Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/217

 and it was accepted by the prime minister in a personal interview on 14 September. The cabinet met later in the day. As a result of its deliberations Ritchie and Lord George Hamilton resigned. They were without any knowledge of Mr. Chamberlain's earlier withdrawal, and were under the impression that he was committing the cabinet to a protective policy. Their resignations were published on 18 September with, to their astonishment, that also of Mr. Chamberlain. The duke of Devonshire alone of Mr. Balfour's free-trade colleagues had learned of Mr. Chamberlain's withdrawal before the cabinet meeting, and he remained for the time in the cabinet. Lord Balfour of Burleigh, the remaining free trade minister, resigned on the 21st. Much controversy ensued between Ritchie and his friends on the one hand and Mr. Balfour and the protectionists of the cabinet on the other. The prime minister, who in his endeavour to keep his party together had avoided any but indefinite pronouncements on the fiscal question, had yet in his ‘Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade’ (published September 1903, but circulated earlier as a cabinet memorandum) ‘approached the subject from the free trade point of view.’ Between him and Ritchie there was at the time no extreme divergence of view. It was solely the presence of Mr. Chamberlain in the cabinet that made Ritchie's retention of office impossible. Had Mr. Chamberlain's retirement been announced to Ritchie, the ground for his own resignation at the moment would have been removed. Mr. Balfour replied in later speeches that he and the majority of the cabinet inclined to some kind of change in the fiscal system, and that Ritchie and his free trade colleagues were in opposition on that point to the majority; that Mr. Chamberlain had already threatened resignation if preference were excluded from the official programme of the government, to which it was not admitted; and that Ritchie's dissent from views expressed by himself in a valedictory letter to Mr. Chamberlain (17 Sept. 1903) showed that he would have retired in any case a day or two after he actually did go (see, Fiscal Reform Speeches, p. 143). Ritchie and his friends retorted that Mr. Chamberlain's verbal announcements of resignation had been frequent in the heat of controversy and were not taken seriously. After the withdrawal of Ritchie and his friends the prime minister's pronouncements leant more decisively to the side of the tariff reformers, with the result that the duke of Devonshire parted from him on 2 October. On 19 Oct. 1903 at Croydon, on 18 November at Thornton Heath, and finally at Croydon on 2 December, Ritchie defended his attitude throughout the fiscal controversy. ‘So far as Mr. Balfour's policy of retaliation is concerned he had never said … that he would not be prepared to adopt it.’ ‘What he had said was, that “we will be no parties to any arrangement with the colonies which shall impose upon us the necessity for putting a tax upon the food of the people”’ (speech at Thornton Heath in Daily Chronicle, 19 Nov. 1903).

With his resignation and his public explanation Ritchie's public life ceased, though in the sessions of 1904 and 1905 he spoke more than once in the House of Commons in support of free trade principles. On 10 Feb. 1905 he suffered a severe blow in the death of his wife after forty-seven years of mutual attachment and happiness. It is doubtful if he recovered from the shock. The resignation of Mr. Balfour's government came on 17 Dec. 1905, and five days later Ritchie was raised to the peerage as Baron Ritchie of Dundee, of Welders, Chalfont St. Giles, co. Buckingham, his country residence. But he was not to enjoy the honour long. A few days before Christmas he went to Biarritz on a visit to Lord and Lady Dudley, and while there was stricken with paralysis. He died at Biarritz on 9 Jan. 1906, and was buried at Kensal Green. He left nine children—two sons and seven daughters. A first-born son, William, predeceased him. His elder surviving son, Charles Ritchie, succeeded him in the peerage.

Ritchie was tall and very dark, with something of a Southerner's swarthiness of complexion. His portrait by John Pettie, R.A., belongs to the present Lord Ritchie. A bust by E. Roscoe Mullins was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1889. A cartoon portrait by ‘Ape’ appeared in ‘Vanity Fair’ in 1885.

Ritchie was never as well known to the public as might have been expected from the usefulness of his political work. He lacked the qualities which make for popularity. Clear and persuasive as a speaker in the House of Commons, he was not an effective platform speaker. In his own constituency of Croydon he was mercilessly interrupted and several times shouted down when defending his fiscal views. But his grasp of complicated detail and his shrewd common-sense gave him substantial