Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 1.djvu/360

 carried during his tenure of the India office. Both her jubilees fell within his premierships. The first Colonial Conference in 1887 was inaugurated under his administration. The ideal of pacific imperialism was one which he endeavoured to impress upon his countrymen, and with which he believed the future of his country to be closely bound up, though with characteristic caution he deprecated any factitious attempt to quicken or consolidate imperial sentiment. Almost his last public utterance (Albert Hall, 7 May 1902) was a warning not to hurry the affections of the mother-country and her daughter states. 'They will go on,' he told his audience, with a touch of mysticism very seldom to be found in his language, 'in their own power, in their own irresistible power, and I have no doubt they will leave combinations behind them which will cast into the shade all the glories that the British Empire has hitherto displayed. But we cannot safely interfere by legislative action with the natural development of our relations with our daughter countries. . . . There is nothing more dangerous than to force a decision before a decision is ready, and therefore to produce feelings of discontent, feelings of difficulty, which, if we will only wait, will of themselves bring about the results we desire.'

Peace was concluded with the Boers on 31 May 1902, and on 11 July he tendered his resignation. He had regarded it as a matter of public duty to see the war ended, and would thus, but for King Edward's illness, have attended the coronation ceremony of that year. His premiership had lasted through a total period of thirteen years and ten months, a tenure exceeding in duration by sixteen months that of Glad- stone. On his recommendation his place as prime minister was filled by his nephew, Mr. A. J. Balfour, already first lord of the treasury and leader of the House of Commons. Salisbury died at Hatfield, a year after his retirement, on 22 Aug. 1903. In accordance with his wishes he was buried beside his wife (d. 20 Nov. 1899) to the east of Hatfield church ; in this last point, as throughout his life, avoiding publicity so far as he was able. Parliament voted a monument to him in Westminster Abbey.

Owing to his great reserve, his character, so lovable to those few who knew him well, remained to the end something of an enigma to his countrymen. They were sensible of a sort of massive wisdom in his presence, and they came to trust him completely, because he was so evidently indifferent to all the baser allurements of place and power. But they hardly realised either the large simplicity of his nature or the profundity of his religion. His life, it was said, had been 'a consecrated one.' Each day at Hatfield was in fact begun in the chapel. The very deep belief in the greatness of goodness, which appears in his tribute to Dr. Pusey (speech at Arlington Street, 17 Nov. 1882), and in his constant insistence upon the superiority of character over intellect, was fortified as well as balanced by a very keen perception of the impenetrable mystery of the universe. He was to the end of his life, as his library and laboratory bore witness, a close student of science as well as of theology. These, though dominant and, as it sometimes seemed during his lifetime, conflicting interests, were curiously blended in the address on 'Evolution' which, as president of the British Association, he delivered at Oxford in 1894. He shows himself there as jealous for the honour of science that no guesses, however plausible, should be taken for solid proof of the theory of natural selection, as, for the honour of theology, that nothing should be allowed to overthrow the argument from design. The address (although one at least of its principal arguments that correlating the antiquity of man with the rate of the cooling of the earth's crust is no longer in date) exhibits a wide range of reading and reflection just as the brilliant article on 'Photography' (Quarterly Rev. Oct. 1864) exhibits great power of lucid exposition and of practical foresight, but it must nevertheless remain doubtful whether he possessed any real talent for original scientific work. The article ' On Spectral Lines of Low Temperature' (Philos. Mag. xlv. 1873, pp. 241-5) does not make for an affirmative conclusion. His early bent was towards chemistry, but he became much interested in electricity later in life.

Theology, science, and history filled his leisure moments. There seemed to be no inclination for any of the thousand forms of recreation which men ordinarily affect. He was accustomed to pass part of the year near the sea, sometimes at Walmer, which came to him in 1895 with the lord wardenship of the Cinque Ports, more usually at his villa in France, first at Puys near Dieppe and afterwards at Beaulieu on the Riviera. He was an interested observer of French developments and a careful student of French thought ; his keen taste in literature made him a reader of the finely cut work of Merimee and Feuillet. Yet no man