Noble Radical

Lord Crewe, 1858-1945: The Likeness of a Liberal, by James Pope-Hennessy. 205 pp. Fair Lawn, New Jersey: Essential Books. $3.40

Lord Crewe, who died in 1945, was very like the Duke of Omnium, in Trollope’s political novels: dry, stiff, learned, diligent, diffident, devoted to duty. And, like the Duke, he was an aristocratic egalitarian, a radical active in guiding the Liberal Party from the Whiggish principles which it still retained at the end of the nineteenth century to the humanitarian, sentimental, collectivistic measures which it advocated in its last years of power, under Asquith. This progress also meant the destruction of the Liberal Party itself. With his friend Sir William Harcourt, of death-duties and “we are all socialists now” renown (and Lord Crewe seems to have been the only man, Conservative or Liberal or Socialist, who ever liked Harcourt), Crewe helped to put an end to the order that had nurtured noble radicals like himself.

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Russell Kirk

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Lord Crewe, 1858-1945: The Likeness of a Liberal, by James Pope-Hennessy. 205 pp. Fair Lawn, New Jersey: Essential Books. $3.40

Lord Crewe, who died in 1945, was very like the Duke of Omnium, in Trollope’s political novels: dry, stiff, learned, diligent, diffident, devoted to duty. And, like the Duke, he was an aristocratic egalitarian, a radical active in guiding the Liberal Party from the Whiggish principles which it still retained at the end of the nineteenth century to the humanitarian, sentimental, collectivistic measures which it advocated in its last years of power, under Asquith. This progress also meant the destruction of the Liberal Party itself. With his friend Sir William Harcourt, of death-duties and “we are all socialists now” renown (and Lord Crewe seems to have been the only man, Conservative or Liberal or Socialist, who ever liked Harcourt), Crewe helped to put an end to the order that had nurtured noble radicals like himself.