He did not have a coupon election by arrangement with the Conservative Party to smother his opponents, hut asked Henry, before he consulted any one, what office he would take for himself and what he thought suitable for other people in his new Cabinet.  Only men of a certain grandeur of character can do these things, but every one who watched the succeeding events would agree that Campbell-Bannerman’s generosity was rewarded.

When C.B.—­as he was called—­went to Downing Street, he was a tired man; his wife was a complete invalid and his own health had been undermined by nursing her.  As time went on, the late hours in the House of Commons began to tell upon him and he relegated more and more of his work to my husband.

One evening he sent for Henry to go and see him at 10 Downing Street and, telling him that he was dying, thanked him for all he had done, particularly for his great work on the South African constitution.  He turned to him and said: 

“Asquith, you are different from the others, and I am glad to have known you ...  God bless you!”

C.B. died a few hours after this.

I now come to another Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour.

When Lord Morley was writing the life of Gladstone, Arthur Balfour said to me: 

“If you see John Morley, give him my love and tell him to be bold and indiscreet.”

A biography must not be a brief either for or against its client and it should be the same with an autobiography.  In writing about yourself and other living people you must take your courage in both hands.  I had thought of putting as a motto on the title-page of this book, “As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb”; but I gave it up when my friends gave me away and I saw it quoted in the newspapers; and I chose Blake and the Bible.

If I have written any words here that wound a friend or an enemy, I can only refer them to my general character and ask to be judged by it.  I am not tempted to be spiteful and have never consciously hurt any one in my life; but in this book I must write what I think without fear or favour and with a strict regard to unmodelled truth.

Arthur Balfour was never a standard-bearer.  He was a self-indulgent man of simple tastes.  For the average person he was as puzzling to understand and as difficult to know as he was easy for me and many others to love.  You may say that no average man can know a Prime Minister intimately; but most of us have met strangers whose minds we understood and whose hearts we reached without knowledge and without effort; and some of us have had an equally surprising and more painful experience when, after years of love given and received, we find the friend upon whom we had counted has become a stranger.

He was difficult to understand, because I was never sure that he needed me; and difficult to know intimately, because of his formidable detachment.  The most that many of us could hope for was that he had a taste in us as one might have in clocks or furniture.