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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.
I suppose that nobody will now dispute that Lord Leverhulme is easily the foremost industrialist, not merely in the British Isles, but in the world. I can think of no one who approaches him in the creative faculty. Not even America, the country of big men and big businesses, has produced a man of this truly colossal stature. Mr. Rockefeller is a name for a committee. Mr.
At present our politics are stupid but fairly honest. There are still representatives of the old school in the House of Commons. But the conquering advance is from the ranks of professionalism. I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a heaven-sent genius of statesmanship.
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.
Modern science and art combine to outdo the attractions of the baths of Imperial Rome. In far different surroundings from these were born the careers of the living captains of modern industry and finance Inchcape, Pirrie, Cowdray, Leverhulme, or McKenna. These men believed in industry, not in fortune, and in judgment rather than in chance.
The Cabinet Minister made no demur to this very natural proposal, but suggested that it might be well if Lord Leverhulme would call at the Treasury and inform them of his purpose. Accordingly the great industrialist, able as was no other man in this particular to serve his country's need, called humbly at the Treasury for permission to ask the public for capital.
Lord Leverhulme, who was then Sir William Lever, obtained a concession for considerably more than a million acres of palm forests in the Congo. He began to open up so-called areas and install mills for boiling the fruit and drying the kernels. He now has eight areas, and two of them, Elizabetha and Alberta, I visited both are on the Congo River.
We must do our best to get along without statesmanship at the head. The reader may not remember that some years before Mr. Lloyd George plunged into a disordered series of social reforms, Lord Leverhulme, sitting in the House of Commons, introduced Bills of a reasonable and connected character to ensure workmen against unemployment and to set up a system of old age pensions.
Carnegie was pushed to fortune by his more resolute henchmen. But Lord Leverhulme, as is very well known in America, has been the sole architect of his tremendous fortunes, and in all his numerous undertakings exercises the power of an unquestioned autocrat. Mr. Lloyd George once remarked to me that the trouble with Lord Leverhulme is that he cannot work with other men.
Not to weary the reader with an incident, however telling, the end of this affair was that after going backwards and forwards between a Cabinet Minister and a Treasury official, Lord Leverhulme was at last permitted to ask the public for a small sum of money which he himself considered inadequate for the Government's purpose.
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