52 - Arthur Balfour (1848–1930): A Skilled Politician Managing the Emergence of Japan as a Great Power

Summary

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR (1848–1930) had a parliamentary career which spanned half-a-century. Educated at Eton, he went on to take a degree in philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge. He entered the House of Commons in 1874. For the next thirty years he rose in the ranks as a Conservative party politician, gradually gaining government responsibilities. From 1895 he was nominally First Lord of the Treasury but in fact acted as deputy foreign secretary. This was followed by five years as prime minister. Then there was the gap of a decade when the Liberal party was in the ascendant. But, when there was a call for politicians to put aside party differences on the outbreak of the First World War, he emerged from the opposition and agreed to act as First Lord of the Admiralty and later as Foreign Secretary in ‘a coalition cabinet’. Even as he retired in the 1920s, he still commanded much respect and served as Lord President in the cabinet of Stanley Baldwin (1925–1929).

As the Japanese diplomat Shidehara Kijūrō said of him, Balfour was ‘embarrassingly eminent’. He had acquired so much experience in those years that he was a difficult person with whom to negotiate or argue. He was both clever and articulate, a born orator and an incisive composer of closely argued minutes. He was a philosopher- statesman, even if, as someone said, he was only ‘an amateur philosopher’. To many he was a tall, shuffling figure, slightly remote and absent-minded but elegant. Definitely not a minister to run a department of state unless he had massive support. Moreover he made mistakes and misjudgements as is inevitable during half-acentury in public life. He had his critics among his contemporaries and later among historians.

As Balfour was pursuing his political career, Japan was coming on to the international map. Indeed the period from 1895 to 1930 was one in which Japan was growing fast industrially and commercially and was gaining wide acceptance in world affairs. She moved from being militarily successful but politically unsuccessful in 1895 to the days of the Manchurian Crisis when she was strong enough to hold her own against the Powers and the League of Nations.