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: II THE CECILIANS MR. BALFOUR, now floridly benign, a rich oracular voice issuing forth from the obscurer recesses of the Coalition; Lord Robert Cecil, a Hamlet in politics, noble of sentiment and frail of purpose ; Lord Hugh, Mercutio in a cowl, intellectually athletic on a diet of dilemmas; Mr. Ormsby-Gore, still looking like an Eton boy, full of gentleness and good sense; as First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, the trenchant Lord Winterton, Mr. Walter Guinness the frank, and Mr. Edward Wood the earnest, not forgetting Lord Wolmer, though one seldom sees him, and, of course, the Marquess of Salisbury, carrying but hardly wielding the sword of his great name. These are the Cecilians. Besides Mr. Wood, UnderSecretary of the Colonies, only one, Mr. Balfour, sits on the Front Bench, but wherever they sit the Cecilians have their minds at any rate on the Front Bench. They were born to the Ministry, whether they get there or not. For a generation before the war they hadbeen fighting a losing battle. It was they and their kind who had to do most of the fighting with Gladstone, and they survived the frontal attacks of the Liberals only to be outflanked and ousted from power by their ex-Radical janissaries. They still hold out in a corner of the stricken field, strongly entrenched in the old hall garden, but Mr. Balfour, one fears, was the last of the hereditary rulers of the Conservative Party. Ought one to fear, or rather to rejoice, over it? There is room for both sentiments. It would be a grave matter if the great political virtues that one associates with the Cecilians were lost to the party by reason of their faults ; on the other hand, one wonders, after all, whether these virtues will not have a better chance when their owners have to fight for their decisions instead of p...