May 28.
Mr, Stanley Baldwin to-day resigns his high office as Prime Minister and to his act finality is expected to be given by his deva tion to the dignity of an Earldom, The House of Commons wherein he has sat continuously for 29 years as Member for Bewdley will know him no more. Judged by the tale of years—barely eight in all—Mr. Baldwin has not held the Prime Ministership for an extraordinarily, Jong period. Yet in the cireumstances of the last six years, during which he has been first of all the leader of the largest single.party in the House of Commons and the pivot of the National Government, his influence has been in excess of the imitations of time, He has} been frequently acclaimed as the' typical Englishman, an assessment which has been encouraged by his own deep love of England and brilliant oratorical salute of English life—"To me, England is the country and the country is Eng-Tend", It has been suggested that! his command of public confidence has been due to some indefinable feeling that with patent honesty, there is in him allied a lack of pretension to cleverness which Englishmen are supposed specially to distrust, This is a superficial verdict. Mr. Baldwin is—and history will probably confirm that view—a most astute politician, using that! depreciatory word in its best, sense, No-one who realizes that for the greater part of his service as Prime Minister he has received and disposed of fiercer attacks from groups, often powerful groups, within his own party than from parties nominally hostile to him, can deny to him the possession of the tegical sense, tactical skill, instinetive grasp of principles which go to make up the consummate political genius. For several years megalomaniacal Press Lords—the Gemini of Fleet Street—carried on a bitter and none too scrupulous' vendetta against him. Their attacks broke ignominiously on his calm rock-like defence. Even though they received a sudden reinforce ment in the greatest crisis of his career last November, he was able, by imperturbable confidence in his judgment of the nation's will, to inflict on them the final defeat.
He himself st quality during told King Edward VIII: a remnant of the old Victorians, but my worst enemy cannot say of me that T do not know what the reaction of the English people be to any particular course of} action." Tt is no. exaggeration to. say that the overwhelming verdiels given by the electorate in 1931 and 1935 respectively in support of the National Government! were votes of confidence in Mr.
Baldwin, even though in the former of the two contests he was playing' second to Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's role as Prime Minister. His ability thus to combine the character of a great politician with that of a plain, blunt man devoid of artifice or finesse, may be explained by recall ing his address to the students of the University of Edinburgh on hfs} inauguration as Lord Rector 1925, when he held up to admit tion the "curious power" of an old-time statesman who could say to the! House of Commons "I know this to} be right, T cannot remember why—but you may take it that it is so" and carry complete conviction, Mr.
Baldwin's leadership acquired the) same quality, At times restiveness:
the camp was due to fear that he. would yield too much to the opposition because of his marked capacity for seeing the other man's point of view. It never degenerated into disbelief in his sincerity. The: character of the man overcome whatever uncertainty his policies may have produced here and there. Those policies too have survived the $5] tests of bitter opposition and eriticism and have acquired strength from the personality of the man behind them.
Rather in understanding of the! typical Englishman's point of view than in a claim in his own person to embody that type has Mr. Baldwin succeeded as a leader of great party and of the greater nation, "Few Englishmen can in their own persons combine his versatility—orator, student literature, Business' man, politician, farmer, statesman. He himself has ascribed a certain streak of obstinacy to the Quaker strain of his ancestry, It also accounts for the breadth of vision which has enabled him to earn the affection of his opponents, sometimes to the despair of some of his accredited followers. If it were possible to) indicate the secret of his ascendancy in the national counsels during the ast decade it might perhaps be found to lie in his breadth of vision, his tolerance, his intense loyalty to his friends, his fidelity to truth, and his unaffected, almost deprecate ing modesty, Those who have been with him on occasions when public criticism has demanded from him defence of his actions or words, will vividly remember the half-humorous smile of encouragement thrown to his followers just before he prepared to rise for the ordeal, the matter-of-fact manner of the exordium, the warming vigorous defence of some col-Teague, the stern contemptuous dismissal of some charge against himself and the final appeal to men of goodwill to consider the issue in the light of national wellbeing or of the larger interests of humanity. He has not been afraid to Permit the House to share with him his fears, even his despair—as in the historic speech on air defence—ud he has thus paid the democratic Institutions of which he has been fervent a defender in these cliff cult days, the supreme compliment of taking the people through them fully into his confidence. Historians will one day submit his career to the considered judgment made Possible by the materials at their disposal. Whether they will hold that his greatest achievement was in handling that delicate crisis last winter when the nation stood solidly behind him, or in his generous self effacement under Mr. Ramsay Ma: Donald's leadership in 1931, or, as the late Lord Balfour immediately, asserted, in the brilliant defence of the ' Declaration of Dominion Status for India, they cannot deny that during his Prime Ministership he kept ever before him the need for preserving national unity as the essential basis of national policy. His adepiness in keeping his own party together was. for him merely an instrument in securing that higher objective. He recognized the salutary influence of party controversy but he was never bound to its chariot wheels. Because he had that supreme rising above party prejudice he was able to stand as the nation's spokesman in an especial degree. He now enters the ranks of elder statesmen amid the grateful applause of sup-Porters and opponents alike. They will wish for him many years in which to enjoy the greater ease and dignity of the "other place" wherefrom his counsel, when offered, will be heeded with all the attention' proper to his noble record.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.