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Page 36
I did, and the Minister of Munitions accepted the compliment with a good
grace.
It is a fortunate thing for this country that a man of so remarkable a
genius for organization as Lord Inverforth should be found willing to
serve the national interests in spite of an almost daily campaign of
abuse directed against his administration. I sometimes wish he would
bring an action for libel against one of these critics. It would be an
amusing case. He might claim damages of, let us say, �7,000,000 or even
�10,000,000, for he is a man of gigantic interests, claiming these
damages on the score that his alleged libellers have injured his
reputation as a man of business in all quarters of the world. They would
have him the craziest muddler and the most easily swindled imbecile
outside Fleet Street--where alone wisdom is to be found. How one would
enjoy a verbatim report of the cross-examination of these critics _in
their own newspapers_.
I will endeavour to show that Lord Inverforth is not quite so consummate
an ass as his critics would have the public to believe, but rather one
of the very greatest men, in his own particular line, who ever came to
the rescue of a chaotic Government.
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.
He could never fire the imagination of a people, nor does he convey a
warm and generous feeling to the heart. His enthusiasms are all of a
subdued nature. The driving force in his character which has made him so
powerful a man of business, owes little to the higher virtues. He has
found the plain of life too full of absorbing interest and too crowded
with abounding opportunities for getting on to raise his eyes to the
mountains. This is not to say that he is a man of no ideals, but to say
that his ideals are of too practical and prosaic a kind ever to stir the
pulses with excitement.
Nevertheless I regard him as a born statesman, and could wish that the
conditions of political life made it more easy for a man of his gifts to
serve the country than men with the gifts of, let us say, Dr. Macnamara
or Sir Hamar Greenwood.
The world knows so little of him that perhaps I may begin my political
reflections in this case with a brief summary of his career, such
details of a business man's biography as may contribute to an
understanding of his character.
Andrew Weir, as he was in those days, went to school at Kirkcaldy, where
he was chiefly notable for seeking information on more subjects than
came under the jurisdiction of his pedagogue's ferule. A benign Rosa
Dartle might have been his godmother. He was for ever consulting
encyclop�dias and books of reference. However badly he knew his Greek
verbs or his Latin syntax he had a very shrewd and curious knowledge of
the world when he left school at fifteen to enter the local branch of
the Commercial Bank of Scotland.
At school he had wanted to own ships. This ambition still lodged in his
brain. His thoughts were all at sea. There was no romance in the world
so pleasing to his soul as the romance of the merchant marine. He had a
real passion for harbours. He loved the idea of far voyages. The smells
of cargoes and warehouses composed a sea-bouquet for him which he
esteemed sweeter than all the scents of hedges and wood. If there was a
big man for him in the world it was the sailor.
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. This was at Glasgow in
the year 1885. He called himself Andrew Weir and Co. He had the feeling
that sailing ships, engaged in coastwise trade, might be bigger. He
announced his intention of building a large coasting ship. People
informed him, with an almost evangelical anxiety as to his commercial
salvation, that he was a lunatic. But the big ship was a success. He
built more and bigger. Then, in 1896 he said to himself, "Why shouldn't
steam be used in the coasting trade?" and he went into steam. Again
there were inquiries after his mental health, but the steamer flourished
like the big sailing ship. At the beginning of what the curate called
"this so-called twentieth century" the firm of Andrew Weir and Co. flew
its flag in all the ports under heaven, and controlled the largest fleet
of sailing ships in the world.
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