter- 
 national Tribunal before which it would be possible to arraign such 
 an international malefactor as the Italian Government. On my 
 return home, I summoned a meeting at Whitefield’s Tabernacle for 
 the purpose of rendering an account of my stewardship, and setting 
 forth the result of my pilgrimage. The meeting was a great success. 
 Afterwards I took the chair at another meeting, when Mr. McCullagh? 
 lectured upon the Italian atrocities at Tripoli. But other issues, 
 notably that of the Anglo-German dispute over Morocco and the 
 question of the Anglo-Russian policy in Persia, submerged the 
 Tripoli question. ‘The Turks themselves broke up into parties, the 
 Pilgrimage never started from Constantinople, and the war is going 
 on to this day.’ 
 
 It is unnecessary to dwell here upon these events. Readers who are 
 
 1 The war between the Turks and Italians in Tripoli. Stead wrote this 
 autobiographical sketch early in 1912. 
 2 Mr. Francis McCullagh, the well-known war-correspondent. 
 
 310 
 
THE, END Sut 
 
 interested in the subject will find Stead’s Constantinople experiences 
 set forth very entertainingly in the Review of Reviews for 1911.4 
 
 It was one of the forlornest of Stead’s forlorn hopes. ‘Mon cher et 
 éminent ami,’ wrote to him in November 1911, M. Jean Finot, editor 
 of La Révue. ‘I am following your Press campaign with the keenest 
 interest. Once again I behold my valiant, eloquent, admirably 
 humane Stead!’ But, M. Finot went on to warn him France had 
 given Italy a free hand in regard to Tripoli. ‘Therefore,’ he went on, 
 ‘you must not cherish the notion that we shall raise any obstacles in 
 the way of annexation.’ As for the other European Powers — with the 
 exception of Austria, who had intimated that the frontiers of Euro- 
 pean Turkey must be respected — so far from threatening Italy, they 
 had been addressing to her ‘opinions amicales.’ 
 
 I shall not attempt to enumerate Stead’s other activities and pre- 
 occupations during these last two years. The award of The Hague 
 Court Arbitration (September 1910), in the Newfoundland Fisheries 
 Dispute was a source of great delight to him; so had been President 
 Taft’s famous utterance a few months earlier, to the effect that even 
 ‘matters of national honour’ ought not to be excluded from Arbitra- 
 tion Courts. Called as a witness before the Divorce Commission 
 which was held in December 1910, Stead had the satisfaction of 
 expounding freely and somewhat startlingly his opinions upon our 
 marriage laws. He found new objects for enthusiasm in Earl Grey’s 
 Co-Partnership schemes, in the Pageants of Sir Frank Lascelles, and 
 in the Anglo-American convivialities initiated by Sir Harry Brittain. 
 He continued the Review of Reviews ‘Character Sketches’ with 
 undiminished verve, revealing to a keenly-interested public the 
 previously unknown features of many men now familiar to us all. 
 In short, it was still the same Stead, more alert and vivacious and 
 alive than anyone else living. 
 
 A cablegram from New York, dispatched March 17, 1912, by Mr. 
 Fred B. Smith, the organizer of a kind of ‘Revivalist’ campaign known 
 as ‘The National Men and Religion Forward Movement,’ prefaced 
 the end. It was worded thus: ‘Will you come New York and address 
 the Great Men and Religious Congress in Carnegie Hall April 
 
 1 In Miss Stead’s volume, My Father, will be found one of Stead’s many 
 accounts of his famous interview with the Sultan. See also Stead’s pamphlet, 
 Tripoli and the Treaties. 
 
312 THE END 
 
 twenty-second (sic) together with President Taft? We pay expenses. 
 Subject World Peace. Please cable.’ 
 
 Here is Stead’s comment upon this enterprise, as printed in the 
 Review of Reviews for April 1912 — one of the last things he wrote : 
 
 ‘THE MEN AND RELIGION FORWARD MOVEMENT 
 
 ‘A very remarkable religious movement has been in progress during 
 the winter in America, which has attracted much too little attention 
 in this country. For some time past it has been noted in the United 
 States that the Churches are falling more and more into the hands of 
 women. They say that on an average there are three women Church 
 members to one male. To arrest this tendency and to restore the 
 requisite masculine element to popular religion in the States, a 
 syndicate was formed for the purpose of uniting evangelical Churches 
 in America, and of combining efforts to bring men and boys into the 
 Church. Women apparently are left out of the movement altogether. 
 It began last Summer with a representative conference at Silver Bay, 
 in the State of New York, which was attended by delegates from all 
 parts of the Union. It was decided to hold a series of eight-day 
 missions, having as their objective the reviving of the interest of men 
 and boys in the work of the Church. The dominant idea of the pro- 
 moters was to bring business methods into religion, and to work for 
 the attainment of moral ends with the same energy, concentration and 
 common-sense that are used in the making of a great fortune. Selected 
 teams of speakers were sent to the various cities with the object of 
 getting the Churches into line in the first case, and in the second case 
 for the getting of the men and boys into the Churches. The objects 
 of the Men and Religion Forward Movement are divided under 
 seven different heads : — (1) Membership; (2) boys’ work; (3) Bible- 
 study; (4) evangelism; (5) social service; (6) home and foreign mis- 
 sions; (7) inter-Church work. 
 
 With the view of enthroning God in the conscience of man, they 
 undertook a religious and sociological survey of the territory, and 
 suggested no fewer than sixty charts which were to be made as the 
 result of this exhaustive series of censuses. The department for 
 social service naturally appeals most to the world at large. The 
 Social Institute programme is very comprehensive. It appeals to all 
 our readers because it is an attempt to realize on a national scale the — 
 ideals of our old Civic Church, plus a distinctly evangelistic element 
 
THE END 313 
 
 which the Civic Church movement lacked. I am interested and 
 surprised to find an almost entire absence of any allusion, direct or 
 indirect, to the fact of existence after death. The committee has been 
 kind enough to ask me to address a meeting, held under their auspices, 
 on the ‘‘World’s Peace,” in Carnegie Hall, New York, on April 21st 
 (sic), at which President Taft and others will be among the speakers. I 
 expect to leave by the Titanic on April roth, and hope I shall be back 
 in London in May.’ 
 
 Among the other speakers were to be Mr. James Bryce, the British 
 Ambassador (afterward Lord Bryce), Mr. William Jennings Bryan, 
 and Mr. Booker Washington. 
 
 Miss Stead has told us how her father spent his last Sunday at home 
 at Hayling Island, how he gloried ‘in the beautiful weather, the blue 
 sea and the sunshine,’ and how on the day of his departure, Wednes- 
 day, April 10, he was full of enthusiasm and delight at the size and 
 magnificence of the Titanic.’ He stood on deck, watching and waving 
 to his wife, as the great ship steamed away on her maiden voyage.* 
 
 To the accounts already published of the disaster, and of the fashion 
 in which Stead met his death, there is not much to add. Mr. W. H. 
 Fairbairns,2 however, one of Stead’s closest friends, has recorded 
 for me memories which follow — they will be read with deep interest: 
 
 ‘One or two days before Stead left on his last journey his daughter 
 was playing Shakespeare in Enfield, and my wife and my family had 
 the pleasure of entertaining them, with Mrs. Stead, in our home 
 there. On the second evening Stead alone came to sleep, and after 
 the performance we sat and talked far into the night. He was full of 
 his journey to America and begged me to go with him. But beyond 
 this he talked about general affairs in that fascinating manner that 
 all who had the privilege to know him loved. I think our house must 
 have been the last that he visited before he went away, and I recall 
 with reverence and gratitude that last talk. Then, when I was in 
 New York in the spring of 1913, I had the good fortune to meet with 
 Mr. Frederick Seward, a New York lawyer who not only was on the 
 Titanic, but sat next to Stead in the dining saloon. He had never met 
 him before, but in a few hours a friendship was formed, and Seward 
 
 1 See My Father, and also Miss Harper’s Stead, the Man. 
 * Of the Campfield Press, St. Albans. 
 
314 THE END 
 
 told me how all at the table were almost spell-bound by the humour, 
 and beauty, and breadth of vision of Stead’s conversation. There 
 were careless men around who were brought in the short space of 
 time that they were together to read serious things that Stead put 
 into their hands. After the Titanic was struck Mr. Seward and Stead 
 were together on deck and talked for a little. Then the latter said 
 “T think it is nothing serious so I shall turn in again.” As far as I 
 know that was the very last that was heard of Stead.’ 
 
 Not ‘the very last,’ for Miss Stead in her Memoir was able to give 
 this further brief statement by Mr. Seward, and, in addition, the 
 evidence of one other fellow-passenger, Mrs. William Shelley: 
 
 ‘He was one of the very few,’ wrote Mr. Seward, ‘who were actually 
 on deck when the iceberg was struck. I saw him soon after and was 
 thoroughly scared, but he preserved the most beautiful composure. 
 Whether he stayed on board or sought safety by leaping into the sea 
 I cannot tell, but I do know he faced death with philosophic calm.’ 
 
 Mrs. Shelley, who with her mother, left the T7tanic in the last life- 
 boat,! wrote afterwards to Miss Edith Harper: 
 
 ‘I was only on deck a short time until mother and I took to the life- 
 boat. 
 
 “Your beloved Chief, together with Mr. and Mrs. Strauss, attracted 
 attention even in that awful hour, on account of their superhuman 
 composure and divine work. 
 
 ‘When we, the last lifeboat, left, and they could do no more, he stood 
 alone at the edge of the deck in silence and what seemed to me a 
 prayerful attitude of profound meditation. 
 
 “You ask if he wore a life-belt. Alas! no, they were too scarce. 
 
 ‘My last glimpse of the T7tanic showed him standing in the same 
 attitude and place.’ 
 
 I have cited already some of the striking tributes to Stead which 
 
 1 In 1886 Stead had published in the Pall Mall Gazette a vivid imaginary 
 description of the sinking of a modern liner with all its attendant horrors, and 
 -had appended to it an editorial footnote as follows: ‘This is exactly what 
 might take place and what will take place if the liners are set free short of 
 boats.’ This article was reprinted in the Review of Reviews for June, 1912, 
 with the comment: ‘After twenty-six years of “progress” the Board of Trade 
 is responsible for the loss of 1,600 lives on the Titani¢, because there were 
 not enough boats!’ 
 
THE END 255 
 
 appeared in the Press after the news of the Titanic disaster was 
 confirmed.! A few lines from an article written by Mr. J. L. Garvin, 
 and printed in the Review of Reviews for May 1912, will suffice here 
 to recall the general feeling evoked by Stead’s death: 
 
 ‘Walking in Oxford Street at midday when the loss of the Titanic 
 was certain, the only name I heard mentioned by the groups on the 
 pavement was his, and that was in itself significant of the extent to 
 which he had made his name a national and international word.’ 
 
 After some references to Stead’s work for friendship with Russia, 
 and for closer bonds between the English-speaking races, as well as 
 to his deep and far-spreading influence upon the journalism of the 
 Empire, Mr. Garvin concludes: 
 
 ‘His grave is where he might have chosen it, midway between 
 England and America, under the full stream of their intercourse; 
 and I cannot but think that his death was in accordance with his 
 view of things. It attested the great realities that underlie the 
 common movements of our life.’ 
 
 1 See Vol. I, pp. 115-116 and 308. See also Appendices V and VII. 
 
CHAPTER 30 
 STEAD’S PLACE IN HISTORY 
 
 HAT will Stead’s name stand for in times to come? Will he 
 
 be spoken of principally in connection with his championship 
 of women? Or as the ardent advocate of a big Navy? Or as the 
 inspirer of the ideals of Cecil Rhodes? Will he baffle students of 
 politics as the perfervid Imperialist who yet, from 1899 onwards, 
 was the most out-and-out partisan of the Boers? His own prophecy — 
 that he would be remembered a hundred years hence, if at all, as 
 ‘Julia’s amanuensis’ — most of us will dismiss as extravagant. His 
 belief in spiritualism constituted, of course, a very remarkable 
 feature of his mental and moral evolution; and in this field of thought 
 and action, as in so many others, he was a bold pioneer: but this one 
 aspect of his character cannot conceivably overshadow all the rest. 
 He himself, in other moods, pointed to his services in the cause of 
 Peace and of Arbitration as among the outstanding things in his life; 
 were he with us to-day, I imagine that ‘Arbitrate before you Fight!’ 
 would, of all his favourite shibboleths, be the one most often on his 
 lips. 
 
 My own impression is that Stead will be remembered rather for 
 what he was than for any of the things he did: that he will figure in 
 history as the bravest and most brilliant of all English journalists, 
 and as perhaps the most extraordinary man ever seen in Fleet Street.! 
 
 Heroic in his courage, kind and generous beyond belief, in his own 
 unique way a man of genius, W. T. Stead, while comparatively free 
 from the besetting sins of Englishmen, was full of all sorts of quaint 
 weaknesses and eccentricities and absurdities. These defects but 
 endeared him the more to his intimate friends — merely making them 
 laugh sympathetically and affectionately — but they were apt so to 
 repel and infuriate many people as to blind them to his great qualities. 
 On the other hand, he always had about him a group of idolatrous 
 worshippers who would admit no defect in him whatever; and 
 even among his quite level-headed associates—as among those 
 admirers who knew him only from afar through his work — there 
 are still, I imagine, a number who regard him with veneration 
 unalloyed. ‘Give your own picture of Stead,’ wrote to me a business 
 
 1 A very interesting comparison might, of course, be drawn between Stead 
 and Cobbett, both as individuals and as publicists. 
 
 316 
 
STEAD GibPLAceEaUN HISTORY, 317 
 
 man of note who was closely allied with him for over ten years; but 
 he added: ‘It will hurt me, I confess, if you say anything against 
 him. I really think he was faultless.’ 
 
 My picture of Stead is not of a faultless man, but it will be found, 
 I hope, to be the picture of a man amazingly, almost incredibly, good 
 and lovable. 
 
 ‘“T Jove the old boy!” is a phrase I have heard more often in Fleet 
 Street regarding dear old Stead than of any other mortal,’ wrote Mr. 
 E. S. Hole to me about his former chief, when sending me those 
 striking memories which we have read. It is on this note that I would 
 end my book. 
 
ae Ol if a 
 Niel 
 sag 
 
 
 
APPENDICES 
 
 I ‘THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE PALL MALL GAZETTE : 
 
 Il STEAD’S FIRST ‘DAILY PAPER.’ HIS ACCOUNT OF IT TO A CHICAGO 
 JOURNALIST 
 
 III STEAD’S OBSESSION WITH SEX. MR. HAVELOCK ELLIS’S LETTER 
 
 IV THE TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY OF THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS, NOTE- 
 WORTHY TRIBUTES 
 
 VY THREE ESTIMATES OF STEAD: MRS. FAWCETT’S; CANON HENRY SCOTT 
 HOLLAND’S; SIR E. T. COOK’S 
 
 VI THE STEAD MEMORIALS IN LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 VII A WREATH 
 

 
APPENDIX I 
 ‘THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE PALL MALL GAZETTE 
 
 HE idea of formulating the P.M.G. Gospel came to Stead after he had 
 
 been told by a Colonial Office official that in every British colony 
 there was ‘a P.M.G. Party and an anti-P.M.G. Party.’ The entire docu- 
 ment as originally printed would fill more than thirty of our pages. Here it 
 will suffice to extract from it the ten outstanding items: 
 
 1. The Development of the Individual. 
 
 All is of the devil that weakens the independent self-reliant individuality 
 of man. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his 
 own soul? And no amount of stall-fed content can compensate for the 
 destruction or the atrophy of the sense of independent identity and 
 personal responsibility by which every man feels himself a distinct unit, 
 responsible directly to his Maker, and not a mere insignificant cog in the 
 great social treadmill. That self-reliant, independent soul is the main- 
 spring of progress. It differentiates men from sheep. 
 
 2. The Independence of Woman. 
 
 Woman, no longer the mere ancillary of man, to be petted or enslaved at 
 his will, is to have as independent a voice in the disposal of her life as he. 
 No longer are careers to be closed to the talents of one-half of the race. The 
 course must be open to all, and woman herself must decide, after full 
 experiment, what best suits her genius, and how best she can develop her 
 faculties. 
 
 3. Christian is that Christian does. 
 
 A new catholicity has dawned upon the world. All religions are now 
 recognized as essentially Divine. They represent the different angles at 
 which Man looks at God. Questions of origin, polemics as to evidences, 
 erudite dissertations concerning formule, are disappearing, because 
 religions are no longer judged by their supposed accordance with Divine 
 Revelation, but by their ability to minister to the wants and fulfil the 
 aspirations of man. The individual, what can it make of him? As it raises 
 or debases, purifies or corrupts, fills with happiness or torments with fear, 
 so it is judged to accord with the Divine will. ... Handsome is that 
 handsome does. Christian is that Christian does. The man who acts as 
 Christ would do under the same circumstances is the true believer, though 
 all his dogmas be heretical and his mind is in a state of blind agnosticism. 
 The true religion is that which makes most men most like Christ... . And 
 what is the ideal which Christ translated into a realized life? For practical 
 purposes this: To take trouble to do good to others. A simple formula, 
 
 L252 VOL. If 321 x 
 
322 APPENDIX 
 
 but the rudimentary and essential truth of the whole Christian religion. 
 To take trouble is to sacrifice time. All time is a portion of life. To lay 
 down one’s life for the brethren — which is sometimes literally the duty of 
 the citizen who is called to die for his fellows —is the constant and daily 
 duty demanded by all the thousand-and-one practical sacrifices which duty 
 and affection call upon us to make for men. Hence the supreme Anti- 
 christ is selfishness, and he is furthest from his Divine Exemplar who 
 converts even the ministrations of religion into the consecration of selfish- 
 ness, which overleaps even the limits of time and obtrudes its hateful 
 egotism into eternity. 
 
 4. Federation of the Empire. 
 
 Empire such as ours there is not in all the world, nor ever has been. The 
 peopling of the waste places with men of our blood, of our race, of our 
 religion, and of our laws, goes on without ceasing. Unless it is checked, 
 the end of another century will see the world divided into two halves — one 
 half speaking English as a native tongue, the other half learning it as the 
 Lingua Franca of the human race. Of all problems, therefore, the most 
 important is to keep these great and growing English-speaking States in 
 friendly alliance, if not in political union. The Federation of the British 
 Empire is the condition of its survival. As an Empire we must federate or 
 perish. If our foreign policy is to be one, one Government must represent 
 all. If all are to be equally exposed to danger of attack, all must share 
 equally in providing for defence. No one proposes to attempt to weld 
 together the ocean-sundered free Republics under the British flag by 
 the loose bonds of a centralized Administration. There should be the 
 minimum control from the centre compatible with the maximum of 
 efficient co-operation in such affairs as are common to all parts of the 
 Empire, and even this minimum can only be safely exercised when the 
 controlled are fully represented at the centre of control. Nothing should 
 be forced, but everything fostered that makes for the enfranchisement of 
 the Englishman beyond the sea at present without a voice in the govern- 
 ment of the Empire, the future of which they will some day control. ... 
 There are two obstacles in the way of this development. One is mechanical, 
 the other theoretical. The mechanical obstacle is the reluctance of the 
 House of Commons to surrender its present absolute sovereignty over the 
 policy of the Empire. ‘The House of Lords may be left out of account. 
 Against the forces of the greater and democratic Britain, the House of 
 Lords, paralysed by atrophy and undermined by the economic revolution, 
 can make no stand. There is no place for a chamber of titled landlords or 
 lawn-sleeved prelates in the new Constitution. But the House of Commons 
 is altogether another matter. It has usurped all power and, like all usurpers, 
 it will cling tenaciously to all that it has grasped. Nevertheless, the very 
 
APPENDIX I 323 
 
 magnitude and multiplicity of its prerogatives will prove its own undoing. 
 It is visibly breaking down before our eyes. 
 
 The burden is too vast to be borne even by a mob of 670 men, one-half of 
 whom spend their lives in preventing the other half getting anything done. 
 Paralysis, which in the House of Lords has supervened as the result of 
 atrophy and apathy, is no less visible in the House of Commons for 
 overwork and a too great eagerness to do everything ‘This will lead 
 to centralization—to Home Rule; and with Home Rule will come the 
 necessity for constituting the Imperial Senate, which will be the crown of 
 the Imperial edifice. The other difficulty is theoretical. The problem of 
 drawing the scientific frontier line, which shall demarcate the provinces of 
 the local legislatures, and the Imperial Senate, has hardly been studied, 
 much less solved. Yet its solution lies at the root of all schemes of 
 federation, and it must be attempted even in passing a Home Rule Bill for 
 Ireland. The Constitution for the Empire has yet to be written. The task 
 is a gigantic one. But all the signs of the times show that it cannot be much 
 longer postponed. 
 
 5. Arbitration in all Anglo-American Disputes. 
 
 The revolt of the American colonies has created one English-speaking 
 State not under the British flag. This disruption of the Union of the race 
 brought about by the headstrong pigheadedness of the Unionists of the 
 eighteenth century should be healed by the statesmanship of the Home 
 Rulers of the nineteenth. Some day inevitable destiny will compel the two 
 great English States of North America—the Dominion and the Republic — 
 to coalesce. Commercial interests and geographical neighbourhood will 
 prove too strong for all the efforts of politicians to preserve duality where 
 there should be unity. When the Dominion and the Republic coalesce the 
 occasion might afford an opportunity for cementing the alliance between 
 the great branches of the English race. At first the only outward and 
 visible sign of union might be the establishment of a High Court of 
 Arbitration, which would adjudicate upon all questions in dispute between 
 the various States of the English-speaking men. If that were effected, and 
 the internal unity of the race secured by the provision for the automatic 
 adjudication of all disputes, other developments would follow. A penny 
 post for all English-speaking men, a friendly interchange of friendly 
 offices on the part of consuls and captains, and who knows but in the 
 future a common Zollverein, on the basis of free exchange, might enable 
 our posterity to escape all the evils of the division which we owe to the 
 infatuation of our ancestors? 
 
 6. Home Rule for Ireland. 
 The Conciliation of Ireland is even more important than the Federation 
 of the Empire. As long as we govern Ireland as we govern no other 
 
324 APPENDIX I 
 
 part of the Queen’s dominions, against the consent of the people 
 who are governed, we shall find the Irish element, instead of cement 
 in the fabric of our race, as it might have been, an element of division, of 
 disunion, and of weakness. You cannot reunite a race when one section of 
 it is bitterly hostile to the other; and that hostility can only be removed by 
 conceding to the Irish what we have conceded to every other section of our 
 Empire — the right to make their own laws according to their own needs. 
 We can hold down Ireland by force if we will, but only at the price of 
 converting the Irish beyond the sea into bitter enemies of the Empire, 
 instead of, as they would otherwise be, the ardent upholders of a dominion 
 which has been founded so largely by their valour. For the sake of the 
 Empire we must consent to concede Home Rule. 
 
 7. Fustice and Understanding in all Relations with Subject Races. 
 
 Our position in India and in the further East, in Africa, and in Polynesia, 
 is one which can only be justified by the exercise of our authority in order 
 to minimize the evils of native anarchy, on the one hand, and of the impact 
 of civilization upon savagery on the other. We are responsible for our 
 rowdies, our filibusters, our slave traders, and our rum-sellers. We rear 
 these men. They go forth armed with the resources of our civilization to 
 exploit and plunder the native populations of the uncivilized world. It is 
 our duty to follow the rowdy with the policeman, to dispatch the gunboat 
 after the kidnapper and slave trader, and to enforce the Maine Law where 
 our adventurers have introduced fire-water. The prohibition of the sale of 
 strong drink to the Indians of the Canadian North-west is one instance of 
 the beneficial exercise of Imperial power, just as the introduction of alcohol 
 and opium into Upper Burma is a signal illustration of the worst abuse of 
 our authority. We may not be under any obligation to civilize the savage. 
 We are under the most imperious obligation to prevent those whom we 
 have reared and whom we have bred from using the weapons and poisons 
 of civilization to make him tenfold more the child of hell than he is. 
 
 Everywhere authority imposed by force, especially by foreign force, upon 
 unwilling populations, is an evil in itself, only to be tolerated because for 
 the time it staves off still greater evils. The object of all such arbitrary 
 dominion must be to render its existence as speedily as possible unnecessary 
 by educating and elevating the subject races to the full control of their own 
 destinies, the government of their own lands. Hence empires such as we 
 have established in India, the French in Tonkin, and the Russians in 
 Turkestan, exist but in order to dig their own graves, and that best fulfils 
 its purpose which most rapidly renders itself superfluous. The process in 
 any case must be slow. But if the goal were regarded as inevitable the 
 question of the length of each stride in that direction could be discussed as 
 a scientific problem in political dynamics, instead of being argued, as it 
 
APPENDIX I 325 
 
 now is, with all the heat generated by a dispute not as to the pace but as to 
 the direction of our movement. What is wanted more than anything else 
 in all affairs relating to the governance of men is impartial justice; and 
 justice to be impartial must be informed by an imaginative sympathy, 
 which enables to realize not only what are the views of our subjects, but 
 the full force of the prejudices and passions which are arrayed against our 
 rule. We always understand our own side of the controversy much better 
 than the case of the other side. And yet, without full understanding, how 
 can we hold the balance even? Until we have put ourselves in the place of 
 those we govern, and asked ourselves if we are indeed doing as we would 
 be done by, how can we understand the nature of the prejudice against 
 our rule? 
 
 In imposing English or Western habits and customs upon races of 
 different blood, religion, and customs, we run a great danger of trans- 
 planting enough to harm, and not enough to benefit. The Spaniard who 
 preached Christianity to the Peruvians at the point of the sword, and slew 
 the heathen for not understanding an imperfectly translated dogma, did no 
 more violence to the religion of Christ than some hasty reformers do to the 
 civilization of the West when they seek to establish the latest results of 
 European social science on a tabula rasa of Oriental superstitions. 
 
 8. Common-sense in Regard to Russia. 
 
 Our chief enemies are within. Of foreign foes we need have but little fear 
 provided that we keep the mastery of the seas beyond dispute, and 
 that we do not surrender to the tempter which is for ever urging us 
 to attack the Power with whom it is our duty and our interest to be on 
 terms of hearty friendship. Every nation has its besetting sin. To England 
 the forbidden fruit, to pluck which would be our undoing, is a war with 
 Russia. Russophobia is a malady affecting the brain, predisposing to 
 suicide. Its victims imagine that they are performing the supreme duty of 
 patriotism when they are merely cutting their own throats. It is a craze 
 which has cost us millions upon millions, and seriously weakened our 
 position in the East. But for the strenuous efforts of a section of our 
 countrymen, and the forbearance and good sense of the Russians, we should 
 twice within the last twelve years have convulsed the world with war... . 
 
 England will do well to stop its ears with wax when next the outcries of 
 these harpy sirens of Russophobia are heard wailing along the wind. Asia 
 is the wedding-ring which unites Russia and England in an indissoluble 
 wedlock. No divorce court can grant a decree for the dissolution of that 
 marriage of the Fates. Neither Empire can destroy the other or expel the 
 other from the continent which they have divided — the north to Russia, 
 the south to England. Russia alone of European Powers has an area and a 
 population that can compare with our own. The two Powers supplement 
 
326 APPENDIX I 
 
 and complement each other. One represents liberty, the other authority. 
 Both are democratic. If they are at peace, Asia is tranquil. If in opposition, 
 the thunderclouds gather over the Hindoo Koosh, and Central Asia is 
 convulsed because St. Petersburg and London are at variance. There is 
 absolutely no danger of a Russian attack if we mind our own business, 
 keep within our frontiers, and do not rush headlong across Afghanistan to 
 fling ourselves into the arms of the Russian Bear. 
 
 9. Foresight in Regard to France. 
 
 For the time being France is the one Power which can injure us. She is 
 the only Power from whose shores an invading army could be landed on 
 our coast; she is the only Power whose fleet would even attempt to hold the 
 seas against our ironclads; and she is the only Power who has a colonial 
 empire worth naming beside our own. She has coigns of vantage all along 
 our ocean highways from which she could threaten the security of our 
 commerce. At the present moment we have outstanding differences with 
 her in three continents, any one of which could precipitate war. She has 
 relinquished none of her claims in Egypt; her fishers are threatening to 
 defy the laws of the Legislature of Newfoundland; and her troops are 
 occupying the New Hebrides in defiance of solemn pledges repeatedly 
 given by her Ministers. France also is the one European Power who 
 possesses within the British Empire populations of her own race and 
 language, who in case of war might take sides, both in Mauritius and in 
 Lower Canada, against the Empire in which they have been incorporated. 
 And as France is the one rival whose ambitions threaten us with serious 
 danger, she is the one menace to the peace of Europe. All this marks her 
 out as the Power with whom we should endeavour to remain on friendly 
 terms, but also as the one Power upon whose alliance it is impossible to 
 depend, inasmuch as her interests and her aspirations run more directly 
 counter to our own than the interests and aspirations of any other Power 
 in the world. 
 
 10. Establishment of the United States of Europe. 
 
 These considerations indicate the true path of English policy in Europe. 
 Friends of all and allies of none, our interests, which are also the interests 
 of European peace, counsel the cultivation of a close political understanding 
 with the German Empire. We are not of those who declare that England 
 should have no European policy. The old doctrine of non-intervention as 
 opposed to the old policy of intervention was sound. But it is not possible 
 for England to stand absolutely aloof from the discussion of European 
 questions, and it would be wicked even if it were possible. Intervention 
 by the landing of armed forces on the Continent is impossible. Of troops 
 available for such a purpose we have fewer than the Principality of Bulgaria 
 or the Kingdom of Belgium. We have ceased to be a military power in the 
 
APPENDIX I 327 
 
 European sense of the word. A State which perseveres in the system of 
 voluntary military service cannot enter the lists against nations whose 
 whole manhood is drilled in arms. We are out of the game, and it is a good 
 thing for us that we are. Our strength is needed otherwhere. But that does 
 not justify the cynical repudiation of the responsibilities attaching to our 
 position as the greatest of naval, commercial, and colonizing Powers. 
 On the contrary, it accentuates them, and is in itself a summons to use such 
 influence as we have in the councils of Europe on behalf of that pacific 
 industrial civilization of which we are the solitary surviving exponent. 
 
 What, then, is the réle which we must play in Europe? We answer, to 
 labour in season and out of season in creating a Europe which will be an 
 organic whole, instead of being, as at present, a more or less anarchic 
 amorphous congeries of States. The germ of a federated Continent exists 
 in the concert of Europe. To foster that germ until it attains its full 
 development in the establishment of the Federated United States of Europe 
 is the special réle of English statesmanship. 
 
AP PE NUD UXT 
 STEAD’S FIRST DAILY PAPER, NOVEMBER 1893 
 
 The interview in the Chicago. Sunday Tribune in November 1893 (vide 
 Chapter 18), in which Stead set forth the principal features of the forth- 
 coming Daily Paper — that still-born first effort, often confused in people’s 
 memories nowadays with the second venture of 1904 —- was immensely 
 long, filling eight columns of the journal. Even these condensed extracts 
 will take up much space. In them, however, we have something very like 
 a phonographic record of Stead, the Talker, in his most characteristic form 
 and launched upon a favourite theme — the possibilities of journalism. 
 
 The interview, heralded, of course, by the usual half-dozen head lines in 
 types of varied magnitude, begins abruptly: 
 
 ‘If there ever was a demagogue,’ said William T. Stead, the London 
 editor, as he slipped further down into his chair and propped his feet up 
 on the railing, ‘if there ever was a demagogue in the world, I am one. I’d 
 much rather be a demagogue than a Brahmin. It is only necessary that the 
 demagogue should be moved by right ideas. 
 
 ‘One of the things I looked forward to in coming to Chicago was meeting 
 your late Mayor, Carter Harrison. He has been called a demagogue. He 
 had, I am told, a premonition of his violent taking off. I have had a similar 
 warning. I am to die a violent death, but before death comes I am to be 
 twice more locked up in prison.’ 
 
 The interviewer hereupon suggested that Stead should celebrate the 
 eighth anniversary of his imprisonment (which fell that very day, Novem- 
 ber 10) by outlining a plan for the reformation of Chicago — an invitation 
 acceded to with much alacrity! We can skip the plan, however, for we shall 
 have it later. Returning to the subject of his imprisonment, Stead got well 
 started on the subject of his latest journalistic ideas: 
 
 ‘Part of my scheme is that before anyone undertakes to write either about 
 the treatment of prisoners or of paupers, or to pronounce critically upon 
 the conduct of men who have revolted against any cruelly hard conditions 
 of life, whether of labour or poverty, such a person should have at least 
 some practical experience of the sufferings of those on whom they pro- 
 nounce judgment. It would not be difficult. You only require to have a 
 model cell, or facsimile of a prison cell with a hard bed and a small tread- 
 mill, and thin soup is cheap and nourishing withal. I know by my own 
 experience the extent to which my very short sojourn in gaol helps me by 
 enabling me to understand how a man feels when the whole organization 
 of society and of justice is turned against him. I have a habit of saying that 
 if I were dictator of the universe I would never allow a man to pronounce 
 
 328 
 
APPENDIX II 329 
 
 a sentence upon his brother man unless he, the Judge himself, had practical 
 personal experience of the result of the punishment he was inflicting. I 
 do not know how it is in your country, but in ours we have had Judges on 
 the bench who have grown grey in service without ever having even so 
 much as inspected a prison and who, therefore, were imposing sentences 
 without the remotest idea as to the actual way in which their edicts bit into 
 the life and soul of the wretches whom they sentenced.’ 
 
 ‘Wouldn’t you like to say something more about your new paper? Is it 
 to be on the American plan?’ 
 
 ‘That depends on what you consider the American plan. If by “American 
 plan” you mean the habit of keeping your eyes open and making your 
 paper as bright and interesting as possible, I hope it will be on the American 
 plan; but if you mean by the “American plan” a reproduction of many 
 salient features of the American newspaper, then I sincerely hope it will 
 not be on the “American plan” as it at present exists.’ 
 
 ‘What ails you in your view of the American newspaper?’ 
 
 ‘The first feature in your press which I would not like to attempt to 
 imitate in England is what you may call its superficial “‘acreage.” I suppose 
 it comes from living in a big country that every newspaper editor seems 
 to be continually endeavouring to enlarge his paper until I expect that 
 some fine day I shall find the Chicago Tribune coming out on Sunday with 
 a paper which, when spread out flat, will cover the whole area of the 
 United States. I suppose even then you will be continually pining for 
 enlargements.’ 
 
 ‘You don’t like these big papers, then?’ 
 
 ‘I can’t say that I do. Already your Sunday paper contains about as much 
 printed matter as your family Bible. You see ours is a small country, 
 Great Britain, and it would not do for us to attempt to introduce colossal 
 blanket sheets. Your paper is too big for us. It is like the bills of fare with 
 which you astound an English visitor on coming down to the breakfast 
 table. I suppose the American can find his way about among the multi- 
 tudinous items of an American menu, but when a rustic from the Old 
 World like myself is suddenly confronted with a bill of fare containing 113 
 items for breakfast he is apt to feel very much as he feels when on Sunday 
 morning he opens the Sunday edition of one of your papers. There is a 
 mustering of an immense multitude of miscellaneous happenings and the 
 whole inventive genius of the most inventive people of the world is put on 
 the rack every night in order to construct startling headlines to make the 
 news look important even when it is not. It may be necessary to print in 
 capitals sometimes, especially for half-educated people, but the habit of 
 perpetually printing in gigantic type defeats your object in the long run, 
 for when everything is printed in capitals nothing has any precedence or 
 priority over the competing items of news.’ 
 
330 APPENDIX II 
 
 ‘Can you name a few of the results of this manner of doing things?’ 
 
 ‘Sometimes, as for instance in the case of one well-known New York 
 daily paper, a diligent reader absolutely missed the murder of Carter 
 Harrison, announced as it was with hardly any greater display than the 
 most ordinary item that is vamped into sensational importance.’ 
 
 The interviewer asked whether there were any other counts in his 
 indictment. Yes, there were. Many. Above all, the way in which American 
 proprietors of newspapers sold their souls to the advertiser, showing ‘no 
 other ambition than to heap up an immense fortune and fatten on their 
 gains.’ They had not even as much public spirit as the medizval robber 
 barons. 
 
 ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked the Sunday Tribune man. 
 
 ‘What I mean is this: In the old days when a man who was stouter or 
 shrewder, or more cunning, than his neighbours raised himself above the 
 level of the common fighting herd and succeeded after a time in carving 
 out for himself a domain in the centre of which he built his castle, from 
 being a mere filibuster, a militant adventurer, fighting for his own profit 
 or for such of his neighbours’ goods as he could seize, he developed 
 under the pressure of the spiritual power welded by the old Church into 
 something like a civilized ruler; that is to say, having “made his pile,” he 
 used it in order to govern and civilize and educate the people in the midst 
 of whom he had established his castle. But there is no such recognition of 
 responsibility on the part of many newspaper proprietors nowadays. 
 Instead of regarding the wealth which they have acquired by the success 
 of their journals as merely giving them a starting point from which they 
 should be able to civilize and educate and humanize the conditions of life 
 in the midst of the people whose support has given them their wealth, they 
 live self-indulgent, self-centred lives. As individuals they may be excellent 
 persons, but from the point of view of the social organization they are but 
 the fatted swine of civilization.’ 
 
 ‘Do you see any way of changing this system?’ 
 
 ‘It can be changed only by bringing back into existence the real live 
 Church. The old medizval baron would probably have been no better 
 than the modern newspaper proprietor if it had not been for the spiritual 
 power which, by a judicious use of hell fire, succeeded in scaring him into 
 something like humanity and decency. We want to substitute something 
 nowadays for the old Church, and I do not at present exactly see where it 
 is to be found, except in the gradual growth of a healthier public and an 
 unsparing and unflinching use of the newspaper as a social pillory in which 
 those who have received much and returned nothing to the community 
 should be stigmatized as they deserve.’ 
 
 ‘What do you propose to call your new paper?’ 
 
APPENDIX II 331 
 
 ‘Simply The Daily Paper.’ 
 
 ‘What novelties have you in mind?’ 
 
 ‘My first novelty is size. So far from being a blanket paper my paper will 
 be a magazine paper, and will be modelled exactly in the shape of its pages 
 upon the Review of Reviews: that is to say, it will be a pocket paper which 
 a man can double up with one fold and put into his pocket. It will contain 
 some forty to sixty double-column pages, and it will be conducted upon 
 the principle of containing everything in the day’s news that a man wants 
 to remember at the end of the day. As to other innovations my, idea is that 
 the newspaper ought not only to supply news to the general reader, but 
 that it ought to be a universal inquiry office, a general information bureau 
 for all its readers, and if any of my readers wish for information upon any 
 subject, especially upon financial subjects, I hope to be able to supply 
 them, either through the paper or by letter, with the best available advice 
 that can be secured for love or money from the best authorities on the 
 particular subject upon which the information is sought.’ 
 
 ‘Are you going to run a confessional in your new scheme?’ 
 
 ‘Certainly,’ responded Mr. Stead. ‘You see my idea of a newspaper is 
 based far more upon the conception of the old Church than upon that of the 
 modern news shop. It is necessary to supply your news and to print matter 
 that the public must read in order to obtain your congregation. Your 
 congregation gives you the ear of the citizens, so that you may be able to 
 inspire them, to educate them, and to generally act as the spiritual power 
 in relation to them. And of course the confessional is indispensable to any 
 institution which attempts to be really helpful to human beings. Of course 
 there is no question of absolution or any ghostly prerogatives of that kind, 
 but the confessional, for purposes of direction, of consolation, and of 
 helpful counsel, ought to be at the very heart and centre of every news- 
 paper which endeavours to do what seems to me the obvious duty of every 
 true journalist.’ 
 
 ‘Well, you’ve got your pillory, your sample gaol, and your confessional, 
 as well as your “Inquire within upon everything” —does that exhaust 
 your novelties?’ 
 
 ‘By no means. I have one or two ideas on which I would be very glad to 
 have the opinion of the American journalists. Take, for instance, the 
 advertising. I believe that the advertiser ought to be kept in his place, and 
 nothing whatever should be published that is paid for as an advertisement 
 that is not plainly and conspicuously stamped as such under the head of 
 advertisements. I think, further, that no advertisement should be permitted 
 to creep into the news pages. And, further, I think that an advertiser who 
 will insist upon publishing a vulgar catch-line, his advertisement ought to 
 be rejected; and even if the advertisement is an interesting one itself, it 
 ought not to be reproduced until it gets stale and wearisome. I shall edit 
 
332 ACE EAN a Le 
 
 my paper with a strict eye to the reader, and shall rely chiefly if not entirely 
 upon his support.’ 
 
 ‘In other words, you would edit your advertising columns?’ 
 
 ‘Certainly. I think an editor’s duty is to edit his paper from the first page 
 to the last page; and, furthermore, I would undertake, if any advertisement 
 which I published could be proved to have swindled any of my readers, 
 I would undertake, on proof thereof being forthcoming, to prosecute that 
 advertiser for obtaining money on false pretences.’ 
 
 That was magnificent, the interviewer remarked, but was it business? 
 The ‘very best business,’ Stead felt sure. The more the advertisers were 
 fenced out of the field, the more anxious they would become to get into it. 
 
 From this topic he passed to a notion to which he attached even greater 
 importance: 
 
 “There is one feature in the new paper which, I think, can hardly fail to 
 interest journalists here in America. It is a curious phenomenon that 
 whereas in France, in Germany, in Italy, and in Russia, the serial story is 
 a necessity of life, in England no first-class newspaper demeans its columns 
 by the publication of a novel in instalments. 'This is curious, and indicates 
 that there is something wrong somewhere. The novel constitutes at this 
 moment the only reading of an enormous section of the population. There 
 are millions of human beings, especially among the young and among 
 women, who will never read anything unless it is served up to them in the 
 form of fiction. As a newspaper only deals with fiction of another sort 
 and religiously abstains from publishing fiction that is honestly labelled 
 such, it fails to secure as readers those whose only literary diet is romance. 
 This not only weakens the newspaper by depriving it of a numerous 
 contingent of readers, but it also injures the public because it leaves a 
 large section of the community without any organic relation to contem- 
 poraneous history, and hence I regard it as a matter of the first importance 
 to bring in the non-newspaper reading public, or the non-political public, 
 and induce them to take an interest in the events of their own times. And 
 this it seems to me can only be done by an adaptation of some form of serial.’ 
 
 “Therefore, I suppose, you will put up novels in newspaper form?’ 
 
 ‘I have hit upon a scheme which I have discussed with Mr. Walter Besant 
 and Mr. George Meredith and Dr. Conan Doyle and Olive Schreiner and 
 many other leading novelists in our own country, all of whom have 
 expressed the greatest sympathy with the project, although some of them 
 consider that it is an attempt to realize an unattainable ideal.’ 
 
 ‘My idea is that the newspaper shall publish a serial, every chapter in 
 which shall have as its motif a leading event of the previous day, and that 
 the chapters of that serial shall be written about midnight every night just 
 as our leading articles are written, and that it shall be served up, as it were, 
 
APPENDIX II 333 
 
 hot and hot the next morning. I should begin with the first number of 
 my newspaper, the first chapter of an English romance — a romance of the 
 world’s history — which, once begun, should never end, but go on as long 
 as the newspaper or the world endured. Of course I shall bring episodes 
 in it to a conclusion; as, for instance, I think I would undertake to marry 
 a heroine and kill a leading character every quarter, but with that excep- 
 tion, the dramatis persone and the general plot would be continuous. The 
 idea is that, if not another printed line was read by its readers they would, 
 nevertheless, have a clear insight into the inside track of political events 
 and would be familiar with the leading political characters and would 
 imbibe from merely reading the story a consecutive narrative of the 
 evolution of human affairs.’ 
 
 ‘Do you really think that is practicable?’ 
 
 ‘I am so convinced that it is that I have already announced it as a leading 
 feature in my new paper. Remember that in writing this serial we have our 
 characters all ready to hand.’ 
 
 ‘But do you mean to say that you are going to put living men and women 
 into this story?’ 
 
 ‘Certainly. As my story is a story of real life, I am going to have real men 
 and women as the heroes and heroines in the story from beginning to end.’ 
 
 ‘But will you be able to deal with the freedom necessary to a novelist, with 
 individuals who are not only characters in your story but who are playing 
 leading parts in the drama of modern life?’ 
 
 ‘Oh, it is not difficult. I think that it would be unpardonable to bring in 
 living persons into the story under their own names and impute any 
 sentiment to them which they had not publicly uttered or to describe any 
 acts of theirs which were not public property, but so long as you observe 
 those limitations you can bring your living people in under their own 
 names. Of course I admit fully that in an immense number of cases you 
 cannot bring in your real person under his real name, but that difficulty I 
 get over by taking a hint from the “Society of Psychical Research” and 
 bringing into existence what may be called the “doubles” of all the real 
 characters who figure in contemporaneous politics and society. That is to 
 say, while I would bring Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Henry Irving into the 
 story, each under his own name, when I simply had to impute to them 
 speeches which they had delivered for publication, or describe acts which 
 were matters of public report, I would at the same time have in the story 
 what may be called the “double” of Mr. Gladstone and the “double” of 
 Mr. Irving under different names, who would play parts studied from the 
 life of those persons, but whose actions would be necessarily more or 
 less fictitious. The only rule that I would preserve to prevent clashing is 
 that I would never bring the “double” and his original into the same 
 chapter.’ 
 
334 APPENDIX II 
 
 ‘Is this an idea of your own; if not, where did you get it?’ 
 
 ‘I got it from two very diverse sources; from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie 
 Queene and from Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. From Spenser’s Faerie 
 Queene I borrowed the idea of putting into a romance more or less idealized 
 portraits of living personages, and so constructing my dramatis persona, as 
 it were, out of real flesh and blood. From Zola I have borrowed the con- 
 ception of a series of stories, all turning upon the fortunes of a family; but 
 whereas Zola has only one family, I should have one or two or three, one 
 of which would represent the progressive element in society, while another 
 would represent the retrograding and barbarous element, while yet a third 
 would represent those who are, so to speak, betwixt and between — neither 
 one nor the other; too good for damning and too bad for blessing. Of 
 course, the story would be more of a panorama than a miniature painting. 
 I should edit my story, but I should have as many men and women 
 employed in writing it as were necessary to secure a full and well-informed 
 treatment of the various episodes which have to be served up in the form of 
 romance. I am convinced that the novelist-journalist, as I may call him, 
 is destined to carry off the bell in the journalism of the future.’ 
 
 ‘Wouldn’t short stories do as well without the consecutive element?’ 
 
 ‘By no means. My idea would be always to make each instalment of the 
 serial as far as possible complete in itself and interesting in itself, so that if 
 anyone took up the paper who had never read the preceding chapters he 
 would find enough in it to interest him and carry him on with it. But the 
 immense advantages of the serial over the short story are two: first, the 
 serial, when it has once caught hold of the reader, carries him on. He 
 wants to see what is going to happen to-morrow. If the events of the 
 previous day do not afford subjects capable of being treated in a story 
 fashion, you could carry on perfectly well for a day or two by printing a 
 purely imaginary story of adventures of purely imaginary heroes and 
 heroines, who by that time will have become as much real persons to your 
 readers as any man in Parliament or the army. By these means, I believe 
 it will be possible to vivify the whole record of contemporary history so as 
 to bring into the intelligent public vast masses of inert and apathetic 
 citizenship which at the present moment is our despair.’ 
 
 Stead now got started on another hobby: 
 
 ‘There is another feature which, perhaps, will surprise you. I do not 
 intend to employ a single man on my paper in any post, from the highest 
 to the lowest, unless I have previously satisfied myself that I cannot find a 
 woman who will do the job. My reason for doing that is that nearly every 
 newspaper office in the country is run upon an exactly opposite principle, 
 and I think that so far as I can in my little way I shall try to redress this 
 injustice so as to do as much as one man can do to make the balance even. 
 
APPENDIX II 335 
 
 Of course I am well aware that for many duties in a newspaper press I 
 shall have to employ men. Women are not trained to them, but if I could, 
 I would not only have my paper written by women, but composed by 
 women and printed by women. I would have my women driving the news- 
 carts that distribute the papers to the various news-agencies. Women can 
 do very nearly everything that men can do, and a good many things that 
 men cannot do; there is nothing that I should enjoy starting the paper more 
 for than to give woman a fair chance to see what she can do. At the same 
 time let me say that I absolutely and entirely disapprove of any one-legged 
 show, as I call it, and I detest any institution, whether it be a club, or a 
 Legislature, or a public meeting, or a newspaper office, that is run exclu- 
 sively by persons of one sex. The human race is composed of both sexes, 
 and every institution which endeavours to represent that race ought to 
 give equal representation to each of the sexes.’ 
 
 Next came a tirade against the ‘Night Editor’: 
 
 ‘Anything that happened during the previous day is “news” to the night 
 editor of a morning paper. Anything that happened a little bit further back, 
 although it may be ever so much more interesting and of far greater 
 importance, is not “news” and goes into the waste basket. Now I believe 
 that the general newspaper-reading public does not in the least share that 
 superstition of the night editor. Night editors are, for the most part, 
 specialists who spend their time among people who make and print and 
 sell news. They are not in very close touch with the reading public and 
 they are continually sacrificing much better news to worse news, merely 
 because the latter occurred a few hours later than the former. Now, to my 
 thinking, the supreme duty of an editor is to make his paper interesting to 
 his readers, and in order to emphasize my protest against the irrational and 
 mechanical domination of the night editor I am going to put my foot down 
 strongly, and I shall say this: “My paper has got to be interesting, and 
 possibly in the whole world, so far as we can scour it with our correspon- 
 dents and reporters, nothing particularly interesting has happened.” You 
 say, ““What are you going to do then?” Then I shall remember that every- 
 thing is news to a man who has not heard it before, and I will remember 
 also that to the enormous majority of the newspaper-reading public the 
 most interesting things that ever happened in the world are totally 
 unknown, and, that being so, I shall not hesitate in the least to publish as 
 news, written up in the very best procurable journalistic style just as tf it had 
 arrived hot from the field of battle or from the law courts or anywhere, the 
 story of events which happened yesterday, a hundred years ago, or a 
 thousand ago, or three thousand years ago, as the case may be. That is to 
 say, I will make free to say that even among intelligent and educated 
 American citizens, who read this issue of The Tribune, there are not more 
 
336 APPENDIX II 
 
 than 20 per cent at the outside who have got a picture before their eyes of 
 that most thrilling of old stories in the drama of the world’s history, which 
 began when Xerxes crossed the Hellespont, and which ended with the 
 triumph of Hellas. And supposing any dull season came along in which 
 mankind seemed to have gone stupid and to be doing nothing particular 
 worth recording, I should boldly announce that I proposed to tell the story 
 of the Persian invasion of Greece, from day to day. I would have special 
 correspondents from the seat of war, even if it were necessary to send the 
 best war correspondent I could find to go over the territory traversed by 
 the Persian and Greek armies respectively; and, although you may think 
 it an audacious assertion, I make bold to assert that some day I shall send 
 out an extra edition and keep the presses going all night with a report of 
 the battle of Thermopyle. At present to people generally it is only a 
 name. I want to make it a thing, a real event, a picture that comes into ~ 
 their daily life; and, what is more, I think it will be done.’ 
 
 ‘Will you apply the same principle to sacred history?’ 
 
 ‘Most unquestionably; only I shall publish a paper for Sunday reading, 
 not, I need hardly say, on Sunday, but like all our Sunday papers on 
 Friday and Thursday, in order to get it well before the public in all parts 
 of the country before Sunday. In that paper I would make an attempt to 
 do the only thing which, in my opinion, will ever make the life of Jesus of 
 Nazareth a living reality to the mass of our population. That is to say, I 
 would tell the whole story of the founder of our faith, not from the stand- 
 point of one who believed in him but from the standpoint of, say, a special 
 correspondent sent out by some newspaper of Imperial Rome to follow 
 the fortunes of a campaign of King Herod, and who incidentally for 
 reasons of his own has his attention specially called to the Miracle Worker 
 of Nazareth. I think that the correspondent’s letters, while they would 
 make many of the orthodox shiver in their shoes because of the realistic 
 fidelity with which they would represent exactly what such a man would 
 say concerning the Wandering Son of the Carpenter, would nevertheless 
 make an ordinary man for the first time understand the immense force of 
 the great argument in favour of the Christian religion which is to be drawn 
 from the mere fact of its having come into existence and conquered the 
 world from such beginnings as it had in Judea. We see the result, and it 
 seems to most of our people the most natural thing in the world that Christ 
 Jesus, being what he was, should have overthrown the whole edifice of 
 pagan Rome; but that is only because we have never for a single moment 
 put ourselves in the position of the Roman courtier or special correspon- 
 dent to whom the claims of the crucified Galilean seemed about as worthy 
 of the serious attention of serious man as the claims of a religious crank in 
 rhe cane-brakes of Louisiana that he is the latest incarnation of Almighty 
 God.’ 
 
APPENDIX II 337 
 
 By a natural sequence of thought, Stead passed from this subject to the 
 Ober-Ammergau Play and the Drama in general. 
 
 ‘Personally, having been brought up in a Puritan household, I have never 
 been in a theatre in my life excepting at political meetings and at the theatre 
 of the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play. At the same time I saw sufficient of 
 the theatre in Ober-Ammergau, where it is run practically as a department 
 of the church, to see what enormous influence the stage can exert on the 
 culture and education of a community. But between the ideal theatre as it 
 might be and the actual theatre as it is there is a wide gulf. We have no 
 national theatre in England, and so we are going to try to get the Daily 
 Paper to bring one into existence in an entirely unique way. I shall get 
 together a committee of the best critics and actors, who will decide what an 
 ideal theatre should be, and we shall there and then proceed to imagine 
 that it has already come into existence, and we shall publish regularly 
 dramatic criticisms, also purely imaginary, of the plays that will be put 
 forward in such a theatre if it did actually exist. By this means we could 
 excite interest in the subject, familiarize the public with what could be 
 actually done by a theatre run on such principles, and in time I think it is 
 quite probable that we might be able to raise by voluntary subscriptions 
 sufficient money to endow and so materialize into existence a theatre which 
 we would, in theosophical phrase, have constructed on the astral plane.’ 
 
 Here the interviewer asked a leading question about Stead’s spiritualistic 
 investigations: 
 
 ‘That reminds me,’ said Mr. Stead, ‘that I must tell you a remarkable 
 feature in my new paper, a sample of which I hope to be able to send you 
 in a few days; it is publishing for the first time in the world’s history an 
 interview between two persons who were separated from each other by a 
 distance of 800 miles, who had no wire or other material means of com- 
 munication. That is to say, in my sample paper I shall publish an interview 
 with Lady Brooke, who will in a short time, probably, be the Countess of 
 Warwick, on the future of the British aristocracy. When that interview 
 took place I was in a railway carriage at Dover and Lady Brooke was 
 residing with her sister, the Duchess of Sutherland, at Dunrobin Castle, 
 in the extreme north of Scotland, but I interviewed Lady Brooke by my 
 automatic, telepathic hand, without even having to go to the trouble of 
 telegraphing to her or writing to her, or asking for the privilege.’ 
 
 ‘How on earth did you accomplish this?’ 
 
 ‘I simply took a pencil in my hand, spread a sheet of blank paper on a 
 blotting-pad in the railway carriage, and in thought addressed Lady Brooke 
 the questions which I should have asked her if she had been sitting on the 
 opposite side of the carriage. Then my hand without more ado, wrote out 
 
 L.s.— VOL, I > 
 
338 APPENDIX II 
 
 her answer to each question. Then I asked another question and she 
 answered it, and so on, just as if the two parties, the interviewer and the 
 interviewed, had been face to face in the ordinary journalistic fashion. 
 When the interview was finished I put it in my pocket, and on arriving in 
 London an hour later, I found a letter from Lady Brooke addressed to me, | 
 which had arrived that morning. When I opened it I found it contained 
 in brief the substance of the remarks which she had made to me, writing 
 through my hand. When I sent a proof of the interview down to her she 
 returned it without correction or erasure, stating that it was marvellous — 
 the perfect accuracy with which I had tapped her mind and had succeeded 
 in procuring a written record of her thoughts. The only criticism she had 
 to make was that she wished I had added something more — an amplifi- 
 cation of what she had already said. This also corresponded with my own ~ 
 impression, having got so sleepy from fatigue in travelling from Switzer- 
 land all night that I didn’t go on with it.’ 
 
 ‘I must say, Mr. Stead, that this opens up a new and bewildering vista of 
 journalistic possibilities.’ 
 
 ‘No doubt. I cannot say how far it may go. I do not know how long it will 
 be before many people will write correctly through my hand. Some will 
 not — cannot. Others scarcely ever make a mistake. If I could secure a 
 staff of persons who were in sufficient mental rapport with me I would be 
 able to have special correspondence instantaneously from the uttermost 
 parts of the world by the simple process of letting each of them write with 
 my hand. Of course I would never publish at present any telepathic 
 interview procured by automatic writing until I had submitted a proof to 
 the person from whom the writing professed to proceed and found that it 
 was authentic; and that, by the by,’ said Mr. Stead, with some vehemence, 
 ‘is just exactly what should be done in relation to interviews when con- 
 ducted in the ordinary way. I think a great security against the abuse of 
 interviewing would be that no interview should be published without 
 giving the person interviewed an opportunity to correct the proof.’ 
 
 ‘Don’t you think the automatic, telepathic system would be a great 
 nuisance in that you would be likely to be interviewed at any moment upon 
 any subject without your consent being asked?’ 
 
 ‘I do not think that you can interview any person without asking his or 
 her consent. I would much rather be interviewed automatically, tele- 
 pathically, than under the existing system.’ 
 
 The interviewer wanted to know more about automatic handwriting — 
 what exactly did Stead mean by the word ‘automatic’: 
 
 ‘I mean that I can at will, when I take my pen in my hand, allow other 
 
 intelligences than my own to use my hand as their instrument for 
 expressing their thoughts on paper.’ 
 
APPENDIX II 339 
 
 ‘What are these intelligences?’ 
 
 “That is a question upon which I do not wish to dogmatize. I know what 
 they profess to be at any rate. Some of them profess to be the individuals 
 who are now living on this earth. Others profess to be individuals who 
 have now no further use for their bodies.’ 
 
 ‘But how is it done?’ 
 
 ‘I cannot explain. I can only say that it is done, and I can give you the 
 explanation which the intelligences themselves give — namely: that they 
 are able to impress their thought upon my conscious brain, and it sets in 
 motion the nerves and muscles of the hand, but I don’t know what I am 
 going to write when my pen begins to write.’ 
 
 ‘Does it write sense?’ 
 
 Yes, always. I get communications from our living friends and also those 
 which purport to come from friends who have quitted this earth. They 
 are often more useful, because they often contain an element of prophecy. 
 I will mention only one small instance on my visit here. I had arranged to 
 leave Chicago on Thursday. My hand wrote and told me decidedly that I 
 should not leave until Friday. I said: “That is all bosh.”” Whereupon my 
 hand said: ‘Don’t believe it by any means, only you will see it will happen,” 
 and it did happen.’ 
 
 ‘Do you think any good will come of it, Mr. Stead?’ 
 
 ‘I think this good will come of it. I believe, with Professor Oliver Lodge, 
 that if this study is carefully and systematically prosecuted with the same 
 patience and perseverance that men of science give to the investigation of 
 the black beetle or of a fossil there will be established on the basis of 
 scientific merit the fact that human beings do not cease to exist when they 
 lay aside their bodies any more than they do when they take off their 
 clothes and go to bed. It seems to me that even the offchance of arriv- 
 ing at such a conclusion in the midst of this materalized and sceptical 
 generation would justify me in giving very much more time to the study 
 of the subject than I am able to do at the present time. And then another 
 advantage arising from the study of the subject is the vivid reality which 
 it brings to the Bible story, both in the Old and New Testaments. ‘The 
 great difficulty about the Bible with many people is that it describes a 
 condition of life which in the opinion of the majority of people is no longer 
 in existence, whereas if you would but take pains to ascertain the facts 
 which are lying around your path you would find that apparitions, pre- 
 monitions, prophecies, and in short the whole of the phenomena usually 
 miscalled the supernatural, are occurring at least as frequently now as they 
 did in the days of the Bible. Another great gain is that it adds enormously 
 to your sense of the wonder of the world and the immense complexity of 
 man’s personality. The more I study this subject, the more I am con- 
 vinced that the segment of man’s personality which manifests itself through 
 
340 APPENDIX II 
 
 the body is but a very small fraction of his real personality. You, for 
 instance, are writing or talking with your body, but another part of you, 
 identical with yourself, may be appearing in double a thousand miles off, 
 while yet another fraction of you may be using some one else’s hand to 
 communicate intelligence or to give advice. I am quite sure that these 
 two manifestations of personality are possible without any consciousness 
 on the part of yourself, or what you call yourself, which is only your 
 conscious self. I have more and more come to regard the human body as a 
 kind of two-legged telephone which a fraction of you takes up and uses at 
 birth and which is rung off when the change occurs which we call death.’ 
 
APPENDIX III 
 STEAD’S OBSESSION WITH SEX 
 
 From a biographer’s point of view one of the most interesting things 
 about Stead was the way in which the subject of sex absorbed him. It 
 would be dishonest as well as stupid entirely to ignore this aspect of his 
 personality. Stead himself discussed it freely and frequently both with 
 women and with men, and not always in an absolutely solemn spirit, 
 although he took it so seriously au fond. Mr. Robertson Scott, in his con- 
 tribution to this book (Vol. I, p. 298), goes so far as to say that Stead could 
 be ‘Rabelaisian.’ + That word might mislead, for Stead rarely indulged in 
 Rabelaisian jests, but Rabelais was not more preoccupied with sex than he 
 was. ‘The astonishing thing is that, with such a bent of mind, Stead could 
 remain so consistently virtuous throughout his life. That is the reflection 
 called forth by the following letter from Mr. Havelock Ellis, who says all 
 there is any need to say on the subject. Only the second portion of the 
 letter bears upon the matter immediately in question, but the opening 
 sentences also are so full of interest that I give it in full: 
 
 ‘I am interested to hear that you are writing the biography of Stead; it 
 is a large and fine subject; he was a great journalist, one might almost say 
 a great man, and it is all the better that his life should be writtten by one 
 who can look at him from a little distance, and so perhaps view him more 
 truly. During recent years I have often wished that we had a journalist 
 of his calibre, so honest and so forceful, to deal with the problems which 
 have arisen. At the same time there were few questions on which I entirely 
 agreed with him, and on many I had no sympathy whatever. There was, 
 also, a certain coarseness of texture in his mind which, although I recog- 
 nized that it was an inevitable part of his great qualities, always rather 
 repelled me. 
 
 ‘In reply to your query, I have written nothing about Stead. I knew him 
 personally, but on one side only. When my “Studies in the Psychology 
 of Sex”’ were prosecuted in 1898, he became interested in them, and he 
 spoke frankly on the question in the Review of Reviews. He would 
 write to me from time to time (sometimes with intervals of years), and 
 now and again would invite me to spend the evening at Smith Square 
 where we would talk in his study till eleven when his daughter would 
 
 * Some words of Edmund Garrett’s in his article in the Contemporary Re- 
 view on Rhodes (already cited) are worth noting here. He says of Rhodes: 
 ‘I have heard him say things brutal and cynical — it was an ugly foible — but 
 things gross such as men even of exemplary life often affect in the licence of 
 the smoking-room never.’ Stead was quite capable of saying gross things. 
 generally in heat and with indignation, but, on occasion, jestingly also. — F.W. 
 
 341 
 
342 APP EN DDS err 
 
 bring him a cup of tea, which was the sign for me to leave and for him to 
 go to bed. The main subject was always sex. He told me that his friends 
 considered him ‘“‘mad on sex.”’ He did not dispute that opinion. In his 
 life and actions he was undoubtedly a rigid moral Puritan and his strong 
 self-control kept him in the narrow path. But in his interests and emotions 
 he was anything but a Puritan, and in the absence of that stern self-control 
 he would have been quite a debauched person. The mastery of sexuality 
 was a great problem with him. His repressed sexuality was, I consider, 
 the motive force of many of his activities.’ 
 
APPENDIX IV 
 
 In January 1911, Stead celebrated the twenty-first Birthday of the Review 
 of Reviews. As in 1900, he wrote to his friends, soliciting expressions of 
 their goodwill, and again the response was swift and generous. Letters of 
 congratulation are apt to be perfunctory and insipid, and they are seldom 
 worth re-reading after the event they commemorate has been forgotten, 
 but many of the things which were written to Stead on this occasion are 
 as interesting now as they were then and demand their place in his bio- 
 graphy as weighty documents testifying to the value of his work and to the 
 place he held in the hearts and minds of those who knew him. The 
 examples which I shall give need no further preface. 
 
 From Lord Morley of Blackburn 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 As you began your London career under my flag you may be sure that 
 I have watched it with good-will, and that I very heartily congratulate you 
 on your anniversary. You have in all the intervening time said hundreds 
 of things from which it has been my ill fortune pretty violently to dissent, 
 but this matters little in view of the thousands of things said by you that 
 needed saying. I rejoice to think that your rare vivacity of mind and pen 
 is unimpaired. Your Review is marked, as not all public instructors are, 
 by diligent exploration of fact, and it conveys a human voice from a bold 
 and sincere worker. I wish you good luck, and hope to remain what I have 
 been for a generation back, your friend. MORLEY OF B. 
 
 From Lord Esher 
 
 Looking back over the twenty-one years, I can remember no single case 
 in which the Review of Reviews has swerved from the lofty standard of 
 religious and imperial duty which was the loadstar of its founder. 
 
 Although I have often disagreed with you, I have always felt that it was 
 upon the means rather than the end that we differed. 
 
 You ask me for a benediction. What can I say, beyond an expression of 
 fervent belief that the Review of Reviews will continue to uphold the 
 doctrines of individual freedom, toleration of all opinions, the peace of the 
 world, and the fusion of the English-speaking race? 
 
 From Lady Aberdeen and Lord Aberdeen 
 VICE-REGAL LODGE, 
 DUBLIN. 
 January 31, 191l. 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 I think you can have but few readers who hold a more continuous record 
 as steady adherents to the Review of Reviews ever since its first appearance 
 343 
 
344 APPENDIX IV 
 
 than Lord Aberdeen and myself. Wherever we have wandered in our 
 journeyings, it has followed us, and wherever we have made our home it 
 has always been a most welcome guest. And we have had peculiar oppor- 
 tunities of appreciating its field of service in countries such as Canada, 
 where men and women of education are living lives of unremitting and 
 heroic labour in far away lonely homes, and who welcome their monthly 
 Review of Reviews in a way which we spoilt children of civilization can 
 scarcely imagine, but which should go far to reward the Editor for his 
 devoted toil... . The experience of a Canadian Association, which not 
 only sends out periodicals and other literature to settlers and miners, etc., 
 but which makes it a rule that there must be personal letters between the 
 individual senders and recipients twice a year, has brought out this read- 
 ing-hunger very forcibly, and when we were in Canada, there were never 
 enough Reviews of Reviews to meet the demand. 
 
 As President of the International Council of Women, I therefore bless 
 you for a double service. Firstly, for enabling thousands upon thousands 
 of persons all over the world to keep in touch with the work and thought of 
 the world’s best writers and thinkers, and to have their hunger for books 
 and papers not only fed but increased. What this has meant to countless 
 women practically shut away from all social intercourse whose standards 
 and ideals must necessarily shape those of their families, is beyond 
 words. 
 
 And secondly, you have ever consistently upheld every movement for 
 the progress of woman and for uplifting her whether in her individual, 
 social, political, moral or religious life. And in pursuing this attitude you 
 have always sought to inspire in women the sense of the greatness of their 
 responsibility and of the need for the whole-hearted devotion of their 
 lives. 
 
 You would neither expect nor wish me to say that we have always agreed 
 with your views and opinions as personally expressed in your Review, but 
 even where we have disagreed, you have stimulated us and all your readers 
 to thought, and what could you do more? 
 
 Would that we had more citizens possessed of your fearless and generous 
 spirit, and consumed with the desire to succour and to serve! 
 
 Your very sincere old friend, 
 
 ISHBEL ABERDEEN. 
 
 To this Lord Aberdeen added a postscript, as follows: 
 
 Success to the comprehensive and courageous Review of Reviews: and 
 may the perennial flow of youthful energy and cheerful zest, by which the 
 Editor of Editors is characterized, be abundantly maintained! 
 
 ABERDEEN. 
 
APPENDIX IV 345 
 
 From General Smuts 
 THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA, 
 DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, 
 CAPE TOWN, CAPE OF GOOD HOPE. 
 March 15, 191t. 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 May I congratulate you on the majority of the Review of Reviews which 
 I understand was attained last January? In one way and another you have 
 been closely associated with many of the principal actors in the South 
 African drama of the last twenty-one years, and thousands of South Africans 
 appreciate your able and disinterested advocacy of the great cause of 
 South African expansion northwards and of peace and concord among its 
 various races and peoples. Many have differed from you, but I think all 
 have admired the fearlessness and singlemindedness with which you have 
 laboured for the good of South Africa according to your light. 
 
 Another great period now lies before United South Africa and I hope 
 before the Review of Reviews. That both may have fair seas and soft 
 winds after the storms of the past is the sincere wish of, 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 W. T. Stead, Esq., J. C. SMUTS. 
 Editor of Review of Reviews. 
 
 From }. E. Redmond, M.P. 
 DUBLIN. 
 January 26, 1gtt. 
 MY DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 I most heartily congratulate you on the twenty-first Anniversary of the 
 Review of Reviews. 
 
 During these long years you have been a powerful supporter of the cause 
 of Ireland. You and I have sometimes differed as to policy and method, 
 but I have always regarded you as a man who at heart was a friend of 
 Ireland, and I am rejoiced at this happy opportunity of saying ‘I thank 
 
 ou.’ 
 
 , J. E. REDMOND. 
 W. T. Stead, Esq. 
 
 From General Booth 
 INTERNATIONAL HEADQUARTERS, 
 LONDON. 
 January 18, Igit. 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 The last twenty-one years have certainly been years of illumination on 
 many of the most profound problems which affect the human race. During 
 
346 APPENDIX IV 
 
 that period you have fought hard and nobly to bring your light to bear on 
 the darkness, and God has helped you. 
 
 I venture to predict that amongst other services to the world, the valuable 
 aid which from time to time you have rendered the Salvation Army in its 
 desperate struggle with misery and sin, will add to the honour in which 
 the future will hold your name, and will not fail of its reward here and 
 hereafter. 
 
 Let us work while it is day! 
 
 Yours affectionately, 
 WILLIAM BOOTH. 
 W. T. Stead, Esq. 
 From the Bishop of Southwark 
 BISHOP’S HOUSE, 
 KENNINGTON PARK, S.E. 
 February 4, 1911. 
 
 How can I refuse altogether such a request at such a time in your history? 
 Especially when I think of some who have gone, Dean Church above all, 
 and Liddon, who never ‘gave themselves away’ to you, but who honoured 
 your chivalry and in particular were drawn to you like myself by your 
 noble stand in the dark days of the Eastern Question. You have dared for 
 the right: and suffered for the right: you have helped us, with broad 
 sympathy and great knowledge and vivid portraiture, to see the greatness 
 of some of our great men: you have made one feel that if one were so happy 
 as to fight in a minority for an unpopular cause one would probably have 
 your assistance, or at least your respect. These are great things: and I 
 would add to them that when I have admired you least and differed from 
 you most (and I have differed constantly and gravely both as to principles 
 and methods) I have always recognized that what I thought your mistakes 
 came of the nobler things misunderstood, and never from meaner causes. 
 
 May Gop give us all more of the Spirit of power, and of love and of 
 ‘sobering’ to understand one another, discern the signs of the times, and 
 strive together for the things of goodness and Gop against the mighty 
 forces of sin, selfishness, arrogance and materialism! 
 
 SOUTHWARK. 
 From Alfred R. Wallace 
 OLD ORCHARD, 
 BROADSTONE, 
 WIMBORNE. 
 January 15, 19it. 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 Many thanks for the excellent and appreciative review of my new book 
 you have given in this month’s Review of Reviews. 
 
 After reading the summary of your twenty-one years’ work Iam very much 
 
APPENDIX IV 347 
 
 pleased to find myself in almost perfect accord with you in every great reform 
 and ideal you have laboured for so strenuously. Like yourself, 1 am more 
 of an optimist than ever, and our chief difference is that, as regards Social 
 Reform especially, I advocate more fundamental changes than you have 
 ventured on. Though of late years I have not found time to follow your 
 work so closely as I did during the first half of the life of the Review, I 
 have always admired your unflinching advocacy of Justice, both at home 
 and abroad, while I have never read more enlightening articles than your 
 long series of ‘character-sketches’ of the great men of the world. 
 
 Sincerely hoping that you may have another twenty-one years of equally 
 beneficial literary work in the cause of human progress, I am glad to be 
 able to sign myself, your admirer and friend, 
 
 ALFRED R. WALLACE, 
 
 From Lord Loreburn 
 KINGSDOWN, 
 DEAL, 
 January 14, 19gtt. 
 DEAR MR. STEAD, 
 
 I congratulate you on the coming of age of the Review of Reviews, and 
 heartily wish you continued success. 
 
 During the last twenty years I have sometimes differed from you, but 
 never, so far as I remember, upon the great national issues. And it is of 
 immense importance to have thorough independence and plain speak- 
 ing such as have distinguished your career, uncontrolled by party ties. 
 I hope you will long continue your valuable work. 
 
 Believe me, sincerely yours, 
 LOREBURN. 
 W. T. Stead, Esq. 
 
 From }. A. Spender 
 THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE, LTD., 
 SALISBURY SQUARE, FLEET STREET, 
 LONDON, E.C. 
 February 16, 1911. 
 MY DEAR STEAD, 
 
 It was a great regret to me that absence from England last month pre- 
 vented me from joining in the tribute which your fellow-journalists paid 
 to you on the twenty-first birthday of the Review of Reviews. 
 
 Though I am late in the day, I must add one word to express my apprecia- 
 tion of the master journalist who has been an example to his generation 
 not only of brilliant workmanship, but of staunch and unflinching advo- 
 cacy of principles at all costs. In days when there are many temptations 
 
348 APPENDIX IV 
 
 to regard journalism merely as a branch of commerce, it is good to look 
 back on your career, and to look forward, as I hope and trust, to many 
 years yet, in which you will be at hand as a counsellor and a friend. 
 May the Review of Reviews continue to prosper, and its editor enjoy long 
 life and good health. 
 Yours ever, 
 J. A. SPENDER. 
 
 From Rev. Dr. F. Clifford 
 MY DEAR FRIEND, 
 
 Most heartily do I congratulate you on the forty-two volumes of your 
 Review. 
 
 As one who had the privilege of welcoming the first issue and has read 
 every number since, and always found your record of the Progress of the 
 World the most informing, interesting and stimulating part of the Review, 
 I add sincere thanks for the benefit I have received and the incalculable 
 good you have done. 
 
 Your leadership has been bold and wise, far-sighted and victorious. 
 Animated by the highest ideals of service to man, you have given your 
 Review a foremost place in the journalistic world. 
 
 May the next twenty-one years witness the growth of your power, and 
 the widening of the fields of your service. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 JOHN CLIFFORD. 
 
APPENDIX V 
 
 ESTIMATES OF W. T. STEAD, BY MRS. FAWCETT, CANON HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND, 
 AND SIR E. T. COOK 
 
 Reprinted from the ‘Contemporary Review’ for Fune, 1912. 
 
 I 
 
 All who care for justice to women, and who desire to see the law and its 
 administration make sure that, as far as possible, the world shall be a place 
 of happiness and safety for children, have lost a stalwart friend in the 
 death of W. 'T. Stead, who went down, on April 16, with the Titanic. 
 
 I first became aware of a new note in journalism — at any rate in London 
 journalism ~— in the early eighties. Here was somebody writing with a pen 
 touched with fire about the things that really mattered — clean living, and 
 the protection of children from the deepest of wrongs; and the pen did not 
 give the impression of being guided by sentimentalism: it was evidently 
 wielded by a man who had made a careful study of facts, and was pre- 
 pared to give battle to defend the right. I do not think I ever heard his 
 name till everybody heard it in 1885, when all London — and, indeed, all 
 the world —rang with the shameless and cruel traffic for immoral pur- 
 poses in little children, exposed for the first time in the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 This traffic could have been, and ought to have been, stopped by law; but 
 the Bill dealing adequately with these horrors, though it had been passed 
 more than once through the House of Lords, had been, session after 
 session, talked out, counted out, and blocked out in the House of Commons. 
 It was counted out no more after Mr. Stead carried out his plan of insisting 
 that all the world should know that these devilish things were of common, 
 everyday occurrence in a so-called Christian country. When he undertook 
 his chivalric campaign, the age of consent in Christian England was thir- 
 teen; little children of thirteen could therefore legally consent to their own 
 ruin, and no legal redress could be obtained from those who were worse 
 than murderers. Many other offences of the deepest villainy were un- 
 recognized as such by the law, and therefore were liable to no legal punish- 
 ment. All this was changed by the action Mr. Stead took. He was blamed 
 for his sensationalism, for his want of good taste. But he knew what he 
 was doing, and his training as a journalist told him that in order to rouse 
 the torpid conscience of the House of Commons, shock tactics were 
 necessary. I remember well his personal description of how he had been 
 worked up to take the action which he did take. As a young man he had 
 been greatly influenced by Mrs. Josephine Butler, and her great crusade 
 against the immoral Contagious Diseases Act. It was Mrs. Josephine 
 Butler who came to him with her heart-rending story, drawn from facts 
 in her own experience, of the sale and purchase of young children in 
 
 349 
 
350 APPENDIX V 
 
 London for the purposes of immorality. Stead felt her message as a call 
 for personal service. ‘Whereupon, Oh King Agrippa, I was not dis- 
 obedient unto the Heavenly vision,’ he might have said —-the Heavenly 
 vision of trying to get God’s will done on earth as it is in Heaven. But 
 though he was full of the spirit which leads to personal service, he was care- 
 ful and cautious in regard to facts. He felt he must make the groundwork 
 of positive knowledge firm beneath his feet. He went, therefore, with his 
 story, Mrs. Butler’s story, to Sir Howard Vincent, then Head of the Criminal 
 Investigation Department. ‘Just tell me,’ he said, ‘are such things pos- 
 sible?’ The reply was: ‘They are not only possible, they are of common 
 occurrence.’ Stead broke in, ‘It ought to rouse hell,’ and Sir Howard re- 
 joined, ‘It does not even rouse the neighbours.’ Stead determined it should 
 rouse the neighbours and the whole country, and through them the miser- 
 able indifference of the House of Commons to villainy which was con- 
 taminating the life-blood of the nation at its source. He madea plan for the 
 fictitious, but apparently real, sale of a child, safeguarding himself and her 
 at every stage by the presence of trustworthy witnesses of his bona fides. 
 He also took into his confidence beforehand the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 Cardinal Manning, and other high ecclesiastics. He then spread broad- 
 cast in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, of which he was the editor, 
 the whole story. He accomplished what he set out to accomplish. The 
 House of Commons boggled no more over the Criminal Law Amendment 
 Bill: there were no more counts out and talks out of that long-delayed 
 measure. The sons of Belial did what they could in the House to minimize 
 its stringency, but they were no longer masters of the situation, and the 
 Act which was finally passed was an enormous improvement on anything 
 which up to that time had found a place in the statute book. 
 
 The enemy furiously raged together, and going over the whole of Stead’s 
 story told by himself with the utmost circumstance and publicity, dis- 
 covered a joint in his armour of precautions, and that he had actually, in 
 his crusade, committed a technical breach of the law. A grateful country 
 sentenced him to three months’ imprisonment as an ordinary criminal. 
 But he was almost immediately made a first-class misdemeanant, and went 
 on editing the Pall Mall Gazette from his cell in Holloway. 
 
 The effect of his heroic action did not cease with the passing of the Act. 
 Many good men and women, foremost among them Mr. and Mrs. Percy 
 Bunting, determined that the deep feeling which had been aroused should 
 have a permanent expression. The National Vigilance Association was 
 formed with Mr. W. A. Coote as Secretary. Its object was to see that the 
 new law was set in motion, and to secure further improvements and 
 developments in it. The International work now going forward with the 
 object of preventing the White Slave Traffic is due to the National Vigil- 
 ance Association, and thus indirectly, to W. T. Stead. The House of 
 
APPENDIX V 351 
 
 Commons shows its old indifference and supineness in relation to this 
 great work: the Bill has been put up for second reading by the Member 
 in charge of it again and again. It is always blocked. The Government, 
 while expressing entire approval of it, declines to take it up: it needs behind 
 it the electoral force which it would receive if women had votes. No one 
 was more clear on this point than Mr. Stead: he constantly recurred to it, 
 The last time I saw him was on March 28. I was, with other women, 
 walking up and down the pavement outside the House of Commons while 
 the men inside were killing the Conciliation Bill. We exchanged a friendly 
 greeting, and I well knew that with his whole heart and strength he wished 
 us well. 
 
 It is pleasant to read what everyone is saying of him now: that to him 
 death was but the passage from one room to another of his Father’s house; 
 that it was quite certain that he would be among the last to leave the ship, 
 that among the tragic uncertainties of this tragic event there was, at any 
 rate, one positive certainty, and that was that he would never seek his own 
 safety at the cost of others, but would die, as he had lived, heroically. No 
 one pretends that he was faultless; but he had a great and generous heart, 
 a boundless and intense vitality, and the spontaneous desire everywhere 
 and always to protect and cherish the weak. We may be thankful for his 
 life, ‘We are a nation yet,’ as long as we can breed such men as he was. 
 
 MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT. 
 
 It 
 
 It added a strange thrill to the horror of the ocean-agony to hear that 
 W. T. Stead had gone down to his death in the silent depths of those icy 
 waters. Such an end became him. He belonged to the sudden and 
 supreme hours, when all that man has is at stake. He understood the 
 vehement, the spasmodic. He was at home in heroic moments of storm 
 and stress, in the daring ventures of the human spirit. He would show 
 himself in all his nobility of soul under this tremendous proof; and no one 
 who knew him could doubt how his tenderness might have spent itself in 
 the service of women and children. ‘Splendid action on the edge of life.’ 
 How he would have loved James Mozley’s famous phrase! His soul would 
 have been aflame to meet the call. If only he could have told us, as no 
 other could tell, the story of the awful night, and have flung out, into 
 burning words, the tragic irony of such a close to that stupéndous toy 
 which man’s power and pride had fashioned for his pleasure! 
 
 He was a most lovable man. He had something of the child about him, 
 which drew and endeared. I recall the old days of Bulgarian atrocities, 
 in which he and Liddon struck up their surprising friendship, I think of 
 his confiding to Liddon, on a drive to Dunkeld, that he had learnt more 
 from John Knox than he had ever got out of St. Paul. ‘Indeed, dear 
 
352 APPENDIX V 
 
 friend: that, I confess, has not been my own experience,’ came the answer 
 in Liddon’s softest tones. 
 
 Then the storm of the ‘Maiden Tribute’ burst. I had been warned by 
 a short visit from Josephine Butler, with her grey, sorrow-stricken, beauti- 
 ful face, to be ready for some tremendous shock. So I was able to under- 
 stand and to recognize the dauntless and devoted courage of the man and 
 to rely absolutely on his spirit of self-sacrifice, however perilous his 
 methods. Later on, I had the help and joy of acting with him over the 
 Eastern Crisis and Armenian Massacres. 
 
 The note of everything about him lay in his moral impetuosity. It 
 carried all along. There was no power on earth that could check, or damp, 
 or repress it. It had the invincible confidence of inspiration in it. It 
 stormed its way through. And, then, it had at its service an intelligence 
 that knew no reserves, and accepted no repression, and revelled in large- 
 ness of scope, and in audacities of venture, and in swiftness of action, and 
 in defiant concentration of all its power upon the immediate purpose. 
 
 Never was a man so magnificently equipped for delivering the direct 
 blow that would tell decisively. He knew exactly what to lay his hands 
 upon, to serve the need of the hour. He could work up any amount of 
 material, at a moment’s notice, into some amazingly effective form. ‘The 
 whole man went into it, at full speed, with every nerve strung and alert. 
 He took the whole world into his purview; nothing was too big: nothing 
 daunted. Everybody and everything could be put to use for the purposes 
 of his fluent advocacy. These were the times at which all his wonderful 
 capacity came out. 
 
 He lay outside conventional movements, and was singularly detached 
 from the normal currents of political influence. He did not belong to any- 
 body. Rather, he broke out in splendid spasms. And no one could foresee 
 where and what his occasions would be. He had a liking for going direct to 
 the central spot, and dealing with it straight, e.g., to the Pope, or the Tsar, or 
 Cecil Rhodes, or the Sultan. His impetuosity gave us shocks and surprises. 
 It swept us into the irretrievable disaster of sending Gordon to the Sudan. 
 But it was always noble, and heroic. It always had a touch of spiritual 
 simplicity in it. It had a prophetic force about it, which cleaned out the 
 dull channels of our sodden lives, and purged our hearts of their dulness 
 and timidity. He did us good, even when he blundered. He stirred the 
 true blood in us, and woke the spirit from its sloth. We became aware of 
 the high calls of faith, and the risks that heroism must ever run, and of the 
 sacrifices that the good cause will ask for to the end. He might be rash: 
 he might be violent: he might be one-sided. When once stirred, he could 
 not help bringing into play the perilous gifts that made him the most vivid 
 and brilliant journalist in England. But he was never stirred but by great 
 motives. He was always prepared to spend himself and to be spent for the 
 
 + 
 
APPENDIX V 353 
 
 highest that he saw or knew. He held nothing back, when he gave himself 
 away. Spiritual convictions were paramount over him. He lived, and was 
 ever ready to die, for the truth as he believed it, and for the God whom he 
 served. 
 
 HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND. 
 
 III 
 
 I remember once asking an eminent man of wide experience who was the 
 cleverest person he had ever met. ‘In sheer intellectual ability,’ he replied, 
 ‘I have never met anyone who surpassed our friend Stead.’ This is an 
 estimate which would, I believe, be endorsed by many who knew that 
 remarkable man in his prime. Not only in intellectual energy and quick- 
 ness, but also in strength of will, in driving power, and in force of person- 
 ality, the Editor successively of the Pall Mall Gazette and the Review of 
 Reviews had few equals among his contemporaries. He had that combina- 
 tion of gifts, and that touch of genius, which must have achieved distinc- 
 tion in whatever walk of life his lot had been cast. In one only of the 
 qualities which make for practical success was he sometimes deficient; had 
 his judgment been equal to his other faculties, there is no measure of 
 success which he might not in any calling have attained. Journalism was, 
 however, the sphere in which his life’s work lay, and in it his influence was 
 deep and wide—far more so than is, perhaps, realized by a younger 
 generation. If the history of modern English journalism should ever 
 adequately be written, Mr. Stead will, I am confident, figure as the most 
 creative and invigorating force in it. 
 
 Carlyle pictured the newspaper as the modern Church. ‘Look well, thou 
 seest everywhere a new clergy of the Mendicant Orders, some barefooted, 
 some almost barebacked, fashion itself into shape, and teach and preach 
 zealously enough for copper alms and the love of God.’ Most people, I 
 Suppose, pause before ‘and the love of God,’ in order to read a sardonic 
 laugh between the lines — as Carlyle, it is likely enough, intended. But the 
 passage as it stands expresses precisely Mr. Stead’s conception of journal- 
 ism and his work in it. Not, indeed, that he was ever very careful about 
 the ‘copper alms.’ He made, it is true, a financial success, as he well 
 deserved, out of the Review of Reviews; but I can conceive that some of 
 those about him would say that such success, though in one sense all the 
 Editor’s own, was in other ways attained more in his despite than by his 
 aid. Mr. Stead was of all men the most unworldly, and of editors the least 
 susceptible to the ‘business side.’ But in another sense he was a consum- 
 mate master in the art of attracting ‘the copper alms.’ He knew, that is to 
 say, that a newspaper in order to have influence must be read, and that an 
 editor’s first business, therefore, is to make his sheet readable. It must 
 have circulation — not by any means necessarily ‘the widest circulation,’ 
 
 12a Ola LL Z 
 
354 AP PLEIN DT 
 
 but circulation amongst the people in many different spheres who count 
 for most. This was what Mr. Stead set himself to attract to the Pall Mall 
 Gazette, both when he was assistant-editor under Lord Morley, and during 
 his own editorship. He acclimatized the ‘interview’; and the way he had 
 with him, assisted by a prodigious memory and literary art, made him 
 supreme in the use of this journalistic form. He developed the ‘special 
 article’ and the ‘signed contribution.’ He was the pioneer in daily journal- 
 ism of maps and other illustrations. Indeed there are few, if any, among 
 laudable features in ‘the new journalism’ which the historian will not have 
 to trace back to the Pall Mall Gazette and Budget, and Extras of Mr. 
 Stead’s time. The amount of personal initiative in idea and of personal 
 work in execution which Mr. Stead threw into the paper would be in- 
 credible if one had not witnessed it. He would think nothing of writing 
 the leading article, half-a-dozen ‘Occasional Notes,’ a special article or an © 
 interview, and a column of ‘exclusive information,’ all in one day’s paper. 
 
 The personal and confidential talks which lay behind such information 
 
 were innumerable. The great Delane himself was not acquainted with 
 
 more important personages, and Mr. Stead’s range of curiosity was far 
 
 wider. In politics Mr. Stead had a footing behind the scenes in both 
 
 camps. He used to correspond with Lord Salisbury, and even Mr. Stead’s 
 
 deputy had at one time the privilege of almost daily conversations with 
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill. A story of Mr. Stead’s famous audience of the 
 
 Tsar has been told elsewhere. But there was one great man nearer home 
 
 whom Mr. Stead failed, after trial, to interview. On his return from one of 
 
 his visits to Russia the time seemed to have come. Mr. Stead had important 
 
 messages, and had seen Lord Salisbury and a yet more exalted personage. 
 
 He informed Mr. Chamberlain to that effect, and begged leave to lay his 
 
 report before the Minister in person. But Mr. Chamberlain was not even 
 
 so to be caught, and replied to some such effect as this: that ‘as Mr. Stead 
 
 had already seen the Prime Minister, Mr. Chamberlain feels that he has 
 
 no right to ask Mr. Stead to call on a subordinate Minister.’ Mr. Stead 
 
 laughed heartily as he recalled the clever letter. It was one of his many 
 
 engaging personal traits that he told the story of any discomfiture with 
 
 the same gusto that he brought to the recital of his triumphs. The 
 
 triumphs were many, the discomfitures few. 
 
 Mr. Stead, then, made his Gazette and his Review interesting and read- 
 able. He did this by taking infinite pains, and as the expression of his own 
 inexhaustible vigour and curiosity. No journalist of the time procured so 
 much “good copy’ and none knew better how to present it in a vivid and 
 arresting manner. All this, however, was the ‘copper alms’ side of the. 
 business — the first thing needful in his conception of journalism; but only 
 the first, and not the chief. The essential thing was to ‘teach and preach 
 zealously for the love of God.’ One or two reminiscences will serve to | 
 
APPENDIX V 355 
 
 bring out this side of Mr. Stead’s journalism. I recall as vividly as if it 
 were yesterday a scene in the old room at Northumberland Street around 
 the Editor’s table at which Mr. Greenwood, Lord Morley, and Mr. Stead 
 had successively worked. The Pall Mall in those days, as some of my 
 readers will remember, was a small sheet, and its front page was wholly 
 consecrated to the leading-article and the beginning of a ‘special article.’ 
 ‘There was a conference of the powers that were, at which it was proposed, 
 in the interests of the business side, to enlarge the sheet, and to place 
 theatrical advertisements in a first column alongside of the ‘leader.’ Dis- 
 cussion was long and lively, and in the end Mr. Stead yielded; ‘but I warn 
 you,’ he added, ‘that it may be the ruin of the paper.’ I think he under- 
 estimated the attraction of his leaders in themselves, and exaggerated the 
 importance of giving them pontifical seclusion; but the tale well illustrates 
 his intense conviction that the day’s sermon was the thing. In an account 
 cabled to the Star of Mr. Stead’s table-talk on board the Titanic, he is 
 reported as saying that he had impressed on Mr. Hearst the importance 
 of giving a ‘soul’ to ‘sensational journalism.’ By ‘a soul’ he meant ‘a 
 definite moral purpose in some social movement or political reform.’ This 
 was the essence of Mr. Stead’s own journalism; and at one time he placed 
 in the hands of every member of his staff a copy of “The Gospel according 
 to the P.M.G.’ —‘a rough outline,’ he explained, ‘scribbled off at such 
 fragmentary hours as were available after my return from the office, of the 
 things which are more surely received among us.’ 
 
 Mr. Stead did not take amiss any harmless liberty on the part of his sub- 
 ordinates and an otherwise trivial sequel may be recounted to illustrate the 
 relations between the editor and his staff. A few days later a letter arrived 
 from a reader, beginning: ‘Sir,—- You have ruined your paper. Hence- 
 forth I shall buy only the St. Fames’s Gazette.’ And then Mr. Stead’s 
 subordinate, who had opened the letter, paused, as if that were all. ‘Ah,’ 
 said Mr. Stead, ‘did I not tell them all so?’ But tragedy passed into 
 comedy, as the subordinate continued to read: ‘The St. fames’s Gazette 
 is now the only paper left of a convenient size for wrapping one’s shoes in.’ 
 Mr. Stead enjoyed the pleasantry as heartily as anyone else. 
 
 “The Gospel according to the P.M.G.,’ as preached by Mr. Stead, has 
 had great and far-reaching influence. This is a country governed by public 
 opinion, and Mr, Stead was a potent moulder of public opinion in the 
 political and social sphere. His work in the cause of womanhood is, I 
 understand, discussed elsewhere in this Review, and this was the work 
 which he considered his greatest. In the field of politics Mr. Stead was 
 the most powerful of the journalists who contributed to form and maintain 
 public opinion on the side of a strong Navy. He was among the first, and 
 was easily the most persistent, in advocating a good understanding with 
 Russia. He was one of the pioneers in familiarizing the ideas roughly 
 
356 APPENDIX V 
 
 expressed in the phrase “Imperial Federation.”’ He was a constant advocate 
 of Anglo-American friendship, and the later years of his life were largely 
 devoted to the cause of International Arbitration. But his influence was 
 widest in a sphere which is less palpable and which less touches particular 
 problems of specific solutions. He was profoundly religious, and his 
 beliefs became more and more touched with mysticism; but the practical 
 gospel, for which those beliefs gave sanction, was the service of man as 
 the service of God. It is impossible to write anything about Mr. Stead 
 without quoting the poet whose words were most often in his mouth and 
 at the point of his pen. He took his marching orders from Lowell: - 
 
 “He’s true to God who’s true to man; wherever wrong is done, 
 To the humblest and the weakest ‘neath the all beholding sun.’ 
 
 The gospel of social service, the politics of social betterment, were what 
 was nearest to his heart. And here he greatly widened his influence by 
 personal intercourse and exhortation. He was not satisfied with preaching 
 only in his paper or his review. He was as instant on the platform and in 
 the chapel as in the printed page. One cannot measure such things pre- 
 cisely; but it cannot be doubted that his persistency of preaching in the 
 Press, his Link (‘A Journal for the Servants of Man’) his ‘Association of 
 Helpers,’ and his personal influence with individuals, have exercised a 
 very powerful force. And, besides, he practised what he preached — not 
 always, it may be, with judicious discrimination, but always with a self- 
 denying generosity. As has been said of him elsewhere, ‘it was enough in a 
 man and a woman to be unfortunate, for Mr. Stead to befriend them.’ 
 
 As I close these remarks, a letter reaches me, in which a friend of his 
 recites a recent conversation. ‘When my work is done,’ he said, ‘I shall die 
 a violent death.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘I cannot tell; but I have had a 
 vision, and I know that it will be true, as surely as that I am talking to you.’ 
 It is unlikely that we shall ever be told how he died; but those who knew 
 him will be in no doubt. He must have faced his doom unflinchingly; for 
 he knew no fear, and he did not believe that death meant separation. And, 
 if occasion arose, he must have comforted any weaker brother within his 
 reach. It was what he was doing all his life. 
 
 E. T. COOK. 
 
APPENDIX VI 
 THE STEAD MEMORIALS IN LONDON AND NEW YORK 
 From the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of Fuly 6, 1920 
 
 At the unveiling of a portrait bronze, erected by British and American 
 journalists to commemorate William Thomas Stead, on Thames Embank- 
 ment yesterday, tributes were paid to his memory in the presence of 
 members of his family and admirers of his journalistic labours. The 
 memorial was the work of Sir George Frampton, and the ceremony of 
 unveiling by Mr. J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, was 
 brief owing to unfavourable weather. Yesterday was the anniversary of 
 Mr. Stead’s birth, and the unveiling synchronized with a similar ceremony 
 in New York. The inscription was as follows: 
 
 W. T. STEAD, 
 1849. 1912. 
 This Memorial to a Journalist of wide renown was erected near 
 the spot where he worked for more than thirty years by journalists 
 of many lands, in recognition of his brilliant gifts, fervent spirit, 
 and untiring devotion to the service of his fellow-men. 
 
 After the unveiling the assembly proceeded to the London County 
 Council Education Office, where Mr. Robert Donald, chairman of the 
 British Committee, who presided, read letters of regret for absence from 
 Viscount Morley and Lord Fisher, both of which messages appeared in 
 the Daily Telegraph yesterday. He also read a letter from Viscount North- 
 cliffe which included the following: 
 
 It was my great fortune to know Stead from many angles. A mighty 
 affectionate creature he was, especially to young men, and to those he 
 loved to criticize, of whom I was one. An aspect of his character that I 
 have not seen referred to was his wonderful general knowledge. He and I 
 spent a day in parts of Roman Britain ~ Silchester, among other places — 
 and packed away in that great brain of his was a vast store of knowledge 
 of the early history of England. How much he did to relieve the tedium 
 of the dull evening newspapers of the early ’eighties was but part of a 
 great revolution which he effected in journalism. When he passed so 
 mysteriously I was one of many who felt that they had lost a true friend. 
 
 SINCERE, JUST, IMPARTIAL 
 
 Mr. Donald also read a letter from the American Ambassador paying 
 tribute to the memory of Mr. Stead, and one from Mr. H. Wickham Steed, 
 357 
 
358 APPENDIX VI 
 
 editor of the Times, who was to have unveiled the memorial. Mr. Steed 
 wrote as follows: 
 
 MY DEAR DONALD, 
 
 I am grieved not to be able to unveil the tablet to our old friend and 
 colleague, W. T’. Stead, next Monday, when I shall unfortunately be away 
 from England, without any chance of even using, as he would have loved 
 to do, the wireless telephone. I had looked forward to this opportunity of 
 paying some tribute to his memory, both as a man and as a journalist, and of 
 bearing witness to the degree in which he possessed the two qualities 
 which lift the exercise of our craft above a level that might otherwise seem 
 sordid —a burning sincerity and a passion for justice. This I can say with 
 full impartiality, since I do not remember having been in complete agree- 
 ment with him on any single question; but neither did I ever detect in him 
 the slightest taint of self-interest other than the self-interest of which we 
 are all guilty when we are striving for the victory of causes which we 
 believe to be right. 
 
 Of his achievements as a writer and an editor it is not for me to speak. 
 Others who were directly associated with him in his daily work have qualifi- 
 cations in this respect which I cannot claim. But I have always owed hima 
 debt of gratitude for the advice he gave me almost exactly thirty years ago, 
 when, as a youth eager to enter journalism, I saw him for the first time in 
 his ‘sanctum’ overlooking the spot where you will gather on Monday. I 
 remember his words as if they had been spoken yesterday, and repeat them 
 here, as they may perchance be of interest, if not of value, to other aspirants 
 to membership of the daily Press. ‘A journalist!’ he exclaimed, ‘how can I 
 know whether you are fit to be a journalist? There is only one way to find 
 out. Try; if you have anything to say that you feel you must say, why, say 
 it, and send it to some editor, who will probably send it back. Don’t waste 
 time over mere phrases. Sail right into the heart of your subject at once. 
 When you have written your masterpiece, imagine that you have to tele- 
 graph it to Australia at your own expense, and cut out every superfluous 
 word—above all, the adjectives. Then, if anything remains, try it on an 
 editor, and see what happens. If you do not succeed, as you won’t unless 
 you have really got something to say that you cannot help saying, try again 
 and again. Presently you will find out whether you are fit to be a journalist 
 or not.’ 
 
 Strange to say, this advice encouraged me greatly, for I was convinced 
 that I had something to say, and that it was the duty of editors to print 
 that something. Presently some of them did, the first being the late Sir 
 E. T. Cook, who printed in the Pall Mall Gazette a short account that I 
 remember writing on a waiting-room table at Liverpool Street Station, of a 
 lecture on old age pensions given by Mr. J. A, Spender at Toynbee Hall, 
 
APPENDIX VI 359 
 
 with the late Charles Booth in the chair. Afterwards, when studying in 
 Germany and in France, the Westminster Gazette was very kind to me, 
 and really gave me my start in journalism — which I have always felt I owed 
 to Stead’s advice. 
 
 We surely do well to commemorate our great men, and Stead had an 
 unquestionable title to greatness in our craft. Erratic and even fantastic 
 as were some of his ideas and enterprises, they were all marked by a touch 
 of genius and by childlike good faith. He refused to be abashed by dis- 
 appointments. To the end he believed the best of everybody and every- 
 thing. He had a faculty for ignoring obstacles that sometimes, though by 
 no means always, helped him to overcome them. His mind was of an 
 absolute sort; not given to subtlety, nor always appreciating the relative 
 value of some general principles; but, above all, he was a real man, respond- 
 ing to every thrill of human nature, overflowing with sympathy, command- 
 ing devotion, because himself devoted to others, and ever ready to laugh, 
 without malice or rancour, at his own disappointments and failures. Your 
 committee has been well-inspired in erecting a permanent memorial to 
 his work, for, rightly understood, it will remain an inspiration to those who 
 knew him and it, and to those who may come after him and us. — Believe 
 me, my dear Donald, very sincerely yours. 
 
 WICKHAM STEED. 
 
 MASTER OF HIS CRAFT 
 
 Mr. Spender said Stead was a master of his craft, with daring and original 
 ideas, and he loved journalism and left a permanent mark on it. Coming 
 on the scene at a time when it was in danger of being entangled in its own 
 traditions, he broke its bonds and enlarged its sphere to embrace a great 
 new range of human interests and emotions. He brought to his work an 
 overflowing vitality, a limitless curiosity, a vehement crusading tempera- 
 ment, a positive preference for shocking, and even scandalizing, the inert 
 multitude, provided only he could make it think. For pointed and animated 
 writing, for the discovery of the human interest which lurked in the heart 
 of the most forbidding subjects, for arresting phrases and unflagging 
 vivacity in what other people thought to be dull times, Stead was un- 
 equalled among his contemporaries, and has not been approached by many 
 of his successors. But journalism with Stead was no mere craftsmanship. 
 His great journalistic qualities were the qualities of a mind full to over- 
 flowing of honest emotion and conviction, a mind to which journalism was 
 always a means and not an end. No one would have repudiated more 
 scornfully the idea that journalism was a mere branch of commerce. 
 
 Again and again he staked his whole fortune and career on forlorn and 
 unpopular causes. And when his impetuous disposition and warm chivalry 
 for man and woman brought him into conflict with worldly opinion and 
 
360 AT PE NID ave 
 
 authority, he never resented any criticism but one, which was that he had 
 done what he had done in order to sell his paper. It was well that journal- 
 ists should have combined to do honour to such a man. He was one of the 
 masters of their calling, and an example to them of high faith, courage, and 
 integrity in pursuing it. Not journalists alone, however, but all English- 
 men had cause to cherish his memory. He had passionate quarrels with 
 some of them at different times, and he stubbornly refused to conform to 
 any school of thought or policy. He was Imperialistic and pro-Boer, 
 ardent champion of peace and arbitration, indefatigable advocate of the 
 big Navy. These seeming inconsistencies were bound together in his own 
 mind by a clear train of thought which based the safety and welfare of these 
 dominions upon its honour. Those who knew him intimately remember 
 not only these public characteristics but the warm-hearted, generous man, 
 whose door was never closed to any petitioner, however humble, who gave 
 of himself unstintedly day by day for his fellow man. Those who knew him 
 rejoice that his name should be honoured and his memory kept green by 
 this memorial, raised to him where he would have most desired it, by 
 his fellow journalists. 
 
 Among those present were: The Rev. Herbert Stead, Dr. J. E. Stead, Mr. 
 John Stead, Miss E. W. Stead, Mr. and Mrs. J. M. Gilliland, Viscount 
 Milner, the Hon. J. McEwan Hunter, Sir Harry Brittain, M.P., Sir Alfred 
 Robbins, Sir George Sutton, Sir George Frampton, Sir Horace B. Marshall, 
 Mr. George Springfield, Sir John Coode-Adams, Mr. Herbert Cornish, 
 the Dean of Durham, Mr. John Burns, Dr. Drakoules, the Rev. Dr. M. J. 
 Elliott, Mr. Arnold White, Mr. Grant Richards, Mr. M. H. Spielmann, 
 Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, Mr. Arthur Mee, Dr. Ellis Powell, Mr. G. B. 
 Hodgson, Mr. Arthur Walter, Mr. T. H. Harley, Mr. T. O’Donovan, Mr. 
 F. Hinde, Mr. F. J. Higginbottom, and Mr. William Hill (hon. secretary 
 of the British Committee). 
 
 * * * 
 
 Lord Fisher, in expressing his regret at being unable to attend the un- 
 veiling, has written as follows: ‘Stead was a consummate journalist — he 
 was an honest man—and (thank God) he possessed the “insanity of 
 genius” which will hand him down to posterity as “a famous man.” He 
 was a lover of his country, and, like John the Baptist, he “‘constantly spoke 
 the truth, rebuked vice, and patiently endured for the truth’s sake!”’ ’ 
 
 # © - 
 
 Viscount Morley, who was invited to be present at the unveiling of the 
 memorial to the late W. T’. Stead on the Thames Embankment to-day, has 
 sent the following letter to Mr. Wickham Steed, editor of the Times, who 
 will perform the ceremony: ‘I wish with all my heart that I could be by 
 your side at the commemoration of our friend Stead. It was my fortune 
 many years ago to bring him up from the North to the field of metropolitan 
 
APY PN DIX VI 361 
 
 journalism. He rapidly made a high personal mark and greatly magnified 
 and exalted the sphere of his profession. He proved himself a colleague as 
 faithful as he was active, painstaking, and original. Without disrespect to 
 the many able and conscientious journalists of modern generations, it may 
 with truth, I think, be said of him that he was surpassed by none of them 
 in any country in his sense of the commanding duties and responsibilities 
 of the mission of the newspaper Press. His temperament was eager, but 
 he had a passion for being right, and to be right in facts and information 
 was with him, as it ought to be for all of us, the foundation of serviceable 
 opinion and popular instruction. You are celebrating the memory of one 
 who was an important new force in his day; the errors of such a man have 
 long fallen out of account.’ 
 * *% * 
 
 From the ‘Daily Telegraph’ of Fuly 6, 1920 
 
 AMERICAN MEMORIAL 
 FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT 
 
 New York, Monday.- Mr. Melville Stone, the doyen of American 
 journalists and head of the Associated Press of the United States, issued a 
 statement to-day on behalf of the American Stead Memorial Committee, 
 in which he expressed the complete agreement of the committee with the 
 steps taken in London to-day to honour the memory of the late William 
 Stead. Mr. Percy Bullen, secretary of the committee, reported that a 
 replica of the Frampton bronze bust had been safely received in New York, 
 and a fitting site for the same at the entrance to the Central Park, New 
 York, had been approved by the city, but the date of the unveiling could 
 not be fixed until the completion of the mural setting by the masons to the 
 satisfaction of the park authorities. It is hoped that the unveiling of the 
 replica may coincide with the first visit to New York of President Wilson 
 since his illness, and in this case a date convenient to the national executive 
 would be arranged. The American committee includes a dozen leading 
 newspaper editors in the United States, several of whom, like Mr. Stone, 
 were for many years the personal friends of Mr. Stead and supporters of 
 the gallant fight which he made in the cause of the world’s peace. Funds for 
 the purchase of the replica in 1914 were subscribed on this side within a few 
 days, but on the day that the New York Art Commission formally approved 
 the acceptance of the bust the war broke out, and further proceedings in 
 connection with the formal inauguration were postponed until peace was 
 concluded. 
 
APPENDIX VII 
 A WREATH 
 
 It seems fitting to devote the last page of Stead’s biography to these lines, 
 written by a friend for whose work he had a warm admiration. 
 
 W. T. STEAD 
 [‘He has gone down into the great waters.’ — A. G.G. in the Daily News.] 
 
 Yes! as he lived he died; a voyager 
 Adventurous ever, on great deeps and strange, 
 Whence new isles dawn and where the wide winds stir, 
 Freighted with fate and change. 
 
 His was the heart of gold whose argosy 
 No ships on all the sea of life could match, 
 
 Whose wealth all shared; whose door to each man free 
 Was ever on the latch. 
 
 Kindness that knew nor end nor bound; the power 
 Thundering its way to thrones; the gentleness 
 That stooped to lift and cheer one wayside flower, 
 
 One fainting life to bless. 
 
 Great heart, intrepid soul, majestic brain, 
 To these, to-day, is many a tribute penned. 
 My wreath is woven of love and wet with pain —- 
 I mourn the man, my friend. 
 S. GERTRUDE FORD. 
 
 362 
 
INDEX FEROS VOLUME, II 
 
 Aberdeen, Marchioness of, 39, 49, 63, 
 237, 280, 343, 344 
 
 Aberdeen, Marquis of, 39, 157, 280, 
 343, 344 
 
 Acton, Lord. 283 
 
 Addams, Miss Jane, 42 
 
 fE (George Russell), 304 
 
 African Mail, 215 
 
 Alden, Percy, 73 
 
 Alexander, Tsar of Russia. See Tsar 
 
 Alexandra, Queen, 188, 282 
 
 Amos, Mrs. Sheldon, 172 
 
 Anglo-German Courier, 285 
 
 Answers, 72 
 
 Aria, Mrs., 265 
 
 Armenia, 127; Armenian Massacres, 
 79, 352 
 
 Archer, William, 247 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 253 
 
 coe a Right Hon. H. H., 87, 279 
 280 
 
 Baccarat Scandal, 103 
 
 Bailey, Sir Abe, 206, 207 
 
 Baily, Commissioner, 304 
 
 Balfour, Right Hon. A. J., 25, 31, 32, 
 TeOntes al 20 ge 791200120 eisai) 
 147, 158, 184, 185, 186, 209, 273, 274 
 
 Banks, Miss Elizabeth L., 70 
 
 Bariatinsky, Princess, 140 
 
 Basili, M., 123, 161, 165, 166 
 
 Barker, Sir H. A., 303 
 
 Barrett, Professor (Sir William) 37 
 
 Bayard, Mr., 110 
 
 Beerbohm, Max, 238 
 
 Begbie, Harold, 12, 238 
 
 Belloc, Miss Marie (afterwards Mrs. 
 Belloc Lowndes), 32, 360 
 
 Belloc, Hilaire, 72 
 
 Benson, F. R. (Sir Frank), 255, 303 
 
 Beresford, Lord Charles, 293, 294, 296 
 
 Berne International Peace Bureau, 180 
 
 Besant, Mrs. Annie, 33, 63, 64, 74, 96 
 
 Besant, Sir Walter, 332 
 
 Best or the Worst of Empires,’ “The, 
 
 244 
 
 Birdwood, Sir George, 224 
 
 Birrell, Right Hon. Augustine, 281 
 
 Bismarck, Prince, 113, 114, 286 
 
 ‘Bitter Cry of Outcast London,’ 13 
 
 ‘Blastus’ (Review of Reviews Annual for 
 1896), 93 
 
 ‘Bloody Sunday,’ 272, 282 
 
 Blowitz, 132 
 
 Bobrikoff, Governor-General, 277 
 
 Bookman, 62 
 
 ‘Books for the Bairns,’ 68 
 Booth, Right Hon. Charles, 359 
 Booth, General, 10, 12, 148, 219, 345, 
 
 346 
 
 Botha, General, 30 
 
 Boulanger, General, 19 
 
 Boulger, Demetrius, 216 
 
 Bourne, Fox, 215, 216 
 
 Bower, Sir Graham, 170 
 
 Braby, Maud Churton, 228, 265, 266 
 
 Bradlaugh, Charles, 225 
 
 Bragg, Mrs., 68, 69, 70 
 
 Brett, R. B. (Lord Esher), 13, 25, 32, 
 15, 179, 209, 233, 343 
 
 Bright, John, 18, 172 
 
 British Weekly, 21, 62, 75 
 
 Brittain, Sir Harry, 360 
 
 Brocklehurst, General (Lord Ranks- 
 borough), 103, 179, 188, 189, 190, 
 191, 274, 278 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, 60 
 
 Bryan, William Jennings, 313 
 
 Bryce, Lord, 31, 39, 78, 79, 80, 135, 
 136, 147, 280, 313 
 
 Bullen, Percy, 361 
 
 Bunting, Mr. and Mrs. Percy, 350 
 
 Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, 213 
 
 Burnett, Miss M., 56, 57, 64 
 
 Burns, Right Hon. John, 10, 118, 150, 
 172, 279, 280, 282, 283, 360 
 
 ‘Burns’s Lambs’, 172 
 
 Burt, Right Hon. Thomas, 225 
 
 Bushnell, Dr. Kate, 62 
 
 Butler, Mrs. Josephine, 61, 349, 352 
 
 Buxton, Right Hon. Sydney, 280 
 
 Bystander, 247 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman, Right Hon. Sir 
 Henry, 118, 198, 279, 280, 281 
 
 ‘Candidates of Cain’ (see South African 
 War), 180 
 
 Cape Times, 93, 204 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 122, 293, 393 
 
 Carnegie, 232 
 
 Carpenter, Frank, 54, 55 
 
 Carrington, Lord, 280 
 
 Cartwright, Albert, 242 
 
 Cassell & Co., 237 
 
 Cecil, Lord Hugh, 290 
 
 Chamberlain, Right Hon. J., 93, 96, 97, 
 98, 99, 100, 109, 110, 169, 171, 178, 
 186, 187, 189, 190, 203, 211, 224, 261, 
 262, 272, 273, 279; 354 
 
 Chesterton, G. K., 72, 238, 239 
 
 Chicago Daily News, 42, 53 
 
 Chicago Record Herald, 174 
 
 363 
 
364 INDEX 
 
 Chicago Sunday Tribune, 328, 329, 33° 
 
 Christmas Numbers of the Review of 
 
 Reviews, 61, 66, 94 
 
 Church, Dean, 220, 346 
 
 Churchill, Randolph (Lord), 30, 354 
 
 Churchill, Right Hon. Winston, 279 
 
 Civic Federation of Chicago, 52 
 
 ‘Civilization in Congo Land,’ 216 
 
 Clarence, Duke of, 104 
 
 Clark, Roger, 172 
 
 Clarke, Rev. Dr., 41 
 
 Clemenceau, M., 131, 132 
 
 Clifford, Mrs., 28 
 
 Clifford, Rev. Dr., 172, 270, 348 
 
 Clough, 229 
 
 Cobbett, 316 
 
 Coburg, Duchess of, 111 
 
 Cocks, Seymour, 215 
 
 Colvin, Sir Auckland, 224 
 
 Congo and Congo Atrocities, 129, 130, 
 131, 213-19 
 
 Contagious Diseases Acts, 349 
 
 Contemporary Review, 80, 84, 193, 204, 
 341, 349 
 
 Coode-Adams, Sir John, 360 
 
 Cook, Dr. (Arctic explorer), 296-301 
 
 Cook siz ESD, 153-75, 102,1103.,101, 
 192, 356, 358 
 
 Coote, W. A., 350 
 
 Corelli, Marie, 227 
 
 Cornish, Herbert, 360 
 
 Courtney, Right Hon. Leonard (after- 
 wards Lord), 175, 176 
 
 Cremer, W. Randal, 87, 122, 172 
 
 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 259 
 
 Cronje, 179 
 
 Crook, W. M., 172, 173 
 
 Dagblad, 154, 157, 160, 161, 162, 166 
 
 Daily Chronicle, 171, 294, 300 
 
 Daily Mail, 292 
 
 Daily News, 129, 134, 296 
 
 Daily Paper, 50, 58, 64, 231, 232, 233, 
 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 246, 
 328, 331, 337, 362 
 
 Daily Telegraph, 19, 110, 357, 361 
 
 Darby, Dr., 87 
 
 Dardanelles, 112 
 
 tae England and the Way Out,’ 
 10, 
 
 Davitt, ‘Michael, 18, 19 
 
 ‘Deliverance or ‘Doom,’ .7 
 
 Dernburg, Friedrich, 284, 285 
 
 D’Estournelles de Constant, 
 157, 159, 163, 241 
 
 Devonshire, Duke of, 119 
 
 De Wet, 179, 181 
 
 Digby, William, 219, 220, 223, 224, 225 
 
 Dilke, Sir Charles, 10, 16, 17, 25, 215 
 
 Baron, 
 
 Dillon, Des rss2 77275 
 Didsy, Arthur, 238 
 Dolgorouky, Prince, 278 
 Donald, Sir Robert, 357 
 Doyle, Sir A. Conan, 332 
 Drakoules, Dr., 360 
 Dreyfus Case, 132 
 Ducommun, Mr., 180 
 Dundee Advertiser, 230 
 Dutt, Romesh, 225 
 
 Edward, King, 282 
 
 Egan, Dr. Maurice, 297, 298 
 
 Elgin, Lord, 280 
 
 Elliot, Rev. Dr. J. M., 360 
 
 Ellis, Havelock, 233, 341 
 
 Emmott, Alfred (afterwards Lord), 219 
 Esher, Lord (see Brett) 
 
 Etvelde, Baron Van, 214 
 
 Evans, Howard, 122 
 
 Fairbairns, W. H., 313 
 
 Fallows, Bishop, 41 
 
 Fawcett, Mrs. Millicent Garrett, 289, 
 349, 350, 351 
 
 Finland, 160 
 
 Finot, Jean M., 311 
 
 Fischer, A., 185, 186, 187, 198 
 
 Fisher, Admiral (Lord), 32, 161, 293, 
 294, 296, 357, 360 
 
 Fitchett, Dr., 231, 289 
 
 Flammarion, M. Camille, 289 
 
 Ford, Gertrude, 362 
 
 Fortnightly Review, 34, 151 
 
 Fowler, Sir Henry, 280, 281 
 
 Fowler, Miss Ellen Thorneycroft, 127 
 
 Frampton, Sir George, 357, 360 
 
 France, 288, 311, 326 
 
 Francis Joseph, Emperor, 132 
 
 Frederick, Emperor, 102, 113, 114 
 
 Frederick, Empress, 114, 115 
 
 Froude, 11 
 
 Fry, Sir E., 290, 291 
 
 Fuller, T. E., 202 
 
 Galsworthy, John, 228 
 
 Gardiner, A. G., 296 
 
 Garrett, Edmund, 29, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 
 167, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 203, 
 204, 211, 245, 341 
 
 Garvin, J. L., 293, 315 
 
 Gatti and Rodesano’s, 239 
 
 Geneva Red Cross Society, 163 
 
 George, Right Hon. D. Lloyd, 172, 
 279, 281, 303 
 
 German Editors, 283, 284, 285 
 
 Germany, 90, 295 
 
 Gibbs, Sir Philip, 301, 302 
 
 Gil Ei Pas BOA 
 
 i 
 
INDEX 
 
 Gilliland, J. M., Mr. and Mrs., 360 
 
 Gilzean-Reid, Sir Hugh, 214, 215, 216 
 
 Gladstone, Right Hon. W.E., 13, 15-20, 
 Asp! S30,° 41,50) T09;-1 10d Ma Te aoe 
 139, 149, 333 
 
 Goodrich-Freer, Miss A. M., 37, 38 
 
 Good Words, 202 
 
 Gordon, General, 30, 138, 139, 202, 302 
 
 Gorst, Sir John, 30, 219 
 
 Goschen, Mr., 161 
 
 Gould, Sir F. C., 92 
 
 Grand, Madame Sarah, 60, 61, 62, 173, 
 228 
 
 Greeley, Horace, 74, 75 
 
 Greenwood, Frederick, 302, 355 
 
 Gretton, R. H., 171 
 
 Grey, Albert (Fourth Earl), 189, 213, 
 
 233 
 Grey, Sir Edward, 279, 280, 290 
 Griffin, Sir Lepel, 224 
 Grindelwald Conference, 57 
 Grundy, Sydney, 255 
 Gurney, Mr., 36 
 
 Haggard, Sir Rider, 229 
 
 Hague Peace Conference, pp. 122-66; 
 also 287, 288 
 
 Haldane, Lord, 279, 281, 289 
 
 Hall-Caine, Sir T., 227 
 
 Hamilton, Lord George, 170, 223 
 
 Hanbury-Williams, General Sir John, 
 138 
 
 Harcourt, Right Hon. Sir William, 30, 
 $13 32/170 
 
 Hardie, Keir, 172, 289 
 
 Harley, T. H., 360 
 
 Harper, Miss Edith, 314 
 
 Harris, Lord, 96 
 
 Harris, Dr. Rutherford, 233 
 
 Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, 328 
 
 Hartmann, Professor, 67 
 
 Hawkesley, Mr., 210, 211, 212 
 
 Hayling Island, 68, 69, 70, 291, 313 
 
 Healy, “Tim,’ 18, 30 
 
 Hearst, Mr., 355 
 
 Heaton, Sir H. Henniker, 227, 237 
 
 Heinemann, W., 59 
 
 Henley, W. E., 93 
 
 Herbert Auberon, 302 
 
 Hereford, Bishop of, 158 
 
 Hetherington, Miss, 50 
 
 Higginbottom, F. G., 360 
 
 Hill, William, 360 
 
 ‘History of the Mystery’ (sequel to 
 ‘Blastus’), 93 
 
 Hinde, F., 360 
 
 Hinds, Dr., 218 
 
 Hobson, J. A., 173 
 
 Hodgson, G. B., 360 
 
 365 
 
 Hofmeyr, Mr., 190, 208 
 
 Hole, E. S., 304, 305, 317 
 
 Holiday, Henry, 236 
 
 Holland, Rev. Henry Scott, 353 
 Holls, Mr., 156 
 
 Holdsworth, Annie, 59 
 
 Hughes, Hugh Price, 15, 16, 19, 224 
 Hunter, Hon. J. McEwan, 360 
 Huntsman, Miss S. K., 73 
 
 Huxley, Prof., 21 
 
 ‘If Christ Came to Chicago,’ p. 53, etc. 
 Illingworth, Mr., 18 
 
 Independent Labour Party, 174 
 Ingalls, John J., 80, 81 
 
 Irving, Sir Henry, 246, 254 
 
 Jacousky, Mile., 135 
 
 Jameson, Dr., 88, 89, 90, 94, 99, 108, 
 109, 168, 169, 170, 188, 233, 245 
 
 Jameson Raid, 30, 78, 88, 89, 90, 94, 99, 
 203 
 
 Jaurés, 159 
 
 Jepson, Edgar, 238 
 
 Jews, 34, 114 
 
 Jingoes and Jingoism, 150, 173, 183, 261 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, Stead compared 
 with him, 71-76 
 
 Johnston, H. H. (Sir Harry), 208, 209, 
 
 ai3 
 ‘Julia,’ 162, 316 
 
 Kaiser William II, 90, 113, 123, 132, 
 133, 159 
 
 Keating, Father, 38 
 
 Kendal, Rev. Henry, 38 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 149, 223, 224 
 
 Kitchener, Lord, 174, 190 
 
 Klondyke, 60 
 
 Knollys, Sir Francis, 13, 14, 15, 103, 
 104 
 
 Koopmans-De Wet, Mrs., 241 
 
 Kruger, President, 89, 92, 100, 169, 170, 
 171, 184, 185, 189, 192, 195, 200, 206 
 
 Krupp, 206 
 
 Labouchere, Mr., 172, 199 
 
 Labour World, 18; Labour Press, 289 
 
 Lamsdorf, Count, 124, 125 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 230 
 
 Lansdowne, Lord, 221, 280 
 
 La Revue, 311 
 
 Lascelles, Sir Frank, 134, 303, 311 
 
 Laveleye, Emile de, 302 
 
 Lawrence, Miss 70 
 
 Lawrence, Miss, A. E., 64 
 
 Lawson, Sir Edward (afterwards Lord 
 Burnham), 106 
 
 Lawson, Sir Wilfred, 172 
 
366 ) INDEX 
 
 Lecky, Mrs., 153 
 
 Le Courrier de la Conference, 290, 291 
 
 Leighton, Sir Frederick, 102 
 
 Lennox, Lady Algy, 105 
 
 Leopold, King of the Belgians, 129, 
 130, ,133,\213, E4215, 210, 210,302 
 
 Lessar, M., 125, 126 
 
 Lewis, Sir George, 16, 102, 118, 302 
 
 Leyds, Dr., 185, 186, 187, 191 
 
 ‘Liberal Ministry of 1906,’ 278, 279, 
 280, 281 
 
 Liddon, Canon, 212, 346, 351 
 
 L’Indépendance Belge, 167 
 
 Link, 356 
 
 Loch, Sir Henry, 96 
 
 Lodge, Sir Oliver, 339 
 
 Lodge, Senator, 80, 81, 82, 83 
 
 Long, Robert Crozier, 239 
 
 Long, Sir John, 234 
 
 Lonsdale, Lord, 132, 133 
 
 Loreburn, Lord, 347 
 
 Lowell, James Russell (Stead’s favour- 
 ite poet), 43, 54, 91, 220, 293 
 
 Loyola, Ignatius, 202, 20 
 
 Lunn, Dr. (Sir Henry), 57, 58, 60 
 
 Lynch, George, 237 
 
 Lyttelton, 279 
 
 MacCarthy, Justin, 18 
 
 MacDonald, Sir Claude, 125, 126 
 
 Mackenzie, Sir Morell, 16 
 
 MacKinnon, Sir William, 213 
 
 Macleod, Rev. Donald, 202 
 
 MacNeill, Swift, 18 
 
 Madden, H. (President of the Illinois 
 Federation of Labour), 42 
 
 ‘Maiden Tribute,’ 102, 352 
 
 Malabari, B. M., 221 
 
 Malan, F. S., 242 
 
 Manchester Guardian, 18, 155, 171 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, 209, 213, 350 
 
 Mann, Tom, 109, 113 
 
 Marriott, Charles, 228 
 
 Marshall, Sir Horace B., 360 
 
 Martens, M., 156 
 
 Massingham, H. W., 49, 171, 173 
 
 Mattei Cure for Cancer, 21, 303 
 
 Maxim, Sir Hiram, 289 
 
 Mazzini, 293 
 
 Mee, Arthur, 360 
 
 McCullagh, Francis, 310 
 
 McDonnell, Sir Antony, 280 
 
 McFall, Haldane, 61 
 
 Meredith, George, 303, 332 
 
 Methodist Times, 18 
 
 Meynell, Mrs., 238 
 
 Mieille, M., 64 
 
 Mijatovitch, 154 
 
 Milholland, John E., 173, 232 
 
 Miliukoff, Professor, 275, 276 
 
 Millar, Gertie, Miss, 255 
 
 Millerand, M., 289 
 
 Milner, Lord, 12, 14, 16, 24, 94, 95, 96, 
 98, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 200, 
 204, 209, 210, 211, 244, 360 
 
 Modern Language Association, 65 
 
 Modern Review, 76 
 
 Monroe Doctrine, 82, 83 
 
 Morel, E. D., 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 
 219 
 
 Morgan, Thomas J. (American Social- 
 ist), 45 
 
 Morier, Sir Robert (British Ambassador 
 at St. Petersburg), 30, 120 
 
 Morley, Lord, 13, 15, 17, 19, 25, 31, 
 74, 75, 92, 102, 103, 118, 120, 132, 
 135, 147, 280, 343, 354, 355, 357; 360 
 
 Morning Leader, 171, 247 
 
 Morning Paper, 64 
 
 Moscheles, Felix, 73, 153 
 
 Munster, Count, 166 
 
 Muravieff (Russian Prime Minister), 
 120,°5132,0195.0536 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., 36, 37 
 
 Naoroji Dadabhai, 225 
 
 Nansen, 289, 300 
 
 National Observer, 50 
 
 National Review, 107 
 
 National Vigilance Association, 380 
 Naval Defence, 239 
 
 Navy, 293, 294, 295, 296, 316, 355 
 Navy League, 119 
 
 Nevinson, H. W., 247 
 
 New York American, 296 
 
 New York Fournal, 129 
 
 Nicoll, Sir William Robertson, 62, 64 
 Nineteenth Century, 153 
 Northcliffe, Lord, 72, 122, 357 
 Novikoff, Madame, 110, 127, 300 
 
 Ober-Ammergau. See Passion Play 
 O’Brien, Barry, 18, 19 
 
 O’Donovan, T., 360 
 
 O’Flaherty, Hal, 53 
 
 Olney, American Secretary of State, 84 
 O’Shea, Mrs., and Parnell, 17, 18, 19, 20 
 Ouktomsky, Prince, 275 
 
 Pal, Bipin Chandara, 226 
 
 Palk, Mr., 23, 24 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette, 13, 14, 18, 32, 66, 72, 
 102, 103, 230, 349, 350, 353, 354) 355» 
 358, 360 
 
 Palmerston, Lord, 115 
 
 Parke, Ernest, 173 
 
 Parker, Dr. Theodore, 22 
 
 Parnell, 10, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25 
 
INDEX 
 
 Passion Play at Ober-Ammergau, 10, 
 II, 12, 59, 60, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 
 260, 337 
 
 Pauncefote, Sir Julian, 156 
 
 ‘Peace Conference, History of the,’ 153 
 
 Peace Crusade, 143, 163, 164, 287, 288 
 
 Peary, Captain (Arctic explorer), 299 
 
 Penny Classics for the People, 228 
 
 Penny Poets, 229, 230, 231 
 
 Penrose-Fitzgerald, Admiral, C.C., 294 
 
 Perris, .G; 1,153) 154 
 
 Pinero Sir A., 263, 264 
 
 Pioneer, 225 
 
 Plehve, M. Von, 233, 277 
 
 Plunkett, Sir Horace, 227 
 
 Pobodonoststoff, M., 273 
 
 ‘Pope and the New Era’, 11 
 
 Powell, Dr. Ellis, 360 
 
 Pratt, Hodgson, 173 
 
 Prince of Wales (King Edward), 10, 
 13,16, IOI, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 
 TLOMELG eiLO Ti 7. al lO lot 
 
 Probyn, Sir Dighton, 15, 190 
 
 Punch, 122, 129 
 
 Quakers, 172 
 Queen Victoria, 115, 119, 152, 157, 189, 
 227 
 
 Rampolla, Cardinal, 134, 143, 144, 146 
 
 Ratcliffe, S. K., 76 
 
 ‘Real Ghost Stories,’ 10 
 
 Redmond, J. E., 345 
 
 Reitz, 185, 186, 192 
 
 Ressi, Countess de, 141 
 
 Review of Reviews, 9, 10, 25, 31, 49-50, 
 54-77) 84-87, 88, 93, 123, 129, 190, 
 198, 199-203, 225, 227, 228, 233, 246, 
 265, 285, 289, 291, 302, 312, 343-348 
 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 
 78, 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 99, 107, 108, 
 109, 167, 169, 170, 178, 188, 189, 195, 
 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 
 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 241, 248, 292, 
 
 ar 
 
 Rhodes, Thomas, 285 
 
 Richards, Grant, 360 
 
 Richet, Dr. Charles, 288 
 
 Ripon, Lord, 281 
 
 Robertson, J. M., 173 
 
 Robbins, Sir Alfred, 360 
 
 Robins, Elizabeth, 59, 179, 228, 246, 
 247, 254, 256, 257 
 
 Rosebery, Lord, 87, 106, 113, 120, 123, 
 175, 176, 177, 189, 261, 262, 279 
 
 Rosmead, Lord, 109, 170 
 
 Rothschild, 209, 210 
 
 Russell, George, see /E. 
 
 Russell, Hon. Rollo, 33 
 
 Russell, T. W., 304 
 
 367 
 Saintsbury, Professor George, 9, 22, 
 
 23 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 20, 30, 63, 84, 87, 117, 
 123, 125, 157, 158, 161, 186, 187, 189, 
 354 
 
 Salvation Army, 13, 148, 219, 346 
 
 Samuel, Herbert, 219 
 
 Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia, 
 
 244 
 
 ‘Scandal of the South African Com- 
 mittee: a Plain Narrative for Plain 
 Men’, 99 
 
 Schreiner, Olive, 16, 25, 26, 29, 30, 96, 
 192, 194, 195, 244, 332 
 
 Schwarzhoff, 161, 162 
 
 Scott, Clement, 251 
 
 Scott, J. W. Robertson, 341 
 
 Seeley, Professor, 209 
 
 Selenka, Madame, 157, 231, 233 
 
 Seward, Frederick, 313, 314 
 
 Shaw, Dr. Albert (Editor of American 
 Review of Reviews), 25, 81, 82 
 
 Shaw, Bernard, 255, 290 
 
 Shelley, Mrs., 314 
 
 Shorter, Clement, 283, 286 
 
 Sievers, Comte Nicolas, 276 
 
 Sinnett, A. P., 225 
 
 SjOblom, Swedish Missionary, 217, 
 218 
 
 Slave Trade (Native), 213, 214, 217; 
 Slave Trade, White, see Prostitution 
 
 Slavs, 127, 128 
 
 Slovo, 278 
 
 Smith, Fred B., 311 
 
 Smuts, General, 270, 345 
 
 Socialists, 174, 289 
 
 Somerset, Lady Henry, 103, 104 
 
 Southwark, Bishop of, 340 
 
 Souza, Mrs. de, 190, 191 
 
 Speaker, 215 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 87 
 
 Spender, J. A., 77, 179, 348, 357, 358, 
 359 
 
 Sphere, 283 
 
 Spielmann, M. H., 360 
 
 Spiritualism, 10, 27, 36, 37, 38, 61, 63, 
 
 Th 
 
 Spokane Review, 71 
 
 Springfield, George, 360 
 
 Spurgeon, Arthur, 238 
 
 Staal, M. de, 123, 155, 156, 157, 158, 
 162, 166 
 
 Stanhope, Hon. Philip (Lord Weardale), 
 172 
 
 Star, 171, 355 
 
 Stead Memorial (list of names of Me- 
 morial Committee), 360 
 
 Stead, Estelle, 229, 360 
 
 Stead, Henry, 305 
 
368 
 
 Stead, Herbert, 123, 292, 360 
 
 Stead, Dr. J. E., 360 
 
 Stead, John, 360 
 
 Stead, Willie, 66, 239, 291, 292 
 
 Steed, Wickham, 150, 357, 359, 360 
 
 Steyn (ex-President of Orange Free 
 State), 192, 198 
 
 Stillman, Miss Bella, 21 
 
 St. fames’s Gazette, 355 
 
 Stolypin, Governor, 278 
 
 Stone, Melville, 361 
 
 Stout, E. H., 49, 140, 304, 305 
 
 Strauss, Mr. and Mrs., 314 
 
 Studholme, Miss Marie, 255 
 
 Sullivan, Donald, 18 
 
 Sussex Daily News, 178 
 
 Sutherland, Duchess of, 336 
 
 Sutton, Sir George, 360 
 
 Taft, President, 312 
 
 Tait, Lawson, 21 
 
 Tchertkoff, 151 
 
 Telepathy, 339, 340, 341 
 
 Temple, Sir Richard, 224 
 
 Temps, 170 
 
 Theatre, Stead and the, 246-264 
 
 Thomas, Sir Alfred (Lord Rhondda), 
 281 
 
 Thompson, H. Yates, 129 
 
 Tickell, Mrs., 303, 304 
 
 Times, 72, 106, 150, 157, 209, 358, 360 
 
 Times-Herald, 80 
 
 Titanic, 62, 304, 313, 314, 315, 349, 
 
 351, 355, 356 
 
 Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm, 255 
 
 Trepoff, Police General, 275, 276 
 
 Trevelyan, Sir George, 31 
 
 Tribune, 43, 47 
 
 Truth, 199 
 
 Tsar Alexander III of Russia, 10, 112- 
 14, 118 
 
 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, 122-24, 128, 
 133, 134-40, 152-66, 271-75 
 
 Turner, Sir Alfred, Major-General, 73 
 
 Tyndall, Professor, 21 
 
 INDEX 
 
 United States of Europe’, ‘The, 326, 
 327 
 
 Van Etvelde, Baron, 214 
 Vatican, I41, 143, 145 
 Venezuela Dispute, 78-86 
 Verney, Sir Harry, 213 
 ‘Victoria Cross,’ 228 
 Vincent, Sir Howard, 350 
 Vladimir, Grand Duke, 273 
 
 Wallace, Prof. Alfred Russel, 173, 288, 
 
 347 
 
 Walsh, Dr., Catholic Archbishop of 
 Dublin, 11 
 
 Walter, Arthur, 360 
 
 Wanklyn, 179 
 
 Ward, Prof., 254 
 
 Warwick, Lady, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107 
 
 Washington, Booker, 313 
 
 Washington Evening Star, 54. 
 
 Watson, Sir William, 87, 149 
 
 Watts, G. F., R.A., 237 
 
 Wedderburn, Sir William, 224, 225 
 
 Weinthal, Leo, 285 
 
 Wellman, Walter, 174 
 
 Wells, H. G., 228, 289 
 
 Welserheim, Count, 159 
 
 Wessels, 185, 186 
 
 Westminster Gazette, 76, 347, 357, 359 
 
 White, Arnold, 74, 360 
 
 Whittier, John G., 54 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 54 
 
 Whitmee, Father, 143, 144 
 
 Wilkerson, Albert H., 236 
 
 Willoughby, 108, 206 
 
 Wilson, President, 361 
 
 Wimbledon (Stead’s home), 66, 76, 235 
 
 Witte, M., 136 
 
 Wolmarans, 185 
 
 Wolseley, Lord, 150, 238 
 
 Yang Yu (Chinese delegate), 162, 163 
 Zangwill, I., 73 
 

 
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