Arthur Balfour

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The Rt Hon Arthur Balfour
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office 11 July 1902 – 5 December 1905
Preceded by	The Marquess of Salisbury
Succeeded by	Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
Born	25 July 1848 Whittingehame, East Lothian, Scotland
Died	19 March 1930 Woking, Surrey, England
Political party	Conservative

Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, KG, OM, PC (25 July 1848 – 19 March 1930) was a British Conservative statesman and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1902 until 1905. The author of several influential works of philosophy, he was one of the more intellectual prime ministers of the 20th century. As Foreign Secretary he authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which supported the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Contents 1 Background and early career 2 Service in Lord Salisbury's governments 3 Prime Minister 4 Later career 5 Writings and academic achievements 6 Arthur Balfour's Government, July 1902-December 1905 7 References 8 Succession 9 Further reading

[edit] Background and early career

Arthur Balfour was born at Whittingehame, and was the eldest son of James Maitland Balfour of East Lothian, Scotland, and Lady Blanche Gascoyne-Cecil. His father was an MP; his mother, a member of the Cecil family descended from Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, was the daughter of the 2nd Marquess of Salisbury and a sister to the 3d Marquess, the future Prime Minister. Arthur Balfour was educated at Eton (1861-1866) where he studied with the influential Master William Johnson Cory, and Trinity College, Cambridge (1866-1869), where he received a Second-Class Honours Degree. Distraught at the death of his cousin May Lyttleton in 1875, whom he had hoped to marry, Balfour remained a bachelor throughout his life.

In 1874 he was elected Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Hertford and represented that constituency until 1885. In the spring of 1878 Balfour became Private Secretary to his uncle, Lord Salisbury. In that capacity he accompanied Salisbury (then Foreign Secretary) to the Congress of Berlin and gained his first experience in international politics in connection with the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict. At the same time he became known in the world of letters; the academic subtlety and literary achievement of his Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) suggested that he might make a reputation for himself as a philosopher.

Balfour divided his time between the political arena and the academy. Released from his duties as private secretary by the general election of 1880, he began to take a more active part in parliamentary affairs. He was for a time politically associated with Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff and John Gorst. This quartet became known as the "Fourth Party" and gained notoriety for the leader Lord Randolph Churchill's free criticism of Sir Stafford Northcote, Lord Cross and other prominent members of the "old gang".

[edit] Service in Lord Salisbury's governments

Lord Salisbury made Balfour President of the Local Government Board in 1885 and later Secretary for Scotland in 1886, with a seat in the cabinet. These offices, while having few opportunities for distinction, served as a sort of apprenticeship for Balfour. In early 1887 Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, resigned because of illness and Salisbury appointed his nephew in his place. The selection took the political world by surprise and possibly led to the British phrase "Bob's your uncle!". Balfour surprised his critics by his ruthless enforcement of the Crimes Act, earning the nickname "Bloody Balfour". Balfour's skill for steady administration did much to dispel his reputation as a public lightweight.

In Parliament he resisted any overtures to the Irish Parliamentary Party on Home Rule, and, allied with Joseph Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists, strongly encouraged Unionist activism in Ireland. Balfour also broadened the basis of material prosperity to the less well off by creating the Congested Districts Board in 1890. It was during this time (1886-1892) that he sharpened his gift of oratory and gained a reputation as one of the most effective public speakers of the age. Impressive in matter rather than in delivery, his speeches were logical and convincing, and delighted an ever wider audience.

On the death of W.H. Smith in 1891, Balfour became First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House of Commons. After the fall of the government in 1892 he spent three years as Leader of the Opposition. On the return of the Conservatives to power in 1895, he resumed the leadership of the House. His management of the abortive education proposals of 1896 were thought to show a disinclination for the continuous drudgery of parliamentary management. Yet he had the satisfaction of seeing a bill pass providing Ireland with an improved system of local government, and took an active role in the debates on the various foreign and domestic questions that came before parliament between 1895 to 1900.

During the illness of Lord Salisbury in 1898, and again in Lord Salisbury's absence abroad, Balfour was put in charge of the Foreign Office, and it was his job to conduct the critical negotiations with Russia on the question of railways in North China. As a member of the cabinet responsible for the Transvaal negotiations in 1899, he bore his full share of controversy, and when the war began disastrously, he was the first to realize the need to put the full military strength of the country into the field. His leadership of the House of Commons was marked by considerable firmness in the suppression of obstruction, yet there was a slight revival of the criticisms of 1896. However, it should be noted that Balfour's inability to get the maximum amount of work out of the House was largely due to the situation in South Africa, a crisis that absorbed the intellectual energies of the House and of the United Kingdom as a whole.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Prime Minister

On Lord Salisbury's resignation on 11 July 1902, Balfour succeeded him as Prime Minister, with the approval of all sections of the Unionist party. The new Prime Minister came into power practically at the same moment as the coronation of Edward VII and the end of the South African War. For a while no cloud appeared on the horizon. The Liberal party was still disorganized over their attitude towards the Boers. The two chief items of the ministerial parliamentary program were the extension of the new Education Act to London and the Irish Land Purchase Act, by which the British exchequer would advance the capital for enabling tenants in Ireland to buy land. A notable achievement of Balfour's government was the establishment of the Committee on Imperial Defence.

The budget was certain to show a surplus and taxation could be remitted. As events proved, it was the budget that would sow dissension, override all other legislative problems of the session, and bring a new political movement into being. Charles Thomson Ritchie's remission of the shilling import-duty on corn led to Joseph Chamberlain's crusade in favour of tariff reform — these were taxes on imported goods, with trade preference given to the Empire, to protect British industry from competition. As the session proceeded, the rift grew in the Unionist ranks. Tariff Reform proved popular with Unionist supporters, but the threat of higher prices for food imports made the policy an electoral albatross.

The debate over Imperial Preference and the subsequent split of the Conservative-Unionist Party dominated the three years of Balfour's premiership. With Balfour's agreement, Chamberlain resigned from the Cabinet (although his son Austen replaced Ritchie as Chancellor of the Exchequer) to stump the country in favour of Tariff Reform. At the same time, Balfour tried to balance the two factions by accepting the resignation of three free-trading ministers, but the almost simultaneous resignation of the free-trader Duke of Devonshire (who as Lord Hartington had been the Liberal Unionist leader of the 1880s) left Balfour's Cabinet looking weak. By 1905 relatively few Unionist MPs were still free traders (the young Winston Churchill crossed over to the Liberals in 1904 when threatened with deselection at Oldham), but Balfour's long balancing act had drained his authority within the government.

Balfour eventually resigned as Prime Minister in December of 1905, hoping in vain that the Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman would be unable to form a strong government. These hopes were dashed when Campbell-Bannerman faced down an attempt (the "Relugas Compact") to kick him upstairs to the House of Lords. The Conservatives were defeated by the Liberals at the general election the following January (in terms of MPs, a Liberal landslide), with Balfour himself losing his seat at Manchester East. Only 157 Conservatives were returned to the House of Commons, at least two-thirds of them followers of Chamberlain, who briefly chaired the Conservative MPs until Balfour won another seat.

[edit] Later career

After the disaster of 1906 Balfour remained party leader, his position strengthened by Joseph Chamberlain's removal from active politics after his stroke in July 1906, but he was unable to make much headway against the huge Liberal majority in the House of Commons. An early attempt to score a debating triumph over the government saw Campbell-Bannerman respond with: "Enough of this foolery". Balfour made the controversial decision, with Lord Lansdowne, to use the heavily Unionist House of Lords as an active check on the political program and legislation of the Liberal party in the House of Commons. Numerous pieces of legislation were vetoed or altered by amendments between 1906 and 1909, leading David Lloyd George to remark that the Lords had become "not the watchdog of the Constitution, but Mr. Balfour's poodle." The issue was eventually forced by the Liberals with Lloyd George's so-called People's Budget, provoking the constitutional crisis that eventually led to the Parliament Act of 1911, which replaced the Lords' veto authority with a greatly reduced power to only delay bills for up to two years. After the Unionists had failed to win an electoral mandate at either of the General Elections of 1910 (despite softening the Tariff Reform policy with Balfour's promise of a referendum on food taxes), the Unionist peers split to allow the Parliament Act to pass the House of Lords, in order to prevent a mass-creation of new Liberal peers by the new King, George V. The exhausted Balfour resigned as party leader after the crisis, and was succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law.

Balfour remained an important figure within the party, however, and when the Unionists joined Asquith's coalition government in May 1915, Balfour succeeded Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. When Asquith's government collapsed in December 1916, Balfour became Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George's new administration, but was not actually included in the small War Cabinet, and was frequently left out of the inner workings of the government. Balfour's service as Foreign Secretary was most notable for the issuance of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a letter to Lord Rothschild promising the Jews a "national home" in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Balfour resigned as Foreign Secretary following the Versailles Conference in 1919, but continued on in the government (and the Cabinet after normal peacetime political arrangements resumed) as Lord President of the Council. In 1921-22 he represented the British Empire at the Washington Naval Conference.

In 1922 he, along with most of the Conservative leadership, resigned with Lloyd George's government following the Conservative back-bench revolt against the continuance of the coalition. Bonar Law soon became Prime Minister. In 1922 Balfour was created Earl of Balfour. Like many of the Coalition leaders he did not hold office in the Conservative governments of 1922-4, although as an elder statesman he was consulted in the choice of Baldwin as Bonar Law's successor as Conservative leader in May 1923. When asked by a lady whether "dear George" (the much more experienced Lord Curzon) would be chosen, he is said to have replied "No, dear George will not."

Balfour was again not initially included in Stanley Baldwin's second government in 1924, but in 1925 he once again returned to the Cabinet, serving in place of the late Lord Curzon as Lord President of the Council until the government ended in 1929. Balfour died in 1930.

Lord Balfour's estate was probated £76,433 5s. 2d. on August 27, 1930.

[edit] Writings and academic achievements

Balfour's writings include:

• Essays and Addresses (1893).
• The Foundations of Belief, being Notes introductory to the Study of Theology (1895).
• Questionings on Criticism and Beauty (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909), based on his 1909 Romanes Lecture.
• Theism and Humanism (1915), based on his first series of Gifford Lectures given in 1914 and is still in print. In 1962, Oxford writer C. S. Lewis told Christian Century that Theism and Humanism was one of the ten books that most influenced his thought.
• Theism and Thought (1923) based on the second in his Gifford Lectures, which were given in 1922.

He was made LL.D. of the University of Edinburgh in 1881; of the University of St Andrews in 1885; of Cambridge University in 1888; of Dublin and Glasgow Universities in 1891; Lord Rector of St Andrews University in 1886; of Glasgow University in 1890; Chancellor of Edinburgh University in 1891; member of the senate London University in 1888; and DCL of Oxford University in 1891. He was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1904, and became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1888. He was known from early life as a cultured musician, and became an enthusiastic golf player, having been captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews in 1894-1895. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1914 to 1915.

Academic Offices
Preceded by Donald James Mackay, 11th Lord Reay	Rector of the University of St Andrews 1886 - 1889	Succeeded by Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava

[edit] Arthur Balfour's Government, July 1902-December 1905

• Arthur Balfour - First Lord of the Treasury and Leader of the House of Commons
• Lord Halsbury - Lord Chancellor
• The Duke of Devonshire - Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords
• Lord Londonderry - Lord Privy Seal and President of the Board of Education
• Aretas Akers-Douglas - Secretary of State for the Home Department
• Lord Lansdowne - Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
• Joseph Chamberlain - Secretary of State for the Colonies
• St John Brodrick - Secretary of State for War
• Lord George Hamilton - Secretary of State for India
• Lord Selborne - First Lord of the Admiralty
• Charles Thomson Ritchie - Chancellor of the Exchequer
• Gerald Balfour - President of the Board of Trade
• Sir William Hood Walrond - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• Lord Balfour of Burleigh - Secretary for Scotland
• George Wyndham - Chief Secretary for Ireland
• Walter Hume Long - President of the Local Government Board
• Robert William Hanbury - President of the Board of Agriculture
• Lord Ashbourne - Lord Chancellor of Ireland
• Lord Windsor - First Commissioner of Public Works
• Austen Chamberlain - Postmaster-General

Changes

• May 1903 - Lord Onslow succeeds R.W. Hanbury at the Board of Agriculture.
• September-October 1903 - Lord Londonderry succeeds the Duke of Devonshire as Lord President, while remaining also President of the Board of Education. Lord Lansdowne succeeds Devonshire as Leader of the House of Lords, remaining also Foreign Secretary. Lord Salisbury succeeds Londonderry as Lord Privy Seal. Austen Chamberlain succeeds Ritchie at the Exchequer. Chamberlain's successor as Postmaster-General is not in the Cabinet. Alfred Lyttelton succeeds Joseph Chamberlain as Colonial Secretary. St John Brodrick succeeds Lord George Hamilton as Secretary for India. Hugh Arnold-Forster succeeds Brodrick as Secretary for War. Andrew Graham-Murray succeeds Lord Balfour of Burleigh as Secretary for Scotland.
• March 1905 - Walter Hume Long succeeds George Wyndham as Irish Secretary. Gerald Balfour succeeds Long at the Local Government Board. Lord Salisbury, remaining Lord Privy Seal, succeeds Balfour at the Board of Trade. Lord Cawdor succeeds Lord Selborne at the Admiralty. Ailwyn Fellowes succeeds Lord Onslow at the Board of Agriculture.

[edit] References

Torrance, David, The Scottish Secretaries (Birlinn 2006)

[edit] Succession

Political offices
Preceded by Sir Charles Dilke	President of the Local Government Board 1885–1886	Succeeded by Joseph Chamberlain
Preceded by The Earl of Dalhousie	Secretary for Scotland 1886–1887	Succeeded by The Marquess of Lothian
Preceded by Sir Michael Hicks-Beach	Chief Secretary for Ireland 1887–1891	Succeeded by William Lawies Jackson
Preceded by William Henry Smith	Conservative Leader in the Commons 1891–1911	Succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law
	First Lord of the Treasury 1891–1892	Succeeded by William Ewart Gladstone
	Leader of the House of Commons 1891–1892
Preceded by: The Earl of Rosebery	First Lord of the Treasury 1895–1905	Succeeded by: Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
Preceded by: Sir William Harcourt	Leader of the House of Commons 1895–1905
Preceded by: The Marquess of Salisbury	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1902–1905
	Lord Privy Seal 1902–1903	Succeeded by: The (4th) Marquess of Salisbury
	Leader of the British Conservative Party 1902–1911	Succeeded by: Andrew Bonar Law and The Marquess of Lansdowne
Preceded by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman	Leader of the Opposition 1905–1911	Succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law
Preceded by Winston Churchill	First Lord of the Admiralty 1915–1916	Succeeded by Sir Edward Carson
Preceded by The Viscount Grey of Fallodon	Foreign Secretary 1916–1919	Succeeded by The Earl Curzon of Kedleston
Preceded by The Earl Curzon of Kedleston	Lord President of the Council 1919–1922	Succeeded by The Marquess of Salisbury
Preceded by The Marquess Curzon of Kedleston	Lord President of the Council 1925–1929	Succeeded by The Lord Parmoor
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by New Creation	Earl of Balfour 1922–1930	Succeeded by Gerald William Balfour

[edit] Further reading

• Piers Brendon, Eminent Edwardians (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980) ISBN 0-395-29195-X

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

Persondata
NAME	Balfour, Arthur James, 1st Earl of Balfour
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
DATE OF BIRTH	25 July 1848
PLACE OF BIRTH	Whittingehame, East Lothian, Scotland
DATE OF DEATH	19 March 1930
PLACE OF DEATH	Woking, Surrey, England