LITMIR.BIZ

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more; a pleasant humour, a ready tact in dealing with friends and opponents, and behind it all the valuable background of ample wealth – these were the endow-ments of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and they made him Prime Minister.

      By origin he belonged to the middle-class, being by birth a member of an outlying branch of the clan Campbell, and no known relation to the Bannermans who hold the baronetcy. He was born in 1836, the second son of James Campbell, who after making a considerable fortune in business in Glasgow became Lord Provost of that city, and was knighted. Sir Henry’s elder brother, who lives at the family place of Stracathro in Forfarshire, and whose own serious illness was an added sorrow to the closing months of his brother’s life, is a strong Conservative in politics, and as such represented Glasgow and Aberdeen Universities till 1906, when he retired, and was succeeded by Sir Henry Craik. Sir James Campbell married Janet, daughter of Henry Bannerman, a Scotsman settled in Manchester, who became very rich and whose son Henry, dying in 1872, left all his property to the young Henry Campbell on condition that he added the name Bannerman to his own.

      It was in this way that be became possessed of Castle Belmont, near Meigle, where so much of his later life was spent. Henry Campbell’s early education was received partly near home, partly abroad, where he became a good French scholar; then, after passing through Glasgow University, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 1858 and his M.A. in 1861. In 1860 he married Charlotte, daughter of General Sir Charles Bruce, K.C.B. a lady who, till her death in 1906, was, in spite of the ill-health which incapacitated her for many years, the close associate of all his thoughts and plans. They had no children, but this only threw them closer together, and the long holidays which they spent in each other’s company, in Scotland or on the Continent of Europe, are said by those who knew them to have been ideal episodes in the “marriage of true minds.”

      In 1868 Henry Campbell had his first chance of entering Parliament, and in the May of that year he was brought forward by the advanced Liberals of Stirling to contest the burghs at a by-election. The new voters under the Reform Act of 1867 had not yet taken their place on the register, so that on a poll of 1,059 votes the young “advanced” candidate suffered defeat at the hands of Mr. Ramsey, a Liberal of more Whiggish colour, by a majority of 71. Then came the dissolution, and at the end of the year, on a poll which had grown to 3,883, Henry Campbell secured a majority of 519. He thus entered on that flood tide of Liberal opinion which made Mr. Gladstone Premier and gave him what was thought in those days to be an overwhelming majority.

      In Gladstone’s third session the sensible, steady-going, impeccable Scotch member, who had married a general’s daughter and was about to inherit a great fortune, was chosen to be Financial Secretary of the War Office. From 1874 to 1880 Disraeli and the Tories were in power; when Gladstone returned, Campbell-Bannerman was moved, in 1884, to what was at that time the most conspicuous and difficult post in the Ministry, that of Chief Secretary for Ireland, in which he succeeded Sir George Trevelyan.

      It was a fortunate appointment. Of the three former occupants of the post one had been driven to resign by the intrigues of his own party, one had been murdered, the third, Sir George Trevelyan, had, after two short years, come back prematurely aged. Campbell-Bannerman was immediately called, by his opponents, “our chief antagonist and our hapless target … and a very dull man.” But it was not many days before they began to have an inkling they had made some mistake. Before the end of the year the story went round that his critics were describing him as “the only possible Chief Secretary, with the hide of a rhinoceros and the heart of an iceberg.” This, of course, was only a pleasant way of saying that Campbell-Bannerman went on quietly administering the law and that he was the very last man in the world to take the Irish members at their own valuation.

      Up to the time when Campbell-Bannerman, with the rest of the Gladstonian Cabinet, went out of office, in the summer of 1885, there seemed no reason to doubt the sincerity of the Chief Secretary’s Unionist principles. During the election campaign in October and November, 1885, he not only repudiated the notion of yielding to what he called “the Separatist faction,” but argued forcibly that the law should be specially and permanently amended to strengthen the arm of justice against intimidation and boycotting, and to secure that Irish jurymen should not be allowed to combine to create impunity for terrorist violence and menaces.

      A very few weeks later, when Lord Salisbury’s Government was thrown out on the Address and Gladstone once more came into office prepared to solve the Irish question by a deal with Parnell, Campbell-Bannerman blossomed out at once as an undisguised Home Ruler. In spite of the brave words of his election address and his campaign speeches, he went with his leader in the full adoption of the policy of Parnell and Davitt. Indeed he declared to a colleague, in a phrase of which he was the inventor and which had much success at the time, that he had “found salvation long ago, though he had kept his secret well.” But he did not return to Ireland; the Chief Secretaryship was given to Mr. Morley, who was no new convert, and the member for the Stirling Burghs went back as Secretary of State to the scene of his earlier labours.

      He remained at the War Office during the short Government of 1886, and returned again during Gladstone’s second Home Rule Government of 1892-93. Of his first tenure of this high post there is little to record, except that within the office itself and in Parliament he made a good impression.

      His tenure of the War Office was brought to an end in June, 1895, by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition. He, of course, was blamed as Secretary for War; but it must be added in fairness that Mr. Balfour, speaking at Manchester in the following January, at a very anxious moment in our history, paid a handsome tribute to the “additions to the fighting power of the Army” which had been made by the Home Rule Government between 1892 and 1895.

      The cordite vote, in fact, was only a pretext to get rid of a Government of which the country was tired, and which ought, in the opinion of most people, to have resigned or dissolved after the defeat of the Home Rule Bill by the House of Lords.

      Campbell-Bannerman was made a G.C.B; but for some years afterwards he remained one of the least prominent of the Liberal leaders. But all this time the internal of the party continued; and on December 14 the world was taken by surprise when Sir William Harcourt announced his withdrawal from the leadership of the Opposition in the House of Commons. The party deliberated in private, and, at a meeting on February 6, 1899, at the National Liberal Club, the names of Mr. Asquith and Sir Henry Fowler having been withdrawn, unanimously voted that Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman should lead the party in the House of Commons. This position Sir Henry filled till the end of 1905, if not with overmastering ability, at least with sufficient success to make his choice as Prime Minister almost inevitable when the time came for a change of Government.

      For a long time one question, and one question only, filled the public mind − our relations with South Africa, and the war which broke out in October. With regard to this crisis in our history, it is impossible for the impartial historian not to blame Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman both for the unwisdom of his initial policy and for the costly injudiciousness of some of his phrases. Speaking at Ilford, soon after the Bloemfontein Conference, he used a sentence which he liked so well that he repeated it in the City of London on June 30, thus proclaiming it as the deliberate policy of his party; it was “I can see nothing whatever in all that has occurred to justify either warlike action or military preparations.” Of course the Boers took this to mean that, whatever they did, we should not proceed to extremities. The Liberal leader was also accused of attacking British soldiers when he spoke of the destruction of farms and the policy of the concentration camps as “methods of barbarism.” It was in vain that he subsequently explained: “I have always borne public testimony to the humane conduct of the officers and men of the Army, and absolved them from all blame.” But the word went round among the Boers that public opinion in England was bitterly divided, and that they had only to hold out.

      Meantime the party itself was by no means a happy family, and Lord Rosebery opened a split, when he came out of retirement to propose the abandonment of Home Rule, and went on to found the Liberal (Imperialist) League, with himself as president and Sir Edward Grey, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Haldane as vice-presidents, all of them men destined within a few years to enter a Campbell-Bannerman Cabinet; but with their titular chief he himself had henceforth

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