The Adventure of Living | Page 9

number of the paper in which my first
two leaders appeared, I found that the second leader had done even
better than the first. Its title seemed appallingly dull, and, I remember,
called forth a protest from Mr. Hutton when I suggested writing it. It
was entitled "The Privy Council and the Colonies." I had always been
an ardent Imperialist, and I had taken to Constitutional Law like a duck
to the water, and felt strongly, like so many young men before me, the
intellectual attraction of legal problems and still more the majesty and
picturesqueness of our great Tribunals. Especially had I been fascinated
by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and its world-wide
jurisdiction. I had even helped to draw some pleadings in a Judicial
Committee case when in Chambers. Accordingly, though with some
difficulty, I persuaded Mr. Hutton to let me have my say and show
what a potent bond of Empire was to be found therein. I also wanted to
emphasise how further ties of Imperial unity might be developed on
similar lines--a fact, I may say, which was not discovered by the
practical politicians till about the year 1912, or twenty-seven years
later.
Now it happened that Mr. Gladstone's Ministry, though beaten at the
elections, had not yet gone out of office. It also happened that Lord
Granville, then Colonial Secretary, was to receive the Agents-General
of the self-governing Colonies, as they were then called, on the
Saturday; and finally, that Lord Granville had a fit of the gout. The
result of the last fact was that he had to put off preparing his speech till
the last possible moment. When he had been wheeled in a chair into the
reception-room--his foot was too painful to allow him to walk--he
began his address to the Deputation in these terms:
In a very remarkable article which appears in this week's Spectator it is
pointed out "that people are apt to overlook the importance of the
Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as one of the bonds that unite
the Colonies and the Mother Country."
He then went on to use the article as the foundation for his speech. I

had talked about the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council being a
body which "binds without friction and links without strain," and Lord
Granville did the same.
But of this speech I knew nothing when I entered The Spectator office
on my fateful second Tuesday. I was only intent to get instructions for
new leaders. Besides, I had been away on a country- house visit from
the Saturday to the Monday, and had missed Monday's Times. I was
therefore immensely surprised when Mr. Hutton, from the depths of his
beard, asked me in deep tones whether I had seen The Times of
Monday, and what was said therein about my Privy Council article. I
admit that for a moment I thought I had been guilty of some appalling
blunder and that, as the soldiers say, I was "for it" However, I saw that
I must face the music as best I could, and admitted that I had not seen
the paper. "Then you ought to have," was Mr. Hutton's not very
reassuring reply. He got up, went to a side-table, and, after much
digging into a huge heap of papers, extracted Monday's Times and with
his usual gruff good-temper read out the opening words of Lord
Granville's speech. He was, in fact, greatly delighted, and almost said
in so many words that it wasn't every day that the Editors of The
Spectator could draw Cabinet Ministers to advertise their paper.
Certainly it was astonishingly good luck for a "commencing journalist"
to bring down two birds with two articles, _i.e._, to hit one of his own
editors with one article, and to bag a Cabinet Minister with the other.
No doubt the perfectly cautious man would have said, "This is an
accident, a mere coincidence, it means nothing and will never happen
again." Fortunately people do not argue in that rational and statistical
spirit. All my chiefs knew or cared was that I had written good stuff
and on a very technical subject, and that I had caught the ear of the man
who, considering the subject, most mattered--the Secretary of State for
the Colonies.
Anyway, my two first trial leaders had done the trick and I was from
that moment free of The Spectator. Townsend's holiday succeeded to
Hutton's, and when the holidays were over, including my own, which
not unnaturally took me to Venice,--"_Italiam petimus_" should always

be the motto of an English youth,--I returned to take up the position of
a weekly leader-writer and holiday-understudy, a mixed post which by
the irony of fate, as I have already said, had just been vacated by Mr.
Asquith.