Prime Ministers and Some Others | Page 3

and tried friend of hers, to undertake the arduous
duties of Prime Minister and to carry on the Government."
It is sometimes said of my good friend Sir George Trevelyan that his
most responsible task in life has been to "live up to the position of
being his uncle's nephew." He has made a much better job of his task
than I have made of mine; and yet I have never been indifferent to the
fact that I was related by so close a tie to the author of the first Reform
Bill, and the chief promoter--as regards this country--of Italian unity
and freedom.
II
LORD RUSSELL Lord John Russell was born in 1792, and became
Prime Minister for the first time in 1846. Soon after, Queen Victoria,
naturally interested in the oncoming generation of statesmen, said to
the Premier, "Pray tell me, Lord John, whom do you consider the most
promising young man in your party?" After due consideration Lord
John replied, "George Byng, ma'am," signifying thereby a youth who
eventually became the third Earl of Strafford.
In 1865 Lord John, who in the meantime had been created Earl Russell,
became, after many vicissitudes in office and opposition, Prime
Minister for the second time. The Queen, apparently hard put to it for
conversation, asked him whom he now considered the most promising
young man in the Liberal party. He replied, without hesitation, "George
Byng, ma'am," thereby eliciting the very natural rejoinder, "But that's
what you told me twenty years ago!"
This fragment of anecdotage, whether true or false, is eminently
characteristic of Lord Russell. In principles, beliefs, opinions, even in
tastes and habits, he was singularly unchanging. He lived to be close on
eighty-six; he spent more than half a century in active politics; and it

would be difficult to detect in all those years a single deviation from
the creed which he professed when, being not yet twenty-one, he was
returned as M.P. for his father's pocket-borough of Tavistock.
From first to last he was the staunch and unwavering champion of
freedom--civil, intellectual, and religious. At the very outset of his
Parliamentary career he said, "We talk much--and think a great deal too
much--of the wisdom of our ancestors. I wish we could imitate the
courage of our ancestors. They were not ready to lay their liberties at
the foot of the Crown upon every vain or imaginary alarm." At the
close of life he referred to England as "the country whose freedom I
have worshipped, and whose liberties and prosperity I am not ashamed
to say we owe to the providence of Almighty God."
This faith Lord Russell was prepared to maintain at all times, in all
places, and amid surroundings which have been known to test the
moral fibre of more boisterous politicians. Though profoundly attached
to the Throne and to the Hanoverian succession, he was no courtier.
The year 1688 was his sacred date, and he had a habit of applying the
principles of our English Revolution to the issues of modern politics.
Actuated, probably, by some playful desire to probe the heart of
Whiggery by putting an extreme case, Queen Victoria once said: "Is it
true, Lord John, that you hold that a subject is justified, under certain
circumstances, in disobeying his Sovereign?" "Well, ma'am, speaking
to a Sovereign of the House of Hanover, I can only say that I suppose it
is!"
When Italy was struggling towards unity and freedom, the Queen was
extremely anxious that Lord John, then Foreign Secretary, should not
encourage the revolutionary party. He promptly referred Her Majesty to
"the doctrines of the Revolution of 1688," and informed her that,
"according to those doctrines, all power held by Sovereigns may be
forfeited by misconduct, and each nation is the judge of its own internal
government."
The love of justice was as strongly marked in Lord John Russell as the
love of freedom. He could make no terms with what he thought

one-sided or oppressive. When the starving labourers of Dorset
combined in an association which they did not know to be illegal, he
urged that incendiaries in high places, such as the Duke of Cumberland
and Lord Wynford, were "far more guilty than the labourers, but the
law does not reach them, I fear."
When a necessary reform of the Judicature resisted on the ground of
expense, he said:
"If you cannot afford to do justice speedily and well, you may as well
shut up the Exchequer and confess that you have no right to raise taxes
for the protection of the subject, for justice is the first and primary end
of all government."
Those are the echoes of a remote past. My own recollections of my
uncle begin when he was Foreign Secretary in Lord Palmerston's
Government, and I can