nions. It soon
became apparent that the one man who was not going to quarrel with the
Trades Unions was Kitchener. Politicians and parliamentary leaders,
supposed actually to be elected by the working classes, were regarded,
rightly or wrongly, with implacable suspicion. The elderly and
old-fashioned Anglo-Egyptian militarist, with his doctrine and
discipline of the barrack-room and the drumhead court-martial, was
never regarded by the workers with a shade of suspicion. They simply
took him at his word, and the leader of the most turbulent Trades
Union element paid to him after his death the simplest tribute in the
plainest and most popular language--"He was a straight man." I am so
antiquated as to think it a better epitaph than the fashionable phrase
about a strong man. Some silent indescribable geniality of fairness in
the man once more prevailed against the possibility of passionate
misunderstandings, as it had prevailed against the international
nervousness of the atmosphere of Fashoda or the tragic border feud of
the Boers. I suspect that it lay largely in the fact that this great
Englishman was sufficiently English to guess one thing missed by many
more sophisticated people--that the English Trades Unions are very
English. For good or evil, they are national; they have very little in
common with the more international Socialism of the Continent, and
nothing whatever in common with the pedantic Socialism of Prussia.
Understanding his countrymen by instinct, he did not make a parade of
efficiency; for the English dislike the symbols of dictatorship much
more than dictatorship. They hate the crown and sceptre of the tyrant
much more than his tyranny. They have a national tradition which
allows of far too much inequality so long as it is softened with a
certain camaraderie, and in which even snobs only remember the coronet
of a nobleman on condition that he shall himself seem to forget it.

The other matter is much more important. Though the reverse of
vivacious, Kitchener was very vital; and he had one unique mark of
vitality--that he had not stopped growing. "An oak should not be
transplanted at sixty," said the great orator Grattan when he was
transferred from the Parliament of Dublin to the Parliament of
Westminster. Kitchener was sixty-four when he turned his face westward
to the problem of his own country. There clung to him already all the
traditional attributes of the oak--its toughness, its angularity, its