Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MR. ASQUITH There are certain things that England does very well, and Mr. Asquith is one of them. One may quarrel with the stuff and the fashion; but given material and mode of treatment, malice itself cannot deny that the product in its own way is very perfect. If one had to express this eminent man in terms of chemistry, the chief symbols would stand for his native Yorkshire town and for Balliol and its famous master, that rather cynical instructor of budding statesmen, Dr. Jowett. Mr. Asquith may be called the Jowettate of Middleclassdom. The base of the compound is of course his own sterling English intelligence, weighty and acute, but rather prosaic; but its character has been profoundly modified by the culture of Oxford. Herbert Henry Asquith was born in 1852 at Morley, and almost his earliest recollection is of walking as a Sunday-school child in a local procession to celebrate the Crimean peace. Morley is one of those smaller towns of the West Riding which, while closely connected with the great seats of the staple industries, remain free from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Leeds and Bradford, and conserve a strongly developed local consciousness. A town of little gra- ciousness of aspect, rather overweighted architecturally with Nonconformist chapels, it is hardly a spot to which the weary man of the world, qui mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes, returns lovingly in his old age. But there are many worse places a clever and ambitious youth of the middling class might choose to be born in. The village and the country town tend to stagnation; in great centres youth is apt to be stunned by the vastness of everything : the seeming futility of a duel between the immature individual and his environment has no doubt crushed many a young Londoner of good natural par...