Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
I will say a word about Slough, which is still the favourite cry of Lord Inverforth's critics, who have held their peace about the "dumps" since the publication of the White Paper describing the sale of stores. Slough was the work of the War Office. It was begun badly. Mistakes of a serious kind were made. It might have been a financial disaster. But Lord Inverforth is a chivalrous man.
We are keeping up Voltaire's idea of our English character. Instead of only admirals, however, we are now hanging all sorts and descriptions of our public servants, but whether to encourage the others or to pay off a grudge, who shall determine? Lord Inverforth takes his hanging very well.
In this way Germany was doomed to defeat. England, so to speak, had the clothing of humanity in her right hand. But Lord Inverforth also controlled flax, hemp, leather, and jute, so that the enemy's case was as hopeless as our own was secure. These gigantic operations involved an expenditure of over £500,000,000.
One day at luncheon he was speaking of Lord Leverhulme, whose acquaintance he had made only a week or two before. Someone at the table said, "What I like about Leverhulme is his simplicity. In spite of all his tremendous undertakings he preserves the heart of a boy." With a twinkle in his eyes, and in a soft inquiring voice, "Have you ever tried to buy glycerine from him?" asked Lord Inverforth.
Is there not a danger that we may fall into the American position, and have our great men in commerce and our second-rate men in politics? I regard Lord Inverforth as one of the few very great men in commerce who have the qualities of genuine statesmanship.
I don't think he had so profound a feeling for bankers. Not quite so downright as Lord Leverhulme in stating his opinion of bankers, Lord Inverforth nevertheless regards them on the whole as lacking in courage and imagination. He said to himself on his banker's stool, "I will learn all I can, but I won't stay here; I'll be a shipowner." In his twentieth year he bought a sailing ship.
Let me not be supposed to insist that a great man of business is a great man. I regard Lord Inverforth as an exceedingly great man of business, one of the very greatest in the world, and this fact I hope to make clear in a few lines, but I do not regard him as a national hero in the wider sense of that term. He has too many lacks for that, and some of them essential to true and catholic greatness.
This story has a sequel. I mentioned it to Lord Leverhulme. "One day two Englishmen," he replied at once, "were passing the Ministry of Munitions. They saw Lord Inverforth going in.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking