We turn with relief from Mr. Lloyd George's latest position
to quite another picture when we read the moving and satisfying address which Mr. Baldwin delivered on Monday as Lord Rector of Glasgow University. His subject was " character," and he showed that Empires had decayed through want of it. To Romans and bar- barians alike Rome had seemed eternal, the one fixed point. Yet her dissolution was explicable and inevitable, and from it sprang a thousand years of war. Character was, at all events, the foundation of the British Empire, and if we saved the one we could save the other. The Romans had been advised by Virgil pad imponere morem —to rear upon peace character. Mr. Baldwin's use of these words was rather free, for the Romans had less thought of setting an example and more thought of enforcing a system than was in his own mind. The French to-day, inheritors of the Latin tradition, would no doubt be inclined to put the emphasis on imponere. Their idea of confining the future by very exact pledges and of making their dependants a model of themselves sharply dis- tinguishes their method from our own. Hence, most of our present differences.
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