Lord Randolph Churchill was to be leader and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

On July 28th Edward and Lady Fanny Marjoribanks came, and I congratulated her on Lord Randolph's appointment, which she would not at first believe, but a long talk with her about her brother to a great extent allayed my melancholy forebodings of his becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. A few days after I heard from Welby of his first pleasant interview with the new Chancellor, and the next day I saw Lord Randolph, and was struck with his extreme courtesy and somewhat oldfashioned manners and dignified solemnity.

"

CHAPTER XXIII

JULY-DECEMBER, 1886

Lord Randolph and the Old Officials-Their Dismay and Reconciliation-Interviews in the Board Room and at Connaught Place-The Fourth Party Sofa"-Lord Randolph and the Decimals-His Assiduity and Concentration-Propositions for the Budget-Economy his Ruling Idea-His Visits to Somerset House and the Custom House-His Sudden Resignation-His Personal Relations with his Opponents and Mr. GladstoneHis Attacks on Mr. Gladstone's Transvaal Policy and Subsequent Retractation-His Sense of Humor and Gifts as a Phrasecoiner Mr. Gladstone's Letter to his Mother-Mr. Gladstone at Wanborough: Writes his Farewell Address on Leaving Office -Deputation from Guildford-Visit to the Italian Lakes-Death of George Barrington-Lord Granville's Anecdotes of Charles Greville-Mr. Ralston at the Holborn Restaurant-L'Envoi.

Up to this time we old officials who had been educated in the school of Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Mr. Gladstone, and Sir Stafford Northcote, regarded Lord Randolph as an impossible man, "whose breath was agitation and his life a storm on which he rode." He was to our eyes a visible genius, an intense and unquenchable personality, an embodied tour de force; but as a serious Minister of the Crown he was to us an impossibility. In his fierce assaults on Mr. Gladstone he had attacked the best friend the Civil Service ever had; and it was a moot point which was in greater dread-we of his entrance within the portals of a government department, or he of having to associate in daily

business with men whom he curtly described to a friend as "a knot of d-d Gladstonians." He was a man to whom the words of Hookham Frere in Monks and Giants might as suitably be applied as they were to that kindred spirit, the brave and fiery Peterborough:

"His birth, it seems, by Merlin's calculation
Was under Venus, Mercury, and Mars;

His mind with all their attitudes was mixed,
And like those planets wandering and unfixed.
His schemes of war were sudden, unforeseen,
Inexplicable both to friend and foe.

He seemed as if some momentary spleen

Inspired the project and impelled the blow."

Such was the impression we had of him, not unnatural and certainly not wholly wrong. But there were other aspects to his many-sided nature-the reckless knighterrant of debate proved at the same time a patient, strenuous, thorough, and far-sighted administrator.

Lord Randolph, between the fall of the Tory Government and his return to office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, had made himself the mouthpiece of an attack with a venom not his own on the Chairman and DeputyChairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. "Those were," as he said, "my ignorant days." When he assumed office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, notwithstanding the reputation he had made for himself at the India Office, he still appeared to the minds of Treasury officials as a Minister who would in all probability ride roughshod over cherished traditions and habits which were very dear to them. That such a man, with all his faults and glaring indiscretions, whose inclinations became passions, should have attached to himself a body. of men like the Civil Service of England, was little short of a miracle. A Frenchman, in a conversation with Pitt at the end of the last century, expressed his surprise

1886 VISITS TO CONNAUGHT PLACE

at the influence which Charles Fox, a man of pleasure ruined by the dice-box and the turf, had exercised over the English nation. "You have not," was the reply, "been under the wand of the magician." It was not long before those who were brought into close communication with Lord Randolph fell under his magic spell. I confess that I, at that time Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, was as much dismayed as any man at the prospect of his becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. I was soon reconciled, and I well remember our first interview in the old historical Board Room at the Treasury, the stiff and formal cut of his frock-coatthe same that he always wore when he was leader of the House-and the somewhat old-world courtesy of manner with which he received me at the door. But it was not long before he produced the new-world cigarette-case and the long mouth-piece, which so soon became familiar. A very few meetings were enough to show me how sincerely anxious he was to learn all the little I had to teach; and from that first hour our acquaintance gradually ripened into a friendship which not all the vicissitudes of his stormy life, nor even his agonizing illness, ever interrupted. The last letter he wrote before he left England on his sad journey was to me. In it he spoke of our long years of friendship, of his return, and of years to come; but the handwriting told how impossible. that return and those future years were to be.

Our early official meetings at the Treasury were soon superseded by more intimate conversations at Connaught Place. On my first visit there I found him in a room bright with electric light, and the eternal cigarette in his mouth. He was seated in a large arm-chair having a roomy sofa on one side, which I afterwards learned was known in the family as the "Fourth Party sofa," and on the other, much to my surprise, a large photograph of

Mr. Gladstone. Whether the photograph and the sofa were thus placed opposite each other for the convenience of the party in rehearsing their attacks I do not take it upon me to say. Although Lord Randolph certainly had never made a study of finance, he was not, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, so ignorant of it as Charles Fox, if the story be true which reports him to have said that he never could understand what Consols were he knew they were things that went up and down in the City; and he was always pleased when they went down, because it so annoyed Pitt. A story is also told of Lord Randolph, that a Treasury clerk put some figures before him. "I wish you would put these figures plainly so that I can understand them," he said. The clerk said he had done his best, and he had, pointing them out, reduced them to decimals. "Oh!" said Lord Randolph, "I never could understand what those d d dots meant." But it soon became clear that besides a wonderful intuition, Lord Randolph possessed many of the qualities which had always won for Mr. Gladstone so high a reputation as a departmental chief—indefatigable assiduity, that energy which Dr. Arnold said is of more value than even cleverness, a vehement determination to learn his subject ab ovo usque ad mala, a strong intellectual force, which, while it in no way interfered with his attention to the opinions of his subordinates, absolutely preserved his own independence of judgment and decision. He possessed the very rare gift of keeping his mind exclusively devoted to the subject in hand, and impressed on all those with whom he worked the idea that the business on which they were employed was the only one of interest to him. For a man of his rapid thought and excitable temperament he was scrupulously patient and quiet in discussion; and from frequent conversations with him on financial subjects I can safely affirm that no