.. 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.
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