(3 of 3)
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.