"It was not his way to arouse enthusiasm. He sought to convince, not to stimulate. Even in his own party he was often, like Mr. Gladstone, unpopular but indispensible, yet his record was remarkable. I will not attempt to recapitulate it. But in the long run perhaps his great service was to build a bridge from the old, somewhat rigid Victorian statesmanship to a more constructive and more social liberalism. He was the first to formulate clearly the idea of a national minimum, that is, a standard of welfare below which no citizen should be allowed to sink, to establish a difference in taxation between earned and unearned incomes, to exempt trade unions from responsibility for the torts of their members, to start the regular medical inspection of schools, and school-care committees, to say nothing of the non-contributory Old Age Pensions and the National Insurance system which his skilful finance had now made possible. However, the radicals of his party felt that he sometimes disappointed them. As an acute critic has said, when in power he was admirable; he knew what to do and how to do it. But in opposition he did not satisfy the more ardent spirits. He did not rouse enthusiasm or make play with popular catchwords. Typical were the series of Free Trade speeches in which he followed Joseph Chamberlain from meeting to meeting and, in the opinion of most economists, shattered point by point the ‘Tariff Reform’ programme; but he neither had nor sought to have the almost religious appeal of Bright and Cobden."