If Lord Carnock were to write his memoirs, not only would that volume
help the historian to follow the immediate causes of the war to one
intelligible origin, but it would also afford the people of England an
opportunity of seeing the conspicuous difference between a statesman of
the old school and a politician of these latter days.

When I think of this most amiable and cultivated person, and compare his
way of looking at the evolution of human life with Mr. Lloyd George's
way of reading the political heavens, a sentence in Bagehot's essay on
Charles Dickens comes into my mind: "There is nothing less like the
great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with
distinct deduction, than the attorney's clerk who catches at small
points like a dog biting at flies."

No one could be less like the popular politician of our very noisy days
than this slight and gentle person whose refinement of mind reveals
itself in a face almost ascetic, whose intelligence is of a wide,
comprehensive, and reflecting order, and whose manner is certainly the
last thing in the world that would recommend itself to the mind of an
advertising agent. But there is no living politician who watched so
intelligently the long beginnings of the war or knew so certainly in the
days of tension that war had come, as this modest and gracious gentleman
whose devotion to principle and whose quiet faith in the power of simple
honour had outwitted the chaotic policy and the makeshift diplomacy of
the German long before the autumn of 1914.

This may be said without revealing any State secret or breaking any
private confidence:

As Sir Arthur Nicolson, our Ambassador at St. Petersburg, Lord Carnock