crisis the people of Belgium had seen their king in mines with a pick and shovel, on railroads driving an engine, and in factories, in which he exploited a mechanical gift for which he was remarkable from boyhood. He afforded the anomalous spectacle of an intellectual sovereign ruling a not particularly thoughtful people, a grave monarch in a normally gay realm. His stern devotion to sociology, his dreams of a paradise on earth for workers in mine and mart, brought upon him some criticism. Even his genius, mathematical and mechanical, seemed alien to his environment, for Brussels before her tragedy was the gayest of capitals, and her sovereign in his splendid palace was sometimes a riddle to his people. They were more accustomed to Leopold.

One had to go back to the Homeric age for an ideal illustration of all that Albec, in the capacity of King, came to signify to the Belgians. He was the comrade as well as the sovereign of his soldiers. The Homeric virtues of courage, endurance, and strength equipped him for the Homeric life he was to lead, charging the foe in the forefront of battle, lying by night in a circle of his soldiers, listening to tales of war. He was the commander-in-chief of his people, their judge and their representative before the world. Like an Homeric prince he helped in the building of trenches and acted as his own charioteer, or chauffeur. His sway was absolute because founded on the example of heroism that he set. His people loved him because he lived their life. Glimpses of King Albert in the trenches revealed him in a soiled uniform, eating warmed-up soup, sharing his match with a soldier from whom he received a cigaret, or affording first aid to the injured.

Albert's cheek-bones tended to prominence, and his voice was rough and heavy. The tall figure lost flesh during the war and his complexion was no longer ruddy. Early in the war there was a slight limp in his walk, for a wound in the foot received at Antwerp was slow to heal. His presence with his men was so much a matter of course that he expected no attention after a swift salute from a soldier to whom he spoke. The etiquette of peace was gone. Belgians no longer stood when in the King's presence. His rank was quite forgotten as he held a torch while engineers repaired a break in a gun-carriage, or lathered his face for him to shave himself without a mirror. Albert was knocked down by a wounded horse during the retreat from Antwerp, and, as his car had been commandeered for ambulance purposes, he walked into France surrounded by thousands of troops as ragged and hungry as himself.

King Albert before the war ran over to London frequently, walking up the Strand in London with no evidence of his rank about him. He and his consort would put up at a plain little hotel of an

exclusive kind and visit the theater as ordinary persons. Albert was often fortunate enough to pass through throngs unnoticed except for his height. It was related of a dealer in motor-cars in London that he had dealt personally with King Albert, selling him two automobiles, and even going with him to luncheon without suspecting that his customer was a European sovereign. One day in making a purchase in London, in reply to the usual question, he stated that his name was Albert. "Albert what?" queried the salesperson. "King," said his Majesty. In due time the purchase arrived, addrest to "Albert King, Esquire."

The courage of Leopold defied the public opinion of Europe in Kongo affairs, but the courage of Albert enabled him to lead a national forlorn hope to a high consummation. The tragedy in which Leopold played the conspicuous part was that of the Kongo; the tragedy of which Albert was the central figure glorified him in the eyes of mankind. His personality was a lesson since it taught that men become great, not through possessing great qualities, but through the use to which those qualities are put.32

HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH, PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN

While reasonably approachable, Mr. Asquith was sometimes a hard person to see. He was an exceptional public man in that, while far from courting publicity, he by nature and habit shunned the limelight. His most implacable enemy would never have suggested that he was anything of an actor. Even when he entered a room he did not feel called upon to act the part of Prime Minister. He was strong, healthy, and British, his hair almost white, but his face youthful, discounting his age by ten years. He was a reserved man, and might have been taken for a shy professor of Greek as he bowed, not without geniality, and walked quietly to a place in a room. But he was a different person in the House of Commons, where he never made a bad speech, altho at times he had "tough cases." Whenever he spoke he disclosed his feeling for good English by a rare choice of words, and a style that easily and clearly made its points. Nothing but thorough scholarship and long training in public speaking could have produced addresses so eloquent. His career at school and at Oxford had been strewn with classical prizes. In debate he overshadowed at Oxford all others of his day. He would talk with such simplicity of some British disaster as to make the event all the more dramatic. In that way he talked in 1914 of the

32 Adapted from an article by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion and based on articles in The Tribune (New York), Figaro (Paris), The Standard (London), and from an article by "W. B. H." in The Evening Post (New York).

loss of three warships-the cruisers Aboukir, Cressy, and Hogue12,000-ton boats. As he made that announcement of the first disaster to the British Navy in this war one thought primarily of his serenity. Not in the slightest degree was he flustered, and yet he was not indifferent. One knew intuitively how deeply he was moved, but he did not unmask his emotion. His poise was admirable— nothing about revenge, and no boasting.

Mr. Asquith was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in June, 1876. After success before the Parnell Commission, he became Queen's Counsel and gradually concentrated on appellate work before the House of Lords and the Privy Council. He was earning, perhaps, £15,000 a year when he became Prime Minister. When the English bar celebrated in him the elevation of one of its members to the premiership, Sir Edward Clarke said that "for thirty years he had preserved an untarnished shield." Mr. Asquith was born in Yorkshire of Puritan stock sixty-two years before the war began. He never took his business home with him, notwithstanding his home as Premier was also his place of business. The Chief Executive of the British Government was both officially and privately domiciled in a house of dull-brown brick which, from the outside at least, would be considered unworthy any Cabinet officer's dignity in the United States. Within doors, however, it was delightful.

Even on great occasions Mr. Asquith seldom allowed himself more than half an hour for a speech. Twenty minutes would usually suffice him even when he had something historic to reveal, but everything essential had been said. Serenity of temper, reserve of language, an absence of everything that was personal, made him the ideal spokesman of a government. One would search in vain throughout his speeches for a word that was violent and provocative. Slowly, steadily, without passion as without haste, he conducted debates day after day, week after week. Tories might yell and fume, even break out in riotous disorder, but Mr. Asquith would proceed on his way with deadly precision and relentlessness, tranquil, self-contained, and unmoved.

With his rise to supremacy not so much of station as of intellectual mastery, there came a subtle change in his personality. No man had been more misunderstood. No man lent himself so much to misunderstanding. He was an Englishman to his finger-tips, and a Yorkshireman, and had more than the usual reserve of his countrymen, but reserve has often been the mask for shyness and shyness lends itself to misunderstanding. Even if he wanted to, Mr. Asquith was incapable of making advances-especially to those who misunderstood him. He was of the type to whom power gravitates. In a crowd he would sit in silence, but his personality would impress

all with his distinction even tho no one knew who he was. No living statesman eschewed the trappings of greatness more sedulously. Even his clothes lacked suggestion of distinction; he affected the quiet black sack coat and the gray trousers that were the vogue in his youth. He had not modified the habits of a lifetime to the extent of keeping a valet. Unlike the modern man, he used the telephone very little and his motor-car rides were never for pleasure. His taste in literature reflected his mind. He read philosophy and economics rather than poetry and fiction. The deeds of great explorers always interested him. He never concealed his lack of sympathy for "feminism" in its extreme contemporary form. His Utopia would be a man's world; but the men would be high-minded, chivalrous, and above all efficient.

His was a quiet and sheltered youth giving no indication of future renown. There remained in him much of the English middle-class mind. His soul was shadowed by Yorkshire hard common sense. While he had a wide acquaintance with literature he seemed to belong distinctly to the Victorians. This left him at times disconcertingly old-fashioned, not only as to literary likings but as to political ideals. He preferred the Victorian novelists, Charles Reade and Wilkie Collins, to writers of contemporary fiction. Few English politicians had read so much American literature, but what he read had the Victorian flavor-Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Longfellow, and Emerson. He came from a rather long line of Yorkshire nonconformist ancestors, men and women who were dissenters from the established church and lived by the Scriptures, but he was devoted to the theater and made no concealment of his fondness for cards. He was prejudiced against peers and claims of noble birth, resenting superiority not founded on natural gifts. His aristocracy would be one of talent.

"Asquith is the one pupil of mine," said Jowett who was proud of him, "for whom I most confidently predict success in life." Jowett made another remark which showed how well he understood his pupil: "Asquith will get on-he is so direct." His capacity to get at facts and to state them with lucidity was equalled only by his integrity in disclosing them. He made his big hit when he appeared before the Parnell Commission. The prestige of that effect had not worn away when Gladstone, delighted with his first speech before the Commons, offered to make Asquith Home Secretary, which was then a great post. Those historic trouble-makers, Home Rule for Ireland and Welsh Church Disestablishment, both under him received the royal assent-Home Rule after twenty-eight years of effort, and Disestablishment first introduced by Mr. Asquith under Gladstone, now after twenty years of waiting. These two momentous

reforms could not have been made law but for the Parliamentary Act, Asquith's own measure, that abolished the veto of the House of Lords, and thus freed the democratic institutions of England of the last strain of feudalism. He was the first Minister of Great Britain to recognize the right of every man and woman in the country to live in comfort when too infirm to earn a living, for he secured oldage pensions for the poor.

Eminent fairness, or a desire to be eminently fair, characterized all his comments on the war. Not only in public remarks was this true, but in private conversation. Everything he said was in the best of temper and marked by unvarying moderation. There was no note of infallibility in his statements, or his arguments, nothing to the effect that England could do no wrong. In his view Great Britain was at war, in 1914, to vindicate the sanctity of treaty obligations and of what was properly called the public law of Europe; to assert and to enforce the independence of free states, relatively small and weak, against the violence of the strong; and to withstand, in the interests not only of their own empire, but of civilization at large, the arrogant claim of a single Power to dominate the development of Europe.33

THEOBALD VON BETHMANN-HOLLWEG, CHANCELLOR OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE

Strolling with his hands behind his back along the unpretentious Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, and pausing in a characteristic manner as if he had suddenly remembered something, Bethmann-Hollweg, Chancellor when the war began, and destined to his principal place in history as the author of the "scrap of paper" phrase, remained for more than two years as impressively unimpressive to journalists in Berlin as he had seemed to be to the German people when Emperor William suddenly made him Chancellor, in succession to Prince von Bülow. He was a lonely, as well as a distinguished, figure, whose gigantic height was accentuated by a black overcoat and high silk hat. His bowed head, with its Saxon nose, was seldom lifted up toward the unassuming fronts of the buildings he passed in his daily walk to the imperial palace. On his way he would sometimes drop into a bookstore to finger the latest issues from the press, paying most attention to works of philosophy-not commentaries on Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but studies in the manner of Hermann Turck, the latest thinker under discussion in Germany. BethmannHollweg was essentially a Christian in his outlook upon life, a man remote from materialism, a simple nature in a complex age.

33 Adapted from an article by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion and from one by H. B. Needham in The Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia).