Although he was a business man, he had a wide understanding and considerable elasticity.

In connection with business men, the staggering figures published in the official White Book of November last year showed that the result of including them in the Government has been so remarkable that my memoir would be incomplete if I did not allude to them.  My father and grandfather were brought up among City people and I am proud of it; but it is folly to suppose that starting and developing a great business is the same as initiating and conducting a great policy, or running a big Government Department.

It has been and will remain a puzzle over which intellectual men are perpetually if not permanently groping: 

“How comes it that Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown made such a vast fortune?”

The answer is not easy.  Making money requires Flair, instinct, insight or whatever you like to call it, but the qualities that go to make a business man are grotesquely unlike those which make a statesman; and, when you have pretensions to both, the result is the present comedy and confusion.

I write as the daughter of a business man and the wife of a politician and I know what I am talking about, but, in case Mr. Bonar Law—­a pathetic believer in the “business man”—­should honour me by reading these pages and still cling to his illusions on the subject, I refer him to the figures published in the Government White Book of 1919.

Intellectual men seldom make fortunes and business men are seldom intellectual.

My father was educated in Liverpool and worked in a night school; he was a good linguist, which he would never have been had he had the misfortune to be educated in any of our great public schools.

I remember some one telling me how my grandfather had said that he could not understand any man of sense bringing his son up as a gentleman.  In those days as in these, gentlemen were found and not made, but the expression “bringing a man up as a gentleman” meant bringing him up to be idle.

When my father gambled in the City, he took risks with his own rather than other people’s money.  I heard him say to a South African millionaire: 

“You did not make your money out of mines, but out of mugs like me, my dear fellow!”

A whole chapter might be devoted to stories about his adventures in speculation, but I will give only one.  As a young man he was put by my grandfather into a firm in Liverpool and made L30,000 on the French Bourse before he was twenty-four.  On hearing of this, his father wrote and apologised to the head of the firm, saying he was willing to withdraw his son Charles if he had in any way shocked them by risking a loss which he could never have paid.  The answer was a request that the said “son Charles” should become a partner in the firm.

Born a little quicker, more punctual and more alive than other people, he suffered fools not at all.  He could not modify himself in any way; he was the same man in his nursery, his school and his office, the same man in church, club, city or suburbs.