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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."