Chamberlain Centennial

The late great Joseph ("Old Joe") Chamberlain, though he was never Prime Minister of England, dominated the policy of the British Empire from 1895 until his paralytic stroke in 1906. Dying in July, 1914. he bequeathed to British politics two arch-conservative sons. Old Joe, scion of masters of the Cordwainers' Company,* maltsters, brewers, cheesemongers and ironmongers, was the first middle-class Englishman to move with arrogant authority among Victorian England's ruling class. Symbols of his good opinion of himself were the monocle in his cold, irritable eye, the invariable orchid in his buttonhole. He wrecked two parties to which he belonged, Gladstone's and Balfour's, and each time emerged greater than before. His platform was social reform for poor Englishmen, confederation and preferential tariffs for the Empire and, internationally, an understanding between Britain, the U. S. and Germany. Last week fell the 100th anniversary of Old Joe's birth, and the two sons, born to two mothers who were cousins, uprose to remind England of their heritage.

Old Joe had picked the elder, Joseph Austen, for the great one. Austen went from Rugby to Trinity College, Cambridge, was staked to further polishing in Paris and Berlin, returned to become his father's secretary, to make a maiden speech in the Commons "dear and refreshing to a father's heart." Bathed by his father's setting sun, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1903. For his work as Britain's Foreign Secretary (1924-29) he got the Nobel Peace Prize and the almost unprecedented honor, for a commoner, of being raised at one stroke to the Knighthood of the Garter, a rank customarily reserved for peers. Then Sir Austen faded into the Conservative Party's greatest wheel horse, wearing his father's monocle, not the orchid.

Meanwhile, Arthur Neville, consigned to business, became prosperous and, like his father, mayor of the family's adopted city of Birmingham, where he tightened the hold of the Chamberlains on Birmingham elections. A far more glacial and forbidding character than his gentlemanly brother, Neville worked harder, became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1923, again in 1931. Last week, still Chancellor, it was he, not Austen, who was being groomed to be next Prime Minister of England and leader of the Conservative Party when Stanley Baldwin steps down.

In London's Albert Hall last week Son Austen called on an audience of Tory imperialists to vow, in memory of the "first Englishman to see in his mind the British Empire as it is seen today in fact," that "not one yard of territory shall be torn from the Empire." Sir Austen read a telegram of congratulation from King Edward VIII. A portrait of Old Joe 50 ft. high was unveiled and the crowd could not help seeing the striking resemblance to Son Austen on the platform.

More important doings were in Birmingham's Town Hall. There Son Neville was none too subtly reminding Britons that both he and his father had gone from the mayoralty of Birmingham to Empire greatness. Said he: "Joseph Chamberlain upheld municipal work as one of the noblest and most useful avocations that any man or woman can follow. He upheld it as an invaluable school of preparation to those who might desire afterward to enter a larger field and engage in national activities." Wiseacres suspected Son Neville meant by "larger field" the House of Chamberlain's first Prime Ministry.

*Shoemakers whose guild name was corrupted from Cordovan (Spanish) leather.

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