The first Labour Prime Minister has not been permitted long to enjoy the pleasures of retirement, Mr, Ramsay MacDonald, however, was a sick man when he handed over the Prime Ministership to Mr. Stanley (now Lord) Baldwin two years ago. Actually he remained in the Cabinet until Lord Baldwin's own transfer to another place in May of this year, but the strain of office on a man who had never spared himself since the days when he "lectured, starved and fought" for the Labour cement in the pioneer days of the nineties chen Keir Hardie, having secured West Ham's support appeared as the sole Labour representative in the Commons, set the ball rolling with himself. Ramsay MacDonald, and twenty-seven other candidates in the 1895 election only to meet with a defeat from which he alone escaped. Eleven years later Leicester gave MacDonald his seat and the parliamentary career of the future Prime Minister began. Perhaps those fighting days were the happiest, the most fruitful of the handsome young Scots schoolmaster-journalist who, married to Mar-garer Gladstone a kinswoman of the Grand Old Man, had inspiration which was all too brief for Margaret died in 1911. The shadow of her loss hung heavily over her widower throughout his remaining days. No Prime Minister, with the exception it is said of the late Lord Rosebery, game to that high office with so intimate a personal knowledge of the life of the poor. MacDonald had the additional advantage of having himself risen from those ranks—the son of a Lossiemouth fisherman, a Board School example of the elasticity of the educational and social system of Great Britain at the head of whose Empire he was destined to stand. A convinced pacifist he seemed the ideal leader of the post-war days of enthusiasm for the movements to end war. He had the mortiücation of being the Prime Minister whose policy had to be directed toward recognition of the failure of aspirations which took insufficient account of the dynamic forces at work in resistance to the status quo. His courage in admitting this failure was bitterly criticized under another label by colleagues who could not see eye to eye with him. The full story of the break has not been told. When it is, perhaps MacDonald will be cleared of treachery as the deserted ones called it, but he may not be acquitted of certain faults of manner and method which unwittingly cast a veil over vital facts and so gave rise to the feeling of having been misled. MacDonald's grasp of foreign affairs was his most striking characteristic in office. He never really abandoned his humanity, his championship of the "bottom dog," whatever his detractors may have been inclined to aver when they noted the ease of his walking with kings and declared that the common touch had been lost. He was not ready to suffer fools gladly. He could not delegate authority and thus imposed on himself a strain which in later years showed itself in a platitudinous incoherence caricaturing the eloquent audacity, of his Fabian days. He will be gratefully remembered as the Prime Minister who steered the Empire through the conomie catastrophe of 1931 and as the Labour leader who justified democracy to itself, gave it faith in its institutions and, even though it outstripped his own conceptions, preserved a sanity not little due to the racial qualities which he so well displayed. His human ses were never allowed by him to the principles on which he battled his way to the front and carried his cause and his comrades with him. He has passed in the knowledge that those principles have now secured in the national thought a foothold which can never be lost. On that achievement his memory may worthily rest, fearless and serene.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.