Lord Hobhouse

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV POLITICAL ACTIVITIES AT HOME. 1878-1892 After leaving India, Sir Arthur Hobhouse found himself drawn, for the first time in his life, into the active warfare of party politics, for it was at the election of 1880 that he made his only attempt to enter Parliament. The causes that first engaged his...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV POLITICAL ACTIVITIES AT HOME. 1878-1892 After leaving India, Sir Arthur Hobhouse found himself drawn, for the first time in his life, into the active warfare of party politics, for it was at the election of 1880 that he made his only attempt to enter Parliament. The causes that first engaged his energies on his return were of a less exciting and polemical character. In 1878 he was appointed by the Conservative Government to act as arbitrator in the difficult and tedious question of the enclosures of Epping Forest, and in the same year he joined the Administrative Committee of the Charity Organization Society. But he soon found himself obliged to enter on more controversial tasks, for his mistrust and indignation had been steadily growing with each new development of Lord Beaconsfield's foreign policy, / and he had determined to make his protest against the temper and conceptions of national aims which characterized those adventures in as direct, emphatic and public a manner as possible. That dangerous and intoxicating policy of ambition had provoked men who had hitherto kept aloof from the strife of the state, among others Herbert Spencer, Ruskin, and Burne Jones, to take part in public life. Hobhouse felt that the crisis obliged him to become a party man. The development of this strong conviction is best described in a lecture he delivered in October, 1880, at the opening of the Westminster Young Men's Liberal Association. If anybody had told me a few years ago, say even three years ago, that I should be asked to deliver an address for the purpose of launching a political party organization or to become the president of one, I should have laughed at him. I should have laughed, because up to that time few men, who had paid any attention to public affairs at al...