"Bloody Balfour" and "Miss Nancy"

"Bloody Balfour" and "Miss Nancy"

Christians mourned the Earl of Balfour last week, but those who actually wept for him were Jews.

Directly after the Earl of Balfour's death the Council of the World Zionist Organization met in London and its President, Dr. Chaim Weizemann, sought to deliver a eulogy. He broke down completely, sobbed aloud. In all parts of the hall prominent Zionists -- including several British millionaires--first shed silent tears, then began to ululate in patriotic grief. For Zion's most potent champion, the author of the "Balfour Declaration," was no more. What would become of Zion? There have been signs that some Britons would like to economize by giving up the British Palestine Mandate (TIME, Sept. 9). The day may come when the Jews of resurrected Zion will be left to the fate their Arab neighbors are so eager to visit on them--as shown by the massacres last year.

"My dear Lord Rothschild," begins the Balfour Declaration, and the remainder of this personal note written by Mr. Arthur Balfour as Foreign Secretary on Nov. 2, 1917 is in the elegant and casual tone he took on all occasions, private, public and forensic. "My dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations, which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet:

"His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."

What does this mean? Like nearly all the great pronouncements of this most British of statesmen it is susceptible of that interpretation which may best serve the needs of King and Country at some future time.

Does one wish to cast off Palestine, then plainly and explicitly the Balfour Declaration is a "declaration of sympathy" and nothing more.

On the other hand, should the interests of Empire make it desirable to hold Palestine, then the Balfour Declaration becomes a sacred pledge, England's word of honor that "His Majesty's Government . will use their best endeavors" etc., and naturally one cannot let the Jews down after they have built their Zion upon this rock.

Or a third course is possible. Some people think British officials in Palestine took it last year sub rosa, when they delayed interfering with the massacre of Jews by Arabs. Perhaps massacre is among "the rights of existing non-Jewish communities."

At least this great achievement of Arthur James Balfour, Knight of the Garter, Earl of Balfour, Viscount Traprain of Wittingehame, will long live after him. It is by far the most important document affecting the Near East. And very typical of the career of the Earl of Balfour, is the fact that he died in the estimation of Jews their greatest friend. He also died esteemed and mourned by most U. S. citizens, yet he did more to loose the storm of European hatred against "Uncle Shylock" than any other man.

This he accomplished by the second so-called Balfour Declaration, a note written on Aug. 1, 1922 to the Ambassador of France and representatives of other European countries in London, some months after the Earl of Balfouc had retired into the peerage, and was supposed to be only a shadowy sort of elder statesman. The letter was written when France and Italy were calling Britain a "Shylock." It pointed out that John Bull was instead merely a debtor of Uncle Sam. John had no wish to collect from his sacred allies in the war-to-end-war. John would prove his generosity by promising to collect from Europe only enough to make his own ends meet and pay what he owed that skinflint Sam.

History may well call the second Balfour Declaration the greatest masterstroke of British statecraft since the War. It not only passed the buck of European unpopularity from John to Sam; but it also convinced Englishmen that they had made a noble sacrifice, and that if only U. S. citizens were greathearted enough to do likewise the earth would be a better place. To this day millions of Englishmen quite honestly fail to see that if A owes B, and B owes C, and C owes D, and then if "debts should be canceled all round," the sole and total loss falls upon D--upon the U. S. Treasury.

However, no one could and no one ever did for long hate Arthur Balfour. He and his countrymen are gifted with a power of believing themselves in the right so powerfully that their opinion is apt to prevail at last. Shortly before tha. great Irish patriot Thomas Power ("Tay Pay") O'Connor, "Father of the House of Commons." died (TIME. Nov. 25). he wrote with a sort of Irish wonder that the Earl of Balfour had so far as he could see always considered him a personal friend, and it plainly appeared that Mr. O'Connor, too, was forced to consider the Earl his friend outside of politics. Yet "Tay Pay" had slashed and fought with all his might against Mr. Balfour when that young man was Queen Victoria's Chief Secretary for Ireland, and was called in Dublin "Base and Bloody Balfour!"

Certainly no Englishman ever executed Irishmen who resisted the authority of the Crown, with cooler unconcern. Yet this was the same young man whom Cambridge called "Miss Nancy," and who had sat languidly in the House of Commons a few months before his appointment, sucking a thermometer in full view of the Empire to assure himself that his health was perfect.

Aristocrat, scholar, philosopher, golfer, musician, one of the most feared debaters upon any subject in the House of Commons of his time, the Earl of Balfour was a "bloody" man of action only when he could not be a flaneur. He wrote a book exalting ''philosophic doubt," followed by other books on philosophy and theology: upholding religion. As Count Carlo Sforza says: "Let us imagine for a moment an analogously contradictory moral and intellectual conduct of life, with an American or Italian or French statesman or diplomat. We may readily see the unpleasant conclusions that everybody--to begin with, Englishmen--would draw."

But even Sforza yields at last to Balfour and concludes with praise for his "double personality," calling its results the patriotic and therefore praiseworthy acts of a man who had "only one rule and one formula: 'My country, right or wrong !'"

No man ever died more charmingly than the Earl of Balfour at 81 last week in the home of his brother and heir Rt. Hon. Gerald William Balfour. A bachelor to the last, he whispered to his nurse. "Is it the end?" She nodded and he motioned for his valet, Coltman. who came with streaming eyes. "Shake hands." whispered the Earl, and Coltman clasped his master's hand, choking with emotion. "Goodbye, James! Thank you very much for all you have done for me."--such were the last words of the Earl of Balfour.

Clemenceau, a few short weeks before Death came to him (TIME, Dec. 2), wrote the Earl's most adequate epitaph, recalled that at the Peace Conference "Mr. Arthur Balfour [was] the most cultured, the most gracious, the most courteous of adamantine men."

Balfour Years were: 1878, when he was in at the Treaty of Berlin with Bismarck and Disraeli, as secretary to his maternal uncle the Marquess of Salisbury (then British Foreign Secretary); 1887-91. Chief Secretary for Ireland; 1902-05, Prime Minister, falling when the Conservative-Unionist party split on free-trade v. tariff; 1905-11, Leader of the Conservative Opposition; 1915-16, First Lord of the Admiralty during the Battle of Jutland, after which his cold, minute announcement of British casualties in ships and men almost gave the public an impression of German victory, created a scandal; 1916-19, Foreign Secretary, Chief of the British diplomatic and military mission to the U. S., Second British Delegate to the Peace Conference, signer of the Treaty of Versailles; 1920, Chief Delegate of Britain to the League of Nations; 1921-22, Chief of the British Delegation to the Washington Conference, at which he fell in with Charles Evans Hughes' aspirations for disarmament, diverted the U. S. from any possibility of constructing a greater navy than Britannia's, and went home to receive the Garter and his Earldom.

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