Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/448

 of and in the course of a schoolmaster's employment); Stickney v. Keeble (of what contracts time is of the essence); Tamplin Steamship Co. v. Anglo-Mexican Co. (frustration of a commercial adventure); Continental Tyre Co. v. Daimler Co. (the doctrine of enemy character as applied to British incorporated companies during war); Admiralty Commissioners v. S.S. America (the right to sue in respect of another person's loss of life); Bowman v. the Secular Society (illegality of anti-Christian associations); and Banbury v. the Bank of Montreal (authority of agents to bind principals by representations to third parties).

The most striking characteristic of Parker's judgments was their intellectual compactness. He instinctively avoided any parade of authorities. What mattered most to his mind was to state a general legal principle comprehensively and then to bring the case in hand logically within it. Having made a judgment clear, he attached little importance to its form. In the same spirit he was relatively indifferent to the particular part he himself played in a discussion, provided a conclusion could be arrived at that was correct in law and would sustain the credit of the tribunal. On one occasion it so chanced, in a case which concerned the interests of workmen, that the House was divided as four to three, the four being of one political party and the three of the other. Parker was one of the minority and felt that this result hardly looked well. He pointed it out to a colleague on the other side and said, ‘If you will read my judgment, I will read yours.’ The offer was not accepted.

When the European War broke out, Parker was one of the first to see the danger of allowing prices and the cost of living to increase rapidly and unreasonably; and, at the time of the ‘business as usual’ cry, he took steps to urge his views upon ministers privately. He met with no success. During 1915 he gave much thought to after-war problems, and brought the subject before the House of Lords in an elaborate and characteristically condensed address on 14 December 1915. During the passage of the Representation of the People Bill, 1918, he took up the cause of those women who had passed the examinations which qualified men for a university degree, and, speaking as an old Cambridge man and as deputy high steward of the university (which he had been since 1915), he pressed on the House of Lords the right of such women to vote for the representation of their university in parliament. In this he was successful. His most noteworthy contribution, however, to debate on public affairs was made in 1918, a few months before he died. His old friend, the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, had often pressed him to take part in discussions in the House, and, on the occasion of a motion by Lord Parmoor on 19 March 1918 in favour of a League of Nations, Lord Parker brought before the House a detailed scheme, which went far beyond the nebulous ideas of the day in definiteness, in logical construction, and in practical detail. To those who recall it, the occasion was a moving one. It was doubly a dark day, for it was the eve of the final German advance. The light had almost failed, and Parker, then no longer able to see handwriting without strong illumination, went to the table to read out the twenty articles of his scheme, so that his fine head stood out against the gloom by the light of the lamp which he was using. His most important idea was that, for the peace of the world, it was necessary to revive the Greek principle that every man and every nation must learn to take a side. Neutrality among modern states was a temptation to aggressors and an embarrassment to those prepared to defend public rights. Only by collecting an overwhelming and united force against wrongdoers could war, as the instrument alike of the commission and the suppression of wrong, be superseded. The debate, as was natural at the time, ended inconclusively, but the impression produced was profound. To say that the scheme itself was premature or idealist is merely to say that Lord Parker's was the mind of a statesman rather than of a politician. Other counsels prevailed in Paris a year afterwards, but had he lived there can be no doubt that he would have greatly developed the scheme.

Parker's health was already beginning to fail. He continued at work until the summer of 1918, and then, after an illness of no long duration, died on 12 July at Aldworth, in Surrey, the first Lord Tennyson's old home, where he had lived since 1914. He had married in 1884 Constance, only child of John Trevor Barkley, civil engineer, who, with three sons and two daughters, survived him. His name is second to none among the judges of the first two decades of the twentieth century, and will live among the most eminent in the history of English law.  422