LORD CARNOCK

LORD CARNOCK, 1ST BARON (ARTHUR NICOLSON, 11TH BART.)

Born, 1849.  Educ.:  Rugby and Oxford; in Foreign Office, 1870-74; Secretary to Earl Granville, 1872-74; Embassy at Berlin, 1874-76; at Pekin, 1876-78; Charge, Athens, 1884-85; Teheran, 1885-88; Consul-General, Budapest, 1888-93; Embassy, Constantinople, 1894; Minister, Morocco, 1895-1904; Ambassador, Madrid, 1904-5; Ambassador, Russia, 1905-10; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1910-16.  Author of the History of the German Constitution, 1873.

[Illustration:  Lord Carnock]

CHAPTER II

LORD CARNOCK

     "Usually the greatest boasters are the smallest workers.  The deep
     rivers pay a larger tribute to the sea than shallow brooks, and yet
     empty themselves with less noise."—­Secker.

One evening in London I mentioned to a man well versed in foreign affairs that I was that night meeting Lord Carnock at dinner.  “Ah!” he exclaimed, “the man who made the war.”

I mentioned this remark to Lord Carnock.  He smiled and made answer, “What charming nonsense!” I asked him what he thought was in my friend’s mind.  “Oh, I see what he meant,” was the answer; “but it is a wild mind that would say any one man made the war.”  Later, after some remarks which I do not feel myself at liberty to repeat, he said:  “Fifty years hence I think a historian will find it far more difficult than we do now to decide who made the war.”

If Lord Carnock were to write his memoirs, not only would that volume help the historian to follow the immediate causes of the war to one intelligible origin, but it would also afford the people of England an opportunity of seeing the conspicuous difference between a statesman of the old school and a politician of these latter days.

When I think of this most amiable and cultivated person, and compare his way of looking at the evolution of human life with Mr. Lloyd George’s way of reading the political heavens, a sentence in Bagehot’s essay on Charles Dickens comes into my mind:  “There is nothing less like the great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with distinct deduction, than the attorney’s clerk who catches at small points like a dog biting at flies.”

No one could be less like the popular politician of our very noisy days than this slight and gentle person whose refinement of mind reveals itself in a face almost ascetic, whose intelligence is of a wide, comprehensive, and reflecting order, and whose manner is certainly the last thing in the world that would recommend itself to the mind of an advertising agent.  But there is no living politician who watched so intelligently the long beginnings of the war or knew so certainly in the days of tension that war had come, as this modest and gracious gentleman whose devotion to principle and whose quiet faith in the power of simple honour had outwitted the chaotic policy and the makeshift diplomacy of the German long before the autumn of 1914.